Spain: Columbus’ brother’s remains dug up

Researchers dug up remains thought to be the brother of Christopher Columbus on Tuesday in the first step of a high-tech project to end a dispute over where the explorer himself is buried.

Workers broke ground at a garden beside a Seville-area ceramics factory where the brother, Diego Columbus, is thought to have been buried for the past decade.

The workers pulled out a corroded zinc box about the size of a suitcase, sliced it open with metal cutters and pulled back the top to reveal brown bone fragments, several of which appeared to be ribs.

The project calls for extraction of DNA from the bones and the remains of other Columbus family members. Those results would then be compared to DNA from two sets of remains both purported to be those of Cristobal Colon, as Columbus is known in Spanish.

One set is buried in an ornate tomb at the cathedral in Seville. The other is in a monument in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Vatican City: Archbishop: Wedding was for shock value

A Zambian archbishop who was threatened with excommunication for marrying a South Korean woman in a group ceremony led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon says he went through with the wedding to shock the Vatican.

Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo made the revelations in a book that has just appeared in Italian bookstores, ahead of his expected return to Italy next month after a year in seclusion in Argentina.

Milingo embarrassed the Vatican last year when he married a South Korean acupuncturist in the group ceremony. Milingo renounced the marriage after a personal appeal from Pope John Paul II.

His latest assertions do not seem to have upset the Vatican, at least on the official level. Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone, a top Vatican official, told Vatican Radio on Tuesday that Milingo had reconciled with the Church after a year of spiritual retreat.

India: Suspected rebels kill 2 in Kashmir elections

Grenades and gunfire killed two people and injured 19 others Tuesday in Indian-controlled Kashmir during the first round of legislative elections.

Islamic militants fighting for independence or the merger of the Himalayan region with Pakistan had threatened to kill those who went to the polls Monday, as well as politicians and electoral workers.

One civilian died in a rocket attack on a polling station Monday, and two civilians were hurt by a grenade. Despite the violence and threats, 44 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, electoral officials said.

Violence continued Tuesday as campaigning began for the second phase of the election, to be held next week in Srinagar and Jammu, the summer and winter capitals of Jammu-Kashmir state.

Unidentified assailants shot dead a member of the opposition People’s Democratic Party in the town of Pattan. Another person was killed and 15 were wounded when suspected rebels tossed a grenade into a busy market in Anantnag, 40 miles south of Srinagar.