The Malaysian Insider

PARIS, March 11 — French voters are set to deliver a sharp blow to President Nicolas Sarkozy this weekend in regional polls that will provide his final electoral test before the 2012 presidential race.

Surveys point to a crushing defeat for Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party with the opposition Socialists aiming for a clean sweep of the 22 mainland regions in the two-round election on March 14 and 21.

“We’re heading for a classic mid-term election where the sitting government is going to be punished,” said Frederic Dabi, director of the opinion and strategy section of pollsters Ifop.

BAGHDAD, March 11 — Iraqis were still awaiting preliminary results today four days after a national election they hoped would bring stable government and help end years of sectarian conflict as US troops ready to leave. Elections officials had expected to release the first results yesterday, but by early afternoon today no official vote counts had been made public.

“God willing, today at 6 p.m. we will announce the results of some provinces and some (voting) centres in detail,” said Qasim al-Aboudi, a member of Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission.

The results were anxiously awaited by foreign oil companies making plans to invest billions of dollars and vault Iraq into the top echelon of global producers, and by Washington policy- makers as the United States prepares to leave Iraq by end-2011.

PATTANI, Thailand, March 11 — Unknown assailants shot dead three people and burned their bodies in Thailand’s predominantly Muslim deep south, police said today.

The victims, who were all Buddhist technicians working for a local telephone company, were gunned down in Pattani province while driving in a pickup truck, which was set alight after the attack, said Police Lieutenant Colonel Duantae Jutanan.

YANGON, March 11 — Myanmar’s military government has allowed the party of detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to reopen regional branch offices that have been closed since May 2003, a party spokesman said today.

“So far as we have heard, about 100 branch offices have been reopened across the country, effective Wednesday,” said Nyan Win, a spokesman for the National League for Democracy (NLD).

The government closed down NLD branch offices after an attack on Suu Kyi’s convoy by pro-regime elements on May 30, 2003. Scores of NLD followers were killed, according to her supporters.

BEIJING, March 11 — Chinese officials have reacted with anger to a speech by exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama in which he said Buddhists were living in prison-like conditions and expressed sympathy with the people of Xinjiang.

In an address marking 51 years since he fled Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, the Dalai Lama referred to Xinjiang as “East Turkestan”, the name given to it by pro-independence exiles.

The region is populated by the ethnic minority Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking largely Muslim people.