A special mission sent by the Organization of American States (OAS) met Haitian President Michel Martelly on Sunday as part of intensifying efforts to resolve an electoral crisis that threatens stability in the Caribbean nation.
Martelly is due to leave office on Sunday, but has no successor because violent protests over alleged fraud in a flawed first round led electoral authorities to call off a runoff vote scheduled to be held a week ago.
The government and the opposition remain at loggerheads, with each side holding protests almost daily and no agreement on who is to rule the nation if Martelly leaves office without an elected replacement.
Photo: AP
Criticism of the first round on Oct. 25 last year focused on hundreds of thousands of party agents permitted to vote in any polling station.
The runoff, with tighter controls on voting by party representatives, was supposed to be disputed between ruling party favorite Jovenel Moise and opposition challenger Jude Celestin.
Anti-government protesters have voiced opposition to the OAS initiative, which they believe might help Martelly remain in power beyond the constitutional date for his departure.
At least four proposals for what to do after Sunday are on the table, including options for an interim government that would be tasked with organizing elections. The proposal most strongly resisted by the opposition is for Martelly to stay on until elections are held.
The opposition, which includes members of several parties, who dispute the results of a first round election, threatens to intensify protests.
Proposals under discussion include nominating a Haitian Supreme Court judge or Haitian Prime Minister Evans Paul as provisional president. Another idea is that Haiti’s National Assembly appoint an interim president.
Martelly said he would not leave if there is no agreement about what happens after Sunday.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS