Political opposition mounts in Ukraine
Kiev, Ukraine Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who came to symbolize Ukraine’s Orange Revolution with her fiery speeches and chic style, signaled in an emotional, televised address Friday that she is moving into the opposition to President Viktor Yushchenko, her comrade in arms in last year’s uprising.
The move by Tymoshenko, whom Yushchenko sacked Thursday, deals the president a huge setback. Her popularity rivals his, and she could become a formidable opponent in parliamentary elections just six months away.
Yushchenko’s firing of Tymoshenko’s seven-month-old government, amid allegations of corruption, deepened a crisis that has diminished the popularity of the man whose dioxin poisoning and defiant stand against election fraud seized the world’s attention last year.
Chirac out of hospital, still vague about illness
Paris French President Jacques Chirac emerged from a hospital Friday, declaring himself in fine shape but walking with a slight hesitation and saying nothing about the illness that kept him there a week.
The 72-year-old leader said doctors advised him to limit his activities for another week and he canceled plans to attend next week’s U.N. summit in New York.
Chirac, a mainstay on the French political scene for more than four decades, was hospitalized Sept. 2 after suffering a “small vascular accident” that impaired vision in one eye, medical officials said without ever fully elaborating.
U.S. tube-feeding some on hunger strike
San Juan, Puerto Rico The U.S. military is tube-feeding more than a dozen of the 89 terror suspects on a hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, a spokesman said Friday.
Some of the 89 striking detainees at Guantanamo have not eaten for a month, said Guantanamo detention mission spokesman Sgt. Justin Behrens.
Fifteen have been hospitalized and 13 of those were being fed through tubes, Behrens said in a written response to questions from the Associated Press.
British lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, who represents one of the hunger strikers, warned Friday that some of the inmates were willing to starve themselves to death.
“People are desperate. They have been there three years. They were promised that the Geneva Conventions would be respected and various changes would happen and, unfortunately, the (U.S.) government reneged on that,” he said.
Guantanamo prison spokesman Maj. Jeff Weir said the military would not allow the detainees’ conditions to become life-threatening.
Japan whalers return with catch of three
Tokyo Japanese whaling ships returned to port Friday with the first three of 60 whales they plan to catch along the nation’s northern coast as they began the season’s research program that opponents criticize as commercial whaling.
The hunt is approved by the International Whaling Commission and Japanese whalers are allowed to catch up to 60 minke whales along the coast of Kushiro on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido.