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..."We put Barack Obama in Your hands. "It is You who chooses leaders, help him in the elections so that he can win," prayed Reverend Samson Otieno, likening the contest between Obama and Republican candidate John McCain to the biblical duel between David and Goliath. "We will give you thanks and praise when he wins," Otieno said. "I am praying the will of God be done so that people do not despise Africans," said Olivia Achieng, sweat pearling on her forehead, after an energetic prayer for her favourite candidate. Other special prayer sessions were scheduled across the western Kenyan region...

It's very clear who they are interested in: Barack Obama. John McCain and Sarah Palin are by all accounts still in the race, but McCain has become a political cipher in a world that has of late tuned into Obama 24/7. The world loved the idea that a man named Barack Hussein Obama could become America's 44th president after a 200-year string of white guys named Washington and Jefferson, Clinton and Bush. Asia was trying to claim Obama for his Indonesian childhood, Africa for his Kenyan father, and the Middle East for his middle name, says Ahmed Benchemsi, who edits...

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) – A Palestinian student in the Gaza Strip is spending his nights making phone calls to the United States, urging Americans to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, according to Palestinian media. “Twenty-three-year-old Ibrahim Abu Jayyab sits by the computer in the Nusairat refugee camp [in the Gaza Strip], trying to call American citizens in order to convince them to vote for the Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama,” the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al Jadida reported this week. According to the paper, most Palestinians “feel hatred” toward the U.S., whose administrations “have always stood by Israel.”...

Another Celebrity Endorsement for Barack Obama Fresh from a no-Jews-allowed “Global Dialog” conference with the mullahs in Tehran, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announces his endorsement of Barack Obama: AFP: Former UN chief mulls ‘phenomenal’ Obama presidency. ====================================== DUBLIN (AFP) — A US presidential poll victory for Barack Obama would be “phenomenal,” former UN chief Kofi Annan said Thursday, adding that whoever wins needs to learn the lessons of the last eight years. ... When asked if the United States and the world was ready for a black US president, he said: “I think it would be a phenomenal...

So, after eight years of Blair and Brown toadying up to Bush, 65% of Brits want Barack Obama to win the presidential election, according to the Guardian's international poll published today, and only 15% are rooting for the McCain/Palin ticket – and one suspects that some of those would be voting for the racist BNP given half a chance, not least when the numbers indicate that Obama is only supported by the 54% of the lowest socio-economic class, whose neglect by New Labour has left many of them clutching at racist straws. In every country, opinions of the US have...

It is for the American people to choose the next president of the United States. Anyone who is not a citizen should proffer advice on the question only with the greatest humility and tact. The price paid in money or in blood for the decisions of the president falls mainly, even if not exclusively, on Americans. And the nuances of political discussion, so important in selecting leaders, are often hard for outsiders to grasp. Yet it would be naive to think that readers of a British newspaper have no stake in the outcome of the contest between Barack Obama and...

It was John McCain's best performance of the three presidential debates. He kept attacking, kept his opponent on the defensive and kept the initiative, booming at one point: "I am not President Bush." But it was not enough. The more Mr McCain laboured on Wednesday night to paint Barack Obama in lurid colours - he accused him of extremism on abortion and class warfare on taxes - the more he appeared to make his opponent's case for him. The epithets may seem hysterical to European ears, although to large swathes of the US television audience, they are probably less so.

From my observation perch in Stanford, and as an English European turned 24/7-cable news-Webcast junkie, I notice that many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election. How curious. Don't they understand? This is our election. The world's election. Our future depends on it, and we live it as intensely as Americans do. All we lack is the vote. The world may not have a vote, but it has a candidate. A BBC World Service poll, conducted across 22 countries this summer, found Barack Obama was preferred to John McCain by a ratio of 4 to...

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, and a place where America's image has been badly tarnished by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Indonesians are keenly interested in the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, and they have a soft spot for Democrat Barack Obama, who spent part of his childhood there. At the school Obama attended in the Menteng district of Jakarta, a security guard named Adang says he is a little tired of the reporters who come expecting to find an Islamic boarding school and evidence of Obama's secret Muslim identity — an image encouraged...

Who do you want as the next president of the United States? View the results table below to see how the world is voting. The results can be organised by region and re-ordered by clicking on the column headings. Return to the world map to cast your vote.

