Malaysia's long-ruling coalition hangs on to power

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia's long-governing coalition won national elections Sunday to extend its 56 years of unbroken rule, fending off the strongest opposition it has ever faced but exposing unresolved vulnerabilities in the process.

The Election Commission reported that Prime Minister Najib Razak's National Front coalition captured 124 of Malaysia's 222 parliamentary seats to win a majority Sunday. Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim's three-party alliance seized 73 seats, and other races were too close to call.

It was the National Front's 13th consecutive victory in general elections since independence from Britain in 1957. It faced its most unified challenge ever from an opposition that hoped to capitalize on allegations of arrogance, abuse of public funds and racial discrimination against the government.

Najib urged all Malaysians to accept his coalition's victory. "We have to show to the world that we are a mature democracy," he said.

"Despite the extent of the swing against us, (the National Front) did not fall," he said in a nationally televised news conference.

Anwar signaled the opposition might dispute the results, saying "irregularities" cost his alliance numerous seats with narrow margins. Within minutes of the National Front's declaration of victory, thousands of Malaysian opposition supporters replaced their Facebook profile photos with black boxes in a coordinated sign of dismay.

The Election Commission estimated more than 10 million voted for a record turnout of 80 percent of 13 million registered voters. They were also voting to fill vacancies in 12 of Malaysia's 13 state legislatures.

Though it retained power, the National Front is weaker than it was at its peak in 2004, when it won 90 percent of Parliament's seats, and it remained unclear whether it would improve upon the 135 seats it held in Parliament before it disbanded this month ahead of the vote. The coalition was anxious to secure a stronger five-year mandate and regain the two-thirds legislative majority that it held for years but lost in 2008.

Three well-known Cabinet ministers and at least one state chief minister were likely to lose their parliamentary seats. The Malaysian Chinese Association, the second-biggest party in the ruling coalition, saw many of its candidates defeated as Malaysia's ethnic Chinese minority community continued to abandon the National Front.

A major difference between the ruling coalition and Anwar's alliance are coalition affirmative-action policies that benefit the majority but often poor Malay population. Malay leaders in the National Front say those policies are still needed to help poorer Malays, but opposition critics say they've been abused to benefit mainly well-connected Malays, and that all underprivileged Malaysians should get help regardless of race.

"I am really fed up," said Andrew Charles, a Malaysian businessman working in Australia who flew home to vote for the opposition in a suburb outside Kuala Lumpur. "There are more abuses in the system and there is no equality among the races. After 56 years, it is time to give others a chance to change this country."

Others saw the National Front as the path of stability.

"The government has made some mistakes but the prime minister has made changes and I believe they (the National Front) will do their best to take care of the people's welfare," said Mohamed Rafiq Idris, a car business owner who waited in a long line at a central Selangor state voting center with his wife and son.

Some voters lined up for more than an hour at schools and other polling places, showing off fingers marked with ink to prevent multiple voting after they had finished.

An opposition win would have represented a remarkable comeback for Anwar, a former deputy prime minister who was fired in 1998 and subsequently jailed on corruption and sodomy charges that he says were fabricated by his political enemies. He was released from jail in 2004.

Anwar and other opposition leaders voiced suspicions Sunday about electoral fraud. Claims of bogus ballots and an apparent ease in which some voters cleaned the ink stains off their fingers dominated social media.

Opposition leaders said the National Front was using foreign migrants from Bangladesh, the Philippines and Indonesia to vote unlawfully. Government and electoral authorities deny the allegations.

The opposition stayed in control of northern Penang state, one of Malaysia's wealthiest territories, and remained strong in Kuala Lumpur, where middle-class voters have clamored for national change.

The National Front's held firm in many traditional rural strongholds, especially in Borneo, where Anwar's alliance had been hoping to make major inroads to bolster its chances of victory.

