Tehran—A top
aide to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
said on Tues-day that five British sailors
detained in southern Gulf waters would be dealt
with firmly if found guilty of “ill intentions.”
The five British men on a 60-foot (18-metre)
racing yacht were detained last week by the
Revolutionary Guards, the elite force said.
Baghdad—The guns are gradually falling silent in
Iraq as a fragile stability takes hold, turning
the spotlight on a stealthier killer likely to
stalk Iraqis for years to come. Incidences of
cancer, deformed babies and other health
problems have risen sharply, Iraqi officials
say, and many suspect contamination from weapons
used in years of war and accompanying unchecked
pollution as a cause.
Geneva—The United Nations called Switzerland’s
ban on new minarets “clearly discriminatory” and
deeply divisive, and the Swiss foreign minister
acknowledged Tuesday the government was very
concerned about how the vote would affect the
country’s image. U.N. human rights chief Navi
Pillay said Sunday’s referendum to outlaw the
con-struction of minarets in Switzerland was the
product of “anti-foreigner scare-mongering.
The Hague—Serbia
argued to the World Court on Tuesday that
Kosovo’s declaration of independence was an
unlawful challenge to the interna-tional legal
order that tore at the very fabric of Serb
national identity. Serbia’s ambassador to
France, Dusan Batakovic, said the February 2008
independ-ence declaration challenged his
country’s sovereignty and undermined
interna-tional law by breaching U.N. Security
Council resolutions that set up a U.N.-backed
provisional administration in Kosovo.
THE asymmetrical war NATO forces are currently
fighting in Afghanistan is one the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation was ill prepared
for; both militarily and psychologically. NATO
was originally formed at the close of World War
II to act as a deterrent to Soviet expansionist
tendencies in Europe, and not to combat
homegrown insurgen-cies, a role it now finds
itself playing in a part of the world where it
was not initially meant to intervene.