Barack Obama's proclamation last July to being a "citizen of the world" was affirmed Monday as a new poll -- taken before the August conventions -- showed that in 16 out of 17 countries surveyed he was the overwhelming choice to be the next president of the United States. The lone country to prefer a John McCain presidency: the U.S. The Reader's Digest magazine poll, released Monday, asked 17,000 people in 17 countries, including the U.S., whom they would like to see elected president. The poll also found that, counter to Obama's claims that America's reputation abroad is taking a...

A supposed deterioration of foreign US image have been hammered over and over by liberals and leftists has an evidence based on rough statistics about the US' approval rates in very different countries given without analysis and specific comments and it has been used as an evidence to make falsely "obvious" that US foreign policy was on the bad track. The untold innuendo of that assertion that US image as to be restored in "the world"(what world?)is that USA should aim to get a high approval rate from every countries in the world as a main determining criteria of judgement...

TOKYO — Groups opposed to Thursday’s arrival of the USS George Washington to Yokosuka Naval Base say demonstrations will grow in size and number in upcoming days. "We want to express our opposition to America," Masahiko Goto, a lawyer and leader of a Yokosuka citizen’s group, said Tuesday. "We want a withdrawal of the deployment." On the day of the ship’s arrival to its new forward-deployed base, a rally will be held at 6 a.m. at Kannonzaki Park near Uraga station, where protesters can watch the carrier as it approaches, organizers said. Protesters also will embark on boats to follow...

Let any bad thing befall the United States of America and its people, and you pretty much count on a cheering section to emerge. Yes, Osama Bin Ladin, “Pooty-Poot” and Ahmadinejad all enjoy watching Americans dying in lakes of fire and blood. Also, and much more obnoxiously, so does much of Western Europe. Not that we haven’t ever given up blood and treasure to pull their sorry butts out of perdition. The latest gaggle of gloating goatees celebrates the hardships afflicting Wall Street during the recent failures of America’s investment industry. To observe European investment bankers watching Wall Street’s latest...

Allies: The reaction of Europeans to our financial crisis has been one of disdain as they sit in cafes assured of U.S. protection. But then they want Barack Obama, who did nothing to prevent the crisis, to be our president.Europeans know a lot about bailouts. We bailed them out twice in the first half of the 20th century and spent most of the second half keeping the Soviets from marching to the English Channel. It's the U.S. that will save their backsides again in the war on terror. NATO is largely an American operation. So it's with some amusement we...

HONG KONG - If Democratic Senator Barack Obama becomes the first African-American president of the United States, anyone living within a block of my family in this city is in for a shock: unbridled ululations. My neighbors have learned to ignore Hong Kong's daily noise barrage - the sirens, the jackhammers the car horns and the collective volubility of a population of nearly 7 million people who love life and the pursuit of money - but ululations of joy, as in long and loud emotional utterances, may stop them in their tracks. This rapturous wailing will come from my Kenyan...

The Obama/Biden campaign continues to be bolstered by widespread support. The Russian newspaper Pravda advised voters to reject the McCain/Palin ticket, referring to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) as a “decrepit warmonger” and Governor Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) as a “worthless bag of hair.” The Communist Party USA, called Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill), “Americans’ most feasible option for a progressive policy that will further the country’s move toward a truly socialist future.” The New York Times called the addition of the “woefully inexperienced” Governor Palin to the GOP ticket “frightening,” suggesting that “maybe there should be a Constitutional Amendment requiring at least...

It's a rare day when finance officials, leftist intellectuals and ordinary salespeople can agree on something. But the economic meltdown that wrought its wrath from Rome to Madrid to Berlin this week brought Europeans together in a harsh chorus of condemnation of the excess and disarray on Wall Street.

A British government minister attacked Republican US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin as "horrendous" at the Labour Party conference on Saturday. The outburst from Communities Secretary Hazel Blears threatens to undermine Prime Minister Gordon Brown's determination for the British government to maintain a neutral position in the US presidential election. Speaking at a fringe meeting of the centre-left party during its annual party conference in Manchester, Blears said Palin was capitalising on people's disillusionment with regular politics. "I just think there is so much anti-politics -- not just in this country but around the world," Blears said. "One of the reasons...

"Between the dread of a world in the midst of collapsing and the shiver of pleasure that finally something serious is happening to the kingdom of liberalism, how to orient oneself?" Eric Aeschimann wrote Thursday in the newspaper Liberation, a voice of French intellectuals whose disdain for capitalism persists in the 21st century." Well, well, well. These are the same people who are just praying that Barack Obama becomes president? With friends like these, who needs allies?