Turkmens elect acting president
Turkmenistan’s acting president overwhelmingly won the election to replace the country’s late autocrat who ruled for two decades, the head of the central elections commission said today.
Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov won Sunday’s six-candidate election with 89.23 percent of the vote.
It was the first time Turkmenistan held a presidential election with more than one candidate, but all six were members of the country’s only legal political party.
Since becoming interim president after Saparmurat Niyazov’s Dec. 21 death, Berdymukhamedov has spoken of making changes from the path set by Niyazov, who had fostered an all-encompassing cult of personality. Among the changes Berdymukhamedov has proposed is allowing ordinary Turkmens access to the Internet.
Taipei, Taiwan
Candidate accused of corruption
Prosecutors indicted presidential hopeful Ma Ying-jeou on corruption charges Tuesday, dealing a blow to the Harvard-educated lawyer widely considered to be a front-runner.
Ma denied the charges in a televised speech and announced that he would run for president next year. Many have high hopes he will be able to improve Taiwan’s rocky relations with rival China.
However, Ma did announce that he would step down as chairman of the Nationalist Party in line with a promise he has made repeatedly over the past several weeks.
Investigators have spent three months probing allegations that Ma mishandled a public fund when he was the popular mayor of Taipei.
Ma is accused of diverting $333,000 of public money to his private account.
Algiers, Algeria
Al-Qaida allies claim bombings
A group linked to al-Qaida staged seven near-simultaneous bomb attacks Tuesday targeting police in several towns east of Algiers and killing six people, officials said.
Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa – the new name for the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, known by its French acronym GSPC – claimed responsibility for the attacks in a telephone call to the Al-Jazeera television network. The group allied itself with al-Qaida last year, raising the stakes in the region’s fight against terrorism.
The seven bombings, some of them car explosions, hit the Kabylie region east of Algiers between 4 and 10 a.m. Tuesday, the state news agency said.
The apparently coordinated attacks surprised the North African country, which has steadily emerged from an Islamic insurgency that killed more than 150,000 people in the 1990s. While scattered violence by the GSPC continues, such carefully planned strikes are rare in today’s Algeria, an ally in the U.S.-led war against terrorism.