Pope names diplomats to key roles in Vatican
By TIMES WIRES
Published June 26, 2007
VATICAN CITY - After a season of apparent policy slipups, Pope Benedict XVI is shuffling top advisers and bringing in veteran diplomats closely identified with Vatican policy in Iraq and the Middle East.
On Monday, Benedict restored an office that specializes in relations with Muslims, a year after he was criticized for disbanding it.
He appointed French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican's foreign affairs chief from 1990 to 2003, as president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, raising the office's profile. Tauran was one of the strongest Vatican opponents of U.S. plans to invade Iraq, saying a unilateral military strike would be a "crime against peace" with no justification on grounds of self-defense.
Elsewhere
BEIJING: North Korea said Monday it was moving forward with its agreement to shut down its nuclear reactor in exchange for aid and would meet with U.N. monitors Tuesday on how to verify the long-delayed shutdown. The North also declared that a dispute over frozen bank funds that had held up disarmament efforts was now over.
FRANKFURT, GERMANY: A team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will travel to Tehran in the coming weeks at the invitation of the Iranian government to try to clear up longstanding questions about Iran's nuclear program, the agency said Monday.
HAVANA: Fidel Castro on Monday accused President Bush of "authorizing and ordering" an attempt on his life, although his rambling essay on the subject provided no details. The White House had no reaction to Castro's statement.
DAKAR, SENEGAL: First lady Laura Bush started a four-nation Africa tour Monday that is expected to focus on how the United States can help fight AIDS on a continent where many countries struggle to even provide basic health care.
ATHENS, GREECE: Southeastern Europe continued to sizzle under an intense heat wave Monday, with temperatures over 100 degrees leading to the deaths of four people in Greece and Cyprus and sparking two dozen forest fires in Italy. Temperatures in the southern Italian city of Bari reached 113 degrees.
BEIJING: China's tiny population of park-bred pandas will all be discreetly tattooed before being released into bamboo forests to integrate with the larger wild panda community, an official said Monday. Over two years, some 200 captive-born pandas will be tattooed with ID numbers inside their mouths to help scientists track their movements, said Huang Xiangming, a researcher with the Chengdu Panda Breeding Center in Sichuan province.
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS: Anne Frank's cousin on Monday donated thousands of letters, photographs and documents that archivists say will reveal details about the background of the teenage diarist who became a symbol of the Holocaust. Bernhard "Buddy" Elias, 82, had kept the materials for decades in his Swiss attic before permanently loaning them to the Anne Frank House to mark Monday's 60th anniversary of the first publication of The Diary of Anne Frank.