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Citizens of Serbia will head to the polls again on Sunday, this time to elect a new parliament (the last one held together less than a year).  It looks to be a close election, with the pro-European Democratic coalition polling just behind the nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS).

According to Belgrade’s bookies, odds fall in the nationalists' favor. In the PM race, most people are putting their money on either the current caretaker prime minister, Vojslav Kostunica or Tomislav “the Undertaker” Nikolic (no, not The Undertaker, though Nikolic, whose nickname stems from his former profession as a cemetery overseer, is not much better).

If Sunday’s elections follow the gamblers’ gut, Serbia’s future will not be bright.  Although staunchly opposed to Milosevic back in the 1990s, Prime Minister Kostunica has proved just as power hungry, and just as willing to play on Serbia’s Kosovo myth, as was Milosevic himself. And a Serbia with Nikolic at the helm would be even uglier. Nikolic is adamant that he’s “no Milosevic,” but only because Milosevic wasn't nationalist enough for his taste. Needless to say, both men oppose European integration as long as most of Europe continues to recognize Kosovo.

Ironically,  a pro-Europe prime minister could only come out of a coalition that includes the leftist parties and the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) -- Milosevic's former party. SPS isn't quite what it used to be, but its inclusion still shows how weak the pro-Europe forces in Serbia's politics are.

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A shipment of ammunition, rockets, and mortar bombs en route from China to Zimbabwe has been denied passage from the South African port of Durban to the shipment's landlocked destination. 

On Friday, South Africa’s High Court barred the transport of weapons aboard the An Yue Jiang, arguing that the shipment would be used by Zimbabwe's president of 28 years, Robert Mugabe, against members of the opposition party. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, temporarily in self-imposed exiled, declared himself the victor of the March 29th elections. Since then, journalists and activists alike have reported that hundreds of opposition supporters have been detained, beaten, or tortured (warning: illustrations may be unsettling).

Although the An Yue Jiang is expected to return to China, a South African paper, News24, reports that a second arms shipment from China is scheduled to arrive by air in order to "expedite the delivery and to circumvent the controversy around last week's shipment by sea." The story also claims that both orders, placed by the Zimbabwean government, were finalized just days after Zimbabwe's elections.

The arms shipments brings to light the hazards of China's growing role in the world's poorest and most unstable continent. According to Serge Michel in the current issue of FP, in the last seven years, "trade between China and Africa jumped from $10 billion to $70 billion." But the resulting projects highlight the competing interests of Chinese-African cooperation:

Take, for example, the dam being built at Imboulou in Congo. Officially, it's a huge success: It's expected to help double national electricity production by 2009... [But according to a project engineer] the quality of the cement being used is sub-standard, the Congolese workers are so poorly paid that none of them stays longer than a few months, and, above all, the drilling has been so poorly done that half of the dam sits on a huge pocket of water that continually floods the site and could cause it to collapse one day."

From weapons to shoddy cement, the Chinese-Africa deal is looking more like a recipe for disaster every day.

After its surprisingly strong showing in Italian parliamentary elections last week, the quasi-separatist, anti-immigrant Northern League Party is likely to take over several key posts in Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet including the interior, reforms, and agriculture ministries. The League's control of the Interior Ministry puts Italy's immigration policy is in the hands of a party whose leaders have suggested that the navy fire on rafts carrying illegal immigrants.

Italy's new deputy prime minister is likely to be Roberto Calderoli, a guy who proudly wears T-shirts emblazoned with the Danish Mohammed cartoons, promoted a "pig day" protest in a Muslim neighborhood, and, after the Italian team's World Cup victory, dismissed their French opponents as "negroes, communists and Muslims."

Berlusconi, who mocked his Spanish counterpart for appointing too many women to top posts, may want to watch his words considering the classy fellows in his own cabinet.

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When I read today that Hillary Clinton is playing John Mellencamp's "Small Town" at her rallies this week, I had to laugh. Because, seriously? How literal are we going to get here? (Plus, I had to wonder whether Mellencamp, a former Edwards supporter, has endorsed anyone yet. He famously asked John McCain to stop playing his songs at rallies earlier this year.)

And in my 5-minute Google search to find out whether Mellencamp's made a pick, I discovered that Bruce Springsteen has just announced this afternoon that he's backing Obama. Here's what Mr. Working Class America said about Bittergate:

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I've envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where '...nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.'

Does this mean no more Springsteen songs at Clinton rallies?

