World Scene
October 13, 2008
LEBANON
Army arrests terrorist suspects
BEIRUT | Lebanese authorities on Sunday arrested members of a "terrorist network" suspected of involvement in deadly bomb attacks in the northern city of Tripoli, the army said.
"Several members of a terrorist cell involved in the recent explosions in Tripoli have been arrested," the army said in a statement carried by the official news agency NNA.
Four soldiers and three civilians were killed when an explosion ripped through a military bus in the port city on Sept. 29. A similar attack in mid-August killed 14 people, including nine soldiers and a child.
The army said an explosives belt for use in a future attack was found during the arrest operation carried out by a joint unit of soldiers and internal security forces.
KAZAKHSTAN
American tourist reaches for stars
BAIKONUR | An American computer game designer reached space Sunday, fulfilling a long-deferred childhood dream that began with the flight of his astronaut father.
The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft carrying Richard Garriott and two crewmates and the digitized DNA sequences of some of the world's most famous minds hurtled into a clear blue sky from the Baikonur facility on the Kazakh steppe.
Mr. Garriott, 47, a multimillionaire from Austin, Texas, is the sixth paying space traveler and the first American to follow a parent into orbit.
The Soyuz is due to dock Tuesday with the international space station, where British-born Mr. Garriott will spend about 10 days conducting experiments - including some whose sponsors helped fund his trip - and photographing Earth to measure changes since his father snapped pictures from the U.S. station Skylab in 1973.
The eclectic DNA list ranges from famed physicist Stephen Hawking to comedian Stephen Colbert and Matt Morgan, best known as the "Beast" from the U.S. television show "American Gladiators."
AFGHANISTAN
Commander rejects talk of losing war
KABUL | The top NATO general in Afghanistan on Sunday rejected the idea that NATO is losing the Afghanistan war to an increasingly bloody Taliban insurgency.
But U.S. Gen. David McKiernan also said he needs more military forces to tamp down the militants, and he depicted a chaotic Afghan countryside where insurgents hold more power than the Afghan government seven years after the U.S.-led invasion. He said better governance and economic progress were vital.
"It is true that in many places of this country we don't have an acceptable level of security. We don't have good governance. We don't have socio-economic progress. We don't have people that are able to grow their produce and get it to market. We don't have freedom of movement," he told a news conference in Kabul.
"We don't have progress as evenly or as fast as many of us would like, but we are not losing Afghanistan," he said.
NORTH KOREA
Pyongyang pledges to disable nuke unit
SEOUL | North Korea said Sunday it will resume disabling its key nuclear complex after the U.S. dropped the country from a terrorism blacklist - a breakthrough expected to help energize stalled talks aimed at ending the country's atomic ambitions.
The spat was the latest of many between Pyongyang and Washington that threatened to scuttle progress before eventually being settled since the international talks aimed at dismantling the communist country's nuclear program began five years ago.
This weekend's developments raised hopes that stalled international nuclear talks could quickly resume and help improve ties between Washington and Pyongyang - Cold War adversaries, still technically at war.
Experts still predict a long, bumpy road ahead before North Korea's nuclear program is ever dismantled.
SOMALIA
Breakaway forces kill two pirates
MOGADISHU | Forces from the Somali breakaway region of Puntland on Sunday attacked pirates holding a Somali cargo freighter, triggering clashes that killed two pirates and a soldier, an official said.
Four others, including another Puntland soldier, were wounded when the forces attempted to rescue MV Awail, owned by a Somali trading company with a crew of 13 Syrians and two Somalis, which was seized Thursday off the region's shores.
The fighting comes amid mounting pressure over piracy in the waters around Somalia, with U.S. and international navies blockading a kidnapped Ukrainian vessel loaded with tanks and weapons.
Meanwhile, delicate negotiations were placed on hold earlier Sunday over a $10 million ransom demand by pirates holding a Ukranian arms ship off the Somali coast.
IRAN
Market merchants protest sales tax
TEHRAN | Merchants in Tehran's main market have closed their shops in protest of a new sales tax despite the government's announcement that it would suspend the measure for two months.
Gold, carpet and textile merchants participated in Sunday's strike against the 3 percent value-added tax that was imposed in September.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered his government to suspend the new tax for two months on Thursday, a day after a rare strike by merchants worried about how the new measure would affect their business.
Merchant strikes have been rare in Iran over the past three decades. A series of merchant strikes helped lead to the 1979 Islamic revolution, with store owners joining clerics to help topple King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
ISRAEL
High-tech scanner cuts airport hassle
LOD | Israel has introduced a step-on scanner that spares airline travelers the nuisance of having to remove their shoes so they can be X-rayed for hidden weapons, though the new device cannot yet sniff out explosives.
Only the shoes of passengers deemed suspicious by Ben-Gurion Airport staff are removed, X-rayed and swabbed for bomb residues. Most people can now keep their shoes on.
Installed next to the walk-through scanners at Ben-Gurion, "MagShoe" announces within two seconds whether the footwear of the passenger contains unusual metal that might be a knife for a hijacking or a bomb detonator part.
"This innovation brings enormous logistical value as it significantly cuts down the discomfort and delays associated with standard shoe searches," said Nissim Ben-Ezra, security technologies manager for Israel's Airports Authority.
