World Digest
U.N. chief says world not safer

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The world is no safer than it was three years ago, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday, countering President Bush's claims he had made the world a safer place.

Annan, at a news conference, also criticized a Bush administration decision to withhold $34 million from the U.N. Population Fund, saying the agency was saving women's lives. The U.S. administration has withheld funding from the fund for three years, accusing it of supporting China's policy of coercive abortion.

Annan's remarks could renew strains on ties between the United States and United Nations, which, while devastated by Bush's inability to win U.N. backing for the U.S.-led war on Iraq, had improved after U.N. help in setting up a new government in Baghdad in time for the U.S. occupation to officially end.

"No, I cannot say the world is safer today than it was two, three years ago," the U.N. leader said, responding to a reporter.

London

Britain to conduct military overhaul

Britain announced one of its biggest peacetime military overhauls yesterday, cutting tanks, ships and thousands of personnel in an effort to adapt its forces to tackle modern threats including terrorism.

The shake-up — at a time when Britain's army is overstretched in operations from Kosovo to Iraq — reflects a post-Cold War shift in emphasis toward rapid-reaction forces capable of swift deployment to world hotspots.

In the past five years, Prime Minister Tony Blair has launched operations in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq, which, with 45,000 personnel, was the biggest deployment since Korea 50 years ago.

Moscow
 
Meskhetian Turks to get refugee status

The first members of a group of long-persecuted Meskhetian Turks began leaving the southern Russia region of Krasnodar for the United States yesterday as part of an agreement between the two countries, said a representative with the Geneva-based International Organization of Migration.

They will be given refugee status in Philadelphia.

About 20,000 Meskhetian Turks live in limbo in Krasnodar and surrounding regions in the southern Russia, where ultranationalist Cossacks resent the influx of immigrants fleeing poverty in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Meskhetian Turks were deported en masse to the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan from the then-Soviet republic of Georgia in the 1940s.

In 1989, racial violence broke out in Uzbekistan, and many Meskhetian Turks fled to Krasnodar.

Also

French police evacuated 4,000 tourists and other people from the Eiffel Tower in Paris yesterday after a telephone caller threatened to attack it, but the threat turned out to be a false alarm.

Anthrax has killed apes in tropical rainforests in the Ivory Coast, where it has never been seen before, and could pose a threat to humans, Heinz Ellerbrok, a virologist at the Robert Koch-Institut in Berlin, said yesterday.

A British man and woman face lengthy prison sentences after being convicted yesterday of trying to smuggle more than two pounds of cocaine in the stomachs of two dogs. The cocaine was discovered inside two Labradorsat Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in September.