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Somali gunmen hijacked a Dutch-owned ship as it travelled from Kenya's Mombasa port to Romania in the latest act of piracy off the lawless Horn of Africa nation's coast.
The MV Amiya Scan, managed by the Dutch Reider Shipping BV, was seized along with some nine Russian and Filipino crew members on Sunday while it passed through the Gulf of Aden, said Andrew Mwangura, director of the Seafarers Assistance Programme.
"Unfortunately we don't know where she is right now ... there's been no ransom demand as of yet," Mwangura said. He said the cargo ship was on its way to Romania and was flying under a Panamanian flag.
Piracy is rampant off Somalia, which has functioned without an effective central government since the fall of a dictator in 1991.
In an effort to combat rising cases of hijackings, France, Britain, and the United States sent a draft resolution to the UN Security Council earlier this year that would give nations the right to arrest pirates in Somali waters.
On Friday, Somali gunmen released a Jordanian-flagged cargo ship after holding it for nearly a week. Pirates generally treat their captives well in the hope of securing a ransom.
Reuters
JohnCenaFan28
05-29-2008, 06:18 PM
Thanks for the news.
A Queensland teacher charged as part of a major paedophile bust has committed suicide, while another is in hospital after a failed attempt to take his life.
More than 90 men across Australia have been arrested and hundreds more remain under suspicion as part of the six-month Operation Centurion.
One of the men arrested, a 59-year-old Gold Coast teacher, has committed suicide after being charged over the bust, News Ltd reported.
A second Queensland teacher, 48, is recovering in hospital after a failed suicide attempt, News Ltd said.
About 1500 people or individual computers in Australia have been identified in the investigation, which is part of a wider Interpol investigation involving 170 countries.
A policeman, four Queensland teachers and a West Australian sports administrator were among those arrested or summonsed in Australia as a result of the six-month operation.
AAP
Peter Robinson took over as Northern Ireland's first minister, succeeding Ian Paisley and shoring up last year's agreement to share power with political foes in a regional government.
Martin McGuinness, member of the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party and former Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrilla, was reappointed as deputy first minister despite tensions with Robinson's pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
Failure to nominate the ministers could have triggered elections and destabilised the fledgling administration whose formation cemented a 1998 peace deal that ended 30 years of bloodshed in which more than 3600 people were killed.
There had been fears that Sinn Fein would stall the nomination process unless it secured a timetable on the transfer of policing powers from London to Belfast.
Paisley, 82, a firebrand Protestant cleric who stepped down on Saturday as DUP leader, set aside decades of hatred last May when he agreed to share power with predominantly Catholic foes.
"He (Paisley) has laid the foundation for this new era and now it is up to the rest of us to build upon it," Robinson told deputies after his appointment.
Gerry Adams, president of the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein, said his party and the DUP had proved politics can work.
"I want to commend Ian Paisley," Adams said. "Today is a day to praise Caesar, not to bury him."
Paisley's jovial appearances over the last year with his former enemy McGuinness have taken many by surprise and led to the unlikely duo being dubbed the "Chuckle Brothers".
Relations with the more businesslike Robinson are expected to be cooler, however.
"There is no elevator that will take us to a successful outcome," Robinson said. "We will just have to take the staircase step by step by step."
McGuinness said building a more prosperous province and securing foreign investment must remain key objectives.
"The honeymoon period is over," McGuinness said. "This is now about hard work. People out there are expecting results."
The IRA pledged to disarm in 2005, pursuing a united Ireland through peaceful means, but its continued existence and sporadic attacks by splinter guerrilla groups mean many DUP members are in no hurry to see a locally controlled police force.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will meet Robinson and McGuinness in London on Friday, aiming to put in place a process to deal with the issues, his office said.
Reuters
The European Union agreed to take a unified stand against whaling ahead of a International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting this month.
"With this decision the European Union can now take a strong role at the International Whaling Commission and use all its political, moral and economic weight to ensure a more effective protection of whales worldwide," said EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.
The European Commission has been spearheading efforts to find a joint position but as the 27-nation bloc is not yet a party to the IWC, it cannot negotiate on behalf of member states.
Environment ministers meeting in Luxembourg adopted a common position based on support for the current moratorium on commercial whaling, the setting up of whale sanctuaries and encouraging the use of non-lethal methods to collect scientific data.
"There is no need to kill whales to obtain scientific information about whales," the EU's executive Commission said in a statement. "Adequate data for management purposes can be obtained using non-lethal techniques," it added.
Reuters
Hillary Clinton will declare her strong support for Barack Obama's White House bid and rally supporters around him, she said in a letter, drawing the curtain on a gruelling 16-month nominating fight that badly split the Democratic Party.
Clinton will publicly back Obama on Saturday and pledge to work for party unity in the general-election race against Republican John McCain.
"On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy," the New York senator and former first lady said in a letter to her backers released early on Thursday morning.
"I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party's nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise."
Clinton confirmed she would hold an event in Washington on Saturday to thank everyone who had backed her campaign. The event was originally planned for Friday but the day was switched to allow more supporters to attend.
"This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans," she said in the letter.
"I will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Senator Obama. The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise."
Clinton has not decided whether to officially close the campaign or suspend it, allowing her to keep control of her delegates to the nominating convention, aides said.
Clinton spent much of Wednesday talking to supporters, many of whom urged her to halt her bid now that Obama has clinched the nomination. Obama attended two fund-raising events in New York City on Wednesday night and acknowledged her decision.
"Your junior senator from New York engaged in an extraordinary campaign," he told attendees at one fund-raiser. "Now that the interfamily squabble is done, all of us can focus on what needs to be done in November."
Obama, the first black candidate to lead a major US party into a White House race, announced a three-member team to head his search for a running mate as he began the task of unifying the party the day after clinching the nomination.
McCain proposed that Obama join him for a series of joint summer town-hall meetings across the country. Obama's campaign manager called the idea "appealing" but proposed format changes and made no immediate commitment.
Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President John Kennedy, will vet prospective Obama running mates along with former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder and Jim Johnson, former chief executive of the mortgage lender Fannie Mae, who performed the same task for Democrats John Kerry in 2004 and Walter Mondale in 1984.
Near the top of their agenda will be questions about a possible teaming with Clinton, who has indicated interest in the job after her presidential bid fell short.
"We're going to be having a conversation in coming weeks," Obama told reporters when asked about the former first lady. He said he was confident the party would be unified to win the general election.
After news of Clinton's decision broke, Obama adviser Linda Douglass told reporters she ran a great race.
"Her supporters have every reason to gather and celebrate that and we're confident the party will be united with her help," she said.
Clinton's supporters turned up the pressure for her to be named as Obama's vice presidential candidate. Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, said he wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus urging members to push Obama to choose Clinton.
Obama's campaign said the search was just beginning.
"Senator Obama is pleased to have three talented and dedicated individuals managing this rigorous process," spokesman Bill Burton said. "He will work closely with them in the coming weeks but ultimately this will be his decision and his alone."
The victory by Obama, son of a black Kenyan father and white mother from Kansas, marked a milestone in US history. It came 45 years after the height of the civil rights movement and followed one of the closest and longest nomination fights in recent US political history.
Reuters
Zimbabwe's presidential election run-off should be scrapped to prevent further bloodshed, the ruling party defector who came third in the first round said.
Former finance minister Simba Makoni won over 8 per cent and his votes could in theory be crucial in swinging the June 27 contest between opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and veteran President Robert Mugabe.
Makoni, who favours a national unity government, told reporters that Zimbabwe could not afford another election and it would not end the political crisis and economic collapse.
"We are convinced that the last thing our country and its people need is another election. Besides, the violence now gripping the country bodes ill for a free and fair election," Makoni said on the sidelines of a World Economic Forum meeting in Cape Town.
Tsvangirai defeated Mugabe in the March 29 presidential election but failed to win the absolute majority needed to avoid a second ballot.
Makoni's campaign had said before the first round that he would back Tsvangirai if voting went to a run-off, but since then he was not formally endorsed the opposition leader.
Mugabe's vow never to allow Tsvangirai's MDC to take power has stoked opposition fears that the ruling ZANU-PF will use intimidation and vote-rigging to extend the president's 28-year rule. Tsvangirai was detained for nine hours on Wednesday as he campaigned southwest of Harare.
The opposition says 65 people have been killed by Mugabe's supporters since the election. On Wednesday it said soldiers and ZANU-PF activists had beaten and threatened to shoot Zimbabweans who wanted to support Tsvangirai.
Mugabe says the opposition is responsible for violence.
The MDC said Tsvangirai, who has been arrested and even beaten by police in the past, had continued his campaign on Thursday.
He described his detention as "yet another indication of the lengths that the Mugabe regime is prepared to go to in order to try and steal the election". Makoni said harassment of opposition leaders and assaults on lawyers and people dealing with the victims of political violence was aimed at creating a hostile environment for a free and fair run-off.
"And if the leaders will that the elections be put off so that we can save lives. . . then it is not beyond us if we will it that the elections be called off," he said.
State media reported on Thursday that the ruling ZANU-PF party and Tsvangirai's MDC have set up a joint team to stop political violence.
The state-controlled Herald newspaper said the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) had facilitated the establishment of a committee comprising ZANU-PF and MDC officials to stem violence.
But MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said the team was unlikely to stop the violence.
"This all appears bold on paper, but not in practice," Chamisa told Reuters.
Reuters
JohnCenaFan28
06-05-2008, 11:07 PM
Interesting news, thanks.
JohnCenaFan28
06-05-2008, 11:07 PM
Thanks for the story.
JohnCenaFan28
06-05-2008, 11:08 PM
I completely agree with them.
JohnCenaFan28
06-05-2008, 11:08 PM
I'm still sad that she lost:(
JohnCenaFan28
06-05-2008, 11:08 PM
Thanks for the story.
A roadside bomb has exploded near a crowded passenger bus in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, killing 20 people and wounding 47.
The blast occurred during the morning rush hour in the southern suburb of Moratuwa. The military blamed Tamil Tiger rebels for the blast, the latest attack on civilians in or near the capital this year.
"The bomb was planted on the road side, hidden in a bush and then exploded using a remote control," said an official of the police bomb disposal unit, asking not to be named.
A Reuters witness said the bus was shredded by shrapnel and the floor was covered in blood and debris.
"I was on my way to office and suddenly I heard a loud explosion and saw people screaming with blood all over," said Aruna Wickramarachchi, a 45-year-old hotel worker.
"My leg was also injured from the explosion," Wickramarachchi said, adding that she was among about 100 passengers on the bus.
The latest attack comes as Sri Lanka's military presses its offensive to retake the Tamil Tigers' northern stronghold in daily land, sea and air attacks in a civil war that has killed more than 70,000 people since 1983.
The military blamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for the blast.
"It is the LTTE who are behind the explosion," said military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara.
The attack comes two days after the military blamed the rebels for a bomb blast on a railway track that wounded 27 civilians in Colombo.
The rebels, who are fighting for an independent state in the north and east of the island, were not immediately available for comment but usually deny involvement in such attacks.
Fighting between the military and the LTTE has intensified since the government formally pulled out of a six-year-old ceasefire pact in January, though a renewed civil war has been raging since 2006.
Analysts say the military has the upper hand in the latest phase of the long-running war given superior air power, strength of numbers and swathes of terrain captured in the island's east.
But they still see no clear winner on the horizon.
Reuters
Israeli troops have killed a Palestinian gunman during an incursion into the Gaza Strip.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said troops operating close to the border east of Gaza City spotted an armed man and shot him. She said an Israeli soldier was wounded in the exchange.
In an air strike earlier on Friday, a missile destroyed an outpost belonging to Hamas militants, critically wounding one gunman. A number of bystanders were also hurt, Hamas said.
A second air strike was aimed at a building suspected of being a munitions workshop in Gaza City. The army spokeswoman said the missile missed its intended target.
The attacks came in response to a cross-border mortar strike on an Israeli industrial plant near the Gaza frontier on Thursday which killed a factory worker. A young Palestinian girl was killed in an Israeli strike on Thursday.
Israel has tightened a blockade on the Gaza Strip and often conducts air strikes and raids into the territory which it says are aimed at ending frequent rocket and mortar fire at towns and agricultural communities close to the border.
Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from the forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction a year ago in a brief but bloody civil war.
Violence along the Gaza border has marred peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas, who holds sway in the West Bank. Egypt has so far failed in efforts to broker a truce to curb the rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli raids in the Gaza Strip.
Reuters
A 14-year-old boy has been charged over an explosion and fire which caused $A5 million worth of damage to a school in southwestern NSW.
The Hay High School's science/library building suffered severe structural damage in the explosion on July 3 last year, police said.
"Police believe the explosion was as a result of arson," a NSW Police statement said.
Local detectives investigated the incident with the arson squad.
Deniliquin Sergeant Miles Rogers said the damage to the school had affected many people in the community.
"Debris from the explosion including a solid external door travelled some 50 metres off the block and neighbouring homes and shops had windows broken," Sgt Rogers said.
A 14-year-old Hay youth has been charged with aggravated break and enter and with committing a serious indictable offence.
He was given conditional bail to appear at Hay Children's Court on July 7.
- AAP
A gas explosion and fire aboard a cargo ship undergoing repairs at a shipyard in Russia's Kaliningrad region has killed three workers with seven more still missing.
The blast onboard the Yenisei was caused by a "violation of safety rules caused by work on the fuel tank," RIA reported, quoting a source close to the investigation.
Reuters
**More News to follow on this Story***
Likely US Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and former rival Hillary Clinton have met privately at her home in Washington, news media reported.
CNN reported it was "a small meeting" with perhaps just the two senators and a few aides in attendance.
There were no details of what was being discussed.
There is intense speculation Obama might pick Clinton as his running mate for November's presidential election against Republican John McCain.
Obama has said the process would take time. Clinton, who has expressed an interest in running as vice president, sought to distance herself on Thursday from efforts by supporters to convince Obama to pick her, saying the choice was up to him.
Obama, an Illinois senator, clinched the Democratic nomination on Tuesday. Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, did not immediately concede but told supporters in a letter she would formally back Obama on Saturday.
The meeting with Obama was initiated by Clinton after a daylong series of talks between their aides, The New York Times reported on its website.
Obama had been scheduled to fly back to Chicago after a rally in northern Virginia but stayed behind for the meeting, shedding his campaign plane and the traveling press corps and entourage, the newspaper said.
- Reuters
Dirt that the Phoenix Mars Lander scooped recently from the planet's surface may be too clumpy to be analysed by the machine's onboard system, Nasa says.
A robotic arm retrieved a cup-sized sample of Martian dirt on Friday and placed it on the lander's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyser, or TEGA, which was scheduled to spend about a week determining the soil's water and mineral content.
The TEGA features a screened opening that prevents large particles from clogging it. Only those thinner than 1mm can pass through, and an infrared beam verifies whether they have entered the instrument.
The beam has not yet confirmed any activity and researchers are not sure why, Nasa said in a statement.
Scientists suspect the soil may be clumped together too tightly, Nasa said.
"In the future, we may prepare the soil by pushing down on the surface ... then sprinkle a smaller amount over the door," Ray Arvidson, the team's science lead, said in the statement.
Engineers are also looking for a way to shake some of the current sample down into the TEGA oven, where it would be heated and analyzed.
Scientists may send instructions to vibrate the compartment after they inspect the problem for a day or two, spokeswoman Sara Hammond said.
The lander will also gather other soil samples, examine them with a microscope and mix them with water to determine their composition, Hammond said.
The $US420 million ($NZ554.30 million) lander spent 10 months journeying from Earth and touched down on Mars 12 days ago. Its three-month mission was proposed after the Mars Odyssey detected frozen water below the Martian surface in 2002.
This is the lander's first attempt to analyse soil, which might contain salt left behind by evaporated water or ice.
The single-use compartment will go unused if scientists are unable to coax any particles to fall down, but there are seven others like it onboard, Hammond said.
Reuters
An underground gas explosion at a colliery in Ukraine's Donbass coalfield injured at least three miners with a further 37 missing, officials said.
The blast occurred at about 5am Sunday local time, about 1 km underground at the Karl Marx pit in the Donetsk region, the heart of the coalfield.
"The blast was very powerful. It shattered windows in the mine's administrative office and damaged the paneling of a lift," said Marina Nikitina, spokeswoman for the regional mine safety inspectorate.
Nikitina said four miners had been injured and 37 were missing.
Ukraine's Emergencies Ministry put the number of injured at three, with 40 unaccounted for.
Gas explosions are a frequent occurrence in Ukraine's outdated mines, many of which are loss-making and date from the 19th century.
Three explosions at the Zasyadko mine in Donetsk late last year killed 106 men in two weeks.
Reuters
Pakistan's ruling party has said it is determined to curtail the powers of the presidency in favour of parliament, whether President Pervez Musharraf likes it or not.
Staunch US ally Musharraf, facing a chorus of calls to resign, told journalists at the weekend, in his first meeting with the media for weeks, that he had no plan to quit.
At the same time, Musharraf sounded a generally conciliatory tone saying parliament, dominated by opponents since his allies were defeated in a February election, was supreme.
Musharraf's fate has consumed the attention of the new coalition since the polls, despite an economy that is deteriorating rapidly and a potent threat from al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Pakistan's stock market and currency have both come under pressure because of a combination of factors, including the uncertainty over Musharraf and worry about more turmoil in the nuclear-armed country.
In the meeting with journalists at the weekend, Musharraf said he would accept proposed constitutional amendments the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto aimed to push through parliament.
But in what media interpreted as a warning he would not tolerate a cut in his powers, a confident-sounding Musharraf indicated he would not like to be reduced to a ceremonial head of state, saying he could not become a "useless vegetable".
The PPP brushed aside any objections, saying parliament was sovereign and could make or amend laws and the constitution regardless of whether Musharraf liked it or not.
"Such hollow warnings would not deter the democratic forces from restoring the powers of the parliament," PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar said in a statement.
Bhutto's widower Asif Ali Zardari, who leads her party, has called Musharraf a "relic of the past" and says the PPP does not recognise him as a constitutional president.
Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister former army chief Musharraf overthrew in a 1999 coup and who leads the second largest party in parliament, wants Musharraf impeached or tried for treason.
Sharif's brother, Shahbaz, was on Sunday elected chief minister of Punjab, the country's richest and politically most important province, bolstering the power of their party that won the most seat in the province's assembly in February.
Reuters
Surgeons in Melbourne have saved the legs of a baby in the womb by performing what is believed to be the earliest in-utero surgery of its kind in the world.
Surgeons removed amniotic bands from above the ankles of baby Leah Bowlen while her mother Kylie was 22 weeks pregnant.
Without the surgery, Leah's legs would have naturally amputated.
Monash Medical Centre surgeons performed the operation, which involved inserting a 2mm operating telescope into Kylie's womb.
The constricting bands were then identified and divided using laser and electric current.
Leah, now almost six months old, was born at 30 weeks gestation on January 24, weighing just 1.63kg.
She had further surgery on her left leg at the Royal Children's Hospital days after her birth to help straighten it.
Leah's left leg is fully functioning, with just an indentation mark around her ankle, according to information from Monash Medical Centre.
Surgeons are hopeful that with physiotherapy and massage, Leah's right leg will also function.
A Monash spokeswoman said Leah was believed to be the youngest ever patient to have surgery to remove amniotic bands.
Amniotic band syndrome, or amniotic disruption complex, is a congenital limb abnormality, which occurs in between one in 12,000 and one in 15,000 live births.
AAP
Hillary Clinton ended her historic presidential bid and endorsed Barack Obama early today (NZ time), urging her supporters to unite behind Obama and help recapture the White House for Democrats in November.
In the first step toward healing the wounds of a sometimes bitter five-month Democratic nominating battle, Clinton told cheering supporters at a final campaign rally that she and Obama shared the same values and goals.
"Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run," Clinton told a crowd of about 2000 at the National Building Museum in Washington.
"I endorse him and I throw my full support behind him," she said, with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and her daughter, Chelsea, standing to the side of the stage.
"We will make history together," she said.
Obama will be crowned the Democratic nominee at the party's August nominating convention and will face Republican Senator John McCain in November's election to choose a successor to President George W. Bush.
Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, was once the heavy favourite to become the first female U.S. president. She had resisted calls to pull out of the race for months as the split between their supporters grew wider.
But she said it was time to put aside their differences and concentrate on winning in November.
"This has been a tough fight but the Democratic Party is a family and now it's time to restore the ties that bind us together and to come together," she said.
Clinton's decision to suspend her campaign means she retains some control of her delegates and can still work to repay more than $20 million (10 million pounds) in campaign debt, including more than $11 million she loaned the campaign from her own pocket.
CLINTON GETS SPOTLIGHT
Obama did not appear at the rally, giving Clinton the spotlight for the day. Clinton won more than 17 million votes during the Democratic nominating battle, and Obama has tried to build bridges to her camp ahead of the November campaign.
Clinton was generous in her praise for the Illinois senator who will be the first black presidential nominee of a major US political party.
"I've had a front row seat to his candidacy and I have seen his strength and determination, his grace and his grit," Clinton said.
"When I started this race, I intended to win back the White House and make sure we have a president who puts our country back on the path to peace, prosperity and progress," she said.
"And that's exactly what we are going to do by ensuring that Barack Obama walks through the doors of the Oval Office on January 20, 2009."
She made no mention of speculation she will be Obama's running mate. She has said she is open to the idea, a prospect that excites many supporters but is viewed with skepticism in Obama's camp.
Some of her supporters have tried to pressure Obama into picking her, but her campaign issued a statement on Thursday saying she is not seeking the vice presidential slot.
Obama has named a three-member team to head his vice presidential search and has sworn off further discussion of the choice.
Clinton entered the race in January 2007 as the clear front-runner and was viewed as the almost certain winner for most of the year, but stumbled to a third-place finish behind Obama in the first contest in January in Iowa.
She bounced back five days later to win in New Hampshire, but never recovered from Obama's string of 10 consecutive victories in February.
Reuters
Accused corrupt cop Mark Standen is now facing a second investigation - this time into his long friendship with a jailed drug runner suspected of a rape and murder.
Homicide detectives want to quiz Standen - placed behind bars this week for his alleged role in a $120 million global drug conspiracy - over his close relationship with underworld identity John Anderson.
Career criminal Anderson is also behind bars, awaiting sentence over an attempt to smuggle $A7 million worth of cocaine into Australia.
Investigators from Manly police stumbled upon the NSW Crime Commission deputy's extraordinary connection to the 68-year-old crook three weeks before he himself was arrested by federal police.
Detectives were following a cold-case lead that Anderson was involved in the rape and murder of a Sydney teenager 30 years ago when their routine enquiry found Standen's son Matthew staying in the home of Anderson's estranged wife Susan.
