World Scene

LATVIA

Passengers taken off stranded ship

RIGA — Latvia’s coast guard yesterday removed more than 650 people from a stranded cruise ship after tugboats failed to pull the luxury liner off an underwater sand bank in the Baltic Sea.

In a five-hour operation, 651 passengers — most of them elderly Germans — and 11 crew members were transferred from the 660-foot-long Mona Lisa onto two naval ships, coast guard officials said.

The passengers and crew left the ship without incident, descending ladders to the naval ships, coast guard spokeswoman Liene Ulbina said.

NORTH KOREA

Top U.S. envoy to visit Pyongyang

SEOUL — The State Department’s top Korean affairs specialist plans to visit North Korea this week for further discussions on the country’s nuclear declaration, a South Korean news report said yesterday.

The State Department said no travel plans were finalized for Sung Kim, although officials would not rule out suggestions that he might leave for North Korea sometime this week.

Yonhap news agency, quoting a high-level South Korean government official, reported that Mr. Kim was preparing to visit Pyongyang later in the week and that Washington would soon announce a detailed schedule.

CHINA

Deadly virus keeps spreading

BEIJING — China reported a jump yesterday in the number of children sickened with hand, foot and mouth disease, saying more than 9,700 cases have been reported.

At least 24 deaths in Anhui province in the east-central and Guangdong province in the south have been blamed on enterovirus 71, one of several viruses that cause the disease, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Xinhua said 8,573 children had been reported infected in the provinces of Anhui, Guangdong, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan and Jiangsu, as well as in Beijing. All wereyounger than 6 and the majority were younger than 2, it said.

IRAQ

Kurdish rebels mull suicide attacks

QANDIL MOUNTAINS — Kurdish rebels could launch suicide attacks against American interests to punish the U.S. for sharing intelligence with Turkey after Turkey bombed rebel bases, a spokeswoman for a wing of a rebel group warned.

Turkey’s military said more than 150 Kurdish rebels were killed in Friday’s air strikes against bases of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, on Mount Qandil on the border of Iran and Iraq.

Peritan Derseem, a senior official of the rebel group’s Iranian wing, PEJAK, said that some rebels want to join suicide squads to avenge the deaths of their comrades but that “combatants are under the control of the organization,” which she said is against such attacks. That may change, Ms. Derseem hinted.

“We have changed our stand toward the United States government and we are standing against them now,” she said. “Maybe some day … individual combatants might launch suicide attacks inside Iraq and Turkey, and even against American interests.”

BRITAIN

Prince Harry awarded for service

LONDON — A grinning and blushing Prince Harry was given a medal for his service in Afghanistan yesterday by his aunt, Princess Anne.

The young red-haired royal struggled to contain a smile as the princess pinned the Operational Service Medal for Afghanistan to his desert fatigues in a ceremony at the Combermere Barracks in Windsor, west of London.

Prince Harry, 23, was among 170 members of his unit, the Household Cavalry Regiment, decorated for their service in Afghanistan as friends and family looked on.

From wire dispatches and staff reports