At a glance

Busy phone line jams pardon for convictMANILA: A busy telephone line prevented President Joseph Estrada from informing prison officials o...

Busy phone line jams pardon for convict

MANILA: A busy telephone line prevented President Joseph Estrada from informing prison officials of a last-minute decision to halt the execution on Friday of a man convicted of raping his own daughter, officials said. Eduardo Agbayani was executed as scheduled, becoming the second person put to death since the Philippines restored capital punishment in 1994. Estrada, who had said earlier that he would not grant a reprieve, changed his mind just five minutes before the scheduled start of the lethal injection after appeals from one of the defendant8217;s daughters and a Catholic bishop. 8220;The President said he would stop it,8221; Bishop Teodoro Bacani said after talking on the telephone to Estrada. But a few minutes later, Estrada called and said telephone lines to the prison had been busy or gave a fax tone.

WB approves China loan, sidesteps Tibetan issue

WASHINGTON: The World Bank has approved a controversial new loan to China but temporarily froze a partof the project that critics say would harm minority Tibetans. Approval of the project followed a compromise hammered out personally by World Bank President James Wolfensohn, Bank officials said, and resolves, at least for a few months, the latest in a series of clashes between China and the US. Only Germany and the US voted on Thursday against funding the six-year, 160 million dollar China Western Poverty Reduction Project, said an official. The Bank said 8220;in an unusual move, the board stipulated that no work be done and no funds be disbursed8221;, for the controversial part of the project pending an internal review by a three-member inspection panel, the Bank said in a statement. Critics have objected to a 40 million dollar component that would relocate some 58,000 poor, mostly Chinese farmers in Qinghai province to an area bordering Tibet, further reducing the proportion of minority Tibetans there.

Champion of bomb survivors8217; rights dead

TOKYO: Surgeon Tomin Harada, who led a group of disfiguredatomic bomb survivors known as the Hiroshima Maidens8217; to the United States for plastic surgery in the 1950s, died on Friday, his family said. He was 87. Harada, who helped pioneer treatment of diseases caused by exposure to radioactivity, died of acute pneumonia in a hospital in his hometown of Hiroshima, his daughter Yukiko Yamazaki said. Harada was an army doctor during World War II and was stationed in Taiwan when the war ended. He returned to his hometown Hiroshima to set up a private practice one year after the atomic bomb had been dropped. In 1955, he led the Hiroshima Maidens8217; to the United States, where they received plastic surgery, which was unavailable in Japan at the time. Harada also pressed the government to enact a law to provide treatment to atomic bomb survivors. Such a law was enacted in 1957, allowing them free medical checkups and treatment.