World Briefs

The NHS has written to a dead man to apologise for leaving him to die in agony three-and-a-half-years after he died.

Tom Milner, 76, was not given his prescribed pain-relieving morphine for terminal leukaemia in his last two days, his family say. (PA)

Soldier's tragic homecoming

A US soldier returning home from Iraq received grim news as soon as he arrived - his father died in a car crash while en route to greet him.

The Colorado State Patrol said 55-year-old Donnie Ferguson died on Interstate 76 in northwestern Colorado.

Mr Ferguson was on his way from Illinois to Fort Carson to greet his 23-year-old son Chris. (PA)

Guantanamo inmates transferred

Two Syrians held at Guantanamo Bay have been sent to Portugal.

The US Justice Department announced the transfer without naming the detainees.

The move left 226 people at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (PA)

DJ found dead

New York celebrity disc jockey DJ AM was found dead in a New York City apartment.

DJ AM, a 36-year-old whose real name was Adam Goldstein, was found in a Manhattan apartment.

The death comes a year after Goldstein survived a plane crash that killed four other people in South Carolina. (PA)

Mercury man bailed

An airline passenger charged in a mercury spill that disrupted flights at Puerto Rico's main airport was released on bail.

Pedro Rafael de Pena de La Cruz of the Dominican Republic faced US federal charges that include the transportation of hazardous materials for the incident at the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport.

The newspaper El Nuevo Dia reports that a judge set bond at $30,000 and ordered de Pena to surrender his passport. (PA)

Drug case fails

A US judge dismissed a major international drug case and ordered that the alleged dealer should not be charged again after the prosecution fell apart.

Chinese-Mexican businessman Zhenli Ye Gon has been in jail for two years on charges of importing methamphetamine from Mexico into the United States.

Mexican authorities said they seized more than $205 million from his Mexico City mansion when he was arrested in a Washington suburb. (PA)

Bird ruling reconsidered

US federal officials will reconsider whether a bird that breeds in Colorado and neighbouring states and spends summers in California should be protected.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service agreed in a settlement to review the mountain plover's status and decide by July 31, 2010, whether it should be added to the endangered species list.

The agreement settles a lawsuit by two environmental groups that claimed a 2003 finding that the bird isn't in danger of going extinct was politically motivated. (PA)

Teacher killing protest

Protest barricades returned to the southern Mexico city of Oaxaca after a teacher was killed there in a clash between rival unions.

Oaxaca city was paralysed by months of protests sparked by a teachers' strike in 2006.

Protesters allied with the Section 22 teacher's union have blocked traffic at three key intersections in the state capital to protest against the shooting of a teacher in an apparent clash with the pro-government Section 59 teacher's union in the coastal Oaxaca town of San Pedro Jicayan. (PA)

Banks closed down

US regulators shut down banks in California, Maryland and Minnesota, pushing to 84 the number of bank failures this year amid the soured economy and rising loan defaults.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp took over the three banks.

They were Affinity Bank, based in Ventura, California, Baltimore-based Bradford Bank and Mainstreet Bank, based in Forest Lake, Minnesota. (PA)

Breath test may show lung cancer early

A sensor made with gold nanoparticles can detect lung cancer in a patient's breath and may offer a diagnosis before tumours show up on an x-ray, Israeli scientists have said.

The device, which the developers say would be cheap enough for everyday use by family doctors, detected lung cancer with 86 per cent accuracy and may offer a way to screen for a disease not usually diagnosed until it has spread and is no longer curable.

It uses sensors based on gold nanoparticles to detect specific compounds - volatile organic compounds (VOC) - that lung cancer patients have in high levels in exhaled breath. (Reuters)