UN votes to fill coveted Security Council seats

The United Nations voted today to pick five new members to the Security Council, with New Zealand, Spain and Turkey locked in a tight race for seats at the world's "top table."
Angola, Venezuela and Malaysia are virtually assured to win support from the 193-nation UN General Assembly as they are running unopposed from their region.
That left two seats to be filled by the three competing countries which sent their foreign ministers to New York this week to lead a last-ditch lobbying campaign for votes.
For the contenders, a council seat is the ultimate diplomatic prize, raising a country's profile several notches, boosting influence and providing knockoff benefits in bilateral ties.

General Assembly president Sam Kutesa opened the voting shortly after 1400 GMT with a first round of secret ballots distributed to the delegates, which were then collected for counting.
Countries must garner support from two-thirds of those present to win a seat.

New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key sounded upbeat ahead of the elections, the culminating moment of years of campaigning for the country.
"It's been a 10-year campaign, we've run a very good campaign and we've done everything we possibly can," Key told reporters in Wellington.
"We're seen as a good, honest, trustworthy country that brings its independent foreign policy to the table."

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu met with General Assembly leaders this week to push his bid which is expected to garner support from Muslim countries.
Spain's Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo has pointed to his country's peacekeeping contribution in the campaign that saw King Felipe discuss the bid when he met with President Barack Obama in New York last month.
The elections come at a busy time for the council, which is grappling with crises on many fronts, from the jihadist offensive in Iraq and Syria, to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Russia's actions in east Ukraine, conflicts in Syria, South Sudan and Central African Republic and the faltering Israeli-Palestinian peace process are also at the top of the council's agenda.

The five elected countries to the 15-member council will join the five permanent powers -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- for a two-year term.