Presidential Election | featured news

Vladimir Putin won a resounding victory in Russia's presidential election, exit polls showed, after a vote that opponents said was marred by fraud.

Vladimir Putin followed in the footsteps of Russia's tsars when he interrupted his presidential election campaign to seek the blessing of the Virgin of Tikhvin, a Byzantine icon which believers say works miracles.

A plot to assassinate Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been foiled, Russia's state-run Channel One TV reported Monday, less than a week before presidential elections that Putin is expected to win.

Vladimir Putin will be elected president in the first round of March's election with more than half the vote, avoiding a runoff that would dent his authority on the eve of his planned return to the Kremlin's top job, a state pollster predicted Monday.

A couple on a motorcycle fired shots into a bus carrying Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate Maria Corina Machado and her supporters Saturday, a campaign spokesman told CNN en Español.

President and one-time revolutionary Daniel Ortega appeared to have won re-election in Nicaragua, according to results released Monday.

The Irish Labour party's Michael D Higgins has been confirmed as the ninth president of the republic after winning a landslide victory in the most fractious campaign in the country's history. The poet and campaigner gained a 56.8% share of the vote, putting him comfortably ahead of his rivals – Dragons' Den star Seán Gallagher, who came second, and former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, who ended in third place.

DUBLIN, Aug 2 (Reuters) - A gay senator who was the front-runner to win Ireland's figurehead presidency quit the race on Tuesday after admitting he used his office to plead for clemency for a friend convicted of having sex with a minor.

The opposition Socialists said that the prospect of Dominique Strauss-Kahn standing for the presidency next year was unlikely.

As the super-pimp who once ran Thailand's biggest brothel empire and then exposed the police kickbacks he had to pay for it to flourish, Chuvit Kamolvisit feels uniquely qualified to lead the country's fight against corruption.