World in brief

Senate backs two deals for free trade

WASHINGTON - The Senate voted Thursday to make the thriving city-state of Singapore the first East Asian nation to share a free trade agreement with the United States.

The 66-32 vote to endorse the open market accord with Singapore was followed immediately by a second vote to make trade history by approving Chile as the first South American country with free trade status. The House has already endorsed both agreements.

The agreements are to take effect Jan. 1, after which Singapore and Chile will join only four other nations that have agreed to eliminate tariffs and other trade barriers. Canada and Mexico are partners in the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, and Jordan and Israel have free trade relations with this country.

The agreements also open the way for far more ambitious regional free trade zones being negotiated with the countries of Central America and with all the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - The U.N. war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia imposed its harshest punishment to date Thursday, sentencing a Bosnian Serb politician to life in prison for exterminating or deporting thousands of Muslims and Croats in 1992.

Though acquitted of genocide, Milomir Stakic was convicted of being a leading figure in a racist campaign of persecution "to achieve the vision of a pure Serbian state," according to a summary of the verdict read in court.

Stakic, a 41-year-old doctor, was convicted of directly planning and coordinating war crimes and was held responsible for subordinates who killed 1,500 people and forced at least 20,000 non-Serb civilians from their homes in the northwestern Bosnian municipality of Prijedor, where he was mayor.

GUATEMALA CITY - Efrain Rios Montt, a former military dictator accused of presiding over atrocities during the harshest era of this country's civil war, registered as a presidential candidate Thursday.

His registration came less than 24 hours after the Constitutional Court, the country's highest court, ruled in his favor, ending a judicial crisis over legal challenges filed in a lower court by opposition parties. His registration also came less than a week after mobs apparently organized by his political party rampaged through upper-class neighborhoods in the capital demanding that he be allowed to run.

SAINTE-MAXIME, France - A hail storm and falling winds Thursday helped firefighters bring the worst of the blazes that have ravaged the French Riviera under control, officials said.

Winds dropped to about 5 mph despite earlier forecasts of violent gusts, easing fears that smoldering embers left by this week's fires in the Var region would reignite.

Nearly 1,000 firefighters from across France, Spain and Greece were drafted in to relieve their exhausted colleagues, many of whom have been battling the flames around the clock since Monday.

Thousands of acres of pine forests and scrubland have been scorched. The risk of further fires remains "severe" today, France's Civil Security unit said.

Investigators, meanwhile, kept up a search for arsonists after the discovery of three Molotov cocktails near one of the Riviera fires.

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