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RUSSIA Riot police cracked down on demonstrators April 14 in Moscow and the following day in St. Petersburg, arresting about 370 people among the hundreds who had turned out to protest President Vladimir Putin’s government. Human rights workers say 54 people were treated for police-induced injuries in one Moscow hospital. The rally, which was authorized, turned into an unauthorized march.

MACEDONIA United Nations prosecutors alleged April 16 that Macedonia’s former interior minister watched police kill seven Albanians during a rampage of the village Ljuboten in 2001. A video played during the war crimes trial, in The Hague, allegedly shows former Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski watching the attacks from several hundred meters away.
TURKEY An estimated 300,000 people protested the country’s growing political Islamism at an Ankara rally April 14. The demonstrators rallied against the prospect of the head of parliament’s leading party, Justice and Development (AK), taking the presidency in upcoming elections. AK has been criticized for bringing religion into politics in the legally secular state.
UK Reports that a BBC reporter kidnapped in Gaza has been executed have not been confirmed, the BBC reported April 16. Alan Johnston, 44, was kidnapped at gunpoint in Gaza City March 12. A militant group claimed in an e-mail that it had executed him.
FRANCE The French foreign intelligence warned the U.S. CIA as early as January 2001 of al-Qaeda plans to hijack U.S. commercial airliners, daily Le Monde newspaper reported April 16. The newspaper reported it had obtained classified documents that described plans for hijackings, but did not specify the planes would be crashed into buildings.
UK The UK government has stopped using the phrase “war on terror” because it empowers terrorists by portraying them as a united enemy, British International Development Secretary Hilary Benn has said. The statements were pre-released excerpts from a speech Benn delivered April 16 in New York City.
ITALY The trial of a U.S. soldier being tried in absentia for killing an Italian intelligence officer in Iraq began in Rome April 16. Nicola Calipari was killed in March 2005 at a security checkpoint after helping free a kidnapped Italian journalist. The accused, Specialist Mario Lozano, says he first fired warning shots at the car but it didn’t stop.
GERMANY An army training video in which soldiers were told to picture black people in New York as they fired machine guns has sparked international outrage and a rebuke from the German Defense Ministry. In the video, an instructor tells officers to imagine that a black man in the Bronx has just insulted his mother. The officer shouts obscenities when firing the gun.
POLAND Parliament rejected bills designed to make the country’s abortion ban part of its constitution. The April 14 vote failed to reach a two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution. The current abortion law, considered one of Europe’s most restrictive, allows for abortion only in cases of rape, severe birth defects or to save the woman’s life.
RUSSIA The chief prosecutor in the trial of Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky asked UK authorities April 16 to strip the accused of his political asylum and extradite him back to Russia. Berezovsky faces charges in his native Russia for calling for a forcible change of political power in the Kremlin. He fled for the United Kingdom in 2000 to escape corruption allegations he claims were politically motivated.


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