Giant skeletons come alive in Mexico for Day of the Dead

Mexico City: Giant skeletons springing forth from asphalt roads are taking over streets in the Mexican capital as the city gets ready to celebrate the festive and deeply spiritual Day of the Dead. The sculptures, in Mexico City's southern Tlahuac neighborhood, were built by a group of artists ahead of the festival’s climax later this week. Day of the Dead celebrations began on Saturday with a parade of women dressed as “Catrina”, a famous skeletal representation of death created by cartoonist Jose Guadalupe Posada in 1912. The Day of the Dead festival, celebrated in Mexico on the first two days of November, is believed to be when the gateway separating the living and the deceased opens, allowing people to pay their respects to those who have died.  AFP

Argentina’s Grossi elected head of UN’s nuclear watchdog  

Moscow: Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident and writer who helped expose the Soviet Union’s abuse of psychiatry to silence critics, has died in Britain aged 76. Bukovsky, whose health had been poor in recent years, died of cardiac arrest in a hospital in Cambridge, England on Sunday night, said the Bukovsky Center, a US-based volunteer organisation linked to the dissident. Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, forced labour camps and psychiatric hospitals and was one of the first to detail the use of such places by the former Soviet Union to punish political prisoners. In 1976, he was deported from the USSR and exchanged in Zurich for Luis Corvalan, the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile. He settled in Britain. AFP