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/ 26 October 2005
To the untrained eye, Egypt’s Parliament list could easily be mistaken for a who’s who of big business. To stay in one of the two clubs, you need to be a member of the other, say observers and opposition members of the incestuous relationship between politics and money in Egypt.
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/ 9 September 2005
Hosni Mubarak swept more than 80% of the vote in an unprecedented pluralist presidential election hailed as an historic step but marred by violations, according to an early count published on Friday. The incumbent’s landslide victory left his nine rivals fighting over crumbs, with most estimates giving Ghad party leader Ayman Nur over Wafd chairperson Numan Gumaa.
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/ 8 September 2005
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was expected on Thursday to win a fifth term in power after an election tipped as a major democratic step but marred by reports of widespread fraud. As vote counting began, Wednesday’s historic election drew a barrage of fraud allegations from Mubarak’s rivals and independent monitors.
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/ 7 September 2005
Egyptians voted on Wednesday in the country’s first contested presidential election, with veteran leader Hosni Mubarak all but certain to head off all challengers amid reports of widespread irregularities. The electoral commission described turnout as ”remarkable”, but confusion marked Egypt’s democratic experiment.
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/ 5 September 2005
Veteran Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who faces his first contested election on Wednesday after a quarter of a century in power, is a longtime Western ally who crushed Islamic violence and saw through peace with Israel before coming under pressure for reform.
Egypt’s presidential electoral commission has banned leading opposition candidate Ayman Nur’s campaign television spot on the grounds the theme song had been plagiarised. A spokesperson branded the move ”one of the dirtiest tricks of the campaign” for the September 7 presidential poll and blamed President Hosni Mubarak’s camp.
A string of coordinated bomb attacks killed at least 10 Iraqis and wounded 30 on Friday in Baghdad, as insurgents showed no sign of letting up after an agreement was reached on a partial Cabinet line-up. At least four of the blasts that rocked the capital at around 8am were car bombs aimed at Iraqi security forces.
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/ 14 February 2005
Iraq’s long-oppressed Shi’ites were basking on Monday in their electoral triumph but pledged to reach out to rival Sunnis whose political isolation could further threaten the country’s stability. The Kurds were also celebrating their strong performance in the landmark January 30 election.
The gates of Najaf’s Imam Ali Shrine were forced open on Thursday by a sea of weeping and chanting Shi’ite Muslims, ending a siege of the shrine that had lasted for days and weeks of fighting with United States forces. Yet as the camp of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr went into talks, the military stand-off appeared far from over.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=121182">Kufa attacks kill 74, injures hundreds</a>
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/ 26 November 2002
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast that killed at least 11 people in west Jerusalem on Thursday morning, but a Gaza-based leader of the radical Islamic group Hamas said the grisly attacks would go on.