World Briefs

Thousands of people, including the acclaimed author of mafia exposé Gomorra, Roberto Saviano, marched in southern Italy's Naples yesterday against decades of mafia violence that has killed some 900 people.

"The mafia and the Camorra (the Naples-area mafia) are not eternal. They can be beaten," Antonio Bassolino, president of the Campagna region that includes the city, told the crowd marking a remembrance day for victims of organised crime.

Calling for more police and judicial resources, he added: "Our byword should be 'continuity,' because we must fight 365 days a year against the mafia."

The demonstrators included family members of victims of mafia violence such as Rita Borsellino, who offered a grim prognosis for the future.

"I am angry and less optimistic than 17 years ago, when my brother was slain," said Borsellino, whose brother, Paolo Borsellino, a judge, was assassinated in the centre of the Sicilian capital, Palermo.

Together, the four Italian mafia - Sicily's Cosa Nostra, the Naples-area's Camorra, Calabria's 'Ndrangheta and Puglia's Sacra Corona Unita - have killed more than 900 people in recent decades.

British medics let sick baby die

A seriously ill baby boy in Britain died yesterday, the day after his parents lost a legal battle to force doctors to keep him alive.

The parents wanted medics to keep treating their son - who had a rare metabolic disorder, was brain damaged and had suffered respiratory failure - but doctors said he had no prospect of recovery and was in intolerable pain.

A hearing at the Court of Appeal in London on Friday to resolve the dispute backed the doctors although judges voiced the "deepest sympathy" for the mother and father of the nine-month-old boy.

Turkey plans Armenian radio

Turkey's state broadcaster plans to launch an Armenian-language radio station this year, Turkish newspapers reported yesterday, amid efforts by Turkey and neighbouring Armenia to end decades of animosity.

Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) is hoping to have the station on air in "two to three" months, the Sabah and Vatan dailies said, without giving further details.

Armenia and Turkey have no diplomatic ties and their border has been closed for more than a decade as their relationship remains hostage to deep differences over the World War I massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of Turkey.

Nonetheless, the two countries have been involved in a tentative dialogue process to resolve their problems.

Turkey's planned radio station comes as US lawmakers were pushing President Barack Obama to recognise the killings as genocide even though such a step would anger Turkey.

Man wounded in Russian roulette

A drunken Russian roulette game left a man fighting for his life in hospital yesterday with a bullet wound to the head, police and judiciary sources said.

The incident occurred after a former soldier who owned a revolver invited neighbours to his Paris flat late Friday.

During a festive evening, the victim took the revolver, apparently after a bet, to play Russian roulette, spinning the chamber of the gun which contained one bullet, putting the weapon to his head and pressing the trigger.

The revolver went off, badly wounding the man, the sources said, giving no details of exactly where the incident happened or where the victim was taken.

The three other people present at the party, including the victim's wife, had been detained for questioning.

Mumbai suspect reading Gandhi

The lone suspect captured by police during the Mumbai attacks in November is reading the autobiography of India's revered independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, a report said yesterday.

Pakistani national Mohammed Ajmal Amir Iman, also known as Kasab, is reading an Urdu translation of Gandhi's autobiography My Experiments With Truth in prison, the Press Trust of India reported.

"Prisoners are generally given books as part of reforms and recreation programmes," T.R.K. Somaiya, the programme co-ordinator of the Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal Gandhi book centre, told the news agency.