The world in brief

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

QUOTE OF THE DAY “It’s scary, too

dangerous. How could people drive or walk on such a day?” Wu Kai, a housewife and mother in the Chinese city of Harbin, on air pollution that reduced visibility to less than 50 yards and was recorded at 40 times the international safety standard Article, this page Rights court frees

Spanish terrorist

MADRID - The European Court of Human Rights ruled Monday against a Spanish law that has allowed the Madrid government to extend the imprisonment of convicted terrorists and members of ETA, the Basque separatist group.

The court in Strasbourg, France, ruled on the case of one ETA member, Ines del Rio Prada, who had appealed against her prolonged prison stay. She was imprisoned in 1989 for taking part in the deadly bombing of a bus carrying police officers. The European court ordered that she be released immediately and receive about $41,000 in damages to cover legal costs.

Jorge Fernandez Diaz, Spain’s interior minister, said last year that 40 of about 500 ETA members held in Spanish prisons could claim to face a comparable situation.

After her arrest and trial, del Rio Prada received a 3,000-year prison sentence.

But under normal Spanish legislation that limits a prison sentence to 30 years, she would have become eligible for parole in July 2008.

Assad doubts end of war from talks

BEIRUT - Syria’s president said Monday that the factors needed for a proposed peace conference to end the country’s conflict to succeed do not yet exist, raising doubts about renewed international efforts to bring the opposing sides in the civil war to the negotiating table.

The U.S. and Russia have been trying for months to convene an international conference in Geneva to negotiate a political solution to Syria’s civil war.

But Bashar Assad brushed aside the renewed efforts to coax the government and the opposition into taking part in a peace conference, telling Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen TV that “the factors that would help in holding it are not in place if we want it to succeed.”

He said it’s not clear who would represent the opposition, or what credibility they would have inside Syria.

Gypsies held; hunt on for girl’s family

ATHENS, Greece - Greek police on Monday released photographs of a couple charged with abducting a girl and judicial authorities put the pair in pretrial custody, as an international search for the child’s biological parents intensified.

Investigators trying to establish how the girl known only as “Maria” came to be with the detained Gypsy couple are considering a range of potential scenarios, including child trafficking to simple charity.

The suspects were identified as Christos Salis, 39, and a 40-year-old woman who used the names Eleftheria Dimopoulou and Selini Sali. They were arrested last week after police found the girl when they raided a Gypsy, or Roma, encampment near the central Greek town of Farsala. Her DNA shows she is not the couple’s child.

A defense lawyer has said they took in the girl as charity, after being approached by an intermediary for a destitute foreign mother who could not afford to raise her.

Front Section, Pages 5 on 10/22/2013