Congo opposition leader declares himself winner

(AP) ? Congo's opposition leader has declared himself winner of the presidential vote, despite placing second in official election results.

The country's supreme court upheld incumbent President Joseph Kabila's victory a little over a week ago, even after international observers expressed concerns about irregularities.

Etienne Tshisekedi said Sunday at a news conference at his home that Kabila's government "is dismissed starting today."

"I consider myself from this time forward as the president elected by the Congolese people of the Democratic Republic of Congo," Tshisekedi said. "I urge you to remain calm and serene, and to create the climate that the foreign investors need."

Government spokesman Lambert Mende said he had no comment on Tshisekedi's declaration. Tshisekedi has previously proclaimed himself president and last month ordered his followers to stage jailbreaks to free detained colleagues. Mende then called Tshisekedi's statements possible treason and criminal.

Kabila first came to power after his father's assassination and now has led the massive, mineral-rich Central African nation for a decade. Presidential election results showed Kabila with 49 percent, and Tshisekedi with 32 percent of the nearly 19 million votes cast. Some international observers, however, have said the turnout was impossibly high in some districts.

Observers fear unrest if Tshisekedi ? a 79-year-old longtime opposition leader who is enormously popular with the country's impoverished masses ? orders his supporters to take to the streets.

The November election was only the second democratic vote in Congo's 51-year history, and the first to be organized by the Congolese government rather than by the international community.

Congo, which is sub-Saharan Africa's largest country, has suffered decades of dictatorship and civil war. The country's east is still wracked by violence from a myriad of militias and rebel groups.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2011-12-18-AF-Congo-Election/id-529bf131ea7948f5b73cd993d4be1f11

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Moody's downgrades Belgium's debt by 2 notches

(AP) ? Moody's Investors Services on Friday downgraded Belgium's credit rating by two notches, citing strains on eurozone countries as they try to finance their heavy debt loads amid the regional financial crisis.

The ratings agency cut Belgium's local- and foreign-currency government bond ratings to "Aa3" from Aa1," with a negative outlook. The ratings remain investment grade.

Moody's said the downgrade comes as soaring borrowing costs strain the finances of heavily indebted countries that use the euro, like Belgium. The strains are also making it difficult for Belgium to reduce debt and rein in spending.

Other factors included the impact the crisis is having on Belgium's economic growth, and concerns about the small nation's banking sector.

Moody's earlier this week said the debt of the euro area countries is under pressure, because of the uncertainty surrounding efforts to solve the region's debt crisis. The agency has said it is reviewing its ratings on France's debt, and downgraded Hungary late last month. It already rates the bonds of Greece, Ireland and Portugal as "junk."

It downgrading Belgium, Moody's said higher costs for financing public borrowing could "significantly complicate" efforts to reduce the country's overall level of debt. In addition, there is an increased probability ? although it is still low ? that further turmoil could result in the inability to sell bonds.

The ratings agency is also concerned about the ability for the "small and very open Belgian economy" to grow, particularly as the rest of Europe aims to reduce debt by putting strict austerity measures into place. Belgium may find it necessary to further cut spending beyond the roughly ?11 billion to ?16 billion cuts planned, which would further weigh on economic growth.

Moody's pointed to Belgium's recent political trouble as another concern in addressing its economic problems.

Elio Di Rupo took the oath as Belgium's prime minister on Dec. 6, ending 541 days under a caretaker government that resulted from impasse among negotiators trying to bridge the divide between the country's linguistic groups.

"Belgium's recent experience of political bargaining indicates that consensus on additional measures can be difficult to achieve," Moody's said.

Finally, Moody's raised the issue of Belgium's banking sector. The ratings agency is concerned that the continued dismantling of Dexia Credit Local could further increase debt. In October, the Dexia Bank Belgium unit was nationalized at a cost of ?4 billion. That move increased Belgium's exposure to the rest of the banking group. Combined, Moody's estimated that exposure to be close to 10 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.

