The world in brief

LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Egyptians feel like we were born again today.”

Osama Abdel,

an Egyptian businessman, on the beginning of the first presidential election in the country since last year’s ouster of autocratic President Hosni Mubarak Article, 1APutin backs bill to raise protest fines

MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin signaled his support Wednesday for a contentious bill now working its way through Russia’s parliament that would increase fines 200-fold for those taking part in unsanctioned protests.

The bill received preliminary approval Tuesday in the elected lower house, where the Kremlin’s United Russia party holds a majority. All three of the other parties voted against it.

Observers’ reports of widespread fraud to boost results for United Russia in December’s parliamentary election set off mass street protests that were unprecedented in post-Soviet Russia. The protests have evolved into regular rallies and, in Moscow, continuous Occupy-style demonstrations decrying Putin’s subsequent election to a third presidential term.

Opposition lawmakers have warned that the new fines will only fuel broad anger and destabilize Russia by depriving the public of a legal way to voice grievances. The bill raises fines for joining unsanctioned rallies from the current maximum of $160 to $32,250.

3 say Mali leader off to Paris for tests

BAMAKO, Mali - Mali’s interim president, who was beaten by a mob of demonstrators who broke into his office this week, has left the country to seek medical treatment in France, an adviser and two French government officials said Wednesday.

The unexpected, and unpublicized, departure of the 70-year-old Dioncounda Traore leaves a power vacuum in the West African nation, which was thrown off course after a March coup.

Contacted by telephone, an adviser to Traore said the interim president had left Mali for France to do medical tests on his heart because he has had a previous heart attack. Two government officials in France confirmed that Traore was going to Paris for treatment. All three requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter.

Mediators have been working around the clock to get the military junta to accept a transition to civilian rule, and the coup leader finally agreed to step aside this weekend and allow Traore, the former head of the national assembly, to lead a one-year transition before new elections are held.

U.N. says reactor radiation didn’t kill 6

VIENNA - A year after an earthquake and tsunami triggered the Fukushima disaster, a United Nations agency preparing a report on the health effects says none of the six former reactor workers who have died since the catastrophe perished because of the effects of radiation.

The U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation said Wednesday that although several workers at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were irradiated after contamination of their skin “no clinically observable effects have been reported.”

Committee Chairman Wolfgang Weiss said in a statement that the agency is aiming to evaluate irradiation levels for about 2 million people living in Fukushima prefecture at the time of the March 11 reactor accident.

He said the committee, which plans to report to the U.N. General Assembly next year, also has information about measurements made on the thyroids of more than 1,000 children in the region.

The World Health Organization said Wednesday that several areas near the plant had radiation above cancercausing levels, but most of the nation did not.

In a 124-page report, it added that neighboring countries had levels similar to normal background radiation and for the rest of the world there was some minor exposure through food.

Somali rebels lose ground to troops

MOGADISHU, Somalia - African Union and Somali forces captured new territory outside Mogadishu that has long been controlled by militant fighters, officials said Wednesday.

Tanks are tearing through the thorny scrubland to the northwest of Mogadishu, where tens of thousands of internal refugees live in informal camps in an area known as the Afgoye corridor. Troops on Wednesday were about 6 miles from the town of Afgoye after the launch of the operation Tuesday.

African Union and Somali forces pushed al-Shabab militants out of Mogadishu in August. The forces are now trying to take control of areas outside Mogadishu.