Britain, Ireland, U.S. on N. Ireland cease-fire panel

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Officials from Britain, Ireland and the United States were appointed Thursday to a new expert commission that will monitor Northern Ireland's myriad outlawed groups -- particularly the Irish Republican Army.

The British and Irish governments hope the Independent Monitoring Commission's reports on paramilitary activity will help build confidence, especially within Northern Ireland's Protestant majority, and pave the way for restoring the province's Catholic-Protestant power-sharing government.

That government -- the central accomplishment of the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 -- took power in December 1999 but fell apart last October amid rising Protestant hostility to working with the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party.

The four commissioners will be John Grieve, former national coordinator of the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist squad in London; Joseph Brosnan, former secretary of Ireland's Justice Department; Richard Kerr, former deputy director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency; and Lord John Alderdice, a moderate Belfast Protestant who was speaker of Northern Ireland's suspended local legislature.

Officials praise Bosnian Serb police for search

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- International officials praised previously uncooperative Bosnian Serb authorities Thursday for an attempt to arrest Radovan Karadzic, the top war crimes suspect in the former Yugoslavia.

Bosnian Serb police had long refused to hunt for Karadzic, who led the Bosnian Serbs throughout Bosnia's 1992-1995 war. But on Wednesday, police searched the home of Bishop Vasilije in the northeastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina after receiving a tip that Karadzic might be hiding there.

"It is a significant move forward toward the normalization in Bosnia-Herzegovina that the Bosnian Serb police are actually taking on these responsibilities," said Capt. Dale MacEachern, a spokesman for the NATO-led peacekeeping force.

Helicopter with 9 people crashes in south Russia

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia -- A helicopter with up to nine people on board crashed in southern Russia on Thursday, and its burnt-out wreck left little hope that anyone survived, officials said.

The Ka-32 helicopter -- which its owners said was delivering supplies to a construction site in the mountains -- was flying near the Black Sea resort city of Sochi when it went missing in the mountains in deep fog, said Alexander Lemeshev, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry's branch in southern Russia.

U.N. committee criticizes Canada over deportation

GENEVA -- Canada breached an international human rights treaty by sending a convicted killer back to death row in Pennsylvania, a United Nations body said Thursday.

The U.N. Human Rights Committee said Canadian authorities were wrong to deport Roger Judge in 1998 after he had served a separate 10-year term in Quebec for crimes committed in Canada.

Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, "for countries that have abolished the death penalty, there is an obligation not to expose a person to the real risk of its application," the committee said in a ruling published Thursday. Canada abolished the death penalty in 1972.

"By deporting Judge to the United States where he was under sentence of death, Canada established the crucial link in the causal chain that would make possible his execution," said the committee.

It said Canada failed to demand guarantees from U.S. authorities that Judge -- an American citizen -- would not be executed, and also broke the rules by sending him to the United States before he had time to lodge a final appeal against his expulsion.

-- From wire reports