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Gaza Strip-to-Egypt crossing reopens

RAFAH BORDER CROSSING, Gaza Strip - Israel reopened the only crossing for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt after a three-week closure, but the army would not say Friday whether it found evidence of an alleged plot by militants to blow up the border terminal.

About 1,400 Palestinians crossed into Gaza after the Rafah terminal was reopened, a Palestinian official said. The three-week closure came during the peak summer season, and hundreds of stranded travelers slept on the ground near the desert post - the only crossing for Palestinian travelers in and out of Gaza.

Israel shut down the terminal July 18, saying it had intelligence information that Palestinian militants had dug a tunnel under the crossing or a nearby Israeli army outpost and planned to blow it up.

BERLIN - A court found two former top East German officials guilty Friday of failing to stop the killing of people trying to escape across the Berlin Wall and sentenced them to probation.

The trial was likely to be the last high profile case, closing an era 15 years after the wall was torn down to mark the beginning of the end of Soviet domination in Central and Eastern Europe.

Hans-Joachim Boehme, 74, and Siegfried Lorenz, 73, former members of the ruling Politburo of the East German Communist Party, embraced supporters outside the court.

Both were convicted of being accessories to murder in three shooting deaths between 1986 and 1989. About 1,000 people were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall and other heavily fortified stretches of Germany's east-west border between 1961 and 1989.

PORTSMOUTH, England - One of the world's greatest collections of memorabilia from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was handed over Friday to a library in the port city where the author had a medical practice and wrote the first two Sherlock Holmes adventures.

When he died in March, writer and collector Richard Lancelyn Green left the 20,000-item collection worth more than $3.6-million to the Portsmouth library service.

U.S. SOLDIERS INJURED: Insurgents attacked American forces with rocket-propelled grenades and explosives on roads in southern Afghanistan on Friday, injuring at least eight U.S. soldiers, two seriously, the U.S. military said.

INDIA, PAKISTAN FINISH TALKS: India and Pakistan finished two days of "frank and candid" talks Friday on their competing claims for the world's highest battleground and agreed to meet again. The talks between top defense officials were the first in six years concerning the Siachen Glacier traversing the Himalayan region dividing the longtime, nuclear-armed South Asian rivals.