East Timor goes to the polls today to pick a new president, with voters in the tiny country to choose between Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta and an ex-fighter who spent years in the jungle battling Indonesian rule.
Ramos-Horta and Fransisco "Lu-Olo" Guterres have both pledged to accept the results of the vote, which many in Asia's newest country hope will herald a new era of peace and stability following an often violent and politically divisive year.
"I will honor the result if Lu-Olo wins," said Ramos-Horta, who is the acting prime minister. "My obligation is to stand behind him and support him, in whatever way I can," said the 57-year-old who speaks five languages.
The vote follows balloting last month that did not produce an outright winner.
Most analysts see Ramos-Horta -- who fled East Timor during the occupation to became the international face of its freedom movement -- as the favorite, especially since five losing candidates in the first round of voting are urging their supporters to back him.
But Guterres, 52, is backed by Fretilin, the political party of the nation's former armed resistance to Jakarta's rule.
It traditionally has strong support across the country and a powerful party machine.
"I believe we will win [the] election," Guterres said, adding he would "work with anyone who becomes president."
East Timor broke free from 24 years of often brutal Indonesian rule in 1999 following a violence-plagued independence referendum. The bloodshed only stopped with the arrival of international peacekeepers.
The country was administered by the UN until 2002, and descended into chaos last year after then-prime minister Mari Alkatiri fired a third of the army following a mutiny, provoking gunbattles between rival security forces that spiraled into gang warfare and looting.
At least 37 people were killed and some 155,000 fled their homes before the government collapsed. A 1,200-strong Australian-led peacekeeping force has since restored order and, along with a similar-sized contingent of UN police officers, now provides national security.
Supporters of rival candidates clashed in the run-up to the first vote, but campaigning this time around has been peaceful.
"We are satisfied that there's enough security in place to guarantee that East Timorese will vote in a safe manner," Finn Reske-Nielsen, deputy head of the UN mission in the country, said late on Monday.
Ramos-Horta has pledged to make it easier for foreign investors to do business in the desperately poor country and said the UN and international troops would be welcome to stay in the country for many years.
"Ramos-Horta is the best person for this position," said Joana Brandao-Carmo, who has been living in a refugee camp since last year's violence. "He can be the ears, the eyes and the mouth of poor people like me."
Guterres spent the Indonesian occupation in the jungles and mountains of the country, battling in a war that killed more than 100,000 people, either in fighting or from starvation and disease linked to the conflict.
By 1999, he was the most senior resistance leader in the country.
Though traditionally left-leaning, Guterres has shown no sign he will steer the country away from the freemarket course it has taken since independence.
"Even though he is not well educated like Ramos-Horta, he has a clear program for people like me," 24-year-old Nelson de Sousa said. "In his last 10 months as prime minister, Ramos-Horta has been unable to ensure the return of refugees to their homes. All he has given us is empty promises."
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the