World Briefs

BAGHDAD – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday his country's troops will leave Iraq by May 31, ending a mission that provided the second-largest military presence in Iraq after the United States.

Britain had previously said the 4,000-strong mission would conclude in the early summer, and Brown's statement appeared to accelerate that timetable to end Britain's role in the war.

The announcement came on a violent day in Baghdad, where police said a double-bombing targeting traffic police left at least 18 people dead and 52 wounded.

WHISTLER, British Columbia – More than 50 people were evacuated from about 30 gondola cars after a tower supporting the cables partially collapsed Tuesday at Canada's Whistler ski resort.

Police said there were no serious injuries at the resort, which is to host the alpine events of the 2010 winter Olympic games. Thirteen people were sent to the Whistler Health Care Center but all had been released by late Tuesday night, said Anna Marie D'Angelo, a spokeswoman for Vancouver Coastal Health, a regional health services agency.

MOSCOW – A new law drafted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's Cabinet would allow authorities to label any government critic a traitor — a move that leading rights activists condemned Wednesday as a chilling reminder of the times under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The draft extends the definition of treason from breaching Russia's external security to damaging the nation's constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity. That would essentially let authorities interpret any act against the interests of the state as treason — a crime prosecutable by up to 20 years in prison.

Prominent rights activists said passage of the bill would catapult Russia's justice system back to the times of Stalin's purges.

"It returns the Russian justice to the times of 1920-1950s," the activists said in a statement, urging lawmakers to oppose what they described as the "legislation in the spirit of Stalin and Hitler."

SAN'A, Yemen – An international anti-piracy force thwarted the attempted takeover of a Chinese cargo ship off the Somali coast on Wednesday, sending in attack helicopters that fired on the bandits and forced them to abandon the ship they had boarded.

In another blow to the thriving piracy trade, the Indian navy handed over 23 pirates it caught at sea to authorities in Yemen.

In Wednesday's assault, nine pirates armed with guns overtook the Chinese ship with speedboats and boarded the vessel, said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur.