Madagascar’s constitutional high court yesterday confirmed Andry Rajoelina as the acting president of the republic, according to a document obtained by AFP.
The confirmation came one day after the military installed the opposition leader in office, rejecting former president Marc Ravalomanana’s attempt to cede power to them.
Ravalomanana stepped down on Tuesday as president, intending to transfer rule to a military directorate. But in a ceremony broadcast from a military camp in the capital, Vice Admiral Hyppolite Rarison Ramaroson said the military was installing Rajoelina, even though at 34, he is too young to be president according to the Constitution.
Rajoelina has been leading anti-government rallies, accusing Ravalomanana of misspending public funds and undermining democracy in Madagascar.
Over the weekend, Rajoelina declared himself president of a transitional government and promised new presidential elections within two years.
Rajoelina told the French television station LCI he had the support of “soldiers, government workers, unions, that is to say all the country’s key groups.”
“Power belongs to the people,” Rajoelina said. “The people give power, the people can take it back.”
Despite losing support at home, Ravalomanana had been backed by the international community because he was the democratically elected president.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is “gravely concerned about the evolving developments in Madagascar,” associate spokeswoman Marie Okabe said at UN headquarters in New York.
The US State Department on Tuesday ordered all nonessential staff at the US embassy in Madagascar and the families of all US personnel there to leave the country because of the uncertain security situation.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS