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Malaysia to hold March 8 elections

(CNN) — Election authorities in Malaysia on Thursday set March 8 as the date for new elections, according to the Malaysian National News Agency.

The path was cleared on Wednesday when King Sultan Mizan Zainal Abi dissolved parliament on Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s request, according to Abdullah.

Abdullah’s term as prime minister was to expire in June 2009, and Parliament would have been dissolved and new elections held then, had Abdullah not acted, said Baradan Kuppusamy, a journalist who has covered numerous Malaysian elections.

Concerns have been simmering over rising food and fuel prices that many analysts expect to worsen next year, Kuppusamy added.

Malaysian prime ministers have traditionally sought the dissolution of parliament several months before the end of their term in hopes their party would prevail in fresh elections, Kuppusamy said.

Abdullah’s coalition party, the National Front, was expected to choose him to continue as prime minister if it captures a majority of seats in the next elections, Kuppusamy said.

The parliament was the 11th for the southeast Asian country, a constitutional monarchy, since its independence in 1957.
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Study: Love rivals get ogled too

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) — Valentine’s Day is a good time for men and women to attend to their lovers — just in case anyone else might be looking.

While people of each gender tend to ogle beautiful people of the opposite sex, they also check out good-looking rivals who might show interest in their partner, a study shows.

The Florida State University researchers examined something that isn’t a surprise to anyone — people’s eyes are quickly drawn to someone attractive. But this being serious research, they gave it a serious name: attentional adhesion.

Jon Maner, an assistant professor of psychology, said human brains are designed to latch on to people’s attractive features in a quest to find the right mate, or to guard a sweetheart from rivals.

I was also surprised that jealous men paid so much attention to attractive men, Maner said.

The professor’s findings were published in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Graduate students Matthew Gailliot, Aaron Rouby and Saul Miller co-wrote it.

Maner and his colleagues found that the study participants — all heterosexual men and women — fixated on highly attractive people within the first half-second of seeing them, even if it was someone of the same sex.

In three experiments, 442 respondents completed questionnaires to determine the extent to which they were motivated to seek out members of the opposite sex.

They were then shown photos of attractive men and women and average-looking men and women.

After a photo of one of the faces flashed in one quadrant of a computer screen, the participants were required to shift their attention away to somewhere else on the screen. Electronic eye-tracking equipment found that it took participants about a tenth of a second longer to shift their attention away from photos of attractive people.

Literally in the blink of an eye … just a tenth of a second, we can detect attractiveness, Maner said. I don’t think we had a good sense of just how automatic and nonconscious this kind of attentional bias can be.

And that stare most likely lasts even longer outside a lab.

In the real world, when people are looking at real people, I suspect attention would linger quite a bit longer, Maner said. E-mail to a friend

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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