16 Pages Number 130 2st Year
1 person gored in Spain’s running of the bulls
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Monday, July 12, 2010
French, Korean tourists’ arrival down
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Exit polls: Japan’s ruling party loses seats Associated Press Writer
TOKYO — Japan voted in parliamentary elections Sunday as the ruling Democrats highlighted reforms and cuts in wasteful spending during their 10-month rule, while apologizing for creating “confusion and mistrust” over tax-hike talk and a dispute involving a U.S. base.
Website says Gibson rant audio not the last word PAGE 12
WEATHER FORECAST CITY
TEMPERATURE OC
DENPASAR
25 - 31
JAKARTA
25 - 31
BANDUNG
20 - 29
YOGYAKARTA
23 - 33
SURABAYA
25 - 33
SUNNY
BRIGHT/CLOUDY
The main opposition conservatives, meanwhile, said voters must act to stop the Democrats’ “wandering, reckless politics.” Polls show the Democratic Party of Japan will likely lose seats in the 242-member upper house, where half the seats are up for grabs. The party’s popularity has taken a hit after Prime Minister Naoto Kan suggested Japan needs to raise its sales tax as the country’s population ages and shrinks — a proposal several top newspapers praised as courageous in front-page commentaries Sunday. The vote won’t directly affect the Democrats’ grip on power because they have a majority in the more powerful lower house. But a weak showing could undermine the party’s ability to pass legislation and force it to find new coalition partners. Kan’s party swept to power last
August, ending 55 years of nearly unbroken rule by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, promising to slash wasteful spending, rein in bureaucrats’ power and bring more transparency to politics. In their brief tenure, the Democrats have delivered mixed to disappointing results. They have put the brakes on many large public works projects considered wasteful, but their first prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, let down voters by breaking a campaign pledge to move U.S. Marine Air Station Futenma off the island of Okinawa and by getting mixed up in a funding scandal. Kan, a plainspoken former finance minister with a grass-roots activist background, enjoyed an initial surge in approval ratings when he came to office just a month ago after Hatoyama quit. Continued on page 6
775 coffins: Bosnia marks 1995 Srebrenica massacre Associated Press Writer
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AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye
A girl helps her mother casting her vote in Japan’s Upper House parliamentary elections at a polling station in Tokyo, Sunday, July 11, 2010.
AFP PHOTO / DIMITAR DILKOFF
A Bosnian woman mourns over the cofin of her relative during the preparation for a mass burial at the Potocari memorial cemetery near Srebrenica on July 10, 2010.
SREBRENICA, BosniaHerzegovina – Weeping among endless rows of coffins, tens of thousands gathered Sunday in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica to bury hundreds of massacre victims on the 15th anniversary of the worst crime in Europe since the Nazi era. A whole hillside was dug out with graves waiting for 775 coffins to be laid to rest at the biggest Srebrenica funeral so far. Still, that was less than a tenth of the total number of Muslim men and boys executed after Serb forces overran the U.N.-protected town on July 11, 1995, during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. At the time, some 30,000 Bosnian Muslims had flocked to the U.N. military base in the town’s suburb of
Potocari for refuge. But when Serb forces came, outnumbered Dutch troops opened the gates. The Serbs separated out men and boys, putting them on trucks and carting them away, the vast majority never to be seen again. The Srebrenica memorial center now stands across the road from that former U.N. base. The bodies being buried Sunday were previously excavated from mass graves and identified through DNA tests. An estimated 60,000 people were at the memorial Sunday. Relatives mingled among the pits on one side and rows of green coffins on the other, looking for the names of their loved ones. Muslim prayers and weeping mixed with speeches of dignitaries condemning the crimes and calling for the perpetrators to be punished. Continued on page 6