The National Front's aura of invincibility has been under threat since three of Malaysia's main opposition parties combined forces five years ago. In recent years the National Front has been increasingly accused of complacency and heavy-handed rule.

Najib, who took office in 2009, embarked on a major campaign to restore his coalition's luster. In recent months, authorities have provided cash handouts to low-income families and used government-linked newspapers and TV stations to criticize the opposition's ability to rule.

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Power, cooling restored at Japanese nuclear plant

TOKYO (AP) — Cooling systems have been restored for four fuel storage pools at Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear plant, more than a day after a power outage halted the supply of fresh cooling water and raised concerns about the facility, which still relies on makeshift equipment.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. says the cooling system at the last pool at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was repaired early Wednesday. It says pool temperatures were well within safe levels and the reactors were unaffected.

The utility says workers are still trying to determine the cause of the outage, which began when a brief power failure hit the plant Tuesday evening.

A massive earthquake and tsunami two years ago caused extensive damage to the plant.

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Mexico's president gathers power, pushes reform

MEXICO CITY (AP) — New President Enrique Pena Nieto has been fast out of the blocks in attacking some of Mexico's toughest issues in a country often stymied by monopolies and corruption.

He arrested the most powerful woman in Mexico, leader of the largest union in Latin America, on allegations of corruption that previous presidents saw but were too compromised to tackle. He is taking on the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim, and pledges to bring diversity to a television industry dominated by the head of the largest network in Latin America, a scion of one of Mexico's leading families.

At one time all three were key allies of Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled for 71 years with a combination of coercion and corruption before being voted out of office in 2000. Now, Pena Nieto is declaring that there are no more sacred cows.

The moves have built momentum behind what could be his most dramatic and difficult reform — modernizing and drawing foreign and private capital to the behemoth state oil company, a long sacrosanct but increasingly inefficient pillar of the Mexican economy. On Sunday, at a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the nationalization of the Mexican oil business, Pena Nieto said again that he will transform Petroleos Mexicanos. The longtime head of the Pemex union, who had been expected by many to fight any changes but has been the subject of questions about unexplained family wealth, pledged his support.

Pena Nieto says his plan will make Mexico more democratic and competitive in the world economy, and his drive for reform is fueling international confidence about Mexico. Rating company Standard and Poor's raised the country's long-term sovereign credit rating from "stable" to "positive" last week, citing optimism about the government's ability to carry out structural changes. The Mexican peso is stronger against the dollar than it's been in a year and a half.

But some analysts warn against mistaking style for substance and making early declarations of victory against entrenched powers built up by the very party that now says it's trying to bring them to heel. It will take many months, in some cases years, before Pena Nieto's reform agenda becomes law and produces its first results, plenty of time for big promises to be derailed by special interests, institutional inertia and the PRI's old guard.

"It's quite remarkable to me that people are assuming that somehow we're at a new stage in political or institutional or economic development in Mexico," said John Ackerman, a law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting scholar at American University in Washington. "Increased competition is great. But the central problem that's holding back Mexico's economic development is the concentration of political and economic power at the top, and with Pena Nieto we see more of this, we see a consolidation of this in fact."

While Pena Nieto has pledged to drive down violence, he has made few changes to Mexico's security policy. There has been no credible sign of a slowdown in the waves of killings that have turned many states into battlegrounds. The most significant change, critics say, has been a clampdown on official information about crime, part of a government-wide attempt to refocus national and international attention onto Mexico's economy.

The day before his Dec. 1 swearing-in, Pena Nieto and his team got the three main political parties to sign a 94-point national legislative agenda known as the Pact for Mexico that promises everything from efficient harvesting of rainwater to opening Mexico's behemoth state oil company to private and foreign investment. The Pact for Mexico was dismissed as theatrics by some observers at the time, but it has become clear Pena Nieto intends to push for every promise to become law as quickly as possible.

Addressing his Cabinet and hundreds of dignitaries at a celebration of his first 100 days, Pena Nieto jubilantly pledged to maintain the breakneck tempo.

