Sudan is holding its first multi-party elections in 24 years.

With several opposition parties boycotting the elections, the campaign had been low-key.

Before electioneering ended on Friday, cars belonging mainly to the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) drove by occasionally in the capital Khartoum with people handing out leaflets urging voters to elect Omar al-Bashir, the president who is seeking re-election.

But it seems most people already know the outcome and there is a sense of apathy among some. Many have also opted to leave the capital until the election is over due to fears of violence.

BANGKOK, April 11 (Reuters) – The Thai government said no live rounds were fired at protesters by troops in Saturday’s clashes in the capital and a spokesman said it had told troops stationed at a downtown protest base to go back to their bases to rest.

“Red shirt” protesters said on Sunday they would not give up their fight for early elections after the clashes killed 19 people.

The fighting, the worst political violence in the country in 18 years, some of it in well-known tourist areas, ended after security forces pulled back late on Saturday.

There will be an independent review after the NHS transplant authority confirmed 21 cases in which the wrong organs may have been taken from donors.

Up to 800,000 people on the UK donor register may have had their wishes about which organs they wished to donate recorded incorrectly.

Health Secretary Andy Burnham said he regretted the error but it should not stop people from donating.

The British Medical Association warned public confidence could be damaged.

NHS Blood and Transplant apologised and said only donors in Scotland, England and Wales who had registered using their driving licence application form were potentially affected.

Mr Burnham said a new system had been put into place to prevent the error from happening again. NHS Blood and Transplant said it was urgently investigating.

Wrongly recorded

While many donors give consent for all their organs to be used for transplant after their death, some withhold consent for certain organs – such as their eyes.

However the details of many donors’ preferences were wrongly recorded in 1999.

The blunder came to light in 2009 when NHS Blood and Transplant wrote to donors, reiterating what they had agreed to donate.

But many wrote back saying the information was incorrect.

Mr Burnham told the BBC a review, led by Professor Sir Gordon Duff of Sheffield University, would be commissioned into how the data was lost.

He said: “We do need to get to the bottom of it. It would appear to relate to a technical error going back to 1999 and this was how data was transferred between the DVLA and the blood and transplant service. That has now been corrected,” he said.

Confidence

In a statement, NHS Blood and Transport said: “We assure everyone currently on the organ donor register that the affected records will not be used in discussions with their family about organ donation.

“They will only be used once they have been corrected in accordance with the donors’ wishes.”

It said steps would be taken to contact all those on the register who were possibly affected to confirm the details held about them were right and added anyone who was not contacted could be confident their records were accurate.

It added: “There are a small number of cases, 21 over the past six years, where the person has died and their preferences may not have been correctly recorded.

“In each case the family gave permission for the donation to take place, but it may not have been in line with the individual’s preferences.

It added: “We sincerely apologise for any distress this may have caused.

“We can reassure everyone that no organs have been donated without the support of the deceased’s nearest relatives and that no one has been registered as a donor against their wishes.”

Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the British Medical Association told the BBC: “You want people to come forward and donate their organs in good faith so that people who have serious conditions can have their lives saved.

“If we are going to have these sort of problems, it does erode the public confidence in that and that’s very concerning.”

He said the review was needed in order to prevent patients’ lives from being put at risk in the long-term.

‘Shocking’

Joyce Robins of pressure group Patient Concern told the BBC she was angry that such “sensitive data” had been so carelessly handled” and said she feared it would not only dissuade people from joining the register but also result in people taking their names off it.

She said the health authority should contact everyone on the register and ask if all information was correct.

NHS Blood and Transplant has since corrected 400,000 flawed records – but hundreds of thousands of people are now being being contacted to confirm which organs may be taken.

Until consent is given from those affected, no organs will be removed.

It is against the law to take organs from the dead without their prior consent, or that of their family after death.

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said consent should always be given and if that had not happened, a full investigation had to be carried out.

He stressed though that it was important for people to continue donating.

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb described the data error as “a shocking revelation” and called for a “full inquiry”.

He said: “People have to have absolute confidence that their wishes will be respected.

LOS ANGELES — “Designing Women” star Dixie Carter, whose Southern charm and natural beauty won her a host of television roles, has died at age 70.

