Around the world
BOMBING: Two bombs exploded in the center of Bogota, Colombia, Monday morning, wrecking cars and buildings and injuring a number of people, police said. A police spokesman said he could not immediately say how many people had been injured by the blasts or whether anyone had been killed.SLAVE TRADE: China has arrested more than 75,000 people for slave trading over the past two years and freed some 40,000 women and children who were sold into bondage, a senior government official said on Monday.
CIA SHOOTING: The suspected killer of two Central Intelligence Agency employees Jan. 25 had worked for the CIA and went on the shooting rampage outside its headquarters because of a dispute with his employers, several newspapers in Islamabad, Pakistan, reported.
TIT-FOR-TAT? Japanese Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe, just back from a four-day visit to Washington, said Monday that Japan would consider countermeasures if the United States restricts Japanese access to the American market. He made his comments at a House of Representatives Budget Committee meeting shortly before being hospitalized for fatigue.
MASSACRE: A federal investigator in Mexico City says that the massacre of 24 people in a remote Mexican village last week was the result of a family feud in a "lawless" place neglected by local and state officials and was not directly related to drug trafficking.
BAD AIR: Pollution in northern Bohemia has gotten so bad that schoolchildren have been told to stay home through Tuesday, and some pregnant women have been evacuated.
SAVED: More than 500 Chinese being smuggled to America in the locked hold of a cargo ship would have died without the intervention of the United States, a U.S. Coast Guard official on the Marshall Islands said Monday. Some 400 of the 527 passengers who set out in late December were kept in the hold until the U.S. Coast Guard boarded the ship Feb. 5.
Across the nation
SUICIDE: Dr. Jack Kevorkian aided in another death Monday in Detroit, the 13th time he has done so, his lawyer's office said. Connie Baker, assistant office manager for Kevorkian's attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, confirmed that Kevorkian had helped someone commit suicide but had no details.
LUCKY LANDING: A Brazilian airliner blew seven of its 10 tires upon touchdown at San Francisco Airport Sunday, scattering metal and rubber over a mile-long stretch of runway. Authorities said 20 people were aboard the Viacao Aerea Rio-Grandense flight, but no one was injured.
HOUSE FIRE: Five children were killed in a fire that apparently began when an electric heater ignited a couch, fire officials in Cleveland said. The house lacked a working smoke detector. The children ranged in ages from 1 to 6 years old.
CARJACKING: A Delaware man was killed and his 5 1/2-month-old son taken during a carjacking in West Philadelphia Sunday evening. Philadelphia police said the child was dumped behind a rowhouse, still strapped in his carseat, about 20 blocks away.
FREED: An Orthodox Jewish couple, accused of abducting a 13-year-old boy in a dispute with his parents over the youth's religious schooling, have been released from a New York jail.