Police vehicles guard the site where a woman was found dead inside a car, two blocks away from a police station in Tijuana, Mexico, on Thursday.

TIJUANA, Mexico – The bodies of four U.S. citizens were found strangled, beaten and stabbed in a van in this border city, two days after they reportedly left their southern California homes for a night at the Mexican clubs, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The victims, ages 19 to 23, were found tied up on Saturday, but their deaths were not reported earlier because they were under investigation, said Fermin Gomez, an assistant state prosecutor in Baja California.

U.S. consular officials in Tijuana said the victims – two men and two women from the San Diego and Chula Vista areas – were U.S. citizens. The state attorney general’s office in Baja California said one of the women was Mexican.

Their deaths are the latest in a string of violence in Tijuana that authorities blame on a bloody turf war between drug cartels.

“I just don’t think kids should be going to Tijuana right now,” Chula Vista police Lt. Scott Arsenault told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “They ran into the wrong people, obviously.”

Bernard Gonzales, a spokesman for the Chula Vista Police Department, said a friend told the women’s parents they were headed to nightclubs in Tijuana on Thursday night. They were reported missing the next day when they did not answer their cell phones.

A plainclothes police officer, wearing a face mask, stands near a house where a methamphetamine lab was found on the outskirts of Tijuana, Mexico, on Wednesday.

The sailors from the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg also seized eight assault rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher when they boarded the pirates’ vessel Wednesday in the Gulf of Aden, said the Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.

The Gettysburg launched the operation with the help of the Korean Destroyer ROKS Munmu the Great after the pirates fired at the Egyptian-flagged Motor Vessel Amira about 75 miles south of Yemen’s al-Mukalla port, the Navy said. Both ships dispatched helicopters during the mission.

The Gulf of Aden is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, connecting Europe and Asia via the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. It is used by 20,000 ships a year and has become the world’s hot spot for pirate attacks.

The 17 pirates seized were taken aboard the Gettysburg for further questioning, said the Navy. They were operating from a “mothership” — a larger vessel pirates often use to resupply the small speedboats that attack ships far offshore. The Navy did not say what happened to the mothership after the operation.

Also Thursday, Iranian state television said the country will send two warships to join an international flotilla protecting cargo ships from pirates off the Somali coast.

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaei, made the commitment in a letter he sent to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday, according to a report on the Web site of Iran’s press TV.

The ships will leave within the next two days for a five-month assignment and will join vessels from the U.S., Denmark, Italy, Russia, China and other countries.

Somali pirates have significantly stepped up their attacks in recent years. They hijacked a cargo ship operated by Iran off the Somali coast in November, the second in the past six months.

At least 19 ships and over 250 sailors are now being held hostage by Somali pirates. Last year, 42 ships were seized and pirates earned an estimated $1 million or more in ransom each time they freed a ship.

The pirates operate freely because Somalia has had no effective central government in nearly 20 years. Nearly every public institution has crumbled, and the U.N.-backed government controls only limited territory and is fighting an Islamic insurgency.

Myanmar activists shout slogans during a rally demanding the immediate release of their pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi near the Myanmar Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday. Suu Kyi was charged Thursday with violating terms of her house arrest in a bizarre case involving an American man who swam across a lake to sneak into her home, her lawyer said.

YANGON — Myanmar’s Nobel Prize-winning pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi faced new charges Thursday less than two weeks before her house arrest was due to end after an American man swam across a lake to enter her home, her lawyer said.

Supporters accused the military government of using the incident to keep her in detention ahead of general elections scheduled for next year.

Suu Kyi, whose detention was set to end May 27, could face a prison term of up to five years if convicted, said lawyer Hla Myo Myint. The trial is scheduled to start Monday at a special court at Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison, where she was arraigned Thursday.

She is accused of breaking the terms of her detention by harboring the visitor for two days, even though another of Suu Kyi’s lawyers said she told the man to leave her home.

“Everyone is very angry with this wretched American. He is the cause of all these problems,” lawyer Kyi Win told reporters. “He’s a fool.”

The junta appears eager to ensure that general elections scheduled for next year are carried out without any significant opposition from pro-democracy groups that say the balloting will merely perpetuate military rule under a democratic guise.

Human rights groups said they feared the trial would be used to justify another extension of Suu Kyi’s yearslong detention despite international demands for her release. The 63-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate has already spent more than 13 of the last 19 years — including the past six — in detention without trial for her nonviolent promotion of democracy in Myanmar, also called Burma.

