World Digest
Poverty poses threat, finance leaders told

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"We have become preoccupied with security," World Bank President James Wolfensohn told delegates from 184 nations attending weekend sessions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, held behind concrete security barricades a few blocks from the White House.

"It is absolutely right that we fight terror," Wolfensohn said. "The danger is that in our preoccupation with immediate threats, we lose sight of the longer-term and equally urgent causes of our insecure world: poverty, frustration and lack of hope."

In talks Friday and Saturday, the United States and other leading industrial nations failed to resolve differences over debt reduction for poor countries and Iraq. They also expressed unease over the effect rising oil prices might have on world economies.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

President's party leads in elections

Brazilian voters gave a boost to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in nationwide municipal elections yesterday, according to initial results. It was the first electoral test for the leftist leader and his plans to remake Latin America's biggest country.

Lula's Workers' Party, which controls 204 city halls, has said it hopes to increase that to at least 400, with analysts saying he is likely to increase his strength across the country.

With 71 percent of the votes counted, the Workers' Party seemed certain to have won outright in six of 26 state capitals but came in second in the country's biggest and politically most important city, São Paulo.

The results tallied by the Superior Electoral Tribunal showed the Workers' Party with commanding leads in Belo Horizonte, Brazil's third-largest city, and in Recife, capital of Pernambuco state.

In Rio de Janeiro, the second-biggest city, incumbent Mayor Cesar Maia of the Liberal Front Party — in opposition to Lula on the federal level — was close to victory.
 
The real test will be the Workers' Party performance in the 95 cities with more than 150,000 voters, which account for 40 percent of Brazil's population.

Pau, France

Two Basque terrorism suspects arrested

Two of Spain's most-wanted terrorism suspects and at least 16 other alleged members of the armed Basque separatist group ETA were captured yesterday in a French-Spanish police operation, authorities said.

Mikel Albizu Iriarte, the suspected leader of ETA's political wing since 1993, and his partner, Soledad Iparraguirre, both 43, were arrested near Pau in southwestern France, according to French investigators and Spanish authorities.

France's government described the arrests as a turning point in the fight against the group suspected of carrying out bombings and assassinations in Spain for an independent Basque state since the 1960s.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried

Cambodia's legislature today approved a long-delayed agreement with the U.N. to put surviving Khmer Rouge leaders on trial for atrocities during their murderous rule in the late 1970s.

The deaths of some 1.7 million Cambodians from starvation, disease, overwork and execution are attributed to the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge. The movement's chief, Pol Pot, died in 1998. But several of his top lieutenants, aging and infirm, still live freely in Cambodia.

Also

A 9-year-old girl died of bird flu in Phetchabun province in northern Thailand, raising the country's death toll from the virus to 11, a Health Ministry official said today.

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has won Indonesia's presidential- election runoff with 60 percent of the vote while incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri took 39 percent. It was not clear if rounding of numbers accounted for the discrepancy in the percentage figure.