Darfur violence rising, report says

Violence has escalated in Sudan's Darfur region since January, throwing another 160,000 people out of their homes and forcing 4.2 million people, about two-thirds of the population, to go on relief aid, the United Nations reported yesterday. Some 2.1 million people have been uprooted from their villages in addition to the more than 200,000 who have fled the country, mainly to neighboring Chad, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. (Reuters)

SERBIA

BELGRADE -- The United States yesterday offered Serbia another 120 days of talks on the fate of Kosovo, but said independence for the breakaway province was "inevitable." Russia has been resisting Western attempts to have the United Nations approve independence for Kosovo without Serbian agreement. US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said Serbia and the province's ethnic Albanian majority would have one last, strictly limited, chance to agree on a way forward. (Reuters)

IRAN

TEHRAN -- Iran's judiciary has launched new investigations into the cases of two detained Iranian-Americans charged with endangering national security, citing fresh evidence, a spokesman said yesterday. The investigations into Haleh Esfandiari and Ali Tajbakhsh have been broadened, said judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi. Prosecutors "obtained new evidence in line with the charges brought against them. The case is under investigation," he told reporters, without elaborating. Esfandiari, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' Middle East program director, was jailed in early May. Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with George Soros's Open Society Institute, is also held on security charges. Two other Iranian-Americans face similar charges. (AP)