The report from Al Jazeera:

The top US general in Afghanistan says Washington and its allies need a new strategy to defeat the Taliban.

In a review submitted to the Pentagon and Nato on Monday, General Stanley McChrystal described the Afghan situation as “serious” but said the war could still be won.

“The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,” the general, who is also the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, said.

He gave no indication as to whether he would ask for more foreign troops but is believed to have called for the Afghan army and police force to be nearly doubled in size.

Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from the Afghan capital, Kabul, said a lot of the focus of the assessment of how US, NATO and Afghan forces operate on the ground would be on the Afghan security forces.

Reports indicate McChrystal wants the Afghan army and police force – now totalling more than 160,000 – to be nearly doubled to more than 300,000.

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Counting of votes in Gabon is still going on, but the son of Omar Bongo, the former president, has already declared himself the winner of the country’s presidential election.

Two of the other main candidates have also claimed victory, raising fears of violence and forcing troops on the streets as Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow reports.

More from Al Jazeera:

Counting is under way in Gabon’s presidential elections amid fears that a win by Ali Bongo, the son of the late president who ruled the oil rich African nation for decades, would lead to violence.

Election results are not expected until Wednesday but Bongo appeared to be in the lead going into Sunday’s vote and there were already accusations of vote rigging.

At least 18 candidates were in the running to replace Omar Bongo in Sunday’s vote, but the fractured opposition is thought to have handed his son the advantage.

During the campaign, Bongo pledged change in the impoverished West African nation, while also defending the legacy of his father, who had been widely accused of corruption.

“It’s not contradictory – not at all,” he said as he attended his final campaign rally on Saturday.

“How could I not be confident?” Bongo asked, pointing at the thousands of supporters chanting his name.

Gabon is sub-Saharan Africa’s fourth biggest oil producer, the world’s third biggest provider of manganese and Africa’s second biggest wood exporter, but an estimated 60 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.

Bongo and the other frontrunners Andre Mba Obame and Pierre Mamboundou have all promised a fairer distribution of the country’s natural resources.

A total of 23 politicians were originally in the race, but Cassimir Oye Mba resigned from the race on Sunday afternoon, saying that he was worried the polls outcome would trigger violence.

Other candidates, including Jean Eyeghe Ndong, a former prime minister and Paul Mba Abessole, a former opposition leader, decided to stand down on Friday in favour of Obame, a former interior minister.

But the announcement also caused a row with four other contenders, including Oye Mba, a former oil minister, denying claims that they had joined the other candidates in pulling out of the race.

Many candidates have questioned the electoral roll, saying that the official figure of 813,164 eligible voters in a country of 1.5 million was too high.

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While official results are still being counted, exit polls by all major media said Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan had won more than 300 of the 480 seats in the lower house of the Japanese Diet. That would easily be enough to ensure that Mr. Hatoyama will be installed as the country’s next Prime Minister in a special session of parliament that is expected to be held in mid-September.

The current Prime Minister Taro Aso, conceding defeat, said he would also step down as president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Although the vote gave the Democrats a landslide win, most voters were seen as venting dissatisfaction with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party more so than endorsing the policies of the opposition. In this light the Japanese election is more a repudiation of the long-governing LDP than an embrace of the Democratic Party of Japan. The conservative Liberal Democrats who with their precursors have held or shared power for 62 of the past 63 years.

The story in the New York Times:

Japan’s voters cast out the Liberal Democratic Party for only the second time in postwar history on Sunday, handing a landslide victory to a party that campaigned on a promise to reverse a generation-long economic decline and to redefine Tokyo’s relationship with Washington.

Many Japanese saw the vote as the final blow to the island nation’s postwar order, which has been slowly unraveling since the economy collapsed in the early 1990s.

In the powerful lower house, the opposition Democrats virtually swapped places with the governing Liberal Democratic Party, winning 308 of the 480 seats, a 175 percent increase that gives them control of the chamber, according to the national broadcaster NHK. The incumbents took just 119 seats, about a third of their previous total. The remaining seats were won by smaller parties.

“This has been a revolutionary election,” Yukio Hatoyama, the party leader and presumptive new prime minister, told reporters. “The people have shown the courage to take politics into their own hands.”

Mr. Hatoyama, who is expected to assemble a government in two to three weeks, has spoken of the end of American-dominated globalization and of the need to reorient Japan toward Asia. His party’s campaign manifesto calls for an “equal partnership” with the United States and a “reconsidering” of the 50,000-strong American military presence here.

One change on the horizon may be the renegotiation of a deal with Washington to relocate the United States Marine Corps’ Futenma airfield, on the island of Okinawa. Many island residents want to evict the base altogether.

The Democrats, who opposed the American-led war in Iraq, have also said they may end the Japanese Navy’s refueling of American and allied warships in the Indian Ocean.

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The recession may be easing in some of Europe’s bigger economies, but for many of the countries of Eastern Europe economic woes still loom large.

Weak economic performance in Romania – where gross domestic product shrink by 8.8 per cent in the second quarter of the year – has exacerbated social and political tensions and could prove a stumbling block to Emil Boc, the Romanian prime minister.

Al Jazeera’s David Chater reports from Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

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President Obama remembers the “Lion of the Senate” at the funeral mass of Senator Ted Kennedy which was held at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Roxbury just outside Boston, Massachusetts on August 29, 2009.

