May 1, 2013 Edition

Three weeks before election day, most Filipinos had still not decided on their complete senatorial slate. Most named only a mean of 7 preferred senatorial candidates out of 12 possible bets, according to the April 2013 Pulse Asia survey — leaving them with 5 more to vote for. The number of bets voters said they will elect in May 2013, decreased as the elections drew near.


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President Barack Obama on Tuesday defended the FBI from suggestions it might have prevented the Boston marathon bombing by acting on warnings about one of the suspects. Russia had advised US authorities about ethnic Chechen Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 and the possibility he was slipping into the grips of hardline Islam, and the FBI probed and interviewed him, although the case was eventually closed. Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzhokhar are accused of going on to carry out the April 15 bombing, which killed three and wounded more than 264 at one of the world’s premier sporting events.


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The Commission on Elections (Comelec) will be assigning more auditors to manually count votes in select precincts nationwide hours after the automated midterm polls close on May 13. The poll body increased the number of members in a random manual audit team (RMAT) this year to 5 from 3 members each per legislative district in 2010 elections. With legislative districts now at 233, there will be a total of 1,165 manual auditors nationwide. Just like in the 2010 elections, public teachers will be tapped to comprise each RMAT. Each team is tasked with ensuring that there are no discrepancies between the election returns count and their manual counting of the ballot. In a midterm election, only votes for senators, representatives, and mayors will be manually counted.


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Britain announced Tuesday that it will cut off direct aid to South Africa in 2015, citing its status as Africa’s biggest economy. London currently gives £19 million ($29 million, 22 million euros) of bilateral aid a year to Pretoria, down from a peak of more than £40 million in 2003. Britain said its relationship with South Africa should now be based on trade rather than aid following its transition from apartheid to a “flourishing democracy”. “South Africa has made enormous progress over the past two decades, to the extent that it is now the region’s economic powerhouse and Britain’s biggest trading partner in Africa,” International Development Secretary Justine Greening was due to tell a conference of African ministers and business leaders in London.


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Israeli president and Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres invited Pope Francis on an official state visit to Israel after a meeting in the Vatican on Tuesday, April 30. “I am expecting you in Jerusalem. Not just me but all the people of Israel,” Peres said in English to the pope at the end of their 30-minute meeting. The president gave Francis a bible in Hebrew and English, with a dedication inside which read: “To his Holiness Pope Francis, so that you may prosper in all you do and wherever you go.” The meeting, the first between a leader from the Middle East and Francis, who was elected in March, came at a time of important developments in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.


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The Philippines bought 187,000 metric tons (MT) of 25% broken white rice from Vietnam as it prepares for the lean season. The National Food Authority (NFA) awarded the supply contract to Vietnam’s Southern Food Corp. under a government-to-government tender. Upon delivery, the purchase will augment the country’s buffer stock by 6 days. The current stock can cover only 19 days of demand, below the 30-day requirement. The rice will arrive mid-June, in time for the lean months of July to September. The Philippines intends to produce over 20 million MT of unmilled rice in 2013, higher than 2012’s production of 18 million MT.

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In a new statement released on Tuesday, April 30, CERN announced it would work on restoring the world’s first website. According to the about page for the new project, CERN “aims to preserve some of the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web.” Not only will they be attempting to restore the first uniform resource locator (URL), they also want to “put back the files that were there at their earliest possible iterations,” and then share the assets available from the first web servers at CERN, restoring machine names and IP addresses to recreate the first experience of the web.


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Actress Heart Evangelista leaves little to the imagination as the cover girl of Esquire magazine’s May election edition. In the cover, Evangelista is dressed in a white tee with the word “VOTE” printed in bold letters. In an interview with Esquire and Rappler, Evangelista revealed her belief that her boyfriend, Senator Chiz Escudero, will choose love over politics. “I told him that, that maybe I’m not good for you. But he said, “If this is what it takes to keep you and to have you in my life, then I’d go for it,” said Evangelista. When asked what attracted the young star to the veteran politician, she said it was his ‘puppy eyes’. “They’re tricky. They always seem like they’re serious or sad or something but that’s what makes it so cute. I melt all the time he looks at me. I get so kilig up to this day.” Escudero is running for re-election in the mid-term elections.


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Scientists said Tuesday, April 30, they had manufactured a lightweight and reusable material that can absorb up to 33 times its weight in certain chemicals — a possible new tool against water pollution. The team made nanosheets of boron nitride, also called white graphene, that were able to soak up a wide range of spilt oils, chemical solvents and dyes such as those discharged by the textile, paper and tannery industries. Highly porous, the sheets have a high surface area, can float on water and are water-repellent, the team from France and Australia wrote in the journal Nature Communications. Once the white sheets are dropped on an oil-polluted water surface “they immediately absorb the brown oil and become dark brown,” they wrote.


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According to a new study, chat apps have overtaken traditional short messaging service (SMS) in the number of messages sent online. Market research firm Informa says that by the end of 2012, more messages were being sent through apps such as WhatsApp, Kik, iMessages and BBM. The Verge reports that WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum recently claimed that his company’s service has grown even bigger than Twitter. SMS isn’t suddenly going to go away, however. SMS is still far ahead in overall user count said the report. Meanwhile, online chat apps have yet to hit a commercial strategy that pays.

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