Earlier Friday, Fitch Ratings said it was considering further cuts to the credit scores of Belgium and five other eurozone nations.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/apdefault/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2011-12-16-Belgium-Ratings/id-d4958f73c40a4bfc90716a7a6edcfc51

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Mexican city to begin countdown for Dec. 21, 2012 (AP)

MEXICO CITY ? A city in southern Mexico wants to live each moment as if it were the last.

Tourism officials in Tapachula have installed a digital clock to count down the time left before the Dec. 21, 2012, solstice, when some believe the world will end.

The clock starts Dec. 21, a year before the supposed apocalypse.

Chiapas state tourism regional director Manolo Alfonso Pinot said Friday that Mayan priests will perform a ceremony at the nearby archaeological site of Izapa.

Maya experts say the doomsday fears are a misreading of Maya stone inscriptions that mention the date, saying the Mayans only considered it the end of one calendar cycle and the beginning of another.

Pinot said he doesn't believe the world will end, but looks at it as a sort of beginning, in the business sense at least.

"A lot of people know they can fill their body with energy if they come to these exceptional sites," he said. "If people are interested, we have to take advantage of this."

Tapachula, best known as a gritty border town crossed by Central American migrants en route to the United States, is not a popular Mayan tourism destination. But nearby Izapa is a place where many stelae have been found, including the "Tree of Life" stone discovered in the 1950s and thought to convey an ancient Mayan tale.

At Izapa, close to the Tajumulco volcano, Pinot says a Mesoamerican ball court, a carved stone and the throne of the Izapa ruler face a straight line that on Dec. 21, 2012 is expected to align with the planets.

"It is hard to say what you will be able to see that day," he said.

The doomsday theories stem from a pair of tablets that describe the return of a Mayan god at the end of a 13th period of 400 years, which falls on Dec. 21, 2012.

Experts say the date marks the end of a 5,125-year cycle that began in 3113 B.C., and the start of another.

___

Follow Adriana Gomez Licon on Twitter at http://twitter.com/agomezlicon

Associated Press writer Mark Stevenson contributed to this story.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/mexico/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111216/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_mexico_apocalypse2012

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In Nuclear Power, Size Matters

The LFTR uses thorium dissolved in molten floride salt. It is proven tech, since the US government
built one back in the late 60s and ran it for 5 years -- with 1.5 years at full power...

The devil is in the details.

While it is indeed possible to build an LFTR, that old bugger called economics tends to come and mess things up.

First of all you need a larger amount of fissile materials since the molten salt transports it out of the core. and around the entire primary loop. Secondly, as with sodium, you need to have a secondary loop to make things safe. Then there's the hydrolysis that can occur at low temperatures, which means you have to keep the salt molten. If the reactor has problems, that may involve drawing power from the grid. The reprocessing technologies kinda work, but are unproven at large scale, and nobody has an idea what the cost will be for a large reactor. They also imply building reprocessing tech for every single plant, which increases capital costs.

Then there is the startup material. Natural uranium is not good enough, so you either need to breed U-233 in a different reactor ( proliferation concern ) , use highly enriched U-235 ( proliferation concern, expensive ) , or startup on plutonium. Now plutonium in a thermal spectrum leads to accumulation of Curium, which is a troublesome waste product that cannot be efficiently destroyed in a thermal reactor.

Add in that while Thorium and Uranium dissolves easily in fluoride salts, plutonium and the other actinides do not. In fact, even at high temperatures with a completely pure salt, the solubility of Pu fluorides is just a few percent. The molten salt reactor experiments got around these issues by using a very exotic salt. Beryllium and Lithium fluorides, with the lithium enriched in Li-7. Now, beryllium is highly toxic, expensive and difficult to work with. It's such a pain that the US and UK considered developing new nuclear warheads that did not use it, even though it is the best lightweight neutron reflector there is. Enriched lithium-7 is a different problem in itself, and even if 99% pure, you will get quite a bit of tritium when it is exposed to neutrons. Perhaps not more than in a CANDU reactor, but all tritium control systems ever designed are made for water coolant.

