Thousands of Malaysians in a riverside town on Borneo voted yesterday in a special election that will show whether the opposition can threaten the ruling coalition’s dominance in one of the country’s biggest states.
At stake is a parliamentary seat in Sibu town in Sarawak state, a longtime stronghold of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s National Front coalition, which has long commanded support among Sarawak’s main population of indigenous tribes.
The state is politically crucial because opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s three-party alliance needs to win more seats there if it wants to achieve its aim of wresting federal power in general elections expected before 2013.
The opposition hopes to win in Sibu because two-thirds of the nearly 55,000 voters are ethnic Chinese, who have increasingly accused the ethnic Malay-dominated government of racial discrimination.
Najib made a surprise visit to Sibu late on Saturday after observers said the opposition could triumph in the constituency, which the National Front won in 2008 general elections with a 3,235-vote majority.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
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