Peacekeepers OK’d for Somalia

The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a resolution authorizing an East African peacekeeping force to prevent an alliance of Islamic militias from overthrowing Somalia’s fragile interim government.

The decision marked the first time the 15-nation council has backed a foreign intervention in Somalia since U.S. and U.N. troops withdrew from the country in the 1990s.

It reflected fears that Islamic militias, known as the Islamic Courts Union, may be poised to topple the country’s internationally recognized government.

Moscow

Ex-spy’s poisoning called murder

Scotland Yard called the radiation poisoning of former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko a murder Wednesday, as Russian and British investigators questioned a witness in the case in Moscow.

Two weeks after Litvinenko’s death, the trail of trace amounts of the radioactive substance polonium-210 continued to expand Wednesday, as authorities said they discovered tiny amounts at a London soccer stadium and the British Embassy in Moscow.

The 43-year-old Litvinenko, a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died Nov. 23 in London, where he lived in self-imposed exile.

Interfax news agency reported that British and Russian investigators on Tuesday and Wednesday interrogated Dmitry Kovtun, one of at least two Russian businessmen who met Litvinenko in London’s Millennium Hotel Nov. 1, hours before he fell ill.

Kinshasa, Congo

Inauguration ends era of dictatorship

After decades of dictatorship and wars, Congo on Wednesday swore in its first freely elected president since 1960, installing the son of a rebel leader who promised a new era of order and better days ahead.

“This moment marks the beginning of a new era that must bring well-being and development to Congo’s people,” Joseph Kabila said at his inauguration ceremony outside the presidential palace.

Though he has been accused of continuing a trend of corruption and ignoring abuses by his army, Kabila, 35, is widely praised for ushering in a peace plan that ended 1998-2002 wars that drew in the armies of at least six countries and creating a unity government that organized the central African country’s first multiparty elections in more than four decades.