In the World

JERUSALEM - Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday fired a rocket into Israel for the first time since a cease-fire reached three months ago ended an Israeli offensive against the militant Islamist group Hamas, police said.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction, claimed responsibility. It called the firing a response to Saturday's death in custody of a Palestinian who was being interrogated by Israel's Shin Bet security agency.

A Grad rocket landed on a road outside the southern city of Ashkelon, causing damage but no casualties, said Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman. The Israeli army said that in response to Tuesday's attack, the Kerem Shalom border crossing, through which goods are shipped from Israel to the Gaza Strip, would be closed.

The death of the Palestinian prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, has heightened tensions in the West Bank after days of street protests in support of four other Palestinian inmates, who are on extended hunger strikes.

- Washington Post

CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez's continued silence in the week since his return to Venezuela has only deepened the mystery about his health.

While tweets and letters have been issued in Chavez's name, and officials insist they have had long meetings with him, no photos have emerged and even an ally as close as Bolivian President Evo Morales was turned away without a bedside meeting.

Some Venezuelans have questioned whether the socialist president is at a military hospital in Caracas at all, whether he even returned from Cuba, or whether he is in fact still alive.

Chavez hasn't spoken publicly since before his Dec. 11 surgery in Cuba. Opposition newspaper editor Teodoro Petkoff said Chavez's post-return invisibility has ratcheted up the surreal nature of a situation that he called "politically Kafkaesque."

- AP

MEXICALI, Mexico - Police in the border city of Mexicali say they have recovered a powerful improvised cannon used to hurl packets of marijuana across a border fence into California.

Police told the Televisa network that the device was made up of a plastic pipe and a crude metal tank that used compressed air from the engine of an old car.

The apparatus fired cylinders packed with drugs that weighed as much as 30 pounds, police said. It was confiscated last week after U.S. officers told Mexican police that they had been seizing a large number of drug packages that appeared to have been fired over the border. - AP