World

Three members of a civilian patrol that enforces Islam's strict Sharia law in Indonesia's Aceh province have been accused of gang-raping a 20-year-old university student, authorities there said. The attack allegedly occurred this month at a small-town police station after the patrol members, known here as the Sharia police, took the woman into custody. Two men, ages 27 and 29, were arrested and one is still being sought, authorities said. Activists say the accusation seriously undermines the credibility of the controversial Sharia police patrols.

Lou Hongfei is playing tour guide. His girlfriend has just arrived in the capital from the provincial city of Chongqing and he wants to show her the urban wonders of Beijing. So he has brought her to Tiananmen Square for a patriotic experience many Chinese tourists liken to the thrill of walking the Great Wall or viewing the terra cotta warriors: the quiet majesty of the flag-handling ceremony in one of the world's largest public spaces. Twice a day, out-of-towners flock to the square's imposing expanse of concrete to watch the soldiers tend to China's iconic flag -- red with five yellow stars -- as it is unfurled at dawn and calmly taken down at dusk.

South Africa gained its third first lady on Monday when President Jacob Zuma married Tobeka Madiba, his fifth marriage and third concurrent spouse. With another fiancee in the wings and rumors about a possible future engagement, the country may have five or more first ladies before Zuma's presidency is over. Zuma's polygamy sits uneasily with the ruling party's commitment to gender equality and has been criticized by women's rights and AIDS activists. But despite the disquiet in some quarters, Monday's wedding passed without media controversy.

The telephones kept ringing with more orders and although Duan Yuelin kept raising his prices, the demand was inexhaustible. Customers were so eager to buy more that they would ply him with expensive gifts and dinners in fancy restaurants. His family-run business was racking up sales of as much as $3,000 a month, unimaginable riches for uneducated Chinese rice farmers from southern Hunan province. What merchandise was he selling? Babies. And the customers were government-run orphanages that paid up to $600 each for newborn girls for adoption in the United States and other Western countries.

Sex shop owner Wang Yunsu wondered how so many competitors could suddenly undercut her low prophylactic prices. Now she thinks she knows: The other condoms are counterfeit. "Some manufacturers are cutting corners," she said, stocking a shelf with a domestic brand whose name translates as Forever Love. "And it's all about profit." It's China's latest knockoff scandal -- inferior contraceptives that health officials say provide little protection and may in fact spread infectious diseases, tarnishing the axiom that condoms mean safe sex. In November, investigators in Hunan province provided details about a July raid on an underground workshop where they found laborers lubricating condoms with vegetable oil in unsterile conditions, passing off the counterfeits as high-quality-brand products.

Seated under a mango tree with helicopters and cargo planes thundering overhead, Haitian President Rene Preval had few answers to the many questions facing the head of a devastated country. He could not say how many people had died. He did not know when the roads would be cleared of debris. He wouldn't venture a guess on whether more survivors might still be pulled from the rubble. "We haven't ended the rescue operations, but we know that as the days pass, the chances are getting smaller and smaller," the president told The Times, speaking after a news conference held at what serves as his government's headquarters: a guarded police station behind cinder-block walls near the airport.

Yulia Tymoshenko has fought her way out of poverty, out of jail, out of standoffs with Russia. She's fought in the streets and in parliament; through communism, post-communism and a messy, primordial democracy. Admirers and detractors alike tend to say one thing about the Ukrainian prime minister with the golden braid wound like a crown over her brow: Tymoshenko knows how to fight. And now her biggest battle is heading for a climax as Ukrainians go to the polls today to elect a new president.

When something goes bump in the night, Benedesmo Palacios not only jumps but also reaches for his revolver. Who could blame him? The Afro-Colombian father of eight led his riverfront community's successful effort to remove a fleet of polluting vessels that dredged for gold, and now he fears he's a marked man. "My nerves are on edge. I'm afraid of people following me and I trust no one," said Palacios, who is Paimado's community council leader. "I've heard there are two contracts out to kill me. But I've left it in the hands of God."

One of Al Qaeda's top military strategists in Yemen was reportedly killed Friday along with five other militants in airstrikes targeting two vehicles in the country's northeastern mountains, according to officials and news agencies. The operation by the Yemeni air force was the latest in a string of attacks on Al Qaeda strongholds and the terrorist network's key operatives. The government, which has been guided by U.S. intelligence in the past, has yet to capture or kill the group's two leaders, but Friday's strikes were an indication that Al Qaeda faces increasing pressure.

