At the order of Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, registration of candidates in the 12th Presidential Elections of Iran began on Tuesday morning with the finishing date being four days later on April 15.

Iranian Deputy Interior Minister for Security Affairs Hossein Zolfaghari also made presence at the Presidential election headquarters and told reporters that security in elections was Iran’s redline; “any party and movement seeking to undermine security of the elections will be strongly confronted with.”

The qualified candidates will be announced after the Guardian Council gives a final list to the Ministry April 27-28.

Campaign trail would kick off on April 28 lasting for 20 days until May 17 since it would not be legal a day before Election Day on May 19.

HA/3950045</s>The first phase of Iran’s presidential elections got under way on Tuesday with candidates registration at the Interior Ministry in Tehran.The four-day registration process will be followed by committee deliberations to decide which candidates fulfil the necessary requirements and ideological criteria for the May 19 election.Report says a final list of candidates may take weeks to appear.The approved candidates would then launch their nationwide election campaigns on May 11.Observers expect a three-way race between reformist candidate President Hassan Rowhani, conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi, and hardliner, Hamid Baghaei.The other candidates that have yet to be known stand only a slim chance.Over 55 million Iranians aged 18 or older are eligible to vote in the election. (dpa/NAN)</s>CCMT 2017: The Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technolohy (SVNIT), Surat has opened the registrations for the Centralized Counselling for MTech, MArch and MPlan admissions (CCMT) 2017. Candidates who are interested in applying for National Institutes of Technology (NITs) can register for the CCMT from the official website.

The counselling will take place in the second week of April 2017 for institutions including IIITM Gwalior, SLIET Longowal, NIFFT Ranchi, PDPM IIITDM Jabalpur, SPA Vijayawada, Central University of Rajasthan, Institute of Technology, IIIT Allahabad and IIEST Shibpur.

The CCMT is a centralized system that has replaced the older system in 2012, in which students had to apply individually to various institutes for appearing in interview/counseling. The centralized counseling has removed the need to apply individually by providing a system for students to fill a single online application form to apply for all programmes in all participating institutions to which they are eligible.

Read | JEE main: Not happy with your performance? Here are 5 alternate options

– Go to the official website for CCMT (ccmt.nic.in).

– Click on the link provided “Online Registration, Registration Fee Payment and Choice Filling”.

– Enter your GATE registration ID and password to log in.

– Enter your details in the fields provided and submit your registration.

– Download the page and take a print out of the same for further reference.

For more stories on CCMT 2017, click here

For all the latest Education News, download Indian Express App now</s>Registration for Iranians hoping to run in Iran’s May 19 presidential election opened in Tehran on April 11.

The registration process will remain open for five days.

Prospective candidates will be vetted by the Guardians Council, a group of powerful conservative clerics that has a record of disqualifying liberal and pro-reform candidates as well as women.

Iran’s official government news agency IRNA reports that the list of approved candidates will be issued by the Interior Ministry on April 26 and 27.

Iranian President Hassan Rohani is expected to seek a second term.

Rohani defended his policies at a Tehran press conference on April 10, a day before the registration period began.

A former culture minister and a former political prisoner were among those who registered on April 11.</s>TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — More than 100 prospective candidates have registered so far on the first day of candidate registration for Iran’s May 19 presidential elections, according to a Tuesday report by the official IRNA news agency.

Registration will remain open until Saturday, and any Iranian national can apply. The applicants will then be vetted by the Guardian Council, a clerical body that will announce a final list of candidates by April 27. The council normally does not approve dissidents or women for the formal candidate list.

President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, is eligible to run for another term. Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line cleric close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Hamid Baghaei, a close ally of former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have announced plans to run. Both have vowed to fight poverty and corruption.

The coming vote is seen as a referendum on the 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers, under which Iran agreed to curb its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.

The nuclear deal was engineered by the Rouhani administration and went into practice in 2016. Since then Iran has resumed selling oil and signed deals worth billions of dollars for passenger planes to replace its aging fleet.

However critics of the deal complain that these economic benefits have yet to trickle down to average Iranians.</s>TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — About 126 prospective candidates submitted their names on the first day of candidate registration for Iran’s May 19 presidential elections, Iranian media reported on Tuesday.

