Brazil: Scientists discover new parrot in Amazon

Brazilian scientists have discovered a new parrot species in the southern Amazon a green plumed bird with a vulture’s hooked neck and a bald orange head.

The bird, which measures about 10 inches from head to tail and weighs about 6 ounces, was discovered in Amazon state of Para near the Madeira river and a tributary of the upper Tapajos by two graduate students at Zoology department of the University of Sao Paulo.

A complete scientific description including the bird’s scientific name will appear in the July edition of the peer-reviewed ornithological journal, The Auk.

Renato Gaban-Lima and Marcos Raposo captured the bird in September 1999 while collecting specimens for Gaban-Lima’s master’s thesis in a little-studied area of the Amazon rainforest.

Moscow: Anti-Semitic phrases spray-painted on mural

Anti-Semitic and obscene slogans were spray-painted above a mural of Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov at a Moscow human rights museum, its director said Friday.

Sakharov, a physicist and one of the developers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, later became an eloquent critic of the Communist regime and a leader of the democratic movement before he died in 1989.

The 10-foot high mural, in a square outside the Sakharov Museum, was vandalized overnight, director Yuri Samodurov said.

He speculated that it could have been damaged by teen-agers or by “an order” from the authorities because of the museum’s outspoken political views.

The museum was draped with a large banner demanding an end to the war in Chechnya that prompted criticism from city officials. “It is a position that irritates the authorities,” he said.

Geneva: Swiss face referendum on anti-abortion law

On the statute books, Switzerland has one of Europe’s toughest anti-abortion laws. Doctors who carry out terminations can face five years in prison. Women who have abortions can get three-year jail terms.

But some 13,000 women have abortions in Switzerland every year in regular clinics, and none has been convicted for an abortion-related offense since 1988. Officials said only five physicians had been convicted for ignoring abortion rules in the past nine years.

Voters will be asked to decide in a referendum Sunday whether to change the 60-year-old law to bring abortion out of the legal netherworld or toughen the legislation to curb terminations.

Switzerland’s abortion law is less restrictive than the virtual bans in Ireland and Poland. But the rules are far tougher than in Britain, France or the Netherlands.

Algeria: Former ruling party wins vote amid violence

The party that governed Algeria for nearly 30 years before the introduction of a multiparty system swept legislative elections that were marred by violence, a boycott and the lowest turnout ever.

The National Liberation Front, led by Prime Minister Ali Benflis, more than tripled its number of seats in the 389-seat parliament, moving from 64 to 199 seats, officials announced Friday.

But Thursday’s election was boycotted by key opposition parties and marred by unrest among the country’s sizable Berber minority. Voter turnout 46 percent was the lowest since Algeria gained independence from France in 1962.