Five years after he was discounted as Moscow's stooge and shunted to the margins of Ukrainian politics, Viktor Yanukovich has regained his lost prestige -- and then some. To the surprise of many, the towering, plain-spoken politician has emerged as the clear front-runner in the presidential vote to be held Sunday. His popularity represents a remarkable reversal of fortunes: In 2004, Ukraine's presidential election dissolved into massive street protests and widespread outrage when the Supreme Court ruled that Yanukovich, then the prime minister, had won the election fraudulently.

Father Metyas Mankarios ministers to garbage men and runs a newspaper for Coptic Christians from an office crammed with brittle archives above vegetable sellers and fishmongers barking out prices along the muddy roads of a Cairo neighborhood. Few have it easy here. From dawn until deep into the night, there is the clatter of making a living, no matter how small. But these days, Mankarios, his face engulfed by a graying beard, worries more about the increasing discrimination and resentment from Muslims who attack monasteries and teach their children that Christians are infidels.

Sinking into irrelevance as rival politicians scrapped to take his place, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko lobbed a grenade into the final days of the campaign: He named a controversial anti-Soviet nationalist assassinated by the KGB half a century ago a "Hero of Ukraine." Here in Ukraine's most avidly Western-leaning, anti-Russian city, news that the rare honor had been bestowed on Stepan Bandera was met with jubilation. Disgust and dismay swept the Russian-speaking provinces, where Bandera is remembered as a Nazi collaborator.

An Iraqi Shiite group with close ties to Iran claimed in a video posted Saturday that it was holding an American hostage who is believed to be an El Cajon man reported missing in Baghdad by the Pentagon. A brief Defense Department statement Friday said that Issa T. Salomi, 60, who works as a civilian contractor, had been unaccounted for since Jan. 23. The undated video posted on an Islamist website shows a gray-haired man wearing U.S. military combat fatigues seated beneath a black banner bearing the name Asaib al Haq, or League of the Righteous.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and a conservative official in Tehran found something they could agree on Saturday, as each dismissed the Iranian foreign minister's suggestion that a deal was near on Iran's nuclear program. Gates said he was disappointed in Tehran's response to a months-old proposal backed by the Obama administration in which Iran would exchange a limited quantity of low-enriched uranium for fuel plates to use in a Tehran medical reactor. "I do not have the sense we are close to an agreement," he said at a round-table meeting with journalists in Ankara, where he also suggested that Washington's patience had limits.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan -- The effectiveness of the alliance between the U.S. military and Afghanistan's security force rests on a particularly delicate question: Will sufficient numbers of Afghans put up a good fight against the Taliban -- starting very soon? Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's strategy to reduce the U.S. role in Afghanistan includes increasing the training of the Afghan force, doubling its size and enhancing its capabilities.

When it comes to messy politics -- and old-fashioned entertainment -- it's hard to top the theatrics of the relatively young democracy in Ukraine. Here are a few choice moments from the presidential campaign that ended with Sunday's runoff election: While on a campaign stop in the western city of Lviv -- an area typically unreceptive to his historically pro-Russia politics -- candidate Viktor Yanukovich had an embarrassing slip of the tongue, Ukrainian...

The witness has grown old and sick. He sits propped on pillows while the snow piles up outside. Recovering from a stroke, he languishes in a cramped apartment because his legs are too frail to negotiate five flights of stairs. His name is Alexei Vaitsen. He is one of the few Jews to survive the torments of the Nazis' Sobibor death camp and the only member of his family who lived to see the end of World War II. His thoughts these days are hundreds of miles away, in a distant courtroom where the fate of another sick old man is being weighed.

A series of command errors set the stage for a Taliban attack on a remote American outpost that left eight U.S. soldiers dead four months ago in one of the war's most lethal ground assaults, according to a U.S. military report released Friday. The investigation of the Oct. 3 onslaught at a small installation in eastern Afghanistan's Nuristan province calls for sanctions against at least two commanders, according to officials familiar with the report. Only the report's executive summary was made public.

The United States on Friday promised allies armored vehicles and technology meant to protect against roadside bombs, an offer officials hope will entice those nations to step up their contributions to the war in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the U.S. would provide heavily armored mine resistant ambush protected trucks, known as MRAPs, to allies conducting operations in violent areas of Afghanistan. "They have saved thousands of limbs and lives in Iraq and Afghanistan," Gates said.

A double bombing Friday in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 140 others as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims commemorated a major Shiite Muslim holy day. The attack took place at the eastern entrance to the city as pilgrims from across the country were leaving after the religious observance in the city center. First, a car bomb exploded near a tent set up to offer refreshments, police said. Moments later a suicide bomber plowed a car into the area.