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Afghanistan shrugs aside Taliban threat and goes to polls
Kabul: Agency reports say that millions of Afghans went to the polls yesterday for a landmark election marked by threats of violence and sabotage from the Taliban, and confusion about the polling process itself.

Voters were faced with a bewildering variety of parliamentary candidates including women, warlords, retired communists and reformed Taliban officials. There have been reports of sporadic violence in some areas.

But the bigger problems for millions of voters would seem to have been presented in the voting process itself. Voters in Kabul struggled to find their parliamentary candidate on a ballot that was seven pages and almost 400 candidates long.

President Hamid Karzai hailed the vote as historic. "After 30 years of wars, interventions, occupations and misery, today Afghanistan is moving forward, making an economy, making political institutions," he said after casting his vote.

Vote-rigging allegations were made at some stations, with polling agents accusing some electoral officials of instructing voters on whom they should vote for. Officials responded that they were only assisting illiterate voters, some of whom could not even recognise the candidates' photographs.

According to reports, smaller than expected queues suggest a lower turnout than the 70 per cent of last year's presidential poll.
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German vote splits between the conservatives and the social democrats
Berlin: German voters split down the middle on Sunday and left neither liberals nor conservatives in the German polls with a clear majority in parliament. According to analysts a coalition that will now result seems unlikely to quickly enact labor and social reforms needed to revitalize Europe's largest economy.

With an 11.6 percent unemployment rate and years of sputtering economic growth, Germans voters may well have expressed their frustration with the policies of the center-left and conservative parties.

The outcome of the polls has been a setback for Angela Merkel, leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, whose party led in the polls for weeks, with she herself expected to become the nation's first woman chancellor.

The election also brought to the fore the political savvy of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who rallied his flagging Social Democrats to within a percentage point of the CDU.

The results appear to have opened a new era in German politics as voters in increasing numbers turned to alternative voices, including the new Left Party of ex-communists and defectors from the Social Democrats.

Merkel and Schroeder each claimed victory Sunday night and began exploring alliances with other parties to control the 600 seats in Parliament. Preliminary results showed the CDU winning 224 seats and the Social Democrats receiving 222. Preliminary results showed the Social Democrats received 34 percent of the vote compared with 35 percent for the conservatives.

They were the lowest percentages either party had received in more than 25 years.

The surprise winners were the pro-business Free Democrats, garnering 10 percent of the vote, and the Left Party, receiving 8.6 percent. Both are likely to play decisive roles in the formation of the new government.

Turnout was 78 percent in this nation of 82 million.
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OPEC meet: Saudi Arabia, Nigeria seek raise in production quotas
Vienna: The president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has urged the group to increase oil quotas for the sixth time in 15 months as rising oil and gasoline prices begin to curtail growth in demand.

"It's very important that we take a decision to try to stabilize the price in the markets,'' Sheikh Ahmad Fahd al-Sabah, Kuwait's oil minister and the OPEC president, told reporters in Vienna. "There are a lot of problems starting to show in the growth of economies, especially in underdeveloped countries.''

The Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, has said he supports a higher quota, as did his Nigerian counterpart, Edmund Daukoru. The oil ministers for the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Dhaen al-Hamli, and Venezuela, Rafael Ramirez, said such a decision may not lead to lower gasoline prices because of bottlenecks in the refining system.

Oil prices more than doubled in the past two years and reached a record $70.85 a barrel on Aug. 30 after Hurricane Katrina sank rigs and shut refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. Analysts warned that more crude oil may fail to lower prices until refineries can make more gasoline.

OPEC will now start a two-day meeting to deliberate an increase in the official output ceiling, now at 28 million barrels a day for the members outside of Iraq.

"The market is very well supplied,'' the United Arab Emirates' al-Hamli told reporters in Vienna. ``If the quota goes up then what difference would that make? We already produce 500,000 barrels a day above the quota.''
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