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Brief World Headlines from Last Week

A close aide to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko who was a chief organizer of the Orange Revolution protests said last week that he had resigned from the government because of systemic corruption around the Ukrainian leader. Oleksandr Zinchenko, who resigned Saturday as state secretary, said the situation had grown "even worse" than under former president Leonid Kuchma and accused several top Yushchenko aides of corruption.

In France, three teenage girls taken into custody for questioning admitted starting a fire in a suburban Paris housing project early Sunday that killed 16 people, police said. The fire in a 19-story building south of Paris was the third fatal blaze in the Paris area in nine days. The death toll rose by one after another man died last week.

Finally, just before the historic elections in Egypt last week, a fire broke out in a crowded theater during a performance, killing at least 29 people and causing hundreds to flee the building in panic, a police official said. About 1,000 people were in the theater in Beni Suef, a city on the Nile River about 60 miles south of Cairo, when the fire broke out.