WORLD
BEIRUT — Syria has given international experts video and photographic evidence that shows a chemical weapons site near the contested northern city of Aleppo has been dismantled and abandoned by the government, inspectors said today.
With the latest documentation, experts from the joint mission of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations have now verified 22 of the 23 chemical weapons sites declared by Syria.
Last month, the inspectors visited 21 of the 23 sites but were unable to visit two because of fighting in the area.
The photographs and footage provided by President Bashar Assad's government showed the facility near Aleppo empty and with “extensive battle damage,” according to a statement from the OPCW-U.N. mission, which is overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons program.
The images were shot with a tamperproof camera that inspectors had fitted with a GPS system so that the location of the camera could be tracked. It added that the photos and video have been authenticated by inspectors.
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Swiss scientists say Yasser Arafat ingested radioactive polonium, most probably as a result of a deliberate poisoning.The Swiss lab examined Arafat's remains and his underclothes and a travel bag that he had with him in the days before his death in a Paris hospital and found that the polonium and lead amounts could not be naturally occurring. The time frame of his illness and death were also consistent with polonium poisoning, they said.“You don't accidentally or voluntarily absorb a source of polonium — it's not something that appears in the environment like that,” said Patrice Mangin, director of the laboratory, today. He said he could not say unequivocally what killed Arafat.The Palestinian leader died in November 2004. Palestinian officials accuse Israel of poisoning him, a claim Israel denies.
MOSCOW — A rocket carrying the Olympic torch successfully blasted off today from Earth on its way to the International Space Station and its first spacewalk in history.Starting a spectacular leg of the relay counting down to the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, NASA Live TV showed the rocket emblazoned with the pale blue Sochi logo launching from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.Russia's Mikhail Tyurin, NASA's Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata of Japan beamed at the crowd as they carried the lit torch aboard the rocket.The torch will not burn on board the space outpost because lighting it would consume precious oxygen and pose a threat to the crew. The crew will carry the unlit torch around the station's numerous modules before taking it out on a spacewalk.By The Associated Press
