Briefly

RUSSIA

Bolsheviks to form alternative assembly

MOSCOW — Russia’s hard-left National Bolshevik party is to join a movement to form an opposition “alternative parliament” to challenge the power of the government, it said yesterday.

“We are going to take part in the National Assembly, an alternative parliament made up of 450 seats like the Duma [parliament], but where there will be proper debates,” said Alexander Averin, speaking for the party.

He was speaking to Agence France-Presse after a meeting of left-wing political groups including the Bolsheviks, led by the writer Edward Limonov.

The “alternative parliament,” planned by former chess champion Garry Kasparov and his coalition of anti-Kremlin parties, is scheduled to meet May 17 and 18.

The unofficial assembly is meant to protest the number of parties disqualified from contesting December’s parliamentary elections, Mr. Kasparov’s Other Russia coalition has said.

FRANCE

Vandals deface soldiers’ graves

PARIS — Vandals defaced the graves of Muslim World War I soldiers in northern France and left behind a severed pig’s head at the cemetery, a prosecutor said yesterday.

Vandals inscribed graves in the cemetery at Ablain-Saint-Nazaire with anti-Islam slogans and left graffiti singling out Justice Minister Rachida Dati, who is of North African origin, Jean-Pierre Valensi, prosecutor in nearby Arras, told France-Info radio. He said 148 tombs were targeted.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the vandalism a form of “unacceptable racism” and said he shares the pain of France’s Muslim community, the largest in Western Europe.

“But this hateful act is also an attack on the memory of all those who fought in World War I, above and beyond their religions,” Mr. Sarkozy said.

The Muslim section of the cemetery also was vandalized last April.

ITALY

Mafia in spotlight in election campaign

PALERMO — Silvio Berlusconi, the favorite to win Italy’s national election on Sunday and next Monday, took an anti-Mafia message to Sicilian voters yesterday after the release of a dozen convicted mobsters.

“We have already showed it in my last government, and we’ll declare it again today: We’re incompatible with the Mafia,” Mr. Berlusconi, a two-time former conservative prime minister, told a campaign rally in Sicily’s capital, Palermo.

Organized crime has been an undercurrent in the campaign for the election, which is being held three years ahead of schedule after the January collapse of Italy’s 61st government since World War II.

Naples’ version of the Mafia, the Camorra, is thought to be partly responsible for a trash collection crisis that gave Mr. Berlusconi ammunition with which to attack the outgoing center-left government.

Center-left candidate Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome campaigning on a “change” platform, spoke out this weekend against the Mafia and an Italian justice system plagued by delays.

From wire dispatches and staff reports