A Shia militia group loyal to radical cleric Muqtada Sadr wiped out a gypsy village in central Iraq which refused to adhere to its puritanical creed, killing some inhabitants and forcing the rest to flee. Scavengers scoured the ruins. Sayuid Yahya Shu­bari, the 30-year-old local clerical commander of the Mahdi’s Army said “it was a well of debauchery, drunkenness and mafia, and they were buying and selling girls.” The town’s destruction has raised fears that the militia is not just operating above the law, but defining it. Mr. Shubari says his office ­operates its own Sharia (Islamic law) courts, and uses its Sharia police to apply Islamic punishments. Mr. Shubari confirmed that his office was punish­ing alcoholics with 80 lashes.

Infosys Technologies, India’s second largest software maker, said it has begun “aggressive hiring in America” to employ 500 people over the next three years to work for a new U.S. subsidiary, Infosys Consulting. … These employees will be advising companies on how to improve efficiency through outsourcing and moving work to India.

The Lord’s Resistance Army is stepping up its rebellion in Uganda, abducting about 10,000 children in the last 18 months for use as fighters and sex slaves in what may be the world’s most neglected humanitarian crisis, a senior U.N. official said Wednesday. The rebel group, which has waged an 18-year war against the Ugandan government, has now driven more than 1.5 million people from their homes in northern and eastern Uganda, U.N. ­Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said. The ­rebels say they are fighting for the establishment of a government based on the biblical Ten Commandments. “Most of the soldiers are children and most of the victims are children,” Egeland told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council on the crisis. Governments to date have pledged just 10% of this year's U.N. appeal for $127 million in human­itarian aid for the region.

The United Nations director for relief in Sudan said that Arab militias were conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing to drive black Africans out of a border region of the country with the apparent tolerance of the Sudanese government. Jan Egeland, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said the armed groups were deliberately destroying food and humanitarian supplies and attacking refugee centers in a program of “systematic depopulation.” He estimated that 750,000 people had been forced from their homes and villages, tens of thousands had fled into neighboring Chad, and 10,000 might have died. Mr. Egeland said that relief workers had witnessed beatings, killings, and gang rapes, but that alerting Sudanese authorities had gotten no response. The fighting began a year ago over local protests that the oil-rich Sudanese government was ignoring the needs of Darfur, which borders Chad.

Jack Kelley, a star foreign correspondent at USA Today before he resigned earlier this year, appears to have fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major articles in the last ten years, including one that earned him a finalist nomination for a ­Pulitzer Prize in 2002, the newspaper reported yesterday. USA Today, the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper, said Mr. Kelley had engaged in his ­deceptions around the globe, apparently inventing such accounts as his face-to-face encounter with a suicide bomber in Jerusalem, his participation in a high-speed hunt in 2003 for Osama bin Laden, and his witnessing the departure of six refugees from Cuba who, he claimed, later drowned. The revelation of Mr. Kelley’s deceptions is but the latest ­example of incidents of plagiarism and fabrication that have come to light in recent months at more than a dozen newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Macon Telegraph. Jay Rosen, the chairman of the journalism department at New York University, said that the disclosure of Mr. Kelley’s journalistic sins was likely to further undermine the public’s faith in the veracity of newspapers and journalists.

With a burst of jubilation from Dublin to Lublin on Poland's eastern frontier, 10 countries representing 75 million people joined the European Union [yesterday], a huge step in unifying a continent rent by war and totalitarianism in the last century and aspiring to be the model of peace and democracy for the new. The largest expansion in EU history included five formerly Communist east-central European states—Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary; three ex-Soviet Baltic ­republics—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; and the Mediterranean island nations of Malta and Cyprus. Romania and Bulgaria are due to join in 2007.

Three years after the United Nations declared a worldwide offensive against AIDS, shortages of money and battles over patents have kept anti­retroviral drugs from reaching more than 90 percent of the poor people who need them. Progress in distributing the drugs, which have sharply cut the death rate in the United States and other Western countries, has been excruciatingly slow despite steep drops in their prices. As a result, only about 300,000 people in the world’s poorest nations are getting the drugs, of the six million who need them, according to the World Health Organization. Experts, advocacy groups and health officials agree that the delays, compounded by inadequate medical facilities and training in very poor countries, are likely to persist unless spending is stepped up sharp­ly. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, has had trouble running even so much as a pilot program for 15,000 of an estimated 3½ million infected people. Many of the country’s 25 treatment centers, which were selling the drugs at a subsidized price of $85 a year, ran dry in September and did not get new supplies until February.

The deadly bombings in Madrid underscore a fact the world’s police long have known and hoped to avoid: railroads are nearly impossible to protect. Rail systems typically span hundreds of miles of track and facilities, too large to be watched constantly and completely, and move thousands of people every day. The U.S. rail system includes about 140,000 miles of routes. This makes it almost impossible to fully secure them from potential terrorist attacks. Passengers and baggage get aboard with little or no screening.

The economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are set to expand for their sixth successive year of strong growth, according to a report published by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the region’s multilateral bank. The study highlights the continuing success of investment in the region nearly 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and just two weeks before eight ex-Communist states, headed by Poland, join the European Union on May 1. William Buiter, the bank’s chief economist, said in an interview that the larger EU accession states—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia—were seeing “real reform fatigue” and “populist escapism” with voters reluctant to back further painful restructuring.

The clandestine network created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, netted $100 million for the technology it sold to Libya alone. Under extraordinary security—guards with automatic weapons stationed every few yards—officials showed the high-speed centrifuges marketed to countries seeking to enrich uranium for bomb fuel. North Korea and Iran are believed to have purchased essentially the same package of technology that Libya obtained after negotiating with Dr. Khan in the mid-1990s. The $100-million estimate was nearly twice as high as the highest previous estimate of what Libya paid for its nuclear technology. The $100-million figure does, however, explain how a government scientist like Mr. Khan could afford a lavish lifestyle, in Pakistan, in homes around the world, and at his hotel in Mali.

Libya armed itself with weapons of mass destruction for the purposes of a war with Israel, the son of Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi told the London-based Al Hayat newspaper in an interview. In the interview, Seif al-Islam, Gadhafi’s second son and the man tipped to succeed him, explained the reasons why Libya decided to forgo its chemical and biological weapons, to stop its nuclear program, and to renew diplomatic ties with the United States and Britain. “The third and most important reason is that we developed weapons for the purposes of a war with the enemy,” he said. “We saw that the armed struggle of the Palestinians, which lasted 50 years, did not produce results like those attained in negotiations that lasted five years. [The Palestinians] said to the commander-in-chief [Colonel Gadhafi] that they gave up the gun, decided to opt for negotiations, and achieved what they had not achieved in the 50 years from Beirut through Tunis to Amman.” Gadhafi’s son also revealed in the interview that the negotiations with the U.S. and Britain over the issue of weapons of mass destruction were concluded before the war began in Iraq in April 2003.

Fatah Tanzim activists in Nablus attempted to use an 11-year-old boy to smuggle a bomb through a roadblock and tried to detonate the bomb when soldiers stopped him. The Tanzim gave the boy a bag containing a seven-to-ten kilogram bomb stuffed with bolts. They promised him a large sum of money if he would carry it through the roadblock and hand it to a woman waiting on the other side. “A military policewoman lifted the bag, which was heavy, and placed it on the table. The soldier noticed the boy was uneasy, and when she questioned him, he told her the bag didn’t belong to him and he had been asked to take it through,” Lt.-Col. Guy, a Paratroop Brigade battalion commander, told The Jerusalem Post. “When the boy’s dispatchers saw he was being detained, they dialed the cell phone inside the bag meant to detonate the bomb in an ­attempt, but it failed to go off,” he said. Guy said it is common for terrorist groups to use children or women as couriers for arms and explosives.

Intel researchers have developed a new chip technology that will speed up the flow of information to the speed of light. The Israeli-developed electro-optical chipsets are based on silicon wafers capable of converting electronic signals to optic signals within the chips. The new chip will enable communication to be conducted at the speed of light—some ten times faster than the present speed. The development could potentially revolutionize computing and telecommunications, yet might not cost very much. “This is the greatest [Research and Development] success,” said Amir Elstein, co-CEO of Intel Israel and director of Intel’s Jerusalem facility. “There is no need to build new factories. Faster chips can be manufactured at lower cost, with the same production infrastructure used in existing ­facilities. We took a theoretical physical effect and, using existing infrastructure, moved it up to a level that was previously impossible to implement.”

The number of visitors arriving in Israel surged 44 percent in the first two months of 2004, compared to the same period last year, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and Tourism Ministry reported. Some 183,200 tourists arrived during this period, compared to 127,000 in the months preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq. These include Jewish tourists as well as Christian groups from North America, Europe, and Latin America. Israelis have also enjoyed a higher level of traveling since the end of the Iraq War. Since April 2003 through February 2004, the CBS and Tourism Ministry have reported a 2.1% average rise per month in exits.

Precipitation in Israel over the three main rainy months of winter (December, January, and February) was slightly higher than average, the Israel Meteorological Service (IMS) announced. The IMS said it was the first time in 53 years that Israel experienced three consecutive winters of above average rainfall. As a result, the Sea of Galilee topped off at its maximum height of 208.90 meters below sea level.The sea has risen 5.52 meters, which represents 966 million cubic meters of water. Since Israel regularly pumps out one million cubic meters a day to store in the coastal aquifers, that means well over one billion cubic meters of water have flowed into the sea, breaking the long drought.

Nearly one out of every three elderly Israelis requires state aid to enable him/her to survive. There are currently 640,000 Israelis over the age of 65, of whom 210,000 are in need of monthly financial ­assistance. Those requiring assistance receive a monthly payment of NIS1,069 (approximately US$237). Sixty-four percent of the senior citizens interviewed stated that at least once a month, they are compelled to decide between buying food or paying other bills.