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Bolivian vote could rewrite constitution

By TIMES WIRES
Published July 2, 2006

LA PAZ, Bolivia - Bolivia's first Indian president, Evo Morales, is hoping for a big win by his socialist allies in elections today to choose an assembly that will rewrite the constitution.

Morales is pushing for a radical overhaul of government and the economy. He has promised to "re-create Bolivia" with a constitution that would empower the majority Indian population, long a poor and politically marginalized underclass.

The main opposition party, Podemos, is making Morales' close relationship with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez the central issue, saying he is directing the constitution process from behind the scenes.

Bolivians will elect 255 delegates to the assembly, which will begin its work Aug. 6. They have up to a year to retool the constitution. Two-thirds of the body must approve the changes, which then must be endorsed in a nationwide referendum.

No polls have been conducted, but the president's Movement Toward Socialism party, or MAS, is favored to win a majority. Morales remains highly popular five months after he took office.

Critics claim that Morales will use the assembly to increase his power like Chavez, who held a constituent assembly in 1999 which concentrated executive power and hastened his re-election.

Perhaps the most divisive issue today is a separate ballot question asking whether voters favor shifting many executive and financial powers to the states from the central government.

Pope Benedict names four people to be named saints

VATICAN CITY - Four people, including a 19th-century woman who founded a religious community in Indiana and a Mexican bishop whose body reportedly did not decay after death, will be elevated to sainthood this fall, the Vatican said Saturday.

Pope Benedict XVI announced the Oct. 15 canonization of Mother Theodore Guerin, Bishop Rafael Guizar Valencia and two others during a ceremony in the Apostolic Palace that centered on the reading of decrees approving sainthood for beatified faithful.

Guerin was a French nun who left her homeland in 1840 for the-then frontier state of Indiana, where she founded St. Mary-of-the Woods College near Terre Haute within a year of her arrival. She died in 1856 at age 57.

Guizar Valencia, who also is being made a saint, was known in life for his piety and kindness to the poor. He was born April 26, 1878, and cared for the wounded and dying in Mexico's 1910-17 revolution. Named bishop of Veracruz, he was driven out of his diocese and was forced to live in hiding in Mexico City.

His body was exhumed in 1950, 12 years after his death, and witnesses said it had not decayed.

Also being canonized are two Italians: Filippo Smaldone, founder of the Salesian order of nuns known for his work with deaf-mutes; and Rosa Venerini, (1656-1728) who founded a religious teaching community.

Study finds fatal bird flu is deadlier for ages 10 to 19

Bird flu tends to kill younger people, much as the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic did, the World Health Organization said Friday as it released an analysis of more than 200 cases.

Deaths from the disease surged in the winter for the last three years, the report said, so a rise in fatal cases can be expected late this year even if the virus does not mutate into a form more easily transmitted.

Moreover, the report warned, the risk of the virus becoming more transmissible remains high "because of the widespread distribution of the H5N1 virus in poultry and the continued exposure of humans."

The median age of victims with confirmed cases was 20 years, the report said. The highest death rate - 73 percent - was among patients ages 10 to 19, while the overall fatality rate was 56 percent. This pattern has been noted before, but the new analysis takes in more cases; the typical age is drifting downward.

A high death rate among young adults echoes the pattern found in the 1918-19 epidemic, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Scientists contend that year's H1N1 virus was also a bird flu that mutated until it spread easily among humans. Although it was fatal to only about 2 percent of those who caught it, that was enough to kill between 40-million and 100-million people worldwide.

The annual flu, by contrast, tends to kill the very young and the very old, often from secondary bacterial pneumonia.

Thousands welcome freed Muslim back to Bosnia

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Cheering crowds on Saturday welcomed home the Muslim commander set free by the U.N. war crimes tribunal after his conviction for failing to prevent murder and torture of Serb captives.

Naser Oric, 39, was released by the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, on Friday after a three-year trial. Judges found him guilty of failing to prevent murder and torture of Serb captives but gave him a lenient two-year sentence and ordered his immediate release, taking into account his time in custody.

Oric had commanded troops defending the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, where a 1995 Serb assault ended with the massacre of as many as 8,000 men and boys in a week. One of the Serb commanders found responsible, Radoslav Krstic, has already been sentenced to 40 years.

Several thousand people gathered at Sarajevo's airport to greet Oric; most were survivors of Europe's worst civilian massacre since the Holocaust.

In Belgrade, Serbian officials expressed outrage over the sentence.

"The verdict brings into question the credibility of the (Hague) court," said Aleksandar Simic, an adviser to Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica.

[Last modified July 2, 2006, 02:31:12]