Leftist political novice sworn in as Peru’s president

LIMA, Peru — Pedro Castillo, a leftist political novice who has promised to be a champion of his country’s poor, on Wednesday became Peru’s new president.

The rural teacher who has never held political office before was sworn in less than two weeks after he was declared the winner of the June 6 runoff election. He is Peru’s first president of peasant origin.

In a ceremony in the capital of Lima, Castillo made a commitment “for God, for my family, for my peasant sisters and brothers, teachers, patrolmen, children, youth and women, and for a new Constitution.” He then he sang the national anthem, taking off his signature hat and placing it over his heart.

He succeeds President Francisco Sagasti, whom Congress appointed in November to lead the South American nation after weeks of political turmoil.

Castillo, who up until days ago lived with his family in an adobe home deep in the Andes, will face a deeply divided Congress that will make it extremely challenging for him to fulfill his ill-defined campaign promises to aid the poor, who are now estimated to make up about a third of the country’s population. His political savviness will be immediately tested, and his ability to reach agreements could even determine if Congress allows him to finish his term.

Castillo defeated his opponent, rightwing career politician Keiko Fujimori, by just 44,000 votes. Peru’s poor and rural citizens supported Castillo and his slogan “No more poor in a rich country,” while the elites favored Fujimori, the daughter of controversial former president Alberto Fujimori.

may have found the earliest fossil record of animal life on Earth, according to a report published in the journal Nature.

Around a billion years ago, a region of northwest Canada now defined by steep mountains was a prehistoric marine environment where the remains of ancient sponges may be preserved in mineral sediment, the paper says.

Geologist Elizabeth Turner discovered the rocks in a remote region of the Northwest Territories accessible only by helicopter, where she has been excavating since the 1980s. Thin sections of rock contain three-dimensional structures that resemble modern sponge skeletons.

“I believe these are ancient sponges — only this type of organism has this type of network of organic filaments,” said Joachim Reitner, a geobiologist and expert in sponges at Germany’s University of Gottingen, who was not involved in the research.

The dating of adjacent rock layers indicates the samples are about 890 million years old, which would make them about 350 million years older than the oldest undisputed sponge fossils previously found.

BERLIN — Officials said they have little hope of finding five missing workers alive, a day after an explosion at an industrial park for chemical companies in western Germany that killed at least two people and injured 31 others.

Tuesday’s explosion at the waste management facility of the Chempark site sent a large black cloud of smoke into the air and ignited a blaze that took firefighters almost four hours to extinguish. The industrial park is located in the city of Leverkusen, near Cologne.

The cause of the explosion isn’t yet known.