Small earthquake hits New York City area

NEW YORK -- A minor earthquake shook the New York City area early Saturday, rattling the nerves of some residents still jumpy in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

A magnitude-2.6 earthquake hit under Manhattan around 1:42 a.m., said Dr. John Ebel, director of the Weston Observatory at Boston College, which monitors seismic activity in the Northeast.

"That's more than a tremor. That's a small earthquake," Ebel said.

At first, police scrambled to determine the source as 911 calls flooded in reporting shaking buildings and a booming sound, said Detective Edward Reuss, a spokesman for the New York Police Department.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, Reuss said. Recovery work continued uninterrupted at the site of the World Trade Center collapse.

Separatist groups seek strike in warring Kashmir

JAMMU, India -- Islamic rebels blew up a police jeep and fought gunbattles with Indian security forces in several areas of Kashmir on Saturday. At least 21 people were killed and 30 wounded.

The attacks came as schools, offices and shops in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir, closed to protest the presence of Indian troops in the Himalayan state. The All Party Hurriyat Conference, a coalition of Kashmiri separatist parties, called the strike.

.About a dozen Islamic militant groups have been fighting Indian security forces in Kashmir since 1989. They are seeking Kashmir's independence or merger with Pakistan, which, like Kashmir, is mostly Muslim. India is predominantly Hindu.

Milan's Islamic center probed for terrorist links

MILAN, Italy -- When police wanted to nab a 27-year-old Tunisian suspected of membership in Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, they waited for him earlier this month outside a mosque on a busy Milan street.

It has been nearly a decade since police began watching visitors to Milan's Islamic Cultural Center and mosque, a converted garage that the U.S. government recently described as "the main al-Qaida station house in Europe."

The Treasury Department said the institute "is used to facilitate the movement of weapons, men and money across the world."

Mosque officials deny any connections with bin Laden's network and say they have denounced the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that have been pinned on bin Laden and his network.

Trimble wins re-election help in Northern Ireland

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The largest Protestant party in Northern Ireland gave its backing Saturday to David Trimble in his bid to retake his position atop a shaky coalition government.

But Trimble could still face a close vote when the territory's assembly meets next week to vote for his restatement as First Minister -- with hard-line members of his party suggesting they may not give him the crucial backing he needs.

Hard-liners in Trimble's Ulster Unionist party said they were unimpressed by recent Irish Republican Army moves on disarmament that Trimble has declared sufficient to bring him back into the fragile Catholic-Protestant administration.

Fire burns Pennsylvania's quirky ship hotel

SCHELLSBURG, Pa. -- Fire destroyed one of Pennsylvania's quirkier roadside attractions and an icon of the historic Lincoln Highway.

The S.S. Grand View Point Hotel, also known as the Ship of the Alleghenies and Noah's Ark, burned Friday. All that remained of the closed hotel, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, were melted and bent girders anchored in the mountain.

Firefighters were hampered by the hotel's position -- 2,464 feet on the side of a remote mountain about 75 miles east of Pittsburgh. The fire companies had to haul water at least a mile from ponds to the mountain.

-- From wire reports