Now NSW Police want access to Standen in jail to question him over any knowledge he had of Anderson's criminal activities.
Anderson was charged with trying to smuggle 27 kilograms of cocaine into Australia chained to the hulls of cargo ships including the infamous Tampa in 2006. His son Michael, 30, was spotted by police attempting to dive under the Tampa before he too was arrested. Michael Anderson is also awaiting sentencing.
Standen has been a close friend of Anderson for at least 30 years and was a regular visitor to his Central Coast home, The Sun-Herald has learned.
Former neighbours of John and Susan Anderson, by co-incidence, had also known the Standen family in Sydney years before. They told how they often saw Mark Standen at the Andersons' home.
"We saw Mark there a number of times but I didn't recognise him as a top policeman until I saw him on the news this week," said the neighbour, who was too scared to be identified.
Anderson and his wife Sue, who hosted lingerie parties, were members of the local gun club and keen divers. Their passion for diving was shared by Standen's 22-year-old son Matthew, who stayed with them. There is no suggestion Matthew had any knowledge of any criminal activity.
Matthew Standen refused to comment when approached at the Standen family home on the Central Coast, where his mother Lynn was being comforted by friends and relatives last week.
The family has been rocked by revelations that Standen, one of Australia's most senior law enforcers, had been accused of attempting to bring in 600 kilograms of pseudoephedrine, used to make the drug ice.
It is alleged the 51-year-old father of four had massive gambling debts and had set up the deal, uncovered by Dutch authorities, while on a luxury trip to Dubai with his mistress, Louise Baker. She works for the Independent Commission Against Corruption. but is not considered a suspect.
Standen has been in trouble in the past. Almost 30 years ago he was departmentally sanctioned for flushing marijuana down a toilet without reporting it had been seized. Yet this failed to slow his rise through the ranks of law enforcement.
The AFP investigation into Standen began in exactly the same month New Zealand authorities had intercepted his friend Anderson's cocaine shipment en route to Australia from South America.
Told of the revelations yesterday, NSW Police Minister David Campbell said he had not been made aware of the interest in Standen's links to Anderson. He said where and when detectives interviewed Standen was a matter for them.
A spokesman for Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione confirmed homicide Strike Force Keldie had been set up to investigate the murder of Trudie Adams who went missing in 1978.
Police sources say the strike force will be driven by cold case specialists and will be seeking to speak to Standen over his friendship with Anderson.
Anderson was among six suspects first identified during the mid-1990s by task force Loquat, which at the time also held hopes of discovering Ms Adams's remains in bushland on Pittwater Peninsula.
The teenager was last seen outside a Sunday night dance at Newport Surf Club in June 1978. Investigators formed the conclusion she was pack raped.
Following her murder nine girls came forward to report also having been raped by two armed men who had abducted them while hitchhiking along Barrenjoey Road over the previous 10 months.
Eight weeks after Ms Adams disappeared, so too did 18-year-old Michelle Pope and her 21-year-old boyfriend Stephen Lapthorne. None of the bodies has ever been found.
Reuters
Hundreds of naked cyclists rode through the streets of Mexico's capital to demand respect from drivers in a city choked with some 4 million vehicles.
More than 500 men and women, half of them nude, pedalled along Mexico City's historic Reforma Avenue to the vast Zocalo Square, chanting, "Save your planet, use a bicycle!"
Some had "emission-free vehicle" painted on their backs.
"We're riding nude to see if this way they'll see us, so they don't run over any more of us," said student Alejandro Hernandez, standing naked before the ride.
"Being naked means we aren't invisible. The motorists don't respect us, they see us as a nuisance," he said.
To combat daily gridlock and chronic air pollution in the sprawling metropolis of about 20 million people, the capital's leftist government is promoting bicycle use and has begun building a network of cycling lanes.
But the lanes are still few and far between, so the city's growing number of cyclists must ride alongside old buses, trucks and stressed motorists.
Mexico City is one of the world's most polluted capitals, along with Beijing, blighted by its thin, high-altitude air and a ring of surrounding mountains that traps exhaust fumes from buses and factories on the city outskirts.
Authorities have worked to remove the worst-polluting vehicles from the road. But as the capital's population grows, the city gains up to 250,000 new cars each year.
Reuters
A man was arrested for trying to enter the home of Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in what the government called an "attack" but police said appeared to be a thwarted break in.
"We believe the motive was unlawful benefit," said police spokesman Veton Elshani.
The suspect was wounded in the arm after security guards spotted him on the balcony of the Pristina home shortly before midnight on Friday and opened fire.
A security source said the 19-year-old had been reported to police by his father. "He's a thief," the source said, adding that the suspect already had a criminal record for theft.
The prime minister's wife and son were at home at the time of the incident, but Thaci was outside Pristina.
The security guards told police there was an exchange of fire, and the government stepped up security for cabinet officials.
"Last night my family was attacked," Thaci, an ethnic Albanian former guerrilla commander, told a news conference.
"No one should have the power to attack the rule of law, freedom and security of Kosovo," Thaci said.
Police said they were unsure whether more than one person was involved.
Thaci led the territory's 1998-99 guerrilla war against Serb rule, which ended in an 11-week Nato bombing campaign to drive out Serb forces and halted their killing and ethnic cleansing of Albanian civilians.
He became prime minister in January, and Kosovo declared independence from Serbia the following month, after nine years as a ward of the United Nations.
Kosovo's postwar politics has been marked by bitter, sometimes violent rivalry. The main political factions control competing security and intelligence structures, and have often been accused of links to organised crime.
Reuters
Zimbabwe's High Court overturned a police ban on opposition rallies this weekend ahead of the June 27 presidential run-off, a lawyer for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said.
"The effect of the order is to allow MDC rallies to proceed. The order simply says that police should not interfere with the MDC rallies. We made an urgent chamber application after police wrote to say the rallies scheduled for this weekend should not continue," MDC lawyer Charles Kwaramba said.
He said High Court Judge Alfas Chitakunye gave the order on Saturday afternoon. The application only sought to challenge the police ban on MDC rallies scheduled for this weekend.
"The ruling is logical. What is disturbing is we have to go to the High Court each time we want to meet our supporters. That only happens in a dictatorship. We are not an underground or guerrilla movement, we need to meet the people," MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said.
He said the rallies the party planned for this weekend would go ahead.
Police on Friday banned several of the planned rallies in the campaign for the presidential run-off between the MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai and veteran leader Robert Mugabe because authorities could not guarantee the safety of party leaders.
Chamisa said the police decision to bar opposition rallies was "deplorable".
"It is absolutely deplorable that the police and some state institutions have willingly become agents of repression. They seem to be taking instructions from ZANU-PF," Chamisa said.
Zimbabwean police arrested another opposition lawmaker - Eric Matinenga - on Saturday, a day after Tsvangirai was detained for the second time this week ahead of the run-off vote.
Six MDC lawmakers have been arrested for various offences since the March 29 poll, in which Tsvangirai beat Mugabe but failed to win the majority needed to avoid a run-off.
The MDC accuses Mugabe of trying to sabotage Tsvangirai's campaign in order to preserve his 28-year hold on power.
Mugabe, however, blames the MDC party for violence and his government this week ordered all aid agencies to stop their humanitarian programmes, saying they were interfering in the country's politics.
The Southern African Development Community, a regional grouping of 14 nations, including Zimbabwe, is sending observers to monitor the run-off.
Tensions have been running high ahead of the vote.
On Thursday, police stopped and held five US and two British diplomats for several hours after they visited victims of political violence. Zimbabwe also barred relief agencies from doing work in the country, suffering economic ruin.
Reuters
Oil jumped more than 8 per cent to a record $US139 ($NZ181) a barrel overnight, extending a two-day rally to more than $US16 as the slumping US currency and rising tensions between Israel and Iran attracted a flood of buyers.
United States stocks plunged on the massive spike, causing the Dow to end down nearly 400 points on renewed fears that the US economy is threatened by 1970s-style stagflation after government data also showed the jobless rate jumped the most in 22 years in May.
Based on the latest data, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 394.64 points, or 3.13 per cent, to end unofficially at 12,209.81. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index slid 43.37 points, or 3.09 per cent, to finish unofficially at 1,360.68.
The Nasdaq Composite Index tumbled 75.38 points, or 2.96 per cent, to close unofficially at 2,474.56.
For the week, the Dow dropped 3.5 pe rcent, the S&P 500 fell 2.6 per cent and the Nasdaq shed 1.9 per cent.
Oil prices could top $US150 by July 4, one of the busiest US travel holidays of the year, as strong demand in Asia triggers a slowdown in shipments of crude to the United States, investment bank Morgan Stanley said.
"We are calling for a short-term spike in oil prices," the bank said in a research note.
US crude settled up $US10.75 at $US138.54 a barrel before touching an all-time high of $US139.12 in its biggest gain in dollar terms on record, adding to a rise of $US5.49 on Thursday. London Brent crude settled $US10.15 higher at $US137.69, off the record $138.12 hit earlier.
"It's eye-popping. It's absolutely stunning," said Chris Feltin, analyst at Tristone CapitaL Inc in Calgary.
Oil has risen 44 per cent this year, threatening economic growth in major consumer countries like the United States, already hobbled by a housing crisis.
Analysts have said the dramatic rally in oil prices is due to rising demand in China and other developing economies as well as an influx of cash from investors seeking a hedge against the weaker dollar and inflation.
The greenback extended weakness against other currencies on Friday on data showing the US economy lost jobs for the fifth straight month and the unemployment rate shot up to its highest in more than three years.
The drop in the dollar added to losses from Thursday when European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said a number of policymakers wanted higher interest rates, possibly as soon as next month.
"Obviously there's a lot of concern on the economic impacts of a weakening US dollar. That seems to be driving some of the momentum here today," said Feltin.
Further support came from remarks by Israel's transport minister that an attack on Iran's nuclear sites looked "unavoidable," the most explicit threat yet against Tehran from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government.
Worries of a potential disruption of the OPEC member's crude supply have helped support prices over the past year.
"We've had a huge historic rally on little fundamental input, other than the weakness of the dollar and the news this morning out of Israel that seems to have pushed some geopolitical risk premium back in the market," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch & Associates in Galena, Illinois.
Morgan Stanley forecast the diversion of Middle East oil shipments away from the United States to Asian markets could push US crude to $US150 a barrel by the US July 4th holiday.
"Middle East oil exports are stable, but Asia is taking an unprecedented share," Morgan Stanley said in a report, adding US inventories have dropped by 35 million barrels since March.
"Robust Asian non-OECD demand growth, coupled with a stagnant global oil supply backdrop, appears to be pricing out Atlantic basin consumers while at the same time driving Atlantic inventories to critically low levels."
The report added to a string of upward price forecast revisions by analysts, with Goldman Sachs in May predicting prices could tip $US200 a barrel within the next two years.
A six-year rally in oil has sent prices up six-fold as demand from emerging economies such as China and India strain supplies.
High prices have started to eat away at global growth however, with some consumers such as the United States and the United Kingdom showing signs of lowering consumption.
Some Asian governments - including India - have decided to cut fuel subsidies, stirring concern rising prices could cut further into demand.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), an adviser to 27 industrialised countries, said it may cut its 2008 demand growth projection further after having already more than halved it to 1.03 million barrels per day (bpd).
Reuters
An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites looks "unavoidable" given the apparent failure of sanctions to deny Tehran technology with bomb-making potential, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's deputies has said.
"If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective," Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
"Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable," said the former army chief who has also been defense minister.
It was the most explicit threat yet against Iran from a member of Olmert's government, which, like the Bush administration, has preferred to hint at force as a last resort should UN Security Council sanctions be deemed a dead end.
Iran has defied Western pressure to abandon its uranium enrichment projects, which it says are for peaceful electricity generation rather than bomb-building. The leadership in Tehran has also threatened to retaliate against Israel - believed to have the Middle East's only atomic arsenal - and US targets in the Gulf for any attack on Iran.
Mofaz also said in the interview that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, "would disappear before Israel does."
A spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did not address Mofaz's comments directly but said that "all options must remain on the table" and said more could be done to put financial pressure on Tehran.
"Israel believes strongly that while the UN sanctions are positive, much more needs to be done to pressure the regime in Tehran to cease its aggressive nuclear programme," spokesman Mark Regev said.
"We believe the international community should be considering further tangible steps such as embargoing refined petroleum headed for Iran, sanctions against Iranian businessmen traveling abroad, tightening the pressure on Iranian financial institutions and other such steps," he added.
Mofaz's remarks came as he and several other senior members of Olmert's Kadima Party prepare for a possible run for top office should a corruption scandal force the Israeli prime minister to step down.
Iranian-born Mofaz has been a main party rival of the Israeli prime minister, particularly following the 2006 elections when Olmert was forced to hand the defense portfolio to Labour, his main coalition partner, at Mofaz's expense.
Mofaz, who is also designated as a deputy prime minister, has remained privy to Israel's defense planning. He is a member of Olmert's security cabinet and leads regular strategic coordination talks with the US State Department.
Israeli planes destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981.
A similar Israeli sortie over Syria last September razed what the US administration said was a nascent nuclear reactor built with North Korean help. Syria denied having any such facility.
Independent analysts have questioned, however, whether Israel's armed forces can take on Iran alone, as its nuclear sites are numerous, distant and well-fortified.
Reuters
Nightblade
06-08-2008, 04:16 PM
God, I hate OPEC...
Attack comes a day after 13 were killed in two bombings at a train station
ALGIERS, Algeria - A bomb exploded on Monday at a bus station in a town east of Algiers, killing 20 people, a security source said.
The bomb went off in Bouira, some 75 miles from the capital, the source told Reuters.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility
It was the fourth deadly bomb attack in six days in regions east of the capital of the oil and gas exporting North African country.
On Sunday, two bombs in quick succession killed killing 13 people, including a French engineer and Algerian firefighters and soldiers who responded to the first blast, a security official said.
The first bomb killed a Frenchman working on a renovation project at the station in Beni Amrane, about 60 miles east of the capital, the security official said. The second bomb hit minutes later, as security officials and rescue workers arrived at the scene. Both devices appeared to be remote-controlled.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Algeria's al-Qaida affiliate, al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa, is known to be active in the area.
The French engineer, working on a project to boost the number of rail lines at the station, was killed as he prepared to leave the site in a car, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to media. The man's Algerian driver was also killed. France's Foreign Ministry said it was in contact with Algerian authorities about the attack but provided no other details.
The second bomb came about five minutes later. Eight soldiers and three firefighters were killed in that explosion, the official said. Several others were wounded, though the exact number was unclear.
Other attacks
The North African nation's Islamic militants have mounted several attacks over the past week. On Wednesday, a suicide attack on a military barracks and a second bombing at a cafe shook a beach neighborhood outside the Algerian capital, wounding six people. A day later, a roadside bomb killed six soldiers in the city of Boumerdes.
The attacks of the past week have come as Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika prepares to inaugurate an international trade fair Monday outside Algiers, a high-profile event that will draw members of foreign governments.
Though Algeria has battled an Islamic insurgency for years, the number of attacks has risen dramatically since the country's main militant group vowed allegiance to al-Qaida in 2006.
Most of the country's bombings have been claimed by al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa, formerly known as the GSPC. The group grew out of an insurgency that raged in the country in the 1990s. The violence, which has left as many as 200,000 dead, was prompted by the army's cancellation of legislative elections in 1992 that an Islamist party was poised to win.
Many attacks in Algeria have targeted the national security services and military, while others have struck foreigners. Sunday's attack was apparently crafted to hit both of those targets. In December, a double suicide bombing in Algiers killed 41 people, including 17 U.N. workers. In April 2007, coordinated suicide strikes against the main government offices in central Algiers and a police station killed 33.
MSNBC
The village of Damadola is caught between tribal loyalties and America's wrath.
Damadola used to be about as quiet as any place on earth. Roughly 2,000 people, subsistence farmers mostly, live in this tree-shaded village of terraced wheat fields and mud-brick houses in Pakistan's northwestern tribal agency of Bajaur. But it's anything but peaceful now. The Afghan border is only two miles away, via a network of unpoliced mountain trails that link the insurgent strongholds of Kunar province (rumored to be the refuge of Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri) with Peshawar and other Pakistani towns.
The location helps explain why more than 100 people in and around Damadola have been killed by U.S. Predator strikes since 2006. While the dead have apparently included some who were committed enemies of America, locals claim others were no more than bystanders—children among them. U.S. operators take extraordinary care in picking targets for Predator strikes, which in the tribal areas are thought to be conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. (The U.S. government does not comment on alleged operations in Pakistan.) But in practice their definition of a legitimate target includes those who make it possible for militants to thrive. "If people in those communities are truly concerned about their welfare, they should not harbor terrorists, and they should oppose those who do," says one U.S. official, asking not to be named when discussing sensitive material. "These terrorists—especially the foreigners—are a menace to Pakistan and to the world at large."
In the United States, few would question that brutal calculus—one thing that both presidential candidates and the vast majority of citizens would agree upon is the legitimacy of going after the Qaeda network in Pakistan's tribal badlands. But Pakistan's new civilian leadership complains that the U.S. strikes—and the collateral damage they've caused—are making the job of pacifying the area harder. At ground level, in mountain hamlets like Damadola, things aren't always as clear as they may seem through the viewfinder of a deadly, high-flying drone.
Villagers in Damadola say it's hard to say no to men with guns, especially when many of those men are your neighbors and relatives. It's even tougher in Pakistan's tribal areas, where the Pashtuns' ancient ethical code requires that every visitor be treated hospitably. "Even if a bloodthirsty enemy comes to your door you have to welcome him," says a gray-bearded villager named Bakhti Gul. He can't help adding: "Especially those who are chased by the U.S." His nephew was among the victims of the most recent Predator attack, early on the morning of May 14. The young man had joined the militants, Bakhti Gul admits, but only after an earlier Predator strike on a nearby madrassa had killed more than 80 of his schoolmates.
That attack, in October 2006, illustrates the murkiness of the conflict in the tribal areas. Pakistani officials claimed at the time that the school was a militant training camp. Locals claim that many of the dead were youngsters, although at least a few may have been valid targets—one in particular was a close associate of Maulana Faqir Mohammad, deputy head of the Pakistan Taliban Movement, under the notorious suicide-bomb trainer Baitullah Mehsud.
Getting firm intelligence on targets from afar is nearly impossible. Shah Khan, 45, a weathered subsistence farmer, saw the first Predator strike on Damadola, before dawn on Jan. 13, 2006. He was tending a newborn calf when he heard a buzzing in the sky near his sister's house, about 100 yards up the hill. He saw a flash of light and what looked like a rain of fire—and then the house exploded. "It looked like Judgment Day," he says. The concussion knocked him down, but he staggered to his feet and ran up the hill. Three of his sister's children lay dead in the rubble. U.S. officials later said the target was Zawahiri himself, who was thought to be meeting with fellow jihadists. Local officials said the attack killed 18 people, but Zawahiri wasn't there. U.S. officials remain convinced that they barely missed him. Khan insists there were no Qaeda members or insurgents in the house.
Even good intelligence can go bad. The May 14 strike targeted a guesthouse belonging to a local preacher, Maulvi Obaidullah. Men had gathered at the house the evening before. They were a diverse group: Gul's nephew, the young militant, was there, but so were the village shopkeeper Haji Omar Shah and a local journalist named Akhondzada. Obaidullah's 14-year-old nephew sat down with the men, as did the preacher's armed militant son, Azizullah, and several local boys who were just hanging out.
The gathering was not atypical. Most men in the tribal areas are armed, and most civilians prefer the protection of the militants, who keep bandits at bay, to government forces, who almost never venture up the mountainsides. Just before dinner, a group of about a dozen Taliban insurgents knocked at the big wooden door and walked in, carrying AK-47s and laden with spare clips. Most of them, too, were local men. Everyone sat down on carpets and pillows on the floor or wooden beds against the walls and tucked into a meal of chicken, potatoes and flatbread. The conversation, the shopkeeper Shah remembers, was largely about Islamabad's messy politics, the high price of food and recent exploits by Taliban fighters.
Shah walked home about 9:30 p.m., he says. Obaidullah left, too, after hospitably prevailing on Akhondzada, the journalist, to stay the night. Shah says he's sure no foreigners or other strangers had been there, and other villagers say the same.
But late that night another band of armed men arrived at the guesthouse. An Afghan Taliban source tells NEWSWEEK that Obaidullah's son had called a meeting of local militants to welcome an important visitor: a senior Qaeda financial operative known as Sheik Suleiman al-Jazeeri. According to the Afghan source, who has proved very reliable in the past and who declines to be named for security reasons, the Algerian-born moneyman often traveled through the area, shuttling between his base in Kunar province and the financial facilities of Peshawar. Secrecy is a matter of basic survival for someone like al-Jazeeri; only one or two local militants may have been told that he was on his way. The arrivals of senior operatives like him generally seem to be scheduled after most villagers are sound asleep.
The Predator's commanders were awake, however, and watching. The blast from the Hellfire missile was so loud that Khan Mohammad says he thought it was the end of the world. The 30-year-old farmer peered outside and then raced to where his neighbor's guesthouse had been. The house where Obaidullah lives and the mosque where he preaches were untouched, but nothing of the guesthouse remained standing other than charred pieces of two walls. Mohammad and other neighbors clawed through heaps of broken bricks, dried mud and twisted steel reinforcing rods in search of survivors.
Villagers say they think 17 people died that night, including Obaidullah's 14-year-old nephew and the visiting journalist, a father of eight. They can't be sure al-Jazeeri was among the dead. Armed militants took control of the site by sunup, spiriting away several corpses to be buried in secret. Local journalists were kept from filming or photographing any of the dead. Pakistani security forces stayed studiously away until the militants left 12 hours later, having combed through the debris.
Could the villagers of Damadola save themselves by simply not "harboring terrorists," as the Americans say? Mohammed Abdul Mateen, a retired science teacher who left Damadola several years ago but visits frequently, agrees the militants are destroying the place, but says the Hellfire attacks only increase their strength. "Soon the last educated villagers will be gone, leaving an illiterate people in the hands of narrow-minded mullahs," he says. Kids in once quiet Damadola are now terrified by loud noises, which could signal an incoming U.S. spy plane. "The land under our feet is on fire," says shopkeeper Haji Omar Shah. "Where can we run?" Since mid-May, villagers say U.S. choppers and drones have been flying over Damadola regularly, swooping low to the ground. They're sure more trouble is coming.
Msnbc
At least 20 others wounded in Sunday attack
BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomb exploded near an American patrol base Sunday in northern Iraq, killing one soldier and wounding 20 other people, the U.S. military said.
