International news briefs
Ogoni activists freed
Twenty Ogoni activists, held without trial by the Nigerian dictatorship since 1994 on trumped up murder charges, were ordered released from Port Harcourt prison in Rivers State on September 8 by the High Court. The regime used the same politically motivated charge to murder Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders in 1995.
All detainees have been released into the care of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, which has led the campaign for the rights of the Ogoni people against the regime and the environmental racism of the Anglo-Dutch oil giant, Shell.
The 20 report they were held in dirty and confined conditions and were subjected to torture and solitary confinement.
Minister jailed for death squads
A former minister in the Spanish Socialist Party government of Felipe Gonzalez was jailed on September 10 for his role in directing anti-Basque death squads.
Former interior minister Jose Luis Barrionuevo waved a rose, the symbol of social democracy, as he arrived at the Guardalajara jail to begin his 10-year sentence.
In July, the Supreme Court found Barrionuevo guilty of ordering the 1983 kidnapping of a Basque businessperson by the Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups (GAL), a state-sponsored death squad. GAL murdered 27 Basque nationalists.
CIA subsidised Dalai Lama
According to a report in the September 15 Los Angeles Times, throughout the 1960s the US Central Intelligence Agency provided the Tibetan exile movement led by the Dalai Lama with US$1.7 million a year. The Dalai Lama was given a "subsidy" worth $180,000 a year.
Declassified US State Department documents show that the CIA funded Tibetan guerillas in Nepal, a military training camp in Colorado, Tibetan support groups in European and US cities, and sent Tibetans to be educated at Cornell University.
Funding dried up in the early 1970s as US president Richard Nixon's administration established diplomatic relations with Beijing.
Iraq innocent of nerve gas charges
A spokesperson for the UN weapons inspectors has refused to comment on a report that tests conducted in France and Switzerland contradicted US findings that Iraqi missiles were armed with VX nerve gas before the 1991 Gulf War.
The London-based Al-Hayat newspaper said it had learned that Switzerland and France had unofficially informed the UN secretariat that most of their tests of Iraqi warheads showed they were free of VX.