World Scene

CHINA

Olympic cover-up brings punishment

BEIJING | Dozens of local Chinese officials and reporters face prosecution for covering up a coal mine accident that killed 35 people just weeks before the Beijing Olympics, a newspaper reported Monday.

Officials in Hebei province’s Yuxian county paid journalists a total of $380,000 not to report the July 14, 2008, accident, in which 34 miners and one rescuer were killed, the China Daily said.

In addition to bribing reporters, officials silenced relatives of the dead with large compensation payments and threats of retribution if they talked, the paper said. The measures managed to keep the accident silent for 85 days, the paper said, without saying how it eventually became known.

It’s fairly common for officials to pay such bribes to keep higher ranking leaders from finding out about disasters and to avoid being fired or handed demerits.

GERMANY

Demjanjuk tried for Nazi murders

MUNICH | A German court put John Demjanjuk on trial Monday to face charges of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at a Nazi death camp, and his lawyer immediately accused the court in Munich of bias.

The 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker arrived in a wheelchair to face the final chapter of some 30 years of efforts to prosecute him, wearing a navy baseball cap and covered in a light blue blanket.

Mr. Demjanjuk became a household name in the 1980s when he was extradited by the United States for trial in Israel on charges that he was the notoriously brutal guard at the Nazi’s Treblinka death camp who earned the moniker “Ivan the Terrible” for his deeds.

He was convicted in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and spent seven years in prison until Israel’s Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the conviction. It ruled that another person, not Mr. Demjanjuk, was actually “Ivan the Terrible.”

UNITED NATIONS

U.N. seeks billions for good works

GENEVA | The United Nations asked Monday for $7.1 billion to pay for its humanitarian work around the world next year, with Sudan and its troubled Darfur region most in need and Afghanistan rising to second.

The money will go toward providing 48 million people in 25 countries with urgent aid such as tents, water and medicines, said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who urged countries not to cut back on humanitarian donations as they struggle with economic turmoil at home.

The global body wants $1.9 billion to fund its operations in Sudan next year, down from the $2.2 billion it asked for in 2009. Aid groups and U.N. agencies are responsible for meeting the basic needs of millions of Sudanese in the south and west of the country, where years of ethnic conflicts have led to widespread displacement and poverty.

From wire dispatches and staff reports