EAST AFRICA

CLANS INAUGURATE TRANSITIONAL PARLIAMENT

NAIROBI, Kenya – Somalia inaugurated a transitional parliament yesterday, taking an important first step toward forming a new government for the devastated country even as rivalries continue to plague a peace process still far from complete.

Newly chosen members of the 275-member assembly took their oaths in a ceremony attended by regional diplomats and U.N. officials, who promised to support the latest of more than a dozen attempts to restore order to the Horn of Africa nation.

Leaders of Somalia’s major clans have been meeting in Kenya since October 2002 in an attempt to end 13 years of fighting. They hope to establish the first effective central government since 1991, when warlords ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre before turning on each other, plunging the country into chaos.

As traditional Somali dancers and singers performed, former enemies took their oaths yesterday and celebrated the Parliament’s first official meeting.

Participants in the peace process – funded by the European Union, the United Nations, Somalia’s neighbors, and China – must still find a way to disarm the gunmen who control Somalia. But there was optimism yesterday that at last there was a forum to discuss the issue.

– Associated Press

EASTERN EUROPE

VIOLENCE, CHARGES OF FRAUD IN ELECTION

GROZNY, Russia – Chechens battered by five years of war, terrorism, and misery voted yesterday for a president in an election that the Russian government portrayed as step toward stability, though critics cried fraud in a ballot that appeared certain to put a Kremlin-favorite in office. Little more than two hours after polls closed, acting Chechen president Sergei Abramov said preliminary results showed Major General Alu Alkhanov, the republic’s top police official and the Russian government’s new choice, had already passed the 50% mark needed to win, the Interfax news agency reported.

Violence shadowed the balloting. A man blew himself up near a polling station after trying to enter it carrying a package, officials said. Worries about terrorism were stoked by the crashes of two Russian airliners five days before the election; officials said traces of explosives were found in the wreckage, and there are suspicions two Chechen women conducted the suicide attacks.

Seven candidates contended to replace the previous Kremlin-backed Chechen president, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May. But six were seen as having little chance against General Alkhanov. A representative of Movsur Khamidov, another candidate, said he found ballot boxes at a polling place stuffed shortly after the station opened. In the village of Tolstoy-Yurt, an Associated Press photographer reported seeing two incidents of people casting multiple ballots. At one polling station in Grozny, a man was killed in an explosion after he approached with a suspicious package. When guards asked to see it, he ran, the package exploded and the man was killed, elections commission head Abdul-Kerim Arsakhanov said on Russian NTV television.

– Associated Press

HEALTH

PILL MAY CUT OBESIT Y AND SMOKING

MUNICH, Germany – A once-a-day pill that helps people to lose weight and stop smoking could be available within two years, scientists said yesterday. The drug, rimonabant, works on a newly discovered system in the brain that is involved in motivation and the control of appetite as well as the urge to smoke. Latest results of a year-long study, issued at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich yesterday, show that 40 to 45% of overweight and obese people in the trial lost 10% of their weight.

The drug also reduced harmful blood fats and the metabolic syndrome, which leads to diabetes. Being overweight, smoking, and diabetes are all factors in heart disease. The drug, which will be sold under the trade name Acomplia, works on the endocannabinoid system in the brain, which researchers believe plays a vital role in how the body regulates appetite.

That line of research began when scientists noted that people who smoked cannabis often experienced sharp increases in appetite. The researchers found that when the endocannabinoid system was over-activated, appetite and the desire to smoke increased. Eating too much stimulated that reaction, which in turn increased the body’s desire to eat more. The drug blocks receptors in the endocannabinoid system, working both on cells in the brain and on fat cells.

– The Daily Telegraph

EAST ASIA

FISCHER FEARS ‘CONVICTION, PRISON, TORTURE AND MURDER’

Bobby Fischer, the American former world chess champion, fears that he will be “tried, convicted, sentenced, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered” when Japan deports him to America. In a characteristically eccentric interview with a Philippines radio station, Mr. Fischer said Japan, his home for the past three years, was guilty of a “vicious betrayal” after he lost his legal battle against deportation last week. He faces a 10-year prison sentence in the United States for violating international sanctions in 1992 by playing a chess game in the former Yugoslavia against his long-time Russian rival, Boris Spassky. Mr. Fischer, 61, has been held in a Tokyo jail for six weeks after immigration officers at Narita airport seized his passport, which had been revoked by American authorities.

“They are preparing to deport me to the U.S. to be murdered,” Mr. Fischer told Bombo Radyo in a rambling telephone interview. “They stabbed me in the back.

“I spent $350,000 here in Japan. I gave them my time, I gave them my money, spent a fortune going to Japanese mineral baths. But just one call from the U.S. embassy and they are sending me to prison in the U.S. to die.” Mr. Fischer believes that he is being persecuted on political grounds. He is renowned for his virulent anti-Semitic and anti-American outbursts, most notoriously praising the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on the evening of September 11, 2001.

– The Daily Telegraph

NORTH AMERICA

FORMER GUATEMALAN PRESIDENT LIVING IN CITY HE FLED

MEXICO CITY – The former Guatemalan president, Alfonso Portillo – suspected of corruption at home – is living and working part-time in the same Mexican city he fled two decades ago to avoid arrest on murder charges, his close associates said yesterday.

Nine months after he disappeared from Guatemala under a cloud of allegations, Mr. Portillo is living in both Mexico City and in Chilpancingo, 130 miles south of the capital, officials close to the former president said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Mr. Portillo left office January 14 and fled to Mexico on a tourist visa a month after he was implicated in an alleged corruption scandal in Guatemala. His whereabouts were unknown until now, although Mexican immigration officials announced this month they had granted him a one-year work visa. Those officials refused to say where he would be working and living.

But in an exclusive interview, Francisco Bahena, owner of Materiales Bahena, said he had hired Mr. Portillo as a financial adviser because the two were old friends. The company is located in Chilpancingo. Mr. Portillo admitted in 1999, while running for president in Guatemala, that he had killed two of his former students while a professor in Chilpancingo in 1982. He said the killings were in self-defense and that he fled because he could not get a fair trial. The case has since been closed, and he can no longer be charged in the killings. He could, though, still face charges in Guatemala, which is investigating allegations of corruption and negligence that range from failure to pay rent for a private mansion he occupied while in office to taking millions of dollars from the army and distributing the cash to other government departments.

– Associated Press