BAD NEWS FOR CATS IN CHINA'S GUANGDONG

The gray tabby cat scrunched at the bottom of a stack of metal cages. If it was male or female, young or old, nobody seemed to know or care. All that mattered was its weight: 6 1/2 pounds.

After a few calculations, the shopkeeper offered to sell the cat for $1.32 per pound, about $9. "We'll cut it up right here in back for you," the shopkeeper suggested.

The scene is routine at butcher shops in the capital of Guangdong Province, formerly Canton. Dog is eaten in many parts of China, but the human consumption of cat meat is special to Guangdong.

"Cat meat is good for women. You can eat it in the summer or winter. It is very light," said Jiang Changlin, a customer.

The Small Animal Protection Association says one Guangzhou-based business captures as many as 10,000 cats per day from throughout China. The cat snatchers are typically unemployed people who are paid $1.50 per cat.

But now fellow Chinese are drawing the line. "Cats are your friends, not food," read the banners carried at a demonstration at Guangzhou train station, where protesters were trying to intercept a shipment of cats.

And cat lovers are increasingly taking matters into their own hands -- staging late-night ambushes of trucks carrying cats to Guangdong.

Said Lu Di, 80, who founded the Small Animal Protection Association: "You can judge how advanced a civilization is by the way it treats its animals. This is a crime that humiliates all Chinese people."

The global financial meltdown has succeeded where historic changes and generations of crusading environmentalists had failed: It stopped production at the Baikalsk Pulp & Paper Mill, a Soviet relic and environmental menace that serves as the economic lifeline for this Russian town of 17,000 people.

The mill closure threatens to drive this lonesome town, clinging to the southern shore of Lake Baikal in the great wastes of Siberia, to extinction. "It seems to me this will soon be a dead town," said Alexander Shendrik, head of the mill's union. "Everybody depends upon the plant."

Built by communism and imperiled by capitalism, the pollution-generating factory chugged for decades alongside the oldest, deepest lake on the planet, an ecological gem nicknamed the Galapagos of Russia for the rare species it houses. A battle has raged for years over whether to shutter the mill to preserve the lake, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Still, the danger of closure didn't come until pulp prices plunged this year. Most of the 2,280 mill workers have been told they are redundant, as the lingo goes, and put on forced leave until early February.

A reigning Mexican beauty queen from the drug-plagued state of Sinaloa was arrested with suspected gang members in a truck filled with guns, police said Tuesday.

Miss Sinaloa 2008 Laura Zuniga stared at the ground, her flowing dark hair concealing her face, as she stood squeezed between seven alleged gunmen.

Zuniga, a 23-year-old model, was arrested at a military checkpoint in Zapopan, just outside the colonial city of Guadalajara, said Jalisco state police director, Francisco Alejandro Solorio. She was riding in one of two trucks, where soldiers found a large stash of weapons, including two AR-15 assault rifles, .38 specials, 9-mm handguns, nine magazines, 633 cartridges and $53,300 in U.S. currency, Solorio said.

Zuniga told police that she was planning on traveling to Bolivia and Colombia with the men to go shopping, Solorio said.

The former preschool teacher placed third in the Nuestra Belleza Mexico pageant in Monterrey in September. That pageant sends its winner to the Miss Universe contest. For placing third, she was expected to represent Mexico in the 2009 Miss International contest. Nuestra Belleza Mexico said it will await the results of the investigation before making any decision about whether to strip Zuniga of her crown.

NEWS SERVICES