World Briefs

BRASILIA, Brazil – The world's top economies need to create a $100 billion fund to stimulate global trade, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Thursday.

Visiting Brazil as part of a three-continent tour to drum up support for a coordinated global economic plan, Brown said the world's richest nations, along with multilateral lenders and the private sector, must act immediately to turn back the global crisis.

"I'm going to ask the G20 summit next week to support a global expansion of trade finance of $100 billion to help revive trade in all parts of the world," he said.

SAO PAULO – Engine pieces from a US plane have fallen from the sky in Brazil, hitting 22 houses and a car but sparing passengers and residents on the ground.

Pieces of one of the turbines of the DC-10 plunged to the ground early Thursday in the Amazon jungle town of Manaus in northern Brazil. The plane is owned by the Miami, Florida-based Arrow Cargo company.

Rai Marinho, Arrow Cargo's station manager in Manaus, she says the plane carrying four people was able to continue its flight to Bogota, using its other two engines.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI – U. S. officials have inaugurated a $1 million police station in a Haitian slum once dominated by gangs. The walled Cite Soleil commissariat will house 32 Haitian police. and is part of the $20 million Haiti Stabilization Initiative to strengthen government institutions in Cite Soleil.

U.N. peacekeepers led by Brazil have provided the only real security in the sprawling oceanside neighborhood since the 2004 ouster of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

BOGOTA – A Colombian court says soldiers were responsible for the 1991 shooting death of journalist Henry Rojas, a correspondent for Bogota newspaper El Tiempo, and is ordering the government to pay damages to his family amounting to $380,000.

Rojas was killed in the northeastern city of Arauca after reporting on alleged corruption in the mayor's office and the military.

BRUSSELS – Pirates armed with machine guns pursued and captured a Norwegian chemical tanker off the coast of Somalia on Thursday, the owners said, less than 24 hours after a smaller Greek-owned vessel was seized in the same area.

The U.S. 5th Fleet, which patrols the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden, confirmed both hijackings and said they happened in the same area but separate from the gulf, one of the world's busiest — and now most treacherous — sea lanes.