With a majority of the popular vote in hand, the Republican president planned to declare victory early Wednesday. "We are convinced that President Bush has won re-election," White House chief of staff Andrew Card said shortly before dawn in the East.

Ceding nothing, Kerry went to bed without conceding. "We will fight for every vote," his running mate, Sen. John Edwards (news - web sites), told supporters in Boston, where he and the four-term Massachusetts senator waited out the late, long count.

Card said Bush not only won a second term but Republicans added "to our majority in the House and ... to our majority in the Senate."

As Bush made plans to declare victory, his high command dispatched a 10-person political and legal team to Ohio in the event Kerry triggered a Florida-like fight. Card said Bush delayed his own public statement to "give Senator Kerry the respect of more time to reflect on the results of this election."

That was a veiled request for Kerry to bow out gracefully, and avoid the rancor that accompanied a 36-day recount in Florida four years ago.

That margin was small, but Bush's lead in Ohio is substantial — Card called it "statistically insurmountable, even after provisional ballots are considered."

With Bush leading by 145,000 votes and roughly 190,000 yet to be counted, one top Kerry adviser said the Democrat's chances of winning Ohio, and with it the White House, were difficult at best.

The race was remarkably similar to the 2000 campaign, Bush winning all but one of the states he carried four years ago, while Kerry picked up where Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites) left off. For Bush, that meant sweeping the South and several western and Midwestern state. For Kerry that meant capturing California, Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois, a handful of West Coast and Midwest states.

Three states hung in the balance — New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio, but only the Buckeye State had enough electoral votes to make a difference.

After winning Nevada in the wee hours Wednesday, Bush stood only 16 electoral votes shy of the 270 required for a second term. Kerry stalled at 252. Bush made plans — later revisited — to declare victory.

Ceding nothing, Kerry dispatched Edwards to tell supporters: "We've waited four years for this victory. We can wait one more night."

The night proved grim for Democrats. Republicans expanded their majority in the Senate, knocking off Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and the GOP extended its decade-long hold on the House for another two years.

Florida fell into Bush's lap with relative ease. Kerry took New Hampshire from Bush — the first and perhaps only state to switch parties — but it has just four electoral votes. That left Ohio as Kerry's only hope.

The holdup was over provisional ballots — those cast by people whose qualifications to vote were challenged. At 3 a.m. EST, Bush had a lead of 125,000 votes; there were more provisional ballots outstanding.

"There's no mathematical path to victory for Kerry in Ohio," said Nicolle Devenish, spokeswoman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, arguing that Bush would get his share of the provisional ballots. The White House had contacted Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, urging the Republican to clarify the number of provisional ballots.

Nationwide, with 97 percent of the nation's precincts reporting, some 112 million people had voted — up from 105 million in 2000.

Bush was winning the popular vote by around 3.6 million, or 51 percent to Kerry's 48 percent.

Early in the voting, Kerry allowed himself to muse about the problems he might face in the White House, including a soaring deficit and a war that has claimed more than 1,100 lives.

"I'm not pretending to anybody that it's a bed of roses," said the 60-year-old Massachusetts senator.

The Electoral College (news - web sites) count was excruciating: With 270 votes needed, Bush won 28 states for 254 votes. Kerry won 19 states plus the District of Columbia for 252 votes.

With three states out, Kerry was still on the hunt for electoral votes that the GOP won four years ago. The states' won by Gore in 2000 are worth just 260 votes this year due to redistricting — 10 short of the coveted number.

Kerry could pick that up plus some in Ohio with 20 electoral votes.

A 269-269 tie would throw the presidential race to the House.  

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041103/ap_on_el_pr/eln_election_rdp&cid=536&ncid=536

WASHINGTON - Republicans tightened their grip on the Senate early Wednesday, dealing defeat to Democratic Leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota and capturing a string of seats across the South.

Daschle fell to former Rep. John Thune, the first Senate party leader to lose a race for re-election in more than a half century.

Republicans were assured of 53 seats in the Senate that convenes in January, two more than they control in the current Congress.

Races in Alaska and Florida remained unsettled. Republicans led in both.

Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama, a Democratic political star in the making, easily won a seat formerly in Republican hands in Illinois, and will be the only black among 100 senators when the new Congress convenes in January.

