World Scene

IRAN

Talks with Europeans end without accord

VIENNA, Austria — Iran’s supreme leader threatened to pull out of negotiations if European countries press their demand for total suspension of uranium enrichment, as a new round of talks ended yesterday without an agreement to avert the threat of U.N. sanctions.

Britain, France and Germany are offering Iran incentives — a trade deal and peaceful nuclear technology, including a light-water research reactor — in return for a halt in enrichment, which can produce fuel for both nuclear energy and atomic weapons.

In talks yesterday, Iran’s delegates insisted on the right to enrich uranium. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, ruled out any long-term suspension of the program.

JAPAN

Toddler rescued 4 days after quake

NAGAOKA — A 2-year-old boy was rescued yesterday, four days after a deadly quake triggered a landslide that buried the car carrying him and his family.

The boy’s mother was flown to a hospital later but was pronounced dead, and rescue workers had to call off efforts to save his 3-year-old sister after darkness fell.

Saturday’s quake killed at least 32 persons and injured more than 3,400 in the rural Niigata region, 150 miles north of Tokyo.

INDIA

Ex-minister questions Powell’s phone help

Former Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh has disputed Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s claim that he helped restart a dialogue between India and Pakistan last year by “setting up” a phone call between the countries’ prime ministers.

“For Powell to suggest that he set it all up is the height of imagination,” Mr. Singh told reporters in New Delhi on Tuesday, according to the Indo-Asian News Service. He also called Mr. Powell’s comments “objectionable.”

In an interview with USA Today on Oct. 18, Mr. Powell said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had asked him by phone last year whether he thought the Indian prime minister would take a call from his Pakistani counterpart.

“I said, ’I’ll call you back in a little while.’ And we set it up, the call was made,” Mr. Powell recalled.

The State Department yesterday stood by Mr. Powell’s version.

“The story as told by the secretary is the true story,” spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.

BRITAIN

Amnesty blasts U.S. on prisoner abuse

LONDON — The United States publicly condemns the abuse of prisoners even while engaging in it behind closed doors, Amnesty International said yesterday in a report urging an independent investigation into the issue.

“In the war on terror, the U.S.A. has not practiced what it has preached on the treatment of prisoners,” said Rob Freer, lead author of the 200-page report tracing U.S. abuses in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

SERBIA-MONTENEGRO

Milosevic attorneys want to quit case

AMSTERDAM — Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s war-crimes trial plunged into fresh uncertainty yesterday after two lawyers appointed to defend him against his will said they wanted to pull out of the case.

Lawyers Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins argued that they were not in a position to present his defense properly because Mr. Milosevic had refused to cooperate with them after they were appointed by judges in September to avoid trial delays because of his ill health.