QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I wouldn’t say we are back to square one, but maybe to square one-and-a-half.”
Ron Bishop, an Australian search-and-rescue expert, after officials said the Indian Ocean patch they had been searching since April likely does not contain missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
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Election monitors fault Egypt vote
CAIRO -- Egypt's presidential election fell short of international standards of democracy, two teams of foreign observers said Thursday, a day after the former military officer who led last summer's military takeover won a landslide victory with more than 95 percent of the vote.
"Egypt's repressive political environment made a genuinely democratic presidential election impossible," Eric Bjornlund, president of Democracy International, an election-monitoring organization funded by the United States, said in a statement.
A team of European Union observers said in a statement that despite guarantees in the Egyptian Constitution, respect for the essential freedoms of association and expression "falls short of these constitutional principles."
Robert Goebbels, a Luxembourg member of the European Parliament, summarized the voting process as "free but not always very fair," noting the winner's overwhelming advantage in both financial resources and media attention.
The winner, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the former army field marshal, was universally perceived as the candidate of the state, the political establishment and the business elite.
Palestinian urges united government
RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree Thursday calling on the prime minister of his West Bank-based Palestinian Authority to form a temporary Palestinian unity government, according to the official news agency WAFA.
It is not clear if Abbas' decision means that the formation of a unity government is imminent or that he is trying to buy more time.
A unity government would consist of technocrats backed by Abbas' Fatah movement and the Islamic militant group Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip in 2007. Since the Hamas takeover, the two rival factions have set up separate governments in their respective territories.
For the past five weeks, they have been negotiating who should be in the unity Cabinet. The deadline for an agreement expired Wednesday.
In his decree Thursday, Abbas asked West Bank Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah to form a national unity government. Theoretically, a prime minister assigned to such a task has five weeks to complete it.
U.K. to reveal intel on invasion of Iraq
LONDON -- British officials have agreed to make public some details of the exchanges between Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq -- but the full versions of the conversations will remain secret.
A British inquiry into decisions and mistakes in the planning and execution of the war began in 2009. Its report has been delayed for several years by negotiations over the inclusion of classified material, including 25 notes and 130 records of conversations between Blair and Bush ahead of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion.
On Thursday, the inquiry's chief, retired civil servant John Chilcot, confirmed that a deal had been reached to publish "gists" and selected quotes from the messages.
He said none of the material made public would "reflect President Bush's views."
N. Korea to review Japan kidnap case
TOKYO -- North Korea has agreed to open a new investigation into the fate of Japanese citizens it abducted in the 1970s and 1980s in return for the lifting of some sanctions, the two countries said Thursday.
Japan will lift the sanctions after it confirms that a committee has been set up and has begun work, said Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga. It will also consider possible humanitarian aid to North Korea depending on the progress of the investigation, which is expected to start in about three weeks, he said.
The sanctions, which are in addition to United Nations sanctions imposed on North Korea, include restrictions on bilateral exchanges and limits on how much money ethnic Koreans in Japan can take on visits to North Korea.
North Korea acknowledged in 2002 that its agents kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly to train spies in Japanese language and culture. It allowed five of them to return to Japan in 2002, but said the others had died.
Japan remains suspicious of that finding and has identified others it believes were abducted.
A Section on 05/30/2014