But the GOP did most of the celebrating by far, taking Democratic open seats in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Louisiana. Rep. David Vitter (news, bio, voting record) triumphed there, the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a term in the Senate.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041103/ap_on_el_se/eln_senate_rdp&cid=536&ncid=536

WASHINGTON - Republicans extended their decade-long hold on the House for another two years, knocking off four veteran Texas Democrats along the way. Among their few setbacks was the defeat of the longest serving GOP member of the chamber, Rep. Phil Crane.

By winning their 218th seat — with several more likely to come — Republicans were set to control the House for a dozen consecutive years, the first time they have achieved that feat since the 12 years that ended in January 1933. With the GOP also renewing its majority in the Senate, the party was assured of reigning over Congress, though with narrow majorities that should allow Democrats to slow and even derail some Republican initiatives.

Even so, GOP leaders were jubilant.

"We are going to be the majority party in the 109th Congress. I've got 218 booked and there's a lot more around the country that has not been decided yet," said Rep. Thomas Reynolds   http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041103/ap_on_el_ho/eln_house_17

Voters in 10 states approved constitutional amendments Tuesday to ban same-sex marriage, in most cases by overwhelming margins. Opponents of the bans held out hope that Oregon, where results were not yet in, would buck the trend.

The amendments — on the ballots in 11 states — won easy approval in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio and Utah. The bans won by 3-to-1 margins in Kentucky and Georgia, 3-to-2 in Ohio, and 6-to-1 in Mississippi.

The Ohio measure, considered the broadest of the 11 because it barred any legal status that "intends to approximate marriage," gathered equal support from men and women, blacks and whites.

In Georgia, Ohio and Mississippi, gay-rights activists were considering court challenges of the newly approved amendments. But supporters of the bans were jubilant.

"I've said all along that this crossed party lines, color lines and socio-economic lines," said Sadie Fields of the Georgia Christian Coalition. "The people in this state realized that we're talking about the future of our country here."

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041103/ap_on_el_st_lo/eln_gay_marriage_9

The curse of the Redskins was broken this election. Howard Stern's incredibly long success rate in battles just ended. A 24/ 7 radio show, documentary movies, comparisons to Hitler,  28 million from one person alone to the Democrats, it all was like sand against the waves.

It is now generally accepted that HIV is a descendant of simian (monkey) immunodeficiency virus (SIV). Certain simian immunodeficiency viruses bear a very close resemblance to HIV-1 and HIV-2, the two types of HIV.

For example, HIV-2 corresponds to a simian immunodeficiency virus found in the sooty mangabey monkey (SIVsm), sometimes known as the green monkey, which is indigenous to western Africa.

The more virulent strain of HIV, namely HIV-1, was until very recently more difficult to place. Until 1999 the closest counterpart that had been identified was the simian (monkey) immunodeficiency virus that was known to infect chimpanzees (SIVcpz), but this virus had significant differences between it and HIV

So what happened in 1999?
Are chimpanzees now known to be the source of HIV?

In February 1999 it was announced¹ that a group of researchers from the University of Alabama had studied frozen tissue from a chimpanzee and found that the simian virus it carried (SIVcpz) was almost identical to HIV-1. The chimpanzee came from a sub-group of chimpanzees known as Pan troglodytes troglodytes, which were once common in west-central Africa.

It is claimed by the researchers that this shows that these chimpanzees were the source of HIV-1, and that the virus at some point crossed species from chimpanzees to human. However, it was not necessarily clear that chimpanzees were the original reservoir for HIV-1 because chimpanzees are only rarely infected with SIVcpz.

The findings of this 10-year long research into the origin and evolution of HIV by Paul Sharp of Nottingham University and Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama were published in 2003². They concluded that wild chimps became infected simultaneously with two simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) which had "viral sex" to form a third virus capable of infecting humans and causing AIDS.

Professor Sharp and his colleagues discovered that the chimp virus was an amalgam of the SIV infecting red-capped mangabeys and the virus found in greater spot-nosed monkeys. They believe that the hybridisation took place inside chimps that had become infected with both strains of SIV after hunting and killing the two smaller species of monkey.

How could HIV have crossed species?

It has been known for a long time that certain viruses can pass from animals to humans, and this process is referred to as zoonosis.

