Pakistan

Elder who ordered gang rape surrenders

A member of the village council that ordered last month’s gang rape of an 18-year-old girl as a tribal punishment was detained Thursday after surrendering to police.

Police say they have detained several other members of the tribal council that ordered the June 22 rape in Meerwala village in Punjab province as well as three of the alleged rapists.

The rape outraged rights groups and strengthened calls for more central government control in Pakistan’s fiercely independent tribal regions.

Police said the teenager was raped by four men when a tribal council ordered her family punished because her 11-year-old brother walked unchaperoned with a girl from a different tribe.

Police said the council’s verdict was illegal. President Pervez Musharraf’s government gave the victim’s family $8,000 as compensation and said a new school would be built in her name.

Tribal punishments against Punjab women, including honor killings and gang rapes, have increased in recent months, rights groups say.

London

Activists protest blasphemy laws

In a face-off Thursday over Britain’s 17th-century blasphemy laws, sidewalk preachers bellowing biblical verses drowned out a group of free-speech activists who read a homoerotic poem about Jesus Christ on the steps of a central London church.

The laws, which ban outrageous or indecent attacks on Christianity, are under review by the House of Lords, which may recommend abolishing them or extending them to protect other religions.

“Christ came into the world to save sinners and YOU need salvation!” one demonstrator shouted at a few activists who took turns reading verses from “The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name” on the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square.

Although blasphemy laws are rarely enforced, the activists said they were risking prosecution and even jail by reciting the explicit poem.

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Survivors of massacre observe anniversary

Under a blazing sun, distraught crowds offered prayers and laid flowers at a memorial to 8,000 Muslims killed in the town of Srebrenica seven years ago, the worst civilian massacre in Europe since World War II.

Widows and children mobbed tanker trucks, throwing water on their faces to wash away sweat and tears, as temperatures hit 97 degrees. Dozens sought help from medical teams after the ceremony.

The mourners came from across Bosnia to the former silver mining town 50 miles northeast of the capital Sarajevo, remembering those killed when Bosnian Serb forces overran what had been declared a U.N. safe zone during the 1992-1995 war.

They came on 112 buses, as helicopters with the NATO-led peacekeeping force hovered overhead.

Yugoslavia

Former president taken by force to testify

Former Yugoslav President Zoran Lilic was detained Thursday and flown to the Netherlands to testify in the U.N. war crimes trial of his successor, Slobodan Milosevic, Lilic’s lawyer and wife said.

Lilic the country’s figurehead president from 1993 to 1997 had refused a subpoena from the U.N. tribunal, based in The Hague, so police forced him onto the plane, according to his lawyer, Dragan Saponjic.

Lilic’s wife, Ljubica, sobbing when reached by telephone, said her husband was picked up in his office in Belgrade.

The time of his arrival in the Netherlands was not immediately known.

War crimes prosecutors have said they would call former members of Milosevic’s inner circle to testify in his trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in three Balkan wars during the 1990s.

Yugoslavia

U.S. to withdraw troops from Kosovo

The U.S. military will reduce its presence in Kosovo by about 1,000 troops, or 20 percent, by year’s end, an American military official said Thursday.

The reduction is part of a NATO plan to draw down peacekeeping forces in the Balkans, said Maj. Mark Ballesteros, a spokesman for U.S. troops in Kosovo. In May, NATO agreed to cut its Kosovo peacekeeping force by 4,800 to 33,200 troops.

The United States has kept 5,000 soldiers in Kosovo, more than any of the 38 other countries participating in the NATO operation. It was the first to announce cuts.

“The reduction reflects no letup in U.S. commitment to Kosovo,” Ballesteros said. “It’s a reflection of the progress that Kosovo has made in the last three years.”

Venezuela

Hundreds of thousands demand Chavez ouster

Dissonance from whistles, drums, horns and fireworks accompanied hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who clogged downtown Caracas Thursday demanding President Hugo Chavez’s ouster.

Laborers and business executives, leftists and conservatives chanted “Out! Out!” in a march underscoring the political divisions gripping this South American nation, a top supplier of oil to the United States.

Chavez, who was ousted April 12 but restored to power two days later, earlier appealed for calm.

Thursday’s march was the fifth, and perhaps the largest, since the April coup and followed a peacemaking mission this week by former President Carter.

Rome

Parliament ends royal family exile

The Italian Parliament gave final approval Thursday to lifting a constitutional ban that kept the male descendants of Italy’s last king out of their homeland, opening the way for their return after 56 years of exile.

However, under Italy’s constitution, because the second round of voting in the Chamber and in the Senate failed to garner a two-thirds majority, the possibility looms for a referendum on the change.

“I want to express my joy and that of my son for this brilliant success,” Victor Emmanuel, son of Italy’s last king, Umberto II, told Italian state television from his villa in Corsica, a French island.

The vote in the lower Chamber of Deputies was the last in two rounds of voting in both chambers necessary to amend the postwar constitution.

Turkey

Minister’s resignation may end government

Turkey’s foreign minister resigned Thursday, pushing the government one step closer to collapse. The economy minister also sought to quit but was persuaded to stay amid fears of panic in fragile financial markets.

Ismail Cem, the popular foreign minister, was the seventh Cabinet member to resign this week the biggest blow yet to the government of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. Dozens of legislators also have left Ecevit’s party.

Calls are mounting from within the government for new elections, amid deep divisions within the ruling coalition over reforms demanded by the European Union. Cem is expected to form a new party that will seek to accelerate Turkey’s bid for EU membership.

Economy minister Kemal Dervis, who is expected to join Cem in the new party, also submitted his resignation Thursday. But Dervis was apparently persuaded by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer to stay in his post. During two hours of uncertainty over Dervis’ position, the lira hit an all-time low of over 1.7 million to the dollar.