In Short

A round-up of other world news in brief

A round-up of other world news in brief

Bin Laden ally guilty of terror conspiracy

MIAMI - A US military tribunal has found Osama bin Laden's media secretary guilty of conspiring with al-Qaeda, soliciting murder and providing material support for terrorism.

Yemeni prisoner Ali Hamza al-Bahlul is the second man to be convicted by a jury in the war crimes court at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He faces life in prison.

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The jury of nine US military officers deliberated for about four hours before reaching their verdict on Friday after a week-long trial. - (Reuters)

Italian ruling on Nazis challenged

BERLIN - Germany says it plans to go to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to contest an Italian court's ruling that Berlin must pay damages for a 1944 Nazi massacre.

Italy's top court ruled last month that Germany should pay about €1 million in compensation to the families of nine victims of the killings, committed by the German army in Civitella, Tuscany.

More than 200 people died in the massacre. - (Reuters)

60 bodies found on Yemen beach

NAIROBI - Sixty corpses of would-be refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia were found on a beach in Yemen over the weekend after smugglers forced many of them overboard.

Medicins Sans Frontières said the latest victims on the perilous smuggling route came across the Gulf of Aden from the Somali port city of Bosasso, fleeing war and poverty. - (Reuters)

Cluster bomb talks resume

GENEVA - Talks to tighten rules on cluster bombs that have resumed in Geneva are simply a distraction from a separate treaty to ban the weapons entirely that is being boycotted by major powers, campaigners say.

More than 100 countries agreed in May to ban cluster munitions - which campaigners say have killed or maimed tens of thousands of civilians - and are due to sign a treaty in Oslo next month.

However, major producers or users of cluster munitions, including the United States, Russia, China, India, Brazil and Israel, oppose a ban and have not adopted that agreement. - (Reuters)

French aid worker held in Kabul

KABUL - Security officials in Afghanistan say gunmen have kidnapped a French aid worker in Kabul.

An eyewitness said gunmen attacked a group of foreigners yesterday and kidnapped one of them. An Afghan intelligence official tried to intervene and was shot dead, the witness said.

Security companies which provide threat assessments to international workers in Kabul said a French aid worker was kidnapped, but that another international worker in the group escaped. - (PA)