The motives of the American, John William Yettaw, 53, remained unclear. State television on Thursday said he had served two years in the military and listed his occupation as “student, clinical psychology, Forest Institution.”

“I know that John is harmless and not politically motivated in any way,” his stepson, Paul Nedrow, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “He did not want to cause Suu Kyi any trouble.”

Nedrow said he was concerned over his stepfather’s health because he was a diabetic and the ailment “could cause him to become disoriented and confused and be unable to make wise choices for himself.”

A pro-government Myanmar Web site earlier said that after arriving at Suu Kyi’s house, Yettaw told her two female assistants — a mother and daughter who are her sole allowed companions — that he was tired and hungry after the swim and has diabetes.

It said the two women, supporters of Suu Kyi’s party, gave him food.

In the past Myanmar’s junta — which regards Suu Kyi as the biggest threat to its rule — has found reasons to extend her periods of house arrest, bending the letter of the law.

“The Burmese regime is clearly intent on finding any pretext, no matter how tenuous, to extend her unlawful detention. The real injustice, the real illegality, is that she is still detained in the first place,” said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who wrote a chapter about her in his book “Courage.”

Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith described Suu Kyi’s arrest as “gravely concerning” and urged her immediate release.

Yettaw, who was arrested last week, was charged at Thursday’s hearing with illegally entering a restricted zone, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, and breaking immigration laws, which is punishable by up to one year in jail, said Hla Myo Myint.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Richard Mei said Yettaw had no legal representation at his arraignment but that the embassy was trying to find him an English-speaking lawyer.

The National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, which describes itself as the country’s government-in-exile, said the junta was using the incident to extend Suu Kyi’s detention.

“It is nothing more than a political ploy to hoodwink the international community so that it can keep (Suu Kyi) under lock and key while the military maneuvers its way to election victory on 2010,” the group’s prime minister, Sein Win, said in a statement.

Suu Kyi has recently been ill, suffering from dehydration and low blood pressure. Her condition improved this week after a visit by a doctor who administered an intravenous drip, said Nyan Win, the spokesman for her National League for Democracy party, who is also part of a team of three lawyers hoping to represent her.

“Please tell them (reporters) I am well,” Kyi Win quoted Suu Kyi as saying. But he added: “I am very concerned about Suu Kyi’s health, even though she said she is well.”

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who was captured by the Nazis, spent the rest of the war as their prisoner and never hurt anyone.

There are Nazi-era documents that suggest otherwise — including a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and saying he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki. Both sites were in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Still, the key to the 89-year-old Demjanjuk’s fate may not lie with the evidence but rather on a German court’s decision about whether he is medically fit to stand trial. In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without a country since the U.S. stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is likely to spend the rest of his life in Germany, either in jail or in a home for the elderly.

One of his German lawyers, Guenter Maull, told AP Television News on Monday that after the plane carrying him from Cleveland, Ohio, to Munich lands, he will be taken to the Stadelheim prison and meet a judge who will read the lengthy arrest warrant.

“As far as I know the warrant is 21 pages long,” Maull said.

Demjanjuk is not expected to say anything.

“On the issues of him saying something or not, I will put pressure on him not to say anything, because we need to talk in peace first and digest everything that is in the arrest warrant,” Maull said.

As for his health, a doctor will examine Demjanjuk and a decision will be taken as to whether he should remain at Stadelheim or be sent to an area hospital.

“If he is sick they first have to try to cure him. If he is incurably sick they have to find a place for him to live,” Maull said, adding that were Demjanjuk to be deemed unfit for trial, it is likely the German government would have to pick up the cost for his care.

Dramatic photos last month showed Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN’-yuk) wincing in apparent pain as he was removed by immigration agents from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio. However, images taken only days earlier and released by the U.S. government showed him entering his car unaided outside a medical office.

Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said Monday that his father is dying of leukemic bone marrow disease.

“It is not a question if he is sick but how sick he is, there are enough diagnoses confirming his illness, the only question is how fast his sickness is progressing,” Maull told AP Television News.

On Monday evening, Demjanjuk arrived in an ambulance at Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport after spending several hours with U.S. immigration officials at a downtown federal building. He was carried in a wheelchair onto a jet that departed for Germany.

The deportation came four days after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Demjanjuk’s request to block deportation and about 3 1/2 years after he was last ordered deported.

Earlier Monday, John Demjanjuk Jr. said an appeal in a U.S. court would go ahead even if his father isn’t in the country.

