World Scene

NORWAY

Sudan donors’ effort begins

OSLO — Norway and the European Union pledged $935 million in aid to Sudan over the next four years at the start of a donors’ conference in Oslo yesterday.

Conference host Norway pledged $500 million between 2008 and 2011 to help Africa’s largest nation recover from 21 years of internal warfare.

The EU immediately followed up with a promise of $435 million in the same period.

The conference is part of a series of donor-nation meetings that began in Oslo in 2005, just after a comprehensive peace agreement ended fighting that cost 2 million lives, many from famine and disease. That conference brought pledges of $4.5 billion in aid.

Despite the peace pact, fighting has raged on in Sudan’s troubled Darfur province. But officials said that must not be allowed to obstruct the broader peace effort.

KOSOVO

Rights group claims rebels took organs

PRISTINA — A human rights group said yesterday that new evidence has emerged to warrant further investigation into claims that ethnic-Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo killed Serbs and sold their organs.

Human Rights Watch said it has information that bolsters charges of abductions and cross-border transfers from Kosovo to Albania in June 1999. At the time, NATO and the U.N. were moving into Kosovo at the end of the war between separatist rebels and Serbian forces.

The claims recently appeared in a book by former U.N. war-crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who wrote that she had been told by “credible journalists” of such an organ-trafficking scheme.

BRITAIN

Mandela to attend birthday celebration

LONDON — Nelson Mandela plans to travel to London next month to attend a special birthday concert in London’s Hyde Park, organizers said yesterday.

The former South African president and Nobel Prize-winner is retired and rarely makes public appearances, but a spokesman for Mr. Mandela’s AIDS charity, Nick Southall, said he will attend the celebration.

Organizers for the June 27 concert said invitations to perform have been sent to the Sugababes, Annie Lennox and Razorlight.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.S. talk-show host Oprah Winfrey also plan to attend.

GERMANY

Scientologists drop anti-bugging battle

BERLIN — Germany’s branch of the Church of Scientology said yesterday it had dropped a legal battle in Muenster to prevent the nation’s domestic intelligence services from monitoring its activities.

The branch said in a statement it “felt it was time to reflect on the whole purpose of this battle of legal material and reach a sensible solution.”

The North Rhine-Westphalia Higher Administrative Court in Muenster refused last month to hear an appeal to a February ruling allowing the intelligence agencies to continue observing the Scientologists.

POLAND

Arab envoy’s son charged in abduction

WARSAW, Poland — Polish authorities charged the Kuwaiti ambassador’s son with briefly abducting three Jewish teenagers at a hotel and claiming he had a bomb, police said yesterday.

The 23-year-old son of Ambassador Khaled Al-Shaibani, identified only as Mohammad A., was charged with holding the teenagers against their will, Warsaw police spokesman Anna Kedzierzowska said.

Ms. Kedzierzowska said the suspect confessed and faces a suspended sentence of 10 months to three years.

From wire dispatches and staff reports