More world news in brief.
Israeli atomic arsenal detailed
LONDON -Former US president Jimmy Carter has said Israel holds at least 150 nuclear weapons, the first time a US president has publicly acknowledged the Jewish state's atomic arsenal.
Asked at a news conference at Wales's Hay literary festival on Sunday how a future US president should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, Mr Carter put the risk in context by listing atomic weapons held globally.
"The US has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union [Russia] has about the same, Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more. We have a phalanx of enormous weaponry . . . not only of enormous weaponry but of rockets to deliver those missiles on a pinpoint accuracy target," he said, according to a transcript of his remarks.
While the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons is widely assumed, Israeli officials have never admitted their existence and US officials have stuck to that line in public for years. - (Reuters)
Judge orders mass arrests over inquiry into Pinochet era abuses
SANTIAGO -Almost 100 former Chilean soldiers and secret police from Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship were ordered to be detained yesterday in the biggest single mass arrest for abuses during the period, said judicial sources.
Judge Victor Montiglio ordered the detentions in a inquiry into the kidnapping and killing of 42 people during "Operation Colombo" early in the 1973-1990 dictatorship, during which 119 Pinochet opponents, many of them leftists, died.
Some of those held worked for Pinochet's infamous DINA intelligence service, which ran torture centres where hundreds of people were either killed or disappeared during one of the darkest periods of modern Latin American history. - (Reuters)
Talks on Arctic ocean carve-up
COPENHAGEN -Officials from five Arctic coastal countries will meet in Greenland this week to discuss how to carve up the Arctic Ocean, which could hold up to one-quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves.
Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the US are squabbling over much of the Arctic seabed and Denmark has called them together for talks to avert a free-for-all. - (Reuters)
Mugabe 'will accept result'
LONDON -Police arrested two 15-year-old boys and a 20-year-old man yesterday after an Asian teenager was beaten to death in a park in northern England. Amar Aslam (17), was discovered on Sunday night in Crow Nest Park in Dewsbury. Police said he "had been subjected to a sustained and vicious beating" and died from head injuries. It is feared he may have been the victim of violence between warring gangs. - (Reuters)