Poll: Republicans lead on most issues

Poll: Republicans lead on most issues

WASHINGTON

All signs point to huge Republican victories in two weeks, with the GOP now leading Democrats on virtually every measure in an Associated Press-GfK poll of people likely to vote in the first major elections of Barack Obama’s presidency.

In the final survey before Election Day, likely voters say the GOP would do a better job than Democrats on handling the economy, creating jobs and running the government.

Most also think the country’s headed in the wrong direction. More than half disapprove of Obama’s job performance. Neither party is popular. But likely voters view the GOP a bit more positively than they do the Democrats. Slightly more say they will vote for the Republican congressional candidate in their district over the Democrat.

Crystal Cathedral teeters on the edge

GARDEN GROVE, Calif.

Capitalizing on the emerging car culture of Southern California in the 1950s, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller started a drive-in church and built it into an international televangelist empire, symbolized by the soaring glass Crystal Cathedral and its weekly “Hour of Power” show. Now Schuller’s life’s work is crumbling.

The organization declared bankruptcy this week in a collapse blamed by some on its inability to keep up with the times and a disastrous attempt to hand the church over to Schuller’s son.

The church’s failure to adapt to a changing landscape is ironic, considering that Schuller, now 84, was considered a theological radical during the Eisenhower years when he started preaching about the “power of positive thinking” from the roof of a concession stand at a drive-in theater.

Afghanistan throws out many ballots

KABUL

Afghanistan has thrown out nearly a quarter of ballots cast in last month’s parliamentary elections because of fraud, but it is still far from clear whether the public will accept the results as fair.

The full preliminary results from the Sept. 18 poll were released Wednesday after multiple delays as election officials struggled to weed out results from polling stations that never opened, along with bunches of ballots all cast for one candidate, or suspiciously split 50-50 between two people.

5,000-year-old wooden door found

GENEVA

Archaeologists in the Swiss city of Zurich have unearthed a 5,000-year-old door that may be one of the oldest found in Europe. The ancient poplar-wood door is “solid and elegant” with well-preserved hinges and a “remarkable” design for holding the boards together, chief archaeologist Niels Bleicher said Wednesday.

Using tree rings to determine its age, Bleicher believes the door could have been made in the year 3,063 B.C. — around the time that construction on Britain’s world famous Stonehenge monument began.

Astronomers claim to see oldest galaxy

WASHINGTON

Astronomers believe they’ve found the oldest thing they’ve ever seen in the universe: It’s a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago.

Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That’s a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.

By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn’t exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Associated Press