■ Serbia
Crucial elections held
Serbs were due to decide yesterday whether to return Slobodan Milosevic's allies to power and risk renewed isolation from the international community, or choose pro-democracy parties that succeeded in ousting the dictator but later failed to live up to voters' expectations. About 6.5 million people are eligible to cast ballots in elections for Serbia's 250-member parliament, seen as crucial for the stability of the republic and the whole of the Balkans, still recovering from four wars fomented by Milosevic and his loyalists in the 1990s. In a sign that the nationalism that led to those wars is on the upswing again, a key Milosevic ally, the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party, is predicted to win most votes among the 19 parties and coalition and more than 4,000 candidates on the ballot.
■ United States
Bodies pulled from slide
Four children were among seven people confirmed dead in a mud slide that struck a rugged canyon in southern California on Christmas Day, local authorities said on Saturday. Seven people were still missing, some of them children, after Thursday's slide in the fire-ravaged Old Waterman Canyon, about 100km east of Los Angeles. The San Bernardino County Coroner's office identified four of the dead as 11-year-old Jose Pablo Navarro, Ramon Meza, 29, and Wendy Monzon, 17, and her 9-year-old sister Raquel, two family members of the caretaker at a camp in the canyon. One victim, aged between 12 and 14, was not identified, and no details were immediately available on the two bodies found late on Saturday.
■ Liberia
Peacekeepers deploy
UN peacekeepers deployed tanks and took up positions in a rebel-held Liberian town Saturday for the first time since arriving in this West African nation to help secure a peace deal to end years of war. A contingent of Pakistani troops rolled into Klay, a small town 37km northwest of the capital, Monrovia. UN peacekeeping commander General Daniel Opande continued on to the nearby rebel stronghold of Tubmanburg and said peacekeepers would also move units there soon. The deployment "begins the long road to reunite the whole country together," Opande said Fighters from the Liberians United for Reconciliation rebel group had blocked the deployment on Thursday, saying the UN had not informed them peacekeepers were coming.
■ Israel
Troops kill teenager
Israeli troops scouring a West Bank militant stronghold killed a Palestinian teenager and wounded at least 17 other people in clashes with stone throwers on Saturday, witnesses and medics said. They said a 17-year-old was fatally shot in the chest while confronting troops, who have stepped up searches in Nablus since a local suicide bomber killed three off-duty Israeli soldiers and a teenage girl outside Tel Aviv on Thursday. Six of the wounded Palestinians were shot by live ammunition and 11 by rubber bullets in clashes, witnesses and medics said. A military spokesman denied troops fired live ammunition, saying they responded with rubber bullets and tear gas after coming under a barrage of stones and Molotov cocktails in various areas of Nablus. He had no word on casualties.
RSS