Venezuela's opposition is final voting results

Venezuela opposition leader Henrique Capriles. (REUTERS/Tomas Bravo)

Caracas (Reuters)-Venezuela's opposition sues President election results last month, which was won by the successor of the late Hugo Chavez, and the more trouble the already messy transition to continue without a divisive leader.

Middle right-wing opposition in the oil-rich South American country that officially filed a lawsuit to the Supreme Court, although they said if the Court loaded with justices of the pro-Chavez will certainly reject the suit.

The opposition coalition official Ramon Jose Medina said the lawsuit lists "of bribery, violence and fraud" during the electoral process that ends with the triumphant successor to Chavez, Nicolas Maduro over his rival Henrique Capriles.

This step is in fact the necessary formalities before the opposition brought the case to the Court of Inter-America for human rights of the Organization of American States.

Maduro, a former bus driver, won the general elections on April 14 with a thin margin, only about 1.5 percent, according to the National Electoral Council.

But Capriles, who also lost to Chavez by 11 points in the general election held in last October, had mentioned some irregularities and saying the Government cheated in elections that accelerated after Chavez hard leaders have ruled since 1998--died of cancer in March.

Audits launched by the National Electoral Council on Monday called a banal and "farce" because it only checks the electronic voting system itself and not a physical record of elections held April, Capriles said Wednesday.

While Capriles said in a press conference on Thursday if he would not rule out chances of a referendum to attract opponents of the pro-Chavez, who was elected to the National Assembly.

"It is clear that the National Assembly did not represent the political realities of this country," Capriles said in a television broadcast cut to allow time for speech Maduro.

Urgent Venezuela referendum on the Constitution can be made if requested by the Member who has completed at least half of their mandate and 20 percent member support.

Tensions have been high since the general election held to replace the bombastic leader, Chavez.

He is using Venezuela's oil wealth to fund programs for the poor, which creates a mengkultuskannya groups, but despised by the rich Venezuela group that says it is making an economy laden inflation and increase of violent crime on the streets.

In protests after elections last month, at least nine people were killed and dozens were injured.

Opposition and pro-Government lawmakers of baku at the spectacular fights in Congress on Tuesday. And both sides are competing May Day marches staged action on Wednesday, with Maduro called Capriles figure "Crybabies" who can't accept defeat, as AFP. (G003/H-AK)

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Special Election Results: Troubling, But Not Apocalyptic for Dems

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Someone trying to use special election results to gauge the national mood could be forgiven for being a bit baffled. In November of 2009, Bill Owens unexpectedly nabbed the New York 23rd District, which had traditionally been Republican, in the special election to replace John McHugh, who resigned to become Secretary of the Army. While the race signalled the growing influence of Tea Party-style candidates — the conservative vote was divided between third-party candidate Doug Hoffman and the GOP nominee, Dede Scozzafava, who eventually withdrew from the race — it failed to signal the Republican wave which would stun Washington a year later. But even after the 2010 drubbing, Democrats continued their upstate success with an unexpected win in the New York 26th District in May, where the Republicans' Medicare plan played a crucial role. That seemed to signal a turnaround for Obama and the Democrats, but any hopes of that were dashed Tuesday night after the party lost two special elections in New York City and Nevada.

The Special Election for Nevada's 2nd District, in which Republican Mark Amodei defeated Democrat Kate Marshall, may represent a more obvious win for the GOP. The vast district includes most of the state, geographically, including its second-biggest city, Reno. It was previously represented by a Republican, although in the 2008 presidential race votes were split between Obama and GOP nominee John McCain. But the Democrats failure to keep Rep. Anthony Weiner's seat, after he resigned following an online sex scandal, stunned political observers who expected the party to be able to hold onto the district which has stayed blue for decades. Republican challenger Bob Turner defeated Democratic State Assemblyman David Weprin by 54 to 46 percent.

[Read about the 2012 Presidential Election.]

Democrats claimed the results were due to peculiarities and not the continued plummeting of Obama's approval rating. During a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, claimed it was hard to draw too much from a race which began with such "unusual circumstances" as the Weiner Twitter scandal. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who held the 9th District for 18 years, claimed that he's never heard it described as a bellwether, and that its strong Orthodox Jewish population makes it more conservative than most New York City districts. Schultz claimed that, despite Tuesday's losses, the true measure of Obama's strength heading into the 2012 election are polls showing that he does well when matched with the individual GOP contenders. That may be true, but most political scientists view approval rating as the best overall predictor of an election, and Obama's popularity seemed to be a deciding factor in the New York race, where 55 percent of voters disapproved of his performance, according to one poll.

One key fact stands out. In both races, the Republican nominees took pains to oppose Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, the deeply unpopular Republican proposal to convert the senior healthcare federal program into a voucher-based system. By defusing that as an issue, Turner and Amodei avoided being associated with Republicans in Congress, who are also troubled with low approval ratings. The results would seem to suggest that voters remain angry with both parties, but are generally more willing to support an outsider than a Democrat, which they view as immediately tied to the White House. That makes it hard to predict exactly how voters will exact their vengeance in 2012, a national race where the party machines will be doing their best to tie each candidate and incumbent with the positions of their parties. But while it's true that special election results have limited value as a way to predict the future, these results certainly still paint a troubling picture for the White House.

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AP Test Results Offer Hope for STEM Ed in U.S.

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Mary Ann Rankin is CEO of the National Math and Science Initiative, a nonprofit organization created by American leaders in business, science, and education to address America's decline in math and science. 

At last. Some good news in math and science education. 

For the past few years, there has been well-justified angst about the alarming decline in math and science achievement in the United States. International rankings by the Organization for Education and Cultural Development placed the United States at 17th in math and 25th in science. That was humiliating and alarming. 

Now there are encouraging signs of progress. The College Board results for Advanced Placement exams for 2010-2011 are being released and they show significant gains--especially in the schools selected three years ago to implement the AP support program sponsored by the National Math and Science Initiative, or NMSI. 

Results for those NMSI schools show passing scores on AP math, science, and English exams have been raised 124 percent. That's nearly six times the national average. The results for minority students and female students are even more encouraging. The AP passing scores for African American and Hispanic students on AP math, science, and English exams increased 216 percent. The female increase on AP math and science exams was 144 percent. 

These positive results show there is a new generation of young people gaining needed skills in math and science. Getting more students with math and science skills into the jobs pipeline is a critical step toward recovery--60 percent of the new jobs that will open in the 21st century will require skills currently possessed by only 20 percent of our workforce, according to the National Commission on Mathematics and Science for the Twenty-first Century. 

Why will Advanced Placement classes help fill that gap? Students who pass an AP course are three times as likely to complete college. This is especially important at a time when the United States has dropped to 20th in high school graduation rates and 16th in college graduation. Today's jobs require more knowledge than a high school education.

Other nations are racing ahead to establish dominance in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields: 

• Russia is building an "innovation city" in the suburbs of Moscow that it hopes will challenge Silicon Valley. It will host five scientific communities next to the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, a top-level business school founded by leading Russian and international companies. 

• Saudi Arabia just opened King Abdullah University of Science and Technology with a $10 billion endowment already in hand. 

• China is creating new technology universities by the dozens and has replaced the United States as the world's high-technology exporter. 

• Singapore has invested more than a billion dollars to make that country a medical science hub and attract the world's best talent. A new university is opening this year to focus on sustainable architecture, product engineering, and information engineering. 

• In Malaysia, a jungle was cleared for a computer city called "Cyberjaya" that includes institutions of higher learning and has drawn investments from 500 companies, including Dell, Hewlett Packard, Ericsson, Motorola, BMW, IBM, Shell IT, Monster.com, and the Response Centre of the Anti-Money Laundering Network. 

• India, which has the third-largest higher education system in the world, next only to China and the United States, recently announced it will build 14 new comprehensive universities of "world-class" stature. 

• France has subsidized the creation of "Sophia Antipolis," a high-tech park near Nice. It houses companies in computing, electronics, pharmacology, and biotechnology, along with several institutions of higher learning and the European headquarters of the World Wide Web Consortium, the international standards organization. 

Whatever their current economic problems, these nations and many others have rightly concluded that the way to win the world economic competition in the future is by doing a better job of educating and innovating. 

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