World
Throwing a challenge back at President Bush, Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat will seek reelection in a new vote next January, a senior aide said. But a colleague disputed the assertion, saying "I never heard this [from Arafat]" The election, in which a new parliament also will be chosen, will be held between the 10th and 20th. Bush, in his landmark speech Monday, called for the ouster of the current Palestinian leadership.
Bush and some other Group of Eight (G-8) leaders apparently were not in agreement on key provisions of his proposal for Palestinian statehood. At the G-8 annual meeting near Calgary, Alberta, host Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada declined to support Bush's demand for the ouster of Arafat. And British news media were reporting a "rift" between Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair that was deemed sufficiently major to cause a private meeting on the sidelines of the G-8 summit.
A four-hour gunfight erupted in Pakistan's volatile North West Frontier Province as government troops tried to raid a suspected Al Qaeda hideout. Reports said 10 soldiers and two "foreign terrorists" were killed. US special forces were nearby at the time but did not take part in the battle, and Pakistani officials disputed claims that FBI agents had been involved. The area is six miles from the Afghanistan border, and local tribesmen apparently provided the militants with shelter.
Results of a comprehensive medical checkup that could determine whether Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit remains in office were being awaited in Turkey. A report that he's too ill to continue could cause the collapse of his coalition government and new economic uncertainty, analysts said. Ecevit hasn't been to his office in almost two months, but he rejects calls for his resignation, some from within his own party. In the meantime, the lira has tumbled in value from 1.3 million against the US dollar to 1.6 million.
So many people turned out to see democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi on her first visit to Myanmar's No. 2 city since 1989 that it took 15 minutes to walk from her car to the local offices of her National League for Democracy. The trip to Mandalay from Yangon, the capital, was seen as a key test of her new freedom since being released from house arrest by the ruling military junta last month. In September 2000, after six years of house arrest, she attempted to go to Mandalay by train but was rearrested.
Weeks of heavy rains have caused flooding that threatens to equal China's worst in half a century, disaster relief officials said. The Xinhua news agency put the number of deaths to date at 596, with more than 300 others reported missing and 1.4 million people evacuated from their homes as a precaution. In 1998, China's flooding season was blamed for more than 4,000 deaths.
