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Jordan

Massive Protests In Jordan, As King Tries To Calm Opponents With Early Elections

AL JAZEERA(Qatar),FRANCE 24-ARABE(France)

Worldcrunch

AMMAN - Led by Jordan's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, thousands of protesters marched in the capital on Friday demanding democratic reforms from King Abdullah.

Following the Friday prayers, protestors who'd come from across the country descended on the Husseini mosque in downtown Amman, chanting: "Listen Abdullah, our demands are legitimate," Reuters expand=1] reported.

The "Friday to Rescue the Nation" rally was the largest single protest in Jordan since the Arab Spring popular movement began to spread across the region in 2011.

On the eve of the march, Abdullah had issued two royal decrees on Thursday that dissolved the Parliament and called for early elections, expected to take place by end of 2012, Al Jazeera reported. The new government is expected to be formed next week. Muslim Brotherhood leaders said the move does not meet their demands.

The constitutional and political reforms that the King has announced over the past year have not swayed the Islamic Action Front (the name of Jordan's wing of the Muslim Brotherhood). The group also announced that they would boycott the parliamentary elections.

In addition to reforms, The IAF claim that there should be more parliamentary representativeness, as most of the seats are held by pro-regime supporters. According to the Arab-language France 24 network, the political elite in Jordan are now worried that they may suffer the same fate as their counterparts in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, all governed by Islamic movements now.

The IAF is mostly constituted of Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origins.

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Green

How Climate Change May Be Triggering More Earthquakes — And Vice Versa

Researchers have identified a possible link between climate change and the frequency of earthquakes — and the quakes may also start a vicious circle of accelerating climate change.

Image of a man trying to measure the offset of a crevasse on a glacier

Crevasse on the Canwell glacier created by the earthquake that struck near Denali National Park in Alaska in November 2002

Paul Molga

PARIS — Between 1900 and 1950, the Earth recorded an average of 3.4 earthquakes per year with a magnitude greater than 6.5. That figured doubled to 6.7 a year until the early 1970s, and was almost five times that in the 2000s.

Their intensity would also have increased with more than 25 major earthquakes per year, double the previous periods. This is according to the EM-DAT emergency events database, which compiled the occurrence and effects of 22,000 mass disasters worldwide in the 20th century.

Can we conclude that there is a causal relationship with the rise of human activities, as some experts suggest? The idea was first suggested in 2011 by an Australian research team led by geology professor Giampiero Iaffaldano. At the time, it reported that it had found that the intensification of the monsoon in India had accelerated the movement of the Indian tectonic plate by 20% over the past 10 million years.

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