The path quickly cleared on Thursday for Brian Cowen to become Ireland’s next prime minister after the entire Cabinet backed him to replace Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.
Cabinet heavyweight Cowen, 48, was poised to be the only candidate when nominations for the next leader of Fianna Fail, Ireland’s perennial No. 1 party, close today.
Fianna Fail chief whip Tom Kitt announced that the party’s 77 lawmakers eligible to vote would crown their new leader on Wednesday morning.
PHOTO: AP
If Cowen remains the only candidate as expected, he would be elected in an unrecorded oral vote.
Cowen then would formally replace Ahern when the parliament elects a new prime minister on May 7.
Cowen has been a loyal Ahern lieutenant throughout the past 11 years of his government, and has served since 2004 as both deputy prime minister and finance minister. Cowen has been known as “the anointed one” ever since Ahern declared him his preferred successor 10 months ago.
Cowen’s lock on the top job became apparent as, one by one, more than a dozen Cabinet colleagues declared they would not challenge him. As darkness fell the final holdout, Transport Minister Noel Dempsey, conceded that he also stood no chance against Cowen.
Backers cited Cowen’s exceptionally broad experience as minister atop six government departments since 1992. They credited Cowen as a no-nonsense, straight-talking leader uninterested in pursuing Ahern’s populist style.
On Wednesday, Ahern shocked Ireland by announcing plans to step down as prime minister and party leader. His move followed an 18-month investigation into his 1990s finances that exposed him as the recipient of large amounts of ill-documented cash, some of which he admits came from business friends. He denies that any of the money amounts to bribes.
Ahern spent his first day as a lame-duck prime minister delivering a speech to a University College Dublin conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday peace accord for Northern Ireland.
Journalists pressed him about why he was quitting now — and whether grueling testimony last month from his former office secretary, Grainne Carruth, had been the tipping point.
Carruth frequently broke down in the stand after denying, then admitting, she had deposited £15,500 (US$30,000) into bank accounts controlled by Ahern and his family in April 1994.
That evidence contradicts Ahern’s insistence that the money Carruth deposited came from his normal monthly paycheck.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS