London

Bomb threat forces emergency landing

A bomb threat that mentioned Iraq forced a New York-bound Greek airliner to make an emergency landing Sunday at London’s Stansted Airport escorted by military jets, authorities said.

An airport spokeswoman said an Athens newspaper had received a phone call saying there was a bomb on the Olympic Airlines plane.

“Flight 411 Olympic for America has a bomb for Iraq,” a caller to the Ethnos daily said, according to a tape the newspaper made available to journalists. In a second call, a voice that sounded like a different person said, “Are you listening? Flight 411 Olympic for America, bomb. America will see. Six o’clock message for you.”

Essex police said teams were removing all baggage from the plane for searching.

Geneva

Voters maintain strict citizenship rules

Dashing the chance for almost 200,000 youngsters to get citizenship easily, voters in Switzerland rejected two government proposals to loosen tough naturalization rules in a referendum Sunday.

Nearly 57 percent of voters opposed granting automatic citizenship to third-generation children born to immigrant families. In a slightly closer result, nearly 52 percent rejected easing naturalization rules for first- and second-generation residents raised and schooled here.

About a fifth of the 7.2 million people living in Switzerland are not citizens, most of them immigrants from Italy and the Balkans or their offspring.

Immigrants have to wait at least 12 years to apply for naturalization, and their Swiss-born children and even grandchildren do not qualify automatically.

Turkey

Parliament approves penal law reform

A special session of parliament approved legal reforms Sunday aimed at opening the way for Turkey to begin membership talks with the European Union after the governing party dropped a proposal to criminalize adultery, a plan that had upset EU leaders.

The vote came before an Oct. 6 EU report that is expected to recommend the bloc start negotiations with Turkey.

The reform package, the first overhaul of the penal code in 78 years, revamps Turkey’s criminal laws and includes tougher measures against rape, pedophilia and torture and improves human rights standards.

Indonesia

Group reports abuse of Indonesian rebels

Indonesian security forces have used torture and inhumane treatment to force confessions from suspected separatists and their sympathizers in the province of Aceh, where the government and rebels have fought a long-running conflict, a human rights group alleged in a report to be released today.

The incidents included cigarette burnings, electric shocks, and beatings with rifle butts and hammers, Human Rights Watch said in its 56-page report. The group based its allegations on interviews with 33 adults and two juveniles who were convicted of rebellion and sent to five prisons in Java, Indonesia’s main island.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman dismissed the allegations as unfounded.

Berlin

Chancellor’s party avoids major losses

Germany’s governing Social Democrats emerged from local elections in the country’s most populous state Sunday trailing well behind the conservative opposition in projections, but party leaders were relieved they avoided major new losses.

The vote for councils and mayors in North Rhine-Westphalia, a traditional stronghold of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s party, was this year’s last electoral test. Amid widespread anger about Schroeder’s drive to trim the welfare state, his party has been battered in a string of state elections in recent months.

The Social Democrats were predicted to win 31.1 percent across the western state that includes the industrial Ruhr region, compared with 33.9 percent five years ago.