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Crude oil prices for future deliveries topped $119 a barrel in trading Monday, driven by striking refinery workers in Scotland. As a result of the walkout, which is not scheduled to end until Tuesday, a pipeline that carries 700,000 barrels of crude a day to cracking plants elsewhere in Britain had to be shut down. The pipeline can be up and running again within 24 hours, but analysts said it could take a week for the refinery to return to production. Supply interruptions also are occurring in Nigeria. Above, strikers at the refinery read a newspaper ad placed by their union.

A four-week delay in releasing any of the tally from Zimbabwe's disputed presidential election was expected to end Monday, but the competing parties will see only the results of a partial recount, reports said. A spokesman for the Electoral Commission said the recount would allow incumbent Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF movement and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to compare it with their own tallies. Both sides can be expected to dispute the figures, analysts said, and the MDC has refused to participate in a runoff against Mugabe.

A passenger train that may have been traveling too fast left the tracks and slammed into another before dawn in eastern China Monday, killing at least 70 people and injuring hundreds more – many of them critically. The Xinhua news agency said the regional railway chief and the Communist Party secretary were removed from their posts as an investigation began. The accident was the second involving trains in Shandong Province this year and was China's worst in a decade.

Tens of thousands of cheering people lined the streets of North Korea's capital Monday for the latest leg of the Olympic torch relay, the first time the flame has been in the authoritarian nation. North Korea is heavily dependent on aid from China, and unlike other stops on the journey, there were no protests during the relay.

Across Austria, people were reacting with disbelief Monday to news reports of a father's 24-year imprisonment and sexual abuse of his own daughter. Police said the suspect confessed to confining the daughter in windowless and soundproofed rooms in the basement of their home and fathering seven children with her. One of the children died in infancy and police said three others "never saw sunlight" until they were freed last weekend. The case came to light when one of them was rushed to a hospital. It is the second of its type to surface in Austria in three years. Below, investigators pass TV cameras to enter the house 80 miles west of Vienna.

In a single record-setting launch, India put 10 satellites into orbit Monday, establishing itself as a major competitor in the commercial space research market. Eight of the satellites belong to foreign customers. Last year, a Russian rocket put 16 satellites into orbit at once, but their combined weight was less than half that of the Indian launch. Later this year, India plans its first mission to the moon.

"Pilot error" was blamed for the crash of a helicopter as it was landing aboard a drilling rig in the Black Sea Monday. The accident killed all 20 employees of Ukraine's state gas company who were aboard. Last month, a helicopter of the same model belonging to Ukraine's border guard crashed in the Black Sea, killing 12 people.

Almost 1 in 5 Cubans will be affected by the latest move to liberalize society since Raul Castro assumed power, reports said. Castro announced Sunday that state pensions for retirees will increase by up to 20 percent and that employees of the judicial system will receive $10-a-month raises. The amounts, while tiny by international standards, will go far in a country where the economy is almost 100 percent controlled by the government, analysts said.

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