World Watch

CHINA
The Beast of Dongting Lake
Astate of emergency was declared in the province of Hunan as more than a million people struggled to stop China's second-largest freshwater lake from flooding. Authorities evacuated 600,000 people living on the shores of Dongting Lake. The government said that it had at least 150,000 soldiers and 930,000 civilians working to shore up dikes and embankments around the lake. When Dongting last flooded in 1998, 4,000 people lost their lives. This year the floods have killed 16 people, destroyed 27,000 homes in the area and ruined nearly 500,000 hectares of crops. In parts of the city of Yueting, on the lake's north shore, flood waters rose to the second floors of some buildings. Authorities worried that if the lake burst its banks, flood waves could put at risk more than 13 million people living in the nearby cities of Wuhan and Changsha.

RUSSIA
Triple Trouble
Police in Moscow arrested a man who threatened to detonate a van filled with explosives in front of the headquarters of Russia's counterintelligence agency. The van driver demanded talks with President Vladimir Putin. After an hour-and-a-half of negotiations the man drove off and was eventually detained by police. Earlier, part of an apartment building collapsed in a gas explosion that killed eight people. And a Duma deputy, Vladimir Golovlyov, was shot dead. Law enforcers, who had previously charged Golovlyov with privatization fraud in his Chelyabinsk region, said they did not yet know of a motive for the murder. But Golovlyov's colleagues in the opposition Liberal Russia Party said it was political.

TURKEY
Whirling Dervis
After weeks of speculation about his political future, Kemal Dervis, a former World Bank official and Turkey's ex-Economy Minister, joined the center-left Republican People's Party (CHP). Dervis had promised to sign up with ex-Foreign Minister Ismail Cem's center-left New Turkey Party but backed out, said Turkey experts, when the CHP looked as if it had the best chance to beat the pro-Islamic bloc in forthcoming elections.

KENYA
Compensation
A group of Kenyan cattle herders accepted a $7 million compensation package offered by the U.K. for deaths and injuries on Kenyan army ranges used by British troops. The money, offered by Britain's Ministry of Defence, will be divided among the 228 claimants. Hundreds of Samburu herders-many of them children-have been killed or maimed by shells discarded by the British army at practice ranges in central Kenya over the past 50 years.

MIDDLE EAST
Terror Cell Broken
Israeli security forces announced that they had smashed an East Jerusalem cell of the militant resistance movement Hamas. Israeli authorities said the cell was responsible for the July attack on the Hebrew University campus in Jerusalem that killed nine students. Of the 15 men detained, five were from East Jerusalem. Israel warned of repercussions for the Arab population in the city.

AFGHANISTAN
Drugs Pay
The new government has "largely failed" in its four-month effort to eradicate the opium poppy crop in Afghanistan, said a U.N. report. In recent years Afghanistan has become the world's biggest producer of the raw material for heroin. U.N. data suggested that this year's crop, worth more than $1 billion to Afghan farmers, was close to the high levels of the late 1990s. In 2000 the Taliban banned poppy cultivation, and U.S. drug agencies determined that this led to almost total eradication of the crop.

PAKISTAN
More Power
Military ruler General Pervez Musharraf announced he would make changes to his country's constitution to give himself yet more power. Musharraf will restore to the presidency the right to dissolve Parliament. He will also oversee the work of the elected government via a National Security Council, which he will lead. Among the other members of the council will be at least three other senior generals and the leader of the opposition in Parliament. Politicians said that the changes would interfere with parliamentary proceedings and make any new prime minister almost powerless.

NEPAL
Mudslide
As many as 41 people were missing and feared dead after a landslide buried the mountain village of Bamti, 100 km east of the capital Katmandu. The avalanche of rock and mud was caused by monsoon rains, which hit the Himalayan foothills every year from June to September. This latest landslide brings the total number of people killed in natural disasters in Nepal since July to more than 500. About 32,000 people have been made homeless.

PHILIPPINES
Beheadings
Muslim separatists in the southern Philippines beheaded two hostages, members of a group of six Jehovah's Witnesses who were trying to convert Muslims on the island of Jolo. The men's heads were found in a market in Zamboanga, the island's main town. The military chief on Jolo, Brigadier General Romeo Tolentino, said a note was attached to one of the heads, saying, "Those who do not believe in Allah will suffer the same fate." The murderers were thought to be members of the Abu Sayyaf group, which claims to be fighting for a separate Muslim state in the southern Philippines and which the U.S. has linked to al-Qaeda. The murders embarrassed Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who had claimed that the rebels were almost defeated.

RUSSIA
Chechen hornet kills Russian cow
Chechen separatists appeared to have scored another bloody victory over the Russian army as at least 116 people died when a military helicopter known as a Cow crashed in Chechnya, southern Russia. The Mi-26, designed to carry 70 soldiers with light packs, had at least 147 people on board-including women and children-when it came down near Khankala, the main military base on the outskirts of Chechnya's capital, Grozny. The crash, which investigators blamed on an anti-aircraft missile, caused the greatest loss of Russian lives since fighting resumed in Chechnya three years ago.

MEANWHILE
Diamonds forever
Death do you Part? Well, not any more. Now you can keep your loved one wrapped around your finger for $22,000 a carat. A company in Chicago claimed it has developed a way of turning cremated human remains into diamonds. "We're building on the fact that all living creatures are carbon-based and diamonds are carbon-based," said LifeGem Memorials.