Support for Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s government has sunk to 23.7 percent, a poll by Jiji news agency showed yesterday, threatening his Democratic Party’s chances of winning a midyear election.
Voters have been disillusioned by financial scandals enveloping the party’s No.2 executive Ichiro Ozawa and other Democrats, and by Hatoyama’s perceived lack of leadership on a range of issues.
A poor showing in the election for parliament’s upper house, expected in July or August, could result in a policy deadlock as the country struggles to nurture a fragile economic recovery and rein in its massive public debt.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Jiji survey also showed that 17.7 percent plan to vote for the ruling Democratic Party in the upper house election, down 3.4 points from the previous month’s survey, against 16.8 percent who opted for the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party.
Opinion polls by Jiji, conducted through face-to-face interviews, tend to show support at about 5 to 10 percentage points lower compared with other polls, which are done by telephone.
Hatoyama’s government boasted support rates of about 70 percent when he took power after a landslide victory in the more powerful lower house of parliament last year.
But recent polls by television networks show support has been languishing just above or below 30 percent.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
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Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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