The News in 2 Minutes

From The Associated Press

China increases efforts to stop deadly virus

BEIJING —China’s Health Ministry ordered heightened efforts to stem the spread of infectious diseases Saturday following an outbreak of a virus that has caused the deaths of 22 children in one city and is spreading.

The outbreak of enterovirus 71, a type of hand, foot and mouth disease that children are susceptible to, is another headache for the communist government as it prepares for the Beijing Olympics already tarnished by an uprising among Tibetans and an international torch relay disrupted by protests.

U.S. strike takes out militant holdout

BAGHDAD — The U.S. military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum on Saturday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.

AP Television News footage showed several ambulances destroyed and on fire, thick black smoke rising from them as firefighters worked to put out the flames.

The strike, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant “command-control center,” the U.S. military said. The U.S. military blamed the militants for using Iraqi civilians as human shields.

Microsoft abandons bid for Yahoo

SEATTLE—Microsoft says it’s dropping its three-month-old bid to buy Yahoo because the two sides can’t agree on an acceptable sale price.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer says in a letter sent to Yahoo on Saturday that the software maker was willing to pay $47.5 billion for Yahoo. That’s $33 per share.

Ballmer says Yahoo insisted that Microsoft pay at least $53 billion. That’s $37 per share.

Microsoft’s original offer was $44.6 billion, or $31 per share.

New Mexico wildfire burned 59 homes

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Firefighters worked in cooler, calmer weather Saturday to clear lines around a blaze that has burned 59 homes and more than 20 square miles in the mountains of central New Mexico.

Authorities were able to confirm Saturday that 50 homes burned Wednesday in a fire caused by humans in the Manzano Mountains, southeast of Albuquerque, said Linda Peters, a fire information officer. Nine homes had burned earlier.

4,100 pounds of pot headed for Philadelphia seized

PHOENIX —Arizona highway patrol officers say they seized 4,100 pounds of marijuana and arrested a Florida man after stopping a big rig headed from Tucson to Philadelphia.

Sgt. Harold Sanders of the Arizona Department of Public Safety says the semi-truck was stopped on Interstate 17 north of Phoenix late Friday. An officer became suspicious and asked for permission to search the truck’s trailer. It was loaded with 20 pallets of boxes of plastic foam plates -- and five pallets in the front of the trailer loaded with 184 bales of marijuana.

Sanders says 41-year-old Lakeland, Florida resident Denzil McFarlane was booked into jail on charges of possession for sale and transportation of marijuana.

Zimbabwe opposition weighs runoff

HARARE, Zimbabwe— ?Zimbabwe’s opposition on Saturday held out the possibility its leader would face President Robert Mugabe in a presidential runoff, but called on the nation’s neighbors to verify the vote count from the first round.

Thokozani Khupe, vice president of the Movement for Democratic Change, said the group still believed a runoff was unnecessary, maintaining opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the first round outright on March 29.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission released results a day earlier giving Tsvangirai the lead, but not the simple majority needed to avoid a runoff with Mugabe, the second-place finisher. The opposition rejected those results as fraudulent.

Bush says administration was ‘clear and candid’

CRAWFORD, Texas —President Bush, defending his record and his rhetoric, said Saturday that his administration has been “clear and candid” about the nation’s economy.

“We saw the economic slowdown coming, we were up front about these concerns with the American people, and we’ve been taking decisive action,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Bush sounded an upbeat tone following a modest uptick of economic news this week.

The economy grew in the first quarter of the year, but only by a meager 0.6 percent. Yet it was not the contraction that some analysts feared. Employers slashed fewer jobs in April than they had in earlier months. The unemployment rate in April also fell slightly.