{{The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) founded by late Malawi president Bingu wa Mutharika, has overwhelmingly voted his younger brother Peter as its new leader at a convention held in Blantyre.}}
Peter Mutharika has been acting as party leader since the death of his brother in April 2012.
Party followers yesterday gave the younger Mutharika an overwhelming vote of confidence with 1,266 votes against 73 votes for his challenger, Speaker of the National Assembly Henry Chimunthu Banda.
Peter Mutharika is currently facing treason charges arising from allegations that he and others close to Bingu wa Mutharika tried to bloc Vice-President Joyce Banda from taking over power following the president’s death.
In his acceptance speech, Peter Mutharika asked party followers to be united and promised to continue with the development work his brother was pursuing.
“We hope those that have not been elected will remain in the party and fight with us as we push to regain the leadership of this country,” he said.
The election also saw several of those answering treason charges alongside Mr Mutharika win party posts. Billy Banda, director of civil rights organisation Malawi Watch, said the election of Mr Mutharika was a show of defiance by party rank and file to the government over the treason charges it has filed.
“The party supporters have displayed a vote of confidence in [Peter] Mutharika despite a treason case hanging on his head,” he said.
The defeated Chimunthu Banda accepted the outcome of the election that was declared free and fair by officials from Malawi Electoral Commission.
{{Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy is to be investigated over allegations that he accepted cash from slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to fund his 2007 election campaign. }}
Sarkozy was among NATO leaders who violated UN Resolution 1973 to invade Libya and kill Col Gaddafi in cold blood, a development that saw him being accused of wanting to silence Gaddafi after reports emerged that the Libyan leader had bankrolled Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign to the tune of US$65.5 million.
Judicial sources confirmed yesterday that a formal probe has been opened that could lead to Sarkozy facing a second set of corruption-related charges arising from his campaign.
Sarkozy (58) was charged last month with taking advantage of a person incapacitated by illness in a case that centres on allegations he accepted envelopes stuffed with cash from France’s richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt.
He adamantly denies any wrongdoing and is suing investigative news website Mediapart over the Libya allegations.
Mediapart reported last April that Gaddafi’s government had contributed US$65.5 million to Sarkozy’s successful 2007 campaign.
Ziad Takieddine, a Franco-Lebanese businessman who is embroiled in a series of political financing scandals in France, has also repeatedly claimed that he has proof Sarkozy was financed by the Libyans but has refused to make his evidence public.
Gaddafi was toppled and he himself was killed in 2011 following an uprising backed by a NATO intervention that Sarkozy was instrumental in organising.
As well as the Libya and Bettencourt cases, Sarkozy is the subject of ongoing investigations into alleged cronyism in the awarding of contracts for opinion polls, an illegal police investigation into journalists and alleged kickbacks on a Pakistani arms deal.
Sarkozy lost his immunity from prosecution after losing the 2012 presidential election to Francois Hollande.
In March, he was placed under formal investigation on suspicion of taking advantage of Bettencourt to secure up to four million euros in financing for his 2007 campaign.
L’Oreal heiress Bettencourt has suffered from dementia since 2006.
Under French law, being placed under formal investigation is the equivalent of being charged in other legal systems but does not mean the case will necessarily end in a trial.
If convicted in the Bettencourt case, Sarkozy faces up to three years in jail, a fine of 375 000 euros (US$480 000), and a five-year ban from public office which would destroy any hope he entertains of making a political comeback.
French judges demonstrated their readiness to go after former leaders with their successful pursuit of Sarkozy’s predecessor as president, Jacques Chirac.
{{A powerful earthquake struck the steep hills of China’s southwestern Sichuan province on Saturday, leaving at least 156 people dead and more than 5,500 injured, nearly five years after a devastating quake wreaked widespread damage across the region.}}
Saturday’s quake, while not as destructive as the one in 2008, toppled buildings, triggered landslides and disrupted phone and power connections in mountainous Lushan county.
The village of Longmen was hit particularly hard, with authorities saying nearly all the buildings there had been destroyed in a frightening minute-long shaking by the quake.
“It was such a big quake that everyone was scared,” said a woman who answered the phone at a kindergarten hours later and declined to give her name. “We all fled for our lives.”
Rescuers turned the square outside the Lushan County Hospital into a triage center, where medical personnel bandaged bleeding victims, according to footage on China Central Television.
Rescuers dynamited boulders that had fallen across roads to reach Longmen and other damaged areas lying farther up the mountain valleys, state media reported.
