■ Liberia
UN sanctions to be renewed
The UN Security Council said on Monday that it would renew sanctions against the government and rebels in Liberia for 12 months in hope of halting the spread of the conflict to neighboring countries. The sanctions, including an arms embargo, a ban on trade in rough diamonds and restrictions on air travel by senior Liberian government and military officials and their wives, expired yesterday.
■ Russia
Baby-seller sentenced
A Russian court Monday sentenced a woman to eight years in prison for selling babies into adoption in Israel, legal officials said. The Supreme Court of the southern republic Kabardino-Balkaria, in the Russian Northern Caucasus, convicted Lyubov Shanibeyeva and seven accomplices of setting up a ring that sold eight infants to Israel. A ninth baby was sold for adoption in Russia and later traced, judge Boris Malbakhov said. Three of the accomplices were given prison sentences and the four others amnestied.
■ United States
Moralist quits habit
William Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues, said on Monday he was quitting gambling amid media reports that he lost US$8 million in the last decade playing slot machines and video poker. "I have done too much gambling, and this is not an example I wish to set. Therefore my gambling days are over," he said in a statement. Praised by admirers as a cogent moral voice and vilified by critics as a sanctimonious national scold, Bennett has been a public fixture in Washington since the Reagan era. There was a bit of media chortling after the story broke, with Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley acknowl-edging that Bennett's predicament provoked unusual levels of schaden-freude. "Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number," Kinsley wrote. Reports on this news began their accounts of Bennett's gambling. "We should know that too much of anything, even a good thing, may prove to be our undoing. ... [We] need to set definite boundaries on our appetites," both stories wrote, citing Bennett in The Book of Virtues.
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