Diplomacy

As a respected Mexican diplomat for nearly six years, Luis Miguel Ortiz Haro spent hours each week listening to the problems of Orange County's poorest residents. Now, as a new consul takes the helm of the Mexican consulate in Santa Ana, Ortiz Haro finds himself telling his own tale of woe. Ortiz Haro, 47, a former elected official in Mexico City who had no previous diplomatic experience, was replaced last month in what Mexican officials described as a routine change of consular heads.

Ecuador and Venezuela said Sunday that they were moving thousands of troops to Colombia's borders, a day after Colombian forces killed a leftist rebel leader in Ecuadorean territory. Bogota later charged that high officials in Ecuador met recently with the slain rebel, Raul Reyes, to accommodate the guerrillas' presence there.

Signaling a break with Washington's longtime dependence on President Pervez Musharraf as the overriding political force in Pakistan, two senior U.S. envoys held talks Tuesday with the country's new prime minister and other leaders of the erstwhile opposition. The round of discussions involving Deputy Secretary of State John D.

The U.S. is offering to gradually normalize relations with Sudan if the government in Khartoum settles issues such as the Darfur crisis and carries out elections next year, U.S. and Sudanese diplomats said Friday. Sudan would have to remove obstacles to the deployment of a U.N.-led peacekeeping force, stop violence against civilians in Darfur, release U.S.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez blew through Russia on Tuesday, cutting business deals, griping about the United States and pumping up the friendship between two oil-rich nations. He pressed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to pay him a visit in Venezuela. He subtly ribbed President Dmitry Med- vedev, who has been widely portrayed as Putin's handpicked puppet.

President Bush dedicated a massive $434-million U.S. Embassy today in Beijing, calling it a symbol of deepening ties between the two trading partners and sometime political rivals. The eight-story American Embassy is the second-largest in the world, after the heavily fortified U.S. mission compound in Baghdad. The 500,000-square-foot structure, situated on 10 acres in a new diplomatic zone, is wrapped in free-standing transparent and opaque glass.

With little leverage but large stakes, the Bush administration launched a delicate diplomatic effort Friday, using private and public pressure to try to bring a cease-fire to the Georgian republic of South Ossetia, where Russian and Georgian forces battled each other into the night. The sudden military confrontation in the Caucasus left the United States in a particularly difficult position: It has promoted Georgia as a budding democracy in a troubled region.

As Condoleezza Rice completes what likely will be her final swing through the Middle East as America's top diplomat, she leaves behind an unfinished peace process and a lingering debate about whether the Bush administration brought the region any closer to a lasting Israeli-Palestinian accord. The secretary of State's regional tour, her 19th in two years, included a stop Sunday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheik for an update on the direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations launched under U.

As the death toll rose after the Sichuan earthquake last spring, three leaders of Southern California's mainland Chinese community rushed to mobilize assistance. Sue Zhang, a septuagenarian socialite whose father was a famed Communist Revolution-era general, helped organize a benefit concert at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse. John Chen, a onetime local government official in China who runs a furniture business in Ontario, led a candlelight vigil at an outdoor amphitheater in Monterey Park.