LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY

“We are ready for a dialogue with anyone who’s willing. Even with those who carry arms.”

Walid al-Moallem, Syrian foreign minister Article, this page

Palestinians give hero funeral to detainee

SAEER, West Bank - A Palestinian man who died under disputed circumstances in Israeli custody was given a hero’s funeral Monday, as thousands thronged his grave site and Palestinian police fired a 21-gun salute.

Palestinian officials, citing an autopsy, said Arafat Jaradat was abused during Israeli interrogation. Israeli officials said more tests are needed to determine the cause of death, and Israel’s public security minister said he would allow an international expert to review the autopsy results.

The weekend death of the 30-year-old gas station attendant and father of two comes amid rising West Bank tensions that have prompted talk in Israel about the possibility of a new Palestinian uprising.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Monday he was consulting with security officials, while U.N. envoy Robert Serry warned that “mounting tensions present a real risk of destabilization.”

In recent days, there have been frequent Palestinian protests in support of some 4,600 Palestinians held by Israel, particularly four inmates who’ve staged extended hunger strikes.

Ikea lands in horse-meat scandal

LONDON - Ikea Group, the world’s biggest furniture retailer, became the latest company to be drawn into Europe’s horse-meat scandal after it stopped serving and selling Swedish meatballs across most of Europe.

The company widened an earlier stop on total meatball sales, which was limited to France and Sweden. Now “the sales stop concerns meatballs manufactured by one supplier in Sweden who supplies meatballs to all European countries,” except Norway, Russia and Switzerland, as they “have alternative suppliers,” Ikea said in a statement.

The decision followed the discovery by authorities in the Czech Republic of traces of horse meat in the product.

The horse-meat scandal that started in Ireland in mid-January has spread across Europe as retailers withdraw products such as frozen beef burgers, lasagnas and meatballs from the shelves. The European Union has ordered immediate testing across the region for equine DNA in beef products and the veterinary drug phenylbutazone in horse meat.

Putin OKs anti-tobacco, health bills

MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed a package of anti-tobacco measures aimed at curbing demand in the world’s second-largest cigarette market, the Kremlin said in a statement.

Effective June 1, the law bans smoking in public areas including workplaces, stairwells of apartment buildings and near schools and hospitals. It also sets minimum prices for cigarettes and allows for higher excise taxes. The ban on public smoking will be extended to restaurants, hotels and train stations on June 1, 2014, and sales will be banned in street kiosks not big enough for clients to enter.

Putin, who returned to the Kremlin last year for a third term as president, is limiting sales and advertising of alcohol and tobacco in the biggest public health initiative since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed campaign in the late 1980s. Smoking and drinking kill about 900,000 people a year in Russia, according to official estimates.

Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, Japan Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco Group control 93 percent of the $19.5 billion Russian market. China is the world’s biggest tobacco consumer.

French: 7 hostages likely in Nigeria

PARIS - French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said seven French citizens, including four children, kidnapped in Cameroon last week are probably being held by the militant Islamist group Boko Haram in Nigeria.

“We now have the information that the Boko Haram group is claiming to detain these hostages, probably in Nigeria,” Ayrault told journalists in a report carried by I-Tele on Monday.

A video posted Monday on YouTube showed what appeared to be the French hostages, including the four children, with two masked captors, who said they were members of Boko Haram.

Authorities in Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer and most populous nation, have been battling an insurgency by Boko Haram that’s killed hundreds of people since 2009. The group has carried out attacks in the mainly Muslim north and Abuja, the capital. Nigeria’s population of more than 160 million has a predominantly Christian south.

Front Section, Pages 5 on 02/26/2013