The Globe and Mail has learned that the Zimbabwe Election Support Network data show that with 433 polling stations sampled, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has 49.5 per cent of the vote; President Robert Mugabe has 42 per cent and independent candidate Simba Makoni has 8 per cent, according to people familiar with the figures. The margin of error is 2 per cent.

Under Zimbabwean law, if no candidate takes 50 per cent plus one vote, there must be a run-off between the top two candidates within 21 days. In the event of a run-off, Mr. Makoni's supporters would almost certainly back Mr. Mugabe.

This news has enormous significance: the opposition will be massively bolstered by the fact that Mr. Mugabe was shown to finish second in a poll, for the first time since he took power here at independence in 1980. It suggests that efforts of his Zanu-PF party to rig the vote were not successful.

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Supporters of Zimbabwe ruling party ZANU PF celebrate in Mbere township in Harare Monday, as first results in the general elections are announced. Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change and President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF were level-pegging as the results trickled in from a weekend general election. (Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images)

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Opposition claims early lead

Zimbabwe's main opposition party on Sunday claimed an early lead in elections, including in some rural strongholds of President Mugabe

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This is also a courageous act on the part of the monitors, who are defying the government, which has insisted that only its own Zimbabwe Electoral Commission can release results.

Mr. Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change has repeatedly claimed victory in this election since shortly after polls closed on Saturday. Party secretary Tendai Biti said today that the party has photographs of all 4,000 polling stations showing the results posted as ballots were counted, and that these show the MDC has as much as two-thirds of the vote nationally. But the MDC has not made its own figures public in the same way that the election network is about to do.

The Electoral Commission released no results until 36 hours after polls closed and has progressed at a glacial pace all day. The latest official figures have less than a quarter of constituencies counted, with a one-seat lead to Zanu-PF.

The release of this data is a significant move for democracy in Zimbabwe but it does not realistically change the fact that the electoral commission may proceed with the release of figures that show a Zanu-PF win, as is widely feared here.

Few people here believe that Mr. Mugabe is prepared to leave office. The next few hours may prove crucial in the process of political change here.

N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Chad's President Idriss Deby on Monday granted an official pardon to six French aid workers jailed in December for abducting children.

The six members of the Zoe's Ark charity were sentenced to eight years' hard labour by a Chadian court late last year after it convicted them of trying to fly 103 African children to Europe without permission.

The charity workers, who had denied the charges, were flown back to France in late December and were serving their prison sentences there under a cooperation agreement. They are now expected to be released on Monday evening.

"The presidential pardon is accorded to Eric Breteau, Emilie Lelouch, Dominique Aubry, Alain Peligat, Philippe Van Winkelberg and Nadia Merimi," said a presidential decree, read on state radio in the former French colony.

STONEHENGE (Reuters) - Archaeologists set out on Monday to unlock one of the secrets of Stonehenge, the majestic monument in southern England -- when were the first standing stones placed at the ancient religious site?

The concentric stone circles that make up Stonehenge, 80 miles (130 km) southwest of London on the sweep of Salisbury Plain, consist of giant sandstone blocks or sarsens and smaller bluestones -- volcanic rock of a blueish tint with white flecks.

Stonehenge experts Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright will use modern carbon dating techniques and analysis of soil pollen and sea shells to work out when the stones were set up, in the first archaeological dig at the World Heritage site since 1964.

"If you want to find out why Stonehenge was built, you need to look 250 kilometres away to the Presili Hills in north Pembrokeshire, where the first bluestones that built Stonehenge come from," Wainwright told reporters as the two-week dig began.

The two archaeologists, who have worked extensively in the Presili Hills in recent years, believe the bluestones, which made up the first stone circles at Stonehenge, were thought to have magical curative powers.

The massive standing stones, set up as long as 5,000 years ago, dominate the even older religious site, marked by numerous burial mounds or barrows.

But what was envisioned as a torch relay around the world that would illustrate unity has instead become a lightning rod for protests.

Activists unfurled banners condemning China’s rights record at last week's flame-lighting ceremony in Greece and on Sunday a small group of protesters tried to block the flame's handover to Beijing officials.

The flame, encased in a lantern, was escorted off a specially equipped plane emblazoned with the words: "Journey of Harmony" and brought to Tiananmen Square, the focus of democracy protests that were crushed in 1989. In the square, the flame was split in two for the first time in its history.

