World Scene

SOMALIA

U.N. races to get food to starving refugees

DOLO — The United Nations will airlift emergency rations this week to parts of drought-ravaged Somalia that militants banned them from more than two years ago.

The foray into the famine zone is a desperate attempt to reach at least 175,000 of the 2.2 million Somalis whom aid workers have not yet been able to help.

Tens of thousands already have trekked to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, hoping to get aid in refugee camps.

Restarting the aid effort is a huge challenge for the World Food Program, whose workers were previously banned from the region by the al-Qaeda-linked militant group al-Shabab. Fourteen WFP employees have been killed in Somalia since 2008.

SAUDI ARABIA

Rights group claims authorities blocked website

CAIRO — Amnesty International said Saudi authorities on Monday blocked the group’s website inside the kingdom, following criticism of a controversial new anti-terrorism draft law.

The London-based group said the bill, which was reviewed by a Saudi government committee in June and has yet to be passed, allows authorities to prosecute peaceful dissent as a terrorist crime.

Amnesty on Friday posted on its website the full Arabic text of the anti-terrorism draft law, along with an internal review of the law by a Saudi security committee.

RUSSIA

Islamist terrorist warns of ‘blood and tears’ campaign

GROZNY — Russia will be the target of new terrorist attacks by a newly strengthened Islamic insurgency, Moscow’s most wanted Muslim militant, Doku Umarov, warned in a video posted on an Islamist-affiliated website on Monday.

A decade after Russian forces drove a separatist government from Chechnya, Moscow is struggling to contain an insurgency that wants an Islamic state in Russia’s North Caucasus.

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