The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Brazil electoral court rejects new opposition party
- U.S. shutdown seen dragging on as debt ceiling fight nears
- Ecuador congress approves Yasuni basin oil drilling in Amazon
| Brazil electoral court rejects new opposition party Posted: BRASILIA (Reuters) - In a decision that could boost President Dilma Rousseff's chances of re-election next year, Brazil's electoral court ruled on Thursday that her main potential rival failed to gather enough signatures to register her new party in time. Environmentalist Marina Silva has until Saturday to decide whether to run on the ticket of an existing party to make her second bid for president next October. The court ruled 6-1 against the creation of her party, called the Sustainability Network, because it fell short of the required 492,000 signatures. Silva blamed electoral notaries across Brazil for failing to validate 95,000 names on time. After the ruling, Silva said she would announce on Friday whether she would run on another ticket, but added there had been no talks with other parties and she planned to keep building her own party to renew Brazilian politics. "It's only a matter of time until it gets approved. We might not be registered, but we have the most important thing: ethics. We will become stronger," she told reporters at the court. Silva, 55, a former senator and environment minister, and the daughter of rubber tappers, won 19.6 million votes to place third in the last election in 2010, won by Rousseff. Silva risks losing that support if she runs with another party because it could undermine her image as a fresh voice whose lack of ties to traditional Brazilian politics and reputation for honesty have appealed to young Brazilians. "She will lose her political capital because she will look like just another politician," said Andre César, an analyst with Brasilia-based consultancy Prospectiva Consultoria. The Superior Electoral Court's decision is good news for Rousseff, who is widely expected to seek a second term, because it could narrow the field and improve her chances of winning outright with no need for a runoff if Silva does not run on another party's ticket. Recent opinion polls show Rousseff recovering from a dramatic drop in her approval ratings following a wave of massive street protests in June against corruption and poor public services that shook Brazil's political establishment. Opinion polls have confirmed Rousseff as the clear front-runner. Silva, the only politician to gain ground from the street protests, narrowed Rousseff's lead to 8 points in July, but the president by mid-September had pulled 22 points ahead of her. The main opposition PSDB is expected to field Senator Aecio Neves, who has failed to gain traction as a Senate leader since 2010 and has fallen to 11 percent of voter intentions. Eduardo Campos, the governor of Pernambuco state, has thrown his hat in the ring and pulled his party out of Rousseff's coalition government. But his national voter support is a negligible 4 percent, if elections were held today. The cast of possible candidates for next year's election shrank earlier this week when Jose Serra, who was considering a third bid for president on another party ticket, announced he was staying in the PSDB. (Additional reporting by Maria Carolina Marcello; Editing by Peter Cooney) |
| U.S. shutdown seen dragging on as debt ceiling fight nears Posted: (Reuters) - The shutdown of the U.S. government appeared likely to drag on for another week and possibly longer as lawmakers consumed day three of the shutdown with a stalling game and there was no end in sight until the next crisis hits Washington around October 17. Bowing to the reality that the impasse requires him to remain in Washington, President Barack Obama cancelled plans to attend summits in Indonesia and Brunei next week. Earlier this week, he cancelled visits to Malaysia and the Philippines because of the shutdown. October 17 is the date Congress must raise the nation's borrowing authority or risk default, and members of Congress now expect it to be the flashpoint for a larger clash over the U.S. budget as well as President Barack Obama's healthcare law. The situation gives "every appearance of getting dangerously close to the conversation on the debt ceiling," said Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives. In fact, she said, "We're in the conversation on the debt ceiling." At the same time, hopes that the debt ceiling fight could be resolved without a catastrophe were raised by reports in The New York Times and Washington Post that House Speaker John Boehner told other lawmakers he would work to avoid default, even if it meant relying on the votes of Democrats, as he did in August 2011. A spokesman for Boehner would neither confirm nor deny the reports, restating previous public statements by the speaker that "the United States will not default on its debt." Senator Charles Schumer, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, reacting to the reports, said, "This could be the beginnings of a significant breakthrough." The New York senator added, "Even coming close to the edge of default is very dangerous," as he urged quick passage of legislation to raise the $16.7 trillion cap on borrowing. There was little action along with the talk on Thursday. The Republican-controlled House continued what has become a long process of voting to fund publicly popular federal agencies - like the Veterans Administration, the National Park Service and the National Institutes of Health - that are now partially closed. Republicans know that neither the Democratic-controlled Senate nor Obama will go along with such an approach, but it allows them to accuse Democrats of working against the interests of veterans, national parks and cancer patients. House Republicans on Thursday began lining up 11 more bills to fund targeted programs. They are to fund nutrition programs for low-income women and their children, a program to secure nuclear weapons and non-proliferation, food and drug safety, intelligence-gathering, border patrols, American Indian and Alaska Native health and education programs, weather monitoring, Head Start school programs for the poor and other aid for schools that rely heavily on federal assistance. Disaster assistance also is slated for temporary renewal under the House measures, as well as a bill to provide retroactive pay to federal workers during the government shutdown. "We're trying to see if we can get the Senate and the president to start talking to us, on anything. They're just not talking to us," said Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, explaining the tactic. The bills are likely to be debated on the House floor over coming days, not all at once. Democrats have rejected the piecemeal approach and Obama has said he will veto the measures. 