President Mikhail Saakashvili headed for victory in Saturday’s Georgian election, according to an exit poll in the former Soviet republic, where he is fighting accusations of authoritarian tendencies four years after coming to power as a champion of democracy. Saakashvili’s supporters waved flags and tooted car horns in the capital after the exit poll showed him winning 53.8 percent of the vote. But the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points — casting doubt on whether the president would hang onto the absolute majority needed to avoid a runoff.
For 5,000 years, great tongues of ice have spread over the 3-mile-high slopes of Puncak Jaya, in the remotest reaches of New Guinea. Now those glaciers are melting, and glaciologist Lonnie Thompson must get there before they’re gone. “No one knows how thick these remaining glaciers are,” Thompson said of Puncak Jaya, or Mount Jaya. “We do know they are disappearing.” As a companion project to Thompson’s expedition, an international research team is planning a first-ever assessment of recent climate change in New Guinea, especially along the 1,200-mile mountainous spine of the southwestern Pacific island.
Benazir Bhutto’s widowed husband accused members of Pakistan’s ruling regime of involvement in his wife’s killing and called Saturday for a U.N. investigation, as British officers aiding Pakistan’s own probe pored over the crime scene. Calls for an independent, international investigation have intensified since the former prime minister was killed Dec. 27 in a shooting and bombing attack after a campaign rally. Opposition activists denounced the government’s initial assessment that an Islamic militant was behind the attack and that Bhutto died from the force of the blast, not from gunshot wounds.
An Iraqi soldier is accused of turning on two decorated American servicemen and shooting them to death during a joint operation in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said Saturday. An Iraqi official said the suspect may have links to militant groups. The Dec. 26 shooting in the northern city of Mosul, which left three other U.S. soldiers and a civilian interpreter wounded, was the second known attack by a member of the Iraqi military on the American troops who train and work closely with Iraqi forces.
Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga on Sunday rejected an offer from his opponent to form a unity government, saying he wanted mediation following an electoral dispute that has sparked deadly ethnic violence. Odinga told a news conference that President Mwai Kibaki, re-elected by a narrow margin in a vote count that international observers said was deeply flawed, “cannot offer us anything because he did not win the election.” He welcomed the expected arrival next week of Ghana’s President John Kufuor, current chairman of the African Union, to\nmediate.
