World Briefs

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

U.S. to help send troops in

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered the U.S. military to transport troops from Burundi into the Central African Republic to help quell the latest upsurge in violence there. Hagel approved the order after speaking with French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian last night from Afghanistan, where he was visiting troops. Le Drian asked the United States to help get African troops quickly into the country to prevent the violence there from spreading, said Pentagon spokesman Carl Woog. More than 400 people were killed in two days of violence last week between Christians and Muslims.

RUSSIAPutin's new press curbs

In what some see as a new move to limit free speech and secure more control over information, President Vladimir Putin dissolved a state news agency dating to the Soviet era yesterday and replaced it with a new body aimed at promoting the Kremlin's positions abroad. RIA Novosti, created as the Sovinformburo in June 1941, two days after Adolf Hitler's Nazi army attacked the Soviet Union, was replaced with a new body called Rossiya Segodnya, or Russia Today.

LIBYAUN to probe uranium store

An inspection team from the UN's nuclear agency will visit Libya to assess the thousands of barrels of yellowcake uranium that reportedly are being stored in a former military facility amid a "precarious" security situation in the country. The International Atomic Energy Agency team will arrive in Libya this month to "verify existing stockpiles and conditions of storage," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's special representative to Libya told the Security Council yesterday. Tarek Mitri said UN authorities have received information "indicating that 6,400 barrels are stored" under the control of an army battalion in a facility near Sabha, in the country's unstable desert south. "Yellowcake" is concentrated natural uranium and the foundation material in the process to make nuclear fuel.