CHICAGO

Younger Daley becomes city’s longest-serving mayor

Richard M. Daley on Sunday surpassed his father’s tenure, becoming the longest-serving mayor of Chicago.

Daley has served 7,917 days in office or 21 years and eight months. That’s one day more than his father, Richard J. Daley, who died in office in 1976.

Daley announced earlier this year that he would retire and not run for a seventh term.

When he leaves office next spring, he’ll have served about five months longer than his father. Between them, the Daleys have been in charge in Chicago for 42 of the past 55 years.

Daley, 68, told reporters last week that he believed his father was the city’s greatest mayor.

“My father, the son will always say, ‘it’s the father,’” Daley said when asked who would win in the debate about which mayor was the city’s greatest.

Edward Bedore was budget director for both Daleys. “One was a builder,” Bedore said. “The other completed the house.”

SOUTH JORDAN, Utah

Shotgun-toting man killed outside Mormon temple

Police shot and killed a man after he refused to drop his shotgun and headed toward a group of people on a Christmas Day stroll outside a Mormon temple, authorities said.

The man had been in an altercation Saturday afternoon in the parking lot outside the Oquirrh Mountain Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, South Jordan police Lt. Dan Starks said.

Starks said police arrived shortly afterward and repeatedly ordered the shotgun-toting man to drop the weapon. “While carrying the shotgun, he fled from the officers toward where there were other people,” he said.

Starks said an officer fired just once, killing the man.

He said officers feared for both their own safety and that of people on the grounds.

Officers found more guns, swords and ammunition inside the dead man’s car, Starks said.

Starks said the officer who shot the man is on administrative leave pending an internal investigation.

MIAMI

Former Venezuelan leader and Chavez target dies at 88

Former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, whose popularity soared with his country’s oil-based economy but who later faced riots, an economic downturn and impeachment in his homeland, died Saturday afternoon in Miami, according to his family.

Perez’s daughter, Maria Francia Perez, said her 88-year-old father died in a Miami-area hospital.

The daughter told The Associated Press that the cause was “respiratory failure.”

Perez came to personify the old-guard Venezuelan political establishment bitterly opposed by current President Hugo Chavez. Perez survived two coup attempts in 1992, the first led by Chavez, who was then a young army lieutenant colonel.

In recent years, Perez lived in Miami while the Venezuelan government demanded he be turned over to stand trial for his role in quelling bloody 1989 riots. Perez — who governed Venezuela from 1974 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1993 — denied wrongdoing.

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast

Rival’s allies call for strike to make Gbagbo step down

Allies of the man who the international community says won Ivory Coast’s disputed presidential election called Sunday for a general strike that would last until the incumbent hanging on to power concedes defeat and leaves office.

It was the latest form of pressure to force Laurent Gbagbo from the presidency nearly a month after the United Nations said his political rival, Alassane Ouattara, won the runoff vote. Gbagbo has refused to leave despite international calls for his ouster, and West African leaders say they now will remove him by force if he fails to go.

Djedje Mady, the head of Ouattara’s electoral coalition, said it called on “all Ivorians and those who live in Ivory Coast and believe in peace and justice to cease all their activities on Monday, December 27, 2010, until Laurent Gbagbo leaves power.”

The U.N. has said that at least 173 people have been killed in violence over the vote.