The CBC proves that the US isn’t the only country with ‘electoral dysfunction’: Azerbaijan announces election winner 1 day before vote

Something funny happened the day before Azerbaijan’s presidential election: The election commission announced the winner.

On Tuesday, a day before the voting began, the smartphone app of the Central Election Commission released results showing President Ilham Aliyev, whose family has been at the helm of the Caspian Sea nation for four decades, winning 73 per cent of the vote.

On Wednesday, the commission said Aliyev had won 85 per cent of the vote. His closest contender, Jamil Hasanli, trailed with six per cent, it said.

Obviously announcing the results before the election has taken place is a bit of a faux pas, but they are losing control as the ‘real’ margin is 85%, which is edging into the range of dictators. They should have stayed with their original number of 73%, which gives the opponents hope, but not much.

The BBC reports that Malala Yousafzai wins EU’s Sakharov human rights prize

Pakistani schoolgirl and campaigner Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban, has won the EU’s Sakharov human rights prize.

The 16-year-old activist was shot a year ago for campaigning for better rights for girls.

The Sakharov Prize for free speech is awarded by the European Parliament annually in memory of Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov.
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The 50,000 euro ($65,000) prize is considered Europe’s top human rights award.

And the CBC reports Alice Munro is 1st Canadian woman to win Nobel literature prize

Alice Munro wins the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Canadian woman to take the award since its launch in 1901.

Munro, 82, only the 13th woman given the award, was lauded by the Swedish Academy during the Nobel announcement in Stockholm as the “master of the contemporary short story.”

“We’re not saying just that she can say a lot in just 20 pages — more than an average novel writer can — but also that she can cover ground. She can have a single short story that covers decades, and it works,” said Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.

Both are extremely qualified for their awards. Sakharov would have certainly admired Malala’s courage, and Alice Munro has been a good read for the last 40 years.