Election officials declared Afghan President Hamid Karzai the winner of a new five-year term Monday, canceling a runoff election scheduled for Saturday just one day after Karzai’s sole challenger quit the race. The decision ended weeks of political drift since a first presidential poll in August was found invalid because of massive fraud.
In the capital, a sense of relief was instant and palpable. Kabul residents honked horns and exchanged celebratory text messages as the news spread. American, European and U.N. officials rushed to congratulate Karzai and pledged to work closely with his new administration.
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President Hamid Karzai’s challenger plans to call for a boycott of next weekend’s runoff election in an attempt to force the vote’s postponement until spring, his campaign manager said — a move that would dim U.S. hopes for a stable Afghan government for months.
Karzai rejected Abdullah Abdullah’s conditions for next Saturday’s vote, including removing top election officials whom the challenger accused of involvement in cheating in the first-round balloting in August.
Abdullah has called a press conference for 10 a.m. Sunday to announce his final decision after Afghans and Westerners close to the challenger said he would withdraw. His campaign manager Satar Murad said the candidate might still change his mind, but that "as of now" he planned to call for a boycott.
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The rainfall brought by typhoon "Ondoy" to Metro Manila and nearby areas in a span of six hours on Saturday was the most in recorded history, surpassing the previous record for the metropolis in 1967, a weather bureau official said.
Nathaniel Cruz, weather services bureau head of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa), told GMANews.TV that the total rainfall from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday surpassed the highest 24-hour rainfall that the weather bureau recorded 42 years ago.
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Chinese housing prices have surged since March, but they will soon lose momentum and even start to fall around the end of the year, boding well for a more sustained contribution to overall economic growth.
A burst of lending in the first six months helped fuel a wave of pent-up end-user buying and speculative purchases, driving up prices for some projects in major cities by 20-30 percent and creating concerns about dangerous bubbles.
Speculative transactions are subsiding now; at the same time, a fresh round of property investments will increase supply.
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At least five workers died Sunday in a fall down an elevator shaft of a skyscraper under construction in Hong Kong, police said. One other was injured.
The accident happened at the International Commerce Center in the Kowloon district, which will be 118 stories high when completed next year, making it one of the tallest buildings in world, as well as the tallest in Hong Kong.
Speaking at the scene, Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang said the men fell after a working platform collapsed in the elevator shaft.
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Nearly 80 percent of people believe Dubai’s construction industry will never return to its peaks of 2008 following the impact of the global economic crisis, according to the results of an Arabian Business poll.
Some 39.6 percent of respondents said they thought the market would not return to its heyday, when property prices were at their highest and billion dollar deals were common.
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Two South Korean construction giants said Thursday they have won massive orders to build integrated gas facilities in the United Arab Emirates, the latest in a series of mega deals clinched in the Middle East region. GS Engineering & Construction Corp., South Koreas No. 2 builder, said that a consortium led by it has won a US$2.2 billion order to build a gas plant facility in the Habshan region of the UAE, according to South Korea News Agency (Yonhap). The South Korean company owns a 55-percent interest in the consortium.
