MEXICO CITY — Mexican leftists, who say the July 2 election was stolen, declared their candidate the ‘legitimate president’ on Saturday, a symbolic move reducing the risk of street protests to make the country ungovernable. Aides said Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who narrowly lost the election, would use mainly political means rather than widespread protests in leading opposition to conservative President-elect Felipe Calderon. Tens of thousands of leftists meeting in the capital’s vast downtown central square rejected a proposal to name Lopez Obrador head of a civil resistance campaign, which would have marked a more aggressive strategy to try to stop Calderon from ruling. The election sharply divided Mexico along class lines, a rift made worse by Lopez Obrador’s fraud accusations. But fears of violence have eased in recent days as Lopez Obrador has apparently opted for an organized political movement to challenge Calderon rather than cause chaos on the streets. Supporters voted to swear Lopez Obrador in at a ceremony on November 20, just days before Calderon takes power on December 1. ‘We won the presidential election. I accept the post of president of Mexico because we reject an imposition,’ he told cheering […]
Neanderthals might have held out in isolated refuges for thousands of years longer than previously thought, scientists reported today. Their survival at what seems to have been their last refuge in Gibraltar for far longer after the arrival of modern humans than once believed suggests our ancestors may not have driven the Neanderthals to extinction. Instead, researchers speculate the Neanderthals fell victim to a cooling of the climate that deteriorated their environment too rapidly for them to adapt. ‘While the rest of where they lived was getting colder, down here at the southernmost tip of Europe there were still little pockets of Mediterranean climate, so the world of the Neanderthals there didn’t change that much,’ researcher Clive Finlayson, an evolutionary biologist at the Gibraltar Museum, told LiveScience. This now prolonged span of time in which modern humans and Neanderthals could have interacted reopens possibilities they might have interbred, experts added. More like wrestlers The researchers investigated Gorham’s Cave, where Neanderthal stone tools such as spear tips were found more than 50 years ago. Neanderthal tools differ from those of modern humans by the way the rock was chipped off and trimmed and by their very […]
An overhaul in how states and localities record votes and administer elections since the Florida recount battle six years ago has created conditions that could trigger a repeat — this time on a national scale — of last week’s Election Day debacle in the Maryland suburbs, election experts said. In the Nov. 7 election, more than 80 percent of voters will use electronic voting machines, and a third of all precincts this year are using the technology for the first time. The changes are part of a national wave, prompted by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 and numerous revisions of state laws, that led to the replacement of outdated voting machines with computer-based electronic machines, along with centralized databases of registered voters and other steps to refine the administration of elections. But in Maryland last Tuesday, a combination of human blunders and technological glitches caused long lines and delays in vote-counting. The problems, which followed ones earlier this year in Ohio, Illinois and several other states, have contributed to doubts among some experts about whether the new systems are reliable and whether election officials are adequately prepared to use them. In a polarized political […]
CAIRO — Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said a Vatican statement on Saturday saying Pope Benedict was sorry for upsetting Muslims with his comments on Islam did not go far enough. ‘We want a personal apology (from the Pope). We feel that he has committed a grave error against us and that this mistake will only be removed through a personal apology,’ Muslim Brotherhood Deputy Leader Mohammed Habib told Reuters. ‘Has he presented a personal apology for statements by which he clearly is convinced? No,’ he said. In a speech on Tuesday the Pope repeated criticism of the Prophet Mohammad by the 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who said everything the Prophet brought was evil ‘such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached’. The remarks sparked outrage across the Islamic world. ‘The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers,’ Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in the statement. The Muslim Brotherhood is a political Islamist group founded in Egypt which has inspired movements across the Arab world.
DDT, a pesticide banned in the developed world, should be used to spray houses in all countries where people suffer from malaria, the World Health Organisation said yesterday, 30 years after it phased the practice out. The new push to use DDT to kill the malaria-transmitting mosquito in Africa and other parts of the world with severe death tolls from the disease will dismay many environmentalists. They fear the polluting effects of the chemical will spread, although the WHO says spraying should be limited to the insides of houses and their roofs. Arata Kochi, the new head of the WHO’s malaria programme, has made no secret of his determination to bring back the chemical weapon that helped rid Europe and the former USSR of malaria decades ago. ‘We must take a position based on the science and the data,’ he said in Washington. Article continues ‘One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT.’ The WHO called on all development agencies and governments to incorporate the use of DDT in their malaria control programmes and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