"The intensity won't be passing. The pace of work will keep up. We didn't come just to govern, but to transform," he declared.

The new president pushed through the most sweeping education overhaul in seven decades, a potentially far-reaching reengineering of Mexico's deeply dysfunctional education system that calls for merit-based teacher hiring and promotion to replace a system in which union domination meant jobs were inherited and sold.

Teachers' union head Elba Esther Gordillo, one of the most powerful-yet-reviled people in Mexico, had pledged to fight the plan that passed Feb. 25, but then was arrested the next day on charges that she embezzled $160 million.

Gordillo rose to her influential position thanks to earlier PRI leaders, although she had strained those ties by supporting other parties in recent years.

Last week, Pena Nieto put forward a set of constitutional and legal changes that he pledged will drive down some of the world's highest cellphone prices and bring programming choice to a country almost entirely dominated by two television magnates.

The largest broadcaster, Televisa, long has been seen as a staunch ally of the PRI. Slim helped build his fortune when he bought Mexico's failing national telephone company at a bargain-basement price from a PRI government. Slim's Telmex controls 80 percent of Mexican landlines and 70 percent of the mobile-phone market. Emilio Azcarraga's Televisa has 70 percent of the broadcast TV market and more than 45 percent of cable television.

Pena Nieto has shown "that yes, he has the capacity to take decisions like arresting Elba Esther Gordillo, difficult decisions that require strength," said Jose Antonio Crespo, a historian and researcher at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City. "These are good signs that's he's willing to get into serious reforms, along with the opposition."

The telecommunications reform has been enthusiastically received by most economic experts and civil-society groups in the week since its introduction, with near unanimous praise of its toughening of the Mexican regulatory system. But many say it would only make it easier for Mexico's existing tycoons to enter each other's markets — not for new players.

And it's far from clear when the president's education revamp will result in real change in the classrooms.

Pena Nieto has made other changes that haven't drawn the fanfare, but have potentially far-reaching consequences for the power of the president, a once-imperial role during PRI rule that was weakened after the National Action Party won the presidency 12 years ago and ushered in a more democratic Mexico.

He persuaded the PRI to rewrite its rules this month, incorporating the president into the party's top leadership after years of nominal separation between the party and the government. The move will assure party fealty to the presidential agenda, avoiding the internal splits that weakened the PRI in the past, analysts said.

Providing another potential stick for Pena Nieto, Congress stripped lawmakers and other public servants of their longstanding immunity from prosecution, leaving only the president with total legal protection.

For some observers, Pena Nieto's first days are reminiscent of the splashy starts of other PRI presidents such as Carlos Salinas Gortari, who took office in 1988 and undertook a dramatic series of reforms but left office amid a devastating economic collapse fueled by overspending and budget mismanagement.

"This style is a way of saying, 'I've arrived, I'm a different president, I'm new,'" said Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez, a political science professor at the National Autonomous Technical Institute of Mexico. "It's an assertion of power, a determination to change the rules."

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Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mweissenstein

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Associated Press writers Galia Garcia-Palafox and Olga R. Rodriguez contributed to this report.

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Power partially restored at nuclear plant in Japan

TOKYO (AP) — Power has been restored to two fuel storage pools at Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear plant, but two others are still without fresh cooling water after nearly 20 hours, raising concerns about the fragility of a facility that still runs on makeshift equipment.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that pool temperatures at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant were well within safe levels, and that pools would remain safe for at least four days without fresh cooling water. The utility said the reactors were unaffected and no other abnormalities were found.

The cooling system was restored at two of the four pools by Tuesday evening, and the systems for the two other pools were to resume by Wednesday morning as workers complete repairs and try to determine the cause of the problem, TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono told reporters.

"We now have better prospects for cooling to resume," he said.

