■ Vatican
Pope to discuss celibacy
Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican officials will hold a meeting to discuss requests for lifting the celibacy requirement made by priests seeking to marry or who have already married, the Vatican said on Monday. The summit will take place tomorrow and was called because of the recent excommunication of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, the Vatican said in a statement. Benedict called the meeting to examine the implications of the "disobedience" of the Zambian prelate, who was excommunicated in September for installing four married men as bishops.
■ Spain
Roman shipwreck revealed
A shipwrecked first-century Roman ship has proved a dazzling find, with nearly 2,000-year-old fish bones still nestling inside clay jars, archeologists said on Monday. Boaters found its cargo of hundreds of amphoras in 2000 when their anchor got tangled with one of the two-handled jars. After years of arranging financing and crews, exploration of the site off the coast of Alicante in southeast Spain began in July, said Carles de Juan, a co-director of the project. The ship is estimated to have been 30m long with capacity for around 400 tonnes of cargo, making it twice the size of most other Roman shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean, de Juan said.
■ Lebanon
UN plan gains approval
The government has approved a UN plan for an international tribunal for the suspected killers of former prime minister Rafik Hariri -- despite the objections of the president and the resignation of six ministers. The draft document now returns to the Security Council for endorsement, but its final approval by the weakened government is far from certain owing to the resignations and threats from Hezbollah to call mass protests unless it and its Shiite Muslim allies gain effective veto power in the Cabinet. Monday's vote in the Cabinet was a small victory for Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, who is facing both the Hezbollah challenge and the objections of President Emile Lahoud. All 18 ministers remaining in the Cabinet voted for the UN plan, which begins the process of prosecuting Hariri's alleged killers in a court with international legitimacy.
■ Sweden
Fire shuts down reactor
A fire broke out early yesterday at the country's biggest nuclear plant, shutting down one of its four reactors, plant officials said. The fire started shortly after midnight in a transformer outside reactor No. 3 at the Ringhals power plant, but never threatened the reactor itself and there was no risk of a radioactive leak, plant spokesman Gosta Larsen said. No one was injured. The plant's safety systems kicked in as they were supposed to and immediately triggered an automatic reactor shutdown, he said.
■ Germany
Rumsfeld target of law suit
Civil rights activists said they would file a suit yesterday asking prosecutors to investigate US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other officials on allegations of war crimes for their alleged roles in abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay. The 220-page suit is being filed by US and German attorneys under a German law that allows the prosecution of war crimes regardless of where they were committed. It alleges that Rumsfeld personally ordered and condoned torture.
■ Brazil
Cabinet member steps down
A former campaign coordinator for President Luiz Lula da Silva has quit his Cabinet post, the latest casualty in a series of corruption scandals dogging the center-left government, officials said on Monday. Luiz Gushiken, the secretary of the Center for Strategic Studies, submitted his resignation on Friday and will be replaced by the center's secretary-general, Oswaldo Oliva Neto, Lula's press office announced on Monday. Gushiken, 56, was once one of Lula's closest collaborators as a leading campaign coordinator in Lula's unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1998 and in his victorious 2002 campaign.
■ Mexico
Indian groups clash
Two people were killed in a clash between two Indian groups, one of them backed by the Zapatista rebels, in a land dispute in the Lacandon jungle in the southern part of the country, police said. The groups fought with firearms, sticks and machetes in the village of Viejo Velasco, 400km north of the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas state police said in a statement on Monday. Lacandon Indians, who have lived for centuries in the jungle near the Guatemalan border, are opposed to the encroachment of Zapatista-backed tribes from the nearby highlands into the jungle to farm.
■ United States
DEA agent's killer gets life
An Arizona court on Monday sentenced a Mexican who was once on the FBI's most-wanted list to life in prison for his part in killing a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent more than a decade ago. Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix sentenced Agustin Vasquez Mendoza to life with the possibility of parole after 25 years for masterminding the murder of DEA special agent Richard Fass in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, in 1994. Vasquez, 37, was also sentenced to several terms of between seven-and-a-half and 20 years to run consecutively, on charges ranging from aggravated assault to kidnapping and attempted armed robbery.
■ United States
Gunman dies in standoff
A man being sought for shooting at police officers over the weekend barricaded himself in a Homestead, Florida, home, firing a high-powered weapon at officers in a nearly nine-hour standoff before he was found dead. Police would not say how the suspect died or confirm his identity. They said officers did not fire any shots into the home. The incident prompted a lockdown at nearby Homestead Middle School and children at two other elementary schools were not allowed to leave unless their bus route was out of the standoff area or their parents picked them up. Police said another man who had been in the home with the suspect left through a back door several hours before the standoff ended.
■ United States
Man charged over letters
A California man was charged with mailing more than a dozen threatening letters containing white powder to Representative Nancy Pelosi, TV talk show host Jon Stewart and other high-profile figures. Chad Conrad Castagana, 39, appeared in US District Court in Los Angeles to face a two-count complaint of sending threats and sending hoaxes by mail, but he did not enter a plea. The judge ordered Castagana held without bail pending a continuation of the hearing tomorrow. Preliminary tests showed the white powder contained in the letters was not hazardous, officials said.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
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