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NEW DELHI. Putin arrives in India. </B>Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in India yesterday hoping to move Moscow closer to its long-term Asian partner and to seal lucrative new contracts for nuclear reactors and arms sales.
<B>QUITO. Defense minister dies.</B> Ecuador’s first female defense minister was killed in a mid-air collision of two helicopters yesterday after only nine days in office, government and military officials said.
<B>LONDON. British Airways cabin crew maintains strike.</B> British Airways cabin crew plan a two-day strike at the end of the month after talks between the carrier and its largest union broke down, the airline said, sending its shares lower.
<B>NEW WESTMINSTER. Serial killer retracts British Columbia. </B>Robert “Willie” Pickton, a man accused of killing 26 prostitutes, dismissed a claim he had admitted to murdering women and feeding them to his pigs, a Canadian court heard.
MORONI. Comoros corruption deters foreign investors. </B>Corruption on the impoverished Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros is the biggest deterrent to foreign investment, a business leader has said. Islamist reformer Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi was elected president last year on a vow to tackle the graft that Comorans complain infects both state and private business on the islands, which are home to less than one million people. But Sambi faces a tough fight, according to Chamssoudine Mlindasse, president of the Comorian Employers Organisation (Opaco). “Corruption is the biggest factor discouraging foreign investors,” he told Reuters in an interview. “The opening of Comoros towards the outside world and the growing demand for foreign capital to support development must be accompanied by a merciless fight against corruption,” said the newly elected Opaco president.
<B>ATHENS. Greek guerrillas threaten more attacks.</B> Leftist guerrillas who fired a grenade at the American embassy in Athens this month threatened yesterday to stage more attacks on Greek and US targets. The Revolutionary Struggle group claimed responsibility for the attack in a five-page proclamation published in an Athens weekly, criticising the United States and its ally Greece. “Our victorious battles against this establishment will show how vulnerable it is. (We aim) to get rid of US military bases and NATO from our country and overthrow those who work with them,” the group said in the tract published in To Pontiki. Revolutionary Struggle emerged four years ago. Its rocket-propelled grenade attack on the embassy has made it Greece’s biggest security threat since the dismantling of the November 17 group in 2002.
<B>MOGADISHU. US again strikes Somalia. </B>The United States has conducted a second airstrike in Somalia, US officials said Wednesday. The new strike, carried out this week, came two weeks after an AC-130 plane killed what Washington said were eight Al Qaeda-affiliated fighters hiding among holdout Islamist rebels pushed to Somalia’s southern tip by Ethiopian and Somalian government forces. One official said the targets this week were part of the Islamic Courts Union, the militant group defeated by government troops with the backing of the Ethiopian military late last year. A second source said the target was an Al Qaeda operative. There was no official confirmation of the strike from the Defense or State departments and no statement on whether anyone targeted was killed.The US believes Somalian Islamists have aided Al Qaeda members accused of bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya in 2002.
<B>VENEZUELA. Chavez says Castro ‘almost jogging’. </B>Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that his ailing friend Fidel Castro is recovering and has been up and walking – in fact “almost jogging” – in recent days. Chavez said he was pleased to hear from Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage that the 80-year-old Cuban leader was making a recovery. Lage, after meeting with Chavez, said: “We will have Fidel and we will have Raul for a lot more time. “Their hopeful remarks came less than a week after Chavez said Castro was “battling for his life.”“Lage told me that Fidel walked I don’t know how many minutes yesterday,” Chavez said, noting he suspected Castro was watching his speech on television.
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