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Japan's leader backtracks

TOKYO - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe today said there was no evidence Japan coerced Asian women into working as sex slaves during World War II, backtracking from a landmark 1993 statement in which the Japanese government acknowledged it set up and ran brothels for its troops.

Abe's comments came as a group of ruling party lawmakers urged the government to revise the 1993 statement, which states that Japan's wartime military used coercion to force women into brothels.

Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from Korea, China and the Philippines were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers in brothels run by the military government as so-called "comfort girls" during the war. Japanese leaders have repeatedly apologized, including Junichiro Koizumi when he was prime minister in 2001.

Abe's comments are likely to provoke a strong reaction from South Korea, China and the Philippines.

Prescription abuse drives lethal market, warns group

VIENNA, Austria - Abuse of prescription drugs is about to exceed the use of illicit street narcotics worldwide, and the shift has spawned a lethal new trade in counterfeit painkillers, sedatives and other medicines potent enough to kill, a global watchdog has warned.

Prescription drug abuse already has outstripped traditional illegal drugs such as heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy in parts of Europe, Africa and South Asia, the U.N.-affiliated International Narcotics Control Board said in its annual report for 2006.

In the United States alone, the abuse of painkillers, stimulants, tranquilizers and other prescription medications has gone beyond "practically all illicit drugs with the exception of cannabis," with users increasingly turning to them first, the Vienna group said.

Unregulated markets in many countries make it easy for traffickers to peddle a wide variety of counterfeit drugs using courier services, the mail and the Internet.

"Gains over the past years in international drug control may be seriously undermined by this ominous development, if it remains unchecked," Narcotics Control Board President Philip Emafo said.

Discount medications that seem to be authentic often turn out to be powerful knockoffs concocted from recipes posted on the Web, he added Wednesday.

N. Korea vows to disarm

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea's No. 2 leader pledged his country's commitment to giving up its nuclear program amid intensifying diplomacy aimed at implementing Pyongyang's pledge to disarm.

"The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is the dying wish" of the country's late founding president Kim Il Sung, Kim Yong Nam said today in Pyongyang during a visit from a high-level South Korean delegation.

The North "will make efforts to realize it," he said.

Report: Bin Laden alive

LONDON - A senior Taliban commander says Osama bin Laden is alive and in contact with leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents, according to an interview aired on British television.

Mullah Dadullah said he had not met bin Laden since the fall of the Taliban regime after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but said "we know he's still alive."

The authenticity of the information could not be confirmed. The television station did not say how it had obtained the footage.

U.S. copter lands `hard'

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa surveillance helicopter made a "hard landing" in northern Iraq, but the military said the problem was mechanical and not the result of hostile fire.

The two pilots were injured today and evacuated to an American military hospital in Kirkuk, about 180 miles north of Baghdad, the military said in a statement. There was no word on the extent of the pilots' injuries.

Afghan blast kills three

KABUL, Afghanistan - A roadside bomb in western Afghanistan left three civilians dead and 48 wounded, including 10 children, officials said.

Today's blast targeted a passing police vehicle in the city of Farah, said Mohammad Qasem Bayan, the chief of the public health department for the Farah province.

The attack happened in the city center near a school, Bayan said.

The police vehicle was slightly damaged and two officers also were wounded, said Zemeri Bashary, a spokesman for the ministry of interior.

Israelis back in Nablus

NABLUS, West Bank - Israel clamped down on this West Bank city for the second time in a week, confining tens of thousands of people to their homes as troops moved house to house in search of wanted militants.

Also on Wednesday, undercover troops in a black car shot and killed three militants in a parking lot in nearby Jenin, including the chief spokesman for the Islamic Jihad group, Palestinian officials said.

The Israeli army has been operating in Nablus, the West Bank's commercial center, since the weekend. Forces briefly withdrew Tuesday, but dozens of jeeps backed by bulldozers moved back in at dawn.

In Jenin, the Israeli undercover troops killed three Islamic Jihad gunmen, witnesses said.