World Scene

YEMEN

Cole attack planner gets house arrest

SAN’A — Yemen has commuted to house arrest the prison term of a mastermind of al Qaeda’s 2000 bombing of a U.S. Navy vessel after he surrendered to Yemeni authorities, his relatives said yesterday.

Jamal Badawi was one of the architects of the attack on the destroyer USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors in Aden port. He is wanted in the United States, which offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest after his escape from jail in 2006, according to the FBI Web site.

Badawi, whose death sentence had been commuted to 15 years in prison, is one of 23 inmates who escaped from a jail in the Yemeni capital San’a. He turned himself in about two weeks ago.

FRANCE

Torture suit filed against Rumsfeld

PARIS — American and European rights groups filed a legal complaint in France accusing former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of responsibility for torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The complaint was filed with the Paris prosecutor’s office as Mr. Rumsfeld arrived in France for a visit, according to the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and two Paris-based groups, the International Federation of Human Rights and the League of Human Rights.

The groups say their complaint could go forward because people suspected of torture can be prosecuted in France if they are on French soil.

AUSTRIA

Man beheaded by Nazis beatified

VIENNA — An Austrian farmer beheaded by the Nazis for refusing to serve in Adolf Hitler’s army was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church yesterday in a ceremony attended by his 94-year-old widow.

About 5,000 people joined 27 bishops and cardinals to honor Franz Jaegerstaetter, a devout Catholic who died in 1943, at age 37.

ISRAEL

Exercise moved to avoid tension

JERUSALEM — Israel has decided to move an upcoming military exercise off the disputed Golan Heights to avoid further heightening tensions with neighboring Syria, defense officials said.

The border has been jittery since the Sept. 6 raid by Israeli warplanes on a target in Syria’s north. Next week’s military maneuver was scheduled to be held partially on the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met yesterday and agreed to begin taking reciprocal steps under a long-stalled peace plan to try to narrow gaps ahead of a U.S.-sponsored conference on Palestinian statehood.

FRANCE

Orphan rescue bid ends in arrests

PARIS — Nine French citizens were arrested in Chad after a group tried to fly more than 100 African children to France, saying it wanted to save them from the crisis in neighboring Darfur, the French Foreign Ministry said.

The group, L’Arche de Zoe, or Zoe’s Arc, had lined up French host families for the children, saying they were orphans from the crisis-stricken Darfur region of Sudan. Many host families had paid thousands of dollars to the charity, and waited at an airport outside Paris to receive the children.

From wire dispatches and staff reports