World datelines

Russia: Wildfires circle city

MOSCOW — Raging forest fires encircled a southern Russian city and tore through provincial villages Thursday, forcing mass evacuations as Moscow suffered through a record, weeks-long heat wave and smog cloud caused by peat-bog fires.

Some 212,506 acres were burning nationwide, and flames all but encircled the city of Voronezh, 300 miles southeast of Moscow. Forest fires on Moscow's outskirts reached the city's western fringe, in the Krylatskoye district, but were extinguished toward nightfall.

State television pictures showed the evacuation by ambulance more than 800 patients from a Voronezh city hospital.

Nicaragua: Deportations

MANAGUA — Nicaragua deported a U.S. couple to Panama, where they face charges of killing two Americans in a scheme to steal their property on a Caribbean archipelago popular with expatriates.

William Cortez and his wife, Jane, were turned over to Panamanian police on Thursday, Nicaraguan deputy police chief Carlos Palacios said. The pair were arrested Monday at the border with Costa Rica and identified themselves with what authorities have called false names.

They are charged with killing Cheryl Lynn Hughes, 53, and another man believed to be a U.S. citizen.

France: Mom admits killings

VILLERS-AU-TERTRE — A French woman who admitted suffocating eight of her newborns and concealing their corpses in the garden and garage of her home has been charged with manslaughter, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Dominique Cottrez, a 46-year-old nurse's aide with two grown daughters, said that after a bad experience with her first pregnancy she never again wanted to see a doctor. She admitted delivering the babies herself and placing the corpses in plastic bags. She buried two of the newborns in the garden and hid the other bodies in the garage, prosecutor Eric Vaillant said.

Cottrez's husband, who was not charged, was in a state of shock but the family remained united behind the mother, his lawyer said.

Bangladesh: Wage hike

DHAKA — Bangladesh has raised minimum monthly wages for its millions of garment workers by about 80 percent after months of violent protests over poor pay and conditions, a government minister said Thursday.

Garment workers in Bangladesh are paid the least in the world and are unable to buy food and arrange shelter on their monthly earnings, according to the International Trade Union Confederation, a Vienna-based labor rights group.

The official minimum wage has been set at 3,000 takas ($45) a month, up from 1662 takas ($25) in the first raise since 2006.

U.K.: Churchill's dentures