Troops in motorboats rescued 350 children from the second floor of their school hostel after it was surrounded by floodwaters in India's Gujarat state, where at least 123 people have died in monsoon flooding.

Soldiers and police snatched the students from the second floor after the ground floor of the building was submerged in Harup village, 45 miles south of Gujarat's main city of Ahmadabad, witnesses and officials said.

Most deaths in Gujarat's floods have been due to drowning, electrocution and house collapses.

Officials said the severe weeklong flooding had left more than 150,000 people homeless or stranded in their houses.

Early yesterday, waters receded in some areas, allowing about 400 passengers stuck in a train for more than 30 hours to leave their carriages.

Madrid, Spain

Marchers celebrate

gay-marriage vote

Hundreds of thousands of people paraded through Madrid yesterday in the largest annual gay-pride march, celebrating Spain's decision to legalize gay marriage.

Waving rainbow flags and behind a banner reading "We Go Forward, Now For Transsexuals," gays and lesbians danced in the sun after parliament's decision Thursday to approve a law giving gay marriage the same status as heterosexual unions.

Several banners attacked Spain's powerful Roman Catholic Church, which had strongly opposed a law it said could harm the fabric of society.

The law takes effect today, making Spain the fourth country to have legalized same-sex marriages, behind the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.

Bramberg, Austria

Alpine train crash

kills 2, injures 34

Two trains collided on a picturesque Alpine railway line in Austria yesterday, killing two people, including a train driver, and injuring 34.

Rescuers said one train apparently failed to wait at a two-track section at a station and sped onto a single track between stops. Four cars derailed.

But Martin Huber, chief executive of Austrian Railways, said it was too early to say if the collision resulted from a technical failure, human error or a combination of the two.

Moscow

Islamic group claims

it set off deadly bomb

An Islamic group connected to Chechnya's separatists posted an Internet message yesterday claiming responsibility for a bomb that killed at least 10 Russian special forces troops as they arrived at a public bathhouse in Dagestan on Friday afternoon.

The group, the Islamic Jamaat of Dagestan Shariat, also known as Shariah Jamaat, vowed to conduct more attacks and said "an invasion group" had been sent to Moscow to carry out sabotage operations.

The blast wounded 14 other soldiers and 13 civilians, a spokesman for Dagestan's Interior Ministry said.

Oranjestad, Aruba

Holland sends jets

to search for teen

Holland will send three F-16 warplanes rigged with search equipment to find Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway nearly five weeks after she disappeared, Aruban authorities said yesterday.

The three planes, equipped with infrared and sonar-scanning capacity, are expected to arrive this afternoon.

Pristina, Serbia-Montenegro

Explosion targets

U.N. mission office

At least three blasts rocked the center of Kosovo's capital yesterday, and one targeted the U.N. mission headquarters.

At least three U.N. vehicles burned in the parking lot of the U.N. mission headquarters in Pristina. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

The second blast detonated near the building of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, which is a block away from the U.N. compound.

The third blast went off near the Kosovo government building which also houses the province's parliament and damaged it slightly. No cause was given by a U.N. spokeswoman.

Kosovo has been administered by the U.N. mission and patrolled by NATO-led peacekeepers since 1999 after the alliance's bombing of Serbian forces waging a crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians.

Compiled from Reuters, The Associated Press and New York Times