London calling

London calling

NEW YORK — Designers at New York Fashion week heard London calling — from 1975.

The looks of the London youth movment in the years when mod morphed into punk dominated runways Saturday in the second day of spring previews. Short skirts and tight pants kept the skinny profile fresh, paired with — what else? — edgy black. The Fashion Rock concert featured a tribute to punk led by Fergie.

The look was in contrast to another emerging trend at the Bryant Park tents: easy, vacation-bound elegance. New York Fashion Week runs through Friday, with more than 100 shows over eight days.

Time isn’t right for deal with Russia, Rice says

ALGIERS, Algeria — Now is not the right time for the U.S. to move forward on a once-celebrated deal for civilian nuclear cooperation with Russia, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday during a trip to South Africa.

Her comment increased speculation that President Bush is planning to punish Moscow for invading Georgia, a former Soviet republic, by canceling the agreement. Such a move is being planned, according to senior Bush administration officials, but is not yet final.

U.S.-Russian relations have cooled considerably since last month’s military standoff between Russia and Georgia. On Saturday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the war has shown the world that “Russia is a nation to be reckoned with.”

Traveling in Italy, Vice President Dick Cheney pushed back against Moscow, saying: “Russia’s actions are an affront to civilized standards and are completely unacceptable.”

Japan joins fight against Internet child porn

TOKYO — Investigative authorities in Japan, United States and 72 other countries launched a joint international crackdown on child pornography video providers that use file-exchange software to distribute the images on the Internet, it has been learned.

The international police operation is designed to eradicate child porn, including video clips, which are proliferating over the Internet, sources said.

The Saitama prefectural police have been investigating several people believed to have been spreading obscene video clips from Japan to other nations via the use of such software, on suspicion of violating the law against child prostitution and child pornography.

Japan has been criticized internationally as a “massive child porn supplier nation.”

24 in Cairo shantytown killed in rock slide

CAIRO, Egypt — At least eight massive boulders crashed down on about 50 houses in a densely-populated shantytown on the outskirts of Cairo on Saturday, killing at least 24 people and burying many more under tons of rubble, Egyptian authorities said.

Frantic residents in the sprawling Manshiyet Nasr slum dug by hand to reach any survivors.

Manshiyet Nasr is home to 1.2 million people, according to Haidar Baghdadi, parliamentarian for the region, who said the area was known to be dangerous, but the government had resettled only a fraction of residents to safer government housing.

The government said survivors would be transferred to new housing for the night and given all necessary aid.

Combined dispatches