Government backs nuclear power plants

LONDON -- The British government embraced nuclear power as a key energy source in the coming decades in a new policy unveiled yesterday , angering environmentalists eager to promote renewable power sources such as sun, wind, and waves. Prime Minister Tony Blair says atomic power will allow Britain to go green, arguing the country can make cuts in its emissions of the pollutants blamed for climate change if it moves away from fossil fuels and includes nuclear power plants in energy plans the next 30-40 years. Environmentalists quickly slammed Blair for backing new nuclear plants despite safety issues and concerns about waste disposal . (AP)

CHINA

BEIJING -- China's president yesterday urged North Korea to refrain from increasing tensions over its nuclear program and to return to disarmament talks as diplomats worked to forestall UN sanctions against the regime. The United States's top nuclear envoy made an unscheduled trip to China, saying efforts to resolve the crisis have reached a crucial point. China's Foreign Ministry criticized a Japanese proposal that demands the North stop developing, testing and selling ballistic missiles as ``an overreaction." (AP)

BEIJING -- A joint Chinese-Japanese team of experts has retrieved 210 abandoned Japanese poison gas bombs from World War II that were buried near a school in northeastern China, a news report said yesterday . A total of 689 shells and bombs were unearthed in Ning'an, a city near the Russian border, and 210 were found to contain mustard gas, lewisite, phosgene, and other toxins, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The weapons were buried at the site, about 200 yards from a junior high school, after a factory received them as scrap metal, the Chinese government said. (AP)

IRAQ

BAGHDAD -- The trial of Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants on human rights charges adjourned yesterday until July 24, still without any sign of the top defendants' lawyers, who boycotted the past two days of the proceedings. Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, presiding over the case, has named substitute attorneys and warned that those court-appointed lawyers would make the defendants' final arguments if the original lawyers don't show up. (Los Angeles Times)

ITALY

ROME -- Prime Minister Romano Prodi yesterday denounced a swastika and other graffiti scrawled on walls in a Jewish neighborhood of Rome overnight, when soccer fans thronged the streets to celebrate Italy's World Cup triumph. Some of the graffiti was painted on a door near outdoor tables of a trattoria on the main street of the Old Ghetto, as the neighborhood is known. Prodi condemned the anti-Semitic graffiti in a letter to the president of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities. (AP)

BELGIUM

BRUSSELS -- Iran ruled out responding this week to international incentives to suspend its nuclear program, saying yesterday the offer contains too many ``ambiguities." Ali Larijani, Tehran's top nuclear negotiator, said after meeting with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana that the ``ambiguities must be removed first in order to have serious talks." His comments dashed any hope that that Iran would meet today's deadline on a six-nation offer of incentives aimed at dissuading Tehran from uranium enrichment. (AP)