Italian Court Acquits Premier of Bribery
ROME -- An Italian court acquitted Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Friday of charges he bribed judges to secure a favorable ruling on a 1980s business deal, ending a four-year trial that clouded his governing of Italy.
"I was right to have been calm" about the case, Berlusconi said in a statement. "I was fully conscious of not having done anything wrong."
Political opponents emphasized what they called the incomplete nature of the verdict. Senator Antonio DiPietro, a former prosecutor, said that "if the statute of limitations has been called, it means the facts were certified as true" concerning that charge.
Berlusconi's attorney, Niccolo Ghedini, denied that the ruling had that meaning; the court will explain its logic within 90 days.
Berlusconi is the richest man in Italy; his family assembled and ownsa vast media and financial empire. Ever since he came to office in 2001, he has faced claims of conflict of interest in his business and political dealings.
-- Sarah Delaney
THE AMERICAS
• TIBU, Colombia -- The commander of Colombia's paramilitary forces, Salvatore Mancuso, wept and apologized for his role in a war against Marxist rebels as 1,400 fighters surrendered their weapons in the largest demobilization of an outlawed armed faction in the country's history.
• MEXICO CITY -- President Vicente Fox presented a plan to improve Mexico's checkered human rights record, pledging to eradicate torture and to hold corrupt and abusive authorities accountable for wrongful arrests and shoddy police work.
• CARACAS, Venezuela -- A Venezuelan military plane crashed in a mountainous area near Caracas, killing all 16 people on board, including two high-ranking military officers.
THE MIDDLE EAST
• JERUSALEM -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon invited the opposition Labor Party to form a national unity government, seeking to avoid early elections and ensure a planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip next year.
Sharon made the offer in a call to Labor leader Shimon Peres, his longtime ideological rival and Israel's leading dove, after the rightist Likud's Central Committee voted Thursday to overturn its earlier ban on negotiating an alliance.
EUROPE
• PARIS -- A week after the disappearance of plastic explosives placed in a traveler's suitcase during a training exercise for bomb-detecting dogs at Paris's main international airport, French authorities conceded they still had no idea where the material ended up.
ASIA
• QUETTA, Pakistan -- Assailants set off a powerful time bomb next to an army truck parked in a market in southwestern Pakistan, killing at least 11 people -- mostly civilians -- and injuring more than two dozen others, police and hospital officials said. A little-known group, the Baluchistan National Army, asserted responsibility. Meanwhile, Pakistani security forces arrested the head of a militant Islamic group suspected in the kidnapping of three U.N. workers in Afghanistan in October.
-- From News Services