Eighteen of the wounded were American soldiers and two were Iraqi contractors working at the base in Tamim province, according to a brief statement from the military.
Tamim has a mixed population of Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, with the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as its capital.
Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir, a senior officer in the Kirkuk police department, said the car bomb targeted a U.S. patrol base in a mostly Sunni Arab residential area in Rashad, about 25 miles southwest of Kirkuk.
The suicide attacker rammed his vehicle into blast walls outside the gates of the U.S. base, Qadir said.
Earlier, the U.S. military issued a statement saying an American soldier died late Saturday when his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad.
The casualties' names were withheld until the families could be notified.
At least 4,094 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Associated Press
Rescuers have brought to the surface alive two miners missing after a gas explosion at a Ukrainian colliery, and tried to push down a ventilation shaft to find 34 of their missing comrades.
The regional mine inspectorate in Ukraine's Donbass coalfield said the body of a third miner was also found about 750m below the surface at the Karl Marx mine northeast of the regional centre Donetsk.
Officials overseeing rescue work said teams were unable to push any deeper through rubble in the goods shaft at the mine, in operation for the past 110 years.
Efforts focused on moving through a ventilation shaft to get down to 1000 metres, the depth where the powerful explosion occurred and where the remaining miners were believed to be trapped.
Rescue workers told Ukrainian television they believed other miners might still be alive 1000m below the surface.
"They say they have heard voices at two levels," Coal Industry Minister Viktor Poltavets told Fifth Channel television.
"For the moment we don't know what is going on at 1000m. But it is our understanding that there are people up to that depth. So we have to get through faster."
The television said the two rescued miners were brought to the surface in a small metal cage, briefly examined and taken to hospital. Both appeared to be in good health.
"We made our way to 750m. They had made their presence known by tapping so we knew there were people there," rescuer Valentyn Kliyenko told Fifth Channel. "We put them in the cage, took them up and handed them over to the medics."
Five staff on the surface suffered burns and other injuries after being struck by equipment tossed about in the explosion, which blocked the two main shafts. Veteran miners described it as one of the most powerful blasts experienced in the industry.
Gas explosions are a frequent occurrence in Ukraine's mines, many of which are unprofitable and date from the 19th century. Many coal deposits are at a depth of 1 km or more, making mining operations more difficult.
The Karl Marx mine in the town of Yenakiyevo was one of 23 where work had been suspended to check on documented safety violations and only restoration and repair work was permitted.
Officials said such work was being conducted at the colliery on Sunday and dangerous concentrations of gas had been detected shortly before the blast.
Post-Soviet authorities have come under pressure to shut down the pits.
Eleven miners were killed in the last explosion in the Donbass coalfield two weeks ago. Three blasts at the Zasyadko mine in Donetsk late last year killed 106 men in two weeks.
Reuters
A systematic government campaign of murder and brutality has eliminated any chance of a fair presidential election in Zimbabwe, an international rights group says.
A report by US-based Human Rights Watch said it had documented at least 36 politically-motivated murders and 2000 victims of a campaign of killings, abductions, beatings and torture by the ruling ZANU-PF party of President Robert Mugabe.
It said more than 3000 people had fled the violence which began after March 29 elections in which ZANU-PF lost control of parliament for the first time and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in the presidential race.
Official results showed Tsvangirai fell short of the absolute majority needed for outright victory and a run-off against Mugabe will be held on June 27.
"Since the run-off was announced, the violence in Zimbabwe has got even worse. Zimbabweans cannot vote freely if they fear their vote may get them killed," said the human rights group's Africa director Georgette Gagnon.
The report said the government had incited and perpetrated the violence to intimidate and punish opposition supporters and had failed to prosecute those responsible, who included the security forces, liberation war veterans and youth militia. The violent campaign "has extinguished any chance of a free and fair presidential runoff," HRW said.
Mugabe accuses the opposition of inciting violence and Deputy Attorney-General Johannes Tomana on Monday told the state-controlled Herald newspaper that both sides were involved.
Human Rights Watch said ZANU-PF and its allies had established torture camps and re-education meetings around the country to try to force opposition supporters to vote for Mugabe. Hundreds of people had been beaten with logs, whips and bicycle chains.
The group said party officials and war veterans beat six men to death and tortured another 70 people including a 76-year-old woman at a re-education meeting in northeastern Zimbabwe. In another incident, around 20 men suspected of voting for Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were beaten in front of their village. A 45-year-old man said he was beaten with whips, chains and iron bars and his leg was broken.
HRW said it had extensive evidence that senior army and police officers were directly implicated in the violence.
"President Robert Mugabe and his government...bear full responsibility for these serious crimes. They have shown gross indifference to the plight of the people, allowing senior-ranking security officers, war veterans, youth militia and ZANU-PF free rein to commit horrifying abuses," Gagnon said.
Six MDC lawmakers have been arrested since the first poll and Tsvangirai was detained twice last week while campaigning. The High Court on Saturday overturned a police ban on several planned MDC rallies.
The government last week accused aid agencies of political interference and ordered them to stop humanitarian programmes.
Deputy Attorney-General Tomana told the Herald authorities had prosecuted over 80 cases of political violence.
"In some provinces it is almost 50-50, with both parties violating the law. We have treated both offenders equally, we deny them bail and speedily handle the cases," he said.
HRW called on the African Union and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to pressure Mugabe to end the violence and urged them to deploy strong poll observer teams.
It said violence had been particularly bad in the ZANU-PF's former rural strongholds where the MDC made significant gains in the March 29 elections.
Reuters
Spanish truckers have begun an indefinite strike over rocketing fuel prices, smashing windscreens of vehicles that crossed picket lines and Spaniards stockpiled petrol over fears of shortages.
Long lines of trucks formed on the Spanish-French border today, Spanish television showing pictures of vehicles with broken windscreens, lights ripped out and tyres punctured after they tried to defy the strike.
Long queues formed outside Spanish petrol stations and at some hypermarkets, and truckers say supermarkets will run out of goods within days once the strike bites.
The truckers have put up blockades throughout Spain in their call for assistance to cope with a more than a 35 percent increase in fuel costs this year.
Truckers' leaders dismissed a government offer of credit lines and other measures for drivers on Sunday as insufficient.
FUEL PRICE PROTESTS DISRUPT TWO INDIAN STATES
Indian police used water canon and batons in Kashmir on Monday to disperse hundreds of government employees protesting over fuel price rises, while a general strike also shut down the northeastern state of Assam.
Elsewhere in the country, though, life continued as normal as protests over last week's rise in fuel prices appeared to taper off.
India increased petrol and diesel prices by around 10 percent last Wednesday, after the cost of subsidising fuel in the face of record-breaking crude prices had brought state oil companies close to bankruptcy.
With less than a year to go to elections, the government's communist allies and the opposition called for protests against the move, but many people complained that strikes in several states last week had only made a difficult situation worse.
The fuel price blow was also cushioned after several state governments announced duty cuts of between two and five percentage points, although Kashmir has not yet announced any duty cuts and Assam made only a tiny cut in sales tax.
In Kashmir, dozens of people were also detained after government employees gathered outside the office of the state's chief minister in the heart of Srinagar to protest against the fuel price rise.
"Roll back price of petrol, diesel and cooking gas," the protesters shouted before being dispersed by police.
A four-day strike called by private transport operators demanding an increase in passenger fares and freight charges also forced thousands of people to walk to work.
Reuters
Australia is to lead the way on kick-starting the faltering nuclear disarmament process, with former foreign minister Gareth Evans to co-chair an international commission.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced his plan to establish an international commission on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament after an emotional visit to the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Japan, the only country to have come under nuclear attack, will be asked to take part, as will other nations, Mr Rudd told students at Kyoto University.
"It's impossible to visit Hiroshima and not be moved by what you see," Mr Rudd told reporters after his speech.
"It is a graphic human story of the horrendous impact of nuclear weapons."
The bomb that flattened Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing 140,000 people, was a single 15 kilotonne bomb.
"Across the world today we have some 10,000 nuclear warheads currently in operation and some 20,000 in storage - many, and probably most, of greater capacity than that bomb which took out Hiroshima all those years ago," Mr Rudd said.
The commission will examine the work of two similar earlier panels, the Australian-led Canberra Commission and Japan's Tokyo Forum, to develop a plan of action for the next nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference in 2010.
Its first task will be to report to a major international conference of experts in Australia late next year.
Mr Rudd will discuss the question of who should co-chair the commission alongside Mr Evans with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda in Tokyo on Thursday.
Mr Rudd said the NPT was under great pressure with some countries developing nuclear weapons outside its framework and others like North Korea defying the international community and leaving the treaty altogether.
"There are two courses of action available to the community of nations - to allow the NPT to continue to fragment, or to exert every global effort to restore and defend the treaty," he said.
The focus on the danger of nuclear weapons had dropped off since the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States and stockpiles dwindled from their peaks in the late 1980s, he said.
Russia and the US had negotiated treaties to cut the number of weapons while South Africa and Ukraine had shown it was possible for nuclear states to disarm.
"We no longer live with the daily fear of nuclear war between the superpowers. But nuclear weapons remain," he told the students.
"New states continue to seek to acquire them. Some states, including states in our own region, are expanding their existing capacity.
"Hiroshima reminds us of the terrible power of these weapons ... Hiroshima should remind us that we must be vigilant afresh to stop their continued proliferation."
AAP
Britain's Labour Party deputy leader Harriet Harman was forced to leave home as two protesters camped out on her roof to demand that divorced fathers be given better access to their children.
The two are from the Fathers 4 Justice protest group, which has staged several high profile stunts in the past including pelting then Prime Minister Tony Blair with condoms full of purple flour in the House of Commons debating chamber in 2006.
Police surrounded Harman's house in south London and waited for the two costumed men, who said they had enough food for a week, to come down.
"I don't think it is fair to the police resources to be tied up outside my house because of this demonstration when they could be doing other important policing work," she told reporters outside her home.
"I also think it is unfair on the neighbours, so we are moving out," she said, adding that although the protesters said they wanted to meet her they had made no attempt to do so.
Fathers 4 Justice says the justice system is prejudiced against divorced fathers, denying them basic visitation rights to see their children.
The two protesters, clad as comic superheroes, hung a banner reading "A father is for life not just conception" down the side of the house and gave media interviews on mobile phones as they sat on the roof in balmy summer weather.
Fathers 4 Justice founder Matt O'Connor, who was not in the rooftop protest, told Reuters the pair had simply walked into Harman's garden while she was at home and used a ladder to climb onto the house.
He said he had asked to meet Harman through his member of parliament but had been rebuffed.
"Harriett Harman and the government have refused all dialogue with F4J for the past two years," O'Connor said.
"We are now resuming a full-scale campaign of direct action against the government, its ministers and the judiciary. F4J is now the last line in the defence of fatherhood."
Reuters
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:23 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:23 PM
Thanks for the story.
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:23 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:23 PM
Thanks for the story.
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:24 PM
That's really great to hear, thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:24 PM
Thanks for the story.
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:24 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:24 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-10-2008, 09:25 PM
Thanks for the story.
Black Widow
06-11-2008, 10:00 PM
Doctors have revealed how the teenage daughter of Austrian rapist Josef Fritzl said "hello" to them as she was woken from a coma - and later said she wants to go to a Robbie Williams gig.
Kerstin was unconscious and critically ill when admitted to hospital on April 19 and placed on a life support machine.
She was put in a medically-induced coma and has now been successfully revived.
At a news conference in Amstetten, Austria, doctors said her recovery had been surprising and "a great relief". There should be no major lasting damage.
Kerstin, 19, was the eldest of seven children fathered by Fritzl, 73, and his daughter Elisabeth, who was imprisoned in a dungeon underneath the family home in Amstetten for 24 years.
"She opened her eyes and showed emotions for the first time, we laughed and she laughed," said Amstetten hospital chief Albert Reiter, adding that Elisabeth Fritzl was able to quickly visit her daughter.
"It was important that the mother came to her daughter's bedside," said Mr Reiter, noting the hospital had managed to keep these visits hidden from the media.
Doctors revealed how they had created a flat for the family where they could live a normal life. Three teachers are providing the children with lessons.
Kerstin is having therapy to rebuild her emotional and physical strength. She has been taking steps accompanied by her mother.
She can read and write and has expressed the desire to go on a boat and to see a Robbie Williams concert.
Mr Reiter said: "Even three days before her breathing apparatus was removed she was lying there almost dancing in her bed listening to Robbie Williams, so for me that was really the time when we (decided to) force through the mobilisation."
Kerstin had spent her entire life in the windowless cellar with her mum, now aged 42, and two brothers.
Three of her other siblings lived "normal" lives as Fritzl's "grandchildren" while another child died shortly after birth.
Doctors told reporters the family's reunion had been "a wonderful coming together - beautiful to see".
Kerstin's admission to hospital lifted the lid on the 'House of Horrors' abuse scandal.
Her mother and siblings are currently staying at a nearby psychiatric clinic.
Fritzl, who remains in custody pending charges, had confessed to the abuse, police have said.
Sky News
Black Widow
06-11-2008, 10:01 PM
The wife of the man who tried to bomb a London Tube station has been convicted of keeping secret his plans for "carnage and mass murder".
Yeshi Girma, 32, knew all along of Hussain Osman's plot to massacre travellers at Shepherd's Bush station on July 21, 2005.
But she did not warn police of the attack, the Old Bailey heard.
It was only because of the fact that the bomb had been put together so badly that there was not a repeat of the July 7 attacks that had rocked the capital two weeks earlier, killing 52 people.
Girma, of Stockwell, south London, was found guilty by the Old Bailey jury of having information about terrorism and "without reasonable excuse" failing to disclose it.
Just over half an hour after his failed attack on the station, Osman was on the phone to his wife to set in motion an escape plan, the court heard.
Girma, the mother of Osman's three children, helped him flee to Brighton.
He later took a Eurostar train to Paris then travelled on to Rome, where he was arrested.
The court heard that Girma knew her husband had fallen under the spell of radical Islamists.
She even allowed him to take their young son away to a training camp in Cumbria where he met four of the five other July 21 plotters.
Her own fingerprints were discovered on tapes featuring "extremist Islamic preaching" by firebrands such as Abu Hamza.
Max Hill QC, prosecuting, said: "Yeshi Girma had prior knowledge of the events of 21/7. She had some information about what the bombers intended to do on 21/7, but failed to bring this to the attention of the police."
Girma claimed in court she did not live with her husband and knew little of the plot.
Mulu Girma, 24, from Brighton, and Esayas Girma, 22, from Stockwell, Yeshi's sister and brother, were both found guilty of failing to disclose information.
Mulu's boyfriend Mohamed Kabashi, 25, from Brighton, pleaded guilty to both charges before the three-and-a-half-month trial, jurors have been told.
Kabashi's flatmates Shadi Abdelgadir, 25, and Omer Almagboul, 22, also from Brighton, were both cleared of the allegations.
Sky News
Black Widow
06-11-2008, 10:08 PM
Marine experts believe 26 dolphins who died in Cornwall became stranded after being frightened by an underwater disturbance.
A number of theories have been forwarded to explain the deaths, one of the worst mass strandings ever in the UK.
It had been thought the striped dolphins came inland to chase fish and then became beached along the Percuil river, near Falmouth.
But Tony Woodley, spokesman for British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR), said: "Very few had anything in their stomachs.
"That adds weight to the theory that they were scared ashore.
"It is another unusual factor in this extremely unusual stranding."
Attention has now switched to the Royal Navy, which was carrying out exercises in Falmouth Bay with ships and a submarine.
The Ministry of Defence said a survey vessel had been using low power, high frequency, short range equipment to map the sea bed about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Falmouth at the time.
A spokesman said: "It is considered extremely unlikely that this operation could have affected the mammals in any way."
He also confirmed that live firing exercises had been carried out off Eddystone Light, south of Plymouth, on Friday.
But the dolphins were found dead early on Monday morning, 60 nautical miles away.
A Royal Navy spokesman added: "There has been no evidence of any of our vessels' sonar ever playing a part in beaching incidents like this.
"The Royal Navy takes take its environmental responsibilities very seriously and always carry out environmental assessments before putting energy in the water."
He said no vessel in the South West had been using low frequency sonar at the time and the submarine's sonar had not been transmitting.
Alan Knight, chairman of BDMLR, said: "I have never heard of anything like this, certainly not in the UK and possibly not anywhere.
"My own personal conclusion is that there was some sort of disturbance that has caused the animals to panic."
Another theory was that a pod of 15 dolphins became stranded, issued distress calls which were picked up by others who followed the signal and also became stuck.
The Natural History Museum said its zoologists from the National Whale Stranding Scheme were working with vets from the Zoological Society of London to unravel the mystery.
It said marine strandings occurred for a number of reasons, including sickness, disorientation, natural mortality, extreme weather conditions or injury.
Sky News
JohnCenaFan28
06-12-2008, 12:54 AM
Thanks for the interesting story.
JohnCenaFan28
06-12-2008, 12:55 AM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-12-2008, 12:55 AM
Thanks for the story.
Black Widow
06-12-2008, 06:31 PM
48 people injured; 2 others die in Kansas twisters, and area could see more
NBC News and news services
updated 11:54 a.m. ET June 12, 2008
BLENCOE, Iowa - The Midwest remained on the lookout for more tornadoes Thursday, after two twisters Wednesday killed six people — four of them Boy Scouts at an Iowa camp where Gov. Chet Culver described the devastation as "horrific."
"The devastation was massive through the campgrounds," Culver told NBC's "TODAY" show.
The twister Wednesday night set off a frantic search to reach others in the piles of debris and downed trees in the hills of western Iowa. Forty-eight children and adults were injured.
"All four of the young men who were killed were Scouts," Culver said. Three of the victims — Josh Fennen, 13; Sam Thomsen, 13; and Ben Petrzilka, 14 — were from Omaha. Officials said the fourth victim was Aaron Eilerts, 14, of Eagle Grove, Iowa.
Culver paid tribute to the Scouts who came to the aid of their injured colleagues, describing them as "the real heroes of this story."
"I'm very proud of the young men who were up there who were able to help the Scouts in need," he told TODAY. "I think lives were saved."
Tornadoes also raked Kansas on Wednesday, killing at least two people, destroying much of the small town of Chapman and causing extensive damage on the Kansas State University campus.
NBC's WeatherPlus service warned that "more tornadic activity is possible especially later in the day," adding that "the storms will gradually shift into the Ohio Valley as we work our way into Friday."
Tornado siren
Lloyd Roitstein, an executive with the Mid America Council of the Boy Scouts of America, said a tornado siren went off at the camp.
The boys had been in two groups when the storm hit the Little Sioux Scout Ranch in the remote Loess Hills. One group managed to take shelter, but the other was out hiking.
At least 42 of the injured remained hospitalized Thursday morning, with everything from cuts and bruises to major head trauma, said Gene Meyer, Iowa's public safety commissioner. At least four of the injured were airlifted from the camp, he said, refusing to elaborate on their conditions or identify the dead.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and the families of the victims," Culver said. "We continue to do everything we can to make sure those injured are going to recover."
All the scouts and staff were accounted for, Meyer said, adding that searchers were making another pass through the grounds to make sure no one else was injured. The camp was destroyed.
Thomas White, a scout supervisor, said he dug through the wreckage of a collapsed fireplace to reach victims in a building where many scouts were seeking shelter when the twister struck at 6:35 p.m.
"A bunch of us got together and started undoing the rubble from the fireplace and stuff and waiting for the first responders," White told KMTV in Omaha. "They were under the tables and stuff and on their knees, but they had no chance."
The nearest tornado siren, in nearby Blencoe, sounded only briefly after the storm cut power to the town, said Russ Lawrenson of the Mondamin Fire Department.
Sounded like a jet
Taylor Willoughby, 13, said several scouts were getting ready to watch a movie when someone screamed that there was a tornado. Everyone hunkered down, he said, and windows shattered.
"It sounded like a jet that was flying by really close," Taylor told TODAY. "I was hoping that we all made it out OK. I was afraid for my life."
Ethan Hession, also 13, said he crawled under a table with his friend.
"I just remember looking over at my friend, and all of a sudden he just says to me, 'Dear God, save us,'" he told TODAY. "Then I just closed my eyes and all of a sudden it's (the tornado) gone."
Ethan said the Scouts' first-aid training immediately compelled them to act.
"We knew that we need to place tourniquets on wounds that were bleeding too much. We knew we need to apply pressure and gauze. We had first-aid kits, we had everything," he said.
Ethan said one staff member took off his shirt and put it on someone who was bleeding to apply pressure and gauze. Other scouts started digging people out of the rubble, he said.
Agencies praised
At a news conference Thursday, Culver praised the scouts for "taking care of each other" as emergency workers from several state and local agencies cut through debris to reach the camp.
Roitstein reminded reporters at the news conference that the Boy Scouts motto is "Be Prepared."
"Last night, the agencies and the scouts were prepared," he said. "They knew what to do they knew where to go and they prepared well."
The injured were taken to Burgess Health Center in Onawa, Alegent Health Clinic in Missouri Valley and Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha.
Burgess spokeswoman Beth Frangedakis said 19 victims arrived at the hospital around 8:30 p.m. They included children ages 2 months to 15 years, plus three adults.
Frangedakis said four were admitted to the hospital, one was taken by helicopter to Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City, Iowa, and the others were released. She wouldn't release the nature of the victims' injuries.
David Hunt, chairman of the Mid-America Boy Scout Council's Goldenrod District, which covers several eastern Nebraska counties, said he believed the boys were from eastern Nebraska and western Iowa.
The 1,800-acre ranch about 40 miles north of Omaha includes hiking trails through narrow valleys and over steep hills, a 15-acre lake and a rifle range.
'Relieved'
Gayle Jessen of Fremont, Neb., said her 19-year-old son Zach is a staff leader at the camp. He called his parents to say he had a bruise on an arm and was being treated at a hospital.
"I'm so relieved my son is OK," Jessen said. She said her husband was headed to the hospital to pick up their son.
Lawrenson said parents will be reunited with their children at a community center in nearby Little Sioux.
The tornado touched down as Iowa's eastern half grappled with flooding in several of its major cities. The storm threatened to stretch Iowa's emergency response teams even further.
Tack said officials were confident that the state's emergency response teams could handle the crisis because western Iowa had been largely unaffected by the recent flooding.
2 fatalities in Kansas
Tornadoes also touched down in central Kansas, killing two, as well as southern Minnesota and eastern Nebraska.
A tornado caused significant damage in Manhattan and Kansas State University, tossing cars and destroying several businesses.
One person was killed in Chapman, where part of the roof of the high school gymnasium was torn off, emergency officials said.
Sharon Watson, spokeswoman for the Kansas Adjutant General's Department, said a half-mile-wide tornado tore through the town Wednesday night, destroying more than 60 homes and numerous businesses.
