Friday Briefs

Chile sets aside 58,000 square miles for marine reserve

Chile established an enormous marine reserve near Easter Island this week that will be off-limits to fishing and other extractive activities, providing a haven for vulnerable species such as sharks and lobsters.

The new Sala y Gomez Marine Park will cover nearly 58,000 square miles around the uninhabited island of the same name, which is in the Pacific Ocean.

Scientists and conservationists began lobbying for such a reserve after an expedition to the island in March found abundant marine life there. The neighboring waters around Easter Island, by contrast, are not protected from fishing and have been depleted.

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said the reserve, along with two other protected areas on land, will preserve "natural landscapes, biodiversity and species of flora and fauna that are in many cases unique in the world."

The marine park, roughly the size of Greece, expands Chile's protected marine area more than 100-fold, to 4.4 percent of its waters. Alex Munoz, executive director of the advocacy group Oceana in Chile and South America, said environmentalists will push for more "no-take" reserves.

Pakistan crossing remains shut

Pakistan kept shut its main border crossing used to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan a day after the United States apologized for killing three Pakistani soldiers in the air strike that triggered the transit point's closure.

At least 2,500 trucks are backed up waiting for permission to enter Afghanistan, Khawaja Muhammad Khan, president of the nationwide truckers body, said by phone from Peshawar, the main city in Pakistan's northwest. Khan Pasand Khan, a government official in Khyber Agency, confirmed there had been no order to allow trucks and fuel tankers, dozens of which were set ablaze by militants in the past week, to cross the Torkham border post.

Pakistan closed the Khyber Pass route into Afghanistan after the Sept. 30 attack by U.S. helicopters, which the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson Wednesday called a "terrible accident." Taliban guerrillas claimed responsibility for recent strikes on tankers parked along the route to Torkham, through which flow most of the 580 truckloads per day of supplies and fuel contracted by NATO.

A joint U.S.-Pakistani investigation established that the U.S. helicopters mistook the Pakistani Frontier Scouts for insurgents, the U.S. embassy in Kabul said in a statement. Pakistan's ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, has linked the investigation to the border supply route being re-opened.

Army General David Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, offered condolences to the families of those killed and wounded and said the coalition "deeply" regrets the loss of life.

Ex-detainee sues U.S., saying captors tortured him

A Syrian man released from the prison at Guantanamo Bay last year sued the U.S. military this week, saying he was the victim of a "Kafkaesque nightmare" in which he was tortured by al-Qaida after being accused of being U.S. spy, liberated, then tortured by the Americans, who held him for seven more years by mistake.

Abdul Rahim Abdul Razak al-Janko, 32, who has been resettled outside the United States, filed suit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, the court that ordered his release in June 2009. At the time, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon concluded that the U.S. government's case for holding Janko "defies common sense."

Janko was tortured by al-Qaida and imprisoned by the Taliban for 18 months on suspicion of being a spy for the United States or Israel. Leon found no evidence that the Syrian was loyal to either group.

Janko says that he was urinated on by his American captors, slapped, threatened with loss of fingernails, and exposed to sleep deprivation, extreme cold and stress positions.

Twenty-six current and former top U.S. military officials are named in the suit, which seeks damages and alleges violations of Janko's rights under the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions and a U.S. law that allows non-Americans to sue for violations of the law of nations.