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Guatemala rejects former dictator

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala - The people of Guatemala, long plagued by war, corruption and poverty, have sent their former dictator into political retirement, and perhaps to a war crimes court, with a resounding vote against him, presidential election returns showed Monday.

With about two-thirds of the vote counted, the old dictator, retired Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, was trailing badly behind the former mayor of Guatemala City, Oscar Berger, 57, a wealthy and conservative businessman, and Alvaro Colom, 52, a textile executive. Berger and Colom face a runoff election Dec. 28.

WARSAW - A Polish woman credited with saving about 2,500 children during the Holocaust was awarded Poland's highest order Monday.

Irena Sendler, 93, "risked her own life to rescue the lives of other people during the most brutal of wars," President Aleksander Kwasniewski said in giving her the White Eagle Order.

"Thanks to people like you we believe that good can triumph, that a fragile woman is capable of defeating the greatest tyrants," Kwasniewski said at a home for the elderly where Sendler has lived since last year.

Sendler was head of the children's section in the Polish underground movement Zegota, which rescued Jews during World War II. Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being executed along with relatives.

Posing as a nurse, Sendler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and convinced parents that their children had better chances of survival outside its walls. She and 20 helpers smuggled children out of the ghetto in 1942 and 1943 and placed them with Polish families.

She wrote children's names on slips of paper and buried them in a yard to help locate their parents after the war. The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused to reveal the names despite severe beatings.

VIENNA - A confidential U.N. nuclear agency report has found "no evidence" to back U.S. claims that Iran tried to make atomic arms, but it cannot rule out the possibility because of past coverups by Tehran, the Associated Press quoted unnamed diplomats as saying Monday. Citing the report by the head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the diplomats said the 29-page document faults Iran for not telling the truth in the past about its nuclear programs.

In Moscow, a top Iranian official said his country is temporarily halting its uranium enrichment program and has agreed to tougher U.N. inspections.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Monday it would judge the new Palestinian Cabinet on whether it uproots terrorists and not on its ties to Yasser Arafat.

The formation of the new Cabinet leaves Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority, in control of security forces. The Bush administration wanted them placed under the interior minister in Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia's Cabinet, but Arafat filled that post with a hand-picked confidant, Hakam Balawi.