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Across much of the Arab world, women married to foreigners are typically barred from passing their nationality to their children.

In Lebanon, however, one woman, Samira Soueidan, has taken her fight to court and won. But her landmark case is now being challenged because it sets a precedent which could alter the make-up of the Lebanese population.

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Awad reports from Beirut.

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The latest polls ahead of Japan’s election indicate the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is at risk of losing power after leading the country for most of the last 50 years. But the impetus for Japan’s voters appears to be frustration with the LDP, rather than enthusiasm for the opposition.

Al Jazeera’s Steve Chao reports from Shikoku, Japan, on what may have led to the current government’s misfortunes.

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Tensions are rising in the African nation of Gabon ahead of the upcoming presidential polls. Ali Bongo, the eldest son of late president Omar, is seeking to take over the seat his recently deceased father occupied with an iron fist for 41 years.

But as Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow reports from the capital, Libreville, many people are anxious to see that their countrys wealth gets shared beyond the Bongo family and its network of allies and associates.

There are fears there will be a violent backlash if elections are not seen as free and fair.

Most Gabonese live in extreme poverty and the countrys oil resources are fast dwindling.

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Fresh clashes between Myanmar troops and millitias near the border with China have resulted in the death of at least one person and forced as many as 30,000 people to flee into China.

As a result, Beijing has issued a rare rubuke to Myanmar’s military rulers, calling on them to end the violence along its border.

Al Jazeera’s Azhar Sukri filed the above report. More from Monsters and Critics:

One Chinese national was killed and several others injured after a bomb exploded on the China-Myanmar border, as fighting in Myanmar’s Kokang region pushed refugees into China’s Yunnan province, state media reported Saturday.

The bomb was thrown onto the Chinese side of the border, He Yongchun, deputy president of the Red Cross’s Yunnan provincial branch, was quoted as saying by the state-run China Daily.

Between 10,000 and 30,000 refugees have crossed over from Myanmar’s Shan State into Yunnan’s Nansan district in the last few weeks, as fighting between Myanmar government troops and a faction of the local Kokang militia escalated, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said.

‘It’s difficult to get a real-time update of that number,’ Yu Chunyan, deputy press officer with the Yunnan provincial government, told the Global Times newspaper, as refugees continued to cross the border on Saturday.

The refugee influx came after fighting which followed a split in the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, as the Kokang army has been called since it signed a ceasefire with the Myanmar government 20 years ago.

Myanmar troops and Kokang rebels led by Peng Jiasheng clashed on Thursday in Mangpiang Village, near Laogai, according to the Shan Herald News Agency a resistance media that monitors news in the region.

A source close to Peng Jiasheng told the Global Times that several civilians had been killed in the conflict.

Calls to the Red Cross in Yunnan and the provincial government were not answered Saturday.

Seven designated camps on the Chinese side were already full, provincial government spokeswoman told the German Press Agency dpa Friday.

China, which has strong diplomatic and trade relations with Myanmar, urged the country to maintain stability in the border area.

‘China is following the situation closely and has expressed concern to Myanmar,’ the Foreign Ministry said.

Some analysts say the influx of refugees could put pressure on diplomatic and business relations between the two countries.

It could hurt up to 10,000 Chinese doing business in the border area, Song Qingrun, a senior analyst with the Institute of Contemporary International Relations, was quoted as saying by the Oriental Morning Post.

China’s oil and natural gas projects in the border area could also be affected, the paper added.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu, said that Beijing ‘asks Myanmar to protect the safety of Chinese citizens in their country, and their legitimate rights and interests.’

The Kokang are an ethnic Han Chinese minority group that has lived in north-eastern Myanmar for centuries. They formed a core fighting group in the now-defunct Burmese Communist Party.

Analysts blame the current fighting on the Myanmar junta, which has reportedly engineered a split within the Kokang army in a divide-and-rule tactic.

The junta is reportedly annoyed with Kokang leader Peng Jiasheng for refusing to accept its policy of forcing their troops to put down their arms and become a government border militia before the planned general election next year.

The Kokang conflict is significant as it may spread to much bigger rebel forces in the Shan State such as the United Wa State Army and Shan State Army, who command about 40,000 troops altogether.

Many of these former insurgencies signed ceasefire agreements with the government 20 years ago, allowing them a degree of autonomy in their traditional territories.

The Kokang are the first to end the ceasefire, and are appealing to the Wa and Shan to join them, resistance sources said.

Meanwhile in Yangon, Myanmar authorities reportedly put Kokang civilian leader Pheung Kya-shin under house arrest, officials said.

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Sixty years have passed since the former Soviet Union detonated its first experimental nuclear bomb in eastern Kazakhstan.

Al Jazeera’s Robin Forestier Walker visits the highly contaminated test site, Polygon, and the surrounding area where effects of the experiments can still be seen.

Cancer rates in the area are 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the country, and the region has high levels of early mortality from a range of common diseases.

Doctors say more research is urgently needed to understand how the 40 years of nuclear tests could harm the children of tomorrow.

The report features an interview with Rebecca Johnson, the director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, who has conducted research in Kazakhstan’s Semei region.

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