A round-up of today's other stories in brief
Democrats close to losing control of House in elections, poll reveals
WASHINGTON – American voters, unhappy at high unemployment, are poised to oust President Barack Obama’s Democrats from control of the US House of Representatives in elections on November 2nd, a new Reuters-Ipsos poll found yesterday.
The national poll found that Americans, by a margin of 48 per cent to 44 per cent, plan to vote for Republican over Democrat candidates, an edge that is likely to allow Republicans to pick up dozens of seats in the House and make big gains in the Senate.
Ipsos pollster Cliff Young said the poll numbers showed Republicans would win about 227 seats in the House to 208 for the Democrats.
In the Senate, the poll suggests Democrats would retain control by 52 to 48 seats, a smaller advantage than they have now.
A split Congress could mean political gridlock in 2011. – (Reuters)
Hairdresser suffers hairy health scare
NEWCASTLE – A hairdresser yesterday issued a health warning to others in the industry as she described how her nose collapsed after years of inhaling human hairs.
Mother of three Edwina Phillipson (51) said the millions of tiny fragments of hair she breathed in during her 35-year career as a hairdresser had lodged in her nose and led to an infection that eventually caused a hole to open in her septum. – (PA)
13% of Germans want strong leader
BERLIN – Militant right-wing views are on the rise in Germany, with more than one in eight of the population ready for a strong leader to take the reins of power, according to a study published yesterday.
The study by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) found just over 13 per cent of Germans “generally or totally agreed” that Germany needed a Führer – a title meaning “leader” once assumed and shaped for his own purposes by Adolf Hitler – to rule the country with a “firm hand”.
Of 2,411 participants, nearly nine per cent thought dictatorship a “better form of government under certain circumstances”, while one in ten thought National Socialism (Nazism) had its “good sides”.
Steffen Seibert, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, described the study as “alarming”.
A far-right party almost cleared the five per cent barrier to enter Germanys national parliament in the 1960s, but such groups have achieved little electoral success recently. – (Reuters)
US Hispanics outlive whites by 2.5 years
CHICAGO – Hispanics in the United States outlive whites by 2.5 years and blacks by nearly eight years, US government researchers said yesterday.
They said the life expectancy for a Hispanic baby at birth was nearly 81, compared with 78 years for non-Hispanic white babies and just under 73 for black babies. This is despite the fact that Hispanics tend to be poorer than the population as a whole. – (Reuters)