Tel Aviv  - Members of Israel's ruling Kadima party were voting Wednesday on their centrist movement's list of parliamentary candidates, some eight weeks before the Israeli elections.

Results were not expected until early Thursday morning.

As she cast her vote Wednesday morning in Tel Aviv, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said: "We will choose a list and with it we will win."

Baghdad  - Iraqi Parliamentary Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani announced his resignation on Wednesday after lawmakers engaged in a quarrel over the reporter who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush.

Al-Zaidi, who has worked for the Cairo-based al-Baghdadiya since 2005, faces the Iraqi Criminal Court for throwing his shoes at Bush during a press conference on Sunday as he shouted in Arabic: "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog."

Minsk/Moscow  - The Justice Ministry of Belarus has after four requests For Freedom democracy movement of the opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich to register as a political party, a spokesman for Milinkevich said Wednesday, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.

The founding of the movement however has not been without controversy, as it is seen by critics as splitting the opposition against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Havana - The Cuban dissident group Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) has asked the European Parliament to lobby on behalf of the freedom of political prisoners in the Caribbean nation.

"The Cuban people are not free. They suffer under totalitarian oppression from a regime that denies us rights which are recognized around the world as human rights," MCL president Oswaldo Paya wrote in a letter publicized Wednesday in Havana.

Nairobi/Mogadishu - Somali parliamentarians Wednesday voted to impeach President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed a day after he defied parliament and appointed a new prime minister to replace Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein.

Yusuf on Sunday fired Hussein and his cabinet, saying Hussein was "unable to perform his duties" and that the president was obliged to act to save the country.

However, parliament on Monday voted overwhelmingly to back Hussein, who said the decision to fire him was unconstitutional.

Washington  - Barack Obama, the politician who rose from obscurity to become the first African-American president of the United States, was named Person of the Year by US magazine Time on Wednesday.

Time cited Obama's unlikely run for the presidency, his ability to energize voters and the expectations abounding for his presidency at home and abroad as some of its reasons for picking him as the top story of 2008.