The prime minister’s house and the ruling party’s headquarters were burnt down by student protesters yesterday, as a mutiny by elements of Burkina Faso’s military spread across the country.

Unrest began in late February when students protested over a young man’s death in custody. At least six people were killed and buildings were torched in Koudougou, the town where the unrest erupted again yesterday.

The military mutiny, meanwhile, began on Thursday night in the presidential compound in Ouagadougou, the capital, when members of the presidential guard began firing into the air, demanding unpaid housing allowances. By yesterday, soldiers in several cities had joined in. Calm returned to the capital after soldiers there were paid their wages.

President Blaise Compaoré, who took power in a violent coup 24 years ago, said on Friday that he was dissolving his government and naming a new army chief. But the steps have failed to stem discontent in this impoverished nation in west Africa.

“There’s pent-up concern and hostility that’s been simmering for a long time,” said David Shinn, a former US ambassador to the country. He said it was likely the protests by students were inspired by developments in Tunisia and other north African countries that have seen regime change.

The escalating cost of living is at the root of the current unrest, said Cema Blegne, who works for the National Syndicate of African Teachers of Burkina Faso. Government leaders are often accused of using state money to fund their lifestyles.

Tassere Koanda, who lives in Tenkodogo, east of the capital, said soldiers stole mobile phones and demanded free drinks in bars. They fired weapons into the air for hours before returning to their barracks.

There was no indication the student unrest and the mutiny by soldiers was being coordinated, but together they pose the most vocal challenge to Compaoré’s rule in more than a decade.

Burkina Faso is near the bottom of the United Nations’ Human Development Index, which measures general well-being. It has high rates of unemployment and illiteracy. Most people get by on subsistence agriculture.

Compaoré, a former army captain, came to power in a 1987 coup in which Burkina Faso’s first president, Thomas Sankara, was killed. Since the coup, Compaoré has won several elections that lacked transparency. He was re-elected again in November. The opposition said the vote was rigged.Shinn and others say it is unclear whether the unrest will bring down Compaore. Shinn said he might be simply buying time with his government reshuffle and other moves, and that the soldiers who are mutinying have narrower, more personal concerns than who is in power.

“I doubt the soldiers are concerned about who are running certain ministries,” he said. “Generally speaking, soldiers are interested in more mundane things such as pay and living circumstances.” Burkina Faso Burkina Faso Protest guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Tehran, Iran (AHN) – Authorities in Iran on Monday sent main opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi to Heshmatiyeh jail along with their wives after keeping them under house arrest in Tehran since last Thursday.

Chief Prosecutor Gholam Hossoein Mohseni Ejei said that the opposition members were isolated from communication, adding that further action could follow against them. The family members of the politicians also said that government had not yet taken responsibility for the arrests.

Speaking to BBC Persian TV on Monday, Mousavi’s spokesperson Ardeshir Arjomand said that his party considered them as taken hostages in the hands of Iran’s highest authorities. The politicians’ disappearance came just hours before anti-government protesters planned nationwide protests on Tuesday in an attempt to put pressure on hardline government of President Ahmedinijad.

The Coordination Council of the Green Path of Hope, a group that supports opposition leaders Mousavi and Karrubi, asked their followers to hold a peacefully rally toward Tehran’s Azadi square on March 1 from 5 p.m. onwards.

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Ireland’s ruling Fianna Fail party faced its worst defeat in nearly 80 years, an exit poll predicted Saturday, as a tidal wave of voter anger swept the Fine Gael opposition into power and crushed the party that dragged Ireland to the edge of bankruptcy.

The exit poll for national broadcaster RTE showed Fianna Fail sinking to a shocking 15.1 percent of the vote in Friday’s election. Going back to 1932, Fianna Fail had never won less than 39 percent in an election and had always been the largest party in the Dail, the lower house of parliament.

The poll said Fine Gael would capture 36.1 percent of the first-preference votes, a figure that puts it in power but without a majority of seats in the Dail.

“However bad people thought it would get for Fianna Fail, nobody thought it would get this bad,” said Michael Marsh, professor of comparative political behavior at Trinity College Dublin. “That is highly significant.”

The Labour Party, Fine Gael’s likely coalition partner, had 20.5 percent, which would be its best performance ever.

“The political landscape of Ireland is completely and utterly redrawn,” said Roger Jupp, the chairman of Millward Brown Lansdowne, which conducted the poll for RTE.

The poll was released Saturday before election officials began counting the ballots. In actual results, election officials said nine seats were final so far: three for Fine Gael, four for Labour, one from the Socialist Party and one independent.

Irish voters punished Fianna Fail for the country’s 13 percent unemployment rate, tax hikes, wage cuts and a humiliating bailout that Ireland had to accept from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund after the collapse of the country’s real estate sector.

The exit poll showed more than 200 independent and minor party candidates with 15.5 percent support, while Sinn Fein -the party that supported the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland- had 10.1 percent. Sinn Fein won 2 percent of the vote in 2002 and 6 percent in 2007.

Fine Gael (“tribe of the Irish”) and Fianna Fail (“soldiers of destiny”), were born from opposing sides in Ireland’s civil war of the 1920s, and many see little difference between them on the issues. Fianna Fail, however, was leading the government when the property boom collapsed in 2007, and it put taxpayers on the hook to bail out Ireland’s failing banks.

Brian Cowen, the outgoing prime minister, had fallen to record low popularity and resigned as Fianna Fail party leader even before the campaign. He had wanted to hold the election in March, but agreed to it in February as part of a deal to win confirmation of the hated EU-IMF bailout.

