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World in brief

Fujimori's daughter wins most votes for Peru's Congress

By Wire services
Published April 14, 2006

LIMA, Peru - Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, easily won more votes than any of the other 2,600 candidates for Congress in Sunday's election.

"People are grateful to my father and put their thanks in me," she said. "People love my father a lot."

That may be, but Alberto Fujimori is wanted in Peru on more than a dozen charges stemming from his heavy-handed presidency from 1990 to 2000. The Peruvian government is seeking to extradite him from Chile, where he has been jailed since an apparent attempt in November to return to Peru.

Keiko Fujimori, 30, blames his troubles on his imprisoned spymaster, Vladimiro Montesinos, and believes he will return to Peru as an exonerated man, in time to run for the next presidential election in 2011.

With Keiko Fujimori leading the slate, Fujimori's party, Alliance for the Future, won 14 seats in the 120-member unicameral Congress. Ollanta Humala's Peru Union Party won the most seats, about 40, followed by Alan Garcia's Apra Party with 38 and Lourdes Flores' National Unity party with 20. Smaller parties won the remaining seats.

Humala led the presidential vote but will face a runoff against Garcia or Flores. Martha Chavez, the presidential candidate for Fujimori's party, garnered only 7 percent of the vote.

TORONTO - Federal officials Thursday tested a British Columbia dairy cow suspected of contracting mad cow disease, potentially bad news for Canadian cattle ranchers still recovering from a two-year ban on their beef in the United States.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said it was trying to confirm whether it is a new case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

In humans, eating meat products contaminated with BSE has been linked to more than 150 deaths, mostly in Britain, from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and fatal nerve disease.

The cow was identified on a Fraser Valley farm through the national surveillance program. It would be the fifth case in Canada since May 2003, when the U.S. border was closed to Canadian beef after the sick cows were detected in Canada.

In a written statement, the inspection agency said the case would have no bearing on the safety of Canadian beef if the cow is found to be positive, as no part of the animal entered the human food or animal feed systems.

A cow from an Alberta farm tested positive for the disease in January.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Some 2,500 Afghan and U.S.-led coalition troops pushed ahead with a huge offensive in Afghanistan's eastern mountains Thursday to flush out rebels believed hiding there, officials said.

Backed up by military aircraft, the forces have killed six insurgents since the operation started Tuesday, but there has been no major battle, Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi said.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Mike Cody confirmed the operation in Kunar province's Pech River Valley was going on Thursday and was the biggest offensive this year. He gave no other details.

Taliban-led rebels have stepped up attacks across Afghanistan in the past year, raising concerns for this country's future.

WASHINGTON - Citing the goal of a lasting Mideast peace, President Bush on Thursday waived legislative restrictions to allow the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority to keep its Washington office open for at least six months.

The United States has designated Hamas a terrorist organization, and Hamas' victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections in January resulted in a no-contact policy with the Palestinian Cabinet and its ministries.

Representation of the Palestinian Authority in Washington, however, remains a useful channel of communication to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who remains committed to the peace process and is still chairman of the authority, said White House spokesman Ken Lisaius.

The Palestinian Authority office in Washington is not an embassy and is not provided immunities or privileges accorded to other diplomatic missions.

ROME - Italian politics were in turmoil Thursday as judges began tallying tens of thousands of contested ballots.

The routine examination of ambiguously marked ballots is unlikely to tip the election in the lower Chamber of Deputies to right-wing media mogul Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose party appears to have narrowly lost to center-left leader Romano Prodi.

The tally could, however, shift the Senate to Berlusconi's coalition, giving him effective control of the upper house. That outcome, while unlikely, would divide the Parliament between the two candidates and impede Prodi from forming a government, leaving Italy in political deadlock.

Berlusconi continues to refuse to accept Prodi's win and to demand a full recount, which Italian law does not allow.

PARIS - The upper house of France's Parliament on Thursday approved a revision of a youth job law that brought thousands of students and union members into the streets.

In another key sign that the 2-month-old crisis was winding down, police dismantled metal barricades outside the prestigious Sorbonne University in Paris. The barricades were erected after angry students occupied for several days in mid March.

The Senate voted 158-123 in favor of the new measure. The lower house approved it a day earlier. The measure now goes to President Jacques Chirac, who has 15 days to sign it into law, and he is widely expected to do so.

[Last modified April 14, 2006, 01:58:12]