WASHINGTON: The United States has decided to slap ``sweeping'' economic sanctions including a trade embargo on Sudan, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said.

``The United States has imposed sweeping new economic sanctions against the government of Sudan because of its continued sponsorship of international terror, its effort to destabilize neighboring countries, and its abysmal record on human rights, including religious persecution,'' she said.

Hussein triumphs

AMMAN: Tribal leaders loyal to King Hussein won an overwhelming majority on Wednesday in parliamentary elections that were spurned by most voters and by the main Opposition Islamic Party.

Contesting as Independents but united in their support for the monarch, the tribal chiefs, many of them centrists, secured 66 seats. The combined strength of 68 gives the royalists more than two-thirds majority in the 80-member lower house of parliament.

Kenya change

NAIROBI: Kenyan legislators voted overwhelmingly today to amend the Constitution, officially making the country a multiparty democracy and giving opposition parties greater representation on the electoral commission. President Daniel Arap Moi, 73, who will seek a fifth, five-year term, has not yet set a date for the elections. Under the constitution, they must be held by December 31.

Cartel busted

BOGOTA: Colombia's police and agents of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) dismantled an international drug cartel and arrested 16 people. The director-general of Colombia's national police said that as part of the operation code-named `Blue Ice', Colombian and DEA agents managed to break through an organisation specialised in cocaine and heroine trade on Tuesday.The joint Blue Ice operation concluded after several raids in Cali, Santa Fe De Bogota, Cucuta and Bucuramanga in Colombia as well as in New Jersey and New York .

Typhoon Linda

PHNOM PENH: Typhoon Linda, which battered fishing and cargo vessels off Cambodia's southern coast over the weekend, has left at least 23 people dead and 200 missing.

At least 45 boats, most of them fishing vessels, capsized in the Gulf of Thailand when the severe tropical storm hit late Saturday and continued through Monday.

France choked

PARIS: France's top political leaders stepped into the fray on Tuesday in the nation's worsening trucker's strike, hoping to avoid the paralysis that a long strike would bring to the country. With some 160 blockades in place by Tuesday evening, striking truckers were tying up commerce, choking off the fuel supply in many regions and blocking traffic through the channel tunnel on the second full day of the walkout.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.