World Scene

BRITAIN

Police chief quits in rift with mayor

LONDON | London’s police chief had weathered controversy over terrorist attacks and the shooting death of an innocent man, but he quit Thursday, done in by a showdown with the city’s new mayor.

Ian Blair’s announcement came as a surprise. It is unusual for the force’s top officer to resign early - his contract ran through 2010 - and even more rare to openly air political disagreements.

Mr. Blair made a point of telling reporters that he was being forced out by Mayor Boris Johnson rather than by any criticism of his dramatic time at the Metropolitan Police.

Since Mr. Johnson’s election in May, there were suggestions that relations between the new mayor and the police chief were frosty. Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party considered Mr. Blair, who was appointed to the department’s top job in 2005, as too close to the governing Labor Party.

GERMANY

Soldier pleads guilty in Iraq killings

VILSECK | A U.S. soldier pleaded guilty Thursday to charges of accessory to murder and was sentenced to eight months in prison for his role in the killing of four Iraqi prisoners who were bound, blindfolded, shot and dumped in a canal.

Spc. Steven Ribordy, 25, of Salina, Kan., also will receive a bad-conduct discharge from the Army as part of a plea deal. In addition, he agreed to testify against other members of his unit.

Ribordy testified that he had helped stand guard as the prisoners were killed by other members of his patrol in early 2007. He said he approached the scene after the shots were fired and saw three bodies lying in a pool of blood, and then the fourth already in the canal.

IRAN

Envoy hints at nuclear review

BRUSSELS | A leading Iranian nuclear envoy on Thursday suggested that the country could reconsider its uranium-enrichment program if it gets cast-iron guarantees of regular international fuel supplies for its nuclear power plants.

Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, the chief Iranian delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, however, declined to clarify whether Iran would halt its enrichment program in return for such international guarantees, suggesting that it might have to continue at a diminished level in case the outside supply stops.

Iran has steadfastly rejected international pressure to give up enrichment, a potential source of both nuclear fuel and fissile warhead material. The U.S. says the enrichment program is designed to give Iran a nuclear bomb. Iran insists that the program is for peaceful nuclear power generation.

NETHERLANDS

Court extends jail for terror plotters

AMSTERDAM | An appeals court on Thursday increased the prison sentences of four Islamic radicals accused of plotting attacks on Dutch politicians, convicting them of the additional charge of membership in a terrorist organization.

The Hague appeals court re-convicted the four Dutch nationals of Moroccan descent for plotting attacks and said trial evidence showed they were part of a single group, as prosecutors had argued.

Judges cited their adherence to a single violent belief system, their training with firearms, and their coordinated efforts to find the addresses of Dutch politicians on a hit list, including the prime minister.

The court’s judges added a year to the sentence of ringleader Samir Azzouz, 22, giving him a total of nine years in prison. Azzouz had videotaped a suicide testament.

TANZANIA

20 children die in stampede

ARUSHA | A stampede at an overcrowded dance hall in central Tanzania killed 20 children and left 50 others injured as they celebrated an important Muslim festival, police said Thursday.

At least 400 children ages 5 to 13 were inside the hall in the town of Tabora when the stampede occurred, police said. They were dancing to English and Kiswahili songs for the Islamic Eid al-Fitr holiday.

Daytime children’s dances, called “Toto Discos,” were once banned in this East African nation but are still held occasionally, usually from noon to 6 p.m.

Wednesday’s dance was held to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan in the prominently Muslim town, which is 460 miles northwest of Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam.

POLAND

Communist leader pleads not guilty

WARSAW | Poland’s last communist leader denied Thursday that he led an organized criminal group intent on depriving people of freedom when he imposed martial law in a 1981 crackdown on the pro-democracy Solidarity movement.

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, 85, said the charges brought against him by the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that investigates communist-era crimes, were unfounded.

It was the first time that Gen. Jaruzelski had the opportunity to speak at his trial, which opened Sept. 12.

PAKISTAN

U.N. raises security after bombing

ISLAMABAD | The United Nations ordered children of its international staff to leave the Pakistani capital and other areas it considered unsafe, raising its security level after the bombing of the Marriott Hotel, officials said Thursday.

The move, made a day after Britain decided to repatriate diplomats’ children, underlines the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, which is under intense U.S. pressure to combat Islamic militants responsible for rising attacks at home and in neighboring Afghanistan.

In the latest incident, a suicide bomber blew himself up near the house of a leading secular politician in Pakistan’s restive northwest Thursday, killing at least four people, police said. The politician, Asfandyar Wali Khan, was receiving guests to mark the end of the Islamic fasting month at his home in Charsadda.

Pakistan has suffered a surge in attacks by Taliban and al Qaeda-linked militants on government, military and Western targets over the past two years that has fanned fears about the nuclear-armed nation’s stability.

SOUTH KOREA

Popular actress found dead

SEOUL | One of South Korea’s most popular actresses was found dead Thursday in an apparent suicide after suffering from post-divorce depression and harassment by online rumors about her purportedly irregular financial dealings, police said.

Choi Jin-sil, whose fame earned her the nickname “The Nation’s Actress,” is thought to have hanged herself in the bathroom of her Seoul home, said Yang Jae-ho, chief investigator at Seoul’s Seocho police station.

Family members said she had been depressed since a 2004 divorce and was distraught over rumors linking her to the suicide of a fellow actor a month ago, he said. She had denied the rumors that she had pressed the actor to pay back a large loan.

No formal suicide note had been found, but Miss Choi sent her makeup assistant cell phone text messages twice Wednesday night asking her to “take care of [my] children no matter what happens” and telling her that “I’m sorry,” the investigator said.

Miss Choi’s mother told police that the actress returned home drunk about midnight Wednesday, crying and denying the rumor surrounding the other actor’s suicide, before going into the bathroom.

Miss Choi, 39, made her debut in the late 1980s and as a bright-eyed ingenue, quickly becoming one of South Korea’s best-loved actresses.

INDIA

Smoking banned in public places

NEW DELHI | India banned smoking in public places Thursday, leaving public health officials with a much tougher task: getting the nation’s estimated 120 million smokers to stub out their cigarettes.

As more countries have clamped down on smoking in recent years, Indians have puffed away freely at playgrounds, railway stations, sidewalk cafes and even hospitals. Now a violator will get a $5 fine.

For years, anti-smoking laws in this nation of nearly 1.2 billion people have been widely ignored, and tobacco companies have fought the government to keep warnings off boxes.

The ban imposed Thursday was the government’s second try in four years and came on the birthday of India’s independence leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who did not smoke or drink.

CAMBODIA

Genocide trial delayed till 2009

PHNOM PENH | The start of the first trial at Cambodia’s genocide tribunal is likely to be delayed until early next year because more time is needed to deal with an appeal for more charges against a Khmer Rouge defendant, officials said Thursday.

The news is likely to fuel further frustration among many Cambodians, who have been waiting for justice for nearly three decades after the Khmer Rouge held power in the late 1970s.

The communist group implemented radical policies considered responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from starvation, disease, overwork and execution.

From wire dispatches and staff reports