While much of the world believes Felipe Calderon has been officially declared Mexico’s next President, it is not true. At least not yet.

(Mexico City) Last week the Electoral Commission, IFE, announced the results of a country-wide count of tally sheets – sheets that are attached to each ballot box – they found that Felipe Calderon (PAN) was ahead of Lopez Obrador (PRD) by around 0.5%. To Calderon, there is no question that he is the winner. But according to Lopez Obrador, he has won more votes.

Despite what both Calderon and Lopez Obrador tell their supporters and what you read in press reports, the next President has yet to be officially declared. IFE is not the body responsible for officially announcing the next President. Rather, it is TRIFE (Electoral Tribunal) that will make an official announcement by early September, after addressing complaints filed by each party. The parties have four days to file their objections following the results of the tally sheet count, which was concluded last Thursday.

Last night, the PRD, Lopez Obrador’s party, delivered their official complaint to the tribunal.

TRIFE, a supposedly non-partisan, independent body, has the responsibility to examine irregularities brought forth to them. TRIFE, will therefore, have to consider facts such as:

– Why hundreds of thousands of ballots have yet to be included in any count;

– Why ballots have been found, literally, in the trash;

– Why there was a massive amount of ‘drop-off’ i.e. where people showed up to vote but did not cast a vote for president;

– Why, on Election Day, Casilla workers in places like Queretaro and Salamanca were caught on video, stuffing ballot boxes and changing tally sheets.

– The use and role of public expenditures on Calderon’s campaign;

– The intervention of the current President, Vicente Fox (a member of PAN), which benefitted Calderon, during the campaign, and which is illegal according to the Electoral Commission’s rules.

Other allegations include:

– A recording of a telephone call between members of PRI (the dominant party in Mexico up until 2000) and members of PAN, which indicates they struck an alliance on Election Day when the results began filtering in, showing PRI was falling way behind.

– Evidence of Hilldebrand’s involvement in compiling voter lists to annul certain voters, as well as manipulation of the PREP, the preliminary election reporting program. (Hilldebrand, a company founded by Calderon’s brother-in-law, was, reportedly, hired by IFE to create the vote tallying software used in the PREP.)

These are a few of the many anomalies not only recognized by the PRD complaint, but some of which that have already been observed by the Electoral Commission itself.
gregpalast.com

Mexico leftist cries fraud with election videos
…On Monday, Lopez Obrador played two shaky amateur videos that he said documented cheating by his rivals.

This story tries to make him look like a buffoon, and wins the award for how many times can you repeat the word ‘leftist’ in a single article.

US President George W Bush has approved an $80m (£43m) fund which he says will go towards boosting democracy in Cuba.
Mr Bush said the fund would help the Cuban people in their “transition from repressive control to freedom”.

The fund is part of proposals by a commission analysing US policy towards Cuba after the eventual death of Fidel Castro, who turns 80 next month.

The Cuban government said the plan was an act of aggression, violating Cuba’s sovereignty and international law.

The president of Cuba’s National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, said the world should be outraged by the actions of the US.

“They will not destroy the nation. They will not succeed in doing that. But they will cause harm and deprivation and suffering of individuals,” he said.
bbc.co.uk

No less than a quarter of annual development aid — about 20 billion dollars — is being used by donor countries to fund technical assistance of sometimes dubious worth, says ActionAid International in a new report.

The study, titled ‘Real Aid 2’, was launched Wednesday by the Johannesburg-based non-governmental organisation (NGO). As with last year’s ‘Real Aid’, it examines how development funding is spent.

The term “technical assistance” refers to research, training, and the services rendered by consultants — some of whom command fees that ActionAid finds excessive.

According to the report, based on 2004 data, it typically costs about 200,000 dollars a year to keep an expatriate consultant on staff. School fees and child allowances account for more than a third of this expense, which could be reduced with greater use of local advisors.

“Money is being spent on consultants who are earning up to 1,000 dollars a day,” Caroline Sande Mukulira, South Africa country director for ActionAid International, told IPS Wednesday.

Notes the report, “High salaries paid to expatriate advisors can also cause significant resentment among counterparts and the public in the south.”

“In the Ghana education service headquarters, government officials receive about 300 dollars a month, what a relatively inexperienced Ghanaian consultant could expect to earn in a day, and a foreign consultant in a few hours,” it adds.

