A round-up of today's other stories in brief.
Request to extradite 20 CIA agents
MILAN - A prosecutor has asked Italy's new justice minister to request the extradition of more than 20 CIA agents over the alleged kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in 2003, a judicial source said yesterday.
Prosecutors had already lodged a request for the extradition of 22 suspected US agents with the government of Silvio Berlusconi but it was rejected. - (Reuters)
Inquiry into death of Afghan civilians
KABUL - An Afghan government inquiry found that a US-led coalition bombing in southern Uruzgan province last week killed 10 civilians and wounded 27, an official said.
Maulvi Muhayuddin Baluch, an adviser on religious affairs to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, said that nine suspected Taliban fighters were also killed during coalition air raids in the Uruzgan capital, Tirin Kot. - (Reuters)
Trial on suicide attack charges
SARAJEVO - A Swede, a Turk and a Bosnian went on trial yesterday on charges of buying explosives and weapons to carry out suicide attacks on targets in Europe. Mirsad Bektasevic (19), a Swedish citizen of Balkan origin, and Abdulkadir Cesur (21), a Turk, are accused of planning an attack to pressure Bosnia or an unidentified European government to withdraw its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. - (Reuters)
Call to scrap law on gays in India
NEW DELHI - The Indian government's HIV/Aids control body is backing demands for homosexuality to be legalised, saying that the law is hampering efforts to curb the virus.
The National Aids Control Organisation filed a statement in Delhi High Court on Wednesday supporting a petition by a local Aids charity demanding that the law criminalising homosexuality be scrapped. - (Reuters)
Jailed in Finland for human trafficking
HELSINKI - A Finnish court sentenced eight people to up to five years in jail yesterday on charges of human trafficking and pimping in the Nordic country's first such trial. The defendants had smuggled 15 Estonian women, one of them mentally disabled, to Finland to work as prostitutes. - (Reuters)
29 hurt in theme park accident
LONDON - A total of 29 people were hurt and two were evacuated by helicopter after an accident on the Runaway Mine Train thrill ride at Alton Towers theme park in Britain yesterday. - (Reuters)
Bird flu found in farms in Bulgaria
SOFIA - Bulgaria said yesterday it had detected bird flu in three farms in a village in the south of the country near the Turkish border and suspected it was the feared H5N1 strain of the virus. - (Reuters)
Germany wants stem-cell funds ban
BRUSSELS - Germany pressed its EU partners to ban European funding for embryonic stem-cell research, a day after US president George Bush vetoed a bill that would have expanded such work in the United States.
"The European Union science programme should not be used to give financial incentives to kill embryos," German research minister Annette Schavan wrote in a letter seen by Reuters yesterday before a meeting on EU science funding on Monday. - (Reuters)
Canada's murder rate increases
OTTAWA - Canada's murder rate shot up last year to its highest in nearly a decade. The homicide rate was two per 100,000 of the population, which is still less than half that of the US rate. - (Reuters)