VOA news for Monday, November 2nd, 2015

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VOA news for Monday, November 2nd, 2015 Thanks to http://gandalf.ddo.jp/ for audio and text Monday, November 2nd, 2015 From Washington, this is VOA news. I'm David DeForest reporting. Turkey's ruling party in the lead, with most of the votes counted. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's party appeared headed to victory in Sunday's parliamentary election in Turkey. Official results are not expected for a number of days. Reuters reports that Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu called for unity concerning constitutional changes now that his party seems to have gained a majority. Returns indicated defeat for the Nationalist Movement party, which lost many of the seats they had gained in the last election in June. Some violence was reported as the election returns came in. An aviation official said Sunday that a Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt "disintegrated" in the air. The remarks come a day after the Metrojet flight disappeared from radar over the Sinai peninsula with 224 people aboard. Nearly all of the passengers aboard the Metrojet charter flight were Russian tourists returning to St. Petersburg from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. Three Ukrainians are also among the dead. Emergency crews have recovered at least 129 bodies and both of the plane's black boxes, which record flight data and pilot communications. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met Sunday with Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov. The two held talks in the city of Samarkand on the fringes of a diplomatic gathering of his five Central Asian counterparts. The meetings are aimed at reassuring them of American engagement in the region. A U.S. State Department spokesman says Kerry and Karimov discussed global issues of shared concern, including combating violent extremism as well as regional security and stability. This is VOA news. The Somali militant group al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility for an attack on a hotel in Mogadishu on Sunday. The attack left at least 12 people dead, including the owner of the hotel, a military commander and two lawmakers. Following the blast, gunmen stormed the Sahafi Hotel, which is popular with government officials and business executives A Somali minister says the attackers, all of whom were killed by security forces, were wearing Burundian military uniforms. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter called on North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program. [He called] He issued the call during a visit Sunday to the Demilitarized Zone, the area at the border of the two Koreas. Carter told reporters it is important for the U.S. and South Korea to have a strong alliance. "The ever-present danger is the reason why we speak of the ability to fight tonight. That's the slogan up here. No one ever wants to have to do that. But deterrence is guaranteed through strength, and that's what the alliance is all about." :Ash Carter. The leaders of South Korea, China and Japan have agreed to resume their annual three-way summits, putting aside ongoing disagreements. South Korean President Park Geun-hye hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Seoul on Sunday for the first trilateral summit between the three Asian countries since 2012. The meetings came to a halt over Mr. Abe's reluctance to acknowledge Japan's past enslavement of Korean women as well as a territorial dispute between Japan and China over a group of islands in the East China Sea. Polls closed Sunday in Azerbaijan's parliamentary elections. The vote was boycotted by the mainstream opposition and widely expected to cement strongman President Ilham Aliyev's grip on power. The opposition and international rights groups have questioned the vote's legitimacy, accusing the government of jailing political opponents on trumped-up charges and limiting parties' ability to campaign. Police in Bangladesh say they are investigating a local radical Islamist group in the latest attacks on two publishers in the capital, Dhaka. Senior police officials say they suspect the banned group, Ansarullah Bangla Team, carried out Saturday's attacks. But another militant group, al-Qaeda on the Indian Subcontinent, also is claiming responsibility. For more on these stories, take a look at our website. You can find it at voanews.com. From the VOA news center in Washington, I'm David DeForest. That's the latest world news from VOA.