“Given the history of this case and not a shred of evidence that he ever hurt one person let alone murdered anyone anywhere, this is inhuman even if the courts have said it is lawful,” Demjanjuk Jr. said.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, a founder of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Demjanjuk deserves to be punished and that this will probably be the last trial of someone accused of Nazi war crimes.

“His work at the Sobibor death camp was to push men, women and children into the gas chamber,” Hier said in a statement. “He had no mercy, no pity and no remorse for the families whose lives he was destroying.”

The center was established to locate and help bring to justice Nazi war criminals.

Throughout three decades of court action in the U.S. and Israel, Demjanjuk has insisted he was an innocent victim.

Among the documents obtained by the Munich prosecutors is an SS identity card that features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk along with his height and weight, and says he worked at Sobibor.

German prosecutors also have a transfer roster that lists Demjanjuk by his name and birthday and also says he was at Sobibor, and statements from former guards who remembered him being there.

The case dates to 1977 when the Justice Department moved to revoke Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship, alleging he hid his past as a Nazi death camp guard.

Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, a conviction overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

A U.S. judge revoked his citizenship in 2002 based on U.S. Justice Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps.

An immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.

Suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk is seen inside an ambulance car as it arrives in front of the Stadelheim prison in Munich.

MUNICH — After three decades of fighting in court, John Demjanjuk arrived at a German prison on Tuesday, deported from the United States to face allegations of being an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews and others as a guard at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp.

A judge is expected to read him the 21-page arrest warrant later Tuesday. If the retired Ohio autoworker is found fit to stand trial, it would be the culmination of a legal saga that began in 1977 and has involved courts and government officials from at least five countries on three continents.

Demjanjuk flew into Munich airport from Cleveland aboard a private jet that taxied directly Tuesday morning into a hangar, where he was transferred to an ambulance. Munich prosecutors said the 89-year-old Demjanjuk, who is allegedly in poor health, slept for most of the flight.

From the airport he rode in a police-escorted ambulance to a special medical unit at Stadelheim prison, where he was to be examined by a doctor and formally arrested.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who spent World War II as a Nazi POW and never hurt anyone.

But Nazi-era documents obtained by U.S. justice authorities and shared with German prosecutors suggest otherwise. They include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and saying he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki. Both sites were in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk’s case is an example of how difficult it has become to bring alleged Nazi war criminals to trial more than six decades since the end of World War II.

After he is read the warrant, Demjanjuk can respond, although his lawyer, Guenther Maull, says he will recommend that his client remain silent.

The next step will be for prosecutors to formally press charges, which they said could happen “within a few weeks” providing “no exonerating arguments are made.”

Prosecutors said the court has already appointed a doctor who must determine whether Demjanjuk is fit to stand trial.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, praised U.S. and German authorities for bringing Demjanjuk in.

“I think this is an extremely important day for justice and the fact that Demjanjuk, who actively participated in the mass murder of 29,000 Jews at Sobibor, will be put to trial is of great significance and reinforces the message that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the murderers,” he said from his office in Jerusalem.

Yet the key to Demjanjuk’s fate may lie not with the evidence but rather with a German court’s decision about whether he is medically fit to stand trial. In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without a country since the U.S. stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is likely to spend the rest of his life in Germany.

Germany’s main Jewish leader urged authorities to act quickly.

“It is a race against time,” Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor, said in a statement.

“For survivors of the Shoah, it is intolerable to watch how a suspected Nazi war criminal, who knew no mercy for his victims, seeks sympathy and compares his deportation to torture,” she said, using the Hebrew term for Holocaust.

Demjanjuk insists he is innocent and fought bitterly for decades against efforts to strip him of his U.S. citizenship and later deport him.

Dramatic photos last month showed Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN’-yuk) wincing in apparent pain as he was removed by immigration agents from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio, in an earlier attempt to deport him to Germany. However, images taken only days earlier and released by the U.S. government showed him entering his car unaided.

Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said Monday his father is dying of leukemic bone marrow disease and claimed he would not survive a trans-Atlantic flight.

The deportation came four days after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Demjanjuk’s request to block deportation.

Among the documents obtained by the Munich prosecutors is an SS identity card that features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk along with his height and weight, and says he worked at Sobibor.

German prosecutors also have a transfer roster that lists Demjanjuk by name and birthday and also says he was at Sobibor, and statements from former guards who remembered him being there.

