Balloons float over the Palote dam Sunday during the Hot Air Balloon Festival in Leon, Mexico.

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TOLUCA — Four scuba divers died while performing maintenance in an aqueduct that supplies Mexico City, authorities reported Sunday.

The Security Agency of Mexico State, which borders Mexico City, said the men were experienced divers maintaining a huge underground line just west of the capital.

Police divers recovered the bodies, and state prosecutors said they were investigating the cause of the accident.

Flow through the aqueduct had been stopped prior to maintenance, but the tunnel was still full of water.

The agency said the men were employed by a private company contracted by the National Water Commission. They entered the aqueduct late Friday to clean and inspect it but failed to return to an access well.

JAKARTA — A powerful earthquake struck waters off eastern Indonesia early today, briefly generating tsunami warnings for coastlines within 600 miles of the epicenter.

Thousands of people in nearby coastal towns fled homes, hotels and hospitals in panic, but there were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries.

The U.S. Geological Survey put the quake's magnitude at 7.5 and said it struck 54 miles from the nearest city, Gorontalo, located on the island of Sulawesi. It was centered 13 miles beneath the sea and was followed by two strong aftershocks.

REIMS — France's main opposition party failed to select a new leader and promote a platform at an annual convention Sunday, plunging the party into disarray as it seeks to challenge President Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 election.

The Socialists will now put the matter to a vote among party members on Thursday, and again on Friday if a runoff is necessary. It will be the first time a Socialist leader is chosen by the rank-and-file without the backing of the party leadership.

The candidates to replace outgoing party chief Francois Hollande are former presidential candidate Segolene Royal, former Labor Minister Martine Aubry and Benoit Hamon. Royal was defeated by the conservative Sarkozy in the 2007 election, and Aubry gave France the 35-hour workweek that Sarkozy is undoing. Hamon represents a far-left faction of the party.

LONDON — Reg Varney, a comic actor who played a cheery Cockney bus driver in the 1970s British sitcom "On the Buses," died Sunday, his daughter said. He was 92.

Jeanne Marley said her father died at a nursing home in Budleigh Salterton, in southwest England.

Born in east London in 1916, Varney began his career as a singer, piano player and comic in the rough-and-tumble world of pubs, music halls and workingmen's clubs. He joined the Royal Electrical Engineers during World War II but continued to perform as part of a touring show entertaining the troops.

In "On the Buses." Varney played Stan Butler, a happy-go-lucky driver tormented by the ire of his irascible boss.

LONDON — Paul McCartney says it's time an experimental Beatles track saw the light of day. He says he wants to release "Carnival of Light," a 14-minute experimental track the Fab Four recorded in 1967 but never released.

The band played the recording for an audience just once, at an electronic music festival in London.

McCartney, who spoke last week in a BBC radio interview — extracts from which were published Sunday by The Observer newspaper — would need permission from Ringo Starr and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison to release the track.