CCTV reported that at least 156 people had died. The government of Ya’an city, which administers Lushan, said in a statement that more than 2,600 people were injured, 330 of them severely.
The quake — measured by the China Earthquake Administration at magnitude-7.0 and by the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 — struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m., when many people were at home, sleeping or having breakfast.
People in their underwear and wrapped in blankets ran into the streets of Ya’an and even the provincial capital of Chengdu, 115 kilometers (70 miles) east of Lushan, according to photos, video and accounts posted online.
The quake’s shallow depth, less than 13 kilometers (8 miles), likely magnified the impact.
Chengdu’s airport shut down for about an hour before reopening, though many flights were canceled or delayed, and its railway station halted dozens of scheduled train rides Saturday, state media said.
Lushan reported the most deaths, 76, but there was concern that casualties in neighboring Baoxing county might have been under-reported because of inaccessibility after roads were blocked and power and phone services cut off.
As the region went into the first night after the quake, rain started to fall, slowing rescue work. Forecasts called for more rain in the next several days, and the China Meteorological Administration warned of possible landslides and other geological disasters.
{{In Zimbabwe, a daring street robber from Montgomery in Bulawayo has been sentenced to 12 months in prison for robbing a neighbour of property, including his artificial teeth, all valued US$150. Greecent Maphosa (27), of Plot 7B Hope Road, in Montgomery stabbed Mr Stephen}}
Chimutashu (34), from Plot 5 Lucy Road in the same suburb with a knife to force him into submission before stripping him naked.
Maphosa pleaded not guilty to plain robbery when he appeared before Bulawayo magistrate Ms Marilyn Mutshina.
He was however, convicted due to overwhelming evidence.
Maphosa was sentenced to one year in prison while two months were suspended for five years on condition of good behaviour.
Maphosa will serve an effective 10 months.
On April 1 Mr Chimutashu was walking along a path between Montgomery and Woodville when he met Maphosa who was in the company of an unknown accomplice.
Maphosa grabbed Mr Chimutashu and dragged him into the bush where he drew a knife and stabbed him on the lower lip while ordering him to keep quiet.
Maphosa then stripped Mr Chimutashu naked and took his pair of trousers, a t-shirt, shoes and a Motorola mobile phone handset.
He also removed Mr Chimutashu’s artificial gold teeth and took them away.
Maphosa left the court in stitches when he said he removed Mr Chimutashu’s artificial teeth because he thought they were dirty.
One trail in the search for clues about why two ethnic Chechen brothers may have carried out the Boston Marathon bombings leads to a sleepy town in Kyrgyzstan where former neighbors recalled a quiet family that was never in trouble.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are remembered as decent and obedient boys from their time in the 1990s in the small community of Chechens in Tokmok, a leafy town under the snow-capped Tien Shan mountains outside the capital, Bishkek.
Tamerlan, the elder of the two, studied well. His father, Anzor, made a living selling used cars and was welcomed with open arms when he visited the town again two years ago, 10 years after the family left for Russia and then the U.S.
The news that Tamerlan had been shot dead by police and Dzhokhar captured after a daylong manhunt on suspicion of carrying out the April 15 bombing, in which three people were killed, was greeted with shock and disbelief.
“The Tsarnaevs were such a good family. They yearned to be well-educated. None of them were rowdy. It was a very cultured family,” said former neighbor Raisa Kaayeva, a middle-aged housewife who is also an ethnic Chechen.
“I feel it with my heart — these boys were framed. Why did they go to this America? They should have stayed in Russia to lead a quiet life. Now they have been made scapegoats. I pity these boys. I was weeping when I saw it on TV — their lives were broken, as well as the lives of their mother and father.”
Badrudi Tsokayev, a friend of the father, waved his hands repeatedly as he described his shock at hearing the news. Like others who recalled the family, he saw no signs of radicalism.
“I wouldn’t imagine seeing this even in a nightmare,” Tsokayev, 60, said on a quiet street in Tokmok, 60 kilometers from Bishkek. “As a child, Tamerlan was such a quiet boy. Today everyone is calling me with just one question — is this true?”
He said Anzor Tsarnaev, who was born in Kyrgyzstan, had been fiercely proud of Tamerlan’s prowess in the boxing ring and said his son had been looking forward to going to Sochi to watch the 2014 Winter Olympics next February.
It is in this town of 53,000 that the boys would have become aware of their Chechen roots.
