Briefly

Jailed Palestinian drops out of race

Ramallah, West Bank Jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouti dropped out of the race to replace Yasser Arafat on Friday, agreeing to support the candidacy of interim leader Mahmoud Abbas in a move intended to head off a split in the ruling Fatah movement.

Barghouti’s decision not to run in the Palestinians’ presidential election Jan. 9 was a big boost for Abbas, a pragmatist who opposes violence and appears to have the tacit support of Israel and the United States.

Fatah’s old-time leaders had feared Barghouti’s popularity among younger activists could carry him to victory – or help other candidates by dividing the Fatah vote, although no other serious candidates have entered the race so far.

Bush backs plan for Irish power

Belfast, Northern Ireland President Bush lent his weight Friday to a final push for reviving power-sharing in Northern Ireland, telling the province’s Protestant leader to do his best to cut a deal with his longtime Catholic enemies.

Ian Paisley, whose Democratic Unionist Party represents most of Northern Ireland’s British Protestant majority, received a telephone call from Bush just before Paisley and his senior aides began to discuss the latest draft of a confidential British-Irish blueprint for compromise.

Bush told reporters at his Texas ranch that he called Paisley to try to nudge the peace process forward. He said he had sought to get the two sides “to the table to get a deal done, to close the agreement they’ve been working on for quite a while.”

16,600 still missing from war in Bosnia

Geneva The International Red Cross said Thursday that it was still looking for 16,600 people missing from the war in Bosnia, almost a decade after the conflict in the Balkan nation.

“The sheer numbers express better than anything else the anxiety of so many who have lived so long in uncertainty,” said Werner Kaspar, head of Bosnia operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Since the end of the 1992-95 war, painstaking work by the Red Cross and other organizations has resolved 5,000 cases of missing people.

Most have been confirmed dead, often through forensic analysis of bodies.

Bosnia is littered with mass graves from the conflict, which was marked by the slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in July 1995 when Bosnian Serbs overran the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.

The Swiss-based ICRC has published six editions of its Book of the Missing from the Bosnian conflict, listing names and places of disappearance of people whose fate thousands of families are trying to discover.

The Bosnian war, part of the fighting during the breakup of Yugoslavia that began in 1991, killed some 260,000 people and left 1.8 million homeless.

Man arrested with 790 pounds of cocaine

Paris Police arrested a man near the Spanish border with more than $19 million worth of cocaine stashed in his camping trailer, one of France’s biggest roadside drug busts in years, the Finance Ministry said Friday.

Police discovered 790 pounds of the drug packed under seats and mattresses in the back of a camper after stopping the vehicle for trying to avoid a routine traffic check in the southern town of Perpignan.

The driver, identified as an Argentine in his 50s, was heading from Spain to Italy, the ministry said in a statement that described the seizure as the largest on French roads since 1995.

Suspected drug kingpin captured

Asuncion, Paraguay Paraguayan police captured a leading Brazilian drug trafficking suspect after a gunbattle with the occupants of a cocaine-laden plane near the border with Brazil.

Anti-narcotics police said a load of about 880 pounds of cocaine was seized, the biggest haul in Paraguay since 820 pounds of cocaine was confiscated near the Bolivian border in 1990.

The Brazilian suspect was identified as Ivan Mezquita. Authorities said he was captured with four other Brazilian nationals Wednesday as the light plane made a refueling stop on a farm some 420 miles north of Asuncion.

Paraguay’s anti-narcotics chief, Commissioner Aldo Pastore, said shots were traded as drug agents swarmed around the plane on a small landing strip near the Paraguayan community of Carmelo Peralta, a farming area close to the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso Do Sul.