Hassan Rouhani wins Iran's presidential election
Incumbent president wins with resounding majority, beating principlist rival Ebrahim Raisi to extend his term in office.
Iran's reformist President Hassan Rouhani has emphatically won the country's presidential election, according to official results, fending off a challenge by principlist rival, Ebrahim Raisi.
With nearly 40 million votes in Friday's hard-fought poll counted so far, Rouhani was leading the race with 56.88 percent, the interior ministry said on Saturday. Raisi, his closest rival, won 38.55 percent of the vote.
Mostafa Mirsalim, a conservative, got 1.13 percent, while reformist Mostafa Hashemitaba got 0.52 percent.
Donald Trump's extravagant trip to Saudi Arabia is a desperately-needed distraction from his crisis at home
The events planned for the President’s summits in Riyadh are pretentious and reek of hypocrisy. There’s even one dedicated to Twitter – in a nation that locks up anyone who uses the social media platform to criticise the government
President Trump arrives in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, mere hours after US bombers attacked pro-Assad militiamen whom the US military say were threatening a base in southern Syria where US and British Special Forces are training rebel fighters.
It would be naïve to imagine that the timing of the US attack, the first intentionally made against Syrian government ground forces in six years of war, was not geared to Trump’s Saudi visit. It has the additional great advantage, from the point of view of the White House, of distracting attention from Trump’s disasters in Washington since he sacked James Comey as head of the FBI and saw a Special Counsel appointed to investigate links between his associates and Russia.
Brazil's top prosecutor accuses president of obstruction of justice
Brazilian President Michel Temer has been accused of taking bribes in a scandal that engulfed both of his predecessors. The new bombshell allegations could plunge Brazil further into political chaos.
Brazil's top prosecutor accused President Michel Temer of obstruction of justice and corruption on Friday. At the same time, the country's Supreme Court released testimony from a plea deal that accused Temer, as well as former presidents Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, of taking millions in bribes.
According to a statement made under oath by Joesley Batista, the owner of the JBS meatpacking firm, transfers of $150 million (133.8 million euros) were made to offshore accounts linked to Lula and Rousseff. He said that former Finance Minister Guido Mantega acted as a middleman for the illegal funds.
How do you explain bombs and cholera to kids? You lie
How do you raise a family in a war zone? Our Observer Hisham al-Omeisy lives in Yemen’s capital Sana’a with his wife and two boys aged seven and 11. He tells us what it is like living in a country crippled by famine, disease, and a civil war, which has been ongoing for two years and has left millions of people in need of humanitarian assistance.
From gifs, cat memes, and dark humoured jokes (“Yemen is now a vegetarian’s nightmare”, he tweeted on May 17, because of a recent ban on fresh produce) to sharp comments on political corruption, Al-Omeisy’s Twitter feed is a candid insight into life in the war-torn country, which is now in the grip of another severe outbreak of cholera.
'Anti-conspiracy' bill steamrolled through lower house committee
The so-called anti-conspiracy bill, which would criminalize "acts of preparations to commit crimes such as terrorism" by changing the conditions that constitute conspiracy, was passed in the House of Representatives Committee on Judicial Affairs on May 19 amid vociferous protests from opposition parties.
The ruling parties motioned to vote shortly after 1 p.m., reasoning that discussion on the bill had been exhaustive by citing the 30 hours of debate that had taken place.
While committee members from the opposition Democratic Party (DP) and Japanese Communist Party (JCP) rushed to the committee chair's seat to stop the vote from taking place, yelling that there had been insufficient discussion, the bill was pushed through with majority votes from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior coalition partner Komeito, plus small opposition party Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party).
The “Muslim ban” president is about to give a speech on Islam. In Saudi Arabia.
What could go wrong?
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For US presidents, their first big overseas trip is basically a debutante ball: It’s meant to introduce the new president on the world stage and induct them into the high society of powerful world leaders. And for most US presidents, it’s an important but still relatively low-stakes affair, with kings, emirs, and presidents rolling out the red carpet to wine and dine the American president and stage smiling photo ops.
But Donald Trump isn’t most US presidents, and the stakes couldn’t be higher for his first trip abroad. All eyes will be watching Trump’s every move to see if he can really hack it as a serious world leader or whether he’ll have the same stumbles abroad that he’s been having at home.
And Trump is making his debut on the world stage in one of the most politically complex places on earth: the Middle East. He leaves late Friday for a two-day trip to Saudi Arabia, followed by a day-long trip to Israel on Monday (and then a short stop at the Vatican, meetings with European leaders in Sicily, and finally a NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium).
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