Afghanistan

Relief agency halts operations after 5 killed

A Nobel Prize-winning relief agency halted its long-established operations in Afghanistan on Thursday after five staff members were killed in the deadliest attack on foreign aid workers since the fall of the Taliban.

Wednesday’s assault in northwestern Badghis province on workers with Medecins Sans Frontieres raised fears that insurgents already disrupting development efforts in Afghanistan’s south and east are now targeting projects in the north. A purported spokesman for the Taliban claimed responsibility.

Attackers using rifles and grenades shredded a four-wheel-drive vehicle painted with the MSF red logo, killing all five people inside: a Norwegian doctor, a Dutch logistician, a Belgian project coordinator and their Afghan driver and translator.

Vietnam

Notorious crime kingpin, four others executed

A alleged Vietnamese crime “godfather” and four of his gangster colleagues were executed by firing squad Thursday after being convicted in a major crackdown on crime that is said to have reached into the ruling Communist Party.

Nam Cam, 57, whose real name is Truong Van Cam, was the kingpin of Ho Chi Minh City’s underworld, using restaurants as fronts for brothels and gambling dens, after starting his life as a dockworker and later a fighter for the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army.

Nam Cam’s trial exposed close ties between his mafia and members of the Communist Party — embarrassing a leadership that prided itself on being tough on corruption.

Poland

Memorial opens at Nazi-era camp

A rabbi’s prayer and warnings against the evils of racism inaugurated a new memorial Thursday to victims of the Belzec death camp, where 500,000 Jews and other Nazi targets were exterminated during just seven months of World War II.

The memorial, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the Polish government, is meant to give dignity and greater prominence to the memory of Belzec’s victims after the site was neglected for decades under communism.

Belzec was one of six death camps set up in occupied Poland as part of the Nazi “final solution” to exterminate Europe’s Jews. It was the first one to use gas chambers, which operated in March-December 1942.

Turkey

Weapons seized on way to Egypt

Customs authorities in Istanbul seized a radio-controlled missile and launcher as well as other weapons from a ship that was headed for Egypt from Ukraine, a government official said Thursday.

The weapons, which also included a number of rockets and warheads, were discovered in two containers after customs officials searched the ship that had docked at the port of Ambarli, 20 miles from Istanbul, said Kursad Tuzmen, the minister in charge of foreign trade and customs.

Tuzmen said the ship’s captain had declared the ship was carrying spare parts. Officials became suspicious after noticing damage to numbers inscribed on the container, he said.

He identified the ship as the Maltese-flagged Breze-47 and said the crew included six Ukranians.

Asked whether the containers may have also included chemical weapons, Tuzmen replied: “The inspections are ongoing.”

Tokyo

Blinded Iraqi boy gets treatment as promised

While on assignment in Iraq two months ago, photojournalist Shinsuke Hashida was so moved by a boy partially blinded by glass shards during a gunbattle that he made a promise: To return to Iraq and bring the child to Japan for medical treatment.

Hashida went back for the boy, only to be killed in an ambush.

But his promise stands.

On Thursday, 10-year-old Mohamad Haytham Saleh, above, boarded a flight to Tokyo from Amman, Jordan. The Rotary Club in Numazu, the photojournalist’s hometown, is sponsoring the boy and his medical care, following through on arrangements Hashida made before he and his nephew Kotaro Ogawa, also a journalist, were killed in an attack south of Baghdad.

Though he has undergone two operations in Iraq, Saleh cannot see with his left eye, which was pierced by glass shards last November during fighting in Fallujah.

Sierra Leone

War-crimes court opens

Prosecutors opened the first U.N.-backed war-crimes trial Thursday in the vicious 1991-2002 conflict in diamond-rich Sierra Leone, calling for “a just accounting for the agony of 10 long years.”

Eleven suspects face trial in terror campaigns estimated to have claimed a half-million victims of killings, systematic mutilation and other atrocities.

The civil war for control of Sierra Leone and its diamond fields won notoriety for insurgents’ trademark atrocity: using machetes to hack off the hands and feet of thousands of civilians. The tribunal is the first international war crimes court to try suspects in the country where the atrocities occurred.

Canada

Church affirms ‘sanctity’ of gay marriage

The Anglican Church of Canada affirmed the “integrity and sanctity” of same-sex relationships Thursday, a move that stops short of authorizing blessing ceremonies for gay couples but still may provoke rancor in the global Anglican Communion.

The “sanctity” measure was offered to encourage gays and their supporters. Gay advocates were disheartened by a decision Wednesday to delay any national go-ahead on church blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples until at least 2007.