Carter died Saturday morning, according to publicist Steve Rohr, who represents Carter and her husband, actor Hal Holbrook. He declined to disclose the cause of death or where she died. Carter lived with Holbrook in the Los Angeles area.

“This has been a terrible blow to our family,” Holbrook said in a written statement. “We would appreciate everyone understanding that this is a private family tragedy.”

A native of Tennessee, Carter was most famous for playing wisecracking Southerner Julia Sugarbaker for seven years on “Designing Women,” the CBS sitcom that ran from 1986 to 1993. The series was the peak of a career in which she often played wealthy and self-important but independent Southern women.

She was nominated for an Emmy in 2007 for her seven-episode guest stint on the ABC hit “Desperate Housewives.”

Carter’s other credits include roles on the series “Family Law” and “Different Strokes.”

She married Holbrook in 1984. The two had met four years earlier while making the TV movie “The Killing of Randy Webster,” and although attracted to one another, each had suffered two failed marriages and were wary at first.

They finally wed two years before Carter landed her role on “Designing Women.” Holbrook appeared on the show regularly in the late 1980s as her boyfriend, Reese Watson.

The two appeared together in her final project, the 2009 independent film “That Evening Sun,” shot in Tennessee and based on a short story by Southern novelist William Gay.

The middle of three children, Carter was born in 1939 in McLemoresville, Tenn.

Carter was the daughter of a grocery and department store owner who died just three years ago at 96. She said at the time of his death that he taught her to believe in people’s essential goodness.

“When I asked him how he handled shoplifting in his new store, which had a lot of goods on display, making it impossible to keep an eye on everything, he said, ‘Most people are honest, and if they weren’t, you couldn’t stay in business because a thief will find a way to steal,’” Carter said. “‘You can’t really protect yourself, but papa and I built our business believing most people are honest and want to do right by you.’”

Carter grew up in Carroll County and made her stage debut in a 1960 production of “Carousel” in Memphis. It was the beginning of a decades-long stage career in which she relied on her singing voice as much as her acting.

She appeared in TV soap operas in the 1970s, but did not become a national star until her recurring roles on “Different Strokes” and another series, “Filthy Rich,” in the 1980s.

Those two parts led to her role on “Designing Women,” a comedy about the lives of four women at an interior design firm in Atlanta.

Carter and Delta Burke played the sparring sisters who ran the firm. The series also starred Annie Potts and Jean Smart.

The show, whose reruns have rarely left the airwaves, was not a typical sitcom. It tackled such topics as sexism, ageism, body image and AIDS.

“It was something so unique, because there had never been anything quite like it,” Potts told The Associated Press at a 2006 cast reunion. “We had Lucy and Ethel, but we never had that exponentially expanded, smart, attractive women who read newspapers and had passions about things and loved each other and stood by each other.”

Carter appeared on the drama “Family Law” from 1999 to 2002, and in her last major TV appearance she played Gloria Hodge, the surly mother-in-law to Marcia Cross’s Bree on “Desperate Housewives.”

Carter said the role was far from the kindly woman she played on “Designing Women.”

“It’s a vast difference,” Carter said while filming the series. “Gloria Hodge doesn’t have any redeeming qualities except her intelligence.”

In addition to Holbrook, Carter is survived by daughters Mary Dixie and Ginna.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Reflections on Apple’s announcements and secrets, strategy and technology in the wake of the latest iPhone announcement.

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — Afghan authorities have arrested three Italian medical workers in a plot to assassinate the governor of the southern Helmand province.

The three workers were arrested Saturday along with six Afghans from a hospital run by Milan-based Emergency in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province.

Emergency is one of the few foreign-run clinics in the city.

The nine were planning to conduct suicide attacks in the province, said Daud Ahmad, the provincial governor’s spokesman.

Authorities said the suspects had taken $500,000 from the Pakistan Taliban to launch their attack in a crowded location when Gov. Gulab Mangal was present.

Authorities found two suicide vests, two pistols and explosives hidden in medicine cartons at the clinic, Ahmad said.

Emergency has maintained a presence in Afghanistan for more than a decade, with its Lashkar Gah clinic treating more than 66,000 people, the group said.

In 2007, a hospital staffer mediated between the Afghan government and the Taliban to secure the release of kidnapped Italian journalist Danielle Mastrogiacomo.

