An Egyptian court sentenced a top opposition leader to five years in prison Saturday for forging petition signatures. Ayman Nour, who came in a distant second to President Hosni Mubarak in the country’s first contested presidential elections earlier this year, said the government invented the forgery charge to eliminate him from politics. Nour had pleaded innocent to ordering the forgery of signatures needed to register his opposition party last year. The United States was “deeply troubled” by the conviction and called on Egypt to release Nour, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
Indonesia: Church security sweeps
Bomb squads checked churches on Saturday and hotel security guards in Santa Claus suits searched cars after Jakarta police warned that al-Qaida-linked militants might be plotting Christmas terror attacks in this predominantly Muslim nation. Authorities said 47,000 soldiers and police were deployed across Indonesia to guard houses of worship, hotels, clubs, restaurants and shopping centers. Christmas Eve services and other festivities proceeded without incident, government officials and religious leaders said.
Sri Lanka: Gunmen kill legislator
Gunmen shot and killed a pro-rebel legislator during midnight Christmas Mass, the government said today. Joseph Pararajasingham, 71, was fatally shot at St. Michael’s Church in Batticaloa, a military spokesman said. His wife and eight others were wounded. Pararajasingham represented the Tamil National Alliance, a proxy party of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the rebel group that wants to create a homeland for Sri Lanka’s 3.2 million ethnic Tamil minority in the country’s northeast. A breakaway faction of the rebels is opposed to the alliance.
France: Lice felled Napoleon’s army
Louse-borne diseases such as typhus and trench fever devastated Napoleon’s army during his ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812, killing nearly one-third of his army, according to a study by researchers at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille. Napoleon invaded Russia with half a million men that summer. Twenty-five thousand French soldiers escaped to Vilnius, Lithuania, during the retreat, but only 3,000 survived to continue the retreat. The rest were buried in mass graves.
Australia: Conflict with whalers
The captain of an environmentalist boat chasing Japanese whalers in the Antarctic claimed today that the Japanese abandoned hunting for the day as they were chased by protesters through storm-tossed seas. “I can assure you no whales are going to be killed today,” said Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace protest ships have been chasing Japan’s whaling fleet for days, hampering their hunt for 850 minke whales and 10 fin whales as part of the country’s scientific research program, which is permitted as research under the rules of the International Whaling Commission.
From Herald news services
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