One flame will be taken to Tibet where climbers, training for years, plan to carry it to the peak of Mount Everest – the world’s highest mountain. The second flame will journey around the world before returning to China in early May for a journey encompassing every province. Security is certain to be tightest in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

The Englishman.

Pernod : Invented to stop people  being blinded by the Deadly Absinthe, is absinthe without Wormwood, a particularly nasty herb associated with death and Fairies.

PARIS/STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - France's Pernod Ricard (PERP.PA: Quote, Profile , Research) won a hard-fought auction on Monday to buy the maker of Sweden's Absolut vodka for 5.63 billion euros (4.48 billion pounds), taking it close to being the world's biggest spirits company.

But Pernod shares stumbled as the market baulked at the price -- far higher than the $6-7 billion estimates in the market, even before the worst of the past few weeks' financial turmoil -- and the hefty debts the company was incurring.

Pernod beat the favourite, Jim Beam bourbon maker Fortune Brands (FO.N: Quote, Profile , Research), to win control of one of the fastest-growing spirits brands and gain a much bigger presence in the United States. Diageo (DGE.L: Quote, Profile , Research), the world's biggest spirits company, pulled out of the auction in February.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has stepped up attacks on the Dalai Lama, blasting him for abusing religion, stirring protests in Tibet and preparing for independence as the Olympic flame arrived in Beijing on Monday under tight security.

The scorn aimed at Tibet's exiled spiritual leader appears to indicate Beijing is digging in its heels in the face of mounting pressure from abroad to engage in dialogue with the Nobel Peace Prize winner. That pressure follows more than two weeks of protests and suppression in Tibetan-populated parts of China.

A report by Xinhua, China's official news agency, said the government had evidence the Dalai Lama and his supporters had planned the rash of anti-Chinese unrest across the Himalayan region and nearby areas this month.

The Dalai Lama's office rejected the claim on Monday and called on China to allow in international investigators.

"The self-proclaimed spiritual leader has obviously forgotten his identity, abused his religion and played too much politics," Xinhua said, adding he was building a "pro-independence infrastructure".

A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman denied what it said was a statement from the Dalai Lama that soldiers posing as monks had instigated the Lhasa violence.But the Dalai Lama's office also denied this.

LONDON (Reuters) - Two former saloon car racing stars died when their private jet crashed into a housing estate at the weekend, police said on Monday, as the operation began to remove five bodies from the wreckage.

David Leslie, 54, and Richard Lloyd, 63, the boss of Apex Motorsport, died when their Cessna Citation jet crashed into an empty house on the edge of the estate at Biggin Hill, Kent, shortly after take-off on Sunday.

Mugabe's party and opponents level as results emerge

Mon Mar 31, 2008 1:46 PM BST

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By MacDonald Dzirutwe

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's opposition was level with President Robert Mugabe's party and two of his ministers lost their seats on Monday as election results trickled out, but counting delays fuelled suspicions of rigging.

The first official results emerged some 36 hours after polls closed and no details were given on the presidential vote, in which Mugabe faces his most formidable political challenge of 28 years in power. Former colonial ruler Britain and the European Union called for results to be released as soon as possible.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said unofficial tallies showed its leader Morgan Tsvangirai had 60 percent of the presidential vote, twice the total for Mugabe, with more than half the results counted.

Mugabe, 84, faces unprecedented pressure because of Zimbabwe's economic collapse and a two-pronged attack by veteran rival Tsvangirai and ZANU-PF defector Simba Makoni.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday, his former colleague said.

Dith Pran founded an awareness project dedicated to educating people about the Khmer Rouge regime.

Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago.

Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.

Schanberg helped Dith's family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times.

It was Dith himself who coined the term "killing fields" for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.

The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million people.

The plane crashed into a house

A small plane carrying two pilots and three passengers has crashed in Farnborough in Kent severely damaging a house and garage.

Flames and a large plume of black smoke billowed from homes in Romsey Close after the Cessna Citation jet came down at about 1430BST near Darrick Wood.

The plane's occupants are unaccounted for and police said a few people suffered minor injuries on the ground.

Residents in the most severely damaged house were thought to be away.

A man named as John told how he was piloting another plane at Biggin Hill when he heard a mayday call from a Cessna come over to the control tower.

