World Digest
Protest turns ugly; nine killed in Uganda

	KAREL PRINSLOO / AP Ojok Nelson cries out for help as he is grabbed by a mob who mistook him for a Lord's Resistance Army collaborator yesterday during a protest march in Lira in northern Uganda.
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At least nine people were killed.

The violence came days after one of the worst massacres in northern Uganda's 18-year-old rebellion and underscored growing anger among the region's people over the government's inability to crush the Lord's Resistance Army, a quasi-religious movement seeking to overthrow President Yoweri Museveni.

Museveni has brought a degree of prosperity to a once-destitute nation and remains popular in most of Uganda. But the carnage reflects growing desperation in the country's largely forgotten north — and augurs poorly for a government that claims to have all but crushed a rebellion that has turned life into a nightmare in northern Uganda.

Later yesterday, the Ugandan parliament voted unanimously to declare the northern part of the country a humanitarian disaster area — a move expected to free up extra money to aid victims of the rebellion.

Plane carrying Macedonia's leader disappears from radar

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — A plane carrying Macedonia's president to an international investment conference in Bosnia disappeared from radar, U.S. peacekeepers said early today.

The Macedonian government aircraft, carrying President Boris Trajkovski to the western Bosnian city of Mostar, lost contact with air-traffic controllers near the border between Bosnia and Montenegro, said Capt. Ben Thorp, a spokesman for U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia.

Officials said it was too early to determine whether the plane had crashed, although an unnamed source told Reuters news service of a crash.

White House delays decision on allowing travel to Libya
 
WASHINGTON — Libya yesterday affirmed it was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, but the Bush administration delayed a decision to permit Americans to travel to the country.

The statement by the Jamahiriya news agency disavowed assertions by the Libyan prime minister that Libya had not acknowledged it blew the jetliner out of the skies over Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people, including 181 Americans.

Hours before the White House was to announce that U.S. passports could be used to travel to Libya, Prime Minister Shokri Ghanem said Libya's government recently agreed to pay $2.7 billion as compensation to victims' families in order to improve relations with the West and to secure the lifting of U.N. sanctions against Libya.

Asked if the payment did not mean Libya had accepted guilt for the bombing, Ghanem replied: "I agree with that, and this is why I say we bought peace."

U.S. helping to protect Kazakhstan, Rumsfeld says

ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The U.S. government is helping Kazakhstan protect its interests in the oil-rich Caspian Sea, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday in the Kazakh capital.

"The Caspian security in the western portion of Kazakhstan is important for this country, it is important to the world that the security be assured in that area," Rumsfeld said after talks with Kazakh Defense Minister Mukhtar Altynbayev.

Former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus region of southwest Asia have become important partners for the United States over the past decade, not only in the fight against terrorism but also in developing democracies in the region.

In Washington, President Bush met yesterday with Georgia's newly elected president, Mikhail Saakashvili, and told reporters he supports Georgia's demands for the withdrawal of Russian troops from its territory.

In a related development, Shell Oil and a group of other oil companies announced an agreement to develop the Kashagan oil field in Kazakstan. The field was discovered in 2000 and is estimated to have 38 billion barrels of oil.

Attack on farming village leaves 48 dead in Nigeria

LAGOS, Nigeria — Suspected Muslim militants armed with guns and bows and arrows killed at least 48 people in an attack on a farming village in central Nigeria yesterday.

Most of the victims died as they sought refuge in a church, police said.

The latest bout of Muslim-Christian violence in the region occurred Tuesday night in Yelwa, a mainly Christian town in Nigeria's Plateau State, police commissioner Innocent Ilozuoke said.

The killings appeared to be the latest retaliatory attack in a sporadic conflict that has rocked the central region since an outburst of sectarian violence in 2001, pitting Christians against Muslims in once-peaceful Jos.

In the initial outburst in Jos more than 1,000 people died in one week.

For decades, the majority Christian inhabitants of Plateau and the minority Muslim population had lived in harmony.

But tensions between the two communities heightened in the past four years as 12 majority Muslim states in the north adopted the strict Sharia, or Islamic, legal codes, perceived by Christians as an expansionist threat.

Also...

U.S. veterans signed an agreement yesterday to help search for leftover bombs from the Vietnam War that have killed nearly 40,000 Vietnamese and continue to claim victims.... A Mexicana airlines flight on its way from Los Angeles to Mexico City made an emergency landing Tuesday night in Zacatecas, Mexico after a passenger locked himself in the bathroom, the airline said. ... The U.N. General Assembly yesterday approved the appointment of former chief war-crimes prosecutor Louise Arbour, a Supreme Court justice in her native Canada, as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. The post has been open since Sérgio Vieira de Mello was killed in the Aug. 19 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq.

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