Image: Residents look over tornado damage in Chapman, Kan.
Orlin Wagner / AP
Residents look over tornado damage in Chapman, Kan., Thursday.
She said another victim was found dead outside a mobile home in the Jackson County town of Soldier.
A tornado ripped a house from its foundation, leaving a bathtub protruding from a back wall near Fulda, Minn., 140 miles southwest of Minneapolis. A woman inside at the time suffered a knee injury.
Another struck a farm near Springfield, Minn., causing extensive damage to outbuildings, but no injuries to people or livestock.
There were no immediate reports of damage from the Nebraska twisters, though a lightning strike knocked out radar at the National Weather Service's office in Valley, about 30 miles northwest of Omaha.
Black Widow
06-12-2008, 06:37 PM
An aspiring model rejected by top agencies because her size 12 frame was "too big" has beaten 200 other girls to be crowned Miss London.
Leah Green, 22, will compete for the Miss England title next month against regional finalists from across the country.
Leah, a fashion design graduate who now works as a design assistant at French Connection, decided to try her hand at modelling.
But the striking 5'10" brunette was told she was too fat and "needed to work hard to achieve the gaunt look" and was then turned down.
She said: "I have tried to get into modelling, but I have been turned away as I'm apparently too big to be a regular model."
Leah hopes to be a role model for voluptuous, curvy girls. "I want to show people that you don't have to be a size zero to be beautiful," she said.
One agency that Leah approached agreed that it would not consider girls who were bigger than a size 10, while another said it had not turned her down because of her size, but because she did not have the "look" it wanted.
The winner of the Miss England title goes on to represent the country in the grand finals in Ukraine capital, Kiev - the semi-finalists are having their own competition next week.
Sky News
Black Widow
06-12-2008, 06:46 PM
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A deer born with a single horn in the centre of its head could expain the centuries old myth of the unicorn.
The animal has been spotted in a nature reserve in Italy.
"This is fantasy becoming reality," Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Centre of Natural Sciences in Prato said.
"The unicorn has always been a mythological animal."
The one-year-old Roe Deer - nicknamed Unicorn - was born in captivity in the research centre's park in the Tuscan town, near Florence.
He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw as his twin has two horns.
Calling it the first time he has seen such a case, Mr Tozzi said such anomalies among deer may have inspired the myth of the unicorn.
The unicorn, a horse-like creature with magical healing powers, has appeared in legends and stories throughout history, from ancient and medieval texts to the adventures of Harry Potter.
"This shows that even in past times, there could have been animals with this anomaly," he said.
"It's not like they dreamed it up."
Single-horned deer are rare but not unheard of but even more unusual is the central positioning of the horn.
"Generally, the horn is on one side (of the head) rather than being at the centre. This looks like a complex case," said Fulvio Fraticelli, scientific director of Rome's zoo.
He said the position of the horn could also be the result of a trauma early in the animal's life.
Other mammals are believed to contribute to the myth of the unicorn, including the narwhal, a whale with a long, spiralling tusk.
Sky News
JohnCenaFan28
06-12-2008, 07:01 PM
That's awful to read...
JohnCenaFan28
06-12-2008, 07:01 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-12-2008, 07:07 PM
:o Thanks for the story.
Pretty Fly Guy
06-13-2008, 12:04 AM
man I hate Tabloids
LionDen
06-16-2008, 09:30 AM
wow an interesting story kurt, nice find. That deer would have been famous back in the day when they had freaks at carnivals etc. It would have made a tiny penny :) lol
Black Widow
06-16-2008, 03:18 PM
http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/674/1688795ey1.jpghttp://img359.imageshack.us/img359/8995/1688796po2.jpg
He is just 14, too young to have any facial hair but old enough to kill.
His name is Shakirullah and he's one of the youngest Taliban prisoners being held by Afghan intelligence.
We are given rare access to him by Afghan intelligence, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), at the interrogation cells in the capital, Kabul.
The agents ponder for some minutes over whether to bring him to us handcuffed and decide against it.
Shakirullah walks in with the awkward gait of a teenager, unsure of his audience or the reception he's going to get.
Two intelligence minders are in the room with us. We are not allowed to film them or identify them but they are well known to the young boy.
There are constant interjections from them as he stumbles and mumbles his way through his story.
He says he had been studying at a madrassa, a religious school, in Pakistan for about six months.
He is from the tribal region of south Waziristan and his family are farmers. This was his first experience of education.
"I was in the madrassa," he told Sky News.
"And after I'd been studying the Koran for some time, the mullah (religious teacher) came to me and told me it was time to go to Afghanistan and be a suicide bomber.
"I didn't want to do it but they told me I had to.
"They said I couldn't stay with them any more and if I didn't, they would take me by force."
He said he was taken to Miramshah on the Pakistan border and then three men smuggled him across and into Khost in eastern Afghanistan.
The night before he was due to carry out the attack in a busy market area in Khost, the men took him for driving lessons.
He said they were spotted by police as they were leaving and the explosives were found.
"They told me when I came back (after the attack), they would give me some money and find me a woman to marry but that I would come back and not die," the boy said with astonishing naivety.
"I just want to be free. I miss my mother."
A few miles away from the intelligence cells is another 14-year-old without a mother.
She is Noorya and her mother was killed by a suicide bomber as she went to work for the Ministry of Interior on one of the buses packed with Government employees.
Qandi Gul was a cook at the Government offices and the main breadwinner in her family.
Her wage supported her husband and her daughter and two sons.
She earned 2,300 Afghani per month (about £24) but it was enough to give the family a secure living.
"I miss my mother a lot," said Noorya. "When she was alive she wouldn't let me do any housework.
"She wanted me to study. She said you are the future of your country so you should keep your eyes on your books.
"As for the 14-year-old suicide bomber who has been caught, I feel sorry for him. He is just a child and only 14.
"He cannot have had a proper education so he was set on the wrong path. I just feel sorry for him," she said with a maturity beyond her years.
Her father Mohammed Raheem is a lot more bitter.
"There were no explosions in Taliban times," he said. "But only explosions in Mr Karzai's Government.
"There are no jobs in Afghanistan now. My sons have had to go to Iran to find work and our economic situation is very desperate now."
Sky News
Black Widow
06-16-2008, 03:21 PM
The wife of Austria cellar rapist Josef Fritzl has visited the underground dungeon where her daughter was held captive for 24 years for the first time.
Rosemarie Fritzl returned to the family home and reportedly collected toys and other belongings from the underground rooms.
Fritzl's wife has told police she knew nothing of the horror occurring under the house in Amstetten, Austria.
Her husband fathered seven children with their daughter, Elisabeth, who he said had run away and joined a cult.
Three of the children lived upstairs as the Fritzl's "grandchildren" after Fritzl told his wife they had been abandoned on their doorstep by their supposedly missing daughter.
Three others remained locked up with their mother in the cellar and another child died soon after birth.
The children, along with their mother and grandmother, are being cared for by psychiatrists at a nearby medical facility.
Reports say Rosemarie spent about an hour at the house and loaded up a vehicle with several suitcases before returning to the clinic.
Rosemarie has said she never wants to live in the "tainted" house again, according to reports.
Last week, the eldest child Kerstin, 19, awoke from a coma and doctors said she was recovering well.
Her admittance to hospital on April 19 brought the horrific saga to light.
Sky News
Black Widow
06-16-2008, 08:16 PM
A father and two young children who were found dead in a car on a remote road in a Welsh beauty spot have been named.
The three were Brian Philcox, 52, and Amy, seven and three-year-old Owen. All had died from carbon monoxide poisoning after inhaling car fumes.
A bomb disposal unit was called to examine the Land Rover Freelander after police found a "device" at Mr Philcox's home in Runcorn, Cheshire.
Four teddy bears along with bouquets of flowers have been tied to the railings outside the address.
Police said the children lived with their mother in Cheshire and Mr Philcox was with their son and daughter under an access arrangement.
A member of the public had raised the alarm after coming across their Land Rover.
Cheshire police said the mother of the children had reported them missing after they failed to return from a Father's Day outing.
The hillside road near Llanrwst in the Snowdonia National Park remains taped off today.
Police said the incident was being treated as suspicious, but were not looking for other suspects.
The bodies were found not far from where Mike Todd, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, was discovered dead earlier this year.
A worker from a bed and breakfast not far from where the Land Rover was parked, said: "The place where it happened is off one of the narrow roads crossing the country.
"It's in the middle of fields with only a few houses nearby, it's very isolated.
"It is one of the prettiest parts of the country. I am more sorry for the children. I think it is a selfish act taking the children away."
The deaths appear to echo the case of Keith Young, 38, who killed himself and his four sons in March 2003 in Llangollen, North Wales.
Sky News
JohnCenaFan28
06-17-2008, 04:19 PM
OMG, what a story, thanks.
JohnCenaFan28
06-17-2008, 04:19 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-17-2008, 04:19 PM
Thanks for the story.
JohnCenaFan28
06-17-2008, 04:22 PM
Israel and militant group Hamas have agreed on a truce starting on Thursday, Palestinian and Israeli officials have told the BBC.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44755000/jpg/_44755149_apcgetty226story.jpg
Israeli officials confirmed the start of the truce, but said Israel was "looking to see if this is serious".
A Hamas official said he was confident all militant groups in Gaza would abide by the agreement, brokered by Egypt.
Earlier at least six Palestinians were reportedly killed in Israeli air strikes in southern Gaza.
Israel said it had targeted "terror operatives".
Islamic Jihad said a missile struck a car carrying five of its members near Khan Younis. A sixth man died in a separate strike nearby.
Two-stage deal
Hamas took over Gaza in June 2007, driving out forces loyal to Fatah, the political faction led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Since then, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the international community have sought to isolate Hamas.
Israel declared the territory a "hostile entity" and has blockaded it in an attempt to pressure Hamas into stopping rocket fire from the strip into Israel.
The truce is due to come into effect at 0600 (0300 GMT) on Thursday.
This stage of the deal envisages a halt to hostilities and a partial reopening of Gaza's borders.
A second stage of the plan would focus on the return of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and on a deal to reopen the main Rafah crossing into Egypt.
Israeli officials have listed three conditions for the general success of the truce, the BBC's Tim Franks reports: that there be a total cessation of hostilities; an end to arms smuggling from Egypt into Gaza; and movement on freeing Cpl Shalit, who was captured two years ago.
Hamas official Ahmed Yousef told the BBC he hoped that the ceasefire would lead to a further opening of the crossing points from Israel into Gaza, and an increase in the number of supplies.
"I am confident that everybody will abide by what we've agreed. All the groups which went to Cairo gave their okay to the ceasefire. If anybody does anything, they will be doing it on their own," he said.
He said that the aim now was to push ahead talks on a prisoner exchange, as well as a new round of talks in Cairo between the rival Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas.
Egypt, which has worked for months to bring Israel and Hamas to an agreement, said both sides had accepted the first stage of the deal, state-owned news agency Mena reported.
"Egypt hopes that the two sides will exert all efforts to bring the calm to a success," the agency quoted a senior official as saying.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-17-2008, 04:23 PM
A human foot has been found on a beach near the west-coast city of Vancouver, Canadian police say.
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It is the fifth human foot to wash up on beaches in the area in the past year. The latest find is a left foot, whereas the other four were right feet.
Walkers spotted the body part floating in water off the suburb of Westham Island in British Columbia on Monday.
Police and coroners are trying to identify the foot and discover if it is linked to the others found in the area.
All were wearing shoes and had been in the water for some time.
A police spokesman, PC Sharlene Brooks, said the find was being treated as a criminal investigation.
"We are certainly not discounting the possibility that this may be linked to the other recovered feet, but it is just too premature and very speculative for us to even entertain that right now," PC Brookes said.
She said police might not be able to say for some time whether the foot's DNA matched a known missing person, or any of the feet found previously.
Gruesome finds
The previous discoveries, all right feet, were all wearing running shoes.
Last August, two human feet washed up on the beaches of small islands north of Vancouver. Then in February a third single, right foot drifted ashore.
The fourth foot was discovered on a beach in suburban Vancouver in May.
The city's newspapers and coffee shops are buzzing with theories to explain the mystery, says the BBC's Ian Gunn in Vancouver.
Organised crime, boating accidents - even the 2004 Asian tsunami - are all being offered as possible solutions, our correspondent says.
Police have said there is no evidence that the feet were deliberately severed or removed by force.
Forensic experts say it is not unusual for body parts to become separated after they have been in the water for a long time.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-18-2008, 07:56 PM
Japan and China have struck a deal for the joint development of a gas field in the East China Sea, resolving a protracted bilateral dispute.
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Japanese private sector firms will take part in China's project to develop the Chunxiao gas field, which is known as Shirakaba in Japan.
A small crowd of Chinese protesters denounced the deal outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing.
China said the deal would "benefit peace and stability".
Wary of the potential for nationalist backlash, China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said that the agreement "did not harm the respective legal stance of both sides".
Tense ties
China started drilling in Chunxiao in 2003, inflaming tensions with Japan, which expressed fears that Beijing could siphon gas from what it considered its own side.
China contends that the gas field falls easily within its maritime zone, but Japan contests this.
In 2004, a Chinese nuclear submarine intruded into Japanese waters near the gas fields.
But ties have improved more recently and in May, Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Tokyo for talks with his Japanese counterpart, Yasuo Fukuda.
The agreement could herald further co-operation between Asia's two largest economies, which have been competing around the world for energy resources. Both rely on imports for the bulk of their energy needs.
Known reserves in the disputed fields are estimated at a modest 92 million barrels of oil equivalent - around three weeks of energy demand in Japan - but the two energy-hungry countries believe more could be found.
There are three other gas fields still in dispute and Japanese media said the two sides had also agreed to co-operate on a second area.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-18-2008, 07:57 PM
Spain and South Africa both "gave the green light" for a failed coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, a British mercenary has told a court in Malabo.
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Simon Mann said it felt as though the coup attempt was an official operation.
He also said that Sir Mark Thatcher, son of UK former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was one of the plot's organisers.
But Mann said London-based millionaire Eli Calil was "the boss". He and Sir Mark have both denied plotting a coup.
Sir Mark was fined in 2005 and received a suspended sentence in South Africa for unknowingly helping to finance it.
But former SAS officer Mr Mann, 55, said Sir Mark was part of the "management team... not just an investor".
He was speaking on the second day of his trial, in which Equatorial Guinea prosecutors have called for him to serve 30 years in jail.
Election rush
If the plot had been successful, veteran Equatorial Guinea opposition leader Severo Moto, then based in Spain, would have become the new president, Mann told the court.
He said Sir Mark had agreed to send a helicopter to transport Mr Moto to the region. Sir Mark has said he believed the helicopter was to be used as an air ambulance.
Mann said the plot was rushed through before the 2004 general elections in Spain, in case the government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar was defeated, Reuters news agency reported.
A Spanish foreign ministry official has denied any involvement.
Mr Mann was arrested four years ago with 64 others in Zimbabwe when they landed in a plane from South Africa.
He served four years in prison there for trying to purchase weapons without a licence before being extradited to Equatorial Guinea earlier this year.
Mann and Sir Mark were neighbours in Cape Town.
The prosecution said they had agreed not to call for the death penalty as part of the deal to extradite him.
The trial is being held at a conference centre in the capital, Malabo, and began amid heavy security.
Journalists were allowed into the courtroom but made to leave mobile phones, cameras and even pens and notepads outside. News reports said that a verdict was expected by Thursday.
Eleven other men, including South African arms dealer Nick Du Toit, who testified that he was recruited by Mr Mann, are already serving sentences in Equatorial Guinea in connection with the coup attempt.
Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich former Spanish colony, has been ruled by President Teodoro Obiang since he seized power from his uncle in 1979.
His government has been accused of widespread human rights abuses and of ruthlessly suppressing political opposition.
Transparency International has put the tiny nation on its list of top 10 corrupt states.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-18-2008, 08:04 PM
A Dutch court is considering whether the UN can be sued for failing to prevent the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995.
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About 6,000 relatives of those killed have brought a case against the UN and the Dutch government over the killings.
Dutch peacekeepers, under a UN flag, failed to intervene as Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in one week in July 1995.
The enclave had been designated a UN safe haven.
The UN has refused to take part in the case, claiming immunity - a position backed by the Dutch government.
Immunity 'undesirable'
Dutch government lawyer Bert-Jan Houtzagers said the UN must be allowed to operate without facing the threat of prosecution.
"The Bosnian Serbs are the ones who are to blame, especially General [Ratko] Mladic. He is a war criminal," he said.
Gen Mladic led the Bosnian Serb forces that overwhelmed Srebrenica. He has been indicted but is still at large.
But Axel Hagedorn, lawyer for the victims' relatives, said: "Functional immunity does not mean that international organisations are wholly above the law.
"Boundless immunity of the UN is both unacceptable and undesirable for the proper functioning and credibility of the UN."
Genocide
A number of cases have been brought by small numbers of Srebrenica survivors or relatives - including one by two families which opened in a Dutch court on Monday - but this collective action is distinguished by its size, representing thousands of relatives, including the Mothers of Srebrenica group.
Wary nations watch Srebrenica case
The Srebrenica massacre has been established as genocide, by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.
The Dutch cabinet resigned in 2002 after a report blamed politicians for sending the Dutch UN troops on an impossible mission.
Now Dutch judges, at The Hague District Court, have to decide whether the UN can be held responsible for the tragedy, under Dutch or international law.
The court will also consider whether the Dutch government can be sued.
After Wednesday's hearing, the court said it would announce its ruling on 10 July.
Many nations are likely to be watching the decision carefully, says the BBC's Nick Miles.
If it opens up the way for the Netherlands to be sued it could make governments more wary of committing troops for peacekeeping operations - making it still harder for the UN to sustain keep them going.
BBC News
scorpionf
06-21-2008, 10:06 AM
I don't understand how anyone could be so cruel and sadistic... He should be made to live as he made his daughter live.
I feel bad for his wife, but a small part of me thinks she is really dumb to have not suspected something, when 3 of her grandkids appeared from nowhere on their doorstep...
scorpionf
06-21-2008, 10:08 AM
That deer looks so sweet, and he is probably wondering what all the fuss is about!
Thanks for the story! :)
scorpionf
06-21-2008, 10:11 AM
I have seen pictures of this girl, and she is really pretty, and she is the same size as the average person, I really hope she does well, and I think she is a good role model.
You do not have to be as skinny as a rake to be gorgeous!
scorpionf
06-21-2008, 10:14 AM
Such a sad story, the poor dolphins :(
JohnCenaFan28
06-21-2008, 09:28 PM
The number of girls born and surviving in India has hit an all time low compared to boys, ActionAid says.
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A report by the UK charity says increasing numbers of female foetuses were being aborted and baby girls deliberately neglected and left to die.
In one site in the Punjab state, there are just 300 girls to every 1,000 boys among higher caste families, it says.
ActionAid says India faces a "bleak" future if it does not end its practice of cultural preference for boys.
Girls 'condemned'
ActionAid teamed up with Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to produce the Disappearing Daughters report.
More than 6,000 households in sites across five states in north-western India were interviewed and statistical comparisons were made with national census date.
Under "normal" circumstances, there should be about 950 girls for every 1,000 boys, the charity said.
But it said that in three of the five sites, that number was below 800.
In four of the five sites surveyed, the proportion of girls to boys had declined since a 2001 census, the report said.
The research also found that ratios of girls to boys were declining fastest in comparatively prosperous urban areas.
ActionAid suggested the increasing use of ultrasound technology may be a factor in the trend.
The document says that Indian woman are put under intense pressure to produce sons, in a culture that predominantly views girls as a burden rather than an asset.
It says many families now use ultrasound scans and abort female foetuses, despite the existence of the 1994 law banning gender selection and selective abortion.
The charity also blames other illegal practices - such as allowing the umbilical cord to become infected - for the growing gender imbalance.
"The real horror of the situation is that, for women, avoiding having daughters is a rational choice. But for wider society it's creating an appalling and desperate state of affairs," Laura Turquet, women's rights policy official at ActionAid said.
"In the long term, cultural attitudes need to change. India must address economic and social barriers including property rights, marriage dowries and gender roles that condemn girls before they are even born.
"If we don't act now the future looks bleak," Ms Turquet said.
Some 10 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the past 20 years, the British medical journal the Lancet has said.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-21-2008, 09:29 PM
At least 12 people have died in a stampede during a police raid on a packed nightclub in Mexico City.
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The capital's police chief said hundreds of youths marking the end of the school year had panicked when police raided the News Divine club.
He said there had been a stampede by customers trying to escape. Three police officers were among the dead.
Police said they had been investigating reports that drugs and alcohol were being sold to under-age clubbers.
At least 13 people were injured during the raid, police said.
Mexico City police chief Joel Ortega told Mexico's Televisa that the panic began when the club's owner announced that police officers were present.
Paramedics treat injured revellers while relatives wait for news
Mr Ortega said the venue had a single entrance and an emergency exit, which was blocked by cases of beer.
"Many of the people concentrated at the club's emergency exit, but it was too small and it was there that people died of asphyxia," he said.
The police chief denied earlier reports in the media that police used tear gas.
At least 500 people were in the club at the time, officials believe.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-21-2008, 09:30 PM
Police in Macedonia have arrested a journalist on suspicion that he is behind three murders he reported on.
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The journalist, Vlado Taneski, is accused of raping, torturing and killing three elderly women in the south-western town of Kicevo.
Macedonian police began to suspect him after he included details in his reports that they had not made public.
Other men have reportedly already been convicted of the first two murders. The third was committed last month.
Mr Taneski, 56, has not yet been charged with any offence, police said.
They allege that he kidnapped and abused the women before cutting them into pieces and dumping them in plastic bags.
"He is also suspected of being involved in... [the disappearance of] a 78-old female who is still missing," said police spokesman Ivo Kotevski.
"All victims were found naked, strangled, wrapped with phone cables," the spokesman said.
"The women were sexually and physically abused. For example, the last victim, a 65-year old female, was found with 13 deep wounds on her skull and multiple rib fractures."
All cleaners
All the women apparently had similarities to the suspect's late mother, with whom he reportedly had a poor relationship.
"All victims were elderly females with poor education who had worked as cleaners. They all were from the same neighbourhood of Kicevo," Mr Kotevski said.
Mr Taneski's editor at the Utrinski Vesnik newspaper told the Associated Press: "We are all shocked with this. I know him as an exceptionally quiet man and I would never believe that he is capable of doing something like that."
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-22-2008, 09:12 PM
A leading Church of England bishop will boycott the Lambeth Conference in protest at the presence of pro-gay bishops, it has been reported.