But he said MagShoe must be used in conjunction with other precautions, especially as it would not spot hidden explosives - a major concern after the botched 2001 "shoe bombing" by al Qaeda sympathizer Richard Reid aboard a Paris-Miami flight.
A bomb-sniffing version of the suitcase-sized MagShoe is in the works, an Israeli security source said. The current version, produced by Israeli firm Ido Security Ltd., costs about $5,000.
AUSTRIA
Haider speeding before fatal crash
VIENNA | Far-right politician Joerg Haider was speeding at more than twice the posted limit before the car crash that killed him, investigators said Sunday as his grief-stricken party appointed a successor.
Flowers, notes and other tributes piled up at the scene of the crash that killed the former leader of the Freedom Party, whose anti-immigration stance and provocative praise of the Nazi era once led the European Union to slap Austria with diplomatic sanctions.
Police reconstructing Saturday's accident in the southern province of Carinthia, where Mr. Haider was governor, said the speedometer in the wreckage of Mr. Haider's high-powered Volkswagen Phaeton limousine was stuck at 88 mph.
The speed limit at the crash site is 43 mph, and it drops to 31 mph just 100 yards farther down the road in the direction Mr. Haider was heading.
LITHUANIA
Opposition party takes lead in vote
VILNIUS | A conservative opposition party and a populist group led by an impeached ex-president made strong gains in Lithuania's election Sunday, while the centrist government faltered, an exit poll indicated.
The poll, released on Lithuania's TV3 network moments after voting ended, suggested the government could be ousted by a conservative-led coalition or a rival populist bloc.
It showed the conservative Homeland Union winning 21 percent of the vote, and two allied populist parties - led by ex-president Rolandas Paksas and Russian-born businessman Viktor Uspaskich - mustering a combined 25 percent.
Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas' Social Democrats received 14 percent of the vote, while their four partners in the coalition government failed to break the 5 percent barrier to remain in parliament, according to the survey by the Rait pollster.
The final result was unclear because the survey included only the party list vote, which covers 70 of the 141 seats in parliament. The remaining 71 seats are decided in individual races in single-mandate constituencies, many of which will require a runoff on Oct. 26.
The vote also featured a nonbinding referendum on whether to keep a flawed, Soviet-era nuclear plant operating beyond its scheduled closure in 2009.
FRANCE
No extradition for ailing terrorist
ASSOCIATED PRESS Tributes amass at the site of the fatal automobile crash of Joerg Haider near Klagenfurt, Austria. The far-right politician was speeding at more than twice the posted limit.
PARIS | France has decided not to extradite a former member of the Italian left-wing Red Brigades terrorist group to Italy because she is in poor health, the president's office announced Sunday. It stressed that the measure does not weaken French resolve to fight terrorism.
Marina Petrella's weakened state and "profound depression" are potentially life-threatening, the office of President Nicolas Sarkozy said, announcing that the French chief of state had annulled an extradition decree for humanitarian reasons.
The statement confirmed a report in Sunday's Journal du Dimanche and comments by Petrella's attorney.
Petrella, who is hospitalized, was convicted in absentia in Italy in 1992 of complicity in the murder of a police chief a year earlier. She was sentenced to life in prison.
In France since the 1990s, Petrella, now 54, was imprisoned last year, but a court ordered her freed in August because of severe depression.
CROATIA
Bosnian Serb charged in shelling
ZAGREB | Croatia said Sunday it was charging a former Bosnian Serb politician with war crimes over the shelling of Dubrovnik during the 1990s war between Croatian forces and Serbian-backed rebels.
Bozidar Vucurevic, 72, a former mayor of Trebinje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, faces charges of "war crimes against the civilian population" and "destruction of historical and cultural property" in the southern Croatian coastal city, officials said.
An estimated 91 civilians were killed in October 1991 and about 200 injured when the Yugoslav army (JNA) bombarded the city, listed as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the surrounding area, according to the prosecutor's office.
From Bosnia, Mr. Vucurevic told the Bosnian Serb news agency Srna that the charges did not concern him.
VATICAN
Pope names four new saints
VATICAN CITY | Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday gave the Roman Catholic church four new saints, including an Indian woman whose canonization is seen as a morale boost to Christians in India who have suffered Hindu violence.
Thousands of faithful from the homelands of the new saints, including a delegation from India, where Catholics are a tiny minority, turned out for the ceremony in St. Peter's Square.
The honor for Sister Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, the first Indian woman to become a saint, comes as Christians increasingly have been the object of attacks from Hindu mobs in eastern and southern India.
Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, had beatified Alphonsa during a pilgrimage to India in 1986. Beatification is the last formal step before sainthood, the Church's highest honor for its faithful. Alphonsa, a nun from southern India, was 35 when she died in 1946.
The other new saints are: Gaetano Errico, a Neapolitan priest who founded a missionary order in the 19th century; Sister Maria Bernarda, born Verena Buetler in Switzerland in 1848, who worked as a nun in Ecuador and Colombia; and Narcisa de Jesus Martillo Moran, a 19th century laywoman from Ecuador who helped the sick and the poor.
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