Opponents of President Hugo Chavez revived a nationwide movement to force him from office, turning out en masse to sign petitions for a referendum on his rule.
Chanting anti-Chavez slogans as they waited in block-long lines on Friday, government foes predicted the president's imminent downfall as they began a four-day signature drive for a presidential recall.
Venezuela has lurched from crisis to crisis -- including a short-lived coup last year and a two-month general strike that fizzled in February -- since the opposition began pushing for Chavez's ouster two years ago.
Venezuela's opposition needs 2.4 million signatures to force a vote next year. Results won't be known for weeks. The country's constitution allows recall votes halfway through a president's six-year term. Chavez passed that mark in August.
This oil-rich South American nation of 24 million people is sharply divided over Chavez, a former paratrooper who was elected in 1998 and re-elected to a six-year term in 2000. Critics accuse Chavez of becoming increasingly authoritarian and following the example of his close friend, Cuban President Fidel Castro.
In May, the Organization of American States (OAS), the UN and the US-based Carter Center got both sides to agree to play by constitutional rules in anticipation of a possible signature drive.
Chavez predicts opponents won't collect enough signatures to convoke a recall vote. He vowed Friday to win the next presidential elections in 2006 and to hand power over to another "revolutionary in 2013."
"There's no turning back," Chavez said.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
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