With one week to go, socialist candidate Michelle Bachelet maintains a strong lead over conservative tycoon Sebastian Pinera

From the imposing Atacama Desert in the north to the inspiring iced peaks in the far south of the country – and the world – Chile, the most stable economy of Latin America, prepares for the final battle between the continuity of the 16-year rule of the centre-left Concertacion and a turn to the right. With one week to go, socialist presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet maintains a strong lead over the conservative tycoon Sebastian Pinera, but about 30% of Chilean polled are still undecided ahead of Sunday elections.

According to opinion polls published by the local media after the TV debate aired last week, Mrs. Bachelet is close to become the first female president, as she has 41 percent of the vote, while Pinera has almost 30 percent of the voices. With another 30 percent of undecided Chileans, the runoff is far from being an easy journey for Bachelet but Pinera will have to make big efforts to frustrate the former minister of Defense in the incumbent administration of fellow socialist Ricardo Lagos.
english.pravda.ru

Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, openly criticized the Russian government in connection with the gas conflict with Ukraine. Ms. Rice used quite a trivial technique of psychological pressure, which is mostly practiced in the field of education.

According to Condoleezza Rice, Russia’s actions towards Ukraine did not characterize it as a respectable member of the Group of Eight. The statement from the high-ranking US official sounded like a reprimand from a strict babysitter that was teaching its baby to behave.

It goes without saying that the largest Eurasian power is not a baby. In addition, the geopolitical system in the world has undergone dramatic changes since the 1990s. The US Secretary of State, however, has seemingly lost the sense of time and reality. Ms. Rice’s wish to exercise her political power became a surprise for both the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and proponents of traditional liberal values.

Ms. Rice’s criticism can be explained with the politician’s personal peculiarities. Why is Condoleezza Rice so fond of her “strict teacher” role? Is it her technique that she follows to stay in the center of political attention? The leader of the Liberal and Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), Vladimir Zhirinovsky, expressed his opinion on the matter in an exclusive interview with Pravda.Ru.

“Condoleezza Rice released a coarse anti-Russian statement. This is because she is a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her late single status. Nature takes it all.

“Such women are very rough. They are all workaholics, public workaholics. They can be happy only when they are talked and written about everywhere: “Oh, Condoleezza, what a remarkable woman, what a charming Afro-American lady! How well she can play the piano and speak Russian! What a courageous, tough and strong female she is!

“This is the only way to satisfy her needs of a female. She derives pleasure from it. If she has no man by her side at her age, he will never appear. Even if she had a whole selection of men to choose from she would stay single because her soul and heart have hardened. Like Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, or Alexander the Great of Macedon Ms. Rice needs to fight and release tough public statements in global scale. She needs to be on top of the world.”
english.pravda.ru

wow

A classic example of Washington’s hypocrisy and many questions to answer

Human rights, freedom of expression, the rule of law, the state of law, the importance of following legal norms…words and expressions used by Washington over the years as it criticizes governments which restrict access for US companies to their markets. At the end of the day, Washington is the one which perpetrates the worst crimes. A shining example is provided by Guantanamo, the US concentration camp in Cuba.
english.pravda.ru

Thousands gathered Tuesday on a beach to celebrate Benin’s once-banned Voodoo, slaughtering animals and welcoming revelers from Brazil and the United States whose slave ancestors took the religion to the Americas centuries ago.

At a ceremony in Ouidah, 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of the commercial capital, Cotonou, Voodoo high priestess Nagbo Hounon Gbeffa sacrificed a goat, a rooster and a chicken as divine offerings.

“I’m very moved,” said Faith McDouglas, a 37-year-old nurse from Omaha, Nebraska. “I’ve understood many things regarding my origins, because I’m a descendant of slaves.”

Voodoo originated in West Africa and holds that all life is driven by spiritual forces of natural phenomena like water, fire, earth and air that should be honored through rituals that include animal sacrifices. There are no zombies or pin-skewered dolls here, but followers believe they can communicate with divinities and spirits by putting themselves into a trance.

Countless Africans were shipped into slavery from the West African coast, taking with them Voodoo, whose cults still survive in the Caribbean, Latin American and the American South.

The annual celebration “is an occasion for us in Ouidah to remember the hundreds of thousands of blacks deported to the Americas as slaves,” said Albert Dossou, a member of the Daagbo Hounon family, which traces its lineage to a 15th-century Voodoo chief.
naijanet.com

…For half a millennium, the Spanish have held on to this little piece of Africa, an enclave carved by conquistadors chasing the last Moors from Catholic Spain. Melilla and its sister enclave, Ceuta, are sovereign Spanish territory with Spanish citizens and flag, geographically in what is today Morocco: the last remnants of Europe in Africa.

