Around the world

ROME — Italy’s government issued an emergency decree Friday to prevent a woman who has been in a vegetative state for 17 years from having her feeding tubes disconnected, but the president said he wouldn’t sign it.

The family of Eluana Englaro, 38, vowed to go ahead and disconnect the tubes, and her nutritional intake was being reduced. She has been in a vegetative state since a 1992 car crash and two years later doctors said her condition was irreversible.

Her father won a protracted court battle to disconnect her feeding tube, which he said had been her wish, but the right-to-die debate has divided Italy and prompted direct appeals by the Vatican in this overwhelmingly Catholic nation to keep Englaro alive.

Russia allows transit of U.S. military supplies

MOSCOW — Russia granted transit rights Friday to non-lethal U.S. military supplies headed to Afghanistan but only after apparently pressuring a former Soviet state to close an air base leased to the Americans.

The signal from Moscow: Russia is willing to help on Afghanistan, but only on the Kremlin’s terms.

Kyrgyzstan announced the closure of the Manas air base but American officials suspect that Russia was behind the decision, having long been irritated by the U.S presence in central Asia.

The Russian decision to let U.S. supplies cross its territory opened another route to those through Pakistan now threatened by militant attacks, but U.S. officials were still left scrambling for alternatives to Manas.

Ships collide in Antarctic whaling clash

SYDNEY — A group of radical anti-whaling activists said they were pelted with bloody chunks of whale meat and blubber after their boat collided Friday with a Japanese whaling vessel in a dramatic Antarctic Ocean clash Japan condemned as "unforgivable.”

It was the second battle this week between the whalers and their foes. No one was injured, but the skirmishes mark the resumption of potentially life-threatening run-ins in a contentious fight that has become an annual fixture in the remote, icy and dangerous waters at the bottom of the world.

"The situation down here is getting very, very chaotic and very aggressive,” activist Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s vessel, told The Associated Press on Friday by satellite phone.

The clashes come as diplomatic efforts to resolve the controversy surrounding Japan’s scientific whaling program appear to have stalled.