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According to the Sunday Telegraph, the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali will decline an invitation to the Anglican Communion summit.
Bishop Nazir-Ali has helped organise the rival Gafcon conference currently being held in Jerusalem.
The Lambeth Conference, held every 10 years, takes place next month.
It is reported that two other English bishops will turn down invitations.
Currently about 280 bishops are at the Gafcon conference, many of whom are expected to boycott the Lambeth gathering.
The organisers behind the Jerusalem conference have called it a "pilgrimage back to the roots of our faith".
Gay bishop ordination
The ever-widening split caused by the dispute over homosexuality is likely to overshadow the Lambeth Conference.
The dispute was ignited when the openly gay bishop Gene Robinson was ordained in New Hampshire, in the US, in 2003.
It is the invitation to Lambeth of bishops who helped the ordination which has most recently angered some - although Gene Robinson himself has not been invited.
The BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott said the news of Bishop Nazir-Ali's boycott - among others - would be damaging to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.
He told Radio 4's Sunday programme: "It's part of a drip, drip of bad news that has affected the Lambeth Conference."
Our correspondent said the boycott, not only by the Bishop of Rochester but many other traditionalists attending Gafcon, was unprecedented in the Lambeth Conference's 100 year history.
"This meeting is needed really to knit together this very diverse group of Anglicans from all over the world and to, in a way, celebrate what they do have in common, which is an enormous amount.
"So to have this real dent in it is harmful, to put it mildly. And then to have English bishops not coming along, and making it quite clear that they are not I think is going to undermine it further.
"It will show that this dispute has entered the Church of England."
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-22-2008, 09:19 PM
Scientists have turned to chickens to help them understand why some people are struck down by severe allergies.
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The birds have a "fossilised" version of the key molecule responsible for severe allergic reactions in humans.
King's College London researchers say their findings, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, could guide the hunt for future treatments.
Experts said the work offered "exciting new avenues" for research into preventing allergies developing.
The molecule in birds, called IgY, appears to be an ancient forerunner of a similar human molecule called IgE - one of the culprits when the immune system goes into overdrive during asthma attacks or anaphylactic shock.
The King's team are trying to find out why IgE causes a problem, while IgY does not.
Dr Alex Taylor, one of the researchers, said: "This molecule is like a living fossil - finding out that it has an ancient past is like turning up a coelacanth in your garden pond.
"By studying it, we can track the evolution of allergic reactions back to at least 160m years ago."
His colleague Dr Rosy Calvert said: "We know that part of the problem with IgE in humans is that it binds extremely tightly to white blood cells causing an over-reaction of the immune system and so we wanted to find out whether IgY does the same thing."
Their lab tests revealed that it did not bind in the same way, and a more detailed comparison could reveal subtle differences which explain why, and perhaps provide targets for new drugs or treatments.
'Stopped before they start'
Dr Brian Sutton, who runs the laboratory where the work is being completed, suggested that IgE evolved specifically in mammals perhaps to counter a particular bacterial threat in the past.
"The problem is that now we've ended up with an antibody that can tend to be a little over enthusiastic and causes us problems with apparently innocuous substances like pollen and peanuts, which can cause life-threatening allergic conditions."
John Collard, Allergy UK's clinical director, said that the find opened "exciting new avenues" of possible treatments, even though they would not be available within the next few years.
He said: "If we could find a way to unbind IgE from white blood cells, then a lot of these allergic reactions could be stopped before they start.
"Current treatments are aimed at dealing with something that has already happened, which means they tend to be less effective than if you could stop something at an earlier stage."
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-22-2008, 09:20 PM
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said the creation of a Palestinian state is in the best interests of Israel and its citizens.
On the first French state visit to Israel in 12 years, he said a peace agreement would allow the two peoples to live in peace and security.
Mr Sarkozy is to hold separate talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Meanwhile, Israel has slightly eased its blockade of Gaza, following a truce with Palestinian militant group Hamas.
An Israeli spokesman said 90 truckloads of food and commercial goods were being allowed into Gaza via the Sufa crossing on Sunday. Normally about 60 trucks make the journey.
'Agreement possible'
Correspondents say the French president's admiration for Israel is in contrast to his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who was widely seen as pro-Arab.
Mr Sarkozy, accompanied by his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was greeted on arrival at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Speaking at the airport, Mr Sarkozy said: "I have always been and will always be a friend of Israel...
"An agreement is possible, tomorrow, and that agreement would allow the two peoples to live side-by-side in peace and security."
"I am more convinced than ever that the security of Israel will only be truly guaranteed with the birth of a second state, a Palestinian state."
From the airport, France's first couple headed to Jerusalem for talks with Mr Peres, followed by dinner with Mr Olmert.
On Monday, Mr Sarkozy is due to address Israel's parliament, the Knesset. He plans to travel to the West Bank town of Bethlehem for talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-22-2008, 09:22 PM
UN nuclear inspectors have arrived in Syria to investigate claims that it was building a nuclear reactor.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) four person team will spend three days examining the al-Kibar site in the desert in northern Syria.
The site was bombed by Israeli jets in September 2007. The ruins were bulldozed after the attack.
Israel and the US have said the installation was a nuclear plant in the making - a charge denied by Damascus.
Speaking on his departure, the deputy chief of the IAEA, Olli Heinonen - who is leading the team of inspectors - said they would meet their Syrian counterparts on Sunday evening.
After that, he said, they would start "looking for the facts".
Syria has welcomed the inspection but insists that it will be limited to the al-Kibar site.
In April, Washington released pictures purporting to show North Korean experts inside the construction, which it said closely resembled a North Korean reactor at Yongbyon.
Syria has repeatedly denied it has any nuclear weapons programme, or any such agreement with North Korea.
Syrian officials have said the bombed site was an unused military facility under construction, but deny that it had anything to do with a nuclear programme.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has criticised both what he saw as a US delay in releasing information on the Syrian site and Israel's bombing of the site before his agency could inspect it.
Ahead of the visit, Mr ElBaradei called on Syria to show "absolute transparency" and to give the inspectors access to all sites they wished to see.
In an interview with Al-Arabiya television, he said: "We have no evidence that Syria has the human resources that would allow it to carry out a large nuclear programme.
"We do not see Syria having nuclear fuel."
BBC News
Black Widow
06-22-2008, 09:47 PM
MANILA, Philippines - Typhoon Fengshen has killed at least 155 people in the Philippines in a torrent of flashfloods and landslides, the head of the Philippines Red Cross, Richard Gordon, told local radio on Sunday, according to Reuters.
The death toll from the typhoon could rise sharply after a ferry with some 845 people on board capsized off an island in the central Philippines with few survivors found so far.
Only 10 wave-battered survivors are known to have made it to land, just hours after the ferry, brought to a virtual halt by the storm, suddenly tilted and went belly up in about a half-hour around noon Saturday.
Six bodies, including a man and woman who had bound themselves together, washed ashore on a high tide awash with children's slippers and life jackets. The dead were believed to be among the passengers or crew of the MV Princess of Stars, which initially ran aground off central Sibuyan island Saturday, then capsized, said Mayor Nanette Tansingco of San Fernando on Sibuyan island.
"I sent a speed boat to check," Nanette Tansingco, a mayor of the coastal town of Romblon province, told local radio. "They saw the boat upside down with a big hole in the hull."
Navy and coast guard ships battled huge waves and strong winds Sunday to reach the area.
"The ship sank 3 km from the shoreline. So far, we have only found four dead, no survivors," Congressman Eleandro Madrona said on radio, Reuters reported.
A local mayor also reported the ship had capsized and said passengers in life jackets were seen bobbing in the sea.
In the central city of Cebu, where Princess of Stars was meant to dock, dozens of relatives maintained a vigil at a small passenger terminal, waiting for news.
"The last time I heard from my son was on Friday evening when the ship left Manila. He texted to say he was coming home," said Celecia Tudtud, a mother of four.
"I really hope he's ok," she said, wiping away tears.
Rescue attempts fail
Rescue vessels aborted an initial attempt Saturday to get to the MV Princess of Stars after it ran aground near Sibuyan, but efforts resumed amid stormy weather Sunday, coast guard chief Vice Admiral Wilfredo Tamayo said.
Fengshen lashed the central Philippines for about four hours Saturday, setting off landslides and floods, knocking out power, and blowing off roofs from houses.
Packing sustained winds of 74 miles per hour and gusts of up to 93 mph, the typhoon shifted course Sunday to the northwest and battered the capital Manila at dawn, chief government forecaster Nathaniel Cruz said.
"Iloilo is like an ocean. This is the worst disaster we have had in our history," Iloilo province governor Neil Tupaz told local radio.
In southern Maguindanao province, at least 14 people drowned in flash floods Saturday, including 10 who were swept away from riverside homes, said provincial administrator Norie Unas. Five others were missing.
A 50-year-old man and his 10-year-old grandson were killed when a landslide buried their hillside shanty in Cotabato city Saturday, Mayor Muslimin Sema said. Authorities recovered the body of a farmer, one of three people reported missing in neighboring Cotabato province.
Ferry's engine failed
Meanwhile, the 23,824-ton ferry was "dead in the water" after its engine failed around noon Saturday, Tamayo said.
Port captain Nestor Ponteres said the ferry's owner, Sulpicio Lines, had lost radio contact with the ship and the fate of its passengers remained unknown.
"A lot of efforts have been done to send off rescue boats, but we really can't get through the very rough weather," Tamayo said.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo directed the defense and local government departments to stand by for relief and rescue missions before she left for the United States late Saturday.
A coastguard vessel was trawling the waters Sunday around the ferry, which is upside down with only its bow above the waves, trying to confirm reports some passengers had made it to a small island.
"We are hoping more people will have reached the shoreline," Tamayo told Reuters.
At least two other coastguard vessels were en route to help in rescue efforts and Tamayo said he hoped divers would be able to scour the submerged ship later on Monday.
He said there was no sign fuel was leaking from the ferry but said an oil-spill response team would arrive with one of the two coastguard ships before dawn on Monday.
Thousands evacuated
In Capiz, more than 2,000 houses were destroyed in the provincial capital and officials were struggling to make contact with communities further afield.
"We got hit real bad this time," said Richard Gordon, the chairman of the Philippines' Red Cross.
After battering Manila on Sunday, Fengshen spun out into the South China Sea on Monday. The storm was en route to Taiwan, where it could make landfall in the next few days
More than 30,000 people were being housed in evacuation centers in the centre and south of the archipelago.
An archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, the Philippines is hit by an average of 20 typhoons a year. Officials said neck-deep flood waters had risen further with a high tide, forcing the evacuation of 5,000 people in Sultan Kudarat township in southern Shariff Kabunsuan province, near Cotabato city.
Officials ordered the evacuation of more than 117,000 people from areas prone to floods and landslides in central Albay province. But many returned home by midday Saturday after the typhoon missed the area.
The National Disaster Coordinating Council reported flooding, landslides and power outages caused by toppled power pylons in many areas in the southern and central Philippines. More than 100 domestic flights were canceled because of the typhoon.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Black Widow
06-22-2008, 09:50 PM
Two boys aged 10 and 12 have been stabbed in a London street attack, Scotland Yard said.
The schoolfriends were knifed in Penrose Street, Walworth, during an apparent attempted robbery.
They had been approached by two older youths just before 3pm yesterday.
Both victims required hospital treatment for their wounds.
The 12-year-old was later discharged with minor injuries while his friend was kept in overnight, but his condition is not serious.
Police later arrested a 15-year-old boy close to the scene and took him to a south London police station for questioning.
Meanwhile, an 18-year-old man is in hospital after being stabbed in the abdomen near a cinema in Wednesfield, Wolverhampton.
The attack followed a confrontation between two groups of young men last night.
Police say the victim, who made his own way to hospital, is in a stable condition.
Sky News
JohnCenaFan28
06-22-2008, 10:19 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-22-2008, 10:19 PM
Wow, that's horrible...
Black Widow
06-23-2008, 03:17 PM
An estate agent who hatched a brutal revenge plot against her boss after being sacked has been jailed for 10 years.
Ambreen Gul, 23, lured Waqas Malik to her flat where he was tortured and ordered to raise a £200,000 ransom or be killed with his son.
She had recruited another sacked colleague and two other thugs to make him pay for her dismissal.
Mr Malik, 48, was kicked, punched and pistol whipped repeatedly.
Judge Deborah Taylor told Gul she had been motivated by "revenge and greed".
She added: "You have shown little remorse and you have consistently shown yourself as dishonest and manipulative, prepared to do and say anything to save yourself, even writing to Mr Malik in attempting to get him to change his mind about pursuing this case."
London's Southwark Crown Court heard that during a seven-hour ordeal, one of the captors stood on Mr Malik's head while another warned he would never see his family again unless he paid the cash.
He was told failure to raise the money would result in the executions of both himself and his 13-year-old son.
After being ordered to make several phone calls to his wife in a desperate bid to raise the funds, he was given a powerful sedative.
But the plot went wrong when he fell ill.
The court heard Gul panicked and ordered her bound, blindfolded and bleeding victim to be put in an office chair, wheeled into a waiting car and driven "almost unconscious" to his home.
Once there she told Mr Malik's wife that he was drunk and had sexually assaulted her before driving off.
The now "comatose" businessman was taken to hospital, where doctors found his face and head covered in bruises and cuts, and "ligature marks" on his wrists from the tape bindings.
Gul, of Hackney, east London, was sentenced with three co-defendants.
Mukshud Ali, 18, of Wilmington Gardens, Barking, Essex, who had also been sacked, was sentenced to seven years nine months in a young offenders' institution (YOI).
Quasim Ahmed, 21, of Westrow Drive, Barking, was jailed for eight years, and former West Ham under-17s footballer Shakib Chowdhury, 20, from Surbiton, Surrey, was sent to a (YOI) for eight-and-a-half years.
All four were variously found guilty or admitted falsely imprisoning the businessman between June 17-20 last year, wounding with intent, blackmail, having an imitation firearm with intent, theft and administering a "poison or noxious substance" with intent.
Gul had managed to entice her former boss - who spent four days in hospital after the ordeal - to her flat by pretending to be interested in buying his car and selling her home to him.
Sky News
JohnCenaFan28
06-23-2008, 05:21 PM
Thanks for the news.
Black Widow
06-25-2008, 09:54 PM
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Briton Neil Entwistle has been found guilty of murdering his American wife and baby.
The former IT worker remained expressionless as the verdicts were read out, and just closed his eyes and shook his head before looking down at the floor.
He shot dead his wife Rachel, 27, and their nine-month-old baby Lillian Rose on the four-poster bed in their home in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, in 2006.
The court heard from 46 witnesses and the jury convicted him of first degree murder after two days of deliberations.
Entwistle, from Kilton, Worksop, will be sentenced tomorrow morning. He will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Sky News US correspondent Michelle Clifford said: "One telling thing is that Entwistle did not react to the verdicts - and neither did his parents.
"They, like everybody else, expected these guilty verdicts. All the sordid details of his life will now come pouring out."
The 29-year-old had a secret life, and trawled the internet for prostitutes, looking at websites about bankruptcy, killing and suicide before shooting dead his family in cold blood.
But outside court, his family, who stood by him through his arrest and trial, vowed to fight to clear his name - claiming he had been falsely convicted.
His mother Yvonne said: "We know that our son Neil is innocent and we are devastated.
"Our son will now go to jail for loving, honouring and protecting his wife's memory.
"We know the evidence points to Rachel murdering our grandchild and then committing suicide."
Elliot Weinstein, defending Entwistle, had suggested his wife shot baby Lillian before shooting herself.
He claimed Entwistle was simply a loving husband trying to "protect her honour" and cover it up by moving the gun away from where their bodies were found.
The court heard a post-mortem examination found Mrs Entwistle was shot in the forehead at close range.
Lillian was killed with a bullet which passed through her abdomen and lodged above her mother's left breast as she cradled her on the bed.
sky news
Black Widow
06-25-2008, 09:56 PM
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The Queen has stripped President Robert Mugabe of his knighthood following the violence and election crisis in Zimbabwe.
The Foreign Office said it was a mark of "revulsion" over the human rights record in the country.
Mr Mugabe is under growing international pressure over violence and abuses ahead of Friday's presidential run-off election.
He was awarded the knighthood in 1994 by John Major's Conservative Government.
Five years ago there were calls for the knighthood to be removed, and then Prime Minister Tony Blair said he would look into the matter, but no action was taken.
Sky's Glen Oglaza said Mr Mugabe "won't really care one way or the other" but it sends a strong signal of the UK government's attitude towards the man.
Earlier, Gordon Brown revealed he was seeking to block a Zimbabwe cricket tour of England planned for next year.
The Queen approved the annulment of Mr Mugabe's knighthood on the recommendation of Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: "This action has been taken as a mark of revulsion at the abuse of human rights and abject disregard for the democratic process in Zimbabwe over which President Mugabe has presided."
In Zimbabwe, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has taken refuge again in the Dutch embassy in Harare after briefly leaving to give a news conference.
Mr Tsvangirai first entered the embassy on Sunday after withdrawing from the presidential run-off.
He has urged the UN to isolate Mr Mugabe and says a peacekeeping force is needed in Zimbabwe.
Mr Mugabe has shrugged off the unprecedented and unanimous decision by the UN Security Council to condemn violence against the opposition and declare that a free and fair presidential election on Friday was impossible.
South African leaders are holding an emergency summit over the growing political crisis.
Jacob Zuma, leader of South Africa's ruling party, has called for the UN to intervene, saying the situation is now "out of control".
Mr Mugabe, 84, in power since independence in 1980, has vowed never to hand over to the opposition, branding MDC officials as puppets of the West.
He has presided over a slide into economic chaos, including 80% unemployment and the world's highest inflation rate of at least 165,000%.
sky news
Kenpachi Zaraki
06-27-2008, 01:28 PM
Very much expected
Black Widow
06-27-2008, 05:19 PM
A mother who left her two-year-old son home alone so she could spend a weekend partying has been jailed for at least nine months.
Kelly Tollerton's son was caged in the kitchen by a baby gate and had to rummage in rubbish bags for food "like a dog".
He was discovered three days later when water from an overflowing sink filled with pots poured into a neighbour's flat below.
Police broke in and found the boy sobbing and standing in several inches of water wearing a filthy Babygro surrounded by dirty nappies and broken crockery. He was shivering with cold and had been using a pile of dirty washing as a bed.
Sentencing her at Lincoln Crown Court, Recorder William Harbage QC said: "It defies belief that any mother can treat her child in that way. In my opinion, you are not a fit mother."
She was sentenced to 18 months in prison but told she should expect to serve at least nine months.
The court had heard that Tollerton's actions were a "deliberate act of abandonment so that she could go out and party".
Tollerton, 22, said she and her 40-year-old boyfriend partied all weekend but their babysitter had let them down.
There was also criticism of the social services and health visitors and an investigation launched after it emerged the boy was placed on an at-risk register at the age of two months because he was seriously underweight.
But social services ended contact with him when he started to attend nursery.
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was put up for adoption and now, aged four, has started school.
sky news
JohnCenaFan28
06-27-2008, 07:01 PM
What the hell was that woman thinking?
JohnCenaFan28
06-27-2008, 07:02 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
06-27-2008, 07:02 PM
Interesting... wonder if they'll get him off?
JohnCenaFan28
06-27-2008, 07:05 PM
Martian soil appears to contain sufficient nutrients to support life - or, at least, asparagus - Nasa scientists believe.
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Preliminary analysis by the $420m (£210m) Phoenix Mars Lander mission on the planet's soil found it to be much more alkaline than expected.
Scientists working on the spacecraft project said they were "flabbergasted" by the discovery.
The find has raised hopes conditions on Mars may be favourable for life.
"We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life, whether past, present or future," said Sam Kounaves, the project's lead chemist, from the University of Arizona.
Exciting data
Although he said further tests would have to be conducted, Mr Kounaves said the soil seemed "very friendly… there is nothing about it that is toxic," he said.
"It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard - you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well."
As well as being far less acidic than anticipated, the soil was also found to contain traces of magnesium, sodium, potassium and other elements.
"We were all flabbergasted at the data we got back," said Mr Kounaves. "It is very exciting for us."
The analysis is based on a cubic centimetre of soil scooped from 2.5cm (one inch) below Mars' surface by the lander's robotic arm.
The sample was then tested using the "wet chemistry" technique, which involves mixing the soil with water brought from Earth and heating the sample in one of the lander's eight ovens.
Ice stores
After a 10-month flight from Earth, Phoenix touched down successfully on Mars' northern plains on 25 May, to undertake a three-month study of the planet's geological history.
The Arctic location where Phoenix touched down is thought to hold large stores of water-ice just below the surface.
Last week, scientists said they were positive there was ice on the planet after eight dice-sized chunks were seen melting away in a series of photographs.
But Phoenix has so far not detected organic carbon - considered an essential building block of life.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
06-27-2008, 07:06 PM
The operation to recover hundreds of bodies inside a sunken Philippine ferry has been suspended after a highly toxic pesticide was found to be on board.
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Ten tonnes of endosulfan were illegally in the cargo, destined for a Del Monte pineapple plantation, officials said.
Whether the ferry operator, Sulpicio Lines, knew of the toxic cargo is unclear, though a senior official warned it could face prosecution.
Only 56 of more than 850 passengers are known to have survived the disaster.
The MV Princess of the Stars controversially left Manila harbour on 21 June despite the approaching Typhoon Fengshen.
Additional danger
It ran aground off Sibuyan island in the central Philippines, and is thought to have sunk in under 30 minutes, leaving hundreds of passengers trapped inside.
The divers who have been working in dark and dangerous conditions all week to remove the dead from the upturned ferry are now faced with a new threat, says the BBC's Michael Barker in Manila.
Exposure to endosulfan, an insecticide, has been blamed for mental and genetic disorders, skin diseases and nervous disorders, and even death.
Vice-President Noli de Castro said the consignment aboard the ferry had been bound for pineapple plantations of Del Monte Philippines.
He said the ferry operator had "a lot to answer for", AFP news agency reported, and warned it could face legal action over the breach.
Del Monte Philippines said in a statement: "While this cargo is owned by Del Monte Philippines, it was still enroute for delivery to Del Monte and was therefore outside its control at the time of the accident."
The firm said that, unknown to Del Monte Philippines, the endosulfan cargo had been loaded by Sulpicio Lines on to the wrong vessel.
The statement continued: "Upon learning that our cargo was loaded in the ill-fated MV Princess of the Stars, we immediately informed the Fertiliser and Pesticide Authority."
Challenging operation
Officials have imposed a fishing ban in the waters around the stricken vessel, but said tests so far had shown no sign of the chemical.
The suspension of dive operations means the recovery of bodies, which had been expected to take a month, is now likely to take even longer, with more agony for relatives of those lost.
