Argentina's version of Hillary Clinton, first lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was taking it easy at home far from the bustle of Buenos Aires on Saturday, ahead of an election almost certain to make her president.
Fernandez was spending the weekend with her husband and outgoing president, Nestor Kirchner, in their house in Rio Gallegos in the chilly and sparsely populated Patagonia region in far southern Argentina.
The couple arrived from the capital late on Friday on board the presidential jet Tango One as restrictions on campaigning ahead of Sunday's vote kicked in.
According to all the last voter surveys, Fernandez can afford to relax.
Her numbers are so high she is expected to easily sweep the elections and emerge as the successor to Kirchner, who is stepping aside for her after only one four-year term.
That would make her Argentina's first elected woman president (Juan Peron's third wife and vice president, Isabel Peron, was made briefly head of state on his death in 1974 before a military coup ousted her).
The only suspense left is whether Fernandez will carry off outright victory in the elections Sunday -- as the polls predict -- or be forced to contest a knockout round next month against the second-placed candidate.
A few of the 13 politicians trailing her dared to hope there would be an upset.
"I think there is a certain possibility of a second round. It depends on the undecided voters, on people voting for other candidates voting for us," Elisa Carrio, seen as coming a distant second in the polls, told La Nacion newspaper.
"If there is a second round, I will lead the people, the voters," candidate Roberto Lavagna, a former economy minister credited with steering Argentina's economy back from its 2001 collapse, told the daily.
In a campaign speech on Thursday, she referred to the popular leftist policies overseen by her husband and vowed more of the same.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of