World Briefs

GOIANIA, Brazil – A young Brazilian man calmly testified Thursday that he stabbed a British teenager to death and dismembered her last year after they argued about his heavy drug use and his refusal to give her money. Mohamed D'Ali Carvalho Santos said he had been smoking crack cocaine for four days when 17-year-old Cara Marie Burke threatened to tell his mother he was spending all his money on drugs if he didn't give her an unspecified amount of cash.

Santos also testified that Burke threatened to have a police officer who was her boyfriend confiscate his drugs and sell them so she could get the money she wanted.

It was then, Santos said, that he killed her with a butcher knife in his apartment living room.

"I don't remember where I stabbed," Santos testified.

YANGON– Myanmar's military junta charged pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi Thursday with breaching the terms of her house arrest over a bizarre incident in which a US man swam to her lakeside house.

The 63-year-old goes on trial on Monday on the charges, which carry a jail term of up to five years and would stretch her detention past its supposed expiry date this month and through controversial elections due in 2010.

CANBERRA, Australia – A court suspended a government program to kill 7,000 kangaroos on federal land near the Australian capital on Thursday, halting efforts to thin a mushrooming population of the beloved marsupials that authorities say are threatening endangered species.

Animal activists challenged the government's contention that thousands of common eastern kangaroos must be slaughtered.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – A team of specialized American sailors apprehended 17 suspected pirates who attacked an Egyptian merchant ship in the dangerous waters off Yemen, the U.S. Navy said Thursday. The sailors from the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg also seized eight assault rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher when they boarded the pirates' vessel Wednesday in the Gulf of Aden, said the Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.

GENEVA – As swine flu cases topped 6,600 worldwide, vaccine makers and other experts met Thursday at the World Health Organization to discuss the tough decisions that must be made quickly to fight the evolving virus.

Pharmaceutical companies are ready to begin making a swine flu vaccine — but as the virus constantly mutates, questions abound: How much should be produced? How will it be distributed?