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By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published October 29, 2006

Youths burn vehicles a year after rioting

FRANCE - Marauding French youths torched hundreds of vehicles overnight and on Saturday in renewed violence coinciding with the first anniversary of riots that exposed a deep schism between poor North African immigrants and mainstream France.

A group of teenagers set one bus on fire Saturday in the southern French port city of Marseille, seriously wounding a passenger. Three others suffered from smoke inhalation, police said. Two other public buses and 277 vehicles around the country were burned overnight, police said.

Six police were injured and 47 people were arrested, ministry officials said. Still the Interior Ministry described the night as "relative calm," noting that up to 100 cars are torched by youths in troubled neighborhoods on an average night.

Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the deaths of two teens that ignited three weeks of riots in 2005. The rioting was fueled by anger at France's failure to offer equal opportunities to many minorities.

Pope says sex abuse by clergy is a crime

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI said Saturday that clerical sex abuses were "egregious crimes" that had damaged the standing of the Catholic Church and its clergy, in his first explicit remarks on the subject since becoming pontiff.

Speaking to a group of bishops from Ireland - an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country where all but one seminary has closed following repeated scandals - Benedict said it was urgent "to rebuild confidence and trust."

"In the exercise of your pastoral ministry, you have had to respond in recent years to many heart-rending cases of sexual abuse of minors," the pontiff told the bishops. "These are all the more tragic when the abuser is a cleric."

Coal mine explosion kills 14 miners, hurts 6

CHINA - An explosion Saturday inside a western China coal mine trapped and killed 14 miners and burned six others, state-run media reported.

The explosion generated such heat that rescuers were unable to enter the mine outside Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, for seven hours, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The rescuers finally got into the mine through an emergency tunnel, Xinhua said. Six workers who had been at the mine's entrance when the explosion occurred suffered burns.

Nobel-winning author is robbed, assaulted

SOUTH AFRICA - Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer was assaulted in her home in Johannesburg by three men who robbed her of cash and jewelry, police said Saturday.

Gordimer, 83, did not sustain serious injuries and no arrests had been made in Thursday's robbery, police spokesman Sergeant Sanku Tsunke said.

Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991.

Elsewhere ...

SRI LANKA: Suspected Tamil Tiger rebels fatally shot a soldier and wounded six police officers in two bomb attacks Saturday as peace talks between the two sides began in Switzerland, the military said.

NEPAL: An overcrowded bus plunged off a mountain road Saturday, killing at least 42 people and injuring 45, police said.

[Last modified October 29, 2006, 00:47:56]