World datelines

Russia: Assassination plot

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin has been told about a plot to assassinate him during a visit to Iran this week, a Kremlin spokeswoman said Sunday.

Interfax news agency, citing a source in Russia's special services, said suicide terrorists had been trained to carry out the assassination.

A spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, denied any such plot had been uncovered, characterizing the news as disinformation spread by Iran's adversaries.

Putin is to travel to Tehran tonight from Germany after meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Cuba: Bus driver arrested

HAVANA — Cuban authorities arrested the driver of a bus that collided with a train, an accident that killed 29 people and injured 75 others, after determining he stopped his vehicle on the tracks as the locomotive approached, state media said Sunday.

Cuba's official National Information Agency reported that transportation experts determined that Manuel Taurino Chavez Pena stopped the bus on the tracks for unknown reasons around midday Oct. 6 shortly before it was slammed by the locomotive.

Twenty-seven of the injured remained hospitalized over the weekend, including two in critical condition, the agency report said.

India: Bomb rips theater

NEW DELHI — A bomb ripped through a packed movie theater in northern India on Sunday, killing at least six people and wounding at least 30 others, authorities said.

The blast in Ludhiana, an industrial town in Punjab state, was the second apparent terror attack this week in northern India. Two people were killed days earlier in the bombing of a venerated Muslim shrine in the neighboring state of Rajasthan.

The Shringar cinema was packed when the blast occurred around 8:50 p.m. in one of its three theaters. Some 600 people were taking in a recently released Bollywood romance, "Janan Janam Ke Saath," or "Together Through Several Lifetimes," the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

Israel: Probe of Olmert

JERUSALEM — Israel's attorney general on Sunday ordered a new criminal investigation into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the latest in a series of probes that threaten to weaken the Israeli leader during ongoing peace efforts with the Palestinians.