World briefs

A Spanish breeder of fighting bulls has decided to clone his favourite stud rather than risk buying a traditionally bred replacement.

Victoriano del Rio wants to repeat the success he has enjoyed with Alcalde, who sired two bulls that so impressed famous bullfighter El Juli in the ring that he keeps their heads mounted at home.

Cloning will cost €30,000-35,000 and will guarantee a perfect genetic copy, although del Rio accepts that does not mean it will produce offspring of Alcalde's fighting quality.

To perform the cloning, stem cells will be extracted from Alcalde's ear lobe and sent to a laboratory run by Texas-based genetics firm ViaGen Inc., who will then return the embryo.

Iraq to track down journalist killers

Iraqi authorities vowed yesterday to hunt down the killers of journalists, days after the head of the country's biggest journalist organisation became the latest media worker to meet a violent death.

The ministry said 270 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called the Iraq war the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history.

Ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul-Karim Khalaf told Reuters that the order to track the killers came after the killing of the head of Iraqi Journalists Syndicate, Shihab al-Tamimi, who died on Wednesday four days after being seriously wounded by gunmen who fired on his car in Baghdad.

High winds kill six

Gale-force winds hammered Austria and the Czech Republic yesterday, killing at least six people and sweeping roofs off houses, uprooting trees and cutting power lines, officials said.

They said air traffic in both countries was briefly interrupted when the storm, packing winds of between 155 kph and 180 kph lashed parts of central Europe, including southern Germany.

Austrian media reported that four people had died as a result of the storm, three of them foreigners on holiday. Two people died when uprooted trees smashed into their cars in Lower Austria near Vienna and Tyrol province in the northwest. One of the two was identified as a 77-year-old German tourist.

A 69-year-old German tourist was killed by a falling tree at a Tyrol campground. The fourth, also believed to be a British tourist, died when a boulder loosened by high winds struck the taxi he was riding through a mountain valley near Salzburg.

In the Czech Republic, an 11-year old girl was killed by a falling tree north of Prague, and flying metal sheets struck and killed an 80-year old priest in a town east of the central European country's capital.

Flights at Vienna's Schwechat airport were halted for about half an hour and power cuts hit tens of thousands of households.

Three arrested in security swoop

Irish police said yesterday they were questioning three people over what public broadcaster RTE said was links to the discovery of materials that could be used to make explosives.

RTE said three men from Afghanistan in their 30s and 40s, were being questioned by police after they were arrested during a search of a hostel for asylum seekers and foreign nationals in County Kerry in south west Ireland.

It said police found several devices which could be used as components for explosives. It could take days before police could confirm what the devices were.