World Briefs

VIENNA, Austria – More nations must take in Guantanamo inmates once the U.S.-run prison closes, the U.N.'s torture investigator said Monday, insisting that many were held simply because they were "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Manfred Nowak told Austrian radio he hopes more countries will set aside their misgivings and show solidarity with the incoming government of President-elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to shut the detention center in eastern Cuba.

Most European nations have refused to accept Guantanamo inmates, citing national security concerns. Nowak told public broadcaster ORF he understands their reluctance, "since the U.S. government for many years represented (the prisoners) as the most dangerous ever captured."

KIEV, Ukraine – Russia's cutoff of natural gas to Ukraine was forcing several European countries to dip into reserves Monday, with Moscow tightening the tap even further.

European Union officials offered assurances Monday that consumers faced no danger for now, even as Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria said that supplies from pipelines through Ukraine remained down, in Romania's case by 30 percent. Russia's state-controlled gas giant Gazprom stopped supplies to Ukraine on Jan. 1 in a dispute over price and overdue bills and said it would keep pumping gas through Ukraine for European customers. But Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said Monday it would cut the amount of gas going into the pipeline by 65.3 million cubic meters, or about 20 percent of what has been daily supply, accusing Ukraine of having stolen that amount.

SYDNEY – An Australian woman who allegedly set fire to her husband's genitals because she believed he was having an affair appeared in court on a murder charge Monday.

After the fire spread through the family home, Rajini Narayan, 44, told neighbours she had only wanted to burn her husband's penis "so it belongs to me and no one else," prosecutors said.

"It's just his penis I wanted to burn, I didn't mean this to happen," she was quoted as saying, the Adelaide Advertiser reported.

Prosecutors said Narayan's engineer husband Satish was asleep in their double-storey Adelaide home when his wife doused his genitals with methylated spirit and set them on fire on December 8 last year

The blaze spread when he jumped out of bed and knocked over the bottle of spirits, causing around a million dollars (700,000 US dollars) damage to the house and a neighboring property, the court heard.