Referendums

Iraq announced a curfew, weapons ban, border closings and other security measures Saturday to prevent insurgent attacks ahead of next weekend's key constitutional referendum. Two U.S. soldiers were killed in fighting in western Iraq, bringing to eight the number of American casualties in a series of offensives the military has launched to weaken militants before the Oct. 15 vote.

Not far from Saddam Hussein's birthplace, a delegation of U.S. and Iraqi election organizers met Monday with Sunni Arab heartland leaders to discuss the new Iraqi constitution scheduled for a referendum Saturday. During two wide-ranging meetings, politicians, clerics, professors, lawyers and tribal elders questioned various tenets of the constitution, the accessibility of polling places and seeds of national disunity they perceive in the document.

Top Iraqi politicians said late Tuesday that they had reached a deal to persuade leading Sunni Arabs to support a draft constitution that will be the subject of a national referendum Saturday. Under the terms of the compromise, Sunni leaders would drop their opposition to the constitution if the current National Assembly requires its successor to renegotiate the charter.

The referendum on Iraq's constitution was important enough to Mufeed Abed Ghafour that he cast not just one, but five ballots. Ghafour walked into a polling station at Al Asad School on Saturday and cast a ballot for himself, his wife and his three children. "We all came earlier," he said. "But the crowds were too large. So now I have returned and have brought their ballots for them."

The fate of Kenya's proposed constitution won't be known until this week, but one clear winner already has emerged: fruit vendors. Proponents of the new constitution are using the banana in their campaign, while opponents are known by the orange. The symbols, assigned by officials to make voting simpler for illiterate citizens, meant robust business for produce stands and grocery stores Saturday, when thousands streamed into downtown Nairobi for rival rallies.

Kenyans voted whether to approve a new constitution in a referendum that officials said went relatively smoothly. The draft charter had bitterly divided the nation and led to preelection violence that killed seven people. In a country where a third of the citizens can't read, voters marked a banana to vote yes and an orange to vote no. Opponents of the constitution won two out of the first three constituencies. An additional 207 constituencies had yet to report their results.

President Chen Shui-bian on Friday appeared set to fulfill his pledge to conduct a highly charged referendum on the island's relations with mainland China when he released the text of two questions he said would be "put to the people of Taiwan" in March.

Calling Taiwan a free and sovereign country, President Chen Shui-bian defended his decision to call a referendum on relations with mainland China and rejected international concerns that the move was a provocation that endangered the uneasy peace in the Taiwan Strait.

President Chen Shui-bian is taking Taiwan down a dangerous and irresponsible path in his bid for reelection, opposition candidate Lien Chan said in an interview. "He's trying to do something to antagonize the mainland," Lien said Thursday, referring to Chen's decision to call a referendum on China's missile program. "If that brings a furious reaction, intimidation, even a missile crisis, all this will serve his purpose" of diverting attention from Taiwan's economic and social problems, he said.

Blowing whistles and chanting, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans marched through the capital on Saturday in an effort to energize their fight for a referendum to recall President Hugo Chavez. The march, the largest by the opposition this year, followed a week of violent clashes between troops and pro-referendum demonstrators in Caracas and other cities that left at least eight people dead.