In the World
TURKEY
Arrest warrant issued
for scholar living in Pa.
A Turkish criminal court issued an arrest warrant Friday for Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish religious scholar who lives in self-exile in Pennsylvania and has become public enemy No. 1 of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's increasingly autocratic president.
The charges paralleled Erdogan's accusations against his former ally.
The court said Gulen had "established an illegal criminal organization with a hierarchical structure that is separate from the state's own structure" in order to "seize influential posts that govern Turkey's social, economic, military and administrative mechanisms." The warrant could lead to a request for extradition.
Gulen, 73, who is in ill health, lives in Saylorsburg, a small town in the Pocono Mountains.
He holds no elected office but wields outsize influence in Turkey through his Hizmet movement, which runs newspapers, television networks and college exam prep schools and is influential in the business community.
- McClatchy Newspapers
IRELAND
Veggies force jet to land
An Air France jumbo jet flying from the Caribbean to Paris with crates of peppers in the cargo hold was forced to make an emergency landing in Ireland after condensation from the vegetables set off a fire alarm. Flight AF733 carrying 142 passengers was headed from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic last Saturday when pilots decided to divert the Boeing 747-400 to Shannon airport in Ireland, the airline said Friday. "Have you ever put your vegetables in the refrigerator in a plastic bag, with no air whatsoever, and seen how they sweat?" said Paul Hayes, a safety expert at Ascend Ltd., a London-based consultancy. - Bloomberg
GAZA STRIP
Airstrike after rocket fire
Israel's military struck a Hamas site in the Gaza Strip early Saturday in its first airstrike on the Palestinian territory since last summer's war. The Israeli military said the airstrike on what it called a "Hamas terror infrastructure site" in the southern Gaza Strip was in response to a rocket fired from Gaza into southern Israel on Friday. The rocket fire caused no injuries. - AP