About 50 workers in hazmat suits and full-face masks were mobilized to fix cabling that involved the last of the three switchboards that they suspect as a possible cause of the problem. The utility was also preparing a backup system in case the repairs didn't fix the issue and "the worse comes to worst," Ono said.

Japan's March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami destroyed the plant's power and cooling systems, causing three reactor cores to melt and fuel storage pools to overheat.

The current power outage is a test for TEPCO to show if it has learned anything from the disaster. TEPCO, which has repeatedly faced cover-up scandals, was slammed by local media Tuesday for waiting hours to disclose the blackout.

Ono acknowledged the plant was vulnerable.

"Fukushima Dai-ichi still runs on makeshift equipment, and we are trying to switch to something more permanent and dependable, which is more desirable," he said. "Considering the equipment situation, we may be pushing a little too hard."

Ono said the utility did not immediately try to switch to a backup cooling system because doing so without finding and fixing the cause could lead to a repeat of the problem but prioritized power restoration after all.

There is a backup cooling system but no backup outside power. TEPCO has backup cooling systems with separate power sources for reactor cooling, but fuel storage pools only have emergency diesel generators as a backup. TEPCO said it will consider installing backup outside power for the pools.

Units 3 and 4 reactors shared a makeshift switchboard that sits on the back of a truck but an upgrade for permanent, safer location was being planned later this month. Reactor cooling water pumps also sit on the back of a truck, with hoses traveling several kilometers (miles) to reach the reactors.

"We have a ton of problems that still needs to be taken care of to overcome the challenges that we have never experienced," Ono said. But he denied the power outage would affect the plant's long-term cleanup plans.

Regulators have raised concerns about the makeshift equipment and urged the plant to switch them to a more permanent arrangement. The operator still has to remove melted, fatally radioactive fuel from the reactors before fully decommissioning the plant, which officials say could take 40 years.

Yoshihide Suga, the chief government spokesman, sought to allay concerns.

"In a sense, we have put in place measures that leave no room for worry," Suga told reporters in a regular briefing.

The command center at the plant suffered a brief power outage before 7 p.m. Monday. Electricity was quickly restored to the command center but not to equipment pumping water into the fuel pools.

The temperature in the four pools had risen slightly, but was well below the utility's target control temperature of 65 degrees Celsius, TEPCO said.

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Associated Press writer Malcolm Foster contributed to this report.

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Power still out at damaged nuclear plant in Japan

TOKYO (AP) — Four fuel storage pools at Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear plant have been without fresh cooling water for more than 15 hours due to a power outage, but the plant's operator said Tuesday morning it was trying to repair a broken switchboard that might have caused the problem.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that pool temperatures were well within safe levels at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, and that pools would remain safe for at least four days without fresh cooling water.

The utility was preparing a backup system in case the repairs didn't fix the problem, Masayuki Ono, an official at operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., told reporters.

"If worse comes to worst, we have a backup water injection system," said Ono.

The command center at the plant suffered a brief power outage before 7 p.m. Monday. Electricity was quickly restored to the command center but not to equipment pumping water into the fuel pools.

The utility was investigating the cause of the power outage and believes it might be due to problems with a switchboard, which it is trying to repair. At the same time, the company is preparing to connect another switchboard if repairs cannot fix the problem.

The temperature in the four pools had risen slightly, but was well below the utility's target control temperature of 65 degrees Celsius, TEPCO said.

The fuel pool for Unit 4, which contains spent and new fuel rods, had risen to 30.5 degrees as of 10 a.m. Tuesday from 25 degrees before the power outage. A common pool storing spent fuel for all reactors was at 28.6 degrees, while the Unit 1 pool was at 17.1 degrees and Unit 3 was at 15.9 degrees.

TEPCO said the reactors were unaffected and no other abnormalities were found.

The March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami destroyed the plant's power and cooling systems, causing three reactor cores to melt and fuel storage pools to overheat. The plant is now using makeshift systems.

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Associated Press writer Malcolm Foster contributed to this report.

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