RABAT, Morocco – Moroccans will vote Friday on a new constitution that the king has presented as wide-ranging reform, even as activists maintain it simply perpetuates an autocracy.

Like all referendums in the North African country, the measure is likely to pass, buoyed by King Mohammed VI’s continuing religious and political legitimacy and a huge media campaign.

Morocco, like the rest of the Middle East, was swept by pro-democracy demonstrations at the beginning of the year, protesting a lack of freedoms, weak economy and political corruption.

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SANTA FE, New Mexico (Reuters) – Firefighters inside a nuclear weapons complex in New Mexico scrambled on Thursday to clear brush near barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste stored just a few miles from a monster blaze roaring through surrounding forests.

The so-called Las Conchas Fire has charred nearly 93,000 acres of thick pine woodlands on the slopes of the Jemez Mountains since erupting on Sunday near the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and was poised to become New Mexico’s largest ever wildfire by day’s end.

“We’re seeing fire behavior we’ve never seen down here, and it’s really aggressive,” Los Alamos County Fire Chief Douglas Tucker told reporters, adding that earlier hopes of lifting evacuations in the area by this weekend had been dashed.

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SEOUL (AFP) – A sweeping free trade pact between the European Union and South Korea, the first in Asia for the world’s largest economic bloc, came into effect on Friday, officials in Seoul said.

“The South Korea-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) took effect as of early Friday,” Kim Hee-Sang, director for FTA negotiations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, told AFP.

The ministry said in a statement that the deal would “open up new opportunities for trade and investment” between South Korea and the EU and strengthen diplomatic relations between the two partners.

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