Watch Nationalists take narrow lead in tight Kyrgyz poll

Nationalists take narrow lead in tight Kyrgyz poll
Early results in Kyrgyzstan's parliamentary election show a narrow lead for the opposition nationalist party Ata Zhurt.

The poll was held under a new constitution intended to make the country a parliamentary democrac
Members of its leadership worked under President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was ousted in a mass uprising in April.

The pro-government Social Democrats and four other parties passed the 5% mark required to gain seats in parliament.

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Kyrgyzstan Turmoil

Uncertain poll a first for region
Desperate flight of ethnic Uzbeks
Kyrgyzstan's anger boils over
Kyrgyzstan vote: 'We need change'
Analysts say no party has an overall majority so parties will have to unite to form a coalition government.

Sunday's election comes just months after 400 people died in inter-ethnic violence in the south of the country.

Turnout was 56% nationwide and even higher in the southern city of Osh, which saw some of the worst of last June's clashes between the Kyrgyz majority and ethnic Uzbeks.

Coalition cabinet
In all, 29 parties are competing for 120 seats in parliament.

Early results suggest that coalition-building will be needed to form a parliamentary majority with the right to select a prime minister.

The BBC's Rayhan Demytrie in Bishkek says the emergence of the Ata Zhurt party as a frontrunner will surprise many in Kyrgyzstan.

Continue reading the main story
Analysis


Rayhan Demytrie
BBC News, Bishkek
The big question now is what kind of coalition will emerge in Kyrgyzstan?

Will it be led by the frontrunner, the nationalist Ata Zurt party which wants to go back to a presidential form of government and shut down the US military base.

One of the party leaders infamously said that no other ethnicity in Kyrgyzstan can be equal to Kyrgyz.

Or will the coalition be led by the Social Democrats, whose leader was one of the top members of Kyrgyzstan's provisional government that came to power following a mass uprising in April.

A lot will depend on the party that came third - Respublika. It might become a kingmaker in this parliamentary vote.

The party has strong backing in the south among ethnic Kyrgyz and it wants to go back to a presidential form of government.

In late June the country approved a new constitution that changed the form of government from a presidential to a parliamentary system.

It followed the ousting of the former president in April.
Coppied by http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11511579

Watch Hungary says clean-up of toxic spill could take a year

Hungary says clean-up of toxic spill could take a year


Budapest: A damburst of toxic sludge that killed at least four people and left scores needing treatment for chemical burns and other injuries could take up to a year to clean up, officials said on Wednesday.

"The clean-up and reconstruction could take months, even a year," Environment Secretary Zoltan Illes said.

On Monday, the retaining walls of a reservoir at an aluminium plant in Ajka in western Hungary collapsed, sending a toxic soup of industrial waste cascading through seven villages.

The devastation spread across an area of 40 square kilometres (15.4 square miles) in what officials say is Hungary's worst-ever chemical accident.



Three adults and one child were killed and 123 people were injured, while three people are still missing.

Karoly Tily, the mayor of Kolontar, the village where all four victims died, declared on Wednesday a day of mourning, and the company which owned the reservoir, the Hungarian Aluminium Production and Trade Company (MAL), said it would foot the costs of the funerals.

Illes told online publication Langlovak in an interview that the overall costs of the clean-up and reconstruction "could reach tens of millions of euros (dollars)”.

If MAL was unable to drum up the funds, "the sum will be borne by the Hungarian government, or it might be necessary to ask the European Union for aid”, he said.

The tidal wave of sludge overturned cars, swept away possessions and raised fears that pollution leeching from it could reach the Danube River, which courses through Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine before flowing into the Black Sea.


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Late Wednesday, officials said they were confident the contamination would not reach Europe's second longest river

"If our calculations are right then by the time the sludge reaches the Danube contamination will be under the acceptable levels," Emil Jenak, president of Northern Transdanubian Water Management, said.

A pollution expert, quoted by the Hungarian news agency MTI, said rain and neutralising agents used so far had already led to a drop in alkaline levels in the Marcal river "and the connecting Raba will suffer much less damage" than feared.

But environmental organisation Greenpeace detected lead, chrome and arsenic in samples taken from a tributary of the Marcal, the river Torma.
Coppied by http://www.zeenews.com/news660066.html

Watch Hungary: toxic sludge will take one year to clean up

Hungary: toxic sludge will take one year to clean up
The wave of toxic sludge that has poured into seven villages in Hungary could take up to 12 months and tens of millions of dollars to clean up, officials have warned

Zoltan Illes, the environment minister, told the BBC the clean-up of the country's worst chemical accident would take at least one year and probably require technical and financial assistance from the European Union.
The red tide, which inundated streets and homes after the walls of residue reservoir at an aluminium plant collapsed, has so far killed four people and injured 120, but the death toll is expected to rise.

