West Asia peace talks

JERUSALEM: Egypt's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman was in Israel on Sunday to meet with top officials during a low-profile visit to the Jewish state, an Israeli official said.

Suleiman met Defence Minister Ehud Barak in his Tel Aviv office and was also due to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as the head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign spy service, according to the official. Barak's office said in a statement that the talks focused on "ways to deal with the regional threats and challenges which both countries face," referring mainly to Iran. The two also discussed ways to renew Middle East peace talks. Suleiman is Egypt's pointman for indirect talks between Israel and the Hamas movement on a prisoner exchange of some 1,000 jailed Palestinians for an Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants in 2006.

49 civilians killed

SANAA: A local Yemeni official said on Sunday that 49 civilians, among them 23 children and 17 women, were killed in air strikes against Al-Qaeda, which he said were carried out "indiscriminately." Exiled southern leader Ali Salem al-Baid had accused the Yemeni authorities of killing at least 62 civilians in Thursday's air strikes Sanaa said targeted an Al-Qaeda training camp in the southern province of Abyan. The local official from the Al-Mahfed region, which includes the village of Al-Maajala where the strike took place, on Sunday confirmed civilian deaths. "The raid was carried out indiscriminately and killed 49 civilians, including 23 children and 17 women," said the official, who did not wish to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Catholics shocked

RIO DE JANEIRO: Heavily Catholic Brazil is reeling from a ritualistic black magic attack on a two-year-old that saw his former stepfather push 30 needles into his tiny body, an episode that could foster intolerance toward non-mainstream faiths, experts say. The needles -- some measuring up to five centimetres (two inches) in length -- were inserted throughout the child's body, including his neck, torso and legs. His former guardian, Roberto Carlos Magalhaes, has confessed he inserted the sewing needles as part of a macabre ritual aimed at exacting revenge on his ex-wife. He said his girlfriend and another woman who claims to be a "Mae de Santo" -- a female priest in Afro-Brazilian religions -- came up with the idea.

Search for baby girl

LONDON: British police were searching on Sunday for an 18-month-old girl taken from a police station by a mystery woman who persuaded officers she was a friend of the child's mother. The girl, Audrey Kessie Nyanor, of Ghanaian descent, was taken from a police station in London on Thursday. Her mother, 36, was arrested that day in Southwark, southeast London, over alleged immigration offenses.