The case dates to 1977, when the Justice Department moved to revoke Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship, alleging he hid his past as a Nazi death camp guard.

Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

That decision came after Israel won access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced laborers who said “Ivan” was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko. Some identified Marchenko in photographs.

A U.S. judge revoked Demjanjuk’s citizenship in 2002 based on U.S. Justice Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps.

A U.S. immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.

A monument commemorating the victims killed at the Nazi death camp of Sobibor on the former camp grounds in eastern Poland. The Sobibor extermination camp was built by Nazi officers in occupied Poland in 1942 and some 250,000 Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners were murdered in its gas chambers before it was razed some 18 months later. In 1965, a monument to the victims of Sobibor was built on the site of the former camp and the ashes of those killed were gathered together in a symbolic mound-mausoleum.

In this Monday, Feb. 28, 2005 file photo, John Demjanjuk arrives at the federal building in Cleveland for an immigration hearing.

A World War II-era military service pass for John Demjanjuk is seen in this exhibit released by the Department of Justice in 2002.

The students were lining up outside their school in northeastern Afghanistan on Tuesday morning when a strange odor filled the yard, and one girl collapsed, said the school’s principal, Mossena, who was herself in a hospital bed gasping for breath as she described the event.

“We took her inside and splashed water on her face,” said Mossena, who like many Afghans goes by one name. Then other girls started passing out, and all the students were sent home.

It was unclear if the incident was a deliberate attack on the school, though the Taliban and other conservative extremist groups in Afghanistan who oppose girls’ education have been known to target schoolgirls. Under the Taliban’s 1996-2001 regime, girls were not allowed to attend school.

Mossena said she did not know what happened next because she collapsed and woke up in the main hospital in Muhmud Raqi, the capital of Kapisa province, which lies just northeast of Kabul.

At least 98 patients were admitted from Aftab Bachi school, including the principal, 11 teachers and two cleaners, said Khalid Enayat, the hospital’s deputy director. He said about another 30 students were being monitored to see if they developed symptoms, although they were not admitted to the hospital.

Tuesday’s apparent attack is the third alleged poisoning at a girls’ school in less than three weeks. It comes one day after 61 schoolgirls and one teacher from a school in neighboring Parwan province were admitted to a hospital after complaining of sudden illness. They were irritable, confused and weeping, and several of the girls passed out.

The first apparent poison attack took place late last month in Parwan, when dozens of girls were hospitalized after being sickened by what Afghan officials said were strong fumes or a possible poison gas cloud.

The patients in Kapisa complained of similar symptoms to those in the Parwan incidents — headaches, vomiting and shivering, said Aziz Agha, a doctor treating the girls.

Interior Ministry Spokesman Zemeri Bashary said officials suspect some sort of gas poisoning, and that police were still investigating. Hospital officials said blood samples had been sent to medical authorities in Kabul for testing.

Though it was unclear if the recent incidents were the result of attacks, militants in the south have previously assaulted schoolgirls by spraying acid in their faces and burning down schools to protest the government.

Scores of Afghan schools have been forced to close because of violence. Still, the three recent apparent poisonings have taken place in northeast Afghanistan, which is not as opposed to education for girls as Afghanistan’s conservative southern regions.

But with no group claiming responsibility, the sicknesses could be a result of a group hysteria sparked by one student’s illness. An education official for Parwan province said they had not found any evidence of an attack in Tuesday’s incident. He said one student fell ill before the others and suggested that some of the illnesses could have been psychological.

Research has borne out this possibility. At a Tennessee school in 1998, 38 people were hospitalized with complaints of dizziness, headaches, nausea and shortness of breath after a teacher noticed a gasoline smell in a classroom, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that there had been no toxic exposure and that the sickness appeared to be psychological.

Fifth-grader Tahira said she planned to go back to school when she felt better, but that now it would fill her with fear.

“I’m going to be scared when I go back to school. What if we die?” the startled looking 11-year-old said from her hospital bed.

Associated Press reporter Heidi Vogt contributed reporting from Kabul.

By Amir Shah, Heidi Vogt

TIJUANA, Mexico – Mexican police say three women who disappeared in the border city of Tijuana were killed by drug traffickers who dissolved their bodies in a caustic substance.

Baja California state investigator Miguel Guerrero says the women — aged 23 to 25 — have been missing since August after they traveled from Mexicali to Tijuana, across from San Diego.

Guerrero says two alleged drug traffickers who were arrested this week confessed to the killings. A third suspect is being sought.