Special chemical-resistant diving suits have been ordered from Singapore to help trace the chemical cargo.
But the operation will be difficult - only the tip of the seven-storey ship's bow is above the water line, with the stern resting on the edge of a reef. At least 100,000 litres of fuel are also thought to be on board.
The sinking is one of the country's worst maritime disasters, and a marine inquiry is underway into the cause of the tragedy.
Sulpicio Lines has figured in three other previous sea disasters, including a collision between a ferry and an oil tanker in 1987 that killed over 4,000 people.
BBC News
Black Widow
06-30-2008, 09:39 PM
A British man who put his "entire life" up for sale online after his marriage ended has sold all his belongings for £200,000.
Ian Usher, who emigrated to Australia six years ago, decided to sell his house, car, job and friends to the highest bidder as he tries to make a fresh start.
The 44-year-old's possessions were estimated to be worth $420,000Aus.
But the lot only attracted a peak offer of $399,300Aus when bids closed on eBay.
Speaking after agreeing the fee, Mr Usher insisted he did not regret making an apparent loss.
He said: "I am relatively pleased but I thought it would go a bit higher, if I'm honest.
"But I've no regrets. What's done is done and I'm looking forward to sorting this all out."
Offers on the 'life lot' rocketed to over $2mAus within hours of the sale's start last Sunday.
However, Mr Usher and eBay had to introduce a registration system to weed out the flurry of hoax bidders, many of which were teenage pranksters from the UK.
Up for auction was his three-bedroom home in the western Australian city of Perth and everything inside it, including his Mazda car, motorcycle, jet ski and parachuting gear.
He also sold an introduction to his friends and a trial run at his sales assistant job at rug shop, Jenny Jones Rugs.
Mr Usher said he would not reveal the identity of the buyer before he had made a private telephone call to him.
On the future, he added: "I've got some ideas. I'd like to do some travelling. I'd like to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower, it's one of a huge list of things I want to achieve."
sky news
Black Widow
07-01-2008, 01:03 PM
Portuguese detectives are dropping the Madeleine McCann case due to lack of evidence, according to media reports in the country.
Two Portuguese newspapers said the Public Prosecutor's office intended to call off their search for the girl before July 14, when the customary official secrecy period covering the investigation ends.
Police could re-open the case if new evidence emerges, the papers said.
Both papers - Correio da Manha and Jornal de Noticias - cited unidentified police sources.
Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007, days before her fourth birthday.
She had been left sleeping in a holiday apartment as her parents Kate and Gerry dined with friends in a nearby tapas bar in the resort of Praia da Luz in southern Portugal.
Her parents were made formal suspects on September 7 last year in one of the many dramatic twists in the case. They insist Madeleine was abducted.
Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns' spokesman, told Sky News: "As usual, these are non-attributed sources and we have not heard this officially. But if it is true it's not before time - Kate and Gerry have suffered enough.
"Police should lift their arguido (suspect) status and should pass their information over to our investigators who continue to work on the case.
"We still need to find Madeleine."
Sky News' crime correspondent Martin Brunt said: "Don't expect any confirmation from the Portuguese police any time soon - but it does signal that they are coming to the end of the investigation.
"If the police stop treating the McCanns as suspects the couple would hope that more effort would be put into finding their little girl."
Another Briton, Robert Murat, was also declared a suspect in the case.
Portuguese journalist Rui Pinto de Almeida told Sky News: "This is a formal legal requirement in Portugal and there remains the possibility of re-opening the case."
The Expresso newspaper says on its website that, according to a police source, the report on the investigation has not reached any conclusions and does not say whether it is a case of abduction, homicide, or concealing of a body.
Another source told the newspaper: "In normal circumstances, with this sort of
a report, the decision would have to be to shelve it in the hope of getting better evidence in the future."
The final report is to go the Ministerio Publico in Portimao, where a decision will be taken in the coming days, according to the newspaper.
sky news
Black Widow
07-01-2008, 04:51 PM
Portuguese detectives are not dropping the Madeleine McCann case due to lack of evidence, the country's Attorney General has said.
Madeleine McCann
Madeleine McCann: Missing since May last year
Media reports suggested the investigation into the British girl's disappearance was being discontinued because of lack of evidence.
But in a statement the Portuguese Attorney General, Fernando Pinto Monteiro, denied this.
The statement said that police had handed over their final report but that officials had made no decision on whether to halt the investigation.
Two Portuguese newspapers said the Public Prosecutor's office intended to call off their search for the girl before July 14, when the customary official secrecy period covering the investigation ends.
Police could re-open the case if new evidence emerges, the papers said.
Both papers - Correio da Manha and Jornal de Noticias - cited unidentified police sources.
Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007, days before her fourth birthday.
She had been left sleeping in a holiday apartment as her parents Kate and Gerry dined with friends in a nearby tapas bar in the resort of Praia da Luz in southern Portugal.
Her parents were made formal suspects on September 7 last year in one of the many dramatic twists in the case. They insist Madeleine was abducted.
Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns' spokesman, told Sky News: "As usual, these are non-attributed sources and we have not heard this officially. But if it is true it's not before time - Kate and Gerry have suffered enough.
"Police should lift their arguido (suspect) status and should pass their information over to our investigators who continue to work on the case.
"We still need to find Madeleine."
Sky News' crime correspondent Martin Brunt said: "Don't expect any confirmation from the Portuguese police any time soon - but it does signal that they are coming to the end of the investigation.
"If the police stop treating the McCanns as suspects the couple would hope that more effort would be put into finding their little girl."
Another Briton, Robert Murat, was also declared a suspect in the case.
Portuguese journalist Rui Pinto de Almeida told Sky News: "This is a formal legal requirement in Portugal and there remains the possibility of re-opening the case."
The Expresso newspaper says on its website that, according to a police source, the report on the investigation has not reached any conclusions and does not say whether it is a case of abduction, homicide, or concealing of a body.
Another source told the newspaper: "In normal circumstances, with this sort of
a report, the decision would have to be to shelve it in the hope of getting better evidence in the future."
The final report is to go the Ministerio Publico in Portimao, where a decision will be taken in the coming days, according to the newspaper.
sky news
Black Widow
07-01-2008, 07:51 PM
Teen dies in dad's arms after Amazon ordeal
Lost in rain forest for 6 weeks, student survives until father finds him
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - A Brazilian student lost in the Amazon rain forest for six weeks was found by his father, only to die in his arms a short time later, rescue officials said on Tuesday.
Jonathan dos Santos Alves, 18, had been lost in the forest since mid-May, when he became separated from two friends he was hunting with in an area 72 miles north of the city of Manaus.
Fire and rescue department chief Antonio Dias dos Santos told Reuters he had been missing for 42 days.
The official search was called off a month ago but his father, Edilson, continued looking with his brother and two other men. On Saturday, they found Jonathan lying next to a river, dehydrated, emaciated and covered in insect bites.
'Gritted his teeth and died'
"I held him in my arms and got the insects away from his mouth," his father, a 40-year-old farmer, was quoted as saying by the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper. "When I tried to revive him, he gritted his teeth and died."
The son was found about 27 miles from where he went missing. Pictures from the scene showed rescuers using a helicopter to lift his body from a tree, where his father had placed it during the weekend to keep it from being eaten by animals.
msnbc
JohnCenaFan28
07-06-2008, 02:48 AM
Those people who do those things are really stupid lol.
JohnCenaFan28
07-06-2008, 02:49 AM
I'm glad they picked it back up.
JohnCenaFan28
07-06-2008, 02:49 AM
Wow, that's a very sad read...
JohnCenaFan28
07-06-2008, 02:54 AM
A man has been arrested after tearing the head off a wax figure of Adolf Hitler at a newly opened branch of Madame Tussauds in Berlin.
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The 41-year-old man was held after attacking the waxwork, only hours after the attraction opened on Saturday.
The inclusion of Hitler in the exhibition has aroused controversy in a country where Nazi symbols are banned.
But the exhibition's organisers said they could hardly depict German history without portraying Hitler.
They said the waxwork depicted Hitler in the hours before his suicide, a defeated figure slumped in his bunker as the Red Army reached Berlin.
The Fuhrer was positioned behind a table, which was supposed to prevent visitors posing with the statue - or damaging it.
'Showing reality'
Police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said a security guard had been shoved aside by the attacker.
Visitors to Madame Tussauds give their reaction to the attack
"He tried to prevent the man from acting but failed. The suspect, from the Kreuzberg district, pushed the man aside and lunged at the Adolf Hitler figure and ripped the head off."
Another visitor, who was not named, said the man went straight to the Hitler figure and stepped behind the desk.
"I heard a rumbling and then he tore the figure down off the chair. The security was immediately there and tried to control him but it wasn't easy, he defended himself. Additional security staff took him away then and I had to leave the place," he said.
The attacker was only the second visitor to enter the exhibition, according to one report.
The decision to include a figure of Hitler has been controversial from the start.
Natalie Ruoss, of Madame Tussauds, said: "We did surveys while we were planning the exhibition on the street with Berliners and with tourists, and the result was quite clear that Hitler is one of the figures that they want to see.
"Seeing as we are portraying the history of Germany we could hardly have left him out... we want to show the reality."
Despite some criticism in the media, Stephen Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he did not object to Hitler being shown, as long as it was done properly.
"Hitler should not become a tourist attraction but if this exhibition helps to some extent normalise the way of dealing with Hitler, as a kind of a demystification, let's try it," Mr Kramer told the AFP news agency.
"Erasing him from history is not going to bring the perished ones back, it's not going to heal the damage that he did, the crimes that he did. That would be counter-productive," he said.
The waxwork museum also includes other German historical figures like Otto von Bismarck, Karl Marx, Beethoven, Bach and Einstein.
Foreigners featured include Winston Churchill, Mikhail Gorbachev and Tom Cruise.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
07-06-2008, 02:56 AM
Religious leaders in Venezuela have criticised a recently formed church that openly backs President Hugo Chavez's socialist politics.
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The Reformed Catholic Church was set up by a group of Anglicans and Catholics who wanted to put more emphasis on helping the poor.
But the ruling body of the Catholic Church says its members are criminals who are trying to divide the Church.
The Church and the government have been in frequent conflict in Venezuela.
Catholicism is practised widely in Venezuela, but the new group's open support for President Chavez's socialist policies is deepening those divisions.
Feathers ruffled
The Reformed Catholic Church was set up by a group of priests from a mixed background.
It has a small following - several thousand people in the west the country.
But despite its size, its philosophy has ruffled a few feathers.
The Venezuelan Episcopal Conference, the ruling council of the Catholic Church, has described the founders as delinquents.
Its vice president, Archbishop Roberto Luckert, has accused the new organisation of taking government money and mixing politics with religion.
But Enrique Albornoz, who was appointed as the Reformed Church's first bishop last week, denies the allegations.
"We support the work the government is doing for the poor," he told the BBC, "but we don't take any political line."
The breakaway organisation is unusual in supporting Mr Chavez.
The Catholic Church has often clashed with the president, accusing him in the past of taking Venezuela down a path to dictatorship.
He in return has criticised the Church for being elitist and ignoring the country's poor.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
07-06-2008, 03:00 AM
Clashes between guards and prisoners at a jail in Syria have resulted in many deaths, human-rights groups have said.
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At least 25 people were killed after military police fired live bullets at Islamist inmates, the groups said.
The Syrian authorities have so far not commented on the situation. Prisoners said the clashes were sparked by raids in which guards beat inmates.
One inmate told the BBC he believed the death toll was higher. The prisoners are reportedly holding hostages.
Several prisoners have managed to contact Syrian human rights group, as well as the BBC, by telephone.
They said the guards had also desecrated copies of the Koran.
The inmates said the early-morning raids were in response to a protest by detainees several weeks ago about conditions at Saydnaya Prison near Damascus, which houses chiefly Islamist and political prisoners.
One inmate told the BBC the guards had roughly treated the prisoners during the raid.
"They shackled our hands behind us, confiscated our clothes and possessions, and beat us. And they insulted the Koran, they trod on the Koran," he told the BBC's Arabic service.
Billowing smoke
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights quoted a political prisoner reached by mobile phone inside the jail as saying that the riot had been started by Islamist inmates.
A number of prisoners had climbed on to the roof of the prison to escape continued shooting with live ammunition by guards, the group said on its website.
"The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights demands that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad intervenes immediately to stop this massacre," it said.
The group told the AFP news agency that several hundred soldiers were being held hostage in the jail in order to put pressure on the Syrian authorities.
Ammar al-Qurabi, of Syria's National Organisation for Human Rights (NOHR), told al-Arabiya TV, a Dubai-based channel, that it was too early to get a clear figure of how many had been killed or injured.
He said the authorities had viewed disobedience by the prisoners as rioting and so had responded with live ammunition.
The NOHR hoped the incident would push Syrian officials to listen to detainees' complaints over conditions, he said, rather than using force.
Muhammad al-Hassani, also from the NOHR, told the Associated Press news agency he could see smoke billowing from the building and prisoners standing on the roof.
He said ambulances were carrying the injured to hospital. Meanwhile, Syrian troops had closed roads around the prison, he said, and phone lines in the area had been cut off.
BBC News
Black Widow
07-06-2008, 08:27 PM
why make a wax work of a wanker anyway
Black Widow
07-06-2008, 08:28 PM
At least 10 Pakistani police officers have been killed after a suicide attacker set off explosives near a police station in the capital Islamabad.
Witnesses reported a horrific scene after the blast, with the road left covered in broken glass and splattered with blood.
A senior government official, said more than 10 people were killed and two or three others wounded.
"All are police officials. It was targeted to the forces by the suicider," he said.
The blast came as thousands of Islamic hardliners were gathered not far away to mark the one-year anniversary of a deadly military crackdown on the radical Red Mosque.
It was not clear whether the events were linked.
The explosion also came following recent threats of revenge from militants in Pakistan angered by a paramilitary operation against insurgents in the tribal northwest.
Violence levels have fallen in Pakistan since last year, but attacks still occur.
A new government that came to power following February elections has sought to end militancy in the country primarily through peace deals with extremists.
sky news
Black Widow
07-06-2008, 08:30 PM
An American man who was born a woman is reported to have given birth to a baby girl.
Thomas Beatie, who lives as a male after undergoing surgery and hormone treatment, gave birth at a hospital in Oregon on June 29, according to People magazine.
Both he and the baby are said to be "healthy and doing well".
Beatie, 34, kept female reproductive organs when he legally became a man 10 years ago.
The baby was conceived through artificial insemination using donor sperm and Beatie's own eggs.
"The only thing different about me is that I can't breast-feed my baby. But a lot of mothers don't," People quoted Beatie as saying.
He has had his breasts surgically removed.
He said that the baby was not delivered by Caesarean section, but no other details about the birth have been confirmed.
Earlier this year, Beatie caused controversy when his pregnancy was revealed and he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
His wife Nancy, 46, whom he married five years ago, was unable to conceive because she had already had a hysterectomy.
The couple, who operate a T-shirt printing business in Bend, Oregon, are legally married and he is recognised under state law as a man.
sky news
JohnCenaFan28
07-06-2008, 11:29 PM
I remember him on Oprah, that was a very strange episode. Thanks for the update on his condition.
Punisher
07-07-2008, 04:48 AM
Well this is awkward... I dont know what to say about this
JohnCenaFan28
07-07-2008, 05:25 AM
Scientists say they have found more evidence that men as well as women have biological clocks and that they start to tick in their mid-30s.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44809000/jpg/_44809649_fatherand-baby_bbc226.jpg
A French study of over 12,200 couples having fertility treatment suggests the chance of a successful pregnancy falls when the man is aged over 35.
It adds that the chance is significantly lower if he is over 40.
Previous studies have shown that both natural and assisted conception is more difficult if the man is over 40.
The researchers told a European reproductive health conference that it was likely the problems were caused by DNA damage in sperm.
Miscarriage risk
The researchers studied couples who had sought treatment for infertility at the Eylau Centre for Assisted Reproduction in Paris between January 2002 and December 2006.
All were given intrauterine inseminations (IUI), also known as artificial insemination, where sperm is inserted into the womb when the woman is ovulating.
It is given to couples where the woman has no fertility problems and is less invasive than IVF.
The men's sperm were examined for quantity, their ability to move and swim and their size and shape.
Rates of pregnancy, miscarriage and births were recorded.
In addition, the researchers analysed detailed data on the pregnancies, which allowed them to pinpoint factors associated with the man and the woman.
As expected, maternal age had an effect in women over 35, who had a significantly higher chance of miscarriage and lower rate of pregnancy.
But the team also found that, where the father was in his late 30s, miscarriages were more common than if the man was younger.
And if a man was over 40, the chances of a successful pregnancy were even lower.
For those couples, a third of pregnancies ended in miscarriage and only 10% of treatments resulted in pregnancies.
'Growing evidence'
Dr Stephanie Belloc, who presented the work to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) conference in Barcelona, said: "This research has important implications for couples wanting to start a family."
She said such couples should be offered IVF (where an egg is fertilised in a lab dish), and where the outer membrane of the egg seems to block sperm with DNA damage, and ICSI (where a sperm is injected directly into an egg), where the best sperm can be selected for use.
"These methods, although not in themselves a guarantee of success, may help couples where the man is older to achieve a pregnancy more quickly, and also reduce the risk of miscarriage," she added.
Dr Alan Pacey, a fertility expert at Sheffield University and secretary of the British Fertility Society, said: "There is growing evidence from a number of studies to show that men are not totally immune from reproductive ageing.
"Previous studies of couples trying to conceive naturally or undergoing IVF have shown that men over the age of about 40 are less fertile than younger men. Moreover, if they do achieve a pregnancy their partners are more likely to miscarry.
"This study reinforces the message that men aren't excused from reproductive ageing."
BBC News
Black Widow
07-07-2008, 06:04 PM
Family, friends and army comrades have said a final farewell to the first British woman to die on active service in Afghanistan.
Corporal Sarah Bryant, 26, of the Intelligence Corps, was one of four soldiers killed when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle last month.
She had been taking part in an operation east of Lashkar Gah in Helmand province when their vehicle was blown apart.
Hours earlier, she was told she had been earmarked for promotion to sergeant, as had her husband, Cpl Carl Bryant.
Cpl Bryant's funeral - with full military honours - was held at Holy Trinity Church in Wetheral, near Carlisle, Cumbria, where she got married two years ago.
A party of six pallbearers, close comrades and friends, carried her coffin - draped in the Union flag, with her beret, belt, campaign medals and a single red rose on top.
During the service, a tribute was paid to the other fatalities of the roadside bomb.
It read: "In memory also of those soldiers who died alongside Sarah, Cpl Sean Robert Reeve, Lance Corporal Richard Larkin and Trooper Paul Stout."
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Suggit, Cpl Bryant's commanding officer, told mourners: "We are here because we all in different ways loved Sarah. Love is a totality - it's an is or an isn't, there's no half measures.
"Sarah gave us all love, the special and individual love of a daughter, wife, a friend and a comrade in arms. This is a special place, it's filled with Sarah's love."
All the mourners, around 300 in all, later joined a procession, walking the short journey from the church to the graveside for a private burial.
A bugler played the Last Post and a party of seven soldiers from the Intelligence Corps fired three volleys over her coffin, before it was finally laid to rest.
sky news
Black Widow
07-07-2008, 06:05 PM
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A bank clerk who tried to steal nearly £72m from HSBC has been jailed for nine years.
sky news
Black Widow
07-08-2008, 12:48 PM
The G8 summit has agreed to set a global target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2050, according to the Japanese Prime Minister.
Yasuo Fukuda said the G8 nations "came to a mutual recognition" that cutting emissions by at least half "should be a global target".
The eight leaders pledged to work with nearly 200 states in United Nations climate change talks to adopt the goal.
Gordon Brown said: "There has been major progress on the climate change agenda, beyond what people thought possible a few months ago.
"Countries which previously objected to setting overall targets have accepted these targets subject to there being an international agreement."
Mr Brown also announced his delight that the aid promises made at Gleneagles would be retained and announced a multibillion-pound investment in malaria nets, fighting infectious diseases and education in developing countries.
However, there was immediate criticism from climate change campaigners who said the pledge did not go far enough.
Environmental group WWF criticised the lack of a commitment to midterm targets and said the 2050 goal was insufficient because many scientists say bigger cuts are needed to address climate change.
In a statement the organisation said: "The G8 are responsible for 62% of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem.
"WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility."
Greenpeace executive director John Sauven said: "The G8 leaders have failed the world again.
"We needed tough targets for the richest countries to slash emissions in the next 100 months, but instead we got ambiguous long-term targets for the world in general."
South African environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said the announcement set out a "vision" but no firm targets to achieve big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
He said: "To be meaningful and credible a long-term goal must have a base year.
"It must be underpinned by ambitious mid-term targets and actions and it should be based on an equitable burden-sharing paradigm.
"It is regrettable that the lowest common denominator in the G8 determined the level of ambition in the G8 declaration on climate change."
Climate change had promised to be one of the most contentious subjects being discussed by the world's richest countries.
Last year's G8 summit agreed to "seriously consider" cutting carbon emissions by 50% by 2050.
But negotiators had struggled to improve on that pledge.
The leaders of the most powerful industrialised nations are meeting in Japan to discuss the main issues facing the world economy.
China and India - who are not in G8 - say it is up to the heavily-polluting developed world to take the lead in the fight against global warming.
But US President George Bush says rapidly developing nations must play their part and has been unwilling to set goals without the two countries.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso warned of the "I will do nothing unless you do it first" approach, which he called a "vicious circle".
G8 environment ministers said in May there was a "strong political will" to meet the 2050 target but that a consensus had not been reached on midterm targets for 2020.
The G8 consists of the US, Russia, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Britain and Japan.
sky news
Black Widow
07-08-2008, 12:51 PM
A retired teacher has won the final round of a legal battle for the right to claim compensation from a serial rapist who won millions on the National Lottery.
The 78-year-old woman, whose identity is protected by law, was told by a High Court judge that she could go ahead with her damages claim against Iorworth Hoare for the psychological injuries she says she suffered after he attacked her in Roundhay Park, Leeds, in 1988.
Hoare, 59, was convicted of attempted rape and jailed for life - he had six previous convictions for rape, attempted rape and indecent assault - and spent 16 years in prison.
He bought a winning Lotto Extra ticket while on day release from prison in August 2004, scooping a £7m jackpot.
Five months ago, the woman, Mrs A, won a vital ruling from the Law Lords that, in cases of serious assault, courts had a discretion to extend the usual time limit within which compensation claims must be brought.
Her claim was sent back to the High Court for a decision on whether, in the particular circumstances of her case, she should be allowed to sue 20 years after the event.
