Georgia

President celebrates end of power struggle

Georgia’s president celebrated the departure of the long-defiant leader of the Adzharia region Thursday, vowing it was only the first step toward unifying this fractured ex-Soviet republic.

President Mikhail Saakashvili flew into the Adzharian capital, Batumi, hours after strong-arm leader Aslan Abashidze resigned amid two days of public protests and fled to Moscow.

Saakashvili, elected in January, has promised to bring separatist regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia back into Georgia. The two broke off in fighting in the 1990s.

Adzharia did not espouse separatism, but Abashidze had defied the central government for years, withholding port fees collected in Batumi, Georgia’s major Black Sea port. He ruled here since Georgia’s 1991 independence from the Soviet Union and is a longtime critic of Saakashvili.

Ukraine

Police seize containers of radioactive material

Ukrainian security forces seized nearly 375 pounds of a radioactive material seen as a likely ingredient for a “dirty bomb” and arrested three people, authorities said Thursday.

In a joint action, Ukraine’s police and state security agents seized two containers of cesium-137 and arrested three men from the southern city of Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, police spokesman Yuriy Kondratyev said.

Cesium-137 is considered a likely ingredient for a so-called “dirty bomb,” in which conventional explosives are combined with radioactive material.

Police and state security agents acted on a tip that two buyers from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, were ready to purchase cesium at an estimated price of $60,000 per container, Kondratyev said. Each container seized weighed more than 187 pounds, he said.

London

Dossier author to lead intelligence agency

The author of a disputed British intelligence dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that laid out the case for war was chosen Thursday to head Britain’s MI6 spy agency.

Opposition politicians said John Scarlett should not have been appointed while a government inquiry is probing why Iraq did not have the fearsome chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs cited as a cause for war.

Scarlett was a major figure in the judicial inquiry into the death of weapons scientist David Kelly. He testified that he, and not Blair’s aides, had the final say on the dossier on Iraqi weapons, published in September 2002.

Washington, D.C.

U.S. charges 9 leaders in Colombian drug cartel

U.S. officials on Thursday announced indictments against nine reputed members of Colombia’s largest drug cartel, an organization believed responsible for smuggling more than $10 billion worth of cocaine into the United States.

The Norte de Valle cartel, which supplanted the Medellin and Cali drug organizations in the early 1990s, could be the source of as much as 60 percent of the U.S. cocaine supply, Drug Enforcement Administration chief Karen Tandy said.

With only one of the nine suspects in U.S. custody, officials announced rewards of up to $5 million for the capture of the others .

The grand jury indictment alleges the Norte de Valle cartel leaders sent more than 1 million pounds of cocaine to the United States since 1990.

Nigeria

Muslim village attack kills more than 500

Militants from a predominantly Christian tribe killed at least 500 people in two attacks on a Muslim town in central Nigeria, a senior Red Cross official said Thursday.

Although an exact toll from the raids Sunday and Tuesday was unavailable, Red Cross workers who interviewed witnesses and families of victims and inspected a mass burial site “estimate 500 to 600 dead,” said Umar Abdu Mairiga, head of the Nigerian Red Cross team visiting the mostly Muslim town of Yelwa after the assaults by the Tarok tribe.

Thousands of people fled the fighting, and at least 158 people were wounded. About 100 people also were missing, many of them women and children allegedly abducted, Mairiga added.

Religious, ethnic and political enmities have fueled outbreaks resulting in more than 10,000 dead since President Olusegun Obasanjo was first elected in 1999.