Now the fun really begins...

The portents are not encouraging. The coalition between the Pakistan People’s party (PPP) of the assassinated former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and the Pakistan Muslim League faction (PML-N) headed by another former premier, Nawaz Sharif, is more a shotgun marriage than a strategic partnership.

Now they have ended Mr Musharraf’s thinly disguised military rule, Pakistan’s two traditional parties, populist in rhetoric and feudal in structure, may revert to their normal condition of visceral hostility.

Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif each had two turns in government and messed up spectacularly, making Mr Musharraf’s 1999 coup welcome to many Pakistanis. To avoid the same fate, the PPP, now under Ms Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and the PML-N must act decisively.

At least 25 people have been killed in a suicide bomb attack on a hospital in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, police say.

"We have carried out the attack in retaliation for the government's actions in Bajaur," he said.

"Musharraf may be gone but his policies remain."

A bomb at a police college east of the Algerian capital, Algiers, has killed 43 people and injured a further 38, the interior ministry says.

An attacker drove a car full of explosives into the school's entrance, witnesses told the AFP news agency.

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