Northern Ireland: Postal worker killed by Protestant group
A Catholic postal worker was shot and killed as he arrived for work Saturday in Belfast, and an outlawed Protestant group claimed responsibility.
Daniel McColgan, 20, was shot several times just before 5 a.m. outside a Royal Mail sorting office in north Belfast's largely Protestant Rathcoole area, police said. He died two hours later in a hospital.
A group called the Red Hand Defenders said it had carried out the killing. Police consider the name a front for members of Northern Ireland's largest illegal paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Assn., and of other illegal Protestant groups.
It was the latest episode in a violence-filled week in Northern Ireland.
Turkey: Turks stage protest against Saudi royals
About 300 Turks burned pictures of the Saudi king Saturday in Ankara to protest the destruction of an Ottoman-era castle in the Muslim holy city of Mecca.
The demonstration outside the Saudi embassy signaled a rise in tensions between the two Muslim countries, both U.S. allies in the Middle East.
The 200-year-old al-Ajyad Castle was destroyed a few weeks ago to allow for construction of a trade center and hotel to accommodate pilgrims to Mecca.
Saudi officials have defended the destruction as a question of national sovereignty. But Turkey, which emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, has compared it to the Taliban's destruction last year of Buddha statues in Afghanistan.
MOSCOW: Russia backtracks on deaths of troops
Three officers will be tried for negligence in the March 2000 deaths of 22 Russian police troops in Chechnya by friendly fire, a blood bath that Russian officials publicly blamed on rebels, a newspaper reported Saturday.
The charges were filed in January 2001 but have been kept secret, the Moscow-based daily Izvestia reported. It said the trial begins Monday in a Moscow regional court and will be closed to the public.
The Russian Prosecutor General's office confirmed Saturday that the case exists.
A riot police unit from Sergiyev Posad, a city 20 miles from Moscow, had just arrived in the Chechen capital Grozny to replace other troops when they came under fire from machine guns and grenades. Officials said 22 were killed and 30 wounded in a battle that lasted four hours.
LONDON: Ex-Catholic favored for top Anglican post
The next archbishop of Canterbury could be a former Roman Catholic who converted to Anglicanism as a young man, the Church of England said Saturday.
The Right Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, a city 25 miles east of London, is considered the favorite to replace Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who retires in October as spiritual leader of the world's 70 million Anglicans.
A spokeswoman for the Church of England called the situation "wholly unremarkable."
"There are many people in the church who have moved from one to the other. It is just that the bishop happens to be a prominent member of the Anglican Church."
A 16-member body of bishops and church officials will decide on two names to recommend to Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose choice will be ratified by the queen.
Spain: Basque separatists say bomb was theirs
A car bomb exploded Saturday on a downtown street in Bilbao after a warning call, wounding two people who were hit by flying shards of glass, police said.
They said an anonymous caller claimed Basque separatist group ETA was responsible.
The mid-afternoon blast shattered windows in several buildings. Police had evacuated the area after a caller phoned a warning to a newspaper and claimed ETA planted the bomb, but they were unable to find it before it exploded.
The Basque region has been plagued by ETA violence for more than 30 years.
The group has claimed responsibility or been blamed for more than 800 killings since the early 1960s, when it began its campaign to carve an independent Basque homeland out of lands straddling Spain and France.
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