BRUSSELS - THE European Commission announced on Tuesday that it had taken Garuda Airlines and three other Indonesian carriers off its aviation blacklist after air transport authorities addressed safety concerns.
GENEVA - WORLD Health Organisation chief Margaret Chan on Tuesday warned that poverty will prevent some countries from gaining access to swine flu vaccines, as she criticised a bias in favour of richer nations.
'Manufacturing capacity for influenza vaccines is finite and woefully inadequate for a world of 6.8 billion people, nearly all of whom are susceptible to infection by this entirely new and highly contagious virus,' she told delegates attending a World Intellectual Property Organisation conference.
TEHERAN - AUTHORITIES in southeastern Iran on Tuesday hanged 13 members of a Sunni Muslim rebel group convicted of bombings and killings in the area, the official IRNA news agency reported Tuesday.
The report said Abdulhamid Rigi, brother of Abdulmalik Rigi, leader of the group known as Jundallah or Soldiers of God, had been scheduled to be hanged along with the 13 men on Tuesday but his execution was postponed. It gave no reason for the postponement.
BAKU (Azerbaijan) - AZERBAIJANI authorities are lashing out at the German and U.S. embassies for their public protests over the arrest of two bloggers.
Last week's Baku court decision ordering two months of pretrial detention for Azerbaijanis Adnan Hadzhizade and Emin Milli also prompted criticism from international journalism advocates.
