QUOTE OF THE DAY

“We waited for the government team today, but they did not come.”

Maulana Samiul Haq, a Pakistani cleric picked by the Taliban to represent the group in peace talks with the government, which were delayed Tuesday Article, this page

Close to boil, Ukraine opposition warns

KIEV, Ukraine - Ukrainian opposition leaders warned Tuesday that tempers are heating up and the president must take action to resolve the country’s protracted political crisis.

Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion who is one of the top figures in Ukraine’s mass protests, met Tuesday with President Viktor Yanukovych as the parliament held a session but took no action.

Over two months of intense protests have put Yanukovych under substantial pressure. But he has made no moves to work with the opposition since last week, when he pushed the parliament to pass a measure providing amnesty to many arrested protesters if demonstrators vacate buildings they occupy.

Protesters rejected that condition and continue to seek Yanukovych’s resignation and an early election.

“The temperature of society is growing, and I told the president we have to immediately take a decision,” Klitschko said after the meeting.

Protests that began in late November have drawn substantial crowds to downtown Kiev, sometimes numbering above 100,000 people, and an extensive protest tent camp has been set up on the capital’s main square. The protests turned violent in mid-January.

Thai opposition asks court to toss vote

BANGKOK - Thailand’s main opposition party petitioned a court Tuesday to annul last weekend’s disrupted national election, launching a legal challenge that has the potential to prolong the deeply divided country’s political paralysis.

The Democrat Party’s petition to the Constitutional Court also urges the dissolution of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s ruling party, which called Sunday’s elections in an effort to defuse anti-government protests that started three months ago.

Wiratana Kalayasiri, a former opposition lawmaker and the head of the Democrat Party’s legal team, said the petition argues that the polls violated the constitution on several grounds, including that they were not completed in one day.

Critics call the Democrats’ argument counterintuitive, saying the reason the election could not be finished in one day is because anti-government protesters backed by the party sabotaged the vote.

The Democrat Party boycotted the election, and the protesters aligned with it forced the closure of hundreds of polling stations in Bangkok and the south, preventing millions of people from voting.

As a result, a series of special elections are required to complete the balloting. Election results cannot be announced until all areas have successfully voted.

Killings top dozen in Baghdad blasts

BAGHDAD - Two rockets slammed into the zone in Baghdad where diplomatic and government offices are located, and a wave of bombings struck across the rest of the city Tuesday, killing more than a dozen people, security sources said.

The rockets, identified as Katyushas, killed a soldier in the international zone. Fifteen people were killed in car-bomb and suicide blasts at markets in three Baghdad neighborhoods and at an army checkpoint in Taji, north of the capital, and a roadside bomb detonated next to a police patrol there, killing a policeman.

Also on Tuesday, two members of the so-called Awakening Councils, local Sunni tribesmen the government pays to fight jihadis in Anbar province, were found slain in Tarmiya, in northern Baghdad province.

More than 40 people were wounded in Tuesday’s violence, security officials said.

Tunisians storm militant hideout; 8 die

TUNIS, Tunisia - Tunisia’s National Guard stormed a suspected militant hideout in a seaside suburb of Tunis after a day-long standoff Tuesday. Seven militants were killed, including suspect in a political assassination last year, a minister said.

One National Guard member also died in the clash, which happened almost a year after the assassination of leftist politician Chokri Belaid by Islamist extremists set off a political crisis in this North African nation.

Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou said one of the militants killed Tuesday had been identified as Kamel Gadhgadhi, the suspected assassin of Belaid. Two other radicals killed were involved in the gruesome ambush of soldiers in Mount Chaambi that left eight dead, five with slit throats, he said.

Front Section, Pages 5 on 02/05/2014