Ghana Election Goes to a Runoff

But ruling party says results still too close to call

(NEWSER) - John Atta Mills has proclaimed himself the winner of Ghana’s presidential runoff election, the BBC reports, but the ruling NPP party says the results are still too close to call. Tensions are running high over the poll—earlier today police were forced to fire warning shots at a huge crowd of Mills supporters descending on election headquarters demanding results. More»

(NEWSER) - President Obama today warned Africans that corruption and strong-arm tactics must be overcome if the continent is to see prosperity, and he promised US support to nations on the right path, Politico reports. “America will be with you,” Obama said in Ghana. “As a partner. As a friend.” (He also dusted off his campaign theme, "Yes you can," for his hosts.) The president highlighted the connection between the two with his own history. The “blood of Africa” is “within me,” he said. More»

Committee passes over all three candidates, doesn't award $5M to any

(NEWSER) - Nobody has won this year's $5 million Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, the committee responsible for picking a winner announced today. That’s an enormous snub to the people eligible for the award, who include former heads of state Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, and John Kufuor of Ghana. The committee professed to have “full respect” for them but said, without elaborating, that it hadn’t been able to pick a winner, the AP reports. More»

(NEWSER) - Before his murder, Benigno Aquino predicted that anyone who succeeded Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos would smell like manure in six months. But his own wife would prove him wrong, writes Howard Chua-Eoan of Time. Corazon “Cory” Aquino, who died yesterday of heart failure, was a political saint who never quite lost her halo, “a good woman whose goodness alone, at the very end, was what proved enough, if only by an iota, to save her country." More»

Former president restored democracy in the Philippines

(NEWSER) - Corazon Aquino, former president of the Philippines, has died at 76, the Los Angeles Times reports. Aquino became Asia’s first female president, leading a “people power” movement that eventually toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986—and arguably set off a wave of democratic revolutions that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union. Aquino was diagnosed with colon cancer last year. More»