London, Oct 30 : After being ‘hammered’ by the Democrats in the Nov 4 presidential poll, the Republican Party will be left in wilderness for up to 12 years, a senior black Republican has warned.

Michael Steele, a rising star in the party and one of its most prominent African Americans, said the first challenge for the Republicans was to admit that their demise was “all of their own making”. He urged a David Cameron-style reinvention to broaden the party’s appeal in the near future.

Washington, Oct 30 : Scientists have found evidence which indicates that the 2004 tsunami that inundated Indian Ocean coastlines, leaving behind a trail of destruction, was not a first-time occurrence, as the mega waves have repeatedly washed over a Thai island during the last 2,800 years.

The evidence was found by a research team, led by Kruawun Jankaew of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, working on Phra Thong, a barrier island along the hard-hit west coast of Thailand.

The team unearthed evidence of at least three previous major tsunamis in the preceding 2,800 years, the most recent from about 550 to 700 years ago.

Nairobi/Kinshasa - A rebel Tutsi general has called a ceasefire after four days of fighting in which his forces routed the Congolese National Army and came on the verge of taking the major eastern town of Goma.

General Laurent Nkunda told the BBC Wednesday night that he was calling a ceasefire to prevent panic in Goma and requested government forces do the same.

The French ambassador to the United Nations, Jean-Maurice Ripert, said he hoped the ceasefire "would stand" and called on Nkunda to cease hostilities from Thursday morning.

Sydney

Washington, October 30 : A team of researchers from three American educational institutions has found that voting decisions are more associated with the brain''s response to negative aspects of a politician''s appearance than to positive ones.

Research collaborators from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa say that this seems to be true particularly when voters have little or no information about a politician aside from their physical appearance.

Washington, October 30 : UC San Diego computer scientists have written a piece of software that can process pictures of keys from nearly all angles, and calculate the number and depth of cuts on them, which is all one requires to make a duplicate key.

“We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret,” said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project.

“Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone’s keys from a distance without them even noticing,” he added.