Iran elections: Parliamentary poll a test for Rouhani
After nuclear deal and the lifting of sanctions, voting will gauge reaction to political policies of Iran's moderates.
| Iran, Hassan Rouhani, Middle East, Elections
Iranians cast their ballots to elect new members of parliament and a council of clerics in elections seen as a referendum on President Hassan Rouhani's rule.
An estimated 50 million people are eligible to vote on a pre-selected list of candidates during the polls on Friday.
The elections take place just a month after years of economic sanctions against the country were lifted.
Surveys indicated a higher turnout compared to the previous parliamentary polls four years ago, but lower than the presidential contest that elected Rouhani in 2013.
Voting started at 8am local time (04:30 GMT).
Rouhani said he had reports of a high turnout, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Turkish journalists released from jail after court rules press freedom violated
Erdem Gül and Can Dündar charged with revealing state secrets for report alleging Erdoğan government tried to ship arms to Islamists in Syria
Turkey’s constitutional court on Thursday ruled that the rights of two Turkish journalists charged with revealing state secrets in a hugely controversial case had been violated, leading to their release after three months in jail.
The Cumhuriyet newspaper’s editor-in-chief Can Dündar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül had been detained since November over a report alleging that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government tried to ship arms to Islamists in Syria.
They had been due to go on trial on 25 March and had been held in jail for 92 days.
The constitutional court, which convened to discuss the journalists’ individual petitions, ruled that their “rights to personal liberty and security had been violated”, the court said in a statement on its website.
Lying Press? Germans Lose Faith in the Fourth Estate
Germans are losing faith in their media. Nowhere is this more apparent than in mistrust of refugee crisis media coverage. Where did journalists go wrong? And how much of this skepticism reflects a preference for rumors over facts? By SPIEGEL Staff
You couldn't ask for a better reader than Isolde Beck. She has had subscriptions to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Badische Neueste Nachrichten and SPIEGEL for many years. And as a retiree, she takes the time to thoroughly read through the newspapers and magazine.
But her relationship with the media has become troubled in recent weeks. She has the feeling that the "news is being suppressed" and that journalists are no longer allowed to "articulate certain things." Beck has stopped believing what the journalists write.
These feelings prompted her to send SPIEGEL an irate letter to the editor in early January regarding a cover story about the sexual violence in Cologne. "We can no longer assume that there is a democracy or even freedom of expression in this country anymore," she wrote, "and the media are complicit, for the most part, perhaps out of reluctance to alienate interviewees, or perhaps because it appears to be gratifying to manipulate readers or to make fun of them, however you want to put it." In retrospect, says Beck, she would not have expressed her thoughts quite as drastically.
Togo: Inside a school without tables or chairs
OBSERVERS
Schoolchildren in the village of Amato in Togo do their best to learn what they can in class, despite not having even the most basic facilities. Since the school was founded 20 years ago, the number of pupils in attendance has soared, yet there still aren't any tables or chairs for them to sit on.
Outraged by the situation faced by Amato's schoolchildren, Oscar, an activist who works for an NGO that focuses on Togo's development, sent us his photos of the school. He's decided to take a stand against his country's crumbling education infrastructure.
Outraged by the situation faced by Amato's schoolchildren, Oscar, an activist who works for an NGO that focuses on Togo's development, sent us his photos of the school. He's decided to take a stand against his country's crumbling education infrastructure.
"Only the head teacher has an official state job, the other teachers have to be paid by the parents!"
In Amato, the primary school was launched back in 1994, but the building promised by the authorities was never built. As a result, it's a shoddy DIY job. There are five classrooms: some have walls made from straw, and others don't even have walls, only roofs. Roofs are built from either sheet metal or straw. In either case, it means that the school isn't properly sheltered from the outside. So when it rains, all the pupils go home. During the summer rainy season, there are hardly any classes for three months!
Khmer Rouge survivor Bunhom Chhorn films return to camp of his childhood
Lindsay Murdoch
South-East Asia correspondent for Fairfax Media
Phnom Penh: Bunhom Chhorn saw the black-uniformed killers in his nightmares as he was growing up in Melbourne.
"They appeared stark and terrifyingly real, always trying to catch me or do me harm," he says.
Bunhom tried to push the images away as he studied, worked night-shift in a factory and then won a place in a documentary-making course.
He never told his friends he was a child survivor of a death camp under communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas who stormed Cambodia's cities in 1975, driving millions of people into the countryside at gunpoint, in one of the most deadly revolutions of modern times.
Ex-Mexican president Fox: 'I'm not going to pay for that f***ing wall'
Updated 0054 GMT (0854 HKT) February 26, 2016
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox is making his position clear on Donald Trump's pledge to make Mexico pay for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
"I'm not going to pay for that f***ing wall. He should pay for it," Fox told Fusion's Jorge Ramos in an interview published Thursday.
Trump quickly responded on Twitter.
"FMR PRES of Mexico, Vicente Fox horribly used the F word when discussing the wall. He must apologize! If I did that there would be a uproar!" he tweeted.
Fox, who was president from 2000-2006, also pushed back on Trump's claim that he was winning support among Latinos, after entrance polls at Tuesday's Nevada caucuses showed him winning Latino Republican caucusgoers.
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