President threatens prime minister

April 6, 2007

ukraine
KIEV -- President Viktor Yushchenko threatened his rival with criminal charges yesterday if he refuses to prepare for early parliamentary elections next month, suggesting the Ukrainian leader was losing patience in the deepening political crisis. Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych remained defiant, however, vowing to first wait for a ruling from the Constitutional Court on the legality of the dissolution order. He also called for the involvement of a European mediator to defuse the crisis, Ukraine's worst since its 2004 Orange Revolution. (AP)

eritrea

Eritrea's government said it has abolished the practice of female circumcision, describing it as a threat to the lives of women. Anyone who requests, incites, promotes, or witnesses female circumcision is subject to a fine and imprisonment, Eritrea's information ministry said late Wednesday. "Female circumcision is a procedure that seriously endangers the health of women, and causes them considerable pain and suffering besides threatening their lives," the government said. With age-old cultural roots, female circumcision, or genital mutilation, is practiced today in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt and other parts of the Arab world. (AP)

france

PARIS -- The conservative presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy abruptly canceled a campaign visit to a neighborhood of the eastern city of Lyon yesterday as demonstrators gathered there and warned that he would not be welcome. About 100 demonstrators gathered in the Croix-Rousse neighborhood in central Lyon, some brandishing signs that read, "Sarkozy, you are not welcome here." As France's law-and-order interior minister, a job he left last week, Sarkozy alienated a huge swath of inhabitants in the troubled ethnic pockets of France. (New York Times News Service)