The world in brief

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The plane appeared in seconds, dropped a bomb and killed children. Here is total chaos.”

Nezir Alan, a doctor who witnessed a bombing in in Ras al-Ayn, Syria, by the country’s military. Article, 1A

U.S. re-elected to U.N. council

UNITED NATIONS - The United States was reelected Monday to another three-year term on the U.N.

Human Rights Council in the only contested election for the organization’s top human rights body.

The U.S. was competing with four countries for three open seats belonging to the Western Group on the council. Germany and Ireland also were elected by the 193-member General Assembly.

African, Asian, Eastern European and Latin American countries put forward uncontested slates, meaning candidates were virtually certain of winning one of the 18 open seats up for grabs on the 47-member panel.

Argentina, Brazil, Ivory Coast, Estonia, Ethiopia, Gabon, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Montenegro, Pakistan, South Korea, Sierra Leone, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela were also elected Monday to three-year terms beginning Jan. 1.

New IRA group claims 1st killing

DUBLIN - A new Irish Republican Army faction in Northern Ireland claimed responsibility Monday for its first killing and defended the bloodshed as a necessary act of vengeance.

The group, a merger of factions that brands itself as simply the IRA, said in a statement to the Irish News in Belfast its members shot to death David Black this month because he worked as a guard at Northern Ireland’s top-security Maghaberry prison.

About 40 members of IRA factions are imprisoned there.

The inmates have protested for more than a year against a policy of strip-searching them in search of weapons, drugs and cell phones. They have previously threatened to kill off-duty guards.

Black, 52, was shot as he drove to work on Nov. 1.

He was the first prison officer killed in Northern Ireland since 1993, the year before the dominant anti-British paramilitary group, the Provisional IRA, began an open-ended truce that inspired Northern Ireland’s peace process. The Provisionals renounced violence and disarmed in 2005.

Leaders call for ‘pot’ policy review

MEXICO CITY - Two U.S. state decisions to legalize marijuana will have important implications for international efforts to quash drug smuggling, four Latin American leaders said Monday.

Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Costa Rica called for the Organization of American States to study the impact of the votes in Colorado and Washington and said the United Nations’ General Assembly should hold a special session on the prohibition of drugs by 2015 at the latest.

“It has become necessary to analyze in depth the implications for public policy and health in our nations emerging from the state and local moves to allow the legal production, consumption and distribution of marijuana in some countries of our continent,” Mexican President Felipe Calderon said after a meeting with Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla and Prime Minister Dean Barrow of Belize.

Mexico is one of the primary suppliers of marijuana to the U.S., while Honduras and Belize are important stops on the northward passage of cocaine from South America.

Costa Rica is seeing increasing use of its territory by drug traffickers.

Front Section, Pages 5 on 11/13/2012

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