He said in a statement Thursday that the women were killed after one of them argued with one of the suspects in a bar. The victims were smothered, and their bodies dissolved in a drum.

In this March 28, 2008, file photo provided by International Fund for Animal Welfare, a hunter clubs a harp seal pup on the opening day of Canada's 2008 commercial seal hunt. This seal was struck by the hunter and wounded before it escaped into the water. The European Parliament has passed a bill that will impose an import ban on seal products, a move meant to force an end to Canada's annual seal hunt, which is the world's largest. The parliament's bill says commercial seal hunting is, notably in Canada, "inherently inhumane."

STRASBOURG, France – The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to ban imports of seal products, including fur coats and even some omega-3 pills, in an effort to force Canada to end its annual seal hunt, the world’s largest.

The Canadian government reacted sharply to the move, with Trade Minister Stockwell Day promising that Ottawa will challenge the ban and take the 27-nation bloc to the world trade body if the new law does not exempt Canada.

The strain in relations came on the eve of a key summit between Canada and the European Union in Prague where they are expected to launch negotiations on a wide-ranging free trade agreement.

The European Parliament voted to endorse a bill that said commercial seal hunting, notably in Canada, is “inherently inhumane.” EU governments still need to back the law, but officials called that a formality and said the ban is expected to take effect in October.

The EU ban will apply to all products and processed goods derived from seals, including their skins — which are used to make fur coats, bags and adorn clothing — as well as meat, oil blubber, organs and seal oil, which is used in some omega-3 pills.

Animal rights activists, Inuit seal hunters, fur traders and authorities from Canada and Greenland lobbied hard ahead of the vote. Activists call the hunt barbaric, while the others said it provided crucial jobs and food for villagers in isolated northern communities.

Canada’s East Coast seal hunt is the largest in the world, killing an average of 300,000 harp seals annually. The EU bill targeted the Canadian hunt because of the size of the annual slaughter and the way seals are killed — either clubbed or shot with rifles. In the past, they have also been killed with spiked clubs, or hakapiks.

Gail Shea, the Canadian minister of fisheries, called the EU parliament’s decision biased and insisted that Canada’s hunt was “guided by rigorous animal welfare principles.”

One-third of the world’s trade in seal products passes through EU countries. Last year, Canada exported seal products — pelts, meat and oils — worth around euro3.5 million ($4.7 million U.S.) to the EU.

Animal rights advocates were euphoric over the vote.

“(It’s) a historic victory … to stop the commercial slaughter of seals around the world,” said Mark Glover, head of Humane Society International.

On the other side, Canadian fur traders and Inuit hunters who joined together in a failed effort to avert the ban urged Ottawa not to pursue new trade talks with the EU.

National Inuit leader Mary Simon said the vote will cause economic despair in native areas in Canada’s north and said the exemption for their communities will do little to help if the markets for seal products have been effectively destroyed.

“If there’s no market we can’t sell our products,” Simon said, adding that Inuit hunt seals for food, clothing and income. “It’s all tied together. If you can’t sell the product you’re not going to have an income and therefore you can’t buy the equipment to go hunting and it affects your food source,” Simon said.

Dion Dakins, managing director of NuTan Furs Inc., of Catalina, Newfoundland, criticized the ban, saying it “has been based on complete falsehoods.”

“I can’t imagine being able to do trade agreements or work forward with a group of countries that can’t honor their obligations under the world trade organization,” he said.

The new EU rule offers narrow exemptions so Inuit communities from Canada, Greenland and elsewhere can continue traditional hunts but bars them from large-scale trading of their pelts and other seal goods in Europe.

Another exemption will permit noncommercial, “small-scale” hunts to manage seal populations, but seal products from those hunts will not be allowed to enter the EU either.

Inuit groups said the restrictions will spell disaster for their communities.

“(The ban) is definitely going to impact the lives of the Inuit,” Joshua Kango, head of the Iqaluit, Nunavut-based Amarok hunters and trappers association, told The Associated Press. “We don’t have any other way to survive economically.”

Despite the Canadian government’s opposition to Tuesday’s vote, Day, the country’s trade minister, said Canada would not let it get in the way of a broader free trade agreement with the EU.

But Newfoundland and Labrador Provincial Fisheries Minister Tom Hedderson told the AP it would be embarrassing if Day and Prime Minister Stephen Harper agreed to a trade deal within days of the European Union’s support for a seal ban.

