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Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 19, 2001
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- British Tornado warplanes bombed a southern Iraqi antiaircraft missile site Tuesday, retaliating for "hostile activities" by Iraq against planes patrolling a no-fly zone, a U.S. Air Force officer said.
The attack targeted a position near Basra, 350 miles south of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, said Maj. Brett Morris, spokesman for the Saudi-based Joint Task Force South West Asia.
"The strikes were in response to Iraq's hostile activities in the past, part of which we also experienced today," said Morris without elaborating.
There was no immediate report on damage.
CAIRO -- A 15-year-old boy was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for practicing homosexuality, the first verdict in the mass Egyptian gay trial that has drawn wide condemnation.
The youth, who was found guilty of homosexuality and debauchery, will serve his sentence in a prison for young offenders, a juvenile court ordered.
The trial of the 52 other defendants, which is being held in an emergency state security court, is expected to resume today. They have all pleaded not guilty.
Homosexuality is not explicitly referred to in the Egyptian legal system, but a wide range of laws covering obscenity and public morality are punishable by jail terms.
GENEVA -- Members of the World Trade Organization formally cleared Taiwan for admission Tuesday, a day after China was approved.
Terms for Taiwan's admission were completed 18 months ago, but the final decision was delayed because of a 1992 understanding that China would join first.
The 142 WTO governments on Tuesday approved a 1,200-page document setting out the terms for Taiwan's membership in the body that sets global rules on international trade.
WTO Director-General Mike Moore welcomed the decision, saying: "With Chinese Taipei's membership, the WTO has taken yet another step toward achieving universal membership."
ARUSHA, Tanzania -- A Rwandan pastor and his son went on trial on genocide charges Tuesday, with a U.N. prosecutor accusing them of setting up a safe haven for Tutsis and then calling on Hutu militiamen to kill them.
Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, 76, was the pastor of the Seventh-day Adventist church in Kibuye, Rwanda, during the 1994 massacres that eventually killed more than 500,000 people nationwide. His son Gerald Ntakirutimana, 44, was a doctor at a neighboring hospital.
The two have pleaded innocent to all charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Nearly 270 bodies believed to be ethnic Albanians killed during the war in Kosovo have been exhumed from a mass grave near Belgrade, a district court said Tuesday.
The Belgrade district court said that the mass grave in Batajnica, a village about 6 miles north of Belgrade, contained "at least" 269 bodies -- mostly men of all ages.
Civilian clothes were found in the grave and the bodies had gunshot wounds, the court said in a statement.
Two more mass graves, containing more than 100 bodies, have been discovered in Serbia, Yugoslavia's larger republic, since the ouster of former president Slobodan Milosevic from power last October.
The new, pro-democracy authorities have accused Milosevic of ordering the transfer of bodies of ethnic Albanians killed during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo to other parts of Serbia in an attempt to cover up war crimes.
Milosevic's brutal crackdown in Kosovo triggered the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and led to an international war crimes indictment against him. Milosevic is now awaiting trial at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
TOKYO -- Amid fears of a nationwide outbreak of mad cow disease, Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries announced Tuesday that feeding bone meal to cattle is now against the law.
The decision followed the revelation late last week that a Japanese meat-processing plant had ground up the carcass of the first cow in the country suspected of having mad cow disease and begun selling it as fertilizer and feed for chicken and pigs.
Later Tuesday in Washington, the U.S. Agriculture Department said it had tightened import restrictions on Japanese meat because of similar concerns. The United States already maintains a ban on live cattle and beef from Japan that it imposed in March 2000 after an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease here.
A potentially fatal human variant of mad cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, has been linked to meat and bones from cattle infected with the disease that are recycled back into cattle feed.