Tenth church fire called arson

A weekend fire at a Baptist church was ruled arson Sunday, the tenth in a recent string of deliberately set church fires in rural Alabama, authorities said.

The Saturday afternoon blaze caused severe damage to the Beaverton Freewill Baptist Church in northwest Alabama, near the Mississippi line.

“It’s definitely arson,” said Ragan Ingram, a spokesman for the state fire marshal’s office. It was not immediately clear if the fire was connected to the other blazes that have destroyed or damaged nine churches since Feb. 2.

Investigators have said they don’t know a motive, but there is no racial pattern. Five of the churches had white congregations and five black. All were Baptist, the dominant faith in the region, and mostly in isolated country settings.

New York City

‘Jaws’ author Benchley dies

Peter Benchley, whose novel “Jaws” terrorized millions of swimmers even as the author himself became an advocate for the conservation of sharks, has died at age 65, his widow said Sunday.

Wendy Benchley said her husband died Saturday night at their home in Princeton, N.J. The cause of death, she said, was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive scarring of the lungs.

Thanks to Benchley’s 1974 novel, and Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie of the same name, ocean swimming became synonymous with fatal horror.

Benchley was born in New York City in 1940. He graduated from Harvard University in 1961 and worked at the Washington Post, Newsweek and as a speechwriter for President Johnson.

Port-Au-Prince, Haiti

Haiti vote tallies in doubt

A member of Haiti’s electoral council said results of the presidential elections were being manipulated, echoing complaints by throngs of supporters of front-runner Rene Preval, who poured into the streets on Sunday with angry allegations of fraud.

Electoral Council member Pierre Richard Duchemin said Sunday he needed access to tallies of vote counts in hopes of learning who was behind the alleged manipulation.

Preval’s supporters converged on the electoral council headquarters, denouncing Jacques Bernard, director-general of the nine-member electoral council.

With 75 percent of the vote counted, Preval was leading with 49.1 percent, short of the 50 percent plus one vote he needs to avoid a runoff.