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ern Guatemalan late Wednesday.
• Eblin Cifuentes, a 26-year-old law student, and a group of his classmates already were collecting medical supplies as part of a school drive to provide aid for the only hospital in San Marcos, a poor, mainly indigenous mountain area of subsistence farms. When the quake hit, the group decided to bring everything they had collected.
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Preparing for power transfer, Hu urges China's communists to maintain firm control, curb graft
• BEIJING (AP) -- President Hu Jintao urged his colleagues in China's ruling Communist Party Thursday to combat official corruption that has stoked public anger, but also told them to maintain firm political control, as he prepared to hand over power after a decade in office.
• Hu opened a weeklong party congress with a speech that cited many of the challenges China faces -- a rich-poor gap, environmentally ruinous growth and imbalanced development between prosperous cities and a struggling countryside. Yet he offered little fresh thinking to address a flagging economy and meet demands from within the party and the public for more open government.
• Instead, the 90-minute, wide-ranging speech gave Hu a chance to define his legacy and lay down policy markers for his successor, Vice President Xi Jinping, while marshaling his clout for the main event at the congress: the backroom politicking to install allies in the collective leadership Xi will lead.
• "For Hu Jintao and his leadership, the most important thing is to make sure that he would have as much influence as possible in placing new members in the new generation of leaders," said Ding Xueliang, a Chinese politics expert at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
• Always an occasion for divisive bargaining, the leadership transition has been fraught, buffeted by scandal and by the sinking economy that has fed public anger over a party increasingly seen as consumed by power and corruption.
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Report: Regime forces battle rebels in far northeastern corner of Syria
• ISTANBUL (AP) -- Syrian regime forces on Thursday battled opposition rebels trying to take control of a region in the far northeastern corner of the country, send (Continued on page 31)
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