Mr Justice Coulson said there were some factor's in Hoare's favour - the length of the delay in suing, the difficulties he might face regarding production of defence evidence in the light of that delay and the fact that Mrs A had already received £5,000 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.
But the factors in Mrs A's favour carried far greater weight.
It was a serious assault which led to Hoare being given a life jail sentence, which rendered him incapable of earning a living and therefore not worth suing at the time.
His lack of funds prior to his lottery win, meaning he was not worth pursuing for damages, was the main reason for the delay in bringing the action.
The judge ordered an urgent trial of Mrs A's damages action if no settlement is reached.
Mrs A says she still suffers from nightmares and that the brutality of the assault destroyed her self-esteem and wrecked her relationships.
Hoare, released from prison in 2005, is reported to live in a £700,000 house near Newcastle.
sky news
Black Widow
07-08-2008, 12:53 PM
The Afghan government has said that "foreign intelligence" was behind a bomb blast outside the Indian embassy in Kabul in an apparent reference to Pakistan.
The explosion killed 41 people and wounded about 150 in one of the worst atrocities in the country since the Taliban was overthrown in 2001.
A security report to the cabinet hours after the blast said the attack could not have been carried out without the "full support of foreign intelligence," according to a summary of the meeting released to the media.
It did not name a foreign intelligence service but Afghanistan regularly accuses circles in Pakistan, a long-time rival of India, of supporting the Taliban and other insurgents.
Pakistan denies the accusation.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai's spokesman said Afghan officials had "sufficient evidence" to blame a foreign intelligence agency.
Humayun Hamidzada did not name Pakistan but told reporters it was "pretty obvious" who was behind Monday's blast.
He said: "The project was designed outside Afghanistan. It was exported to Afghanistan."
sky news
JohnCenaFan28
07-09-2008, 04:13 AM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
07-09-2008, 04:13 AM
Thanks for the read.
JohnCenaFan28
07-09-2008, 04:14 AM
Wow, that's really far away. They should have tried to aim earlier...
JohnCenaFan28
07-09-2008, 04:15 AM
Interesting story, thanks for posting it.
JohnCenaFan28
07-09-2008, 04:16 AM
Thanks for the read.
piececore
07-09-2008, 06:33 AM
woah! i didnt know that there were still pirates!
JohnCenaFan28
07-10-2008, 04:34 AM
Prosecutors say DNA tests have cleared the family of JonBenet Ramsey over the child beauty queen's murder.
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Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy said the tests pointed to an "unexplained third party".
Police initially said parents John and Patsy Ramsey were under an "umbrella of suspicion" over the six-year-old's 1996 killing. Mrs Ramsey died in 2006.
Ms Lacy said no family member was now considered a suspect and apologised for any extra distress caused to them.
Six-year-old JonBenet's body was found in the cellar of her family home in Colorado after her parents had reported her missing on 26 December 1996.
She had been garrotted with a cord and her skull had been fractured.
Her family, who later moved to Atlanta, Georgia, fought for years to clear their names amid persistent accusations they were involved in her death.
Accusations
Ms Lacy released a copy of a letter sent to John Ramsey, in which she said: "To the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime, I am deeply sorry."
She added that she wished it had been possible to clear JonBenet's parents and their son Burke, who was nine when his sister was killed, before Mrs Ramsey died of ovarian cancer.
In a press statement, Ms Lacy said that following scientific advances, police had been able to identify genetic material and a DNA profile from underwear she was wearing when she died.
"That genetic profile belongs to a man and does not belong to anyone in the Ramsey family," she said.
The male profile has been entered into the national DNA data bank, Ms Lacy said, and is believed by prosecutors to be that of the killer.
Ms Lacy commented on the huge media interest that JonBenet's killing and the subsequent investigations had provoked.
"The suspicions about the Ramseys in this case created an ongoing living hell for the Ramsey family and their friends, which added to their suffering from the unexplained and devastating loss of JonBenet," she said.
While it appeared that they were being tried in the press, the Ramseys were never charged. In 1999, a grand jury refused to indict either parent.
And in 2003, a federal judge in Atlanta concluded that the evidence that she had reviewed suggested that an intruder had killed JonBenet.
In 2006, a former teacher was arrested in Thailand after he claimed to have killed JonBenet, but DNA tests cleared him of the crime.
John Mark Karr had said he was with her on the night that she died, but that her death was an accident.
BBC News
Black Widow
07-10-2008, 09:20 PM
Lebanese troops have taken to the streets of the city of Tripoli to end a series of gun battles between rival sectarian factions which have left at least four people dead.
Fighting erupted late on Tuesday in the northeastern Bab al Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen districts of the port city.
The battles had died down by Thursday morning as dozens of army vehicles moved into the flashpoint areas.
The fighting, which claimed the lives of four people and left 58 wounded, had raged into the night despite a ceasefire that was supposed to come into effect at 8pm local time.
A Lebanon army statement said: "In order to put an end to the breach of residents' security, the army command has announced that it is reinforcing its presence in the sensitive areas.
"The army will confront those who fire first and calls on all parties to show calm and allow the military to take control of the situation."
Militants armed with rockets, sniper rifles and grenades fought in the streets throughout Wednesday, causing panicked residents to flee and shops and schools to close.
The dead included two brothers killed by snipers, a Palestinian nurse and a resident of the Jabal Mohsen district, which is dominated by members of the Alawite community, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, which support the opposition.
The latest unrest follows the eruption of similar battles two weeks ago in Tripoli, Lebanon's second largest city after the capital Beirut, that left nine people dead and dozens wounded.
It comes amid continued efforts by prime minister Fuad Siniora to form a national unity government which have been hampered by bickering between rival factions over cabinet posts.
Fighting was centred on a main road separating the areas of Bab al Tebbaneh, where most residents are Sunni supporters of the Western-backed premier, and Jabal Mohsen, a largely pro-opposition area.
Television images showed masked gunmen running across deserted streets and smoke billowing out of nearby buildings as clashes continued intermittently.
The two sides announced late on Wednesday that they had agreed to observe a ceasefire from 8pm and allow the deployment of the army in the two neighbourhoods of Tripoli, which is home to almost 400,000 people.
Sporadic fighting has erupted in Lebanon despite a power-sharing deal between rival factions aimed at ending a political crisis that boiled over into clashes that left 65 dead in May and raised fears of a return to all-out civil war.
sky news
JohnCenaFan28
07-10-2008, 10:32 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
07-10-2008, 10:34 PM
Georgia is to recall its ambassador from Russia after Moscow admitted its fighter jets had entered Georgian airspace earlier this week.
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Tbilisi accused Moscow of committing a "very grave act of aggression".
Moscow said its jets were above Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia to "cool hot heads in Tbilisi".
Tension has been rising over South Ossetia and another Georgian breakaway region, Abkhazia. Moscow supports separatist administrations in both.
The Kremlin accuses Georgia's pro-Western government of pushing the two separatist regions to the brink of armed conflict in its attempts to return them under Tbilisi's control.
Georgia blames Russia for fuelling the situation in order to create instability and undermine Tbilisi's efforts to join Nato.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a visit to Tbilisi on Thursday, warned Russia against stoking up tension in the region.
'Preventing bloodshed'
"We will take some aggressive diplomatic steps in order to respond adequately to Russia's actions," Georgian Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili said.
"One such step is that from today [Thursday], we are recalling our ambassador in Russia for consultations," the minister said.
Ms Tkeshelashvili's comments came shortly after Russia admitted its planes flew over South Ossetia on Tuesday night.
The Russian foreign ministry said it had ordered the flights because it believed the Georgian government was preparing to attack the rebel region.
"The need arose to take urgent and active measures to prevent bloodshed and keep the situation within peaceful bounds," a Russian foreign ministry statement said.
"To clarify the situation, aircraft of the Russian air force carried out a brief flight over the territory of South Ossetia," it added.
"As subsequent events showed, this step allowed to cool hot heads in Tbilisi and prevent events developing along military lines," the statement said.
Moscow has previously denied Georgian accusations of over flights.
[U]BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
07-10-2008, 10:36 PM
US civil rights leader the Rev Jesse Jackson has apologised for "regretfully crude" remarks he made about Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
In a reference to Mr Obama, Mr Jackson had said on US Fox News: "I want to cut his nuts off", not knowing his comments were picked up by a live microphone.
Mr Jackson had said he thought Mr Obama was "speaking down to black people".
The reverend said he was "very sorry for any harm" and that he had "deep and wide" support for the Obama campaign.
Mr Jackson has been a key civil rights campaigner and was unsuccessful when running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984.
'Moral content'
Mr Jackson was talking to a guest ahead of a live interview on Fox on Sunday in Chicago when he made the remarks.
He was discussing the question of Mr Obama's speeches on morality that the presidential candidate had made in black churches.
He said he thought there were other key issues facing the black community, such as unemployment and crime.
The reverend added: "See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based... I want to cut his nuts off... Barack... he's talking down to black people."
Mr Jackson said he had called the Obama campaign to apologise "for any harm or hurt that this hot mic private conversation may have caused".
"My support for Senator Obama's campaign is wide, deep and unequivocal."
Mr Jackson said he was trying to appeal to Mr Obama for "the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy".
A spokesman for the Obama campaign, Bill Burton, said the presidential candidate would "continue to speak out about our responsibilities to ourselves and each other, and he of course accepts Reverend Jackson's apology".
Mr Obama has had a number of problems with clergymen during his election campaign.
In May he said he was "deeply disappointed" with a sermon by supporter Rev Michael Pfleger, who suggested presidential rival Hillary Clinton had felt "entitled" to beat Mr Obama because she was white.
Earlier, Mr Obama denounced the claim by Rev Jeremiah Wright, who officiated at his wedding and baptised his daughters, that the 9/11 attacks were an example of "America's chickens coming home to
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
07-10-2008, 10:37 PM
Police in the US have uncovered cocaine with a street value of $400,000 (£200,000) - in a police car.
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An undercover officer in Dallas discovered nearly 50lb (22kg) of the drug as he was cleaning the car his squad had been using for two months.
The cocaine was hidden in hydraulically controlled secret compartments.
The vehicle was seized at a crime scene earlier this year. It was put into police service after a search by the narcotics squad found nothing unusual.
"These compartments have recently been more and more popular with drug operations," Julian Bernal, deputy chief of the narcotics division, told local media.
"Because of the use of hydraulics, you normally don't have any indication that the car has been altered in any way.
"They use multiple switches and relays, and you have to know the sequence in order to make the panel open," he told the Dallas Morning News.
Second car
The vehicle was seized in March, after officers responded to a report of a violent altercation and gunshots.
They found $34,000 in cash, a set of scales and a small amount of cocaine at the address.
Police impounded the two-door 2004 Infiniti and a second car, which was later sold at auction.
Mr Bernal said police wanted to track down the buyer to check whether any drugs had been hidden in that car.
BBC News
Black Widow
07-11-2008, 08:02 PM
A teenager has been found guilty of murdering stab victim Martin Dinnegan, 14, in north London.
Martin was stabbed to death near his home in Holloway, north London, within an hour of dirty looks being exchanged between two groups of youths.
He was chased by a gang and left to die on the street in June last year.
Local resident Tom Morgan said he saw Martin run past him pleading: "Please help me," as he was chased along the street.
"He ran past us on the road to my left then a guy with a black tracksuit went past on a large-framed BMX," he said.
"He [Martin Dinnegan] was very white-faced, he was sprinting towards us and shouted 'Help me, please help me'."
- Eyewitness Tom Morgan
"He dropped the bike when he got alongside the victim. Martin stood still and put his hands up as if to placate the cyclist. Martin appeared scared, very scared."
He said the cyclist then punched Martin in "the head or neck".
Martin fell to the ground and the youth pinned him down. Mr Morgan added: "Then I saw what seemed to be a stabbing motion rather than a punching motion four or five times in very rapid succession."
Martin, a pupil at St Aloysius College in Archway, lived on a local housing estate where there was rivalry with youths living on another estate.
The jury at the Old Bailey took just five hours to convict the 16-year-old youth of Martin's murder.
A 17-year-old was found guilty of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm.
He was cleared of murder and manslaughter.
Rene John-Baptiste, 21, of Plaistow, east London, and Sean Clark, 19, of Holloway, were cleared of all charges.
The two juveniles cannot be named because of their ages. They were remanded in custody for sentencing on August 8.
sky news
Black Widow
07-11-2008, 08:03 PM
The head of Scotland Yard has sought to reassure the public after four men died in separate knife attacks in London in 24 hours - and a fifth remains fighting for his life.
Sir Ian Blair said the killings were not linked - and promised that the Metropolitan Police were doing "everything possible to get knives off the street".
The four murders took place with 17 hours of each other in Edmonton, Leyton, Walthamstow and Tottenham.
A fifth attack took place in Willesden, leaving a man in his late 20s critically ill with stab wounds to his back and stomach.
Sir Ian said: "These attacks are not connected nor do they all involve teenagers. Detectives have made arrests in three of the four murders.
Gordon Brown has described the recent stabbings as "shocking and tragic".
The Prime Minister said in a statement that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith would set out the Government's latest plans to tackle knife crime on Monday.
"The dreadful loss of life in just 24 hours graphically illustrates the need for everyone to pull together to put an end to this unacceptable violence."
Last week Deputy Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson revealed a 75-strong task force aimed at tackling knife crime.
Thousands of people have been stopped and searched in recent weeks as part of a police drive to deter young people from carrying knives.
Meanwhile, London Mayor Boris Johnson said he would be talking to the Government about bringing forward new measures to tackle the crime.
"We need to do all we can to address the long-term complex root causes of violence as well as ensuring the police are providing an effective deterrent to those who carry knives and guns," he said.
Stabbing updates
:: Edmonton: Two men have been arrested after a 19-year-old was knifed in a confrontation at a bedsit in Gloucester Road.
:: Leyton: Detectives are investigating reports that 20-year-old Adnan Patel was stabbed in a road rage incident and tried to flee the scene in his car before crashing. Four people were arrested shortly after the attack.
:: Walthamstow: a man aged in his 20s was fatally stabbed in the chest and head in an attack in St David's Court.
:: Tottenham: A man thought to be in his 40s was found stabbed to death at the rear of a disused pub in Tottenham High Road. Two men and a woman were arrested nearby.
Black Widow
07-11-2008, 08:05 PM
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Australian victims of church sex abuse have attacked a new law preventing people from "annoying" Catholics, on the grounds that it limits their right to legitimate peaceful protest.
Civil libertarians are fighting to have the measures - introduced to stop activists "inconveniencing" pilgrims during Pope Benedict XVI's upcoming visit to Sydney - scrapped.
They said the laws mean that people wearing T-shirts with slogans deemed inappropriate could face fines of up to £2500.
Under the new laws, police will be able to stop behaviour that "causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants" in World Youth Day, which is the focus of the pope's visit.
Two members of protest group NoToPope went to the Federal Court in an attempt to have the laws overturned.
NoToPope member Rachel Evans said her group objected to the fact that they faced criminal sanctions for handing out condoms to World Youth Day pilgrims.
"These laws are very draconian and we have the right to protest and say our piece," she told reporters outside the court.
One of the judges hearing the case, Catherine Branson, said the concept of annoyance was subjective.
"It's the subjective element that, can I say for myself, I find most troubling," she told the court.
"There's a risk of public life in Sydney becoming extraordinarily bland over a period of weeks because of the force of this."
Meanwhile one of Australia's largest sexual health groups said it would provide free condoms to pilgrims through its four Sydney healthcare centres.
Jill Michelson of Marie Stopes International said: "The simple fact is that many young people - including Catholics - have sex.
"When young people get together to celebrate and the euphoria is high, sexual activity can occur.
"To not provide access to condoms to those that choose to engage in sexual activity is simply encouraging unprotected sex, sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy."
Michelson said that to avoid breaching the annoyance laws her organisation would not hand out condoms at World Youth Day venues, unlike the NoToPope coalition.
sky news
macewindu
07-13-2008, 07:38 AM
woah!!
Black Widow
07-13-2008, 01:13 PM
Pope Benedict has landed in Australia where he will apologise for a sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Church in the country.
His visit is expected to be marred by protests from victims of abuse, who claim it still goes on.
But the Pope said everything possible would be done to prevent a recurrence.
"It is essential for the Church to reconcile, to prevent, to help and also to see (its) guilt," he said.
"It must be clear. Being a priest is incompatible with this behaviour because priests are in the service of our Lord.
"We have to reflect on what was insufficient and our education and our teaching (of priests). This is the essential content of what we will say (as we) apologise.
"We will do everything possible to heal and reconcile with victims".
The issue of sexual abuse of minors by priests has been a major scandal in several countries around the world.
When he visited the US last April, Pope Benedict spoke repeatedly about the "shame" the scandal had wrought on the Catholic Church.
He also met with abuse victims.
Broken Rites, a group which represents abuse victims in Australia, has a list of 107 convictions for sexual abuse but says the real number is higher and only a handful go to court.
Victims say the Catholic Church in Australia continues to cover up abuse by clergy despite issuing an apology for past abuse and compensation.
sky news
Black Widow
07-14-2008, 08:46 PM
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Nine British women who took part in an oral sex competition while on holiday on the Greek island of Zakynthos are facing charges of prostitution.
Six British and six Greek men, including two bar owners, were also charged over the incident, which took place at Laganas beach in the south of the island.
The women had been paid to take part in the competition, which was video recorded and was to be posted on the Internet, police said.
The men were charged with encouraging obscene behaviour.
In recent years, Laganas has established itself as one of Greece's most popular destinations for twenty-something holidaymakers and is known for its alcohol-fuelled nightlife.
Tour operators say the resort offers "non-stop partying" and "wild entertainment well into the night".
Around 15m people - a fifth of them British - visit the eastern Mediterranean country each year, drawn by its soaring summer temperatures, clear waters and sandy beaches.
Zakynthos, also known as Zante, is one of the Greek Ionian islands that is most popular with tourists.
sky news
Black Widow
07-14-2008, 08:52 PM
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Three men accused of plotting a series of terrorist attacks on transatlantic jets have pleaded guilty to conspiring to cause explosions.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27, admitted the offence at Woolwich Crown Court, in south east London.
The trio and two other defendants, Ibrahim Savant, 27, and Umar Islam, 30, also pleaded guilty to conspiring to cause a public nuisance by publishing videos threatening suicide bomb attacks.
A jury must still decide if the five men, and three others, are guilty of conspiring to murder thousands in a wave of mid-air terrorist explosions using homemade liquid bombs.
All eight men deny two charges of conspiracy to murder between January 1 and August 11 2006.
One of the charges specifies that the attacks would involve the detonation of improvised bombs on passenger aircraft.
Prosecutors claim the eight men plotted to blow up passenger jets flying from Heathrow to major cities in North America.
They planned to use powerful hydrogen peroxide liquid bombs disguised as soft drinks to bypass airport security, jurors were told.
The devices would be assembled by injecting the chemicals into plastic soft drinks bottles and detonated using a battery from a camera flash, it was claimed.
They were being assembled at a bomb factory flat bought by the gang in northeast London, the court heard.
The same flat was allegedly used by six members of the gang to record martyrdom videos in which they ranted hatred against the West and non-Muslims, jurors were told.
In their defence, Ali and Sarwar said they planned to record a documentary highlighting injustices against Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.
A small explosion at the Houses of Parliament in which no one would be hurt would act as a publicity stunt to draw attention to the programme.
The two men also considered other targets including gas terminals, oil refineries and airports, Sarwar said.
Ali and the five other men who recorded videos said they were acting the role of violent hate-filled extremists and the footage would be woven into the video.
sky news
Black Widow
07-18-2008, 04:35 PM
The US Army has defended a practice of shooting live pigs as part of a medical training exercise for soldiers heading to Iraq.
The military says the practice teaches troops emergency lifesaving skills needed on the battlefield when there are no doctors or medical facilities nearby.
"It's to teach Army personnel how to manage critically injured patients within the first few hours of their injury," said Major Derrick Cheng, spokesman for the 25th Infantry Division.
But animal cruelty organisation Peta has labelled the practice outdated and unnecessary and have urged the Army to rethink the plan.
"There's absolutely no reason why they have to shoot live pigs," spokeswoman Holly Beal said.
Peta said the training was brought to their attention by a "distraught" soldier who told them of plans to shoot the pigs with M4 carbines and M16 rifles.
The organisation said there were more humane options available, including high-tech human simulators.
But Major Cheng said shooting pigs was the best option.
"Those alternative methods just can't replicate what the troops are going to face when we use live-tissue training," he said.
"What we're doing is unique to what the soldiers are going to actually experience."
He added that the pigs were anaesthetised for the drill.
"We understand (Peta's) concerns and point of view. At the same, the Army is committed to providing the soldiers with the best training possible," he said.
Determined to halt the exercise, Peta has asked its two million members to flood the Army with calls and emails.
sky news
Black Widow
07-19-2008, 07:17 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Afghanistan on Saturday, met with American forces and, according to a U.S. official, is expected to meet Sunday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was visiting the southern Asian nation before he embarks on a tour of the Middle East and Europe, a trip aimed at boosting his foreign policy credentials.
The trip, which comes four months ahead of the presidential election, marks Obama's first visit to Afghanistan.
On Saturday, the senator from Illinois traveled to eastern Afghanistan to visit Americans forces under NATO's Regional Command East. Obama is accompanied by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska and Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island.
The senators met service members at Jalalabad airfield in Nangarhar province. The governor of Nangarhar province, Gul Agha Shirzai -- formerly the governor of Kandahar province -- also met the senators at the air base. Shirzai and Obama embraced briefly at the end of the meeting. Video Watch Obama's visit to Jalalabad »
Upon arrival at Bagram Air Base, the senators were briefed by Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, commanding general of the Regional Command East.
Ahead of the trip to Afghanistan, the senators stopped in Kuwait to visit U.S. troops, said Obama campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs. They left Washington on Thursday.
In Kuwait, the senators visited Camp Arifjan for about two hours to meet with U.S. Army Central leadership, take a brief tour of the base and talk with soldiers, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Bill Nutter said.
They met with about 1,000 military members at a gymnasium, and Obama played basketball with some soldiers before conducting a meet-and-greet there which included photo opportunities, Nutter said.
Following the events at the the gymnasium, they met with Lt. Gen. Jim Lovelace, the U.S. Army Central Commander, and senior leadership who gave them an overview of the command, Nutter said.
Obama spoke briefly to a pool reporter about his trip just before leaving Washington.
"I'm looking forward to seeing what the situation on the ground is," Obama said. "I want to, obviously, talk to the commanders and get a sense, both in Afghanistan and in Baghdad of, you know, what the most, their biggest concerns are. And I want to thank our troops for the heroic work that they've been doing."
