The election in Iraq
Voting for provincial elections was by every measure a success.
"How can we not vote? All of us here have always complained about being oppressed and not having a leader who represented us. Now is our chance," said Basra voter Abdul Hussein Nu
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"So far, so good. The significance? Historic," U.N. Special Representative Staffan de Mistura told Reuters at a polling station in a Baghdad school.
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Charles Krauthammer says
What you have is the growth of civil society. And what's going to happen after this election, because of the vast number of parties, is going to be the bargaining among them, and you're going to get all kinds of interesting coalitions.
It is the beginning of a civil society in Iraq and the strengthening of a democracy. And, in a way, it vindicates the surge and the entire idea of Iraq as capable of having a real democracy.
Even the New York Times reported
Iraqis voted on Saturday for local representatives, on an almost violence-free election day aimed at creating provincial councils that more closely represent Iraq's ethnic, sectarian and tribal balance. By nightfall, there were no confirmed deaths, and children played soccer on closed-off streets in a generally joyous atmosphere.
Rainforests coming back bigtime
These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.