“The EU just denied us access to their markets. Isn’t this what this trade deal is about?” Hedderson said. “We’re talking anywhere from $30 to $60 million of an industry. If that’s peanuts to Minister Day, so be it.”

Arlene McCarthy, who chairs the European Parliament’s market and consumer protection committee, said a majority of Europeans were against the seal hunt, and for EU lawmakers that took precedence over the wishes of sealers and Inuit groups.

“While we of course have sympathy for those particular groups of people, the reality is that we sit here in the European Parliament and that millions of our citizens would like us to do the right thing and ban the cruel trade,” she said.

Seals are also hunted in Norway, Namibia, Sweden, Finland, Britain and Russia.

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ON THE WEB

www.banthesealtrade.eu

www.sealsandsealing.net

Roxana Saberi, a 32-year-old dual Iranian-American national was convicted last month of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison after a one-day trial behind closed doors. The U.S. government has called the charges against her “baseless” and demanded she be freed.

“Roxana called last night to inform me that she has ended her hunger strike,” her father Reza Saberi told The Associated Press. “I’m relieved that she has done so to avoid a deterioration of her health.”

Saberi’s case has been an irritant in U.S.-Iran relations at a time when the Obama administration has said it wants to engage its longtime adversary in a dialogue. The case has also drawn the concern of press freedom groups.

Iran has promised a complete review of the case on appeal and insisted Saberi will be allowed to provide a full defense at that point, possibly an indication it wants to ease the tensions with the U.S. On Tuesday, the judiciary said the appeal will be heard next week and judiciary officials have suggested her jail term could be reduced.

But Iranian officials denied several times over the past two weeks that Saberi was even on a hunger strike.

Media freedom group Reporters Without Borders said she was briefly hospitalized on Friday in Evin prison, where she has been held since her arrest in January, after she intensified her hunger strike by refusing to drink water.

Saberi’s Iranian-born father said Roxana began a hunger strike April 21 to protest her imprisonment, vowing to keep it up until she was freed.

“My wife and I met her in Evin prison Monday morning and gave her some yogurt. We asked her to stop the hunger strike,” he said.

Saberi was born in New Jersey and raised in Fargo, North Dakota. She moved to Iran six years ago and worked as a freelance journalist for news organizations including National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corp. She received Iranian citizenship because her father was born in Iran.

She was arrested in late January and initially accused of working without press credentials. But earlier this month, an Iranian judge leveled the far more serious allegation of espionage.

Reporters Without Borders said it was relieved to learn Saberi had ended her hunger strike.

“The press freedom organization continues to call for the appeal against her conviction to be given a fair hearing and not any sham proceedings,” the statement read.

Antasari Azhar, 56, has overseen a series of high-profile probes into government officials and institutions since taking the helm of the independent Corruption Eradication Commission, better known as the KPK, two years ago.

He has not officially been charged with a crime and has denied wrongdoing.

Azhar was arrested Monday after eight hours of questioning at police headquarters as a suspect in March 14′s killing of businessman Nasrudin Zulkarnaen, who was shot through the window of his car by two motorcycle gunmen as he was leaving a golf course on the outskirts of the capital, Jakarta, said police spokesman Col. Chrysnanda Dwilaksana.

He refused to comment on the motive or local media reports alleging it was a crime of passion — relatives of the victim claimed both Zulkarnaen and Azhar were involved with a 22-year-old female golf caddy.

The defendant’s lawyer, Denny Kailimang, would only say his client was in police custody.

Indonesia ranks as one of the world’s most corrupt countries and Yudhoyono’s vows to crack down on graft helped him win 2004 elections. Several key politicians, lawmakers, central bank officials and businessmen have been arrested since then, helping boost the president’s image and putting him on course to win another five-year term in July.

Few analysts believe Monday’s arrest will affect his re-election bid.

Azhar made no comment to reporters as he was led away by police.

But he said over the weekend his efforts to put high-ranking officials behind bars has earned him many enemies — implying his arrest was the result of a smear campaign. But he said he respected the legal process and would cooperate with authorities.

“I and my family are ready to face this case,” Azhar said.

Teten Masduki, secretary general of Transparency International Indonesia, said he did not expect the arrest to derail the country’s larger anti-graft fight.

“The achievements of the KPK were not his alone,” he said. “There are four other members and they will continue to do their work.”

Zulkarnaen was the director of PT Putra Rajawali Banjaran, a state-owned pharmaceutical company, and had been serving as a witness in a graft case.