Hong Kong elections signal shift in support

Hong Kong

Chinese national pride after the Olympics and growing distress over inflation combined to produce a shift in Hong Kong's legislative elections on Sunday. The pro-business Liberal Party lost seats while populists aligned with mainland China made gains with promises to introduce a minimum wage and reduce pollution.

Most of legislators favoring wider democracy kept their seats, despite a low turnout among the middle-class and upper-middle class voters who make up their main support.

With most of the vote counted, it appeared that they would retain enough seats to prevent the local government from working with central-government officials to rewrite the Basic Law, which has allowed Hong Kong special treatment since Britain relinquished control in 1997.

The current government of Donald Tsang, Hong Kong's chief executive, retained the support of a majority of the legislature after Sunday's elections, though the composition of that support shifted.

Manila, Philippines

11 die in slides caused by rains

Two landslides triggered by heavy rains buried more than 20 houses in a remote gold-mining village in the southern Philippines, leaving at least 11 people dead and 16 others missing, officials said Sunday.

Small stone houses and huts at the foot of the mountain village of Masara were destroyed Saturday by falling mud and rocks, killing six villagers and injuring 17 others. Another landslide struck the village early Sunday, killing five more people.

Luanda, Angola

Ruling party ahead in voting

Partial vote results released Sunday indicate Angola's ruling party is well ahead of a former rebel group in parliamentary elections.

The trend was unsurprising, given the stranglehold President Eduardo dos Santos's Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola party has had on politics since independence from Portugal in 1975.

As of Sunday night, some 3.5 million votes had been counted, but election officials could not say how many of the country's 8 million registered voters had cast ballots in an election marred by organizational problems.

They said the partial result indicated the ruling party — known as the MPLA for the initials of its name in Portuguese — had more than 80 percent of the vote, while the former rebel movement known as UNITA had about 10 percent. The rest was divided among several smaller opposition parties.

Paris

Anti-semitic attack injures 3 in Paris

Three young Parisian Jews were treated for fractures and bruises after what France's interior minister described Sunday as an anti-Semitic attack.

The three — ages 17 and 18 — were wearing skullcaps and walking in northern Paris on Saturday when another group of youths threw a walnut at them, the Union of Jewish Students of France said.

One of the Jewish youths approached the other group to ask for an explanation and was encircled and beaten, said Raphael Haddad, the student group's president. The other two Jewish youths went to help their friend and were also beaten, Haddad said.

France has western Europe's largest population of both Jews and Muslims. The nation faced a surge in anti-Semitic crime starting in 2000 amid a flare-up of Israeli-Palestinian tensions in the Middle East.

Also

China will launch its third manned space mission in late September, featuring its first-ever spacewalk, a state news agency said. The Shenzhou 7 launch is to take place between Sept. 25 and 30, the official Xinhua news agency reported late Saturday.

Seattle Times news services