The report also mentions a former UK-funded consultant’s claim that their daily take-home pay in Sierra Leone was the same as the monthly salary of the auditor general.

Perhaps more alarmingly, however, these high-priced advisors may fail to deliver lasting benefits.
allafrica.com

…Right now, we do not know beyond a shadow of a doubt what was said but all the circumstantial evidence points at least toward a variant of SOS Racisme’s claim. Zissou is the son of Algerian immigrants who has sparred verbally with Europe’s far-right political machine for more than a decade. He is an outspoken anti-racist on a team that has defined itself by its multiculturalism and stubborn insistence to stand up against bigotry both inside and outside the sport. Materazzi on the other hand, will be playing this year for the Italian team Lazio, where his father was the former coach. Lazio’s fan club, The Ultras, are notorious for their Fascist-friendly politics. Lazio’s hardcore Ultras, known as the “Irriducibili,” have members in Italy’s extra-parliamentary far right and try to use the club to recruit. The group has frequently uses racist and anti-Semitic banners, one time hanging a 50-foot banner that said their opponents were a “team of niggers.”

It,s wrong to taint Materazzi for the actions of Lazio,s fans, but there is more. Earlier this season in a match that pitted Messina against Inter in Sicily, Messina’s star African player Marc Zoro famously picked up the ball and walked off the pitch in protest of the monkey chants rained upon him by Inter supporters. In a stirring act of solidarity, many of the Inter players immediately showed support for Zoro’s actions. But one opponent yelled, “Stop that, Zoro, you’re just trying to make a name for yourself.” That opponent’s name was Marco Materazzi.
counterpunch.org

JERUSALEM – Israel’s president is being dogged by allegations of sexual harassment in a spiraling scandal that has pushed the country’s violent standoff with Hamas off the front pages.

The swirl of accusations against President Moshe Katsav has not led to charges or even a police investigation. But it is threatening to tarnish the image of a Mr. Clean politician and has invited comparisons to another presidential sex scandal.

“Who does he think he is? Clinton?” a pair of comedians wrote in a newspaper column this week.

Katsav, who has held the largely ceremonial office since 2000, denies wrongdoing.

The first allegation surfaced late last week when Israel’s Channel 2 TV reported that a former senior employee in the president’s office accused him of sexually harassing her. The woman has not been identified.

In a meeting with Katsav last week, she also threatened to disclose the number of an overseas bank account allegedly set up to collect money the president received in exchange for presidential pardons, the television report said. The employee demanded hush money, it added.

The Maariv newspaper reported Tuesday that a second woman has since come forward with similar accusations.
news.yahoo.com

PARIS (AFP) – The Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda put on the Internet a video showing the mutilated bodies of two US soldiers kidnapped in June and executed to “avenge” an Iraqi woman raped near Mahmudiyah south of Baghdad.

“Here is a film on the remains of the bodies of the two American soldiers kidnapped near Yussufiyah (south of Baghdad). We are showing it to avenge our sister who was raped by a soldier belonging to the same division as these two soldiers,” said a preamble by the Mujahedeen Al-Shura Council, an Al-Qaeda dominated alliance of armed Sunni groups in Iraq.
news.yahoo.com

Would that be the big bad Osama Al Qaeda or ‘Al Qaida in Iraq’? The distinction was being made a year ago. Not anymore.

BAGHAD, Iraq – Suicide bombers struck Tuesday across the street from the heavily guarded Green Zone, killing up to 16 people, the deadliest attack in a wave of bombings and shootings that threatened to shatter confidence in Iraq’s new government.

In all, about 60 people died in more than a dozen bombings, shootings and ambushes, mostly in the Baghdad area, according to police reports. The dead included 10 Shiites slain by gunmen who fired on their bus as it left the capital for a funeral in southern Iraq, police said.

Lawmakers summoned the defense and interior ministers to explain the failure of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s security plan for the capital, where most of the recent violence has occurred.
news.yahoo.com

Mindless slaughter a calculated tactic
IRAQ’S bloodshed is rarely the result of militant groups engaged in mindless sectarian slaughter in the name of religion. Violence such as Sunday’s is carefully planned, and calculated to achieve a political objective.

