PRAIA — Finnish authorities dismissed talk Sunday that the Arctic Sea was bearing a cargo of nuclear material, as Russia and NATO joined forces in an international hunt for the missing vessel.
Jukka Laaksonen, head of the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, said firefighters conducted radiation tests on the ship — last reported off Cape Verde — at a port in Finland before it began a voyage full of intrigue.
But he dismissed as "stupid rumours" reports in British and Finnish newspapers that the ship could be carrying a "secret" nuclear cargo that could explain why it was attacked on the Baltic Sea before vanishing.
Khirbet Silm, south Lebanon – Israel and its arch foe Hezbollah are waging an increasingly heated war of words, fanning concerns about another bruising encounter between the two enemies who fought a devastating but inconclusive conflict in 2006.
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Militants managed to penetrate one of the safest nooks of Kabul to detonate a massive car bomb Saturday, shaking the confidence of voters just five days before presidential elections.
The powerful blast, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility, killed seven Afghan civilians and wounded 91 more. The bomb went off outside NATO headquarters just after 8:30 Saturday morning, the beginning of the Afghan workweek. It sent a plume of smoke visible around Kabul and knocked out glass windows more than 500 feet away.
Palestinian Fatah has said it was "encouraged" by the meeting between Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and his US counterpart in the White House, while Hamas said the encounter would lead to nothing.
"Palestinians are encouraged by the commitment President Obama and his administration have shown to Middle East peace," Saeb Erakat, a Fatah member and the Palestinians’ top official said on Friday.
Britain said on Sunday it was hopeful the United Nations Security Council will deliver a resolution against North Korea that includes tougher financial sanctions, after the isolated state’s nuclear test last week.
"There is a genuine world concern, and hopefully a consensus will come from that," Ann Taylor, British Minister for International Defense and Security, told Reuters in an interview on Sunday on the sidelines of a regional defense conference.
Colombo – Amnesty International called Saturday for an independent probe into the number of civilians killed in the final weeks of Sri Lanka’s civil war and also urged the UN to reveal its own estimates.
The call by the rights group followed a report in the Times of London newspaper on Friday citing confidential UN reports that more than 20,000 civilians were killed by Sri Lankan army shelling.
The report followed weeks of allegations that large numbers of civilians had been killed as the army closed in on Tamil Tiger rebels to end the decades- long war.
Pakistani forces battled militants in South Waziristan on the Afghan border on Sunday as a government official said an offensive in the Swat valley could be over in two or three days.
Pakistani forces have undertaken their most concerted offensive against an expanding Taliban insurgency that has raised fears for the nuclear-armed U.S. ally’s stability and the safety of its nuclear arsenal.
The focus of the fighting has been the former tourist destination of Swat, 120 km (80 miles) northwest of Islamabad, which the Taliban virtually took as the government alternated between inconclusive military action and peace pacts.
