Serbian war crime

THE HAGUE: Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has asked the UN war crimes tribunal to delay his trial by 10 months to give him time to review nearly 1 million pages of prosecution evidence. In a submission released on Friday, Karadzic said it would take more than 15,000 hours for a normal person to read the 72,634 prosecution documents. — AP

63 dead in earthquake

JAKARTA: An official says Indonesian rescue workers have pulled several more bodies from the rubble of a landslide, lifting the death toll from a powerful earthquake to 63. Disaster Management Agency spokesman Priyadi Kardono says the number of houses destroyed or damaged in Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Java has jumped to more than 87,000. Two dozen bodies have been recovered from Cikangkareng village in the badly hit district of Cianjur, where several dozen people are still missing after the landslide. — AP

Comoran crash probe

PARIS: A Comoran investigator says the black boxes from a Yemenia Airways flight that crashed into the Indian Ocean in June are damaged. Mohamed Ali Abdou says investigators are still trying to recover the information held in the flight’s black boxes. Experts began examining the boxes from the Airbus 310 plane on Monday. In a statement on Friday, Ali Abdou says it is still unknown what caused the crash. Ali Abdou is assisting French experts from the BEA aviation accident agency. The French agency made no statement Friday.

The boxes were fished out of deep waters northwest of Grand Comoros island late last month by underwater robots. Yemenia Flight 626 from Paris to Moroni, the capital of Comoros, plunged into the ocean June 30, killing 152 people. — AP

Supreme Leader’s plea

Tehran: A top official said on Friday Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had urged MPs to approve President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cabinet, the latest sign of open backing for the hardliner from Iran’s powerful spiritual guide. The ISNA news agency quoted Mohammad Reza Bahonar, deputy speaker of parliament, as saying that if Khamenei had not backed the proposed line-up, eight or nine nominees would have been rejected in Thursday’s confidence vote.

“The message of the leader played a big role,” Bahonar said. The conservative-dominated parliament approved 18 out of 21 members of the proposed cabinet. — AFP