Melamine levels OK, government says

Hong Kong

Authorities said Tuesday the amount of melamine found in two samples of chocolate made at British candy maker Cadbury's Beijing factory was legally acceptable for human consumption, a day after the company recalled 11 items sold in parts of Asia and the Pacific.

Hong Kong's Center for Food Safety said it tested six Cadbury chocolate samples, including two made at Cadbury's Beijing plant, and found them to contain less than 2.5 parts per million legally considered acceptable here. It did not say whether it was testing the other nine products being recalled.

Baby formula containing melamine has been blamed for killing four babies and sickening over 50,000 in mainland China.

Tokyo

15 killed in fire at video shop

Police say 15 people were killed early today in a fire in a video shop on the first floor of a seven-story building in Osaka in western Japan.

Kyodo News said the victims were male customers of the shop and were found in rooms equipped with a TV set to view the videos. A cause of the fire has not been determined.

Toronto

Aide resigns over plagiarism

A senior campaign staffer for the governing Conservative Party resigned Tuesday after admitting he wrote a speech for Prime Minister Stephen Harper that plagiarized another leader's address urging support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

The opposition Liberals released transcripts and video of speeches delivered by then-Australian Prime Minister John Howard on March 18, 2003, and one by Harper two days later in the Canadian Parliament when Harper was the opposition leader.

Liberal foreign-affairs spokesman Bob Rae said nearly half of Harper's speech was a word-for-word recitation of Howard's comments.

Conservative campaign worker Owen Lippert resigned later in the day after taking responsibility for the speech. He said he worked in Harper's office in 2003 and wrote the speech calling for Canadian troops to be sent to Iraq.

He said neither Harper nor anyone else in Harper's office had any idea he copied from Howard's speech.

Baghdad

U.S. soldier killed by small-arms fire

A parked car bomb targeted a restaurant in a mostly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing three people and injuring at least six others.

A U.S. soldier also was killed Tuesday by small-arms fire in northern Baghdad, the military said.

The death raises to at least 25 the number of American troop deaths reported this month, up slightly from 23 recorded in August. In all, at least 4,176 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Also

New chief: Pakistan named Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha the new chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency in a move that is sure to be scrutinized by U.S. officials who have questioned the powerful spy agency's loyalties in the war on terror.

New limitations: As hundreds of European Union monitors prepared to deploy in Georgia today, Russia said it would not allow them to enter a buffer zone surrounding separatist South Ossetia.

New party: Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev said Tuesday he is teaming up with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to form a new political party that will challenge the country's recent steps away from democracy.

Seattle Times news services