World Digest
Israelis start building another part of barrier

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It was the first construction on the barrier in the southern part of the Palestinian territory. The 425-mile barrier is about one-third done, with all of the completed work in the northern or central West Bank.

Israeli officials said the timing of the construction was unrelated to last week's suicide bombing in Beersheba, which killed 16 people. But they conceded that the attack, and a public outcry that followed, made construction more urgent.

Israel says the barrier is needed to block Palestinian militants from reaching its towns and cities. Palestinians say it is an attempt to annex land that belongs to them.

Tokyo

Offshore earthquakes shake western Japan

Two strong earthquakes, one magnitude 6.9 and the second magnitude 7.3, rattled western Japan within hours of each other last night, injuring 14 people, shaking buildings in Tokyo and triggering 3-foot-high tsunamis.

Damage and injuries appeared to be limited because both quakes were far off Japan's coast and the region shaken most strongly was a sparsely populated rural area, Wakayama, 280 miles west of Tokyo.

In 1995, a magnitude-7.2 quake in the western port city of Kobe killed 6,400 people.

Berlin

Chancellor's party suffers election defeat
 
German voters handed Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder a stinging defeat in elections yesterday in the small western state of Saarland, reflecting public anger over his drive to cut into the country's cherished network of social programs.

Schroeder's Social Democrats slumped to about 30 percent of the vote for the state legislature from 44.4 percent in the 1999 election, according to exit polls.

The Christian Democrats, in power in the state for the last five years, improved to 48.5 percent from 45.5 percent in the 1999 election and retained control of the statehouse, projections said.