Briefly

UNITED STATES

Maine residents remain behind locked doors

Shocked and fearful Maine residents kept to their homes for a second night as hundreds of heavily armed police and FBI agents searched intensely for Robert Card, an Army reservist who authorities said fatally shot 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar in the worst mass killing in state history. Schools, clinics and grocery stores closed and people stayed behind locked doors in cities as far as 80 kilometers from the scenes of the shootings. Maine's largest city, Portland, closed its public buildings, while the Canada Border Services Agency issued an "armed and dangerous" alert to its officers stationed along the US border.

JAPAN

Workers hospitalized after toxic water splash

Four workers at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant were splashed with toxic water containing radioactive materials, with two of them hospitalized as a precaution, the plant operator said on Friday. The incident on Wednesday highlighted the dangers Japan still faces in decommissioning the plant that was knocked out by an immense tsunami in 2011 in the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. Five workers were cleaning pipes at the ALPS system filtering nuclear-contaminated water for release into the sea when two were splashed after a hose came off accidentally, and two others were contaminated when they were cleaning up the spill, a spokesman for operator TEPCO said.

MALAYSIA

Country picks Sultan Ibrahim to be next king

Malaysia's Conference of Rulers on Friday chose an influential sultan from the southern state of Johor to be the country's next king. Sultan Ibrahim will be officially installed as king on Jan 31, replacing his predecessor Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement where the throne changes hands every five years between rulers of the nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty.

QATAR

India 'shocked' at death penalty for 8 citizens

India said on Thursday that eight of its citizens had been sentenced to death by Qatar in a case that Indian media reported involved high-ranking ex-naval officers accused of spying. New Delhi said it would "take up the verdict with Qatari authorities" and would continue to "extend all consular and legal assistance" to the prisoners, India's Foreign Ministry said in a statement. It gave no further details on the eight condemned or their alleged crimes. There was no immediate confirmation from the Qatari authorities.

ITALY

Quakes beset town as supervolcano rumbles

The talk in shops and coffee bars in Pozzuoli, a port town outside Naples, is not about soccer or politics, but of the fear that has gripped residents since a supervolcano sparked a swarm of earthquakes. Over the past weeks the government has been planning for a possible mass evacuation of tens of thousands of people who live around the vast volcanic area known as the Campi Flegrei, or Phlegraean Fields, from the ancient Greek word for burning. Sulfurous fumes escape from the surface, giving the area a surreal look and making it a magnet for tourists. Residents have become used to the smell, the fumes and the trembling. There were more than a thousand quakes in September, most of them minor.

Agencies - Xinhua