Support for Bloomberg

Support for Bloomberg

NEW YORK — The speaker of the New York City Council says she supports Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his bid to stay in office for a third term.

Christine Quinn said Sunday that voters should have the choice of keeping the current leadership during the financial crisis. Quinn, a Democrat, was considered a likely candidate for mayor next year.

Bloomberg, a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent, is due to leave office next year. He is pushing for a change in city law that would let officials run for a third term.

The council speaker wields considerable influence with other members. Many of them have not decided how to vote.

Canadians going to polls

TORONTO — Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is gambling that an opposition pushing an unpopular carbon tax will steer voters to the right in Tuesday’s election and bolster his hold on power.

If the polls are any indication, though, Canada’s third national ballot in just over four years will give the country yet another minority government.

In the 2006 election, opponents painted him as a right-winger who would reshape the landscape like a U.S.-style Republican.

“Just because someone’s a Conservative doesn’t mean he’s George Bush,” Harper told voters in Quebec on Saturday.

Immigrant’s grave marked

NEW YORK — The New York grave of an Irish woman who was the first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island has been marked with a Celtic cross.

Clergy members joined Annie Moore’s descendants and admirers Saturday in a Queens Cemetery. She died 80 years ago, but her unmarked grave was discovered only two years ago.

Moore was 17 when she arrived in New York from County Cork in 1892. The Irish consul general in New York says she is a symbol for the hundreds of thousands of Irish who settled in New York.

Ellis Island was the gateway to America for more than 12 million immigrants. As many as 5,000 people a day passed through the processing center at its peak in the early 1900s.

Car bombers kill 13 in Iraq

BAGHDAD — Suicide car bombers struck twice Sunday in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least six people and wounding dozens of others, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. A car bomb killed seven other people in Baghdad.

Two Iraqi soldiers were killed by snipers in separate attacks Sunday in the capital’s Yarmouk district, police said.

Also Sunday, the government announced new security measures to protect Christians in Mosul after a spate of attacks against them by Sunni religious extremists.

The series of attacks shows the ongoing security challenges facing Iraq as the U.S. shifts responsibility to this country’s own soldiers and police after the sharp decline in violence since last year.

Progress with N. Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Sunday it will resume disabling its key nuclear complex after the U.S. dropped the country from a terrorism blacklist — a breakthrough expected to help energize stalled talks aimed at ending the country’s atomic ambitions.

The spat was the latest of many between Pyongyang and Washington that threatened to scuttle progress before eventually being settled since the international talks aimed at dismantling the communist country’s nuclear program began five years ago.

This weekend’s developments raised hopes that stalled international nuclear talks could quickly resume and help improve ties between Washington and Pyongyang — Cold War adversaries, still technically at war.

Experts still predict a long, bumpy road ahead before North Korea’s nuclear program is ever dismantled.

Battling California wildfire

LOS ANGELES — Firefighters backed by water-dumping helicopters and planes gained ground Sunday on a wildfire that destroyed two homes and forced the evacuation of about 1,200 people in a rugged area 20 miles north of downtown.

The blaze charred up to 750 acres and also burned a garage, several sheds and three motor homes, said Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman Ron Haralson. No one was seriously injured, but a firefighter and one resident reported minor breathing problems.

Associated Press