World Briefs

LONDON – The speaker of Britain's House of Commons has rejected calls for his resignation amid the country's widening lawmaker expenses scandal.

Fifteen legislators urged Michael Martin on Monday to become the first speaker in 300 years to step down.

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands – A lawyer for one of five suspected Somali pirates being prosecuted in the Netherlands described his client Monday as a modern-day Robin Hood driven by poverty to hijack ships.

Danish Navy sailors captured the men after a Jan. 2 attack on the cargo ship Samanyulo in the Gulf of Aden. The ship's crew fended off the pirates with signal flares until the Danish naval ship came to the rescue and sank the pirates' boat.

BRUSSELS – A four-hour fire at the European Union's landmark Commission headquarters Monday sent the EU's top officials scurrying down 13 floors of stairs to safety and forced the evacuation of a few thousand bureaucrats and visitors.

Officials said the fire likely started in the basement archive before heat and gases raced upward through a wire shaft to the executive floors where EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and his fellow Commissioners were at work in their offices.

YANGON – Myanmar opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi went on trial on Monday amid tight security at a notorious prison, facing up to five more years in detention on charges of harbouring a US man who swam to her home.

Dozens of her supporters gathered near Insein prison outside Yangon.

BEIJING – This investment turned out to be as risky as it was risque.

A sex theme park that featured explicit exhibits of genitalia and sexual culture is being demolished before it can even open, a government spokesman in southwestern China said Monday.

The park, christened "Love Land" by its owners, went under the wrecking ball over the weekend in the city of Chongqing, said the spokesman, who like many Chinese bureaucrats would give only his surname, Yang.

BERLIN – German police are searching for a motorist who beat a 24-year-old woman selling white asparagus because he was upset about her asking price for the coveted springtime vegetable, police said Monday.

The prices for white asparagus, sometimes called "edible ivory" in Germany, fluctuate wildly during the short springtime season, peaking early in the season at 10 euros per kilo.