Eurasia

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday replaced the armed forces’ chief of general staff, General Yuri Baluyevsky, who had clashed with the defense minister, a former tax official with no military background. Baluyevsky’s post was a powerful one in the state hierarchy — besides the president and …

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – An agency set up to identify the dead of the Yugoslav wars is now sharing its missing persons expertise with nations including Lebanon, Colombia and Iraq. “Effectively, we have the biggest human identification laboratory in the world,” Kathryne Bomberger, the head of the Sarajevo-based International Commission for …

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnian police have arrested a Bosnian Serb policeman suspected of taking part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, the office of the war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A day after a bomb attack outside the Danish embassy, Pakistani investigators questioned residents and tested the residue of the explosives used, while suspicion for the blast fell on al Qaeda or its allies. Monday’s suicide car bombing in the capital, Islamabad, followed a relative lull in …

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) – Five children died when a mortar shell they were playing with exploded in the southeastern city of Quetta, while a landmine killed four people in Pakistan’s Kurram tribal region on Tuesday, officials said.

GROZNY, Russia (Reuters) – Authorities in the Chechen capital have dismantled a memorial to the victims of Soviet repression, triggering public outrage in the southern Russian region. Workmen appeared without warning last week and dismantled the monument, erected by Chechen separatist leader Dzhokbar Dudayev who fought Russia’s armies in the …

SKOPJE (Reuters) – Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski scored an overwhelming election victory on Sunday but the violence that marred the poll may perpetuate divisions and delay the country’s progress towards European Union membership. Gruevski’s conservative VMRO-DPMNE party will have the healthiest majority in parliament in more than a decade, …

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (Reuters) – At least one missile was fired at a house next to a mosque in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, almost completely destroying the building but killing no one, a resident of the area said. Security officials said they had no information about any blasts in a village …

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Pakistan put its clocks forward an hour on Sunday while shops have been ordered to close early as the country struggles with an acute electricity shortage. Setting clocks forward by an hour, to six hours ahead of GMT, should enable the country to take advantage of an …

SKOPJE (Reuters) – Voting in Macedonia’s parliamentary election was halted for security reasons in an ethnic Albanian area in the north of the country, the electoral commission said on Sunday.