They would have learned about the difficult fate suffered by their predecessors in Soviet times that has fostered a sense of injustice among some Chechens and helped fuel an independence drive in Chechnya that led to two wars with Moscow in the 1990s.
Kyrgyzstan, a mainly Muslim nation of 5.5 million which hosts U.S. and Russian military air bases, had a huge influx of ethnic Chechens in 1944. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens and ethnically close Ingush were evicted from their homes in the North Caucasus and moved to Central Asia in cattle wagons after being accused by dictator Josef Stalin of collaborating with Nazi Germany.
About 99,000 of the Chechens and Ingush ended up in what was then the Kyrgyz Soviet Republic.
In Tokmok, the Tsarnaev clan alone inhabited a whole street before most of them moved back to their native village of Chiri-Yurt in Chechnya in the 1960s, residents said. About 20 Chechen families still live in a district popularly known as the Glass Factory, after the building that dominates it.
The brothers would have become more familiar with Islamist militancy when they moved in 2001 to Dagestan, the southern Russian province that lies at the heart of an Islamist insurgency and sees daily violence, and where their parents still live.
In Tokmok, they lived in a modest brick house before moving to a more spacious, two-story house opposite School No. 1 in the town center, where Tamerlan and his two sisters studied.
A school register shows Tamerlan’s date of birth — Oct. 21, 1986 — and the date when he entered the fifth grade, Jan. 18, 1999. He studied here for a year. Dzhokhar, born in 1993, was too young to go to school at the time.
“Yes, the Tsarnaevs studied here. I wouldn’t say they were anti-social or anything like that. No, I can’t say so,” said school director Lyubov Shulzhenko.
“The Chechen community here is so closely-knit and decent. We have never had problems with their children,” said Natalya Ryabovol, a physics teacher.
In the Soviet era, Tokmok hosted a busy base which trained military pilots for pro-Soviet countries stretching from eastern Europe to Africa. A Soviet-made jet fighter is perched on a pedestal at the town’s entrance.
Many of the townspeople today make a living by growing fruit and vegetables and tending cattle. The attack in Boston seems part of another world.
Kyrgyzstan, which borders China, is politically fragile after the toppling of two presidents since 2005. It says it cannot be held responsible for the brothers’ actions.
{A house in Tokmok where the Tsarnaev brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan, lived before leaving for Dagestan.}
{Schoolchildren marching on Friday in front of a school where Tamerlan Tsarnaev studied in Tokmok.}
{{South Sudan army (SPLA) Chief of General Staff, Gen. James Hoth Mai has warned the military to stay away from politics and misuse by politicians.}}
The senior military official, while addressing the SPLA forces in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state Saturday, told the forces not to be affected by disagreements between politicians in the capital, Juba, in direct reference to the recent contest between President Salva Kiir and his deputy, Riek Machar.
“Don’t allow yourselves to be misused by politicians in Juba. Some may come to you and say where are my people in the army…so that we can beat those Dinkas or those Nuers. No, only when they come with their ballot boxes is when we shall make choices and vote the ones we want,” he said in a statement .
Gen. Mai reminded the army of their constitutional mandate to protect the people of South Sudan from external threats, but not to be used by politicians for their personal gains.
“This army doesn’t belong to anybody,” he said, adding that politicians should play their politics without involving the army.
There has been unease in recent weeks as the ruling party (SPLM) prepares for its national convention in which to confirm President Kiir, also the current chair of the party, or elect a new chairman who will also be its flag bearer for the upcoming 2015 presidential elections.
The president also issued an order withdrawing some of unspecified delegated powers from the vice president, which caused public outcry.
There have been speculations that the recent shakeup of the army, from removal of deputies to the chief of general staff, was an attempt to maintain political loyalty in the army, which the army command refuted and described as normal.
Four candidates have emerged, in accordance with the recent party’s political bureau meeting, which also urged Kiir to step down.
Among the four senior officials who have expressed their intention to contest include Machar, who also doubles as the party’s deputy chairman, second deputy chairman, James Wani Igga, and Secretary General, Pagan Amum Okiech.
The ruling party has, however, not set the date for the said national convention, which was supposed to take place next month, according to its normal schedule in five years.
{{Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) plans to assemble the Lexus ES 350 sedan at its Kentucky plant in 2015, marking the first time the Japanese automaker has built a vehicle from its luxury lineup in the United States.}}
Toyota said on Friday it will invest $360 million at the Georgetown factory, which makes the Toyota Camry and other models. The move will create 750 new jobs and boost the plant’s production capacity by 10 percent to 550,000 vehicles.
