The opposition filed a suit on Tuesday seeking a court annulment of Nigeria's presidential elections it says were flawed and demanded another poll.
President-elect Umaru Yar'Adua is scheduled to take over the top job from President Olusegun Obasanjo on Tuesday, making a final ruling unlikely before Obasanjo leaves office.
The opposition says the April 21 vote was rigged by Obasanjo's ruling party in favor of its candidate, Yar'Adua, and the top two runners-up according to official results filed their cases on Tuesday in the capital, Abuja, to try and force a rerun.
"We want Umaru Musa Yar' Adua disqualified and to nullify the election and let's go back to the polls with those who are qualify," said Mike Ahamba, a lawyer for the second-place finisher, General Muhammadu Buhari.
Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who officially placed third in the vote deemed not credible by international election observers, filed a separate, but related suit.
Buharri filed a similar case after 2003 elections he lost to Obasanjo. The case took over two years to reach a final conclusion, which found that the vote had been rigged in many places. But the courts could not say definitively that Buharri would have been the winner in a clean vote.
Yar'Adua's declared victory gave the governer of northern Katsina State a win with nearly 70 percent of the vote.
Obasanjo's 1999 election ended decades of near-constant military rule -- a period in which both he and Buharri both served as leaders.
Japan has started its first nationwide survey of animal cafes amid concerns over animal welfare, hygiene and public health, a government official said, bringing greater scrutiny to the popular but lightly regulated sector. The desktop survey, which began this month, will examine the number of facilities, the types of animals they house and the conditions they are held in, and how visitors interact with the animals. Exotic animal cafes, where visitors can interact with species ranging from otters to owls and marmots, have become popular attractions for Japanese and foreign tourists. However, researchers say some facilities keep threatened species, raising
OLD WOUNDS: Protestant marchers seized on an overturned injunction to stage a march, which drew thousands of counterprotesters to block the road in Portadown UK leaders called for calm as a tense standoff with residents seeking to halt a pro-British Protestant march through a primarily Catholic area stretched into the night on Sunday, in one of the worst crises for Northern Ireland in the past few years. The tensions were triggered after a Belfast appeal court overturned a High Court injunction in the early hours of Sunday to clear the march by the Orange Order to go ahead for the first time since 1997. The Parades Commission, Northern Ireland’s independent body regulating contentious processions, had authorized 35 Orangemen to march silently along Garvaghy Road in Portadown,
The winner of this year’s Fat Bear Week has been crowned after a nail-biting final — and it’s the son of a former champion. Backpack, a 20-year-old male beloved by rangers in Alaska for his quiet determination, edged out female fellow finalist Dancing Queen in the annual ursine eating competition at Katmai National Park. More than 2.3 million people voted in the week-long competition that sees bears unwittingly jostle in a series of head-to-head contests to decide which one of them has most impressively piled on the pounds ahead of hibernation. Viewers watch a livestream of the enormous animals as they scoop salmon
A shark stranded in a canal in the South Korean port of Busan has become the country’s latest wildlife sensation, with the city saying about 600,000 people have flocked to see it over the past two weeks. The 3.5m shark was first spotted in a narrow waterway in North Port on Sept. 18. As the days passed without the shark finding its way back to the ocean, authorities on Tuesday launched a rescue operation to guide it out, but the effort failed. The South Korean Coast Guard and other agencies deployed vessels to spray jets of water behind the shark
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