UN envoy says Darfur conflict is worsening

NAIROBI -- The conflict in Sudan's western Darfur region has worsened, with 200,000 additional people being forced from their homes, a top UN envoy barred from visiting the zone by Sudanese authorities said yesterday. Jan Egeland, UN under-secretary general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, said Sudanese government officials had denied his UN aircraft permission to fly over Darfur in order to visit Sudanese refugees in neighboring Chad. A day earlier, they had barred him from visiting the capital, Khartoum, and the Darfur region. ''Many believe the problems are over in Darfur. They are getting worse," he told journalists in Kenya after leaving southern Sudan. (AP)

Colombia

BOGOTA -- Active and retired police and army officers working for one of Colombia's largest cocaine cartels used commercial cargo planes to ship drugs to the United States, authorities said yesterday in announcing seven arrests. US officials, who are seeking the extradition of the seven, said the case illustrates the reaches of Colombia's notorious drug rings and the danger posed by corruption among the country's security and transportation workers. Among those arrested are a retired police major and captain, a former army lieutenant, two police officers, and an employee of Colombia's national airline, Avianca. Police said they seized 1,200 pounds of cocaine linked to the cartel in a warehouse in Bogota on Monday. (AP)

Canada

TORONTO -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper moved to end more of the liberal hallmarks that make Canada distinctive from the United States and to reverse the policies of 12 years of Liberal-led government. Harper's Conservative government outlined its legislative goals in a formal speech to Parliament, pledging to cut taxes, replace the federally backed day-care system with subsidies, curb what Harper calls lenient treatment of criminals, and loosen the government's monopoly on health care. On Monday, Harper announced his government would back away from marijuana decriminalization, a regular platform of the Liberal government. He has frozen funding for some grass-roots environmental programs, and pledged to scrap the country's gun registration program. (Washington Post)

France

PARIS -- A French court fined convicted guerrilla Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as ''Carlos the Jackal," $6,100 yesterday for insisting in a television interview that killing was sometimes necessary. But it ruled that he had broken no law in welcoming the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, saying he had not gone as far as actually seeking to justify them. Illich Ramirez is serving a life sentence in France for deadly attacks in Europe in the 1970s and '80s. (Reuters)

Austria

VIENNA -- For centuries, historians have portrayed Mozart as poor, but new documents suggest the composer was not nearly as hard-up for cash as many have believed. Scholars who combed through Austrian archives for an exhibition opening yesterday on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's later years in Vienna found evidence that he was solidly upper-crust and lived the good life. Letters show that Mozart repeatedly borrowed money from friends to pay for his travels and his social obligations, and that his family was forced to move at least 11 times. The new documents reveal that he earned about 10,000 florins a year -- at least $42,000 in today's terms. That would have placed him in the top 5 percent of wage-earners in late 18th-century Vienna, say specialists, who were unable to prove suspicions that gambling debts took a big bite out of Mozart's earnings. (Reuters)