WORLD briefs

SCOTLAND. Scotland freed the terminally ill Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds Thursday, allowing him to die at home in Libya despite American protests that mercy should not be shown to the man responsible for the deaths of 270 people. Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said Abdel Baset al-Megrahi's condition had deteriorated from prostate cancer.

WASHINGTON The number of first-time claims for unemployment benefits rose unexpectedly for the second straight week, a sign that jobs remain scarce even as other data show the economy is stabilizing. The Labor Department said Thursday the number of new jobless claims rose to a seasonally adjusted 576,000 last week, from a revised figure of 561,000.

MOSCOW Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered Thursday that key parts of Russia's aging infrastructure be checked and upgraded after a power plant accident in Siberia left scores feared dead and strained the vast region's power supply. The confirmed death toll in the Russian power plant accident rose to 17 Thursday after three more bodies were found.

BEIJING More than 1,300 children have been sickened by lead poisoning in central China, the second such case involving a large number of children this month, state media said Thursday. The official Xinhua News Agency said 1,354 children — or nearly 70 percent of the children tested — who lived near a manganese processing plant in Wenping township in Hunan province were found to have excessive lead in their blood.

WASHINGTON. Two minutes after he cleared a private plane for takeoff and a fateful flight over the Hudson River, an air traffic controller at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport was on the phone with a woman in the airport operations office, joking about barbecuing a dead cat.The transcripts conform with a sequence of events laid out last week by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the accident, although they differ on the time events occurred