UPDATE: A Getty Images search for "Springsteen Obama" brings this result:

The Guardian's Chris McGreal has filed a grim report from rural Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe's goons have launched Operation Makavhoterapapi, or "Where did you put your cross?" in the local language. The operation amounts to a campaign of violence and intimidation against suspected opposition supporters, and in some cases even their children. Singled out for reprisals are those who did not vote at polling places that were known to be monitored by Mugabe loyalists. Said one victim:

When they were beating me they wanted to know why I didn't go to their polling station. They said to me: there we could see how you put your vote, if you vote in the other place it's secret and that means you voted for the opposition. They said they knew how people voted in that polling station from the figures and it wasn't for Zanu-PF."

Meanwhile, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has changed his mind and will contest a runoff election against Mugabe. This can only get uglier.

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Within the fragile coalition that has brought Silvio Berlusconi back to power, the big winner appears to be the Lega Nord, a separatist party that advocates federalism or even complete independence for Northern Italy (or Padania, as they call it.) The Lega won about 8.3 percent of the vote out of a total of 47 percent for Berlusconi's center-right coalition.

There's already speculation that the Lega will use its new influence to push for tougher immigration laws. The Lega has become known for its extreme anti-immigrant sentiment in recent years due to neighborhood patrols aimed at intimidating immigrant communities, racist campaign posters, and the inflammatory rhetoric of party leader Umberto Bossi, who once said that the Italian navy should open fire on boats carrying illegal immigrants. The party has already used its influence over Berlusconi to nix an idea he had hinted at during the campaign for giving immigrants the right to vote.

The Lega's position in Italy's governing coalition means that it will probably have to soften its Padanian separatist stance, but the party might still push to give regional governments more autonomy and budgetary control. That will be a tough pill for Berlusconi to swallow, but with all the challenges he's facing, he'll need all the help he can get. After all, a defection by the Lega brought down another Berlusconi government in 1994. He's not likely to cross them this time.

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In summer 2001, I was on a trip to Kathmandu, Nepal with some friends from college. It just so happened that my long-planned visit came just after the royal heir supposedly went crazy, machine-gunned his father and dozens of palace guards, and then committed suicide (naturally, by shooting himself in the back with an AK-47). The king's unpopular brother, who seemed a lot like Scar from The Lion King, took power. Meanwhile, Maoist insurgents held something like seven provinces at the time.

Needless to say, the country was a bit on edge when my friends and I arrived. We felt safe, but it often seemed like we were the only tourists around.

I remember taking a rickety taxi out to see the famed "monkey temple," a.k.a. Swayambhunath stupa. On the way, I craned my neck incredulously to see a bombed-out bus that looked like it might still be smoldering. "What's that?" I asked the driver. "Don't worry," he laughed. "It's just the Maoist rebels." He assured me that they only killed policemen. When I returned to my hotel that evening, a note from the U.S. Embassy warned us not to go to the attached casino, which had received bomb threats.

Nearly seven years later, the Maoists are going to be in charge. Ain't democracy grand?

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Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has an op-ed in today's Guardian in which he predicts that President Robert Mugabe is about to bring the hammer down to maintain power after last week's election, the results of which have still not been released:

Adept at stealing elections from the hands of voters, Mugabe is now amassing government troops; blocking court proceedings where we have attempted to seek an order simply for the electoral commission to release the final tally of the March 29 poll; raiding the offices of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC); and casting a pall of suppression and gloom over the country. The feared militias, made up of misguided activists and the same war veterans who pushed for and benefited from the disastrous land confiscations from the late 1990s, are being mobilised. This can only mean, despite some earlier evidence to the contrary, that sanity has been discarded along with truth in the offices of Zanu-PF.

Tsvangirai goes on to promise Mugabe that he need not fear prosecution if he steps down.

Mugabe, predictably, is going back to one of his favorite tactics by raiding the country's few remaining white-owned farms and accusing white farmers of trying to regain their lost property amid the election chaos:

"Land must remain in our hands. The land is ours, it must not be allowed to slip back into the hands of whites," President Mugabe told a crowd gathered at a funeral of his wife's uncle.

Stoking racial tensions has worked for Mugabe in past times of crisis, but the fact that election results have still not been released and he is accusing his own handpicked election commission of "errors and miscalculations" is probably a sign that Mugabe did much worse than expected. Mugabe's "father of the nation" routine is going to be harder to pull off this time. Short of resorting to brute force on a massive scale, it's hard to see how he gets out of this one.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

After promising to do so for months, the Clintons have just released their tax returns. And they've made a pretty penny since Bill left office.

