英倫翻譯社/ Trsmaster

Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al Jaber Al-Sabah approved a new government formed by Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah, the state-run KUNA news agency reported.

The ministers of oil, finance, foreign affairs, commerce, interior and defense in the new 11-member Cabinet remain the same, KUNA reported, citing an Emiri decree.

Sheikh Sabah dissolved parliament on Dec 6 and said elections should be held, after a dispute over corruption allegations sparked anti-government protests unprecedented in the Persian Gulf state.

New elections, according the constitution, must be held within 60 days of the dissolution of parliament.

The 10-minister cabinet will last until the announcement of the results of the parliamentary elections expected to be held in early February.

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The Special Prosecutors Office Special Investigation Division has started investigating three past investments by the government’s National Development Fund, including the politically sensitive Yu Chang case, reports said Wednesday.

The ruling Kuomintang and the opposition Democratic Progressive Party have been fighting a war of words over when DPP Chairwoman and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen knew she would become Yu Chang Biologics Co. chairwoman several months after leaving the function of vice premier in 2007.

Tsai denies she was involved in the early 2007 decision by the NDF to invest in Yu Chang, while the KMT claims she is guilty of conflict of interest. The dispute reached a new level when Council for Economic Planning and Development Minister Christina Liu admitted Tuesday she got the dates wrong on documents about the case.

The Chinese-language United Evening News reported Wednesday that special investigators visited the NDF management offices late on Tuesday to browse and read all documents related to the Yu Chang case and two other related files. Since the cases were complicated, the investigators took materials back with them, the paper said.

In a first reaction, DPP lawmaker Tsai Huang-liang said the prosecutors were being used as a political weapon in the hands of the KMT government. Reports suggested the special division might start interrogating prominent former officials involved in the NDF cases before the January 14 presidential and legislative elections.

The government was mobilizing lawmakers, ministers and the judiciary for a joint full-scale attack against the DPP’s presidential candidate in the final month of the election campaign, the lawmaker said.

At the heart of the cases were attempts to manufacture an HIV/AIDS treatment drug known as TNX-355. The NDF reportedly rejected an application by a group with links to influential former KMT lawmaker Kao Yu-jen, but approved the relatively similar bid by Yu Chang within a short period of time, the paper said.

In 2008, the NDF agreed to invest NT$875 million (US$28.9 million) in the venture capital arm of the TaiMed Group. The group only came up with NT$70 million (US$2.3 million) of the venture capital’s total capital of NT$3.5 billion (US$115 million), yet it demanded three seats on the board, the United Evening News reported.

The investigators would comb through the NDF files related to the three cases and discuss the eventual occurrence of legal problems, the paper said. The special division would investigate the eventual involvement of public officials but was unwilling to release more details to the media, the paper said. CEPD Minister Liu later confirmed the investigators’ visit to the press, reports said.

Taipei, Dec. 14 ( CNA) More than 80 percent of voters in the 20-39 age group with college degrees or higher have no knowledge of Taiwan's "single-member constituency, two vote" electoral system, according to the results of an online survey released Wednesday. The survey, which was conducted jointly by Business Today, Taipei Society and Citizen Congress Watch, showed that only 17.8 percent people in that age bracket are aware that they have one vote for a candidate running for a regional seat and another vote for a party in the Jan. 14 legislative election. Meanwhile, around 62.4 percent of young people see the nomination of legislators at-large as a form of political patronage, according to the survey. At the time of the poll, 48.4 percent of the respondents said they had not decided which party to vote for, while other 46.5 percent said they did not support any particular party. The "single-member constituency, two vote" electoral system was adopted in Taiwan in 2008 when the number of legislative seats was halved from 226 to 113 seats. Commenting on the poll, Citizen Congress Watch Chairman Ku Chung-hwa said young people generally lack political awareness. It is vital to educate them on how political issues affect their personal lives and the society, he said. This will encourage more young people to become involved in political activities, which in turn will help to improve the country's political climate, he said. The survey, which collected 1,071valid responses, had confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. ( By Tseng Ying-yu and Maia Huang)

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s Nov 28 presidential election “lacked transparency,” calling into question the credibility of the results, the European Union’s electoral observation mission said.

The Central African country’s electoral commission announced incumbent President Joseph Kabila as winner on Dec 9, a ruling that was rejected by runner-up Etienne Tshisekedi, who declared himself the true president. Opposition parties have challenged the results at the Supreme Court.

The EU mission “deplores the lack of transparency and the irregularities in the collection, the compilation and the publication of results,” it said in an e-mailed statement. The problems “cannot but affect confidence in the results and their credibility.”

“Several polling station results published the night of the count and observed by our teams on the ground ... do not correspond with those published by the National Electoral Commission,” it said.

It also said officials had failed to count 7.6 percent of the roughly 64,000 polling stations nationwide, which it estimated excluded about 1.6 million people’s votes.

Despite of the fact that Defense chief Leon Panetta’s timetable told US militaries Wednesday they were winning the 10-year war in Afghanistan, during a visit focused on handing security to Afghans as US troops withdraw; however, the military and the United Nations disagree over the extent to which violence is really falling in Afghanistan.

Panetta is in Afghanistan to review the war effort with the United States, which is on track to recall 33,000 troops by the end of the next year and is shifting its focus to an advisory role in training Afghan security forces.

"We're moving in the right direction and we're winning this very tough conflict," he told troops at Forward Operating Base Sharana, 56 kilometres (35 miles) from the Pakistan border, in the eastern province of Paktika.

In October, the Pentagon said that Taliban attacks were down for the first time in five years but that insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan were feeding violence on the border and threatening the war effort.

"Are there challenges out there? You're damn right, there are challenges. Are we gonna be able to take on those challenges? You're damn right we will," Panetta told the troops.