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Somalia executes man in public

By TIMES WIRES
Published September 23, 2006

MOGADISHU, Somalia - A convicted murderer was executed by firing squad Friday as thousands of people watched, the first public execution since Islamic fundamentalists seized control of the capital and much of southern Somalia in June.

Abdiqadir Mohammed Diriye, believed to be in his 20s, was sentenced to death after a jury trial for killing a businessman in a dispute over a cell phone, Islamic officials said.

"We tell everybody who commits crimes that they will be punished in accordance with Islamic sharia law," the Islamic group's spokesman, Abdirahim Ali Mudey, told the Associated Press. He said the execution would be "a message to all kinds of culprits."

19 laborers in Afghanistan reported killed in attack

KABUL, Afghanistan - Militants ambushed a bus carrying construction workers in the country's volatile south Friday, killing 19 of the laborers, while Afghan and NATO forces said they killed 35 Taliban militants in two separate firefights.

The attack on the bus in Kandahar province began when a roadside bomb exploded near the vehicle, said Zemeri Bashary, the Interior Ministry spokesman. Some laborers may have been killed by the bomb, while others were shot by militants who attacked the panicked workers with gunfire, he said.

Rice again urges Sudan to halt offensive in Darfur

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday renewed her call for Sudan to halt a military offensive in Darfur and yield to international pressure to allow more than 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers to protect civilians there.

Rice spoke at a gathering of representatives from 25 governments that she and her Danish counterpart, Per Stig Moller, convened to maintain international pressure on Sudan.

Khartoum has defied repeated U.S. and U.N. appeals over the past nine months to allow U.N. peacekeepers into the Darfur region to help halt an outbreak of violence that has left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

Clinton says summit raised $7.3-billion to better world

NEW YORK - Bill Clinton said Friday his three-day summit of political leaders, tycoons and nonprofit groups amassed more than $7.3-billion in pledges for money and programs to combat poverty, global warming and other world problems.

The former president said the number of commitments secured by the end of this year's Clinton Global Initiative had reached 215. Those included a plan by Wal-Mart to conserve natural resources by improving product packaging and a pledge by drugmaker Merck to spend $75-million to vaccinate all children born in Nicaragua for the next three years against a virus that causes potentially deadly diarrhea.

Hungarian leader says he will not step down

BERLIN - Despite four straight nights of protests in Budapest calling for his resignation, Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany of Hungary, in Berlin to attend an economics forum, said it was his intention not just to survive politically but also to pursue reforms to solve the economic problems his administration covered up when it sought and won re-election.

The protests this week were set off by a leaked tape of a speech Gyurcsany made in May to a closed meeting of Socialist Party officials. He admitted in the speech that the party had "lied in the morning and lied in the evening" to deceive the public about the state of the economy.

[Last modified September 23, 2006, 01:26:26]