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Madagascar court confirms president's poll victory Reuters South Africa - Johannesburg,South Africa ANTANANARIVO (Reuters) - A Madagascar court on Saturday confirmed President Marc Ravalomanana's victory in elections held on December 3, paving the way for a ... See all stories on this topic Madagascar Prez Reelected Prensa Latina - Havana,Cuba Luanda, Dec 23 (Prensa Latina) Madagascans knew through an official announcement of the High Constitutional Court that current President Marc Ravalomanana was ... Madagascar confirms poll result BBC News Sat, 23 Dec 2006 9:20 AM PST Madagascar's President Marc Ravalomanana is confirmed as the winner of the recent election. Marc Ravalomanana re-elected as president of Madagascar People's Daily Online - Beijing,China Madagascar High Constitutional Court (HCC) announced here on Saturday that Marc Ravalomanana was re-elected as Madagascar's president for the next five years. ... Madagascar’s president declared election winner Gu...

ANTANANARIVO: Madagascar’s incumbent President Marc Ravalomanana was officially declared yesterday the winner of December 3 elections, securing a second five-year term. “Candidate Ravalomanana, Marc is elected president of the republic having won more than 50% of the votes,” said Jean Michel Rajaonarivony, the head of the Constitutional Court. The court ratified the results in which Ravalomanana won 54.79% of the votes cast, beating 13 opponents in the first round of the race to the Indian Ocean island’s top seat. The former parliament speaker Jean Lahiniriko came second with 11.65%, followed by Roland Ratsiraka, nephew of ex-president Didier Ratsiraka, whom Ravalomanana beat in the last election five years ago, with 10.14%. Ravalomanana can thus serve a second five-year term. He will also be eligible to run for a third term under the island’s constitution. “I am very happy. This confirms our confidence with Madagascans and the international community,” Ravalomanana told AFP. “We will ...

Madagascar High Constitutional Court (HCC) began its process on Monday to verify the validity of the presidential election on December 3 as vote counting was completed by Sunday evening. The process began in all of 116 counties across the country immediately after the completion of the account, a senior HCC official told Xinhua on Monday. It would last for 20 days and final result would be announced officially by HCC as soon as verification was over, said the chief of HCC secretariat, who gave his name only as Rauson. The Interior Ministry announced Sunday evening that Marc Ravalomanana was re-elected as Madagascar's president for the next five years as vote counting was completed. Ravalomanana had beaten 13 other challengers and won 54.8 percent of the votes in the election, according to a release by the Interior Ministry, which oversaw the vote counting. A total of 4,521,267 voters, or 61.45 percent out of legitimate voters of 7,457,204, cast their votes across the Indian Ocean i...

Provisional results show president Marc Ravalomanana has been re-elected in what observers have generally considered free and fair elections. Although some votes - but not enough to influence the results - still need to be counted, government projections gave Ravalomanana 54.80 percent of the presidential ballot on 3 December, a comfortable lead that will allow him to avoid a second round runoff. "The elections went quite well. There won't be a need for a second round, [and the result] seems to be accepted by the opposition," Solofo Randrianja, professor of Political History at the University of Toamasina, told IRIN. According to the Ministry of Interior and Reform (MIRA), voter turnout was 61.45 percent. Jean Lahiniriko, the recently sacked president of the National Assembly, was Ravalomanana's closest challenger with 11.68 percent, and Roland Ratsiraka, Mayor of Madagascar's second city, Toamasina, and nephew of former president Didier Ratsiraka, came in third w...

The third-place finisher in Madagascar's presidential elections last week has filed suit challenging the victory of incumbent Marc Ravalomanana and demanding a second-round run-off. Roland Ratsiraka, nephew of the Indian Ocean island's former leader whom Ravalomanana ousted five years ago, said Monday official results giving the president more than 50 percent of the vote in the December 3 polls were fraudulent. The challenge, filed with Madagascar's High Constitutional Court, raises the specter of a repeat of the crisis that engulfed the country after the 2001 polls when Ratsiraka's uncle refused to accept defeat to Ravalomanana. According to the younger Ratsiraka's camp, this year's election was marred by an influx of unknown voters and official results giving Ravalomanana 54.8 percent of the votes could not be believed. They said their own figures showed Ravalomanana with only 47.5 percent of the vote and Ratsiraka coming in second with 12 percent, a tally tha...