The researchers concluded that HIV could have crossed over from chimpanzees as a result of a human killing a chimp and eating it for food.

Some other rather controversial theories have contended that HIV was transferred iatrogenically i.e. via medical experiments. One particularly well publicised theory is that polio vaccines played a role in the transfer.

The journalist Edward Hooper has suggested that HIV could be traced to the testing of an oral polio vaccine called Chat as batches of the Chat vaccine may have been grown in chimp kidney cells in the Congo, the Wistar Institute and Belgium. That could have resulted in the contamination of the vaccine with chimp SIV, the simian version of HIV-1. This vaccine was then given to about a million people in the Belgian Congo, Ruanda and Urundi in the late 1950s.

However, in February 2000 the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia announced that it had discovered in its stores a phial of polio vaccine that had been used as part of this polio vaccination program. The vaccine was subsequently analysed and in April 2001 it was announced³ that no trace had been found of either HIV or chimpanzee. A second analysis⁴ confirmed that only macaque monkey kidney cells, which cannot be infected with SIV or HIV, were used to make Chat.

What is crucial in regard to the credibility of any theory is the question of when the transfer took place.

Is there any evidence of when the transfer took place?

During the last few years it has become possible not only to determine whether HIV is present in a blood or plasma sample, but also to determine the particular subtype of the virus. Studying the subtype of virus of some of the earliest known instances of HIV infection can help to provide clues about the time of origin and the subsequent evolution of HIV in humans.

Three of the earliest known instances of HIV infection are as follows:

Analysis in 1998 of the plasma sample from 1959 was interpreted⁵ as suggesting that HIV-1 was introduced into humans around the 1940s or the early 1950s, which was earlier than had previously been suggested. Other scientists have suggested that it could have been even longer, perhaps around 100 years or more ago.

In January 2000, the results of a new study presented at the 7th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, suggested that the first case of HIV infection occurred around 1930 in West Africa. The study was carried out by Dr Bette Korber of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The estimate of 1930 (which does have a 20 year margin of error), is based on a complicated computer model of HIV's evolution.

Is it known where the emergence of HIV in humans took place?

Many people now assume that because HIV has apparently developed from a form of SIV found in a type of chimpanzee in West Africa, that is was actually in West Africa that HIV first emerged in humans. It is then presumed that HIV spread from there around the world.

However, as discussed above, chimpanzees are not necessarily the original source of HIV and it is likely that the virus crossed over to humans on more than one occasion.² So it is quite possible that HIV emerged at the same time in say both South America and Africa, or that it even emerged in the Americas before it emerged in Africa.

We will probably never know exactly when and where the virus first emerged, but what is clear is that sometime in the middle of the 20th century, HIV infection in humans developed into the epidemic of disease around the world that we now refer to as AIDS.

What caused the epidemic to spread so suddenly?

There are a number of factors that may have contributed to the sudden spread including international travel, the blood industry, and widespread drug use.

International Travel

The role of international travel in the spread of HIV was highlighted by the case of 'Patient Zero'. Patient Zero was a Canadian flight attendant called Gaetan Dugas who travelled extensively worldwide. Analysis of several of the early cases of AIDS showed that the infected individuals were either direct or indirect sexual contacts of the flight attendant. These cases could be traced to several different American cities demonstrating the role of international travel in spreading the virus. It also suggested that the disease was probably the consequence of a single transmissible agent.

The Blood Industry

As blood transfusions became a routine part of medical practice, this led to a growth of an industry around meeting this increased demand for blood. In some countries such as the USA paid donors were used, including intravenous drug users. This blood was then sent worldwide. Also, in the late 1960's haemophiliacs began to benefit from the blood clotting properties of a product called Factor VIII. However, to produce the coagulant, blood from thousands of individual donors had to be pooled. Factor VIII was then distributed worldwide making it likely that haemophiliacs could become exposed to new infections.

Drug Use

The 1970s saw an increase in the availability of heroin following the Vietnam War and other conflicts in the Middle East, which helped stimulate a growth in intravenous drug use. This increased availability together with the development of disposable plastic syringes and the establishment of 'shooting galleries' where people could buy drugs and rent equipment provided another route through which the virus could be passed on.