No Accord on U.N. Trip To Guantanamo Bay
GENEVA -- Officials from the United Nations and the United States have not been able to agree on conditions for a possible fact-finding mission to the U.S. detention center at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay, the U.N. special investigator on torture said Tuesday.
Manfred Nowak met Monday afternoon with Pierre Prosper, the American ambassador-at-large for war crimes, and said U.S. officials refused to guarantee him the right to speak to detainees in private -- an "absolute precondition" for such a visit.
Nowak, an Austrian lawyer, also said his team would need full access to the facilities and the prison population, conditions that Washington was hesitant to agree to.
"I would have hoped that yesterday we would have received a formal invitation -- that was not the case," he said. "Either we get an invitation [to Guantanamo] this year or not at all."
AFRICA
• UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary General Kofi Annan gave the International Criminal Court a list of 51 people suspected of slaughter, rape and pillaging in Sudan's Darfur region, the first step toward a war crimes prosecution.
The sealed list was put together by an independent commission sent by the Security Council to Darfur last year. The case is the first referred by the Security Council to the tribunal, the world's first permanent criminal court, based in The Hague.
• NORTON, Zimbabwe -- Two British journalists detained in Zimbabwe pleaded not guilty to charges of reporting without permission and overstaying their visas.
The Sunday Telegraph's chief foreign correspondent, Toby Harnden, and a photographer, Julian Simmonds, who were arrested on election day last Thursday, denied breaking Zimbabwe's tough media laws and immigration regulations.
ASIA
• LONDON -- China carried out the majority of executions reported worldwide last year, according to Amnesty International, which said an accurate count of death penalties imposed was impossible to track because many of the sentences were carried out secretly.
During 2004, more than 3,797 people were executed in 25 countries, including at least 3,400 in China, the rights group said. More than 7,000 people were sentenced to death in 64 countries, it said.
• KABUL, Afghanistan -- The U.S. military will dramatically expand its role in combating Afghanistan's booming narcotics industry by taking charge of training police and identifying targets for anti-drug raids, a senior American general said.
The military will fly Afghan forces on missions against smugglers and refiners of the country's massive opium crop, said Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
