Harvard names female president

Harvard University on Sunday named historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its first female president, ending a lengthy and secretive search to find a successor to Lawrence Summers after his tumultuous five-year tenure.

The seven-member Harvard Corporation elected Faust, a noted scholar of the American South and dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as the university’s 28th president. The 30-member board of overseers ratified the selection.

Faust, 59, recognized the significance of her appointment.

“I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago,” Faust said at a news conference on campus. But she also added, “I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard.”

KISMAYO, Somalia

Explosion ends march for peace

A march that drew thousands in support of peacekeepers ended in violence Sunday when an explosion went off as the army chief prepared to address the rally and government troops fired into the crowd in response. At least five people were killed.

Thousands had marched through Kismayo, 260 miles southwest of the capital, Mogadishu, to support a proposed peacekeeping mission for Somalia. “Somali people need the help of Africans,” they chanted. “Somalia’s stability needs to be restored.”

It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion, which happened as Army Chief Gen. Abdi Mahdi was to address the rally at the city’s Freedom Park.

Government troops fired into the crowd and then opened fire on the streets of Kismayo, but it was not clear whom they were targeting. Ethiopian and Somali government troops sealed off the park after the explosion.

Col. Abdirazaq Af Gudud, a senior army official who did not take part in the rally, said three soldiers died in the explosion.