Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Dies
The British conservative former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died today of a stroke, said today her spokesman, Lord Bell, quoted here by local television in the capital.
Thatcher, known as the Iron Lady, headed the destinies of the United Kingdom (UK) from 1979 to 1990 and was the one who decided in 1982 to launch the Navy and British troops against the Falklands, claimed by Argentina.
The Iron Lady gave way to the term Thatcherism which came to mean a period of tough adjustment reforms applied amid an economic crisis that caused great social upheavals and strikes, especially in the mining sector.
According to initial reports, the only woman who has come to lead a cabinet in the UK barely came out of her residence in these last months. The stroke occurred after surgery last December to remove a tumor in the bladder.
The also Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven assumed as a deputy in 1959 and in 1975 became head of the Conservative Party, four years before arriving at the office of 10 Downing Street, from where she launched a conservative program of privatization, public jobs cut and reduction of union power.
After her resignation in 1990, three years after being elected to a third term, Thatcher gradually abandoned politics and it is considered that by the beginning of 2000, she started suffering from senile dementia.
The Iron Lady developed a foreign policy of total alignment with the United States during the Cold War.
Scientists Make Healthier, Less Fat Chocolate
British scientists were able to replace the fat in chocolate with fruit juice without changing its taste and said that products made with this technique can be traded.
According to a new study presented at the American Chemical Society’s meeting, this method would allow manufacture of chocolate with fruit juice, vitamin C water or diet cola replacing up to 50 percent of the fat.
The researchers, who are chemists of the University of Warwick, UK, explained that the resulting candy is just as tasty, but much healthier.
The juice is in the form of micro-bubbles that help chocolate retain the lush, velvety “mouth-feel”, the texture that is firm and snappy to the bite and yet melts in the mouth, researchers said.
The process also prevents “sugar bloom,” the unappetizing white film that coats the surface of chocolate that has been on the shelf for a while.
“We have established the chemistry that’s a starting point for healthier chocolate confectionary,” said Stefan A. F. Bon, Ph.D., who led the research.
“Now we’re hoping the food industry will take the next steps and use the technology to make tasty, lower-fat chocolate bars and other candy,” he added.
The Remains of Chilean Poet Neruda Were Exhumed Today
The remains of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda were exhumed today to be submitted for expert examinations, to determine whether his death was natural or caused by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The casket was taken from the tomb located at one end of his house-museum in Isla Negra, 110 kilometers northwest of the capital, where he rests alongside his widow, Matilde Urrutia.
The remains were transferred to the Forensic Medical Service in this capital for forensic investigation in response to a criminal complaint filed by the Communist Party of Chile.
In response to the request, in late February of this year the judge ordered Mario Chariot performed the process which opened the challenge to the prevailing version indicating that the poet had died of prostate cancer.
The preparatory work for the exhumation began on Sunday afternoon, with the first efforts aimed at opening the grave stone and the concrete set in the garden of what was once his house in Isla Negra, in the region of Valparaíso.
According to experts, the results of the analyzes could take up to three months.
The case was sparked in 2011 after Neruda’s driver, Manuel Araya, revealed that a strange injection was placed in the abdomen of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1971, while still at the clinic Santa Maria.
Neruda became alarmed and called his wife Matilde Urrutia, who then tried to contact Araya, who was that day in Isla Negra, the house owned by the poet, on the eve of the trip where he had planned to go into exile to Mexico on the 24 of September 1973, the day before his death.
After the death of Neruda, his driver was arrested and held in the National Stadium, which the dictatorship turned into a center of torture and death.
Years later, Araya’s testimony appeared in an article in the Mexican magazine Proceso, written by Chilean journalist Francisco Marin.
The revelations of the driver countered the opinion of the doctors, who certified that the writer died of cancer cachexia.