Mexico City

Presidential aide resigns in protest

President Vicente Fox’s chief of staff resigned on Monday, a stunning announcement that indicated even the Mexican leader’s most trusted staff have become disillusioned with his administration and his wife’s possible campaign to succeed him.

Alfonso Durazo turned in a 19-page letter saying he objected to first lady Marta Sahagun’s presidential ambitions and claiming the administration was repeating some of the vices of the old ruling party that Fox unseated after seven decades in power.

“The desire for a government to decide who the next president will be or won’t be was the original sin of the old regime,” Durazo wrote in the resignation letter, dated June 22. “It is my conviction that that the issue of presidential succession is operating more under the logic of the old regime than that of a government of transition.”

He was referring to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which held Mexico’s presidency without interruption from 1929 until Fox defeated it in the polls in 2000.

London

Lawmakers reject ban on spanking

British lawmakers on Monday voted against a ban on parents spanking their children and decided instead to tighten existing rules.

After a three-hour debate in the House of Lords, peers rejected the ban by 250 to 75.

Instead, they voted by 226-91 to allow moderate spanking but make it easier to prosecute parents who physically or mentally abuse their children by spanking.

The amendment must be approved by lawmakers in Parliament’s lower chamber, the House of Commons, before becoming law.

Britain is out of step on the issue with several European countries, including Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Austria, where all physical punishment of children is illegal.

Pressure groups insist children must have the same legal protection from being hit as adults and had called for the law to be changed. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has repeatedly shied away from a ban, fearing it will be accused of intruding into family affairs.

India

Fire destroys school, ancient copy of Quran

Kashmir’s oldest school was burned down Monday, destroying one of the world’s oldest copies of the Quran and thousands of other rare Islamic texts, in a suspected arson attack that some blamed on Islamic militants targeting moderate Muslim leaders.

The destruction shocked many in the disputed Himalayan territory, with the loss of the 105-year-old Islamia Higher Secondary School — where some of the region’s most prominent figures studied — and of its 30,000-book library.

People came out into the streets in protest in Srinagar, the capital of India’s Jammu-Kashmir state, and shut down shops. Hundreds of the school’s students staged a protest march.

The school, set up in 1899, was a landmark symbol of the movement to modernize Islam — the region’s first religious school to offer courses in English and the sciences. The brick and wood structure in the center of Srinigar also had architectural value with its high arched windows and ceilings of cedar logs.