■ RUSSIA. Priest murdered on eve of Orthodox Christmas. A Russian priest was killed while trying to stop thieves stealing religious artworks from his church on the eve of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, news reports said yesterday. Police detained two suspects in the attack, which took place in the Ural Mountains late on Saturday, Interfax news agency said. Russian Orthodox believers celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7. Interfax quoted police as saying 21 icons ? which can fetch high prices on the antiques market ? were missing from the church in the village of Neivo-Shaitansky. Detectives believe the thieves hit the priest with a blunt instrument and set fire to the church to try to cover up their crime, Vesti 24 television station said.

■ IRAQ. Car bomb kills two persons in Baghdad. A car bomb exploded in a market in the Iraqi town of Hilla south of Baghdad yesterday, killing two people and wounding 11, police and Interior Ministry sources said, adding the death toll could climb. The explosion took place near a local government office in Hilla, 100 km south of the capital. The mainly Shi?ite town, surrounded by Sunni Arab areas, has been hit by suicide bombings and sectarian violence. In February 2005, a suicide car bomb attack killed 125 people and wounded 130 in one of the bloodiest attacks since the US invasion in 2003.

■ INDIA. Police find nine bodies in sex murder case. Police investigating the sexual murders of two labourers have stumbled on India?s second serial killing case in the space of a few days, digging up nine bodies so far in the southern city of Hyderabad. ?We are recovering bodies one after another,? said S. Prabhakar Reddy, a top police official. The killings follow the discovery of skulls from 17 people, mostly children, at a house near New Delhi, in another murder drama that has transfixed India. Police had arrested two men after two labourers in Hyderabad, a centre for the tech sector, were sodomised and their heads smashed with a boulder. The arrested men told interrogators they had sodomised or raped and killed 13 people, most of them men but including two women.

■ UNITED STATES. Big avalanche buries Colorado highway. A large avalanche tumbled onto a major highway leading to the Colorado ski resort of Winter Park on Saturday, burying some cars and injuring at least one person, state authorities said. The snow slide was 62 metres wide and 4.5 metres deep and buried at least two cars along US Highway 40, about 100 km west of Denver. ?Our preliminary reports indicate that the slide covered all three lanes of the roadway and two cars were covered and pushed off the road,? Bob Wilson, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Transportation, said. ?Our crews are saying it is the largest slide they have ever seen.? The avalanche occurred at midmorning at the 3,350-metre Berthoud Pass after the bulk of skier traffic had passed. Seven people were taken to a hospital by ambulance. Only one person sustained injuries, which were not life threatening, Wilson said.

■ Finland. The pill may raise odds of having allergic kids. Mothers who have previously used oral contraceptive pills seem more likely to have children with nasal allergies, Finnish researchers report. Dr. Leea Keski-Nisula, of Kuopio University, Finland, and colleagues note in the medical journal Allergy that there has been a suggestion of an association between oral contraceptive use and allergic diseases. To investigate, the researchers studied 618 asthmatic children aged five or six years and compared them with 564 similar but unaffected children. The team found that, compared to children whose mothers had not used oral contraceptives, those who had taken the pill within a year of becoming pregnant had a 67 % greater likelihood of having a child with allergic rhinitis, or nasal allergy.