Iran

Patience urged in case of slain photojournalist

An Iranian court spokesman on Saturday urged Canada to be patient in the case of a photojournalist who died in Iranian custody under suspicious circumstances, saying “tension won’t expedite justice.”

Judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimirad said a Tehran appeals court will hold a hearing on July 25 before senior judges issue a verdict in the case of Zahra Kazemi, who held both Canadian and Iranian citizenship.

Canada is campaigning to determine the cause of death of Kazemi, who died in 2003, several days after being arrested for taking photos of a demonstration outside a Tehran prison.

Hard-line Iranian authorities said Kazemi died of a stroke, but a commission appointed by Iran’s president found she died of a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage that were caused by the impact of a hard object. Iranian reformists have said she was tortured to death.

Canadian Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew last week said Ottawa would further limit diplomatic contact with Iran to back demands for justice in Kazemi’s case.

Afghanistan

Former Taliban official to run in elections

A second former top Taliban official said Saturday that he will be a candidate in Afghan legislative elections, while the country’s president urged more women to take part in the polls.

Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, the former deputy interior minister for the ousted Taliban regime, said he would run as an independent candidate in the September elections. Khaksar secretly contacted the United States in 1999 to seek American help in stopping the Taliban, and renounced the fundamentalist movement after its collapse in 2001.

On Tuesday, a former Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, who is considered a relative moderate, also nominated himself as a candidate in Kandahar.

The Afghan government has recently reached out to Taliban members to lay down their weapons and rejoin civil society. Several midlevel Taliban commanders have accepted the offer, but the insurgency continues to produce heavy clashes.

Ireland

Sinn Fein representative has visa request denied

U.S. immigration officials have barred a senior American-based representative of Sinn Fein from traveling back to the United States after a trip to Ireland because she violated her visa restrictions, the Irish Republican Army-linked party said Saturday.

Rita O’Hare, who has been Sinn Fein’s senior lobbyist and organizer in the United States since 1998, was denied a visa to accompany Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness on his visit next week to New York and Washington.

Peter King, a Republican congressman from New York who is sympathetic to Sinn Fein, said U.S. officials were trying to “send a signal” to the group with the travel ban.

On Saturday, McGuinness and O’Hare met U.S. Ambassador to Ireland James Kenny to seek a reversal of the ban.

U.S. immigration officials say O’Hare is being punished because she violated the terms of a previous visa by traveling without authorization to Florida.

Belfast-born O’Hare requires a special U.S. visa because she jumped bail in Northern Ireland more than 30 years ago while awaiting trial for attempted murder of British soldiers and remains subject to arrest if she returns to the British territory.

Japan

Driver in train wreck was reprimanded before

The driver of the train that derailed on the JR Fukuchiyama Line in April, killing 107 people, was forced to write 19 essays expressing his regret for overshooting a stop line last June.

The driver, Ryujiro Takami, 23, who was killed in the derailment on April 25, underwent the program known as “day shift” immediately after the June incident.

During the program given at West Japan Railway Co.’s Kyobashi train office in Osaka, Takami also was reprimanded by three superiors for failing to make up for the 10-second delay.

The police and the Construction and Transport Ministry’s Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission will investigate the firm’s re-education program.

According to sources, the office has recorded and kept details of re-education programs for employees, including essays of regret.

The police are questioning the train office head and other employees on suspicion that Takami’s reckless driving to make up for a 90-second delay resulted in the fatal derailment.

South Africa

Afrikaners protest plans to change capital name

Several hundred people, most of them white, demonstrated Saturday to protest a proposal to change the capital’s name from Pretoria, the name given to it by white settlers, to Tshwane, as the site was once known to its original African inhabitants.

Arguing it would disregard the traditions of white Afrikaners, the protesters handed an official a petition with thousands of signatures of people opposed to the change, which the South African Geographical Names Council is to discuss Thursday.

The council will consider the signatures, heritage director Vusithemba Ndima told the South African Press Assn.

The Tshwane Metropolitan Council voted in March to change the name of the wider metropolitan area around the capital, leaving only the center as Pretoria.

Established by white settlers in 1855, the city was named after Andries Pretorius, a leader of the Afrikaners’ “Great Trek” into the interior of the country. Tshwane is derived from the Ndebele name used by some of the region’s earliest African inhabitants. It means “we are the same.”