Race as a factor in assigning students to high schools Seattle students entering high school were allowed to rank which schools they preferred. If an individual school had more applicants than available slots, the School District used a series of tie-breakers to decide who got in. First priority was for students with a sibling attending the school. The student's race was second tie-breaker when an individual school's racial composition deviated more than 15 percent from the overall racial composition of the School District. Parents Involved, an organization of parents with school-age children, sued the District claiming that screening students on the basis of race violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. The 9th Circuit held that the District's approach was lawful. Whenever a government entity (such as a public school district) makes decisions based on race, the courts engage in "strict scrutiny." This means that the District must have a "c...

Oral Argument Audio Release for Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, December 4.

WASHINGTON - The Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to confirm Robert Gates as defense secretary, with Democrats and Republicans portraying him as the man who will help overhaul President Bush's Iraq policies. ADVERTISEMENT The 95-2 vote was a victory of sorts for Bush, who named Gates to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld at the Pentagon on Nov. 8, a day after voters gave Democrats control of Congress for next year. Even so, much of Gates' support stemmed from his pledges to consider new options in Iraq. Overshadowing the vote was the release of an independent study lambasting Bush's approach to the war, increasing pressure on the White House to change course. "I am confident that his leadership and capabilities will help our country meet its current military challenges and prepare for emerging threats of the 21st century," Bush said in a statement after the Senate vote. He said Gates had shown during his confirmation hearing this week before the...

WASHINGTON - President Bush's war policies have failed in almost every regard, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group concluded Wednesday, and it warned of dwindling chances to change course before crisis turns to chaos with dire implications for terrorism, war in the Middle East and higher oil prices around the world. ADVERTISEMENT Nearly four years, $400 billion and more than 2,900 U.S. deaths into a deeply unpopular war, violence is bad and getting worse, there is no guarantee of success and the consequences of failure are great, the high-level panel of five Republicans and five Democrats said in a bleak accounting of U.S. and Iraqi shortcomings. It said the United States should find ways to pull back most of its combat forces by early 2008 and focus U.S. troops on training and supporting Iraqi units. The U.S. should also begin a "diplomatic offensive" by the end of the month and engage adversaries Iran and Syria in an effort to quell sectarian vi...

WASHINGTON - U.S. military and intelligence officials have systematically underreported the violence in Iraq in order to suit the Bush administration's policy goals, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group said. In its report on ways to improve the U.S. approach to stabilizing Iraq, the group recommended Wednesday that the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense make changes in the collection of data about violence to provide a more accurate picture. The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. "Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence," it said. "The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases." It said, for example, that a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack, and a roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn...

As a motivational speaker and executive coach, Caroline Adams Miller knows a few things about using mental exercises to achieve goals. But last year, one exercise she was asked to try took her by surprise. ADVERTISEMENT Every night, she was to think of three good things that happened that day and analyze why they occurred. That was supposed to increase her overall happiness. "I thought it was too simple to be effective," said Miller, 44, of Bethesda. Md. "I went to Harvard. I'm used to things being complicated." Miller was assigned the task as homework in a master's degree program. But as a chronic worrier, she knew she could use the kind of boost the exercise was supposed to deliver. She got it. "The quality of my dreams has changed, I never have trouble falling asleep and I do feel happier," she said. Results may vary, as they say in the weight-loss ads. But that exercise is one of several that have shown preliminary promise in recent research i...

Microsoft is probably the greenest company in all of high technology. Not green in the environmental sense—green with envy. It is so jealous of the iPod’s success that last week it unveiled a new music system—pocket player, jukebox software and online music store—that’s an unabashed copy of Apple’s. It’s called Zune. The amazing part is that it’s Microsoft’s second attempt to kill the iPod. The first was PlaysForSure—a gigantic multiyear operation involving dozens of manufacturers and online music stores. Microsoft went with its trusted Windows strategy: If you code it, the hardware makers will come (and pay licensing fees). And sure enough, companies like Dell, Samsung and Creative made the players; companies like Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster and MTV built the music stores. But PlaysForSure bombed. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex —something of a drawback when the system is called Pla...

A Florida voter may have unwittingly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by using an extremely rare stamp to mail an absentee ballot in Tuesday's congressional election, a government official said on Friday. The 1918 Inverted Jenny stamp, which takes its name from an image of a biplane accidentally printed upside-down, turned up on Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale, where election officials were inspecting ballots from parts of south Florida, Broward County Commissioner John Rodstrom told Reuters. Only 100 of the stamps have ever been found, making them one of the top prizes of all philately. Rodstrom, a member of the county's Canvassing Board, said he spotted the red and blue Inverted Jenny on a large envelope with two stamps from the 1930s and another dating to World War Two. The nominal value of the four vintage U.S. Post Office stamps was 87 cents, he said. "I thought, 'Oh my God, I know that stamp, I've seen that stamp before,"' said Rodstrom, 54, wh...

Ron Rogers gets behind the wheel of his Acura Integra before dawn in Brentwood, Calif. His iPod, loaded with stand-up comedy and audio books, is hooked up to the car stereo. Rogers needs plenty of audio material for his commute: He drives more than 90 miles -- roughly two hours each way -- from the San Francisco Bay Area to his job as a public relations specialist at a communications technology firm in suburban Sacramento. Rogers is one of the 3.4 million workers that the Census Bureau has dubbed "extreme commuters." At least 2 percent of Americans wake up to a commute of 90 minutes or more one way. Not surprisingly, most of these workers live near major metropolitan centers: New York, New Jersey, Maryland, California, and Washington, D.C., have the most workers with extreme commutes. The number of super-commuters nationwide has skyrocketed 95 percent since 1990, as workers hang on to lucrative jobs in city centers but move farther and farther afield in search of better housi...

A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows. Over the past three weeks, President Bush and top aides have defended the electronic monitoring program they secretly launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as a vital tool to protect the nation from al-Qaida and its affiliates. Yet 56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism. Agreeing with the White House, some 42 percent of those surveyed do not believe the court approval is necessary. "We're at war," Bush said during a New Year's Day visit to San Antonio. "And as commander in chief, I've got to use the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect ...

President George W. Bush defended domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency on Sunday after a newspaper report about a Justice Department official's resistance to the program prompted new calls for a Senate inquiry. The New York Times reported on Sunday that James Comey, a deputy to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, was concerned about the legality of the NSA program and refused to extend it in 2004. White House aides then turned to Ashcroft while the attorney general was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the Times said. "This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America," Bush said after visiting wounded troops at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The NSA program "listens to a few numbers called from the outside of the United States and of known al Qaeda or affiliate people," he said. "If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why," Bush said. White House spokes...

- U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito wrote as a lawyer in the Reagan administration 20 years ago that he personally backed its efforts to ban abortion and racial quotas, a 1985 memo released on Monday showed. ADVERTISEMENT Alito wrote the memo as part of his successful bid that year to be elevated to a deputy assistant attorney general. "It has been an honor and source of personal satisfaction for me to serve in the office of the Solicitor General during President Reagan's administration and to help advance legal positions which I personally believe in very strongly," wrote Alito, then an assistant U.S. solicitor general. "I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion," Alito added. The memo, part of a job application, was among more than 100 pages of documents releas...

No, it doesn't have the sexy allure of chocolate, the glamour of raspberry or the Southern charm of peach. But we had to have it, even when the price soared to about $8 for a measly 2-ounce bottle of extract last year. We yearned for the wholesome, comforting, slightly exotic flavor. Vanilla prices are falling now, so it's time to break out the recipes. Lavish the stuff in a homemade cream soda, a double vanilla pound cake with rum-vanilla sauce or a luxuriously rich vanilla custard sauce for berries. Or make some vanilla extract to steep all summer and fall, and bottle for gifts in December. For the pound cake, you'll need a vanilla bean, vanilla sugar and vanilla extract. The cream soda, homemade extract and custard sauce are made with whole vanilla beans. Whole vanilla beans are available in the spice aisle of many supermarkets. The pliable, dark-brown pods usually are packaged in a bottle or glass tube. Some stores sell vanilla sugar, or you could make your own by buryi...

All it took to make us appreciate plain old vanilla was a couple of cyclones, an oil boom and political unrest. By the time vanilla extract prices peaked in December at $4 to $10 an ounce, the tropical spice seemed downright exotic. But hold on to your recipes, because happy days for vanilla lovers are almost here again. Vanilla extract soon may be inexpensive enough to bathe in — or to at least make a batch of homemade cream soda or a double vanilla pound cake. "Prices started coming down in February," said Jim Trout, vice president of merchandising and sales for the Fred W. Albrecht Grocery Co., parent firm of Acme stores. Predictions in December of a lush 2005 harvest in Madagascar, the world's top producer of vanilla, helped drive down the price. Unprecedented harvests worldwide are expected this year, which should send the wholesale price of vanilla beans through the floor. "This is the first year (since 1999) we have more than enough — roughly double what the w...