World briefs

KENYA: Eager voters line up at polls

Enthusiastic voters, many wrapped in colorful traditional blankets, waited for hours Wednesday to cast ballots on a new constitution that could spell a new era for Kenya - curtailing the president's enormous powers and giving citizens a bill of rights. With memories fresh of the ethnically charged violence that left more than 1,000 people dead following the disputed 2007 election, police were deployed en masse across the country. Returns from about 30 percent of the polling stations showed the "yes" camp taking an early lead.

IRAN: Nation obtains missile systems

Iran has obtained four S-300 surface-to-air missile systems despite Russia's refusal to deliver them to Tehran under a valid contract, a semiofficial Iranian news agency claimed Wednesday. The Fars news agency, which has ties to the country's most powerful military force, the Revolutionary Guard, said Iran received two S-300s from Belarus and two others from another unspecified source. Fars didn't elaborate, and there was no official confirmation of the report. Russia signed a 2007 contract to sell the S-300s, but so far has not delivered.

GERMANY: Historian at trial of accused Nazi

A U.S. military historian Wednesday testified in the trial of the retired Ohio autoworker accused of being a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp and expressed doubt about John Demjanjuk's account of his whereabouts in the last years of World War II. Bruce W. Menning told the Munich state court Wednesday that Demjanjuk's claim he went to the Austrian city of Graz late in 1944 to join a Ukrainian force fighting the Soviets under German command was "implausible" as the group only came through the Austrian city in March 1945. But defense attorney Ulrich Busch rejected Menning's testimony, saying his account of historical events was partly wrong.

BRITAIN: Food supply system under fire

News that meat and milk from the offspring of cloned cattle - illegal to sell here without proper authorization - may have made their way into the food chain has set hands wringing in Britain, a country still sensitive from its experience with mad cow disease. And while scientists made the rounds of breakfast TV shows to assure consumers that the products were safe, the flap illustrates what industry-watchers say are the pressures and regulatory loopholes pushing meat taken from the progeny of clones and genetically engineered foods into the European market, whether citizens like it or not - or even know about it.