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President's popularity plunges ahead of elections as drought leads to blackouts and electricity rationing

An energy crisis has battered Venezuela's economy and President Hugo Chávez's popularity, prompting severe rationing to avert nationwide blackouts and paralysis.

One of the worst droughts in decades has crippled the hydroelectric plants that supply most of Venezuela's power, plunging cities into darkness and forcing industries to go slow and even shut down.

The emergency has closed offices, halted escalators and turned off air conditioning, leaving the capital, Caracas, sweltering in 35C heat (96F).

Businesses have reported a collapse in sales and employment, which is expected to aggravate a recession already the deepest in South America, and compound the president's woes ahead of legislative elections.

Blackouts and rationing have become increasingly frequent since December, prompting an estimated 25% fall in economic activity, according to business leaders. "We feel as if the country is shutting down bit by bit," said Damiano Del Vescovo, head of the chamber of commerce in Valencia.

Chávez has told big businesses and government offices to cut energy consumption by 20% and warned of tougher measures to come. "I apologise to all the people who are suffering electricity rationing. But I've said it since the start of the year, we have to do it. It's like being put on a diet, in this case an electricity diet," he said this week.

It is feared the rainy season, which typically starts in May, will be too late to avert disaster at the main reservoir, El Guri. "Guri is 13 metres (43ft) away from what they call the level of collapse," Chávez said. "It would just shut down. We would have to close the Guri plants which supply electricity for half of Venezuela. That's the reality."

With every dip in the reservoir anxiety rises a notch. Hospitals have reported a rise in numbers seeking psychological help.

"I can't take it anymore. It's like an oven. Look at me, drenched and stinking!" said Nazareth Garcia, 27, a civil servant finishing her shift at a Caracas municipal office without air conditioning.

Many government offices shut at lunch to try to reach their energy saving quota. Shopping malls which used to open at 7am now open at 11am, a big blow to beauty salons which used to be packed with female customers in the early morning. Several salons have folded.

Stores have curbed use of refrigeration and lighting. "They could be bruised for all I know, can't see a thing," grumbled one elderly shopper sifting through a supermarket box of tomatoes in Centro Plaza.

Restaurants have reported losses from damaged food and absent diners who do not want to sweat while they eat.

Industry appears worst hit, especially car assembly and steel and aluminium plants. Economists expect the economy, which shrank 3.3% last year, to contract again. Inflation, meanwhile, is 24%.

One sector which is booming is generators. Hardware shops have sold hundreds in recent weeks, prices ranging from £200 to £1,000. Partly as a result, Venezuela is expected to consume a third more fossil fuels for electricity generation this year.

A recent opinion poll found 62% thought the country's situation was negative and 54% had little or no confidence in Chávez. Almost 60% disapproved of the government's handling of the crisis. Critics say the drought would not have been so damaging had there been more investment in power plants.

The socialist president has said his Bolivarian revolution ? named after liberation hero Simón Bolívar ? will falter if he loses legislative elections in September.

"The squalid ones are hoping it won't rain," Chávez said, using his usual term for the opposition. "But it's going to rain, you'll see, because God is a 'Bolivarian'. God cannot be squalid. Nature is with us."

The government has launched a marketing campaign to educate Venezuelans ? Latin America's biggest per capita energy users ? about profligacy. The army and local councils are distributing millions of energy-efficient bulbs.

Business leaders have urged Chávez to reverse a 30-minute time change ordained in 2007 to give children more daylight to get to school. Moving clocks forward would cut monthly energy use by 800 megawatts, said Noel Alvarez, president of the Fedecamaras business chamber.

"[Chávez] must recognise that he made a mistake. He must return to the former time zone. But the government hasn't wanted to do it, so it's currently trying to punish businessmen."

Brain scans revealed with reasonable accuracy which short film clip volunteers were thinking about

Scientists have used brain scans to delve into people's minds and predict what films they are thinking about from one moment to the next.

This is the first time brain imaging has been used to decipher such complex thoughts, which take place in the base of the brain in a region known as the medial temporal lobe.

The work follows an earlier study in which neuroscientists at University College London showed they could read a person's thoughts about where they were standing in a virtual reality simulation.

"In the previous experiment we were able to predict where someone was in a simple, stark virtual reality environment. What we wanted to know is can we look at 'episodic' memories that are much more naturalistic," said Eleanor Maguire, who led the study at the university's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. "The kinds of memories we form day-to-day are far more complex ? they involve people and buildings and all kinds of actions."

The scientists recruited six women and four men, with an average age of 21, to watch three film clips, each lasting seven seconds. All three films were similar, and showed an actress performing a particular activity in a street. In one film, for example, a woman drank a coffee before binning the cup, while in another, a different woman posted a letter.

After watching the clips, the participants practised recalling the three films as vividly as they could.

The scientists then used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to look for memory traces in the participants' brains when they thought about each of the films in turn. At first, they were told which film to recall while the scanning was in progress.

Using a computer program, Maguire's team was able to identify consistent and characteristic memory traces for the three films in each participant.

In a second series of experiments, the volunteers were asked to remember the movie clips at random while having their brains scanned.

The computer program was not good enough to predict which film a person was thinking about every time. With three films to choose from, a blind guess would be right 33% of the time on average. The computer predicted the right film 40-45% of the time.

The memory traces associated with each film stayed the same throughout the experiment, suggesting the memories were fixed, at least for the duration of the study. More striking was the finding that the memory traces for each of the three films looked similar in all 10 volunteers.

"The patterns of neurons that are able to represent these different movies are certainly in a similar place across the group," Maguire said.

The researchers recorded memory traces from three different areas of the medial temporal lobe, including the parahippocampal gyrus, the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. Of these, the hippocampus was the most important for recording everyday memories and held the most reliable memory traces.

The study appears in the journal Current Biology.

The researchers are now trying to understand which aspects of people's memories they were reading. They may be only partial memories, such as the location each movie clip was set in. Previous studies have shown that the neocortex plays a major role in storing the content of memories, while the hippocampus orchestrates the recollection of the memory.

"Now that we are developing a clearer picture of how our memories are stored, we hope to examine how they are affected by time, the ageing process and by brain injury," said Maguire.

Tremor of magnitude 7.2 strikes just minutes before inauguration of Sebastián Piñera as president

The largest aftershock since Chile's devastating earthquake 12 days ago rocked the country today, minutes before the inauguration of Sebastián Piñera as president.

The 7.2-magnitude aftershock was stronger than the 12 January quake that devastated the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. It happened along the same fault zone as Chile's 8.8-magnitude quake on 27 February, said geophysicist Don Blakeman of the US Geological Survey.

"When we get quakes in the 8 range, we would expect to see maybe a couple of aftershocks in the 7 range," he said. Chile could now expect to feel "aftershocks of the aftershock".

The tremor rocked buildings and shook windows in the capital, Santiago, and provoked nervous smiles among dignitaries arriving for the ceremony at the congressional building in coastal Valparaiso. The Bolivian president, Evo Morales, seemed briefly disoriented and Peru's Alan Garcia joked that it gave them "a moment to dance".

The outgoing president, Michelle Bachelet, arrived in an open limousine, followed by Piñera, who entered the hall of congress to loud applause and swore his oath as president.

As she prepared to hand over the government to the first rightwing president elected in 52 years, Bachelet said: "I'm leaving office with sadness for the suffering of our people, but also with my head held high, satisfied with what we have accomplished."

Bachelet led a "Viva Chile" cheer and then delivered a long goodbye from the presidential palace, La Moneda, where she lingered with a passionate crowd in the plaza outside. Supporters waved socialist party flags and pressed forward to shake her hand, give her flowers and even caress her face.

Piñera, a billionaire investor, Harvard-trained economist and airline executive with little patience for bureaucracy, asked that pomp and circumstance be mostly set aside at his inauguration. Instead, he planned a brief lunch with foreign dignitaries, then a working visit to coastal Constitución, where the tsunami following the earthquake killed many people.

After meeting with survivors, he planned to fly back to the capital, address citizens from a balcony of the presidential palace and then hold a late-night strategy session with his cabinet.

Piñera had vowed on election night to make Chile "the best country in the world", spending billions to accelerate economic growth, create a million jobs in four years and combat crime.

Now reconstruction is his top priority. Last month's earthquake killed 500 identified victims and possibly hundreds of others, destroyed or heavily damaged at least 500,000 homes and broke apart highways and hospitals. Repairing infrastructure alone will cost $5bn and overall recovery costs could soar above $15bn.

Piñera's victory ended a 20-year run for the leftist coalition that led Chile back to democracy after the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and puts the country's relatively small business elite in power.

It's best paws forward as Crufts, the annual dog jamboree, gets under way at the NEC in Birmingham

AP - Hours after terrorist bombs ripped through Madrid commuter trains six years ago Thursday, an outpouring of grief engulfed the city, with people flocking to makeshift shrines to leave tokens of mourning.

AP - Pakistan will play a major role in peace talks with the Taliban, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday, apparently trying to dismiss speculation that Kabul was trying to sideline Islamabad, once a close ally of the militants.

Emergence of memo warning that safety was being put at risk by cost-cutting piles pressure on Japanese carmaker

A four-year-old memo from Japanese factory workers warning that safety was being put at risk by aggressive cost-cutting has aggravated the woes of the Japanese carmaker Toyota, which is battling to reassure customers after yet more suspected cases of faulty accelerator pedals causing runaway vehicles.

At the request of a US Congressional committee, Toyota has handed over a 2006 letter from a small Japanese splinter union, the All Toyota Labour Union, which complained that quality was being compromised by longer working hours, outsourcing, shortened development time and a drop in the number of experienced employees in favour of contractors.

The 20-member union sent the letter amid concern over a surge in recalls of faulty Toyota vehicles. The same year, Toyota was the subject of a criminal investigation into negligence allegations, following an accident in Japan that injured a family of five. The company was eventually cleared.

Edolphus Towns, a Democratic congressman who chairs the house oversight committee in Washington, asked for a copy of the memo after the Los Angeles Times unearthed it in a news report.

According to a translation by the LA Times, the letter attacked corner-cutting by Toyota as the company geared up for increased demand in the US for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. It said: "We are concerned about the processes which are essential for producing safe cars, but that ultimately may be ignored, with production continued in the name of competition."

It added that any failure to act may "become a great problem that involves the company's survival".

Toyota is mired in a confidence crisis after a spate of dangerous incidents involving faulty accelerator pedals and non-responsive brakes. The company has been obliged to recall more than 8m vehicles since difficulties emerged in late 2009 and the problems have been linked to at least 19 deaths.

Yet another suspected incident happened in New York state on Tuesday. Federal investigators are examining a report of a 56-year-old woman whose Toyota Prius sped across a busy road and crashed into a stone wall.

The driver, who suffered minor injuries, was pulling out of a long, curved driveway in the 2005 car. Anthony Marraccini, acting police chief in the town of Harrison, 25 miles north-east of New York, said the car accelerated beyond her control and hit the wall with such force that large boulders were hurled up to 15ft away.

Toyota has blamed accelerator problems largely on floor mats getting caught under pedals. Marracini said the mat in this case was firmly secured: "The floor mat is not a contributing factor."

The accident came just 24 hours after an incident in California, in which a highway patrolman guided a motorist onto a steep uphill slope to stop a car which had sped out of control at up to 90mph.

Critics of Toyota say that its fix for safety hitches is inadequate and that the problems could be down to a sophisticated electronics fault. Toyota's president, Akio Toyoda, was hauled before Congress last month to apologise for the crisis.

Christoph Schonborn, archbishop of Vienna, calls for 'unflinching examination' of possible reasons for paedophilia

The Archbishop of Vienna today said priestly celibacy could be one of the causes of the sex abuse scandals to hit the Catholic church.

In an article for Thema Kirche, his diocesan magazine, Christoph Schonborn became the most senior figure in the Catholic hierarchy to make the connection between the two and called for an "unflinching examination" of the possible reasons for paedophilia.

He wrote: "These include the issue of priest training, as well as the question of what happened in the so-called sexual revolution.

"It also includes the issue of priest celibacy and the issue of personality development. It requires a great deal of honesty, both on the part of the church and of society as a whole."

Schonborn is not the first person to suggest a link between celibacy and paedophilia ? the theologian Hans Kung has made the same assertion.

A spokesman clarified the archbishop's words, insisting he was "in no way" seeking to question the celibacy rule or call for its abolition.

Schonborn's remarks followed further revelations of abuse across Europe, with new incidents coming to light in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, and followed claims by an Italian academic that a greater presence of women in the Vatican could have prevented clerical sexual abuse from taking place.

Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, Lucetta Scaraffia said women might have helped remove the "veil of secrecy" surrounding the abuse.

She used the word "omerta" ? the Mafia code of silence ? to describe the conspiracy involved in hiding the offences.

"We can hypothesise that a greater female presence, not at a subordinate level, would have been able to rip the veil of masculine secrecy that in the past often covered the denunciation of these misdeeds with silence," she said.

"Women, in fact, both religious and lay, by nature would have been more likely to defend young people in cases of sexual abuse, allowing the church to avoid the grave damage brought by these sinful acts."

In an attempt to contain the fallout from abuse cases, Vatican officials expressed concern that the church's insistence on confidentiality in its treatment of priestly sexual abuse cases was seen as a ban on reporting serious accusations to the civil authorities.

Earlier this year, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the head of the Congregation for Clergy group, said instances of sexual abuse by priests were "criminal facts" as well as serious sins, and required co-operation with the civil justice system.

AP - Chilean President Sebastian Pinera is urging citizens along the coast to move quickly to higher ground following five strongly felt aftershocks, including the biggest since last month's 8.8-magnitude temblor.

AP - Partial preliminary results from four of 18 provinces in Iraq show the prime minister's bloc and a secular challenger winning two provinces each.

OneWorld Today's News

Niger: Constitution Crisis Turned Coup

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