World news

Woman elected Mexican state governor

Zacatecas, Mexico A woman was elected governor of a Mexican state on Sunday for the first time since the end of one-party dominance in 2000.

Amalia Garcia, 52, of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, claimed victory in the state of Zacatecas as polls gave her 48 percent to 50 percent of the vote. Several women were elected state governors during Mexico’s 71 years of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Report: N. Korean leader will visit South

Seoul, South Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has told a Chinese leader he intends to visit South Korea at an “appropriate time,” a former South Korean presidential aide said Sunday.

The North Korean leader agreed to visit the South after hosting former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang for a historic inter-Korean summit in 2000.

But the trip has yet to happen – after the election of President Bush, election of a new South Korean president and eruption of an international standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.

An aide to former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung said a leading Chinese official was told that Kim Jong Il intends to make the trip and meet former President Kim during the stay.

Marchers barred from Catholic section

Portadown, Northern Ireland Police blocked about 2,000 Protestants of the Orange Order from parading through the Catholic section of this bitterly divided town Sunday. The demonstrators dispersed peacefully after their leaders handed police a letter of protest.

It was the seventh year in a row that the hard-line Protestant fraternal group has been prevented from marching down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, the major Catholic enclave in this overwhelmingly Protestant town southwest of Belfast.

Orange leaders gave the letter of protest to police commanders at a 10-foot-high steel wall blocking the road.

They demanded to be allowed to march to the center of Portadown via Garvaghy Road, where Catholic hard-liners began blocking the Orangemen’s usual parade route in 1995.