QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Just as the West financed al-Qaida in Afghanistan in its beginnings, and later paid a heavy price, today it is supporting it in Syria, Libya and other places and will pay the price later in the heart of Europe and the United States.”
Syrian President Bashar Assad, accusing the U.S. and other countries of backing the international terror group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Article, 2A
Venezuela judge: No basis for recount
CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela’s Supreme Court president said Wednesday that there is no legal basis for holding a vote-by-vote recount that opposition candidate Henrique Capriles is demanding for the disputed presidential election.
Capriles has not formally filed a request for a recount with the National Electoral Council, which on Monday ratified Nicolas Maduro, late President Hugo Chavez’s anointed successor, as the winner. The council said Maduro won with 50.8 percent of the vote to Capriles’ 49 percent.
Judge Luisa Estela Morales, the Supreme Court chief, said Venezuela’s voting system is so automated that a manual count doesn’t exist. Technically, however, a recount is possible. Paper receipts are issued for every vote cast and can be checked against tallies done by each voting machine, voter registries and centralized records.
Morales is the same judge who issued a decision three days after Chavez’s March 5 death saying that Maduro effectively became president at the moment of his mentor’s passing. That enabled Maduro to be sworn in the same day as acting president.
Capriles has presented a series of allegations of vote fraud and other irregularities that he contends easily add up to more than Maduro’s 262,000-vote winning margin of about 14.9 million votes cast.
Theft trial delayed for anti-Putin blogger
KIROV, Russia - Just 45 minutes after it began Wednesday, the trial of Russia’s most popular opposition leader was delayed for a week at the defendant’s request.
Alexei Navalny, a 36-year-old anti-corruption blogger and protest leader, has been charged with stealing more than $500,000 from a state-owned timber company. He served as an adviser to the governor in Kirov in 2009, when authorities say the crime occurred.
Navalny contends that the charges have been conjured up to silence him and frighten off others who are in opposition to President Vladimir Putin. He said he expects a guilty verdict despite his innocence.
The court’s chief judge, Konstantin Zaitsev, said an innocent verdict was most unlikely, pointing out that Russia has a conviction rate higher than 99 percent. That is because only watertight cases reach court, he said.
Mubarak’s retrial set to resume May 11
CAIRO - The Cairo appellate court on Wednesday set the resumption of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s retrial for May 11. Mubarak faces charges in the deaths of hundreds of protesters during the uprising that deposed him.
An order to transfer the 84-year-old ex-president back to a prison hospital from a military facility set off a noisy demonstration Wednesday. Mubarak supporters blocked the road in front of the military hospital and forced a delay in his transfer, said a security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
Mubarak remains in custody on new corruption charges, though a court ordered him released earlier this week before his retrial.
The decision to transfer him back to Tora prison, where his two sons are being held before facing a corruption trial, was made after the prosecutor ordered the formation of a committee to look into Mubarak’s health.
Warsaw ghetto exhibit opens in Poland
WARSAW, Poland - Israel’s ambassador to Poland opened a 3-D show of Warsaw ghetto photos on Wednesday as part of observances marking the 70th anniversary of the ghetto’s ill-fated revolt against German Nazis.
The 48 pictures shown at Warsaw’s Fotoplastikon are images of people walking or begging in the streets, street vendors, German troops and the Jewish cemetery. Most of them were taken between 1940, when the ghetto was set up, and 1945, when almost nothing remained of Warsaw’s Jewish district.
Ambassador Zvi Rav-Ner said the photos are proof of the immense suffering of the Jews in the ghetto and a warning against nationalist violence.
On April 19, 1943, a few hundred poorly armed Jews put up resistance to the German forces, who were sending ghetto residents to death camps. The revolt was crushed in May, and the ghetto was razed, its residents killed.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 04/18/2013