If the groups responsible can trigger a continuous cycle of tit-for-tat violence, they hope to create a broader civil war and make Iraq ungovernable. The newly formed, US-backed Government in Baghdad would crumble. The fledgling security forces would fall apart.

Western public opinion would exert pressure on American, British and other leaders to bring their forces home. Extremist Sunni and Shia leaders would be free to carve out their own fiefdoms, much as Lebanon’s warlords did three decades ago.

That outcome would never be allowed.

KABUL: At least 60 civilians were killed in air strikes conducted by the US-led coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, said an official on Tuesday.

“The aircraft pounded three villages namely Deh Jauze, Sarosah and Kakrak, 12 km away from Trinkot, the provincial capital of Uruzgan, early on Monday. The strikes lasted from 1:00 am to 4:00 am,” said Abdul Khaliq, a provincial official.

Around 30 people were injured in the air strikes, he added. Meanwhile, the US military rejected these claims as baseless.
indiatimes.com

Backing away from Afghanistan no option: UN
KABUL (Reuters) – The international community underestimated the ability of the Taliban to recover from their 2001 defeat and the world should now respond by stepping up support for Afghanistan, the United Nations said on Monday.

An announcement by Britain expected on Monday that it will send more troops was “excellent news” and other countries should increase help, whether military, political or financial, the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative said. “These are difficult times for Afghanistan. These are difficult times for the south, but backing away is not an option,” the special representative for Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, told a news conference.

…Commercial Media organizations are reporting that Felipe Calderon won Sunday’s presidential election by 0.58 percent of the vote and will govern Mexico for the next six years, beginning on December 1.

It would not be the first time that the Commercial Media has been wrong.

Many of those reports have claimed that Wednesday’s first official count of precinct results in Mexico, 130,000 pieces of paper that claim to represent the vote tallies was a ‘recount.’

It would not be the first time that lazy ‘pack journalism’ got a major international story wrong.

The truth: No recount occurred on Wednesday, or before, or since. What occurred, we repeat ,was only the first official count of precinct tallies.

A Narco News investigation has found that in the small sample of precincts, less than one percent,where a recount was allowed, the shift in numbers away from Calderon was so drastic that, if recounts of all the ballots followed the same trend, the official results would invert and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would become the clear winner of the presidency by more than one million votes.
narconews.com

Part I Narco News

Democracy, Mexican Style – Part II
…n addition, it was learned that Felipe Calderon’s brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala wrote the vote-counting software, and it’s already been hacked. This new discovery is especially disturbing as whoever controls the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) computer systems can manipulate the vote process, control which votes get counted, which ones don’t, and what the final vote tally will be. The opportunity and temptation for fraud was therefore in the hands of the declared winner’s close family member and ally with every reason to believe he’d take full advantage.

Mexico’s leftist candidate presents evidence of fraud
Mexico’s leftist presidential candidate prepared to launch his legal battle to overturn his conservative rival’s apparent victory on Sunday when his lawyers submit what they claim is proof of vote fraud to the nation’s top electoral court.

The move by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who appears to have narrowly lost the vote to ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon, comes a day after the fiery leftist held a massive rally in Mexico City’s historic center and called on his supporters to help keep his hopes alive.

The evidence to be presented to the Federal Election Tribunal includes alleged proof of computer manipulation of results and that votes weren’t counted, his party says.

The legal appeals won’t seek to annul the July 2 election, but to force authorities to conduct a manual vote-by-vote recount. Over 100,000 supporters rallying in Mexico City on Saturday chanted “vote by vote!”

Voter support for former head of state Daniel Ortega increased last month in Nicaragua, according to a poll by Borge y Asociados. 30.1 per cent of respondents would back the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) member in this year’s presidential election.

Eduardo Montealegre of the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance – Conservative Party (ALN-PC) is second with 24.4 per cent, followed by Jose Rizo of the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) with 21.6 per cent, Herty Lewites of the Sandinista Renewal Movement (MRS) with 17.3 per cent, and Eden Pastora of Christian Alternative (AC) with one per cent.

The survey was completed before the death of Lewites on Jul. 2. The MRS has announced that economist Edmundo Jarquin would be its new presidential candidate, with singer-songwriter Carlos Mejia Godoy as his running mate.
angus-reid.com