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JUNEAU, Alaska: Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin
abused her position as Alaska governor by pressuring officials to
sack a state trooper once married to her sister, a long-awaited
official investigation said Friday. In a potentially explosive
263-page report released by Alaska’s Legislative Council following
a six-hour closed-door hearing, investigator Steve Branchflower said
Palin violated state ethics rules governing public officials. Palin
had allowed her husband Todd Palin to use the Alaska governor’s
office and its resources to pressure officials to fire state trooper
Mike Wooten, her former brother-in-law, the investigator said.
McCain-Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton said the report showed Palin
had acted “properly and lawfully” in axing Monegan, dismissing
the investigation as politically motivated. A Republican-dominated
bipartisan committee had launched the investigation following
Palin’s decision to sack Alaska public safety commissioner Walt
Monegan in July.
-- AFP
JUNEAU, Alaska: Democrat Barack Obama opened a
double-digit lead over rival John McCain in a key opinion poll
Saturday while investigators found Republican vice presidential
nominee Sarah Palin had abused her powers as Alaska governor. Just
over three weeks from the November 4 vote, Obama leads McCain 52
percent to 41 percent among registered voters, according to the
latest survey conducted by Newsweek magazine. A similar poll a month
ago showed the two candidates tied at 46 percent. As many as 86
percent of voters said they were dissatisfied with the way things
were going in the United States, and only 10 percent said they were
satisfied. With voters preoccupied by the faltering economy, Obama
has broadened his base of support. According to the survey, he now
leads McCain among men 54 percent to 40 percent and women 50 percent
to 41 percent.
-- AFP
WASHINGTON, D.C.: US President George W. Bush
will hold talks with G7 finance ministers Saturday in search of
coordinated ways to tackle the financial crisis that has shaken
markets from Asia to the United States. The early morning meeting at
the White House comes after the Group of Seven finance chiefs agreed
Friday to use “all available tools” to support major banks and
prevent their failure as they sought to dampen a financial firestorm
threatening more mayhem. The plan followed another day of massive
falls on the markets as investors rushed to the exits, putting G7
officials under intense pressure to come up with a convincing
accord.
-- AFP
SEOUL: North Korean television on Saturday
showed photographs of Kim Jong Il, the first time in almost two
months the reportedly ailing leader has been pictured by the
communist state’s official media. Chosun Chung-ang TV carried 10
still pictures of Kim, 66, inspecting a women’s artillery battery
wearing his trademark khaki boiler suit, but did not say when the
visit was made. It was the first time since mid-August that official
media has carried a photograph of the reclusive leader. After he
failed to appear on September 9 for a parade marking the country’s
60th anniversary, South Korean officials said he had suffered a
stroke around mid-August. They said he underwent brain surgery but
is recovering well.
-- AFP
BEIJING: The latest tests on Chinese milk powder
have found no traces of melamine, the country’s top quality
control agency said on Friday. It was the third round of tests for
the industrial chemical since the breaking of the tainted baby
formula scandal that left at least four infants dead and sickened
more than 50,000 others, according to the General Administration of
Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine. The tests covered
113 batches of baby formula from 20 brands in nine provinces and 267
batches of other milk powder from 72 brands in 18 provinces, the
agency said.
-- Xinhua
TOKYO: The United States will remove North Korea
from a terrorism blacklist later Saturday, Japan’s Kyodo News
reported, quoting a senior US administration official. Kyodo did not
give any details nor name the US official in its report, which was
datelined from Washington. Reports from several countries have said
the United States is close to removing North Korea from the US list
of state sponsors of terrorism in the hope of saving a crumbling
six-country nuclear disarmament deal with the North.
-- AFP
YANGON: Myanmar’s detained democracy leader
Aung San Suu Kyi has appealed to the ruling junta against her
detention, her party’s spokesman said Saturday. The appeal was
sent by the opposition National League for Democracy party to
military leaders in the administrative capital Naypyidaw in an
attempt to secure her release from house arrest at her lakeside home
in Yangon. “One of her lawyers U Hla Myo Myint sent her appeal to
the cabinet in Naypyidaw on Thursday. They accepted it and signed
the receipt,” Nyan Win, an NLD spokesman said.
-- AFP
VIENNA: Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider
died in a road accident Saturday, APA news agency reported quoting
the police. “The governor of Carinthia and leader of the BZOe
[Alliance for Austria’s Future] Joerg Haider died after a car
accident early Saturday in Klagenfurt”, the capital of his home
state, the agency said. Haider, 58, was at the wheel of his official
car in the south of Klagenfurt when it veered off the road for
unknown reasons after overtaking another vehicle. He suffered
serious injuries to his head and chest as his car flipped over
several times and died shortly after the accident, APA added.
-- AFP
LIMA: Peruvian Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo announced
Friday that President Alan Garcia had accepted the resignation of
his Cabinet members because of their alleged corruption. During an
event at the government palace, del Cas-tillo said Garcia
accepted the resignation of his ministers, which was presented
Thursday after a week of crisis due to alleged corruption on the
grant of oil fields. Four audio-tapes emerged on Sunday linking
members of the ruling party to a plan to steer lucrative petroleum
contracts to a Norwegian oil company in exchange for bribes.
-- Xinhua
WASHINGTON, D.C.: A grassroots organization that
grew out of 1960s radicalism found itself Friday at the center of a
political storm over alleged voter registration fraud in the run-up
to the US presidential election. The Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now, better known by its acronym ACORN,
boasts gathering the names of 1.3 million mostly non-white,
low-income voters in 21 states in the biggest voter registration
drive in US history. But its achievement is being challenged by
conservative opponents of Democratic front-runner Barack Obama,
after allegations of voter registration fraud emerged in at least
six to eight states. Republican rival John McCain’s campaign
jumped into the fray Friday, suggesting in a new video that Obama
trained ACORN activists, and alleging that ACORN had engaged in
“bullying banks” into making risky loans to poor households.
-- AFP
BANGKOK: Thailand’s highest-ranking military
officer Saturday piled pressure on the government to end political
unrest in which two persons were killed and hundreds injured this
week. Supreme Commander General Songkitti Jagga-batara, who oversees
the army, navy and air force, said he had instructed the govern-ment
to solve the country’s political crisis, ruling out any immediate
military action.
-- AFP
KUALA LUMPUR: Somali pirates seized a Greek
tanker and separately attacked a World Food Programme-chartered
ship, a maritime piracy watchdog said Saturday. Noel Choong, head of
the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre in
Kuala Lumpur, told Agence France-Presse that pirates boarded the
Greek chemical tanker Friday. Choong said the tanker was hijacked in
the notorious Gulf of Aden waterway. On Thursday, pirates attempted
to board a WFP ship off Mogadishu, he said, adding the “captain
took anti-piracy action and managed to escape.”
-- AFP
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