Assembly Seat

The abrupt resignation last month of a disgraced GOP politician has generated a whirlwind special election for Orange County's 72nd Assembly District seat and set up a sharp-elbows contest between two well-known political figures in the Republican stronghold. Mike Duvall (R-Yorba Linda) quit Sept. 9, a day after the televised broadcast of remarks about his sexual encounters that he had made to a fellow legislator during a lull in a July legislative hearing. Unbeknownst to Duvall, the remarks were broadcast over an open microphone.

Gardena Councilman Steve Bradford won Tuesday's special election for the Los Angeles area's 51st Assembly District, but a Nov. 3 runoff will be required to settle the Bay Area's 10th Congressional District race. Bradford finished first in a six-way race with 52.9% of the vote, followed by Gloria Gray (19.2%), David Coffin (17.1%), Robert Pullen-Miles (4.9%), Thomas Jefferson Cares (4.6%) and Mervin Leon Evans (1.2%). All the candidates are Democrats except Coffin, a Republican. The seat became vacant when Curren Price Jr. was elected to the state Senate earlier this year.

Mark Ridley-Thomas' election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last fall already has spawned three special elections for legislative seats. And there will be a fourth if none of the six candidates on the Sept. 1 ballot for the 51st Assembly District can muster a majority. The field consists of five Democrats -- two members of city councils, a water board member who formerly served on a local school board, a 20-year-old making his first bid for elected office and a perennial candidate.

Seven candidates have filed to run in the Sept. 1 special election to fill the 51st Assembly District seat left vacant when Curren Price won a state Senate post earlier this year. Gardena City Councilman Steve Bradford, who lost the 2006 Democratic primary to Price by just 113 votes, got off to a fast start, lining up support from a host of local elected officials and raising money even before the nomination period closed at 5 p.m. Monday. Many observers see Bradford as the early front-runner.

Officially, at least, there is not yet a vacancy in the Los Angeles area's 51st Assembly District. But the jockeying to replace Assemblyman Curren Price Jr. is already underway. Price emerged with the Democratic nomination for the 26th state Senate District in last Tuesday's special election and is virtually assured of winning the May 19 runoff, political experts said.

After a decade leading a communist insurgency in the mountains of Nepal, former top rebel Prachanda became the newest member of an assembly that will chart the future of the Himalayan country. Prachanda, whose rebel nom de guerre means "the fierce one," led a powerful showing by the former Maoist guerrillas in early results from Thursday's elections. The vote is expected to usher in sweeping changes and probably signals the end of a 239-year-old royal dynasty. Prachanda, whose real name is Pushpa Kamal Dahal, got almost twice as many votes as his closest competitor, election official Devendra Parajuli said.

Democrat Warren Furutani of Gardena was sworn in Thursday to represent the 55th Assembly District, which includes Wilmington and parts of Long Beach. The seat opened in August after Assemblywoman Laura Richardson (D-Long Beach) won the 37th Congressional District seat left vacant by the death of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald. Richardson beat Furutani for the seat in 2006 and served less than a year in the Assembly. An education consultant for Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles)

Anson Chan, a hugely popular former government official, won a seat in Hong Kong's legislature today, a victory she said was a call for greater political freedoms in the southern Chinese territory. Chan, 67, dubbed "Hong Kong's conscience" for her championing of civil liberties, received 175,874 votes, or about 54.6% of the ballots cast in Sunday's poll, election officials said.

SACRAMENTO -- The field was set Monday for an election to fill the state Assembly seat vacated when Laura Richardson was elected to Congress, with the Democratic primary featuring two candidates with close ties to organized labor and friends in high places. The special primary election Dec. 11 for the south Los Angeles County 55th Assembly District seat is a match between Carson City Councilman Mike Gipson and Los Angeles Community College board member Warren Furutani.

During a quarter-century in which he has made his mark on European law enforcement, Jean-Louis Bruguiere has taken on all kinds of adventures and adversaries. The anti-terrorism magistrate flew by helicopter into the Sahara in 1989 to inspect the wreckage of a Paris-bound passenger jet blown up by Libyan spies, killing 170 people. In 1987, he escaped a grenade that Corsican militants rigged to the door of his Paris home.