EASTERN EUROPE

RUSSIA POURS BILLIONS INTO ANTI-TERROR PLAN

MOSCOW – Russia announced yesterday it was pouring $5.4 billion in additional funding into its security agencies, the first concrete step in an anti-terrorism battle that President Putin has called the country’s No. 1 priority.

“The fight against terrorism requires a long-range perspective,” the finance minister, Alexei Kudrin said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency, one day after Mr. Putin proposed a major extension of Kremlin control over Russia’s political and security structures.

Russia’s main security agencies – the Federal Security Service, Interior Ministry and Foreign Intelligence Service – will split an additional $1.71 billion in funding. The Defense Ministry will receive an additional $3.66 billion, ITAR-Tass reported, citing Mr. Kudrin.

Mr. Kudrin had already committed $68.5 million in next year’s budget to a new anti-terrorism program to increase security in public places, including Moscow’s subway. In response to a series of terrorist attacks that killed 430 people in the past three weeks – including a school in the town of Beslan – Mr. Putin said a central, powerful anti-terrorism agency must be created, but details were not made public.

Separately, Russian prosecutors charged a Chechen man, identified as Nurpashi Kulayev, with terrorism and murder in the deadly hostage-taking, the Interfax news agency reported yesterday.

– Associated Press

MIDDLE EAST

TURKEY BACKS OFF PLAN TO OUTLAW ADULTERY

ANKARA, Turkey – Turkey’s government backed off its plan to outlaw adultery after criticism within the European Union, strident protests from opposition politicians, and a march on Parliament yesterday by hundreds of outraged Turkish women.

Government leaders had proposed an adultery ban as part of a major overhaul of the mostly Muslim country’s 78-year-old penal code, which comes as the 25 E.U. states prepare to decide by end of the year whether to begin talks on Turkey’s appeal for membership. The government has been hoping to tack the adultery ban onto the draft penal code, apparently to appease Prime Minister Erdogan’s conservative and devoutly Islamic base.

Mr. Erdogan’s government, with its strong Islamic roots, has raised concerns among some Europeans and Turkish secularists who worry he might try to steer the country away from its more than eight decades of strict secularism, instituted by Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

But after meeting with a leader of Turkey’s opposition yesterday, the justice minister, Cemil Cicek, said that only measures agreed on by the governing and opposition parties would be brought to the floor – a move certain to doom the proposal.

– Associated Press

WESTERN EUROPE

BLAIR WARNS OF CLIMATE CATASTROPHE

LONDON – Prime Minister Blair embarked yesterday on an international effort to persuade America and Russia to face up to the “catastrophic consequences” of climate change.

The prime minister issued his starkest warning yet about the “alarming and unsustainable” consequences of global warming.

He said that within the lifetime of his children – and possibly his own – the impact on the world could be so far-reaching and “irreversible in its destructive power” that it altered human existence radically.

The 10 warmest years on record had all been since 1990. “By the middle of this century, temperatures could have risen enough to trigger irreversible melting on the Greenland ice cap – eventually increasing sea levels by around seven meters,” Mr. Blair said. He said he was “shocked” by the latest scientific forecasts about the future – and the message he wanted to leave with his audience was one of “urgency.”

Giving the Prince of Wales Business and the Environment Program anniversary lecture in Whitehall, Mr. Blair said action to reverse climate change would be a priority of Britain’s presidency of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations next year.

The G-8 includes America and Russia, which have so far refused to sign the Kyoto treaty on reducing carbon emissions.

– The Daily Telegraph

AMERICANS, EUROPEANS DRIFT APART OVER IRAN

VIENNA, Austria – An American-European rift surfaced yesterday over how harshly to deal with Iran and its suspect nuclear program, with the Europeans ignoring American suggestions and circulating their own recommendations to other delegates at a key meeting of the U.N. atomic agency.

Diplomats at a board of governors meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency had suggested earlier that the United States and the European Union were making progress in drafting common language for a resolution that would set a deadline for Iran to meet demands designed to dispel fears it was trying to make nuclear arms.

But the latest draft, being circulated informally yesterday for reaction from other delegations, was nearly exactly the one that France, Britain, and Germany came up with Friday – a text that American officials had said would be unacceptable.

The American suggestions demand Iran grant agency inspectors “complete, immediate and unrestricted access;” provide “full information” about past illegal nuclear activities; suspend “immediately and fully” uranium enrichment and related activities; and meet all agency demands to “resolve all outstanding issues” nurturing suspicions of a possible weapons program.

– Associated Press