In the News

WORLD

BEIJING – Demonstrators angry at a crackdown on dogs staged a noisy protest in China’s capital on Saturday, decrying police killings of dogs and new limits on pet ownership.

About 200 police strung up tape to cordon off the roughly 500 demonstrators who waved signs and chanted near the entrance to the Beijing Zoo. Many clutched stuffed animals and wore buttons that said, “Stop the indiscriminate killing.”

Touching off the demonstration were new restrictions that limit households to one dog and ban larger breeds. Police in recent days have gone through city neighborhoods, seizing unregistered dogs and beating some of them to death, witnesses said.

Keeping pets has been controversial in China for decades. Banned as a middle-class habit during the radical Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, dog-raising surged anew with the introduction of free-market reforms.

Complaints about vicious dogs, barking and excrement-covered sidewalks prompted Beijing to impose height limits in 1995, banning dogs taller than 14 inches from the city center. Many cities have enacted similar measures.

In some cases, protesters said, dog owners have been given as little as one week’s notice to get rid of their large dogs or move to outlying districts. Protesters said the measures are not only inhumane but wrongly place the burden of punishment on the dogs, not the owners.

NATION

WASHINGTON – The government believes Fidel Castro’s health is deteriorating and that the Cuban dictator is unlikely to live through 2007.

That dire view was reinforced last week when Cuba’s foreign minister backed away from his prediction the ailing Castro would return to power by early December. “It’s a subject on which I don’t want to speculate,” Felipe Perez Roque told The Associated Press in Havana.

U.S. government officials say there is still some mystery about Castro’s diagnosis, his treatment and how he is responding. But these officials believe the 80-year-old leader has cancer of the stomach, colon or pancreas.

With chemotherapy, Castro may live up to 18 months, said the defense official. Without it, expected survival would drop to three to eight months.

A planned celebration of Castro’s 80th birthday next month is expected to draw international attention. The Cuban leader had planned to attend the public event, which already had been postponed once from his Aug. 13 birthday.

STATE & LOCAL

VIRGINIA BEACH – More than a third of the 2,000 homeowners who sued the federal government over Navy jet noise have agreed to accept part of a $38 million settlement, lawyers said.

At least 96 percent of the plaintiffs must accept by the settlement by mid-January, or it will be void.

The homeowners live near Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach and Fentress Naval Auxiliary Landing Field in Chesapeake. The lawsuits stem from the arrival of the Navy’s F/A-18 Hornets at Oceana in 1998 and 1999. Homeowners said the jets, which are louder than the F-14 Tomcats they replaced, subjected their homes to more noise and devalued their property.

The settlement will be divvied up based on where homes are located within jet-noise zones and the homes’ values in 2000, Quinn said. For example, a homeowner in a noise zone of 75 decibels would get more than a homeowner in a similar house in a 65-decibel zone.

The tentative settlement was reached Oct. 17, two days before the first lawsuits were scheduled to go to trial in Chesapeake.