Indonesia votes today in only its second direct presidential election since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship, with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono expected to win another five-year term.
The liberal ex-general is hoping to avoid a run-off in September by beating opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri and outgoing Vice President Jusuf Kalla with a clear majority in the first round.
Most opinion polls indicate he has enough support to avoid a run-off, although some have pointed to a much closer race with Yudhoyono facing either Megawati or Kalla in a second-round decider.
Hundreds of thousands of police have been deployed across the vast archipelago to safeguard polling stations, especially in Papua where ethnic tensions are high and violence marred legislative polls in April.
Last-minute disputes over inaccurate voter lists were settled after Megawati obliquely suggested Yudhoyono’s supporters were trying to rig the vote. In a dramatic ruling late on Monday, the Constitutional Court changed voter registration rules to allow Indonesians left off the rolls to cast their ballots with identity cards.
“Let’s make the election a success. Don’t let the world see improper things happening in Indonesia,” Yudhoyono said in response to the ruling.
Speaking to provincial governors yesterday, he called for a “smooth presidential election that is truly honest, fair, direct, free and secret.”
Megawati called on Indonesians to vote with a “clear and honest mind.”
If he wins, the 59-year-old known simply as SBY would be the first president to serve consecutive terms at the helm of the world’s third-biggest democracy after India and the US.
His centrist Democratic Party tripled its vote in April’s polls to become the largest party in parliament, allowing him to handpick a loyal Cabinet of technocrats to speed up his reform agenda if he is re-elected.
Despite his popularity, Yudhoyono has been criticized for caving in to Islamist extremists over tolerance issues such as a controversial anti-pornography law and restrictions on the minority Ahmadiyah sect.
The presence of Suharto-era generals on all three tickets shows the lingering power of the military elite in Indonesia, analysts said. Megawati teamed up with notorious special forces ex-commander Prabowo Subianto as her running mate, while Kalla chose former military chief Wiranto, who has been indicted by UN prosecutors for crimes against humanity over East Timor’s bloody independence referendum in 1999.
Yudhoyono chose Western-educated economist and former central bank chief Boediono as his vice-presidential candidate.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS