China opposes military acts on peninsula
BEIJING, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- China says it opposes military acts in the Korean Peninsula but urged North Korea, which conducted a nuclear test, to refrain from aggravating the issue.
"China opposes any military action to resolve the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue," a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman told the official Xinhua news agency.
The spokesman also said North Korea "should refrain from any action that may aggravate the Korean Peninsula situation," and asked that country to return to the six-party talks that include China, Russia, the United States, Japan and the two Koreas.
The spokesman said, "We believe that the denuclearization and the maintaining of peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula best serve the interests of all parties."
NKorea issues warnings to Japan
PYONGYANG, North Korea, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- A senior North Korean diplomat says his country will take countermeasures against new sanctions imposed by Japan in response to his country's nuclear test.
Speaking to Japan's Kyodo news agency, Song Il Ho, North Korea's ambassador in charge of diplomatic normalization talks with Japan, said, "We will take strong countermeasures. The specific contents will become clear if you keep watching. We never speak empty words."
He also said his country is trying to assess what plans Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has about relations with it.
Japan's additional economic sanctions against North Korea will include bans on all imports and on North Korean ships from entering Japanese ports.
Earlier, in response to North Korea's missile tests in July, Japan banned remittances to 15 entities suspected of links to North Korean weapons of mass destruction programs.
On the resumption of the stalled talks to normalize relations between Japan and North Korea, Song told Kyodo he felt it could be inappropriate to do so with the sanctions in place.
160 bodies exhumed from Bosnia mass grave
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- Experts working at a mass grave have exhumed the remains of 160 people killed at the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
Forensic teams uncovered 96 complete skeletons and 64 incomplete ones in the grave at Snagovo, close to the border with Serbia, Belgrade's Beta news agency reported Thursday.
Prosecutors for war crimes in the northern Bosnian town of Tuzla said the skeletons were the remains of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica, tortured and killed at the eastern Bosnian town of Zvornik on the Drina River.
Along with the skeletons, experts found blindfolds, many bullet shells, clothes and a number of personal documents.
The U.N. tribunal in The Hague has been seeking Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, including the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995.
More than 7,000 bodies of people, killed during the ethnic war in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992-95, have been exhumed from mass graves.
Report: U.S. intel on N. Korea in disarray
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- As many as 10 recent U.S. intelligence reports and estimates on North Korea's nuclear abilities were wrong, The Washington Times reported Thursday.
Bush administration officials who did not want to be identified told the newspaper the failures included some reports that cast doubts on whether Pyongyang's uranium enrichment posed an immediate threat and whether the country could actually produce a useful bomb.
Other recent reports said Pyongyang was bluffing a week and a half ago when it announced plans to conduct an underground nuclear test, the newspaper said. Monday, there was a large explosion in North Korea, but it remains unknown if it was atomic or conventional.
The sources said the intelligence community was also caught off guard when North Korea fired its July 4 salvo of seven missiles.
Carl Kropf, a spokesman for Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, dismissed the allegations of wrong or investigated too late.
"That is absolutely wrong, that we were not tracking this issue for some period of time," Kropf told the newspaper.
Drug class not effective for Alzheimer's
BETHESDA, Md., Oct. 12 (UPI) -- A study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., says antipsychotic drugs used to treat Alzheimer's patients are mostly ineffective.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that the drugs benefit very few patients with the degenerative illness, and the helpful effects are canceled out by frequent side effects, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
The researchers studied 421 Alzheimer's patients who suffered from disabling agitation, delusions or hallucinations. The patients were randomly assigned a placebo or one of three antipsychotic drugs -- Zyprexa from Eli Lilly; Seroquel from AstraZeneca; and Risperdal from Janssen Pharmaceutical, The New York Times reported.
Lead study author Lon Schneider, a professor of psychiatry, neurology and gerontology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, said "there were no significant differences between the groups with regard to improvement" after 12 weeks of treatment, the Times said.
Spokesmen for the three pharmaceutical manufacturers said the drugs were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for Alzheimer's use and the companies did not recommend them for that function.