Total income since 2000: $109,175,175

Bill's cumulative speech income: $51,855,599

Last year, it was reported that Bill gave more than 350 speeches in 2006, but that only 20 percent (so, 70 speeches) were for personal income. Their 2006 returns show that he made about $10.5 million that year on speeches, or about $150,000 a pop. So, given that he's commanded far more than that for various events (as high as $450K a speech in '06), I'm actually surprised he hasn't made more.

This doesn't sound good:

Security agents and paramilitary police in riot gear are surrounding a Harare hotel housing foreign journalists.

A man answering the phone at the hotel says they are taking away some reporters.

The man refused to give his name but said about 30 police entered the hotel Thursday and were preparing to take away four or five journalists.

The elections definitely haven't been playing out according to Mugabe's script. If you're positioning yourself to steal a runoff, a good first step would be to lock up anyone who might call you out.

Update: One of the arrested journalists is reportedly the NYT's Barry Bearak.

John Moore/Getty Images

Tomorrow, nearly 6 million of the world's poorest billionaires will head to the polls to elect Zimbabwe's next president. Which could be same president the country has now.

Yet Freedom House Deputy Executive Director Thomas Melia yesterday described the atmosphere in Harare, the nation's capital, as one of "nervous hopefulness" at an event co-hosted with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). That's because this is shaping up to be the 84-year-old Robert Mugabe's toughest election since he took over as president in 1980.

The tide may have turned against Mugabe in rural areas that he and his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), used to be able to count on for support. Thousands now rally for rival party MDC, largely without the kind of politically targeted violence that took place last year against Morgan Tsvangirai, who has been the party's leader since 1999.

If elected, Tsvangirai promises to make desperately needed reforms including improvements to the health sector, better food security, and the creation of new jobs (admittedly, it's hard to do worse on these fronts than Mugabe has). Tsvangirai has also proposed desperately needed reform of the economy and vowed to create a new currency within the first six months of his presidency. The value of Zimbabwean dollars it plummeting so quickly these days that it is being issued with expiration dates.

In addition to Tsvangirai, a new opposition candidate has recently thrown his hat in the ring. Although some think his candidacy will split the opposition vote and end up helping Mugabe, he is more than just the Ralph Nader of Harare. Simba Makoni, ZANU-PF party member and former finance minster, has presented himself as an alternative to Tsvangirai, and there are rumors that his ties to the ruling party could be helping him to build a secret coalition of powerful supporters. His candidacy could be laying bare fissures within ZANU-PF and hurting Mugabe's hold on the party.

The two opposition candidates announced yesterday that they would form a united front in the event of a runoff. But if Mugabe and his supporters have anything to do with it, they'll never get that far. Multiple incidents of attempted election rigging have been cited, including the printing of 9 million ballots for a registered 6 million voters. Investigations have also determined that recently deceased Ian Smith, the last white leader of what was then known as Southern Rhodesia is still on the ballot. Add to this allegations of planned intimidation at the polls and a new gerrymandered voting district system (click here for an interactive map outlining other deleterious election conditions), and it seems a foregone conclusion that Mugabe will be declared the winner.

The real question isn't whether Mugabe tries to steal the election -- his attempts to do so are glaringly obvious -- it's whether his fellow Zimbabweans, party leaders, military elements, and civil servents will agree to help him do so yet again. While he seems to still be able to get folks to rallies, it's possible that the time has come when the bribes simply aren't enough to keep him in power.

How many votes will the Tibet crackdown swing in tomorrow's elections in Taiwan? Presidential candidate Frank Hsieh is looking to Tibet to salvage a lagging campaign:

Ruling Democratic Progressive Party candidate Frank Hsieh, who has trailed in media polls, has pushed a message that to vote for the more China-friendly Nationalist Party candidate Ma Ying-jeou could make Taiwan "a second Tibet".

These voters, at least, seem a lot more concerned with the sagging economy, and Ma has been touting a potential "common market" with Beijing. We'll soon see whether Tibet has reminded voters that Chinese guns may accompany the butter.

Human Rights Watch: Supporters of Zimbabwe's opposition are being denied access to food. More here.

A power-sharing deal has been signed in Kenya, but it will take far more than a handshake in Nairobi to heal the wounds -- more than 1,000 dead and 600,000 displaced -- of the past few months. Here, Massai warriors battle a rival ethnic group in western Kenya with bows and arrows.

