World
Saying, "After this, my candidacy is out of the question," Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul indicated Sunday that he'd end his bid to become president. A former Islamist, he failed to win election for the second time in less than a week when parliament again could not muster a quorum. Gul, said he felt no resentment at the situation. Analysts said it was unlikely that a president can be elected until after an early general election in July.
US troops killed 10 Shiite militants, seized 150 mortar bombs, and destroyed a torture room that may have been used by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. But elsewhere Sunday, terrorists exploded a car bomb in a crowded Baghdad market. The blast took at least 35 lives and wounded 80 other people.
On the heels of the new agreement on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, the government of Japan pledged up to $2.1 billion to the Asian Development Bank's effort to promote "greener" investment in the region. The bank, which has been criticized for funding coal-fired development projects, is trying to counter the mentality that poor countries must sacrifice environmental concerns in their march toward progress. Last Friday, at the latest UN conference on climate change, delegates from 120 countries approved the first blueprint for reducing emissions.
Competing factions in Zimbabwe's ruling party have resolved their differences, ending all thought of nominating a successor to hard-line President Robert Mugabe, a report in a state-owned newspaper said. The Sunday Mail quoted a senior party official as saying, "We shall have the president as our leader" for the next six years, by which time he'd be 89.
Two more foreign oil-industry contractors were seized by armed militants in Nigeria's delta region, bringing the number of such incidents to six in the past five days. The frequency diminished last month in the run-up to the nation's presidential election but has risen again since then. The latest to be kidnapped were a Belorussian woman and a Briton. Eight of the last 28 people taken hostage were soon let go, police said.
Reports that signs of a downed Kenya Airways jetliner had been found could not be confirmed Sunday. The Boeing 737, bound from Douala in Cameroon to Nairobi and carrying 114 people, crashed in a rainstorm shortly after takeoff early Saturday. It has been sending an automatic distress signal, but searchers have been hampered by continued poor weather and dense forest. The plane was new, reports said.
Search and rescue efforts were expected to be suspended Sunday for more than 40 Haitian migrants whose small boat capsized and sank in stormy seas off the Turks and Caicos. At least 36 others were confirmed dead; 78 were reported to have been rescued. The Haitians were assumed to have been headed to Florida.
Remains of at least 211 people have been unearthed from mass graves in densely forested southern Colombia near the border with Ecuador, prosecutors said over the weekend. The discovery is the largest in 40 years of war between guerrillas and ultra right-wing paramilitaries, and information supplied by area residents leads investigators to believe these victims were killed by both sides between 1999 and 2001, reports said.
Rescuers reentered a smoky coal mine in central China Sunday to search for 10 men still trapped after an explosion and fire that killed at least 20 of their co-workers. Ninety-five others escaped. The Xinhua news agency said the mine had been ordered to suspend production and was operating without a permit.
