The UN General Committee, which sets the agenda for the General Assembly, voted unanimously Sept. 18 to approve a Serbian resolution calling for a review of Kosova's declared independence. The resolution, opposed by the US and UK, next goes before the General Assembly. If approved there, Kosova's independence would go before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Spanish Judge Balthasar Garzón has ordered government and religious authorities across Spain to turn over information about those killed at the hands of Francisco Franco's fascist forces following his 1936 military uprising. Garzón hopes to draw up a comprehensive list of victims in a bid to document human rights abuses outside of the theater of war. There is no official record of how many died on the Republican side during the three-year Civil War, which claimed the lives of some 500,000 Spaniards. More were killed for opposing Franco during his 36-year dictatorship. While the Franco regime honored its own dead, those of the losing side remained buried in unmarked graves across Spain.

Thank goodness Rome's Jews have got the cogliones to protest this! From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Sept. 8:

Roman Jews criticize mayor over Fascist remarks
Jewish leaders criticized Rome's right-wing mayor for declaring that Italy's Fascist-era anti-Semitic laws, not Fascism itself, constituted "absolute evil."

The Polish government signed a deal Aug. 14 to host a 10 interceptor missiles at a site along Poland's Baltic Sea coast as a part of the US "missile shield" plan. The site, staffed by US forces, would complement a US radar installation to be based in the Czech Republic. Washington says those facilities, to be operational by 2013, would complete an anti-missile system already in place in the US, Greenland, and Britain. In return, Poland will receive "enhanced security cooperation"—most significantly, a separate missile defense system for its own armed forces. A US Patriot missile battery is to be relocated to Poland from Germany for this purpose, to be initially operated jointly with the US. (NYT, RFE/RL, Aug. 15)

Misha Glenny writes for the New Statesman, July 24:

Looking a little like God in a Cecil B DeMille film, Radovan Karadzic was genuinely unrecognisable when he was arrested on a Belgrade bus last Monday evening. Yet even more astonishing was the news that he had been working as a crystal-rubbing therapist promoting well-being to audiences around Serbia. The killer as New Age healer - you couldn't make it up.

In the third incident this month at a French nuclear plant, 100 employees were "slightly contaminated" July 23 at the Tricastin plant in the southern Vaucluse region, according to the EDF power company. EDF insisted the exposure was well below legal limits and the incident rated at "level zero" on the seven-point nuclear accident scale. But the Commission de Recherche et d'Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité (CRIIAD) said the legal annual limit for exposure to radioactivity was not "a level at which risk begins but a level of maximum permitted risk." Annie Thebaud-Mony, a researcher at France's INSERM medical research institute, said that "emphasising that the accident is minor...is a way of downplaying the fact that the employees are exposed to radioacitivity."

Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was detained July 21 in Serbia, government sources in Belgrade report. He has been wanted by international authorities since 1996 on genocide charges. A statement by Serbia's National Security Council, headed by President Boris Tadic, said Karadzic was arrested and handed over to the Belgrade-based Special War Crimes Court. The statement did not offer further details.

The European Parliament approved 336-220 a resolution branding Italy's fingerprinting members of the country's Roma community a direct act of racial discrimination, and called on Rome to bring the program to an immediate halt. Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said the move was "politically motivated and based on prejudices" against the country. He said the program "does not target ethnic groups and is not inspired by racism but by the elementary need to identify anyone who does not have a valid document."