It's an image that brings to mind what former Kenyan corruption czar John Githongo recently told FP:

Negotiations are taking place in Nairobi, mediated by Kofi Annan, but it is the realities on the ground that will likely drive things, not the talks.

Looking at the image above, I'd call that an understatement.

On the day of Iran's parliamentary elections, The Economist's correspondent runs into some cynical folks in Tehran:

"I have voted once in 30 years, and that was for the creation of an Islamic Republic" says an old gentleman who deals in real estate. "I'm not going to get [expletive] again."

Driving back to the hotel late at night, my taxi driver is clearly drunk. As we careen along the near-empty expressway, he belts out made-up lyrics to "Old McDonald", ending in a refrain that has something to do with getting a visa to France and drinking viski. Pointing at a billboard of a senior bearded cleric he shouts, "Shaitan!" (Satan) and draws a finger across his throat. Somewhat timidly, I ask in my limited Farsi about the elections. He cackles with laughter, then clutches his head in mock-dismay.

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images

Thousands of Serbs took to the streets of Belgrade again Wednesday, but not to burn embassies or protest Kosovo's status change. Instead, they gathered in memory of Zoran Djindjic, Serbia's westward-looking prime minister who was assassinated five years ago to the day.

The commemorative gathering fell on the eve of Serbian President Boris Tadic's decision to dissolve parliament and call for new elections on May 11. The decision came after Serbia's ruling democratic coalition split irreconcilably over the Kosovo issue.

Local and international experts alike agree that the May election could well determine whether Serbia eventually joins the EU and prospers or remains isolated over Kosovo. While Serbia's election may be about its future, it is also a choice between legacies of the past –- between Djindjic's hope for a European Serbia, as embodied by the pro-European party of President Tadic, and Milosevic's nationalist scheme for a Greater Serbia, a banner carried on by former PM Vojislav Kostunica in coalition with the Serbian Radical Party.

Europe is hopeful that elections will produce a Serbia that leans westward. But with Kostunica's willingness to pander to the emotional loss of Kosovo, Europe might find itself short a key Balkan player, and Serbs might find themselves, yet again, poor and alone.

The blog English Russia has a fantastic collection of creatively filled-out ballots from the recent Russian presidential election. The ballot above is a vote for Vladimir Putin's dog Koni. Variations on the essentially untranslatable "Preved Medved" Internet meme were quite popular. Adolf Hitler and Chuck Norris picked up some write-in votes as well.

I've always heard about John McCain's legendary temper, but never really seen it in action. Here's how the Arizona senator responded to a question about a conversation he had about being John Kerry's running mate in 2004:

(Hat tip: The Caucus)

Here's a clip of Susan Rice, one of Barack Obama's foreign-policy advisors, discussing the infamous 3 a.m. phone call ad:

Transcript:

Clinton hasn't had to answer the phone at 3 o'clock in the morning and yet she attacked Barack Obama for not being ready. They're both not ready to have that 3 a.m. phone call."

Whoops.

(Hat tip: The Caucus)

UPDATE: MSNBC sends along the full clip, so that you can see the context and judge for yourself.

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It's puzzling to me why it's so difficult for some to let go of the old 1990s formulation that the economy still matters most in elections.

"[I]t's really about the economy," declared a BusinessWeek headline yesterday morning. To be sure, the economy has played an important role in the campaign over the last couple weeks. But if Hillary Clinton's victories in Ohio and Texas last night prove anything, isn't it the opposite? Voters are still very much in a Sept. 11th mindset. Clinton won last night in large part by beating Barack Obama two to one among voters who made their decision within the last three days of the race. And she did that by attacking his preparedness to handle national security, not the subprime crisis. Most notably via the now-infamous, and apparently effective, "It's 3:00 A.M...." ad.

Why did that strategy work? Because, as Michael Gerson points out in today's Washington Post, this is really the only issue on which Obama is beatable. Clinton insiders have, it appears, finally grasped this fact. "His vulnerability is experience and judgment on national security," Harold Ickes and Mark Penn wrote in a memo last night.

I suspect foreign policy is now the issue on which Obama's political future will live or die. This morning, he told reporters aboard his campaign plane, "Over the coming weeks we will join [Clinton] in that argument. Was she negotiating treaties? Was she handling crisis? The answer is 'no.'"

John McCain is already signaling that he intends to make November a referendum on national security. Like it or not, it's a foreign-policy election.