UNITED NATIONS

Economists lower forecast for growth

The global economy will grow more slowly than had been expected this year and next, largely because of uncertainty in the Middle East, declining U.S. stock prices, and economic turmoil in Latin America, according to a revised U.N. forecast issued Wednesday.

At a meeting in April, economists predicted the economic recovery would reach full momentum in the second half of this year. But the new report forecasts that peak economic recovery will not take place until around mid-2003.

“Not only that, the sustainability of the ongoing recovery remains subject to a number of uncertainties,” it said.

Chief among those concerns are the “geopolitical tensions” in the Middle East; the corporate scandals in industrialized countries; the decline of equity prices, especially in the United States; and the worsening fiscal predicaments in Latin America, the report said.

Belgium

European Union approves 10 members

The European Union’s executive Commission declared eight east European nations, Cyprus and Malta nearly ready for EU membership and recommended Wednesday that they be invited to join in 2004 the most ambitious EU expansion ever.

In a move bound to upset Ankara and Washington, however, the European Commission, in Brussels, remained silent on when to start entrance talks with Turkey, an EU candidate since 1999.

A Commission report said Turkey still failed to meet political and economic membership criteria and needed to clean up its human rights records.

The 93-page Commission report said membership talks with Malta, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia had gone well enough to justify bringing them into the EU in 2004.

Jamaica

Jimmy Carter to lead election observer team

Former President Jimmy Carter will lead an international delegation to observe Jamaica’s tightly contested upcoming general elections.

Carter arrives Monday, two days before Jamaicans cast ballots in islandwide races muddied by a surge of violence between supporters of the governing People’s National Party and the opposition Jamaica Labor Party.

The 55-member delegation will include observers from 16 countries, including former Costa Rica President Miguel Angel Rodriguez.

Carter, who observed Jamaica’s 1997 elections, will join other observers monitoring polling stations and ballot counting on election day.

China

Kite flying banned in Shanghai parks

China’s largest city is fighting a new airborne menace kites.

Shanghai has banned kite flying in all its 125 parks after a growing number of accidents, Fang Yan, an official in the city’s Gardening Administrative Bureau, said Wednesday. Fang had no figures but said many innocent passers-by had been struck on the head by wayward kites. Tangled strings in electric wires and in tree limbs were also creating an eyesore, he said.

Violators will be reprimanded, but there are no fines or other punishment, Fang said.

Kites first appeared in China more than 2,000 years ago as a military technology. Archers used them to calculate distances by knowing the length of their string. Later, kite-making became a leisure activity of aristocrats and officials, including the last emperor, Puyi.