The city’s leaders hold up Melilla, the more remote of the two enclaves, as a shining example of ethnic coexistence that can serve as a model for an increasingly divided world. The Melilla mantra, repeated faithfully by politicians and community leaders, goes like this: four religions living side by side in harmony sharing less than 5 square miles and 500 years of history.

Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Hindus do get along better here than in most places these days. But just below the surface, there is tension, latent mistrust and uncertainty over Melilla’s identity, economic well-being and future.
latimes.com

Was Colombus really a Catalan pirate? DNA test will decide
Spanish scientists are to test the DNA of hundreds of Catalans with the surname Colom to prove that Christopher Columbus, far from the Italian gentleman he has long been believed to be, was in fact a pirate born in Catalonia.

The experiment, in determining whether any of the participants are related to the explorer, is designed to clarify the disputed origins of the man who made landfall in America in 1492. While historians have mostly reckoned he was born in Genoa in 1451, a counter-lobby argues that he was the Catalan Cristofol Colom, who airbrushed his past to conceal activities as a pirate and conspirator against the king.

Some 120 Catalans are to donate samples of saliva next week to a team of geneticists headed by Jose Antonio Lorente Acosta, head of the Laboratory of Genetic Identification at Granada University. Similar tests on another 180 sharing the name Colom will follow in Mallorca and Valencia. Investigators will compare the results with DNA from Columbus’ illegitimate son Hernando, whose remains lie in Seville cathedral.

Genetically modified crops that benefit consumers or the environment are yet to materialise despite renewed promises by biotech corporations, according to a new report by an environmental group.

The biotech industry continues to misleadingly claim that GM crops play a role in solving world hunger, the Friends of the Earth International report said.

“Contrary to the promises made by the biotech industry, the reality of the last 10 years shows that the safety of GM crops cannot be ensured and that these crops are neither cheaper nor better quality. Biotech crops are not a solution to solve hunger in Africa or elsewhere,” said in Nnimmo Bassey of Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

The 100-page report said the world’s largest producer of GM seeds, Monsanto, has an objectionable influence over agriculture and food policies in many countries and international bodies.
aljazeera.net

They have long been thought of as the antidote to harmful greenhouse gases, sufferers of, rather than contributors to, the effects of global warming. But in a startling discovery, scientists have realised that plants are part of the problem.

According to a study published today, living plants may emit almost a third of the methane entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

The result has come as a shock to climate scientists. “This is a genuinely remarkable result,” said Richard Betts of the climate change monitoring organisation the Hadley Centre. “It adds an important new piece of understanding of how plants interact with the climate.”
guardian.co.uk

Cool. Cut down the rest of the trees then.

Private sector will defeat climate change, US tells anti-Kyoto summit

BAGHDAD – Many Iraqis see dismal days ahead in the face of rising violence and the decision by the U.S. government not to seek any further funds for reconstruction.

“It is obvious that the situation is much worse than it used to be,” retired army general Ahmed Abdul Aziz told IPS. “Can you walk free in the streets? Did you receive your food ration last month? It is essential for most Iraqis to receive the food ration just to feed their families.”

The former Iraqi general added: “When you go to the hospital, do you find medicines? The answer is no medicines, no services, no sheets or pillows, no beds, no nursing, and no ambulances to carry you from your house.”

World Bank president and former U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz had said Iraq could “really finance its own reconstruction.” But such words have fallen flat because the state of the infrastructure is clearly worse now than even during the harsh economic sanctions of the 1990s.
antiwar.com

The blogger Xymphora makes several good points about the supposed mugging-murder of the New York Times’ recently retired journalist, David Rosenbaum, most notably the fact the crime did not resemble a normal mugging. Thus we must consider the possibility that Rosenbaum was assassinated for reasons that are not clear and probably never will be. Xymphora speculates that Rosenbaum “might reveal some of the secrets behind the odd relationship of the Times to the Bush Administration (holding stories of extreme national importance back for a year, and engaging in discussion of what news is ‘fit to print’), or behind the campaign of lies told by the Times to help the Bush Administration trick the American people into the attack on Iraq.”
kurtnimmo.com

… There is one aspect of all this, however, that is especially interesting to foreign policy aficionados, and that is Abramoff’s connections to the far right wing of Israel’s Likud Party, the “settler” movement, and, here in America, Israel’s amen corner in the conservative movement.

According to a report by Michael Isikoff in Newsweek, Abramoff was soliciting funds on behalf of a shady organization known as the Capital Athletic Foundation (CAF), which was supposed to be funding sports programs and imparting “leadership skills” to inner-city youth. Instead, CAF funneled millions scarfed up from Indian tribes not only into Abramoff’s own pockets and the pockets of his cronies, but also to ultra-right-wing Israeli “settlers.” Isikoff reports:
antiwar.com

Jack Abramoff, ‘Super Zionist’