At a glance

At a glance

CULT OF KIDNAPPING: Disciples of Japan's Aleph cult, formerly aUM Supreme Truth, have kidnapped the seven-year-old son of former guru Shoko Asahara, the police said. ``Six members of the sect took the eldest son away,'' said a police official responsible for Asahi village, 100 km northeast of Tokyo, where the boy was snatched. ``We don't know where the boy is now. He is not back there,'' said the police official after Friday's dawn kidnap. The bizarre case came just three days after the doomsday cult declared it had changed its name and deposed 44-year-old Asahara as its leader, five years after gassing Tokyo's subway. Japanese newspapers said the kidnappers included Asahara's third daughter, aged 16, who has a strong influence within the cult.

sCHOOL VIOLENCE, FRENCH STYLE: The attempted murder of an 11-year-old BY fellow students and the ordeal of a 17-year-old terrorised by classmates has drawn into stark relief the problem of violence in French schools. In the first incident, in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, three boys aged between 16 and 18 allegedly tried to murder an 11-year-old Spanish schoolmate after he refused to continue doing their Spanish homework. To punish the boy, the trio threw him down a school staircase. The second incident took place in the northeast town of Longwy, where three students were arrested last week for terrorising a fellow classmate for months. The boy, identified only as Sebastien, who was too scared to tell his parents or teachers of his ordeal, was beaten on the knuckles with a hammer, punched and burned with a hot iron rod.

JEWISH UNDERTAKING: Syria announced that it would not resume peace talks with Israel until the Jewish state provided a ``written undertaking'' accepting the principle of a full withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights. ``(Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Barak must provide a written undertaking accepting the principle of a withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines (which existed before Israel's occupation of the Golan) and the demarcation of that frontier in order to pave the way for a third round of talks,'' the government daily Ath-Thawrah said.