World Briefs
BELGIUM
NATO
considers plan to expand peacekeeping outside Kabul
CASTEAU -- NATO,
which takes over the international peacekeeping mission Kabul,
is considering a plan to send small groups of soldiers across
the country to support reconstruction teams.
Aid agencies, U.N. officials and the
Afghan government have appealed for the international force to
fan out across the country to restore security, but the 5,000-
peacekeepers is restricted to Kabul under a U.N. Security
Council mandate.
But in an effort to
extend the peacekeepers' influence further into the country,
NATO is looking at an American plan for small groups of
soldiers to fan out into the provinces in support of
reconstruction work.
The aim is to have
16 such Provincial Reconstruction Teams spread out around the
country, said British Gen. Sir Jack Deverell, commander of
NATO's northern headquarters which is planning the Afghan
mission.
ISRAEL
Burial box of Jesus' brother a hoax,
archaeological experts agree
JERUSALEM -- Israel's archaeological
experts declared Wednesday that an ancient limestone burial
box, which bears an inscription suggesting it held the remains
of Jesus' brother James, was a modern forgery.
When the existence of the burial box,
or ossuary, was announced in October, it stirred great
excitement as potentially the earliest artifact linked to
Jesus.
But Israel's Antiquities
Authority said it had found overwhelming evidence that the
inscription on the box was a fake produced in modern times.
"The bottom
line is that every single scholar who examined this came to
the conclusion that the inscription was not authentic," said
Gideon Avni, director of excavations and surveys for the
Antiquities Authority. "It was done recently by a very
skillful artist."
GERMANY
Japan
blocked from resuming the commercial killing of whales
BERLIN --
Anti-whaling nations blocked Japanese requests Wednesday to
resume commercial whaling, calling for more research into
stocks before any easing of a 17-year international ban.
A global whaling conference voted 27-17
and 26-19 to defeat two Japanese motions -- one seeking
permission to take from the North Pacific 150 Bryde's whales a
year between 2004 and 2008, and another for 150 minke whales
starting this year.
FRANCE
French
court says medics in AIDS-tainting case aren't liable
PARIS --
France's highest court on Wednesday threw out cases against 30
medics accused of giving patients AIDS-tainted blood, a
decade-old scandal that shook the public health establishment.
More than 4,000 people, mainly
hemophiliacs, were infected by blood products tainted with the
HIV virus. Several hundred have died.
The 30 defendants had been charged with poisoning or
complicity in poisoning and involuntary homicide or injury.
In its ruling, the court determined
that doctors who prescribed tainted blood products before 1985
could not be accused of poisoning because they did not have
"knowledge of the necessarily deadly character" of the
products.
MYANMAR
Democracy
leader marks birthday in custody of military government
YANGON --
Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi spent her 58th birthday
Thursday locked up in an undisclosed place by a military
government that defied demands by foreign government to free
her.
Even Myanmar's partners in the
10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations have told the
generals of the junta to free Suu Kyi quickly, a remarkable
departure from the group's policy of not commenting on each
other's internal affairs.
"The brutal
rulers of Burma need to understand that the only acceptable
way forward is to release Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters
and to resume dialogue with her and with her party," Secretary
of State Colin Powell told a news conference Wednesday in
Cambodia.
Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi
has been held incommunicado since May 30, following violent
clashes in northern Myanmar where she was on a tour. The
government says the violence started when her motorcade tried
to plow through a group of pro-junta demonstrators.
SWEDEN
50-year-old wreck of spy plane found
beneath the Baltic Sea
STOCKHOLM -- A Swedish spy plane that
vanished five decades ago over the Baltic in a Cold War
mission has been found, researchers said Wednesday.
The DC-3 and its eight-man crew were
last heard from on June 13, 1952. For some 40 years, Sweden
maintained it was on a training mission, and the Soviet Union
said it didn't know what happened to it.
In the late 1980s, Sweden acknowledged
the plane was surveying Soviet military installations in the
then-Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
-- all now independent states.
Shortly
before its 1991 collapse, the Soviet Union admitted its
fighters shot down the twin-engine plane.
The Swedish marine explorers said they
found the wreck last week after a three-year search.
Photographs and video from a remote-controlled deep-sea camera
confirmed that it was the missing plane, lead researcher
Anders Jallai said.
FINLAND
Two months after taking office, woman
prime minister resigns
HELSINKI -- Just two months after
becoming Finland's first female prime minister, Anneli
Jaatteenmaki resigned Wednesday amid accusations she lied
about the leak of sensitive political information during the
election campaign.
Jaatteenmaki's
Center Party won a narrow victory in March elections over the
ruling Social Democrats after accusing the incumbent prime
minister of compromising Finland's neutrality by supporting
the U.S.-led war against Iraq.
But she
was accused of using information gleaned from leaked
confidential Foreign Ministry documents to exploit the
anti-war feeling among the majority of Finns and unseat former
Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen.
Jaatteenmaki, 48, also was accused of publishing classified
documents on her Web site, which is illegal, possibly leaking
them to the press and inciting someone else to pass on the
classified material.
Jaatteenmaki, who
spent the day being grilled by Finnish lawmakers over the
allegations, said she would hand in her government's
resignation Wednesday night to President Tarja Halonen.
She did not admit any wrongdoing but
said the scandal made it impossible for her to continue as the
Nordic country's leader.
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