It is Croatia versus the Czech Republic and Costa Rica versus the Dominican Republic in this year's battle for seats on the powerful UN Security Council.
But Libya -- which in some quarters is viewed as the most controversial candidate -- is virtually assured of election because it has been endorsed by the African group along with Burkina Faso and faces no opposition.
Vietnam, which was endorsed by the Asian group, is also running unopposed.
The 192-member General Assembly was scheduled to meet yesterday to vote for five new nonpermanent members of the council to serve two-year terms. In the secret ballot, candidates must get a two-thirds majority of members voting to win.
Last year's election saw the third-longest battle in UN history for a seat on the council.
It ended with victory for Panama on the 48th ballot after US-backed Guatemala and leftist Venezuela withdrew to end the deadlock for a Latin American seat.
Most council diplomats expect this year's race for the East European seat between Croatia and the Czech Republic and the contest for the Latin American seat between Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic to go several rounds -- but not as many as last year's contest.
Until last month, there was a three-way race for the two African seats but Mauritania dropped out in the expectation that Libya would support its candidacy in 2012-2013.
Susan Cohen, of Cape May Court House, New Jersey, who lost her 20-year-old daughter, Theodora, in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, said the US should oppose Libya's candidacy for a seat because Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was responsible for the attack.
"I feel that the US has totally lost its moral compass," she said. "Qaddafi blew up an American plane."
In 2000 the US successfully blocked Sudan's bid for a council seat, and Washington's candidate, Mauritius, won.
But in 2005, the US backed Nicaragua and Peru won. This year, Washington did not back a candidate against Libya.
Ten of the council's 15 seats are filled by the regional groups for two-year stretches. The other five are occupied by its veto-wielding permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the US.
The five countries elected to the council will take their seats on Jan. 1, replacing Congo, Ghana, Peru, Qatar and Slovakia.
The five countries elected last year -- Belgium, Indonesia, Italy, Panama and South Africa, will remain on the council until Jan. 1, 2009.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees