Nexus - 0802 - New Times Magazine-pages

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... GLOBAL NEWS ... NEWS radiation to the official carcinogen list. UV radiation can damage the eyes and skin. It comes in three forms, ranging from the relatively long-wavelength UVA to the shortest wavelength UVC. UVA accounts for most of the solar UV radia- tion because it is not absorbed by the atmosphere. UVB is mostly absorbed by the ozone layer and UVC is totally absorbed. (Source: Associated Press, Washington, DC, 18 December 2000) Imagine that the self-declared winner's "victory" turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother. + Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favouring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate. * Imagine that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives and livelihoods, turned out in record num- bers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy. + Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self- declared winner's brother. ¢ Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self- declared winner's "lead" was only 327 votes—fewer, certainly, than the vote- counting machines' margin of error. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district. « Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions. ¢ Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the High Court of that nation. None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page, thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peo- ples in some strange country elsewhere. (Source: Via Conspiracy-Theory@ egroups. com, from an article circulating on the Internet, in which a Zimbabwe politician is quoted as saying that children should closely study events surrounding the recent US election, for they show that election fraud is not only a Third World phenomenon.) POWER OF PRAYER TO FIGHT POWER OF THE CHURCH? I is likely that the residents of Cesano, a northern suburb of Rome, have been praying for divine intervention in the face of increased cases of cancer. It is reported that they are experiencing an incidence of tumours 30 per cent above the national average. This has resulted in 7,500 deaths over six years, leading to an official investigation. It would appear that the culprit is the Vatican, which broadcasts all over the world from a forest of antennae at Santa Maria di Galera, near Cesano. Vatican Radio's electromagnetic pollu- tion, according to a separate enquiry by the Lazio region, is almost three times the legal limit. But reducing the radio emis- sions will not be easy. The Vatican's legal representatives argue that those who exer- cise Vatican activities are not punishable by Italian law, and the 1951 accord recog- nises the extra-territoriality of the radio transmitting complex. It remains to be seen whether the prayers of local people will prove to be more pow- erful than the legal might of the Roman Catholic Church. (Source: Life & Soul magazine, UK, no. 19, Summer 2000, www.lifeandsoul.com) SINGAPORE TO PHASE-IN CASHLESS ECONOMY ik could prove to be the death-knell of notes and coins. Singapore is to phase- in e-money and force all its businesses to accept it as legal tender by 2008. Financial transactions will be made using money stored on computer chips. Cash will be superseded as money will change hands electronically via digital pulses transferred through mobile phones, hand-held computers and even watches. A shopper will be able to point a mobile phone at an item to register the price. The phone would check the shopper's bank bal- ance on the Internet and deduct the money from the account if it were told to buy the item. Singapore's government says the move will save a small fortune on the labour, security and transportation costs involved in making and moving notes and coins. "The physical notes and coins will be a A THIRD-WORLD VIEW OF FIRST-WORLD DEMOCRACY magine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the Third World, in which the self-declared winner is the son of the former prime minister [or presi- dent] ,and that former prime minister [or president] is himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA). * Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (Electoral College) from the nation's pre-democracy past. Seman NEXUS <7 FEBRUARY — MARCH 2001