There are six women and seven clerics among the 126 registered people, with ages ranging from 18 to 79.

Registration will remain open until Saturday, and any Iranian national can apply. The applicants will then be vetted by the Guardian Council, a clerical body that will announce a final list of candidates by April 27. The council normally does not approve dissidents or women for the formal candidate list.

A dissident activist Mehdi Khazali, who served several prison terms on security-related charges, said after registration that hostility toward the west would come to an end if he is elected.

“We must seek to remove tension with the entire world. Relations based on mutual positive interaction must be established.” Khazali said.

Mostafa Mirsalim, a former minister of culture in 1990s who represents traditional conservatives, came to register while wearing blue-collar workman’s clothes — part of his campaign theme to create more job opportunities.

“I have come to retrieve your share of the Islamic Revolution and deliver it to you,” Mirsalim told the crowd.

One female registrant, who identified herself only as Mirfattah, pledged to form a half-female Cabinet if she wins.

President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, is eligible to run for another term. Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line cleric close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Hamid Baghaei, a close ally of former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have announced plans to run. Both have vowed to fight poverty and corruption.

The coming vote is seen as a referendum on the 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers, under which Iran agreed to curb its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.

The nuclear deal was engineered by the Rouhani administration and went into practice in 2016. Since then Iran has resumed selling oil and signed deals worth billions of dollars for passenger planes to replace its aging fleet.

However critics of the deal complain that these economic benefits have yet to trickle down to average Iranians.</s>The bungled registration process for the 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, administered by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, offer typical examples of three major governance problems in Nigeria. One, due to poor record keeping, there is a lack of necessary background data to aid in the kind of planning that would match the scope of a project with available resources and proposed completion time.

Two, there is the tendency to make policies, which could not be successfully implemented for lack of appropriate infrastructure and adequate manpower.

Third, partly owing to the above inadequacies, policy reversals or flip-flops have become standard practice. When unbridled corruption is mapped unto these three inadequacies, the grounds for failure become rock-solid.

In the case of the 2017 UTME, these inadequacies are amply manifested in the three-stage process of registration, namely, the creation of the candidate’s profile on the JAMB website; the payment of the registration fee at a bank; and registration for the exam at a Computer Based Test Centre or a JAMB-approved vendor, often a cyber cafe.

All three stages involve online transactions and adequate personnel with sufficient knowledge of the JAMB platform and specific requirements. Therefore, for the process to be efficient, three things are needed: a robust bandwidth for heavy online transaction traffic; regular and

adequate power supply to support online transactions; sufficient and adequately trained manpower at the banks and CBT centers.

A month-long investigation at the five CBT Centres in Akure, Ondo State; visits to cyber cafes; observations at selected banks hooked up to the Remita platform; and interview of several candidates at these venues revealed that not even the simplest of the three stages, that is, the creation of a candidate’s profile, was easy to accomplish.

Across the country, candidates groaned and moaned over poor network connectivity on their phones, cyber cafes and CBT centers. To complicate matters, JAMB’s server failed to respond from time to time as a result of either poor connectivity or data overload as thousands of candidates across the country sought access at the same time.

It is not the case that JAMB is unaware of the relatively poor standard of Nigeria’s mobile telephone and internet providers. Their facilities are extremely poor. Yet, they are grossly over-subscribed, leading to poor voice and data connections for consumers. Some telecom companies on the copuntry are particularly horrible for internet connectivity, which is why JAMB issued a warning on its website to prospective UTME applicants to avoid two particular networks.

Since these are the two largest networks in Nigeria, there is a lot of pressure on the other networks. The result is network failure all over the place, from mobile phones and cyber cafes to banks and CBT Centres.

Network problems apart, banks and CBT Centres were inadequately manned. They were overcrowded with long lines, due partly to poor internet connectivity and partly to inadequate manpower. In both cases, there were too few people to attend to hundreds and hundreds of applicants.

At the JAMB office at Akure, some applicants told me that they had spent four days without being able to make it to the entrance door of the building, let alone get near the registration desk. Some of the workers confessed that they, too, had kept sleepless nights at the office, trying to cope with the large population of applicants.

