Paraguay: Police restore order in state of emergency

Helmeted police in flak jackets dispersed hundreds of anti-government protesters Tuesday under a state of emergency imposed by the president after widespread protests left two people dead and more than a dozen others injured.

National police and guardsman took up positions outside Congress in downtown Asuncion, where hundreds of protesters had gathered Monday to call for the resignation of President Luis Gonzalez Macchi.

Protesters were no longer on the streets in the capital, and police were working to clear those lingering from other demonstrations elsewhere in the country. Police on Tuesday pushed back protesters at a roadblock in the southern city of Encarnacion and cleared demonstrators off a highway some 150 miles northeast of the capital. There was no report of injuries.

France: Would-be assassin posted plans on Web

The young man who allegedly tried to assassinate the French president had first advertised his plans to cohorts in an extreme-right group and on an extremist Internet site, news reports said Tuesday.

“Watch the Tv This Sunday, i will be the star,” read a message posted on the Combat 18 Internet site, signed “Maxime.”

The message was dated July 13, the day before Maxime Brunerie pulled a .22-caliber rifle from a guitar case as President Jacques Chirac passed about 50 yards away, reviewing troops at France’s Bastille Day military parade.

A shot rang out as at least one spectator turned the rifle barrel aside and others helped wrestle Brunerie to the ground.

Brunerie also spoke Saturday of his plans to a couple close to one radical rightist group and a best friend in the student extreme-right group, GUD, Le Figaro and other newspapers reported. All three told police they did not take Brunerie seriously, Le Figaro said.

Moscow: Brezhnev’s grandson eyes communist revival

The Communist Party has a new challenger in Russia: a portly man with a familiar name, a small political party and a promise to re-establish “the very best” from the Cold War rule of his grandfather, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

In an interview Tuesday with the newspaper Gazeta, Andrei Brezhnev criticized the main successor of the Soviet Communist Party that his grandfather led, saying it has lost its bearings and was too interested in nationalism and religion.

Brezhnev said he hopes his New Communist Party will earn the support of Russians who are unhappy with the Communist Party but believe in the communist ideals and understand that capitalism “is for now doomed to failure in this country.”

Iceland: Environmentalists urge protest on development

Environmentalists mounted a campaign Tuesday to persuade Alcoa to abandon plans to build a giant aluminum smelter in the Icelandic highlands.

The Icelandic Nature Conservation Assn. says the smelter and an accompanying hydroelectric complex to be built by Iceland’s national power company will ruin the environment above Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest glacier, in east Iceland.

It urged supporters to besiege the U.S. company, the world’s largest producer of aluminum, with e-mails demanding it pull out of the development.

“This is an appeal to Alcoa and the conscience of its board,” the association’s director Arni Finnsson said Tuesday in Reykjavik.

Alcoa said Tuesday it was negotiating with the Icelandic government and the national power company Landsvirkjun and hoped to reach an agreement as soon as possible.