encyclopedia of current events

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Baghdad - Violence may have fallen sharply in Iraq from the worst days of sectarian killing, but an average monthly death toll of 500 people must not be considered "normal," the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

"There is a lack of respect for human life. Even if security has improved a lot ... you still have dozens of people killed on a daily basis," Juan-Pedro Schaerer, the head of the Red Cross' Iraq delegation, told Reuters in an interview Tuesday.

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MILAN - An Italian prosecutor called on Wednesday for 26 Americans, all but one believed to be members of the CIA, to be jailed for between 10 and 13 years each for the kidnapping of a terrorism suspect in 2003.

public Prosecutor Armando Spataro also asked a Milan court to sentence four Italians, including the former head of Italy's SISMI secret service, to up to 13 years in prison for the abduction of Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr.

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United Nations - The UN Security Council on Wednesday unanimously adopted a resolution calling for a halt to the use of sexual violence as a tactic of war.

Resolution 1888 reiterated the 15-member body's "demand for the complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence with immediate effect."

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the US military commander in Iraq is set to announce that the US will withdraw 4,000 of its soldiers from the country by the end of October.

General Ray Odierno is due to tell the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the US is speeding up its military withdrawal to complete it by September 2010.

In an advance copy of his address, Odierno said: "We have approximately 124,000 troops and 11 Combat Teams operating in Iraq today. By the end of October, I believe we will be down to 120,000 troops.

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A senior UN official in Afghanistan is to be removed from his post following a row about the country's presidential election, the BBC has learned.

UN officials said Peter Galbraith had not been fired but would be removed from the mission.

Mr Galbraith, a US diplomat, said: "The secretary general appointed me and has not fired me so far as I know."

Mr Galbraith angered Afghan President Hamid Karzai by reportedly calling for a complete recount of the vote.

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A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk ("Of course I can") and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London's National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

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WASHINGTON - Sans video camera, filmmaker Michael Moore on Tuesday turned his megaphone on the current health care system and those Blue Dog Democrats he claims are "dogging" the health care debate.

Moore, an advocate of a single-payer, government-run health care system, called the current setup "cruel," and said that two-thirds of Americans support a single-payer system and would punish those Democrats who steer the conversation away from that option.

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Tens of thousands of chemicals found in everyday items, from toys and cell phones to food containers and medical devices, would face high levels of federal scrutiny and control under a set of guidelines unveiled tuesday in San Francisco by President Obama's top environmental official.

The effort to rewrite how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency evaluates and enforces the use of potentially harmful chemicals marks the most significant overhaul of the nation's chemical policies since the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.

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Twenty-five million more children will go hungry by the middle of this century as climate change leads to food shortages and soaring prices for staples such as rice, wheat, maize and soya beans, a report says today.

If global warming goes unchecked, all regions of the world will be affected, but the most vulnerable - South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - will be hit hardest by failing crop yields, according to the report, prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

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WASHINGTON - The story line that dominated media coverage of the second Iranian uranium enrichment facility last week was the official assertion that U.S. intelligence had caught Iran trying to conceal a "secret" nuclear facility.

But an analysis of the transcript of that briefing by senior administration officials that was the sole basis for the news stories and other evidence reveals damaging admissions, conflicts with the facts and unanswered questions that undermine its credibility.

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Right-wing and antigovernment activists â€" a few of them wielding not only signs but even loaded firearms â€" have organized some of the angry protests surrounding the health care debate. But in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday morning, a different sort of health care protest took place, led by left-leaning groups who accused insurers of greed and called for nationwide, single-payer health insurance.

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Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said the US was "climate illiterate" and that the rest of the world may be forced to agree a new deal without it.

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The 15-8 rejection marked a victory for Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the committee chairman, who is hoping to push his middle-of-the-road measure through the panel by week's end.

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RIGNANO GARGANICO, Italy - After crossing half of Africa and surviving a perilous boat trip from Libya in search of a better life in Italy, Boubacar Bailo is now contemplating suicide.

One of an army of illegal immigrants hired to harvest tomatoes in the Puglia region, Bailo squats in a fetid cardboard shack restlessly waiting for a call to the fields.

Every year thousands of immigrants, many from Africa, flock to the fields and orchards of southern Italy to scrape a living as seasonal workers picking grapes, olives, tomatoes and oranges.

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