Pakistan’s two main opposition parties announced Thursday they would form a new government together after their victory over President Pervez Musharraf’s allies in elections this week. The two leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party of slain former premier Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League led by Nawaz Sharif made the announcement at a joint news conference after meeting in Islamabad. “We have agreed on a common agenda. We will work together to form a government together in the center and in the provinces,” Sharif said.
Barack Obama won the Democrats Abroad global primary in results announced Thursday, giving him 11 straight victories in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Illinois senator won the primary in which Democrats living in other countries voted by Internet, mail and in person, according to results released by the Democrats Abroad, an organization sanctioned by the national party. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has not won a nominating contest since Super Tuesday, more than two weeks ago. More than 20,000 U.S. citizens living abroad voted in the primary, which ran from Feb. 5 to Feb. 12. Obama won about 65 percent of the vote, according to the results released Thursday.
Serb rioters broke into the U.S. Embassy Thursday and set fire to an office after a large protest against Kosovo’s independence that drew an estimated 150,000 people. Masked attackers broke into the building, which has been closed this week, and tried to throw furniture from an office. A blaze broke out but firefighters swiftly put out the flames. Authorities drove armored jeeps down the street and fired tear gas to clear the crowd. The protesters dispersed into side streets where they continued clashing with authorities.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband says two extraordinary rendition flights refueled at a British territory in the Indian Ocean. Miliband told lawmakers U.S. officials hadn’t informed Britain about the 2002 flights until recently. The U.S. planes refueled on the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The British government had previously insisted it had no evidence to support allegations that Britain had been involved in rendition — the U.S. program of secretly transporting terror suspects.
President Bush offered encouragement and help Thursday to lift Liberia, a country shattered from years of ruinous fighting, as he concluded a tour of Africa and turned toward other global problems. In Liberia, the final stop on Bush’s five-country trip, almost nothing works and people are nervous about their future in the aftermath of a 14-year civil war that ended in 2003. The country is overrun with weapons, malnutrition is pervasive, half of children are not in school and many buildings are uninhabitable. There is little running water or electricity and no sewage or landline phone system.
Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has decided whether or not to extend his Mahdi Army’s cease-fire, and sent the message in sealed envelopes to be opened at the beginning of Friday’s sermons, one of his officials said. Although the content of the message, delivered Thursday to 200 loyal clerics around Iraq, was not known, there were strong indications from officials in his organization that the anti-U.S. firebrand would extend the six-month cessation of what had been an undeclared war against the U.S. military since 2004.