Mastrogiacomo was freed but an Afghan translator, Ajmal Naqshbandi, was killed by militants.

Afghan authorities now say the three arrested Italians killed Naqshbandi.

The Italian government could not immediately be reached for comment.

The charity said it has not been able to reach the three employees by phone.

“This accusation sounds simply groundless to us, and we are absolutely certain that the truth will come forth quickly,” the nongovernment organization said in a statement on its Web site.

Afghan authorities have not contacted it to explain the reasons for the detention, the group said.

“These are individuals who for years have been working to ensure medical treatment for the Afghan people,” the statement said. “We ask that their rights be respected, the first of which is to allow them to communicate with us and let us know their personal conditions.”

A special service is being held in east Belfast on Sunday morning to remember all those who died in the plane crash which killed Poland’s president.

Lech Kaczynski died alongside his wife, several military commanders, MPs, historians and economists while travelling to Smolensk in Russia.

On Saturday evening a vigil was held outside Belfast City Hall.

Fr Andrzej Kolaczkowski, who is taking Sunday’s service, said the tragedy was hard to come to terms with.

“The loss of one person has a huge effect,” he said.

“But the loss of 96 people who also played an important role in Polish politics and Polish social life is very, very daunting.”

The service is being held at St Anthony’s Parish Church off the Woodstock Road.

On Saturday, Justyna Samolyk of the Polish Association for Northern Ireland, who lives in Belfast, said the community was in deep shock.

“He was a great man – he really devoted his life for Poland and was very active in the Solidarity movement,” she said.

“He was really popular, so a tragedy like that was really moving.”

Thick fog

Polish and Russian officials said no-one survived after the president’s plane apparently hit trees as it approached Smolensk airport in thick fog.

Russian air traffic control said the pilots ignored advice to divert to another airport.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the crash was the most tragic event of the country’s post-World War II history.

The Polish delegation was flying in from Warsaw to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre of thousands of Poles by Soviet forces during WWII.

Serbia has made great strides, but its apology for the Srebrenica massacre should acknowledge that what happened there was genocide, says Harry de Quetteville.

The terrifying thing about the Srebrenica massacre is that the figures keep changing. Was it 6,000 Muslim men and boys who were herded to the side of pits and shot dead by ethnic Serb soldiers in 1995? Or was it 7,000?

The consensus when I was covering the Balkans was: between the two. That was the best guess from the remains recovered from the area around a shattered town in eastern Bosnia. But then, after a while, the total more often mentioned increased to 7,000.

I don’t work in the Balkans anymore, but even so it wasn’t much of a surprise when I saw, in the news reports about the fact that Serbia has finally, today, officially apologised for this killing field, that the estimated death toll now stands at 8,000.

And what, you may ask, is another 1,500 bodies when you are dealing with a system of savagery? A system which dehumanises individuals because of their race or religion? A system, in other words, of genocide.

And what is 7,000 or indeed 8,000 when set against the genocide of millions in the Second World War? The figures seem as meaningless, as unimaginable, as the recent multi-billion dollar losses of the world’s financial institutions. In both cases it is tempting to argue that the precise numbers are less important than ensuring that the systems which went so wrong do not do so again.

With this in mind it is heartening that among the political groups that endorsed the Serbian parliament’s apology in the early hours of this morning was the Socialist Party, once led by Slobodan Milosevic. It has moved on from the nightmare of expansionist nationalism that drove the 1992-95 wars following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

Serbia has moved on too. These days Serbs dream not of Greater Serbia but of EU membership and the ease of trade and travel that come with it. The country’s president, Boris Tadic, is a good man, understated in his way, but not ineffective. Not even the amputation of the former Serb province of Kosovo, now an independent nation, has opened the sluices for fresh rivers of blood, as many predicted it would.

Serbia is fit for membership of the EU (itself a club which has played a crucial role in offering Balkan people a future in which peace promises more than war). Ratko Mladic, the general who led the massacre at Srebrenica, is one of the only two Serbs wanted for war crimes still left uncaptured. His days at large are surely numbered.

For Muslims in Bosnia, understandably, this is not enough. For today’s Serb resolution, while it offers an apology, does not mention the word ‘genocide’.

