Pakistan

Dam accident kills 54; hundreds missing

Troops and rescue workers raced to a coastal town devastated when heavy rains burst a large dam, sending water surging through the streets and sweeping people into the Arabian Sea. At least 54 were dead and hundreds missing, officials said Friday.

The 485-foot-long Shakidor Dam burst late Thursday near the remote Pasni village in Baluchistan province, about 1,180 miles southwest of the capital, Islamabad. The torrent of water from the ruined dam swept trucks out to sea and destroyed telephone lines, roads and eight bridges, according to officials and witnesses.

Pakistan’s army said 1,200 people had been rescued from the floodwaters, while another 500 were evacuated from the area. Some 400 remained missing, said army spokesman Mudasser Butt.

Saudi Arabia

Islamic candidates said to win elections

Candidates backed by Islamic clerics won municipal elections in Saudi Arabia’s capital in the kingdom’s first regular balloting, an election observer said Friday. But it was too early to say whether this represented a trend in the landmark polls, which are staggered across three months.

At least five of the winning candidates for the seven electable seats on the Riyadh City Council are believed to be Islamists.

The municipal elections will be held in three stages. Thursday’s first stage was for half the country’s municipal councils, with voting in other regions scheduled for March and April. Only men were allowed to vote.

Germany

British soldier denies role in prisoner abuse

A British soldier on trial for alleged abuse of detained Iraqis denied in emotional testimony Friday that he made two detainees simulate sexual acts, saying a subordinate who brought the accusation was lying.

Cpl. Daniel Kenyon, the senior defendant, told a court-martial he stopped the abuse as soon as he saw it and decided not to report it to superiors because other soldiers also had been treating detainees harshly that day in an effort to deter looting, hitting them with sticks.

Kenyon has been accused by Lance Cpl. Gary Bartlam, whose testimony and photos taken in May 2003 at a British-occupied aid warehouse outside Basra underpinned the British military’s case against them and two other soldiers.

Kenyon has pleaded not guilty to aiding and abetting the abuse of detained looters and failing to report it.

Paris

Swedish hate-speech verdict reversed

A Swedish appeals court on Friday overturned the conviction of a Pentecostal pastor found guilty of violating the country’s strict hate-speech law with a sermon that labeled homosexuality “a deep cancerous tumor in the entire society” and equated it with pedophilia.

The appeals court ruled that Sweden’s law, enacted after World War II to protect Jews and other minorities from neo-Nazi propaganda and only recently extended to gays, was never intended to stifle open discussion of homosexuality or restrict a pastor’s right to preach.

The defendant, the Rev. Ake Green, had a right to preach “the Bible’s categorical condemnation of homosexual relations as a sin,” the court said, even if that position was “alien to most citizens” and if Green’s views could be “strongly questioned,” according to news-service translations of the court’s ruling.

Togo

Delegation cancels visit as tensions mount

Security forces used tear gas and batons to scatter hundreds of opposition demonstrators Friday, and tension heightened between Togo and its neighbors over what West African and other leaders call a Togolese military coup d’etat.

Five West African leaders refused an invitation to Togo’s northern city of Kara for a meeting with Togo authorities on ending the constitutional crisis, saying they preferred to meet in the capital, Lome, instead. The leaders then offered to meet Togo officials in Niger.

The capital has be beset by unrest in recent days and Kara is a stronghold of the Gnassingbes.

Hundreds of people gathered early Friday in the capital’s southern neighborhood of Be, long a stronghold of opposition against dictator Gnassingbe Eyadema, who died last week.

Demonstrators angered by the iron-fisted military’s installation of Eyadema’s son, Faure Gnassingbe, as president blocked the roads with tires and set them ablaze.

Vatican City

Pope sends message of support to the sick

Out of the hospital but still frail, Pope John Paul II sent his blessings Friday to fellow ailing Catholics, assuring them that suffering has a purpose in God’s plan and asking for their prayers to keep him at the head of the church.

The 84-year-old pontiff did not attend a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica for the World Day of the Sick, where patients prayed. Instead, he watched the service on television and dispatched a cardinal to read his personal message about the meaning of pain.

“Your suffering is never useless, dear sick ones,” said the message from the pope, who was spending his first full day at the Vatican after recovering from the flu and breathing problems that required a 10-day hospitalization.