Miami

Powell plans visit to Central America

Secretary of State Colin Powell will visit Panama, Nicaragua and Honduras next week in a two-day swing through Central America to discuss regional security, free trade and corruption.

Powell will arrive Monday in Panama to attend the 100th anniversary of its independence from Colombia and meet with President Mireya Moscoso, the State Department announced Wednesday.

He will fly to Nicaragua later that day to meet President Enrique Bolanos and to Honduras on Tuesday to meet President Ricardo Maduro.

Powell is likely to raise the issue of the security of the Panama Canal with Moscoso. His meetings with Bolanos and Maduro will touch on corruption and the rule of law.

South Korea

Workers clash with riot police

Violent labor demonstrations rocked South Korea on Wednesday, with workers clashing with riot police in three cities to protest lawsuits brought by employers that they claimed had driven some union leaders to suicide.

Hundreds of workers hurled stones at riot police in downtown Seoul, while national news agency Yonhap said that in the central city of Daegu, 1,200 workers clashed with police and several protesters were hospitalized.

Yonhap also reported a violent street clash in the southern city of Busan, involving 2,000 workers who wielded metal pipes and threw rocks.

It was the worst outburst of labor unrest in recent months, coming despite government promises of new legislation to make it more difficult for employers to sue labor unions for financial damages caused by illegal strikes.

London

Conservatives oust party leader Smith

Lawmakers in Britain’s opposition Conservative Party ousted their leader Iain Duncan Smith on Wednesday, triggering a battle about his successor that is likely to further divide the already fractured Tories.

In a vote of no confidence, lawmakers voted 90-75 against Duncan Smith, a former army captain who failed to unite the party in his two years at its helm.

“The parliamentary party has spoken … and I will stand down as leader when a successor has finally been chosen,” Duncan Smith said after the results were announced. “I will give that leader my absolute loyalty and support,” whoever is chosen, he added.

He said he would continue to defend the policies he had espoused as leader.

Duncan Smith was elected as party leader in 2001, after the Tories suffered a second crushing election defeat at the hands of Blair’s Labor Party.

Germany

Court won’t release suspect linked to 9-11

A German court on Wednesday rejected a defense motion to free a Moroccan charged with helping the Sept. 11 hijackers, citing evidence of his long association with the Hamburg al-Qaida cell as suspicion that he backed their plot.

Defense lawyers had sought Abdelghani Mzoudi’s release after the Heinz Fromm, the head of German intelligence, testified that Hamburg cell members received details of the plan during a trip to al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan in late 1999.

A decision read by presiding judge Klaus Ruehle cited witness testimony as showing that Mzoudi, 30, had been “in close contact over years” with members of the Hamburg terror cell and had backed their increasingly radical anti-Jewish and anti-American stance.

Mzoudi is charged with 3,066 counts of accessory to murder.