Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika is due to be inaugurated for a second term after a landslide election win.
The election commission said he had won more than 2.7m votes, with nearest rival John Tembo taking nearly 1.3m.
Mr Tembo cried foul but his opposition coalition backer, ex-President Bakili Muluzi, congratulated the incumbent.
Mr Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) also won a majority in parliament. Regional heads of state are in Malawi for the inauguration.
Zambia’s President Rupiya Banda, Mozambican President Armando Guebuza and Tanzanian Vice-President Ali Mohammed Shein are also due to …

Ricardo Martinelli is the current President-Elect of the Republic of Panama

Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) on Wednesday rejected President Hamid Karzai’s order of holding the presidential polls in April, months earlier than the date set by the commission.
The independent election authority has announced in January the election would be postponed to Aug. 20 because of logistical and security worries. But Karzai, who has declared his intention to run for a second term, suddenly issued a decree last week, ordering the commission to move the election forward to adhere to the Afghan constitution.
The President’s five-year office term will end on May …

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans streamed through the streets of Caracas on Saturday to protest leftist President Hugo Chavez’s second attempt to change the constitution to let him govern as long as he wins elections.
Opinion polls give a slight lead to Chavez ahead of a February 15 vote on whether to allow the president and other politicians to run for reelection as many times as they like in South America’s top oil exporter.
In 2007, voters rejected a similar proposal.

New members of the House and Senate were sworn in to open the 111th Congress today, but most of the drama revolved around seats left unfilled.
Roland Burris — who says he is the lawfully appointed replacement for President-elect Barack Obama — showed up at the Capitol but was turned away by Senate officials because his paperwork was incomplete.
The Illinois secretary of state had not signed the certificate of appointment for Burris, whom embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich named to the seat. The certificate is a Senate requirement for admittance.

A presidential election was held in Ghana on December 7, 2008, at the same time as a parliamentary election. Since no candidate received more than 50% of the votes, a run-off election was held on December 28, 2008 between the two candidates who received the most votes, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and John Atta-Mills.

Caroline Kennedy, who spent most of her life looking to steer clear of the spotlight, is capping off a year of unusually public — and political — activity with interest in the Senate seat that would be vacated by Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton.
And her interest in that seat could mean the continuation of a Kennedy legacy in the Senate that began 56 years ago with the election of her father, John F. Kennedy, as the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain goes into the campaign’s final weekend a bigger underdog than any victorious candidate in a modern election.
With four days until Election Day, national polls show his Democratic rival Barack Obama leading by an average of 6 percentage points, and battleground polls show Obama ahead in more than enough states to win the decisive 270 Electoral College votes.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s ruling coalition expanded its control of city halls in elections that ended yesterday, winning the mayor’s office in about two-thirds of the country’s municipalities.
Lula’s party itself elected 559 mayors, up from 411 in the 2004 races, according to preliminary results posted on the electoral court’s Web site. The president’s main ally, the so- called PMDB, won in 1,201 adding 142 cities it controls and consolidating its place as the country’s biggest party.

The Constitution Party is a United States political party. It was founded as the U.S. Taxpayers’ Party in 1992. The party’s official name was changed to the Constitution Party in 1999; however, some state affiliate parties are known under different names.