UK recognizes Libyan rebels

UK recognizes Libyan rebels

LONDON

Britain has officially recognized Libya’s main opposition group as the country’s legitimate government, the U.K. foreign secretary said Wednesday, announcing the expulsion of all diplomats loyal to Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.

William Hague also said his country was unfreezing $150 million of Libyan oil assets to help the National Transitional Council, which the U.K. now recognizes as “the sole governmental authority in Libya.”

The council had been invited to send an ambassador to London, Hague told reporters, adding that “we will deal with the National Transitional Council on the same basis as other governments around the world.”

Statements set for today in Jeffs trial

SAN ANGELO, Texas

A judge dealt a blow Wednesday to the defense of polygamist religious leader Warren Jeffs, refusing to suppress evidence police seized during a 2008 raid on his sect’s remote West Texas compound.

District Judge Barbara Walther’s decision clears the way for a small mountain of documents — including marriage and birth records, and thousands of pages of Jeffs’ own writing in personal journals — to be presented to the jury during Jeffs’ sexual- assault trial. Jurors also may be able to see DNA evidence collected from children living on the compound.

Opening statements in the case now are set for this morning, after one more suppression hearing.

N. Korea predicts new nuke-arms race

UNITED NATIONS

North Korea’s U.N. ambassador said Wednesday that U.S. modernization of its nuclear weapons and expansion of its missile defense systems eventually will spark a new nuclear-arms race.

Sin Son Ho told a General Assembly meeting on revitalizing the Conference on Disarmament, which North Korea chairs this month, that if “the largest nuclear weapon state” — a reference to the United States — wants to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, “it should show its good example by negotiating the Treaty of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons.”

Fugitive caught in Colo. after 32 years

DENVER

Officers posing as forest rangers surprised a 60-year-old fugitive from Florida at a remote Colorado cabin Wednesday, bringing a sudden end to his 32 years on the lam after a murder conviction in the 1970s.

Frederick Barrett was arrested outside a makeshift but tidy cabin near Montrose, about 200 miles southwest of Denver, when the officers said they wanted to discuss fire danger, the U.S. Marshals Service said. When they saw a tattoo on his hand that matched one that Barrett was known to have, they told him he was under arrest.

“His whole face, every expression dropped out of his face,” said Charlie Ahmad of the Marshals Service, recounting what the arresting officers told him.

Circumcision ban to be taken off ballot

SAN FRANCISCO

A judge said Wednesday she intends to strike a ban on male circumcision from the city’s November ballot.

Superior Court Judge Loretta Giorgi said in a tentative ruling that the proposed law prohibiting circumcision of male children violates a California law that makes regulating medical procedures a function of the state, not cities.

Giorgi ordered San Francisco’s elections director to remove the controversial measure from the ballot that would have made the city the first in the nation to hold a public vote on whether to outlaw the circumcision of minors.

Associated Press