The exit poll was based on face-to-face interviews with 3,500 voters at polling stations on Friday, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 points. In the last election in 2007, the exit poll numbers were within a point of the official results.

The new government, like the last, will be constrained by the terms negotiated for the euro67.5 billion ($92 billion) credit line from the European Central Bank and the IMF. The loan is contingent on Ireland cutting euro15 billion ($20.6 billion) from its deficit spending over the coming four years and imposing the harshest cuts this year.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, the next prime minister, has pledged to try to negotiate easier terms for repaying the loan. He has also promised to create 100,000 new jobs in five years and to make holders of senior bonds in Ireland’s nationalized banks shoulder some of the losses.

Fine Gael said it would seek to balance public finances mainly through cuts, not tax hikes; it would also reform the health service and abolish 150 public bodies.

Colette Lavelle, 46, confessed to modest hopes after voting in County Mayo.

“It’s very bad at the moment, hopefully it will improve, but not over the next five years,” said Lavelle, who is unemployed. “We really want to get rid of the government we have at the moment because they’re all corrupt and spent all the money we had.”

The counting of ballots is expected to continue through Sunday as officials work through Ireland’s proportional representation system.

Earlier this month, the Standard & Poor’s ratings agency cut its credit grade for Ireland and warned it could fall further because of doubts about the true scale of defaulting loans in the country’s largely state-owned banks.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – In an attempt to prevent President Barack Obama’s plan to bring terror suspects to the United States for trial, the House voted 212-206 on Tuesday to curb the government’s expenses in the fiscal year. The measure targeted funds aimed at transferring inmates from a military holding facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to prisons in the U.S.

The move hurts Obama’s efforts to close the controversial detention camp by next year or his attempts to transfer 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in America.

“None of the funds made available in this or any prior Act may be used to transfer, release, or assist in the transfer or release to or within the U.S., its territories, or possessions Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other detainee held at Guantanamo Bay as of June 24, 2009,” the bill explains.

The bill will be presented to the Senate for approval and would be sent to Obama to sign into law.

Upon assuming power in 2008, Obama had pledged to close down the notorious facility within a year but failed due to unyielding opposition from the U.S. Congress.

Currently, the prison, which is in Cuba’s Guantanamo naval base, holds nearly 170 detainees, including 58, who have been put into indefinite detention without trial.

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Yangon, Myanmar (AHN) – Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been on house arrest for nearly two decades, has been released in Burma. The military government, after years of international pressure, has allowed the Nobel Peace Laureate to leave her confinement and greet her followers in person.

Military leader Than Shwe personally signed her release. Hundreds of supporters gathered outside of the gates to her home as she met the crowd. U Win Tin, the co-founder of her now-banned National League for Democracy (NLD) party was also on the scene.

The 65-year-old Suu Kyi has been under arrest for 15 of the past 21 years.

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Rome, Italy (AHN) – Less than a week after an ancient house once buried in volcanic ash by Mount Vesuvius collapsed into rubble, Italian opposition groups have called for Culture Minister Sandro Bondi to take responsibility for the incident and step down from his post.

Antonio di Pietro and Luigi Bersani, who head the Italy of Values party and Democratic Party respectively, submitted formal motions for the minister’s resignation Wednesday.

Their actions came after the so-called “House of Gladiators” fell at the archaeological site of the ancient city of Pompeii, which was destroyed in a volcanic eruption in 79 AD. The house was once owned by gladiator Marcus Sandro Fronto.

On his visit to the northeast Italian region, Bersani said that people around the world saw the images of Pompeii’s collapsed house and shared similar opinions on Bondi’s responsibilities.

However, the culture minister poured cold water on the resignation demands. He charged the opposition politicians were trying to make his destiny part of the country’s ongoing political crisis.

The minister said the Pompeii house collapsed because of local management problems at the site and not because of cuts in cultural budgets.

“The problems in Pompeii, like those of a large part of our artistic heritage, have existed for years without anyone resolving them definitively or imposing an efficient strategy,” Bondi said.

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Austin, TX, United States (AHN) – Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s trial on allegations he laundered corporate political donations entered its second week Monday. The Republican is the highest member of Congress to face criminal charges.

Testimony resumes in the trial in Travis County in which DeLay, 63, is accused of directing corporate contributions to Republican candidates for the Texas House of Representatives in 2002.

The former congressional leader remains adamant about his innocence. The allegations are “a political vendetta that has no substance of crime,” he told the New York Times last week.

DeLay is charged with funneling $190,000 in corporate donations from a political action committee he founded, Texans for a Republican Majority or TRMPAC, to state House candidates through the Republican National Committee. He was indicted in 2005 along with former aides John Colyandro and Jim Ellis for conspiracy and violating campaign finance laws in the state. The charge of violating election law was later dismissed.

Prosecutors say DeLay and his co-defendants made an arrangement with the Republican National Committee’s deputy chief of staff at the time, Terry Nelson, in which TRMPAC would contribute a certain amount of money to the RNC. The RNC would then make donations using the money to Texas House candidates, violating Texas law prohibiting corporate political contributions.

On the stand last Thursday, Nelson said that Ellis had asked to exchange corporate donations with campaign contributions.

DeLay’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, dismissed the testimony as “All smoke and no fire,” according to the Austin-American Statesman.

DeLay is facing life in prison if he is convicted of one count of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to engage in money laundering. His trial, which is expected to last two more weeks, comes two months after he was cleared in a wide-ranging federal probe into the corruption case of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was convicted of bribery, fraud and tax evasion in two separate trials.

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