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Six people are missing and another eight are in critical condition in hospital, suffering from chemical burns. The sludge is a mixture of water and mining waste containing heavy metals and is considered highly dangerous.
In some places the torrent, which swept cars off roads and damaged bridges, was eight feet deep.
It is estimated that 38.8 million cubic feet (the equivalent of 440 Olympic-size swimming pools) of red, poisonous sludge has affected some 15 square miles.
Hundreds of residents have been evacuated and a state of emergency has been declared in three western counties.
As the clean-up operation began fears mounted that the highly poisonous sludge could have reached the River Danube.
Coppied by http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/hungary/8045257/Hungary-toxic-sludge-will-take-one-year-to-clean-up.html

Pakistan flood recovery could take years

enjoy Pakistan flood recovery could take years




Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari warned his beleaguered nation could take years to recover from devastating floods as global pledges topped 700 million dollars and waters refused to relent.
The near month-long floods have killed 1,500 people and affected up to 20 million nationwide in the country’s worst ever natural disaster, with the threat of disease ever present in the camps sheltering desperate survivors.
“Your guess is as good as mine, but three years is a minimum,” Zardari told reporters on Monday when asked how long it would take Pakistan to go through relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation after the floods.
“I don’t think Pakistan will ever fully recover but we will move on,” the president said, adding the government — under fire for its slow relief response — was working to protect people from similar disasters in future.
Senior US official Dan Feldman, the deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington that a UN General Assembly meeting last week was “a real galvanising moment” in the aid effort.
“By our count, we’ve seen over 700 million dollars pledged, including our own 150 million dollar commitment, from over 30 countries,” Feldman said, without giving a country-by-country breakdown.
He said there are an “additional 300 million dollars in as yet undefined commitments” from a variety of countries.
The United States has made nuclear-armed Pakistan a key ally in the fight against Islamic extremism with fears militancy could benefit from the instability after the flooding and fury at the government.
Zardari was strongly criticised for failing to cut short a visit to Europe at the start of the disaster and while he defended that decision, he acknowledged that some criticism of the government’s response was justified.
“There will always be a ‘could have been better, would have been better, should have been better’... (but) you have to understand how enormous the issue (the scale of the disaster) is,” he said.
Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from flood-threatened areas in the south since Saturday, including most of the 100,000 residents in the city of Shahdadkot, which authorities were battling to protect.
Dozens of villages around Shahdadkot were inundated, district administration official Yasin Shar told AFP Monday, as floodwaters threatened the city.
Nearly 90 percent of people living in the area had left and the remaining were being rushed out, he said.
Similar efforts were being made to save Hyderabad, a city of 2.5 million people on the lower reaches of the Indus river, where at least 36 surrounding villages have been swept away.
Pakistani officials on Monday began talks with the International Monetary Fund in Washington amid reports Islamabad was asking the fund to ease the terms of a loan worth nearly 11 billion dollars.
Last week Pakistani officials said Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh would ask the IMF to restructure the current loan or consider new financing.
There are fears that losses as a result of the floods could reach 43 billion dollars.
Millions of survivors are in desperate need of food, shelter and clean drinking water and require humanitarian assistance to survive, as concerns grow over potential cholera, typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks.
Disaster management officials say that the scale of the flooding is much larger than Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake, which killed 73,000 people and made 3.3 million homeless.
Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Islamabad, said that 1.5 million people were being treated for everything from respiratory and skin infections to diarrhoea
Coppied by http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayarticleNew.asp?section=todaysfeatures&xfile=data/todaysfeatures/2010/August/todaysfeatures_August41.xml

winning the 2010 Rogers Cup ATP tennis tournamen Murray beats Federer to take Toronto titlet

Watches this enjoy Murray beats Federer to take Toronto title
TORONTO (AP): Andy Murray beat Roger Federer 7-5, 7-5 to defend his Rogers Cup title on Sunday.

The 23-year-old from Scotland overcame several rain delays to become the first man to repeat as champion since Andre Agassi in 1995.

The players last met in the Australian Open final, an easy win for Federer that gave him 16 Grand Slam titles, most in tennis. Rain delayed the start of the match by 15 minutes, and when play finally began, Murray seemed intent on blasting Federer from the stadium before fans could dry their seats, breaking Federer twice in the first 10 minutes.

Federer's last action before this tournament was his quarterfinal loss at Wimbledon. He even worked with a coach, Paul Annacone, and declared he would "love to win another 10 Wimbledons, another five French Opens, an Olympic gold in London, a Davis Cup and whatever - you name it."

Andy Murray of Great Britain celebrates winning the 2010 Rogers Cup ATP tennis tournament after defeating Roger Federer of Switzerland in two-straight sets in Toronto Sunday, Aug. 15, 2010. - APix
After being held to only two points through the first two games on Sunday, Federer broke back to get to 3-1 and climbed all the way to 5-5 when Murray double-faulted his way to a break. But Federer lost his own serve before Murray served out.

Murray was on serve with Federer up 2-1 in the second set when another rain delay happened, this one more than 45 minutes.

Murray held serve to level the second set at 2-2 when the chair umpire called the two men back to their umbrellas just moments after play resumed.

A storm rolled in to cause about an hour-long delay. Federer perked up briefly when play resumed, but eventually Murray's serve was too much, and the Swiss superstar hit his final return long to end it.

The tournament had the top four players in the semifinals. Federer beat Novak Djokovic and Murray beat Rafael Nadal.
Coppied by http://thestar.com.my/sports/story.asp?file=/2010/8/16/sports/20100816070601&sec=sports