World datelines

Canada

TORONTO — A police sharpshooter shot and killed an armed suspect who held a woman hostage for more than 40 minutes in front of Toronto's busy Union Station at the height of morning rush hour Wednesday. The hostage-taking came after the suspect shot another woman in the head at a nearby food court, police said. The woman was conscious on arrival at the hospital.

China

BEIJING — China evacuated 320,000 people from the east coast as Typhoon Aere hit the mainland Wednesday, after a mudslide buried a family of four in northern Taiwan pushing the regional death toll to 16. Aere came ashore at 4:30 p.m. in Fujian province, south of Shanghai, state television reported, showing footage of howling winds and driving rain. Cars plowed through flooded streets littered with uprooted metal barriers. No injuries or deaths were reported on the mainland.

Hungary

BUDAPEST — The ruling Socialist Party chose one of Hungary's richest businessmen on Wednesday to become the new prime minister, resolving a split with a smaller party that had threatened to undo the center-left governing coalition. Ferenc Gyurcsany, a centrist reformer who was sports minister, still must be formally approved as head of government by parliament, where the Socialists and the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats hold a narrow majority.

Japan

TOKYO — A worker injured in Japan's deadliest nuclear-plant accident earlier this month has died, raising the death toll to five, an official said Wednesday. Masaru Kameiwa, 30, had been severely burned in the Aug. 9 accident, which occurred when a corroded cooling pipe — carrying boiling water and superheated steam — burst at a plant in Mihama, about 200 miles west of Tokyo.

South Africa

CAPE TOWN — Mark Thatcher, the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was arrested Wednesday and charged with helping to finance a foiled plot to overthrow the government of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Thatcher, a 51-year-old businessman who has lived in South Africa since 2002, was arrested at his Cape Town home shortly after 7 a.m. and taken before the Wynberg Magistrate's Court, where he was charged with violating South Africa's Foreign Military Assistance Act.

Sudan