Senegal’s highest court has ruled that Abdoulaye Wade can run for a third presidential term, sparking angry protests.
The constitutional body announced its verdicts late Friday. The list of confirmed candidates included the name of the 85-year incumbent, but the candidacy of Senegalese pop star Youssou N’Dour was declared invalid.
After the announcement, police opened fire with tear gas to disperse protesters in central Dakar, who threw who rocks at police and set tires on fire.
Ahead of the court ruling Friday, hundreds of opposition protesters chanted and marched through the streets of Dakar to protest President Wade’s plan to can seek a third term.
N’Dour told reporters the constitution makes it clear that President Wade should not have the right to run again.
“History is being made today here in Senegal. We are not going to accept anything else but our constitution, which is very clear. He [Wade] doesn’t have the right to run once more. It’s my final word on this. It’s clear and we are ready,” said N’Dour.
The Senegalese government initially banned Friday’s demonstration, but the country’s interior minister said late Thursday the rally would be allowed to proceed.
A Senegalese constitutional amendment limits presidents to just two terms.
Wade was first elected president in 2000, and re-elected in 2007. He argues the amendment does not apply to him since it was not in effect when he first assumed office.
Anti-government riots paralyzed Dakar in June after the ruling party moved to create the post of vice president, and also to lower the percentage of votes needed to win the presidential election.
The president’s opponents said the moves were aimed at making it easier forWade to be re-elected, and for his son, Karim Wade, to succeed him. The proposals later were dropped.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
Twenty-six new exoplanets have been discovered by NASA scientists seeking to locate planets outside our solar system. The alien planets were found orbiting stars in 11 newly discovered solar systems by the Kepler telescope, which the U.S. space agency operates.
The exoplanets range in size from slightly larger than Earth to larger than the gas giant Jupiter in our solar system. They were discovered by Kepler, a space telescope which stares at 150,000 stars in a narrow sliver of the night sky from its perch orbiting the sun.
The alien planets orbit their host stars, which are bigger than the sun, once every six to 143 days. The largest of the newly-discovered solar systems, called Kepler-33, hosts five exoplanets ranging in size from one-and-a-half to five times Earth’s size.
Doug Hudgins is the program scientist with the Kepler mission. Hudgins says scientists do not believe any of the newly discovered exoplanets could support life.
“All of them are in orbits that are smaller than our Earth’s orbit around our sun. So they would be fairly hot planets,” Hudgins said.
In the two years since the Kepler began observing the cosmos, scientists have discovered 61 exoplanets and some 2,300 candidate planets that need to be verified through further observations.
Kepler identifies exoplanets by continuously monitoring the brightness of a distant star in its narrow field. A planet orbiting its host sun casts a faint shadow that is detected by Kepler.
The telescope confirms planetary candidates by measuring so-called Transit Timing Variations, or TTVs, which occur when two or more planets in a tightly packed solar system orbit their host stars.
The gravitational pull of each passing planet causes one to speed up and another to slow down, according to Hudgins, helping astronomers confirm a planetary observation
“If you had something that was just mimicking a planet transit, they wouldn’t interact. The fact that you see these transit timing variations tells us that there’s a gravitational interaction and that tells us that these really have to be planets because they are interacting with each other,” Hudgins said.
Hudgins says the ultimate goal for planet hunters is a telescope that can separate the light of a dimmer planet from its bright star, allowing scientists to study its electromagnetic spectrum.
The information gleaned from the light spectrum could tell astronomers what gases make up a planet’s atmosphere and possibly even some surface characteristics, according to Hudgins, who is anxious to find signs of life.
“That’s why we do this. That’s the exciting thing, We are addressing one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of humankind. And that is, are we alone?,” Hudgins said.
Hudgins believes such a telescope will be built in his lifetime, allowing Kepler scientists to move on to the next phase of their discovery mission.
A new study shows that social networking is growing on the African continent, especially in South Africa, where the country’s Twitter-active population posted around five million messages in the last quarter of 2011, double the amount of tweets coming out of Kenya, the continent’s second most Twitter-savvy nation.
Now South African authorities are getting in on the action, using the micro-blogging site to gauge public opinion on important matters — most notably, the country’s space program.
South Africa’s National Space Agency is reaching out to citizens via Twitter, asking for input on what its agenda should focus on over the next 20 years.
It’s a move that hasn’t surprised Arthur Goldstuck of World Wide Worx, an internet research company.
“The only surprise about the move onto Twitter and Facebook is that it took so long for a government agency to do it,” says Goldstuck. “But it’s appropriate that a high-tech agency like the Space Agency should take that step, because you would expect them to be visionary and forward thinking.”
The main drawback of gauging public opinion via social media, though, is that it reaches only the internet-savvy market — a small, mostly elite segment of South Africa’s population.
“Initially, the internet user in South Africa, and therefore the social networker, was part of the higher income group,” says Goldstruck. “But with the explosion of smart phones in South Africa, we’re seeing the growth of the internet in the mass market through mobile access to the web and through apps and the like. And particularly because of the fact that any smart phone that you buy today will already have Twitter and Facebook installed on the device, or at least a logo or link to those services. As a result of that, the broader market is moving into social networks in this country. The fact that there’s something like 4.8 million Facebook users in [South Africa] and as many Twitter users suggests that it’s not only the haves, it’s beginning to move into the arena of the have-nots.”
To balance the scales, South Africa’s space agency is also engaging citizens face-to-face, aiming to create an all-round robust public discussion on its planned space program.
To assess the power of social networking in Africa, one needn’t look further than the Egyptian revolution, which began with a couple of Twitter messages. But how does South Africa measure up to other countries — the United States, for example — when it comes to engaging citizens online?
“There’s a fundamental difference in the way government uses social networks in South Africa [as] compared to the U.S.,” says Goldstruck, explaining that South Africa still has a way to go. “In the United States, social media and social networks played a major role in the last presidential election, and that woke up the entire landscape to the importance of Twitter, as both a campaigning and communication tool between government and citizens. In South Africa, it played a very small role.”
But the government’s first decisive step into the Twittersphere has got locals buzzing. It is only logical, they seem to think, that cyberspace would prove the ideal place to help plan the country’s journey into space.