Northern Ireland

Blair cancels elections

British Prime Minister Tony Blair canceled Northern Ireland’s elections Thursday, saying deepening divisions among Catholic and Protestant voters threatened to bring “complete and total chaos.”

Blair said he planned to move the May 29 election for Northern Ireland’s dissolved legislature to the autumn. But he warned the vote could be delayed longer if the outlawed Irish Republican Army didn’t explicitly renounce violence, cease all hostile activities and disarm.

Gaining such an IRA commitment “goes to the very soul of the Good Friday agreement,” he said, referring to the 1998 pact that proposed power-sharing between British Protestants and Irish Catholics in the province.

Moscow

Officials prepare for space landing

Anxiety is high for this weekend’s return of three international space station residents who will be making the first spacecraft landing since the Columbia disaster and NASA’s first touchdown on foreign soil.

With the space shuttle fleet grounded indefinitely, the two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut will barrel back to Earth about 9 p.m. CDT Saturday in a Soyuz capsule that is a throwback to the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days.

Instead of splashing into the ocean as in NASA’s early days, the capsule will parachute into Kazakhstan.

Astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit consider it the experience of a lifetime to cap a stretched, five-month mission. Cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin has been through it twice before.

Madrid

Powell pushes ‘map’ to Mideast peace

Secretary of State Colin Powell warned Israel and the Palestinian Authority on Thursday against letting violence “immediately contaminate the road map” toward peace that President Bush has offered.

Opening a three-day trip built around Middle East peace efforts, Powell said much work remained before Bush’s goal of a Palestinian state by 2005 could be met. That work includes ending suicide bomb attacks and harsh defensive actions by Israel, he said.