Guatemala

Dam seized by peasants

Hundreds of angry farmers seized Guatemala’s largest hydroelectric dam Tuesday, threatening to shut off power to large parts of the country unless the government agrees to return nearby lands to them.

The farmers forced their way into the Chixoy dam complex in the province of Alta Verapaz, seized the control room and were trying to force employees to close the gates that supply water to the facility’s turbines.

“Hundreds of farmworkers have cornered the manager in the control room, and are pressuring him to close the gates,” said Fredy Lopez, spokesman for the National Electricity Institute, which runs the facility.

The farmers are demanding the institute give them land around the dam. The agency expropriated that land — and gave residents other plots — in order to secure the dam’s watershed and catchment basin.

Washington, D.C.

Compensation claims lag for Ground Zero volunteers

More than half the injury claims from Ground Zero volunteers have yet to be resolved, according to a review by congressional investigators.

A study of workers’ compensation claims from the cleanup at the World Trade Center site after the 9-11 attacks found that about 90 percent of the 10,182 claims for workers’ comp have been resolved.

In contrast, less than a third, or 31 percent, of the 588 volunteer claims were resolved as of June 30, 2004, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found.

State officials told investigators the relatively high percentage of unresolved volunteer claims was due mainly to instances where claimants have not pursued their initial filing, possibly because they made their claim before any symptoms developed. Other unresolved cases included those where no conclusive proof had been found of a connection between the illness and 9-11, the GAO reported.

The GAO’s findings are contained in testimony prepared to be delivered today to a House committee.

North Carolina

Pakistani who videotaped buildings appears in court

A Pakistani man arrested while videotaping the Charlotte skyline pleaded not guilty Tuesday in federal court to six nonterrorism-related charges.

Kamran Akhtar is charged with two immigration violations — refusing to leave the country after being ordered to do so, and using a false document — and four counts of lying to investigators. He faces up to 55 years if convicted on all six counts.

Akhtar, 35, of New York City, was jailed July 20. Investigators said he had acted suspiciously and they found a videotape in his camera showing the 60-story Bank of America tower and a skyscraper that houses the local FBI office.

His family has said Akhtar is merely a “video buff.”

Akhtar’s attorney, George Miller, said after Tuesday’s hearing that prosecutors had ample time to level terrorism charges against Akhtar if they wanted to.

“They’ve been to New York and been inside his home and his business,” he said. “I think we’ve seen the extent of the charges.”

Iowa

Cheney: ‘Wrong choice’ threat to nation

Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that the nation faces the threat of another terrorist attack if voters make the “wrong choice” on Election Day, suggesting that Sen. John Kerry would follow a pre-Sept. 11 policy of reacting defensively.

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney said in Des Moines.

If Kerry were elected, Cheney said the nation risks falling back into a “pre-9/11 mind-set.”

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards issued a statement saying: “Dick Cheney’s scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs.”

New York City

Clinton recovering but off campaign trail

Former President Clinton was talking and taking liquids on Tuesday, a day after undergoing an operation to relieve four severely clogged arteries, a hospital source told The Associated Press.

Clinton remained in intensive care at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia, and his spirits were “fine,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The former president was taken off his respirator Monday night, a crucial step in his recovery, said Dr. Bob Kelly, a member of the surgery team.

Clinton had planned to campaign for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, but the recovery will take him off the stump.

Washington, D.C.

White House accused of hiding 9-11 evidence

Former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the 9-11 hijackers.

Graham’s charges, made in a new book and at a news conference arranged by the John Kerry campaign, were rejected by Republicans as “bizarre conspiracy theories.”

Graham’s statements support Kerry’s claims that Bush is too close to the Saudi royal family and unwilling to pressure it to crack down on the financing of terrorists. But they are at odds with the findings of the independent 9-11 commission, which has said it found no evidence that the Saudi government funded al-Qaida.

Washington, D.C.

Study: Gunmakers market assault weapons

With the federal ban on assault weapons set to expire next Monday, gun manufacturers are marketing military-style firearms and are ready to sell them as soon as Tuesday, a consumer group said.

“The gun industry is champing at the bit for the ban to expire,” said Susan Peschin, firearms project director at the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit association of 300 consumer groups that released the study.

For example, ArmaLite Inc., a gun manufacturer in Geneseo, Ill., is advertising a “Post-PostBan Rifle Program,” offering consumers attachments to convert their firearms to their preban configuration, with shipping available Tuesday. The company is offering a prepayment option to those who wish to get a jump-start.

Ohio

Gunman opens fire near elementary school

A man opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle on the town’s main thoroughfare as residents headed to work Tuesday, wounding three people. The gunman was killed.

Police Chief Dan Dudik would not confirm the man killed himself but said no one else, including police, had fired any shots.

The shootings took place about 500 feet from an elementary school. Several children were on their way to class, but none were hurt.