'STOP THIS FARCE' In a speech at a Maryland construction company on Thursday, Obama challenged Republicans to "stop this farce" by allowing a straight vote on a spending bill. He reiterated he will not negotiate on the spending bill or the debt ceiling. Obama said there were enough Republicans willing to pass a spending bill immediately if House Speaker John Boehner would allow a vote on a bill without partisan conditions attached, a so-called clean vote. But Obama said the speaker was refusing to do so because "he doesn't want to anger the extremists in his party." "My simple message today is 'Call a vote,'" Obama said. "Take a vote. Stop this farce, and end this shutdown right now." Work in Congress was interrupted on Thursday afternoon when the U.S. Capitol was locked down briefly due to gunshots fired outside the building. One female suspect was shot dead after a brief car chase across downtown Washington. Police said it appeared to be an isolated incident. The security alert halted work in both the House and the Senate and briefly diverted attention from the shutdown that took effect at midnight on Monday (0400 GMT on Tuesday), leaving nearly a million federal workers sidelined without pay and many others in the private sector suffering from the knock-on effect. The Capitol Police who responded to the incident are working without pay due to the shutdown - they are deemed essential and so remain on the job, but their pay is frozen. ECONOMIC WARNINGS In his speech earlier, Obama warned that as painful as the government shutdown was, a default caused by a failure to raise the debt limit would be dramatically worse for the economy. Alhough some moderate Republicans have begun to question their party's strategy, Boehner so far has kept them largely united with the small bills to reopen national parks, restore health research and other parts of the government most visibly affected by the shutdown. The Tea Party Express, one of the anti-tax groups in the conservative Tea Party that has led the fight against Obamacare, sent an email to supporters on Wednesday evening saying that as many as 12 Republicans had indicated they were willing to "give up on the fight" and join Democrats in voting for a funding bill without conditions. "We need your immediate support to put pressure on the weak Republicans to pass a sensible solution that allows America to avoid the Obamacare train-wreck, while fully funding the federal government," the group said in its email. The U.S. Treasury warned on Thursday about the "catastrophic" impact of a debt default, saying a failure to pay the nation's bills could punish American families and businesses with a worse recession than the 2007-2009 downturn. Major stock markets fell on Thursday, while the dollar dropped to an eight-month low over concern the budget standoff would merge with the coming fight over raising the U.S. borrowing limit. The U.S. Labour Department on Thursday said the government's September employment report, the most widely watched economic data both on Wall Street and Main Street, would not be released as scheduled on Friday due to the shutdown. Despite the shutdown, Republicans have failed to derail Obama's controversial healthcare law, which passed a milestone on Tuesday when it began signing up uninsured Americans for subsidized health coverage. Obama blamed the shutdown on Republicans' "obsession" with reversing healthcare reforms passed in the Affordable Care Act, but noted they had been passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate and been deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. "Last November, the voters rejected the presidential candidate that ran on a platform to repeal it," he said on Thursday. "So the Affordable Care Act has gone through every single democratic process, all three branches of government. It's the law of the land. It's here to stay." (Reporting by Richard Cowan, Steve Holland, Jeff Mason, Susan Heavey, Jessica Wohl; Writing by Fred Barbash and Claudia Parsons; Editing by David Storey, Tim Dobbyn and Peter Cooney) |
| Ecuador congress approves Yasuni basin oil drilling in Amazon Posted: QUITO (Reuters) - Ecuador's parliament on Thursday authorized drilling of the nation's largest oil fields in part of the Amazon rainforest after the failure of President Rafael Correa's plan to have rich nations pay to avoid its exploitation. The socialist leader launched the initiative in 2007 to protect the Yasuni jungle area, which boasts some of the planet's most diverse wildlife, but scrapped it after attracting only a small fraction of the $3.6 billion sought. The government-dominated National Assembly authorized drilling in blocks 43 and 31, but attached conditions to minimize the impact on both the environment and local tribes. Though Correa says the estimated $22 billion earnings potential will be used to combat poverty in the South American nation, there have been protests from indigenous groups and green campaigners. About 680,000 people have signed a petition calling for a referendum. "We want them to respect our territory," Alicia Cauilla, a representative of the Waorani people who live around the Yasuni area, said in an appeal to the assembly. "Let us live how we want." Correa has played down the potential impact of oil drilling in the area, saying it would affect only 0.01 percent of the entire Yasuni basin. A U.S.-trained economist, Correa has won broad popular support among Ecuador's low-income majority with heavy spending on welfare, health, education and infrastructure projects. He says it is essential for the country to expand its oil reserves in order to direct more state spending toward the poor. Oil output in OPEC's smallest member has stagnated since 2010 when the government asked oil investors to sign less-profitable service contracts or leave the country. Since then, oil companies have not invested in exploration. State oil company Petroamazonas will be in charge of extraction in blocks 43 and 31, which are estimated to hold 800 million barrels of crude and projected to yield 225,000 barrels per day eventually. Ecuador currently produces 540,000 bpd. (Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Ken Wills) |
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