For the second time, ICELANDERS voted against a deal to re

Daniel Ortega, NICARAGUA'S president, issued a decree moving three municipalities with large numbers of opposition voters from one electoral department to another. The unconstitutional gerrymandering should help Mr Ortega's party win more seats in an election this November.



Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori, two populist candidates, finished first and second in the first round of PERU'S presidential election. A run-off will be held in June.



A GUATEMALAN court granted a divorce to the country's president and first lady, Alvaro Colom and Sandra Torres. The divorce will enable Ms Torres, who has already declared her candidacy for president, to circumvent a constitutional ban on close relatives of the incumbent from running to succeed him.



JAPAN raised the severity level at the Fukushima nuclear-power plant to seven, the highest on the accepted international scale. Only the Chernobyl accident 25 years ago ranked as high. The government said the new assessment reflected the accumulated radiation that has escaped the plant, not a sudden deterioration. Total radiation emissions have been a tenth of Chernobyl's so far, with no radiation-linked deaths.



Following MYANMAR'S first parliamentary elections in 20 years and the release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi late last year, the European Union eased long-held travel and financial restrictions on four ministers in the repressive regime.



The government in SRI LANKA rejected out of hand a UN report on human-rights violations in the bloody ending of the long civil war in 2008-09. The army's crushing of the rebels at the time also killed, injured or displaced tens of thousands of Tamil civilians.



A bomb exploded on the metro in Minsk, the capital of BELARUS, killing 12 people and injuring more than 200. Two men were arrested on suspicion of planting the device. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka later said they had "confessed".



ITALY'S lower house passed a bill that would in effect end a bribery case against Silvio Berlusconi. Separately, Mr Berlusconi said he planned to step down as prime minister in 2013.



For the second time, ICELANDERS voted against a deal to re
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