WORLD briefs

LONDON. Two British teens were acquitted of a plot to carry out a massacre at their high school in a Columbine-inspired attack despite police evidence of the pair allegedly making explosives together. Matthew Swift, 18, and his friend Ross McKnight, 16, were cleared of what prosecutors had alleged was a plan to slaughter students and teachers at the school in Manchester, in northwest England, on the 10th anniversary of the US high school shootings.

YANGON. Authorities in military-run Myanmar have barred opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from attending an upcoming appeal against her recent conviction for breaking the terms of her house arrest, her lawyer said yesterday.The 64-year-old opposition leader was convicted on Aug. 11 and sentenced to three years in prison with hard labor after an American intruder stayed at her home. The sentence was commuted to 18 months of house arrest.

WASHINGTON.A United States judge in Virginia has set a November 10 execution date for the man behind the 2002 sniper attacks on the Washington DC area. John Allen Muhammad was sentenced to death for the murder of Dean Meyers, one of 10 people killed during the shootings.

HAVANA.The Cuban government has given permission for religious services to be held in the island's prisons for the first time in 50 years, a church official said on Tuesday. The services will be allowed in all prisons where the inmates request them, said Marcial Miguel Hernandez, president of the Cuban Council of Churches.

HAGUE.Former Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic, convicted of war crimes, is to be freed from her Swedish prison cell several years early. Plavsic, 79, turned herself in in 2001 and has served two-thirds of her 11-year sentence. A hardline nationalist known as Bosnia's "Iron Lady", she was convicted in 2003 after pleading guilty to war crimes.