World datelines

Afghanistan: Man kidnapped

KABUL — Gunmen in Pakistan kidnapped the brother of Afghanistan's finance minister as he was returning to his mother's home from prayers, Afghan officials said Sunday.

He was at least the third person with ties to the Afghan government to be abducted in Pakistan's lawless border region, used by al-Qaida and Taliban militants as a base to attack U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Zia ul-Haq Ahadi was visiting his sick mother in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and was abducted on Friday. The kidnapped man's brother is Finance Minister Anwar ul-Haq Ahadim.

Iraq: Saddam's yacht for sale

BAGHDAD — Iraq says it has decided to sell Saddam Hussein's luxury yacht after winning a legal dispute over its ownership.

The former dictator's 269-foot superyacht is fitted with swimming pools, salons, a secret passage and a rocket-launching system.

Iraq's government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement that the government on Sunday agreed to part with the superyacht.

China: Tainted feed destroyed

SHANGHAI — Chinese regulators said over the weekend that they had confiscated and destroyed more than 3,600 tons of animal feed tainted with melamine, an industrial chemical that has contaminated food supplies in China and led to global recalls of Chinese dairy products.

In what appeared to be China's biggest food safety crackdown in years, the government also said Saturday that it had closed 238 feed makers in a series of nationwide sweeps that involved more than 369,000 government inspectors.

Jordan: Idle a 'ticking bomb'

AMMAN — Jordan's Queen Rania has warned that rising unemployment among Arab youth is a "ticking time bomb" that has to be defused before it causes unrest.

Rania says the number of unemployed people under 30 in the Middle East could increase from 15 million today to 100 million by 2020. The region already has the highest rate of youth unemployment in the world.

Vietnam: Capital flooded

HANOI — Much of Vietnam's capital remained under water Sunday as the death toll from the city's worst flooding in two decades climbed to 18, disaster officials and state media reported.