LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY
“If the cards are marked, are we expected to play anyway?”
Yigal Palmor, the spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, defending the decision not to cooperate with a U.N. fact-finding mission Article, this page
U.K. gets Libya help in bombing probe
LONDON - British Prime Minister David Cameron made an unexpected visit to the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Thursday and announced that U.K. police officers will travel to the North African nation to investigate the Lockerbie bombing.
He also held bilateral talks to explore what support and expertise Britain can offer to Libya to strengthen its security and defeat terrorism.
Cameron said at a news conference in Tripoli that he was “delighted” that police would be able to visit Libya and “look into the issues” around the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. The attack killed 270 people, many of them Americans.
The death last spring of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi - a former Libyan intelligence agent and the only man convicted over the Lockerbie bombing - renewed pleas from victims’ relatives for further investigation of the bombing.
After the 2011 fall of Moammar Gadhafi, Britain asked Libya’s new rulers to help fully investigate.
Judge: No outside censors in 9/11 trial
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba - The military judge presiding at the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks trial Thursday ordered the government to unplug any outside censors who can reach into his courtroom and silence the war-crimes tribunal.
Only a court security officer sitting in court, at the judge’s elbow, has the authority to hit a mute button on the proceedings if there’s a suspicion that national-security information could be spilled, Judge James Pohl announced.
At issue was an episode Monday when the sound to spectators was suddenly replaced by white noise in court after 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s attorney David Nevin said the word “secret.”
Nobody inside court did it. The judge appeared surprised that “some external body” had the power to prevent the public from listening to the proceedings - which are broadcast in the spectator’s gallery on a 40-second delay.
“This is the last time that will happen,” the judge said Thursday. “No third party can unilaterally cut off the broadcast.”
2 sentenced in Tibet self-immolations
BEIJING - A court in southwest China gave severe prison sentences Thursday to two Tibetans who court officials said were guilty of urging eight people to self-immolate, three of whom died, according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency.
One Tibetan, Lorang Konchok, 40, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, which often means the convict will eventually get a lifetime prison sentence. His nephew Lorang Tsering, 31, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The Xinhua report said the older Tibetan also was being stripped of his “political rights” for life, while the younger would have his stripped for three years.
The sentencing took place in Aba Prefecture of Sichuan province, an area at the heart of the recent wave of self-immolations by Tibetans. Nearly 100 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since 2009 to protest Chinese rule in Tibetan regions, which lie in western China but which many Tibetans say should be granted independence or true autonomy.
At least 81 died after their acts, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based in London. Few other nations have been confronted by such a large wave of self-immolations as political protest.
Pakistan blast kills 2 polio workers
ISLAMABAD - A roadside bomb killed two polio workers in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday, in the third such attack this week on workers struggling to immunize children against the crippling disease.
The explosion struck as the two workers, with a U.N.-backed campaign, were traveling by motorcycle through the Parachinar district, near the border with Afghanistan.
It was the first such attack on health workers in that area, said a senior local official speaking by phone on the condition of anonymity, offering further evidence that a Taliban-led campaign of violence and intimidation against polio workers is spreading across northwestern Pakistan.
Despite an internationally supported campaign to halt polio in Pakistan, infection rates have soared in the past year, coinciding with a wave of militant attacks against the poorly protected workers at the heart of the effort.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 02/01/2013