QUOTE OF THE DAY
“There will be no personal score-settling.”
Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the Egyptian military chief who last summer removed the Islamist president and has led a crackdown on his followers, after announcing he is running for president Article, this page
Civilian victims of Kosovo war buried
MALA KRUSA, Kosovo - Fifteen years after they were killed by Serb forces, the remains of 46 ethnic Albanian civilians were buried Wednesday in western Kosovo to the tears and wails of their relatives.
One funeral took place in the village of Mala Krusa, where 112 boys and men were killed when Serb forces rounded them up, sprayed them with bullets and then set them on fire in revenge for NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia.
Some 40 miles to the east, another 27 civilian victims, most of them members of one family, were buried in the town of Suva Reka. The remains were found in a mass grave in Serbia, part of an attempt by the authorities to cover up the killings.
The two attacks were among the worst atrocities during Kosovo’s separatist war that left some 10,000 dead, most of them ethnic Albanians.
More than 1,000 people are still considered missing from the Kosovo war.
Court orders Twitter unblocked in Turkey
ANKARA, Turkey - A Turkish court ordered the telecommunications authority to restore access to Twitter on Wednesday, five days after the government blocked access to the social network.
The website ban went into effect shortly after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to “rip out the roots” of Twitter, which has been a conduit for links to recordings suggesting government corruption. The telecommunications authority accused Twitter of disobeying Turkish court orders to remove content.
The move drew international criticism, and many Turkish users found ways to circumvent the ban. President Abdullah Gul tweeted his opposition to the blockage.
Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said the telecommunications authority would obey Wednesday’s court decision when it received official notice, but it reserved the right to appeal.
Twitter, meanwhile, said it had also filed petitions to several Turkish courts, seeking an overturn of the ban.
The company’s general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, said two of three court orders cited by Turkish authorities were related to content that violated Twitter’s rules and had been removed. The third related to accusations of corruption by a former minister and was being challenged in court.
Pakistan, Taliban enter negotiations
ISLAMABAD - A Pakistani government team held direct talks with the Taliban after traveling Wednesday to a secret location in the country’s northwest, part of a push by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to strike a peace deal to end an insurgency that has killed thousands of people in recent years.
Although previous Pakistani governments have spoken directly with Taliban representatives, these are the first such negotiations since Sharif took office in June. Over the past month or so, intermediaries representing the two sides have met and laid the groundwork for the talks.
Maulana Samiul Haq, one of the Taliban negotiators, said the discussions lasted for seven hours and would resume later in the week. Haq, a cleric, said the talks were fruitful and helped the two sides understand each other better.
The Taliban spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid, also cast the meeting in a positive light.
“The talks with the government team were held in a cordial atmosphere today. The two sides discussed all the issues, including how to exchange each other’s prisoners and continue the cease-fire,” he said.
Nazi-looted textile returned to Czechs
PRAGUE - A 19th-century synagogue textile stolen by the Nazis was returned to the Czech Republic after being discovered in the United States last year, officials said Wednesday.
The textile dates to 1855 and belonged to the Jewish community in the town of Mlada Vozice, 30 miles south of Prague. It is believed to have been used in the local synagogue, which no longer exists.
It was confiscated by the Nazis in 1943 during Czechoslovakia’s occupation by Adolf Hitler’s troops.
The Nazis gathered items from Jewish communities at a depository in Prague before killing Jewish residents in death camps.
The piece’s whereabouts had been unknown for almost 60 years. It was discovered by curators of Prague’s Jewish Museum in 2013 in the U.S. shortly before Sotheby’s was to put it up for auction in New York among more than 400 other Jewish treasures in April.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/27/2014