INTERNATIONAL PETITION AGAINST "NEW FIDE TIME CONTROL"
An international petition to "proclaim high and strong my dissatisfaction" with the decision of FIDE to "impose a new time control: 40 moves/75 minutes then 15 minutes + 30 seconds for the end of the games" appears on the French website chesslines.com (click "petition," upper left). There appear to be several hundred signatures so far, including GMs such as Gregory Kaidanov and Gyula Sax. A large percentage of the signatures are from one small country (Norway), suggesting that the number of names could explode dramatically once the petition is better known to the entire chess world.
Even though FIDE has retreated from its declaration that the "new time control" will be required, and now says this was never intended and the new control is only an option, we feel that having a large number of signatures may decrease the chance that FIDE will attempt to mandate use of such a time control for international events in the future.