World Digest
Cambodia's king abdicates, citing poor health

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The king, 81, made the announcement in a letter from Beijing. The note was read to the National Assembly early today by his son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who heads the assembly.

Although Cambodia's monarch is not selected according to heredity, the candidate must have a royal bloodline. Ranariddh has been considered a candidate for the throne in the past, but he has said he is not interested in becoming the country's next monarch.

London

Turkey's bid to join EU gains momentum

LONDON — Turkey took a significant step yesterday toward its long-cherished goal of joining the European Union when the EU's executive branch proposed opening formal negotiations over membership for the predominately Muslim nation.

The proposal from the European Commission needs to be endorsed by leaders of the union's 25 member states when they meet in December, and officials warned that many obstacles remained, including a requirement that Turkey modernize its penal code and improve its human-rights record. Full membership could take a decade or longer, they said.

A larger obstacle is the reluctance of many European countries to further expand their largely Christian club to include a nation of 71 million people that straddles the geographic, religious and cultural divide between Europe and the Middle East and is far poorer and more populous than most European Union members.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Peacekeepers move to put down violence

U.N. peacekeepers and Haitian police in armored personnel carriers moved in on a downtown slum, trying to put down a campaign by loyalists of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide who have carried out a number of gory beheadings in imitation of Iraqi insurgents.
 
Yesterday, the headless body of a man lay in the street in La Salines, a seaside slum facing Port-au-Prince port. Three police officers were decapitated last week when Aristide supporters launched the guerrilla campaign, dubbed "Operation Baghdad."

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell visited hurricane-ravaged Grenada yesterday and pledged that $100 million in aid sought by the Bush administration would be rushed to the island. On Tuesday, Bush asked Congress for an additional $50 million to help victims of four major hurricanes that slammed into Haiti, Grenada, Jamaica and other Caribbean nations — on top of $50 million he already proposed for those countries. Not on the list is Cuba, whose communist leader has rebuffed U.S. help.

The violence has scared away workers from the port, where officials said 135 containers with 2,430 tons of food were stuck.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

War-crimes trial starts for Bosnian Muslim

The U.N. war-crimes tribunal yesterday started the trial of a Bosnian Muslim commander accused of overseeing the destruction of 15 Serb villages and the torture of prisoners in Eastern Bosnia.

Naser Oric, 37, one of only a few Muslims brought to trial alongside dozens of Serb suspects, is hailed by supporters as a heroic defender of the besieged Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.

The trial is important for the U.N. tribunal's attempts to demonstrate impartiality in prosecuting Balkan war crimes. But it is especially sensitive because Oric operated in the Srebrenica region, where Serb troops murdered more than 7,000 Muslim civilians in 1995, in Europe's worst civilian massacre since World War II.

Santiago, Chile

Panel backs inquiry into CIA's meddling

The lower house of the Chilean Congress yesterday announced plans to investigate alleged CIA involvement in Chile in recent decades.

In a resolution, the chamber approved the formation of a committee that will try to determine whether the CIA's actions violated Chile's sovereignty.

Text of the measure mentioned a 1970s report by a U.S. commission led by former Sen. Frank Church, which disclosed the CIA's actions including alleged efforts to block the election of Salvador Allende, a Marxist elected president in 1970 and toppled three years later in a bloody military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.