Michael J. Harwood, 32, of nearby Madison, fired about 50 shots from a .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle fitted with a telescopic sight, the police chief said.

Dudik would not discuss a possible motive but said Harwood was aiming at a specific car, whose driver was wounded and in guarded condition at a hospital.

New Jersey

Governor answers public about resigning

Gov. James McGreevey answered questions for the first time in public Tuesday about his decision to resign.

Since his Aug. 12 announcement that he was gay and planned to step down Nov. 15 as governor, McGreevey had refused to answer questions about that decision or the extramarital affair he said was partly the reason behind his resignation.

McGreevey met with workers at a manufacturing plant in Wall Township, touting his administration’s record on job training, then briefly answered questions from reporters.

“I made a difficult, yet personal decision to assure that the governor’s office and state administration run competently,” McGreevey said.

The governor offered few specifics about how he came to his decision.

“I had a personal crisis which I attempted to respond to in the most honest way I could,” McGreevey said.

California

More help bolsters fight against wildfire

An infusion of fresh manpower helped firefighters gain the upper hand Tuesday on a wildfire that had burned across more than 12,500 acres and destroyed four homes in Northern California’s wine country.

Cooler, moist air that had been forecast for the region failed to materialize during the night, but the extra personnel more than compensated for the poor weather, said Janet Marshall, spokeswoman for the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

With more than 2,600 firefighters on the front lines, up from 1,110 a day earlier, officials said the blaze in Sonoma and Lake counties was 85 percent contained Tuesday morning, up from just 35 percent the night before.

Los Angeles

Missing student found

Ahmad Yaseen Arain, the 20-year-old UCLA honors student who vanished in July while taking a bus to the campus, has been found after spending six weeks disoriented and penniless in Tijuana, Mexico, after an apparent mental breakdown, family members said Monday.

He contacted his family Sunday by e-mail and was picked up that evening by relatives, they said. It’s not known how or why he ended up in Tijuana.

The bookish computer science student from Orange, on a full academic scholarship at UCLA, apparently spent about a month on the streets of the Mexican border city, sustained only by drinking water from gas station hoses, his brother, Sulaiman Arain, said.

Two weeks ago, a Mexican family found the disheveled Arain by the side of a road and befriended him, his family said. The Mexican family was given an undisclosed amount of money for their help.

China

Floods’ death toll surpasses 100

Floods unleashed by torrential rains have killed at least 114 people and left dozens more missing in southwestern China, prompting authorities to put the massive Three Gorges hydroelectric project on alert, officials reported Tuesday.

Authorities called in thousands of army and navy personnel to help after five days of continual downpours in Sichuan province. An alert was ordered and navigation halted as flood crests passed through the Three Gorges Dam along the flood-swollen Yangtze River, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

In many cities, men pulled women and children, shown above, on truck inner-tubes and plastic washtubs to safety.

Tokyo

Powerful typhoon kills at least three

A powerful typhoon pounded western Japan on Tuesday, knocking out power to more than a million households, forcing thousands to evacuate and killing at least three people.

Twenty-five crew members were missing from two cargo ships — one that sank and another that ran aground. Across the country 580 people were injured, public broadcaster NHK reported.

Packing winds of up to 89 miles per hour, Typhoon Songda was centered about 106 miles off the Noto Peninsula in the Sea of Japan. It was expected to travel up the country’s western coast and hit northern Japan by early today.

South Korea

Nation denies production of uranium

South Korea’s top nuclear energy official on Tuesday denied claims that scientists in his country had produced near-bomb-grade uranium, seeking to ease concern that the previously undisclosed experiments were in apparent violation of international law.

“Yes, we did enrich uranium, but an amount so small it was almost invisible and to levels that were not close” to weapons grade, said Chang In-soon, president of the government Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute.

His description of the experiments appeared to be at odds with testimony that South Korean officials are said to have provided last week to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. Diplomats familiar with the testimony said the South Korean officials had reported that they enriched uranium to almost 80 percent — close to levels used in nuclear weapons.

The Hague, Netherlands

Milosevic refuses help from lawyers

Slobodan Milosevic angrily refused to work with two court-appointed lawyers Tuesday as they called the first witness in his war crimes defense case — an elderly Serbian nationalist, Smilja Avramov, who taught the ex-Yugoslav leader law and advised the wartime Serbian government.

She was questioned for several hours by Steven Kay, one of two British lawyers assigned last week to Milosevic.

Avramov denied allegations that Milosevic designed and carried out a complex plan to create an ethnically pure Serb nation by expelling or murdering non-Serbs in the former Yugoslav republics to carve out a “Greater Serbia.”

Milosevic refused to question Avramov himself.

“These defense lawyers are not my lawyers. They are your lawyers,” Milosevic told Presiding Judge Patrick Robinson.