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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012
PAGE 3A
NEWS OF THE WORLD
No official results were expected before Monday. Independent verification of the vote was not possible.
ASIA
YANGON, Myanmar — The party of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi said she had led it to a landslide election victory Sunday, setting the stage for her to take public office for the first time and head a small opposition in the military-dominated parliament.
The victory, if confirmed, would mark a major milestone in the Southeast Asian nation, where the military has ruled almost exclusively for a half-century and where a new reform-minded government
Democrat candidate Suu Kyi wins seat in Myanmar election
As results came in Sunday night from the poll watchers of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, party spokesman and campaign manager Nyan Win projected it would win 40 of 45 parliamentary seats at stake. It contended 44.
is seeking legitimacy and a lifting of Western sanctions.
It would also mark the biggest prize of Suu Kyi's political career, and a spectacular reversal of fortune for the 66-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate who the former junta had kept imprisoned in her lakeside home for the better part of two decades.
Associated Press
A digital signboard outside the National League for Democracy's headquarters in Myanmar's main city, Yangon, announced in the late afternoon that Suu Kyi had won a seat. Supporters gathered by the thousands began wildly shouting upon learning the news, chanting "We won! We won!" while clapping, dancing, waving red party flags and gesturing with thumbs-up and V-for-victory signs.
As more counts came in from the NLD's poll watchers around the country,
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the crowd grew to as many as 10,000. The party's security guards tried without success to keep the traffic flowing past the people occupying much of the road and all nearby sidewalks.
Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party supporters cheer upon the party's announcement outside party headquarters in Yangon, Myanmar, Sunday.
Descendents of ancient Islamic city of Timbuktu attack city
AFRICA
AGADEZ, Niger — Booms from rocket launchers and automatic gunfire crackled Sunday around Mali's fabled town of Timbuktu, known as an ancient seat of Islamic learning, for its 700-year-old mud mosque and, more recently, as host of the musical Festival in the Desert that attracted Bono in January.
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On Sunday, nomadic Tuauregs who descended from the people who first created Timbuktu in the 11th century and seized it from invaders in 1434, attacked the city in their fight to create a homeland for the Sahara's blue-turbaned nomads. Their assault deepens a political crisis sparked March 21 when mutinous soldiers seized power in the capital. The Tuauregs have rebelled before, but never have they succeeded in taking Timbuktu or the major northern centers of Kidan and Gao, which fell Friday and Saturday as demoralized government troops retreated.
The Tuareg set up their camel-skin and palm-mat tents in the dry season, attracted by Timbuktu's location where the Niger River flows toward the southern brink of the Sahara Desert, prompting some to call it the point where "the camel meets the canoe."
The expression "from here to Timbuk
tu” conjures up the end-of-the-earth remoteness of the sun-baked frontier town. It does not express the town’s dynamic role as a major crossroads for the caravan trade between the Arab north and black West Africa, bringing together black Africans, Berbers, Arabs and, above all, the Tuaregs.
The tents soon gave way to sun-dried terracotta-colored mud brick buildings built in the Moorish style as traders, medical doctors, clerics, artists, poets and others settled.
Maliian soldiers from the 512th Motorised Infantry company complete their training by U.S. Special Forces in the desert near Timbuktu In this March 18, 2004.
From the sizzling desert sand and burning sun, one enters walled enclosures with a central courtyard and archways leading to the welcome cool
of shadowy rooms where men chat over copious cups of strong, mint-flavored tea brewed thrice in a time-honored tradition. Women bake bread in the sand and cook spice-perfumed dishes of goat, cow and camel meat flavored with dried wild hibiscus flowers or the powdered leaves of the okra plant fried in shea butter.
EUROPE
Police block off Red Square to prevent anti-Putin protest
MOSCOW Police detained about 55 protesters on Sunday outside the gates to Red Square, which was unexpectedly closed to all visitors and tourists to prevent an anti-Kremlin demonstration.
Opposition activists had called on supporters to walk around the square wearing the white ribbons that have become a symbol of the protest movement against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the stifling of democratic politics during his 12 years in power.
When police took the unusual step of closing the vast cobblestone square near the Kremlin, about 300 protesters gathered instead just outside the gates. The meeting place, communicated through social networking sites, was the "zero kilometer," the spot from where all distances from Moscow are
measured.
Holding hands to form a circle, the protesters chanted "This is our city," "Russia will be free" and "Russia without Putin."
Putin faced unprecedented protests by tens of thousands of people in the months ahead of a March presidential election. Since his victory, the street protests have dwindled and have been routinely broken up by police. Those detained have usually been released by the end of the day.
Some of the protesters then demanded to be allowed onto Red Square and police rounded them up, leading or carrying them onto waiting buses.
Police said about 55 people were detained.
The protest movement, however, has inspired a rise in civic activism and
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Russian police officers detain a protester during an unsanctioned opposition rally in Moscow Sunday.
involvement in local politics.
Hundreds of volunteers from Moscow were observing a second-round mayoral election on Sunday in the city of Yaroslavl, 250 kilometers (150 miles) northeast of the capital, where the opposition candidate was in a runoff with the candidate supported by the local and regional governments.
NORTH AMERICA
Presidential candidates in Mexican election promise change
MEXICO CITY The four candidates for Mexico's presidency officially launched their campaigns for the July 1 election on Friday, all of them promising change.
Enrique Pena Nieto, who is running for the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, used the word "change" 26 times in his first official campaign speech.
"Mexico is clear on what it wants, and it doesn't want more of the same," Pena Nieto declared in the western city of Guadalajara. "It wants to exit this stage of shadow and darkness and enter a new stage of light and hope."
The Obama campaign's skillful use of social media in 2008, when it employed email, text messages and the Web to reach voters, appears to have made an impact on the Mexican political scene.
Pena Nieto's focus on "a grand crusade for change" and "the change we want" echoed the 2008 campaign slogan of President Barack Obama, "change we can believe in." It was unclear whether that echo was intentional.
Josefina Vazquez Mota, whose pre-campaign appearances have been plagued by logistical difficulties and poor planning, told supporters Friday to use social media, "this new world that accompanies us," to attract potential voters.
"It's going to be hard to reach every corner of the country," Vazque Mota acknowledged. In fact, the first female candidate for a major Mexican party has had trouble making it on time to campaign events in Mexico City, let alone the often violent and isolated outlying regions of the country.
Though she is an incumbent-
party candidate, Vazquez Mota is
campaigning on the one-word slogan, "Different," perhaps an attempt to distance herself from President Felipe Calderon's six-year offensive against drug cartels. More than 47,000 lives have been lost to drug-related violence in that time.
All three major-party candidates said they want to bring peace to Mexico.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is making his second run for the presidency for the leftist Democratic Revolution Party after narrowly losing the 2006 election, said at his first campaign news conference Friday that he represents "true change."
Lopez Obrador led weeks of street blockades to protest what he claimed was fraud in the 2006 elections and later anointed himself as "legitimate president." He has since been seeking to change his angry, radical image for a softer one.