World in brief: U.N. panel orders partial recount
KABUL, Afghanistan – Amid continuing charges of massive fraud in Afghanistan’s presidential elections, a United Nations-backed complaints commission has ordered a recount of nearly 10 percent of the 26,000 polling stations, members of the commission said Tuesday.
The recount is expected to strip away votes from incumbent President Hamid Karzai, but it isn’t clear whether it will reduce them enough to force Karzai into a runoff with his principal challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.
According to an initial tally released by the Afghan Independent Election Commission, which Karzai appointed, the president currently has more than 54 percent of the vote. If the recount pushes him back below 50 percent, then Karzai would face Abdullah in a runoff that would be scheduled for sometime this fall or in the spring.
Resignations clear way for new leader
TOKYO – Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso and his Cabinet resigned today to pave the way for parliament to elect Yukio Hatoyama as the country’s next leader.
The top officials resigned after holding their final Cabinet meeting early this morning, the prime minister’s office said.
The resignations were a formality so that parliament’s lower house, now controlled by Hatoyama’s party following their landslide election victory last month, can vote him in as Japan’s prime minister. Hatoyama’s victory ends more than 50 years of nearly unbroken rule by Aso’s Liberal Democratic Party.
Hatoyama, head of the left-of-center Democratic Party of Japan, has promised to shake up Japan’s political system, cutting government waste, reinvigorating the world’s second-largest economy and focusing policies on consumers, not big business.
Parliament was to convene in a special session later in the day to formally select the new prime minister. Hatoyama’s party controls 308 of the 480 seats in the body’s lower chamber, which selects the prime minister, virtually assuring him of the post.
“I am excited by the prospect of changing history,” Hatoyama said early today. “I also feel the weight of the responsibility of making history.”