World Scene

CANADA

Two sect leaders arrested on polygamy

VANCOUVER, British Columbia | Two top leaders of a polygamous community in western Canada have been arrested and charged with practicing polygamy, British Columbia’s attorney general said Wednesday.

Attorney General Wally Oppal said Winston Blackmore is charged with marrying 20 women, while James Oler is accused of marrying two women.

Mr. Blackmore, long known as “the Bishop of Bountiful,” runs an independent sect of about 400 members in the town of Bountiful. He once ran the Canadian arm of the Utah-based Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but was ejected in 2003 by that group’s leader, Warren Jeffs.

Mr. Oler is the bishop of Bountiful’s FLDS community loyal to Jeffs.

FLDS members practice polygamy in arranged marriages, a tradition tied to the early theology of the Mormon church. Mormons renounced polygamy in 1890 as a condition of Utah’s statehood.

SRI LANKA

Tamil Tigers return to terrorist list

COLOMBO | Sri Lanka hit the Tamil Tigers on Wednesday with a terrorist designation it lifted as part of an ill-fated 2002 truce, as soldiers pressured the separatists’ last stronghold on the Jaffna Peninsula.

Though largely symbolic since the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are already on terrorist lists in the United States the European Union and India and the government routinely calls them terrorists, the Cabinet vote is just one more sign that Sri Lanka has no plans to negotiate.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa had given the LTTE until the new year to free civilians, which rights group say the rebels are keeping as human shields and using as fighters or battlefield laborers. The LTTE denies that.

The original ban was imposed on the Tigers in January 1998, and lifted as part of a Norway-brokered truce four years later. Mr. Rajapaksa scrapped the poorly observed truce a year ago, accusing the LTTE of using it to rearm and vowing to eliminate them.

CHINA

Bird flu death prompts alert

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