Japan

Army deserter leaves for visit to U.S.

A U.S. soldier who deserted his Army unit 40 years ago and fled to North Korea left his home in northern Japan on Monday for his first visit to the United States since he turned himself in late last year.

Charles Jenkins, his Japanese wife and their two daughters were scheduled to fly today to Washington after spending a night in Tokyo. He has said he has no plans to move to the United States, but has repeatedly said he wants to see his 91-year-old mother, who lives in a nursing home in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.

He was expected to stay in the United States for about a week. The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo issued him a passport last month.

Austria

Atomic agency’s leader reappointed

Mohammed ElBaradei won a third term Monday as head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency and said he was “grateful to the United States” after the Bush administration last week publicly dropped its opposition to him.

ElBaradei, a 62-year-old Egyptian diplomat, said his priorities would include fighting the threat of nuclear proliferation and the potential menace posed by nuclear terrorism – issues on which he said he has full U.S. support.

“We looked to the future and … did not discuss the past,” he said of the meeting last week with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that led to a public U.S. announcement for his reappointment.

Administration hawks accuse ElBaradei of being too mild on Iran and of trying to obstruct America’s invasion of Iraq by questioning U.S intelligence that asserted Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arms program.

Italy

Voters don’t overturn tough fertility law

In victory for the Vatican, Italian voters shunned a referendum that would have eliminated bans on egg and sperm donation, freezing embryos and other widely used methods by couples wanting to have children.

Pope Benedict XVI had endorsed a call by Italian bishops for a boycott of the vote, held Sunday and Monday. The four ballot measures drew 25.9 percent of eligible voters, roughly half the required turnout of 50 percent plus one for the results to be binding on Parliament.

The vote was seen as a test of the Vatican’s influence in a country that is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic but has strayed from church doctrine, notably by approving divorce and abortion in referendums decades ago.

The referendums would have ended a limit on the number of embryos that can be created at one time and lifted bans on freezing them for future implantation or screening them for defects. In addition, a provision that gives embryos the same legal rights as those who are born would have been eliminated.

The Holy See’s press office said it had no comment.

Aruba

Two guards released in missing student case

Prosecutors on Monday released two former hotel security guards who were the first men detained in the disappearance of an Alabama honors student, and one proclaimed his innocence.

Three young men who took 18-year-old Natalee Holloway to a beach early in the morning hours before she went missing remain in custody.

The release of Antonius “Mickey” John, 30, and Abraham Jones, 28, came before a judge reviewed a motion for the release filed Monday in Oranjestad, said John’s lawyer Noraina Pietersz. And it came the day after the missing girl’s mother said she believed the former security guards were innocent.

“I’m very happy but also disappointed,” John told The Associated Press of his detention since June 5. “I knew from day one that I was innocent.”

The missing teens’s mother, Betty Holloway Twitty, 44, said the three young men knew what happened and should be pressed to tell the truth. Holloway Twitty said if she does not see results soon, she might start to believe that authorities are trying to protect the young men, who told police they took the 18-year-old Holloway to a beach after an evening of dancing and drinking, hours before she disappeared.