As I turned off the runway, I looked back and saw the plane drop out of the sky Jon Pilot at Biggin Hill In pictures: Plane crash

He told the BBC: "I was about thirty seconds from touchdown and I heard a mayday call.

"(The pilot) reported severe engine vibrations. You could hear the alarms in the cockpit.

"The pilot came back over the radio a second or two later and said 'We're going down, we're going down'.

"The radio stayed live, and as I turned off the runway I looked back and I saw the plane basically drop out of the sky.

"And then the radio went dead and black smoke came up from over the hill."

Black smoke plume

An eyewitness, Paul Daisley, said: "We heard a light aircraft coming across as if it was having trouble putting its wheels up.

"The wheels wouldn't come down and it was dropping rather rapid[ly], as it came across the tennis centre. And then we just saw a big plume of black smoke go up in the air."

Local resident Karl Mills, told Sky News: "It was the loudest noise I've ever heard. All you could see was a big ball of fire, and smoke billowing over the house."

Another eyewitness Katherine Simnett told the BBC she believed the house was empty, and residents next door left safely.

She said roads in the crash area were closed and the smell of fuel was heavy in the air.

Nearby Farnborough Hospital said it was on standby to take any casualties.

The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.

The remains of the two giant reptiles were found by astonished rangers in the Everglades National Park. The headless python with the alligator poking out from it's stomache.

The rangers say the find suggests that non-native Burmese pythons might even challenge alligators' leading position in the food chain in the swamps.

The president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, has called on EU leaders to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing if China does not soften its handling of the current protests in Tibet.

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"If there continue to be no signals of compromise, I consider boycott measures to be justified," Pöttering told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag in an interview on 23 March.

"We should not exclude the possibility of a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. We want a successful Games, but not at the price of the cultural genocide of the Tibetans," he added.

Reuters Today.

In Sichuan province's Aba county, where police opened fire on protesters a week ago, 26 suspects were detained for their involvement, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Police seized guns, bullets, explosives and knives in Aba's Kirti monastery, as well as Tibetan flags and banners advocating independence for Tibet, the report said.

The Tibet Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, based in India, gave a different account, saying more than 100 monks from the Kirti monastery were detained and that police raided rooms.

In Gansu province, whose southern, heavily Tibetan areas saw widespread unrest, notices were pasted on walls urging protesters to give themselves up.

The paramilitary People's Armed Police manned frequent checkpoints in the region, armed with riot shields and clubs and bayonets on their rifles, a sign of ongoing tension in the area.

U.S. President George W. Bush has urged China to exercise restraint in its response to the unrest and to meet representatives of the Dalai Lama, against whom Chinese state media has been waging an intense propaganda campaign.

"Dealing with such a person, who can blow hot and cold, the Chinese government has shown the greatest patience," Xinhua said in a commentary on Sunday. "It was the Dalai Lama clique that closed the door of dialogue," it said.

A meeting of European Union foreign ministers also called on Saturday for an end to violence in Tibet and urged dialogue on the region's religious and cultural rights.

But in a joint text, the bloc avoided reference to the Beijing Games, after a week of public differences over whether to boycott the opening ceremony.

Over the past several days, the North has lashed out at the new conservative government in Seoul and its ally the United States by test-firing missiles, expelling South Korean officials at a joint factory park in the North and threatening to slow down a nuclear disarmament deal.

"The Korean People's Army (KPA) will counter any slightest move of the south side for 'pre-emptive attack' with more rapid and more powerful pre-emptive attack of its own mode," the North's KCNA news agency quoted one of its military officials as saying.

North Korea, one of the world's most militarised states, has made similar statements for years threatening pre-emptive attacks, but those have almost always been in response to joint South Korean-U.S. military drills.

Authorities imposed a curfew in parts of Biratnagar, 200 km (125 miles) southeast of Kathmandu, on the border with India, after the attack late on Saturday.

"Two bombs were hurled at the mosque. One went off and the other did not explode," police officer Yogendra Katuwal said.

"A small part of Biratnagar is under curfew," he added.

Majority-Hindu Nepal has no history of any serious conflict with Muslims who form a religious minority group.

A little known group called Nepal Defence Army in a statement to local media claimed the responsibility for the blast.

Madhav Raj Regmi, district administrator of Morang where Biratnagar is located said investigations were underway regarding the claim.

Biratnagar is the home town of Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala.