Pakistan

Former P.M.’s husband arrested in slaying

Pakistani police on Tuesday arrested the husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in the killing of a former judge and his son in 1996, taking him back into custody just a month after he’d been freed on bail, lawyers and officials said.

Asif Ali Zardari was detained at an airport near the capital, Islamabad, after arriving on a flight from Karachi to address a major opposition rally.

On Nov. 22, Zardari had been released from eight years in jail after the Supreme Court granted him bail involving other cases over alleged corruption, which his supporters claim are politically motivated.

A judge of the anti-terrorism court in Karachi, Pir Ali Shah, ordered Zardari’s arrest Tuesday after canceling his bail, citing his failure to attend proceedings in the murder trial, said Shahadat Awan, a lawyer for Zardari.

The trial is over the fatal shootings of a former judge and his son in Karachi eight years ago. Both were shot in a car near their home.

Zardari is accused of plotting the murders.

Georgia

Stalin’s hometown celebrates birthday

Dozens of residents of Josef Stalin’s hometown celebrated the 125th anniversary of his birth Tuesday, singing, dancing and drinking champagne toasts to the late Soviet dictator.

People cried and kissed a 6-foot-tall cardboard cutout of Stalin and laid wreaths at the base of a monument in the small town of Gori, 50 miles west of the capital, Tbilisi.

Considered a brutal tyrant for political purges in which more than 10 million are believed to have died and for forced collectivization that wiped out the peasantry, Stalin continues to be admired in the former Soviet Union, even by many non-Communists, for leading the country to victory in World War II and pulling it into the industrial age. He died in 1953.

Yevgeny Dzhugashvili came to the Gori celebration to mark the birthday of his grandfather, whose real name was Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

“People remember how everything used to be. There was work,” Dzhugashvili said.

Russia

Putin says sale of oil fields legitimate

President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that the buyer of a key asset of the bankrupt Russian oil giant Yukos was a group of “individuals with a long history in the energy sector,” and he said the sale, which went forward despite a U.S. court injunction barring it, followed Russian law and was an internal matter.

Separately, two Russian newspapers identified the representatives at Sunday’s auction of the previously unknown BaikalFinansGroup, which bid $9.3 billion for the Yuganskneftegaz oil fields in Siberia, as employees of Surgutneftegaz, another Russian oil major that has large cash reserves and close ties to the Kremlin.

“They, as far as I have been informed, intend to forge relations of some sort with other energy companies in Russia with an interest in this asset,” said Putin, speaking in Germany where he was meeting Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. “As for the possibility of state-owned companies buying these assets, they, like other market participants, have the right to this.”

Israel

World Bank chief seeks Palestinian reforms

The president of the World Bank pushed Tuesday for Palestinian economic reforms and the lifting of Israeli travel restrictions in the West Bank in exchange for an additional $500 million in desperately needed aid to the Palestinians.

The visit by James Wolfensohn to Jerusalem is his first since the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence in 2000.

The World Bank has said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plans to pull out of the Gaza Strip next year must be accompanied by Israeli moves to dismantle roadblocks and lift travel restrictions in the West Bank and Palestinian steps to reform their bureaucracy and end violence. Only then would there be any hope of resuscitating the Palestinian economy, which has been smothered by four years of violence.

The bank wants international donors, led by the United States and Europe, to add $500 million to the $930 million they already provide in annual aid to the Palestinians, but only if both sides make the needed changes.