Briefly

India

Pro-India party ousted in Kashmir election

Kashmiri voters ousted the ruling pro-India party the dominant force in the Indian-controlled province for more than 50 years demanding economic and social reforms and an end to the Islamic militancy that has claimed thousands of lives.

Final results Thursday showed the National Conference party, which is closely tied to the Hindu-nationalist government in New Delhi, lost half the seats it held in the last state assembly, maintaining only 28 constituencies far below the 44 needed to form a majority government.

The party declared it would not ally with its rivals in a coalition government, signaling an overhaul of the political landscape in the Himalayan province wracked by Islamic separatism and at the center of nuclear-armed brinkmanship with neighboring Pakistan.

Venezuela

Labor group joins call for Chavez resignation

Venezuela’s largest labor confederation said Thursday it will call a nationwide general strike if President Hugo Chavez doesn’t resign or call early elections by next Wednesday.

Carlos Ortega, head of the 1 million-member Venezuelan Labor Confederation, said workers will lead a general strike Oct. 21 if Chavez refuses his demand. Ortega’s threat capped a march in Caracas by hundreds of thousands of people demanding Chavez’s resignation and early elections.

Chavez had no immediate comment but has repeatedly insisted he won’t resign.

Organizers boasted that as many as 1 million people participated in the demonstration the biggest since troops and Chavez supporters confronted a 600,000-strong opposition march April 11 on the presidential palace.

China

British tourist killed near Great Wall

The Chinese government confirmed Thursday that a tourist carrying a British passport was found slain near a popular section of the Great Wall, the apparent victim of an attack that could undermine China’s reputation as a safe place for visitors.

British media identified the victim as Tom Dawson, 24, a graphic designer from London who was touring Asia.

The tourist was assaulted near the Great Wall’s well-traveled Badaling section, about 40 miles north of Beijing, according to an officer in the Yanqing Public Security Bureau who declined to give his name.

Violence against foreigners is rare in China, which places great value on its reputation as a safe place for tourists and its citizens.

London

Study: Cancer estimates too pessimistic

The chances of surviving many types of cancer are better than statisticians thought, according to a new way of calculating the odds that takes into account improvements in treatment.

The new technique, outlined this week in The Lancet medical journal, separates recent patients from those who received less-advanced treatment in years past.

The method is increasingly being adopted in Europe, where it was first proposed. U.S. experts are starting to evaluate its merits. The new approach, proposed by German epidemiologist Hermann Brenner, is commonly used in other areas of medicine, such as predicting life expectancy.

The conventional method of estimating cancer-patient survival, called the cohort approach, estimates the chances of surviving a particular cancer for a period of time by looking at what has happened to patients diagnosed, for example, between 1990 and 2000.

The new approach, called period analysis, is based only on recent years for example, on patients who were alive and under follow-up during the year 2000.