World in brief

Fire breaks out on cruise ship

A fire broke out today on a cruise ship in the English Channel with 708 people on board, the British coast guard said.

The Calypso, a Cyprus-registered ship, issued a Mayday as it was about 20 miles off Beachy Head, on England’s southern coast, said Eric Birkett, a duty watch manager at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

Birkett said the fire broke out in the engine room, and that “many, many search and rescue units” responded to the distress signal.

Rescue helicopters were taking fire crews out to the ship, he said. There were 246 crew and 462 passengers on board, Birkett told the Associated Press.

GENEVA

U.S. officials deny charges of torture

U.S. officials defended the United States on Friday against allegations that it’s allowed the torture of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the United States has an “absolute commitment” to eradicating torture and preventing abuse.

The U.N. Committee Against Torture met the defense with skepticism, accusing American officials of playing word games and of mounting a legalistic defense rather than confronting specific accusations of prisoner abuse.

“There is the rule of law, and the rule of what is right,” said committee member Guibril Camara, of Senegal.

The U.S. defense and the committee members’ comments came during the opening meeting of a two-day hearing into American adherence to the U.N. Convention Against Torture. U.S. officials are expected to return Monday to respond to questions.

The hearing is intended to probe a variety of American activities, including long-standing issues in domestic prisons ranging from the psychological strain to inmates of living on death row to the use of stun guns by guards.

But the meeting quickly focused on interrogation methods that U.S. intelligence agents have used on prisoners taken during the war on terrorism. Those methods have been criticized in the United States and worldwide.

BEIJING

China seeds clouds to relieve drought

Chinese weather specialists used chemicals to engineer Beijing’s heaviest rainfall of the year, helping to relieve drought and rinse dust from China’s capital, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

Technicians with the Beijing Weather Modification Office fired seven rocket shells containing 163 cigarette-size sticks of silver iodide over the city’s skies Thursday, Xinhua said.

The reaction that occurred brought as much as four-tenths of an inch of rain, the heaviest rainfall this year, helping to “alleviate drought, add soil moisture and remove dust from the air for better air quality,” Xinhua said.

China has been tinkering with artificial rainmaking for decades, using it frequently in the drought-plagued north. Last month, another artificial rainfall was generated to clear Beijing. after the city suffered some of the fiercest dust storms this decade.

Whether cloud-seeding actually works has been debated in the scientific community.

Compiled from wire reports