JAMB, of course, knew in advance that nearly 2 million candidates would like to sit for the 2017 UTME exams. Indeed, just 18 days into the registration process, over 1 million candidates had registered. By then, JAMB’s unpreparedness for the exercise had been displayed all over the

country as candidates protested across the nation. Yet, the candidates endured and showed up on Saturday, April 7, 2017, at the various CBT Centres for the Mock UTME exams. JAMB wanted to use the mock exam to test-run the newly introduced exam platform, which the candidates would use for the first time.

The disappointment following the cancellation of the exams, well after some candidates had spent over seven hours at the CBT Centres, reverberated across the country, affecting

both candidates and the parents who took them there. JAMB’s attempt to put the blame on “technical partners” is unacceptable. The partner’s platform for the exams should have been tested well before the mock exam date. At the end of the day, JAMB had to postpone the mock exam indefinitely and extend the registration deadline from April 19 to May 5, 2017. Furthermore, the UTME exam was shifted from May 6-13 to May 13-20, 2017. The failures experienced in the registration process so far as well as the mock exam flop indicate a level of unpreparedness not only by JAMB, but also by JAMB’s technical partners and internet providers in the country.

Surely, the 2017 UTME candidates and their parents have reason to worry as to whether the exam proper will hold on the new dates. Nigerians also have to worry about the quality of service offered by the telephone networks, which also provide internet access for consumers. My major concern here is with the wider implications for our educational system of JAMB’s failure to process the UTME candidates’ registration and conduct a mock exam without a hitch. JAMB paraded the nation as a failurein the eyes of mostly teenagers and sent a message to them that nothing really works in this country. JAMB also demonstrated to them that they must suffer to pay for the services the country promised them and also suffer to obtain the services they have paid for. It is the Nigerian way, they are being told. And that should not be so.

The JAMB experience with postponements is not unique within the Nigerian educational system. Even University semester exams sometimes get postponed for one technical hitch or the other, when they are not postponed because of a union strike or student unrest. Similarly, scheduled

statutory Senate or Council meetings sometimes get postponed at short notice.

The difference with JAMB though is that all it does is to conduct exams and assist in processing admissions to the universities. Its duties are seasonal, which gives the body enough time to plan for the next round of exams and admissions exercise. There is no reason why the registration window should be less than three months, given the internet connectivity and power supply problems besetting the country. The practice of cramming activities within a short period is unproductive, especially when over one million candidates are involved.

Copyright PUNCH. 

 All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH.</s>Candidate nominations for next month’s local elections in the Fenland area have been announced.

The polls, which will take place on Thursday, May 4, will herald the start of a fresh political chapter as voters choose the inaugural mayor of the new Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority.

A total of seven candidates are contesting the role, which was created following the agreement of a devolution settlement for the region last year.

The elections to Cambridgeshire County Council are also the first to be fought under new ward boundaries introduced last year.

A similar process means seven fewer councillors will be elected to Lincolnshire County Council this time round.

There are no changes to the Norfolk County Council divisions covering villages such as Upwell, Outwell and Emneth.

And there is also an election to fill a vacancy on Wisbech town council for the Octavia Hill ward.

The deadline for voter registrations passes tomorrow and communities secretary Sajid Javid is among those residents to ensure they can have their say, particularly in the mayoral poll.

He said: “This is not just about voting for another politician. They’re voting to take control of issues that matter to them, whether that’s housing or transport, skills provision or new jobs.

“So my message to people in Fenland is simple: check you’re registered to vote, so you can have your say on May 4.”

Jo Anderson, Fenland District Council’s elections team leader, added: “Anyone not yet registered to vote should do so immediately before it’s too late.

“We don’t want anyone to miss out on having their say on polling day.”

The full list of candidates standing is as follows:</s>TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran has opened registration for those hoping to run in the May 19 presidential race.

The official IRNA news agency said Tuesday that prospective candidates can register through the end of Saturday. They will then be vetted by the Guardian Council, a clerical body that will announce a final list of candidates by April 27.

President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, is eligible to run for another term. Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line cleric close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Hamid Baghaei, a close ally of former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have announced plans to run.

The election is expected to serve as a referendum on the 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers, under which Iran agreed to curb its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.
The five-day registration process of candidates begins for the elections to be held on 19 May.