Iran: Ayatollah orders reversal of scholar’s death sentence

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, ordered the death sentence of a popular reformist history professor reversed on Sunday, amid escalating demonstrations against the verdict at universities around the Islamic Republic capital.

As supreme leader, Khamenei has the final say on all matters of state and religion, but as of Sunday night, the judiciary had not publicly responded to his order.

Aghajari was prosecuted for a speech he gave in August in the western Iranian city of Hamadan, in which he said Shiite Muslims were not “monkeys” to blindly follow the teachings of senior clerics.

Chicago: United Airlines plans to cut 9,000 jobs

United Airlines will cut 9,000 jobs and reduce its flight schedule by another 6 percent as part of an effort to return to profitability, the carrier’s parent company announced Sunday.

UAL Corp. faces a Dec. 2 deadline to avoid a bankruptcy filing and hopes to receive a $1.8 billion federal loan guarantee by then.

United spokesman Jeff Green said the airline planned to drop from its current 83,000 employees to 74,000 by 2004.

North Korea: Radio says country has nuclear weapons

North Korea’s state-run radio reported for the first time Sunday that the communist country has nuclear weapons, but South Korean officials doubted the credibility of the report.

Pyongyang Radio reported in a Korean-language report that the country “has come to have nuclear and other strong military weapons due to nuclear threats by U.S. imperialists,” according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, which monitors broadcasts from the North.

Some took the report as the North’s first confirmation of possession of nuclear weapons. Until now, North Korea had claimed that it was “entitled to have nuclear weapons and more powerful weapons than that to protect its sovereignty from U.S. threats.”

But early today, South Korean officials were skeptical that the report was a change in North Korea’s official position on nuclear weapons.