Tens of thousands of people have marched to protest Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s decision to disband a public electricity company.
The marchers included leftist groups and many of the 44,504 people employed by Luz y Fuerza, the company that provided electricity to Mexico City and the surrounding area.
Many demanded Calderon’s resignation or urged Mexicans to stop paying their electricity bills.
He’s 23 and has no college degree, and he’s angling for a plum job overseeing France’s premier business district. Jean Sarkozy, whose papa is the nation’s president, is likely to get what he wants.
Outraged critics are crying nepotism, and say the brash bid by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s son is an affront to France’s egalitarian values. Leftists are decrying the prospect of the wealthy “Sarkozy clan” intertwining itself even more intimately with the realm of big business.
Jean Sarkozy’s conservative backers insisted Monday that he’s qualified to chair EPAD, the quasi-governmental agency that manages the La Defense financial district on the western outskirts of Paris. Some 150,000 people commute to work in the sprawling complex of skyscrapers that houses the headquarters of some of Europe’s biggest companies, such as oil giant Total and bank Societe Generale.
The Russian Soyuz capsule carrying Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte and two other space travelers landed safely in Kazakhstan on Sunday, ending the entertainment tycoon’s mirthful space odyssey.
Laliberte, who wore a bulbous clown nose during his stay aboard the International Space Station, was extracted from the cramped Soyuz capsule Sunday morning following its landing in the steppes of northern Kazakhstan.
After the landing, he was carried from the capsule wearing the round red nose.
Laliberte returned with Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere several hours after their capsule left the International Space Station.
It seems Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are more than childhood pals and Hollywood collaborators.
According to the New England Genealogical Society, they’re also cousins. Tenth cousins, once removed, that is.
Society researchers dug up evidence that both Damon and Affleck are descended from William Knowlton Jr. He was a bricklayer who came to the U.S. from England in the 1630s and settled in Ipswich.
The society said Friday that Affleck has lots of other famous relatives, including 16 U.S. presidents — Barack Obama among them — and the late Princess Diana.
Affleck and Damon were friends growing up in the Boston area and teamed up as writers and co-stars for the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting.”
Rescue teams, using shovels and bare hands, searched on Sunday for more bodies under tonnes of mud and debris in the northern Philippines as officials counted the cost on crops and property from two typhoons this month.
Nearly 200 people have died and more than 5 billion pesos ($107.5 million) in crops and infrastructure were lost after a week of heavy rains from Typhoon Parma, said Lieutenant-Colonel Ernesto Torres, spokesman for the national disaster agency.
“We’re trying to retrieve more bodies from under collapsed houses buried by mud,” Torres said, adding rescuers were only using shovels and bare hands to avoid another possible landslide.
A suicide bomber that killed more than 40 people in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar capped a week of provocative moves by the Pakistani Taliban in defiance of a threatened military attack on their headquarters in the tribal region of South Waziristan. A military showdown now seems all but assured.
“We have no other option but to carry out an operation in South Waziristan,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told a local television station. “All roads are leading to South Waziristan. We will have to proceed.”
Once again, it is ordinary ethnic Pashtuns caught between the traded blows and bravado of the militants and the state.
The announcement drew gasps of surprise and cries of too much, too soon. Yet President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday because the judges found his promise of disarmament and diplomacy too good to ignore.
The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee — four of whom spoke to The Associated Press, said awarding Obama the peace prize could be seen as an early vote of confidence intended to build global support for the policies of his young administration.
They lauded the change in global mood wrought by Obama’s calls for peace and cooperation, and praised his pledges to reduce the world stock of nuclear arms, ease U.S. conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthen its role in combating climate change.
Fresh flooding hit about 30 towns in the northern Philippines on Friday, sending residents fleeing to rooftops and scrambling for safety after dams released excess water from recent heavy rains, officials said.
Pangasinan provincial Vice Gov. Marlyn Premicias said she was getting frantic text messages from residents asking to be rescued, adding: “Eastern Pangasinan has become one big river.”
Rains and water discharged late Thursday night from a dam in Pangasinan inundated 30 out of 46 towns along the Agno River in the coastal province, said Boots Velasco, the province’s information officer.
Britain called Thursday for U.N. sanctions against the tiny Red Sea nation of Eritrea for supplying weapons to opponents of the transitional government in nearby Somalia in violation of a U.N. arms embargo.
The United States, which warned in July that Eritrea could soon face sanctions unless it stops support for Somali extremists, said it was time for the international community to address the country’s destabilizing impact on Somalia and the region.
And Russia called on countries in the region not to allow mercenaries and arms into Somalia in violation of sanctions.
Insurgents fought their way inside an American base in Afghanistan last weekend in a rare security breach before they were driven back under heavy fire during the deadliest battle for U.S. troops in more than a year, a U.S. official said Wednesday.
The bold assault raised serious questions about the security of thinly manned outposts spread across the troubled nation’s volatile border region with Pakistan, and reflects growing insurgent resolve.
It comes as pressure is building on the Obama administration to decide a way forward in the conflict. Wednesday marked the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion that ousted the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.
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