Expanding U.S. production fits in with Toyota’s strategy to make cars in the markets where its customers live. The move also counters the effect of the strong yen, which has made exporting from Japan expensive.
“This decision is in line with two key goals,” Toyota President Akio Toyoda said at a news conference in New York. “First, to serve our U.S. customers. And second, reduce the effect of the exchange rate on our customers.”
The U.S. market is the world’s largest for luxury vehicles.
{{Italy’s Parliament on Saturday re-elected Giorgio Napolitano to an unprecedented second term as president, after party leaders persuaded the 87-year-old to serve again in hopes of easing the hostility that has thwarted formation of a new government.}}
Napolitano easily surpassed the simple majority required to be elected Saturday afternoon. He garnered 738 votes, far more than the 504 needed for victory for another seven-year mandate.
Parliament had a much harder time. It took it three days of balloting to choose a president, reflecting the legislature’s deep polarization following inconclusive nationwide elections in February.
After the weeks of stalemate, Napolitano can formally begin one of the head of state’s most important tasks once he takes a new oath of office. He must figure out who has the best prospects of putting together a new government, with enough support to successfully work with Parliament and survive a mandatory vote of confidence.
That won’t be easy. Italy’s main political parties — essentially three distinct ideological blocs in Parliament and their often shifting allies — are heavily polarized, and antagonism only grew sharper during the gridlock.
Napolitano, a former Communist, will have to quickly start sounding out parties about a potential premier. The next government faces pressure to bring urgently needed economic and electoral reforms to the recession-mired nation.
Italy has had a caretaker government for months, led by economist Mario Monti, a Napolitano appointee whose harsh austerity measures of higher taxes, pension reform and slashed spending helped keep Italy from succumbing to the debt crisis.
Napolitano, citing his advanced age, had repeatedly refused to be a candidate for another term that would see him turn nearly 95 when it runs out. But he yielded to the appeals out of a sense of responsibility toward the nation, he said.
{{China slammed the human rights record of the United States in response to Washington’s report on rights around the world, saying that U.S. military operations have infringed on rights abroad and that political donations at home have thwarted the country’s democracy.}}
The report released Sunday in China — which defines human rights primarily in terms of improving living conditions for its 1.3 billion people— also cited gun violence in the U.S. among its examples of human rights violations, saying it was a serious threat to the lives and safety of America’s citizens.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2012 said the U.S. government continues to strengthen the monitoring of its people and that political donations to election campaigns have undue influence on U.S. policy.
“American citizens do not enjoy a genuinely equal right to vote,” the report said, citing a decreased turnout in the 2012 presidential election and a voting rate of 57.5 percent.
The report from the information office of the State Council, or China’s Cabinet, which mostly cited media reports, said there was serious sex, racial and religious discrimination in the U.S. and that the country had seriously infringed on the human rights of other nations through its military operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
The U.S.’s annual global human rights report issued Friday by the State Department said China had imposed new registration requirements to prevent groups from emerging that might challenge government authority.
It said Chinese government efforts to silence and intimidate political activists and public interest lawyers continued to increase, and that authorities use extralegal measures such as enforced disappearance to prevent the public voicing of independent opinions.
It also said there was discrimination against women, minorities and people with disabilities, and people trafficking, the use of forced labor, forced sterilization and widespread corruption.
China’s authoritarian government maintains strict controls over free speech, religion and political activity — restrictions that the U.S. considers human rights violations.
{{ Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi defended his handling of some of the nation’s most pressing problems in a nearly two-hour television interview on Saturday, and pledged to appoint new Cabinet ministers in a move that could ease the country’s deep political polarization.}}
Reshuffling the Cabinet has been a key demand of the nation’s largely liberal and secular opposition, which is at odds with Morsi’s Islamist backers over a myriad of issues that have surfaced since the 2011 uprising that ousted longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
In the interview with Al-Jazeera, Morsi said the Cabinet changes would involve a number of key ministries, although he did not say how many. He also did not give a timeline or say which ministries would be affected.
It would be the second reshuffle since Morsi took office in July. The last ministerial shake-up in January led to the appointment of a new interior minister to oversee the police force.
Rights groups allege that since Mohammed Ibrahim took the post, police have used excessive force, killing dozens of people nationwide in protests against Morsi.
There is no guarantee that a reshuffle of Cabinet posts would help bridge the deepening divide between Morsi’s opponents and supporters, but it could help the country build political consensus around painful austerity measures needed to secure a nearly $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.
