Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

World in brief

Another meeting is set on German leadership

By wire services
Published October 6, 2005

BERLIN - Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and challenger Angela Merkel said Wednesday they will hold a meeting to discuss who will be Germany's next leader following last month's inconclusive elections.

A third round of talks Wednesday between the two sides had shown that "there is a basis" for a coalition between Germany's two biggest parties to resolve the country's political stalemate, Schroeder said.

The planned meeting would be held "very, very soon," Schroeder said, but neither he nor Merkel would give a date.

Heading into the session, the two sides had been divided by Merkel's insistence that Schroeder's party back off its claim to keep him as chancellor before the two parties can open talks on forming a so-called "grand coalition."

MADRID, Spain - The only Spanish citizen to have been held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay has been sentenced to six years on being convicted of collaboration with an armed organization, a National Court spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Hamed Abderrahman Ahmed was returned to Spain in February, 2004, after Spanish investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzon sought his repatriation for questioning. During his trial last month, the prosecution accused him of having gone to Afghanistan to train in an al-Qaida terrorist-training camp.

He denied all links with the organization and claimed he had gone to Afghanistan to study at an Islamic school. He said he opposed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington because they were contrary to religious teachings.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Local authorities have ordered the FBI to turn over weapons and other items to an investigation into the death of a fugitive Puerto Rican independence activist, officials said Wednesday.

The U.S. territory's Justice Department issued a subpoena to the FBI as it decides whether anyone in the law enforcement agency committed a crime in the fatal shooting of Filoberto Ojeda Rios, who was sought for a 1983 robbery in Connecticut.

The subpoena, which was issued Tuesday, directs the FBI to deliver information, documents and objects connected to the Sept. 23 raid on a farmhouse in western Puerto Rico where Ojeda Rios, 72, lived in hiding with his wife.

GENEVA - Many disabled children in the former communist countries of eastern Europe and Central Asia are being put in institutions, perpetuating the old Soviet practice of "child abandonment," according to a UNICEF report released Wednesday.

Instead of integrating the children into general schools, these countries still employ a policy of "defectology," a leftover Soviet discipline in which disabled children are put in institutions that separate them from society and their families, said the study by U.N. Children's Fund's Innocenti Research Center in Florence, Italy.

[Last modified October 6, 2005, 01:15:08]