It is true that the Serb soldiers did not kill everyone at Srebrenica. Technically, I suppose, it was only the men of fighting age (if children and pensioners can be considered of fighting age) who were butchered. But few doubt the ethnic dimension of the killings. So an apology for genocide there should be. But that should not devalue the great strides that Serbia has made towards acknowledging and accounting for its bloody recent past.

Back in Srebrenica meanwhile, there is work underway that serves us all more than any Serb apology. There, teams still excavate and exhume bodies from the many pits in which the dead were buried. So far more than 5,600 victims have been identified by DNA analysis.

They have been rescued, in other words, from the anonymity of the mass grave. They have been given names and faces again, and in many cases have been reburied under their own headstones. They are individuals once more. This work shows that establishing the precise numbers of genocide is not less important than ensuring that the systems of genocide cannot occur again. Rather, it is integal to that process.

Anyone who has visited Yad Vashem knows of its efforts to catalogue the Holocaust, to remember each individual caught up in a system of savagery. By doing so it shows that such systems, which try so hard to strip their victims of identity and humanity, fail and are doomed to failure.

UNITED NATIONS — The U.S. government pledged $1.15 billion Wednesday at an international conference on rebuilding earthquake-shattered Haiti, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warning that “what happens there has repercussions far beyond its borders.”

The American government and United Nations are co-sponsoring the conference, which aims to drum up nearly $4 billion to rebuild the impoverished country over the next 18 months.

The conference seemed likely to meet that goal, with the European Union announcing a $1.6 billion commitment and Brazil pledging $172 million.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the goal was not just to rebuild Haiti but to transform its history of deep poverty and dysfunction.

“What we envision today is a wholesale national renewal, a sweeping exercise in nation-building on a scale and scope not seen in generations,” he told the conference.

Clinton warned that failing to support Haiti could lead to more migration, political instability, drug-trafficking and the spread of drug-resistant diseases beyond its borders.

She spoke from a podium sitting next to the U.N. secretary general, Haitian President René Préval and her husband, Bill Clinton. The Haitian government has asked the former U.S. president to co-chair an interim commission that will oversee the spending of international reconstruction aid.

Haiti needs $11.5 billion to rebuild over the next decade, according to an assessment drawn up by its government and foreign technical experts. Donors from about 120 countries were attending the pledging conference.

FBI raids suspected Christian militia to prevent violent revolt; bond hearings Tuesday

This photo provided by the U.S.

Worried that a plot to kill police officers and kick-start a violent revolution against the government could be just weeks away, federal authorities moved to arrest members of a Michigan militia who called themselves “Christian warriors” as they prepared to battle the Antichrist.

“The time had come that we needed to arrest them and take them down,” U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Prosecutors have said that members of the Hutaree militia, who had trained themselves to make bombs and use firearms, planned to make a false 911 call, kill responding police officers, then set off a bomb at the funeral to kill many more. Federal officials said they began monitoring the militia last summer and that they believed an attack was planned for April.

Alleged ringleader David Brian Stone is among nine Hutaree members arrested in FBI raids across the Midwest at the weekend. Each of the suspects is being held without bond and they have all requested a public defender. Bond hearings are scheduled Wednesday for 44-year-old Stone of Clayton, Michigan, and other Hutaree members.

Stone and his family, who lived in a rural Michigan trailer home, had always been devout, but his private devotions evolved over the years into the Hutaree — a name the group’s Web site says they created to mean “Christian warrior.”

Stone’s former wife Donna, 44, said his personal theology partly destroyed their marriage, but that nevertheless her ex-husband was able to entice her stepson, Joshua Matthew Stone, and her 19-year-old son, David Brian Stone Jr., into the militia that grew out of his faith.

“I honestly feel, and think, their dad never told either of those boys what they were getting into,” she said. “This a bunch of garbage, these charges. There is no way my son would do these things.”

Donna Stone said she met David Brian Stone in the late 1990s in a grocery store where she worked. He courted her and soon afterward, she and her son, Sean Stetten, moved into his small trailer in Lenawee County, near the Ohio state line. The boys were raised as brothers, and David Brian Stone legally adopted Sean, whose name was changed to David Brian Stone Jr.