Then is the issue of in-core materials. The molten salt reactor developed by the US dealt with damage to in-core materials by replacing the graphite core materials frequently. Not only is this expensive, but it's not very fun to handle radioactively contaminated graphite. It is hard to reprocess since it forms organic compounds and is difficult to dissolve in nitric acid. Pyro-processing by electro-refining and similar is also poorly suited for graphite. This is one of the reasons why the pebble bed reactors are usually seen as "once through". Nobody has come up with a practical way to deal with the graphite. Since the material will be in direct contact with the fuel salt, it will likely adsorb quite a bit of contaminants.

Plateout on heat exchangers is another issue. The noble metals have poor solubility in fluoride salts, so unless a very potent ( i.e expensive ) reprocessing system is able to get rid of them quickly, they will plate out on the cold parts of the reactor, which is usually the heat exchangers. A suggested solution is to use graphite-based heat exchangers, which has its own spectrum of development issues and research needs.

I'm not saying molten salt reactors can never become a good idea. I'm just saying that in comparison to the number of issues that need to be resolved to make them practical for a power plant, they are extremely hyped.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/1OGasBLRoJI/in-nuclear-power-size-matters

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Bulging Brain Structures Separate Us from Neanderthals (LiveScience.com)

Modern humans possess brain structures larger than their Neanderthal counterparts, suggesting we are distinguished from them by different mental capacities, scientists find.

We are currently the only extant human lineage, but Neanderthals, our closest-known evolutionary relatives, still walked the Earth as recently as maybe 24,000 years ago. Neanderthals were close enough to the modern human lineage to interbreed, calling into question how different they really were from us and whether they comprise a different species.

To find out more, researchers used CT scanners to map the interiors of five Neanderthal skulls as well as four fossil and 75 contemporary human skulls to determine the ?shapes of their brains in 3D. Like modern humans, Neanderthals had larger brains than both our living ape relatives and other extinct human lineages.

The investigators discovered modern humans possess larger olfactory bulbs at the base of their brains. This area is linked primarily with smell, but also with other key mental functions such as memory and learning ? central olfactory brain circuitry is physically very close to structures related to memory.

"We all know from our personal experience about the intense links between smell and memory ? for example, when, after years and as adults, we enter our old school building and by breathing and smelling the air of the stairways or of our old classroom, suddenly we are vividly and undecidedly transported back in our memory into our school days and associated experiences that we learned long ago," said researcher Markus Bastir, a paleoanthropologist at Spain's National Museum of Natural Sciences, in Madrid.

Intriguingly, smell may also play a social role, such as for recognizing family and friends and reinforcing group cohesion.

"In the German language ? I am Austrian-born ? we have a saying, 'Ich kann dich gut riechen,' which translates into English as, 'I can smell you well,' but means, 'I like you,'" Bastir told LiveScience. "That would reflect a linguistic example how smell relates to social behavior."

Compared with Neanderthals, modern humans also possess larger temporal lobes, an area near the base of the brain. "Neuroscientists relate temporal lobes with language functions, long-term memory, theory of mind [the ability to consider the perspective of others], and also emotions," Bastir said.

We also have a relatively wider orbitofrontal cortex than Neanderthals, a part of the brain immediately above the eyes. "The effects of the wider orbitofrontal cortex are difficult to evaluate," Bastir said. The area is linked with decision-making. [Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time]

All in all, it remains unclear exactly how these brain differences might have set us apart from Neanderthals, Bastir cautioned. We only know how these skulls molded themselves around these brains, and not the precise structures of the brains in question.

In the future, Bastir and his colleagues would like to scan the interiors of more fossil skulls to refine their ideas about them. An implicit problem of the project is the fragility of the structures they would like to examine, he said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Dec. 13 in the journal Nature Communications.

Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/fossils/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20111213/sc_livescience/bulgingbrainstructuresseparateusfromneanderthals

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