World briefs

LONDON – A former British resident who claims he was tortured at a covert CIA site in Morocco was freed from Guantanamo after nearly seven years in U.S. captivity without facing trial.

Binyam Mohamed, the first Guantanamo prisoner released since President Barack Obama took office, returned Monday to a British military base and was expected to be out of custody within hours. The Ethiopian's case has raised questions about torture and secrecy for the British and U.S. governments.

TROLL RESEARCH STATION, Antarctica – A parka-clad band of environment ministers landed in this remote corner of the icy continent on Monday, in the final days of an intense season of climate research, to learn more about how a melting Antarctica may endanger the planet.

Representatives from more than a dozen nations, including the U.S., China, Britain and Russia, were to rendezvous at a Norwegian research station with American and Norwegian scientists coming in on the last leg of a 1,400-mile (2,300-kilometer), two-month trek over the ice from the South Pole.

MUMBAI, India – Children broke into Bollywood dance numbers and crowds cheered in the narrow lanes of a teeming Mumbai slum on Monday as their hometown heroes nabbed Hollywood's highest honors.

Two of the child actors in "Slumdog Millionaire" were plucked from a desperately poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Mumbai to star in the rags-to-riches tale that stormed the Academy Awards.

GENEVA – The European Union has made a fresh proposal to Latin American banana producers in a bid to end a decade-old dispute over the bloc's banana import policies, sources close to the WTO said Monday.

In the fresh proposal, the EU has proposed lowering its taxes on banana imports from Latin American countries to 114 euros per tonne by 2019, instead of 2016, prompting swift criticism from the producer nations.

Banana imports to the EU from Latin America are currently subject to taxes of 176 euros per tonne, while imports from mostly poor former European colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific region enter the bloc tariff-free.

As a result, Latin American exporters have been pushing for this barrier to be lowered.

The latest proposal would envisage lowered taxes but levied three years later than the 2016 deadline Brussels offered last July in a proposal made on the sidelines of negotiations between ministers for a world trade liberalization deal. However, Latin-American producers want the EU to honour the July agreement.