Asked if he would have tough talk for the leaders of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama said he was "more interested in listening than doing a lot of talking."
"I think it is very important to recognize that I'm going over there as a U.S. senator. We have one president at a time, so it's the president's job to deliver those messages," Obama said. Video Watch Obama's foreign policy adviser discuss overseas trip »
The fight in Afghanistan has become a more pressing issue on the political radar. Three times as many coalition soldiers and other military personnel have died this month in Afghanistan, compared with Iraq. July's death toll for coalition troops in Afghanistan reached 22 Saturday, after the Friday death of a Canadian soldier was announced.
The fight in Afghanistan has become a more pressing issue on the political radar. Three times as many coalition soldiers and other military personnel have died in July in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
On Sunday, nine U.S. soldiers were killed in a fight with about 200 Taliban militants in eastern Afghanistan. It was the deadliest attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan in three years.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday that U.S. officials are looking for ways to send more troops to Afghanistan, amid the resurgence of violence nearly seven years after the ousting of the Taliban government.
Gates said the hope is to send additional forces "sooner rather than later."
He said the Pentagon is "working very hard to see if there are opportunities to send additional forces sooner rather than later." That likely means further reductions in troop levels in Iraq later this year to free up forces for Afghanistan.
Shortly after Obama laid out his foreign policy vision in Washington on Tuesday, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain criticized his proposals as naive and premature. McCain visited Iraq in March.
"I note that he is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he has even left, before he has talked to Gen. [David] Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time," McCain said.
"In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: First, you assess the facts on the ground; then you present a new strategy."
Obama on Tuesday called the war in Iraq a "dangerous distraction" from the battle in Afghanistan, and said if he is elected one one of his top goals will be to finish the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda, which their regime harbored in Afghanistan.
"As should have been apparent to President Bush and Sen. McCain, the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was," Obama said. He said part of his new strategy will be "taking the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan."
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Obama said that on his first day in office he would give the military a new mission: ending the war in Iraq.
Obama will travel to Jordan on Tuesday, then visit Israel, Germany, France and England.
CNN
Black Widow
07-19-2008, 07:18 PM
(CNN) -- Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday offered his strongest public statement yet on sex abuse against minors by Roman Catholic priests, apologizing to victims and calling the abuse "evil."
The apology came during a mass in Sydney, Australia, and expands on comments the pope made during an April visit to the United States, during which he publicly acknowledged the pain the church's sex abuse scandal has caused and met privately with abuse victims.
"Indeed, I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them as their pastor that I too share in their suffering," he said Saturday at Sydney's St. Mary's Cathedral.
The comments came on the pope's third day of public appearances in Australia, where he is attending World Youth Day. Dubbed "the Catholic Woodstock," the event is believed to be the largest Christian gathering in the world and this year is believed to have attracted more than 150,000 people from 70 countries.
The pope said he wanted to "acknowledge the shame which we have all felt" over reports of sex abuse by clergy and said those responsible for the "evils" should be brought to justice.
He asked those attending the mass to help their bishops to end the abuse.
"It is an urgent priority to create a safer, more wholesome environment, especially for young people," he said.
In April, the 81-year-old pontiff acknowledged "the enormous pain" caused by sexual abuse of children by the clergy.
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"It is vitally important that the vulnerable are always shielded from souls who would cause harm," he said then.
Benedict also met with three people who said they were childhood victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.
CNN
Black Widow
07-20-2008, 07:06 PM
Four bombs have exploded in Spain - the devices are believed to have been planted by the Basque separatist group ETA.
No injuries were reported following the blasts in the north of the country.
One bomb exploded outside a bank in Getxo, damaging a cash dispenser and breaking windows.
Officials said the homemade device packed into a gasoline tin went off without warning at about 5am.
Five hours later, an anonymous caller said ETA had planted four bombs on beaches in Laredo, Ris and Noja as well as at a golf course close to Noja.
Police cordoned off the towns and a device exploded near Laredo's beach at around 12:15 pm.
It went off on the seafront promenade in the Cantabrian resort.
Later in the day a second bomb exploded in Lardeo.
An official said grey and showery weather meant the beaches were not busy in the morning.
A third device then went off at a golf course near Noja that had already been evacuated.
Until now, the most recent attack by the armed Basque separatist group happened on July 4.
The organisation, which is fighting for independence in the Basque region, carried out a bomb attack against a telecommunications centre.
sky news
Black Widow
07-20-2008, 07:09 PM
A French tourist has beaten his four-year-old daughter's head against the stone base of a Rome monument so hard the child is now in a coma.
And when passers-by finally managed to snatch the child away, the man tried to bash his own head against the stone.
The pavement in the Piazza Venezia at the heart of the city is still stained with blood after the violent attack late last night.
Paediatric hospital Bambino Gesu said the child, named Luna, was already in a coma with severe head injuries when she was admitted shortly before midnight.
"Her condition is stable but very critical," spokesman Daniela Perrotta told reporters.
The father, who has been named as 37-year-old Julien Monnet, was behaving strangely moments before the attack, according to a Canadian tourist who grappled to try and stop him.
Traffic officer Anna Esposito told Italian broadcasters: "He was holding the child in an unhealthy way. The child was crying and screaming.
"He was holding the girl by her arm and then started striking her (head) against the stone," Ms Esposito said.
The Canadian grabbed the child while she struggled to hold the man and called for reinforcements.
"He was like a furious beast," she said.
Police have since said that Monnet's backpack contained medicine indicating he was receiving treatment for psychiatric problems.
Monnet is believed to live with the child's mother near Paris - she is thought to have been on holiday in Turkey at the time of the attack and had no idea they had travelled to Rome.
Police say Monnet appeared to be in a state of shock when arrested, before being taken to Rome's Coeli jail on suspicion of causing grave injury.
sky news
Black Widow
07-20-2008, 09:30 PM
Kids are coming out younger, but are schools ready to handle the complex issues of identity and sexuality? For Larry King, the question had tragic implications.
Teenage Tragedy
A 15-year-old boy told family and friends he was gay. He dressed flamboyantly; he hit on a classmate. His murder made clear that issues of sexuality, at such a young age, can have heartbreaking consequences.
At 15, Lawrence King was small—5 feet 1 inch—but very hard to miss. In January, he started to show up for class at Oxnard, Calif.'s E. O. Green Junior High School decked out in women's accessories. On some days, he would slick up his curly hair in a Prince-like bouffant. Sometimes he'd paint his fingernails hot pink and dab glitter or white foundation on his cheeks. "He wore makeup better than I did," says Marissa Moreno, 13, one of his classmates. He bought a pair of stilettos at Target, and he couldn't have been prouder if he had on a varsity football jersey. He thought nothing of chasing the boys around the school in them, teetering as he ran.
But on the morning of Feb. 12, Larry left his glitter and his heels at home. He came to school dressed like any other boy: tennis shoes, baggy pants, a loose sweater over a collared shirt. He seemed unhappy about something. He hadn't slept much the night before, and he told one school employee that he threw up his breakfast that morning, which he sometimes did because he obsessed over his weight. But this was different. One student noticed that as Larry walked across the quad, he kept looking back nervously over his shoulder before he slipped into his first-period English class. The teacher, Dawn Boldrin, told the students to collect their belongings, and then marched them to a nearby computer lab, so they could type out their papers on World War II. Larry found a seat in the middle of the room. Behind him, Brandon McInerney pulled up a chair.
Brandon, 14, wasn't working on his paper, because he told Mrs. Boldrin he'd finished it. Instead, he opened a history book and started to read. Or at least he pretended to. "He kept looking over at Larry," says a student who was in the class that morning. "He'd look at the book and look at Larry, and look at the book and look at Larry." At 8:30 a.m., a half hour into class, Brandon quietly stood up. Then, without anyone's noticing, he removed a handgun that he had somehow sneaked to school, aimed it at Larry's head, and fired a single shot. Boldrin, who was across the room looking at another student's work, spun around. "Brandon, what the hell are you doing!" she screamed. Brandon fired at Larry a second time, tossed the gun on the ground and calmly walked through the classroom door. Police arrested him within seven minutes, a few blocks from school. Larry was rushed to the hospital, where he died two days later of brain injuries.
The Larry King shooting became the most prominent gay-bias crime since the murder of Matthew Shepard 10 years ago. But despite all the attention and outrage, the reason Larry died isn't as clear-cut as many people think. California's Supreme Court has just legalized gay marriage. There are gay characters on popular TV shows such as "Gossip Girl" and "Ugly Betty," and no one seems to notice. Kids like Larry are so comfortable with the concept of being openly gay that they are coming out younger and younger. One study found that the average age when kids self-identify as gay has tumbled to 13.4; their parents usually find out a year later.
What you might call "the shrinking closet" is arguably a major factor in Larry's death. Even as homosexuality has become more accepted, the prospect of being openly gay in middle school raises a troubling set of issues. Kids may want to express who they are, but they are playing grown-up without fully knowing what that means. At the same time, teachers and parents are often uncomfortable dealing with sexual issues in children so young. Schools are caught in between. How do you protect legitimate, personal expression while preventing inappropriate, sometimes harmful, behavior? Larry King was, admittedly, a problematical test case: he was a troubled child who flaunted his sexuality and wielded it like a weapon—it was often his first line of defense. But his story sheds light on the difficulty of defining the limits of tolerance. As E. O. Green found, finding that balance presents an enormous challenge.
Larry's life was hard from the beginning. His biological mother was a drug user; his father wasn't in the picture. When Greg and Dawn King took him in at age 2, the family was told he wasn't being fed regularly. Early on, a speech impediment made Larry difficult to understand, and he repeated first grade because he had trouble reading. He was a gentle child who loved nature and crocheting, but he also acted out from an early age. "We couldn't take him to the grocery store without him shoplifting," Greg says. "We couldn't get him to clean up his room. We sent him upstairs—he'd get a screwdriver and poke holes in the walls." He was prescribed ADHD medication, and Greg says Larry was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder, a rare condition in which children never fully bond with their caregivers or parents.
Kids started whispering about Larry when he was in third grade at Hathaway Elementary School. "In a school of 700 students, you'd know Larry," says Sarah Ranjbar, one of Larry's principals. "He was slightly effeminate but very sure of his personality." Finally, his best friend, Averi Laskey, pulled him aside one day at the end of class. "I said, 'Larry, are you gay?' He said, 'Yeah, why?' " He was 10. Averi remembers telling Larry she didn't care either way, but Larry started telling other students, and they did. They called him slurs and avoided him at recess. One Halloween, someone threw a smoke bomb into his house, almost killing the family's Jack Russell terrier. In the sixth grade, a girl started a "Burn Book"—an allusion to a book in the movie "Mean Girls," where bullies scribble nasty rumors about the people they hate—about Larry. The Larry book talked about how he was gay and falsely asserted that he dressed in Goth and drag. And it ended with a threat: "I hate Larry King. I wish he was dead," according to one parent's memory of the book. "The principal called my wife on the phone and she was crying," Greg says. "She found the book, and said we needed to do something to help protect Larry." His parents transferred him to another elementary school, hoping he could get a fresh start before he started junior high.
E. O. Green is a white slab of concrete in a neighborhood of pink and yellow homes. In the afternoons, SUVs roll down the street like gumballs, the sound of hip-hop music thumping. Once the students leave the campus, two blue gates seal it shut, and teachers are told not to return to school after dark, because of gang violence. Outside, there's a worn blue sign that greets visitors: this was a California distinguished school in 1994. The school is under a different administration now.
E. O. Green was a comfortable place for Larry when he arrived as a seventh grader. He hung out with a group of girls who, unlike in elementary school, didn't judge him. But that didn't mean he was entirely accepted. In gym class, some of his friends say that the boys would shove him around in the locker room. After he started dressing up, he was ridiculed even more. He lost a high heel once and the boys tossed it around at lunch like a football. "Random people would come up to him and start laughing," Moreno says. "I thought that was very rude." One day, in science class, he was singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" to himself. Kids nearby taunted him for being gay. "He said to me, 'It's OK'," says Vanessa Castillo, a classmate. " 'One day, they'll regret it. One day, I'll be famous'."
Larry's home life wasn't getting any better. At 12, he was put on probation for vandalizing a tractor with a razor blade, and he entered a counseling program, according to his father. One therapist said Larry might be autistic. At 14, Larry told Greg he thought he was bisexual. "It wouldn't matter either way to me," Greg says. "I thought maybe some of the problems would go away if we supported him." But the therapist told Greg he thought that Larry was just trying to get attention and might not understand what it meant to be gay. Larry began telling his teachers that his father was hitting him. Greg says he never harmed Larry; still, the authorities removed Larry from his home in November 2007. He moved to Casa Pacifica, a group home and treatment center in Camarillo, five miles away from Oxnard.
Larry seemed to like Casa Pacifica—"peaceful home" in Spanish. The 23-acre facility—more like a giant campground, with wooden cottages, a basketball court and a swimming pool—has 45 beds for crisis kids who need temporary shelter. Every day a driver would take Larry to school, and some weeks he went to nearby Ventura, where he attended gay youth-group meetings. "I heard this was the happiest time of his life," says Vicki Murphy, the center's director of operations. For Christmas, the home gave Larry a $75 gift card for Target. He spent it on a pair of brown stiletto shoes.
In January, after a few months at Casa Pacifica, Larry decided to dress like a girl. He went to school accessorized to the max, and his already colorful personality got louder. He accused a girl to her face of having breast implants. Another girl told him she didn't like his shoes. "I don't like your necklace," Larry snapped back. Larry called his mom from Casa Pacifica to tell her that he wanted to get a sex-change operation. And he told a teacher that he wanted to be called Leticia, since no one at school knew he was half African-American. The teacher said firmly, "Larry, I'm not calling you Leticia." He dropped the idea without an argument.
The staff at E. O. Green was clearly struggling with the Larry situation—how to balance his right to self-expression while preventing it from disrupting others. Legally, they couldn't stop him from wearing girls' clothes, according to the California Attorney General's Office, because of a state hate-crime law that prevents gender discrimination. Larry, being Larry, pushed his rights as far as he could. During lunch, he'd sidle up to the popular boys' table and say in a high-pitched voice, "Mind if I sit here?" In the locker room, where he was often ridiculed, he got even by telling the boys, "You look hot," while they were changing, according to the mother of a student.
Larry was eventually moved out of the P.E. class, though the school didn't seem to know the extent to which he was clashing with other boys. One teacher describes the gym transfer as more of a "preventative measure," since Larry complained that one student wouldn't stop looking at him. In other classes, teachers were baffled that Larry was allowed to draw so much attention to himself. "All the teachers were complaining, because it was disruptive," says one of them. "Dress code is a huge issue at our school. We fight [over] it every day." Some teachers thought Larry was clearly in violation of the code, which prevents students from wearing articles of clothing considered distracting. When Larry wore lipstick and eyeliner to school for the first time, a teacher told him to wash it off, and he did. But the next day, he was back wearing even more. Larry told the teacher he could wear makeup if he wanted to. He said that Ms. Epstein told him that was his right.
Joy Epstein was one of the school's three assistant principals, and as Larry became less inhibited, Epstein became more a source of some teachers' confusion and anger. Epstein, a calm, brown-haired woman with bifocals, was openly gay to her colleagues, and although she was generally not out to her students, she kept a picture of her partner on her desk that some students saw. While her job was to oversee the seventh graders, she formed a special bond with Larry, who was in the eighth grade. He dropped by her office regularly, either for counseling or just to talk—she won't say exactly. "There was no reason why I specifically started working with Larry," Epstein says. "He came to me." Some teachers believe that she was encouraging Larry's flamboyance, to help further an "agenda," as some put it. One teacher complains that by being openly gay and discussing her girlfriend (presumably, no one would have complained if she had talked about a husband), Epstein brought the subject of sex into school. Epstein won't elaborate on what exactly she said to Larry because she expects to be called to testify at Brandon's trial, but it's certain to become one of the key issues. William Quest, Brandon's public defender, hasn't disclosed his defense strategy, but he has accused the school of failing to intercede as the tension rose between Larry and Brandon. Quest calls Epstein "a lesbian vice principal with a political agenda." Larry's father also blames Epstein. He's hired an attorney and says he is seriously contemplating a wrongful-death lawsuit. "She started to confuse her role as a junior-high principal," Greg King says. "I think that she was asserting her beliefs for gay rights." In a tragedy such as this, the natural impulse is to try to understand why it happened and to look for someone to blame. Epstein won't discuss the case in detail and, until she testifies in court, it's impossible to know what role—if any—she played in the events leading to Larry's death.
Whatever Epstein said to Larry, it's clear that his coming out proved to be a fraught process, as it can often be. For tweens, talking about being gay isn't really about sex. They may be aware of their own sexual attraction by the time they're 10, according to Caitlin Ryan, a researcher at San Francisco State University, but those feelings are too vague and unfamiliar to be their primary motivation. (In fact, Larry told a teacher that he'd never kissed anyone, male or female.) These kids are actually concerned with exploring their identity. "When you're a baby, you cry when you're hungry because you don't know the word for it," says Allan Acevedo, 19, of San Diego, who came out when he was in eighth grade. "Part of the reason why people are coming out earlier is they have the word 'gay,' and they know it explains the feeling." Like older teenagers, tweens tend to tell their friends first, because they think they'll be more accepting. But kids that age often aren't equipped to deal with highly personal information, and middle-school staffs are almost never trained in handling kids who question their sexuality. More than 3,600 high schools sponsor gay-straight alliances designed to foster acceptance of gay students, but only 110 middle schools have them. Often the entire school finds out before either the student or the faculty is prepared for the attention and the backlash. "My name became a punch line very fast," says Grady Keefe, 19, of Branford, Conn., who came out in the eighth grade. "The guidance counselors told me I should not have come out because I was being hurt."
The staff at E. O. Green tried to help as Larry experimented with his identity, but he liked to talk in a roar. One teacher asked him why he taunted the boys in the halls, and Larry replied, "It's fun to watch them squirm." But Brandon McInerney was different. Larry really liked Brandon. One student remembered that Larry would often walk up close to Brandon and stare at him. Larry had studied Brandon so well, he once knew when he had a scratch on his arm—Larry even claimed that he had given it to Brandon by mistake, when the two were together. Larry told one of his close friends that he and Brandon had dated but had broken up. He also said that he'd threatened to tell the entire school about them, if Brandon wasn't nicer to him. Quest, Brandon's defense attorney, says there was no relationship between Larry and Brandon, and one of Larry's teachers says that Larry was probably lying to get attention.
Like Larry, Brandon had his share of troubles. His parents, Kendra and Bill McInerney, had a difficult, tempestuous relationship. In 1993, Kendra alleged that Bill pointed a .45 handgun at her during a drunken evening and shot her in the arm, according to court records. She and Bill split in 2000, when Brandon was 6. One September morning, a fight broke out after Kendra accused her husband of stealing the ADHD medication prescribed to one of her older sons from her first marriage. Bill "grabbed Kendra by the hair," and "began choking her until she was almost unconscious," according to Kendra's version of the events filed in court documents. He pleaded no contest to corporal injury to a spouse and was sentenced to 10 days in jail. In a December 2001 court filing for a restraining order against Kendra, he claimed that she had turned her home into a "drug house." "I was very functional," Kendra later explained to a local newspaper, in a story about meth addiction. By 2004, she had entered a rehab program, and Brandon went to live with his father. But he spent years caught in the middle of a war.
While his life did seem to become more routine living with his dad, Brandon's troubles resurfaced in the eighth grade. His father was working in a town more than 60 miles away, and he was alone a lot. He began hanging out with a group of misfits on the beach. Although he was smart, he didn't seem to have much interest in school. Except for Hitler—Brandon knew all about the Nuremberg trials and all the names of Hitler's deputies. (When other kids asked him how he knew so much, he replied casually, "Don't you watch the History Channel?" Brandon's father says his son was interested in World War II, but not inappropriately.) By the end of the first semester, as his overall GPA tumbled from a 3.3 to a 1.9, he was kicked out of his English honors class for not doing his work and causing disruptions. He was transferred to Boldrin's English class, where he joined Larry.
Larry's grades were also dropping—he went from having a 1.71 GPA in November to a 1.0 in February, his father says. But he was too busy reveling in the spotlight to care. "He was like Britney Spears," says one teacher who knew Larry. "Everyone wanted to know what's the next thing he's going to do." Girls would take photos of him on their camera phones and discuss him with their friends. "My class was in a frenzy every day with Larry stories," says a humanities teacher who didn't have Larry as one of her students. He wore a Playboy-bunny necklace, which one of his teachers told him to remove because it was offensive to women. But those brown Target stilettos wobbled on.
The commotion over Larry's appearance finally forced the school office to take formal action. On Jan. 29, every teacher received an e-mail with the subject line STUDENT RIGHTS. It was written by Sue Parsons, the eighth-grade assistant principal. "We have a student on campus who has chosen to express his sexuality by wearing make-up," the e-mail said without mentioning Larry by name. "It is his right to do so. Some kids are finding it amusing, others are bothered by it. As long as it does not cause classroom disruptions he is within his rights. We are asking that you talk to your students about being civil and non-judgmental. They don't have to like it but they need to give him his space. We are also asking you to watch for possible problems. If you wish to talk further about it please see me or Ms. Epstein."
Jerry Dannenberg, the superintendent, says the front office received no complaints about Larry, but according to several faculty members, at least two teachers tried to formally protest what was going on. The first was the same teacher who told Larry to scrub the makeup off his face. She was approached by several boys in her class who said that Larry had started taunting them in the halls—"I know you want me," he'd say—and their friends were calling them gay. The teacher told some of her colleagues that when she went to the office to file a complaint, Epstein said she would take it. "It's about Larry," the teacher said. "There's nothing we can do about that," Epstein replied. (Epstein denies she was ever approached.) A few days later another teacher claims to have gone to the school principal, Joel Lovstedt. The teacher says she told him that she was concerned about Larry and she thought he was a danger to himself—she worried that he might fall in his three-inch stilettos and injure himself. Lovstedt told the teacher that he had directions, though he wouldn't say from where, that they couldn't intervene with Larry's sexual expression. (Lovstedt denied NEWSWEEK's request for an interview.) There was an unusual student complaint, too. Larry's younger brother, Rocky, 12, also attended E. O. Green, and the kids started picking on him the day in January when Larry showed up in hot pink knee-length boots. Rocky says he went to several school officials for help, including Epstein. "I went up to her at lunchtime," he says. "I said, 'Ms. Epstein, can you stop Larry from dressing like a girl? The kids are saying since Larry is gay, I must be gay, too, because I'm his brother'."
As you talk to the teachers, many of them say they tried to support Larry, but they didn't always know how. In blue-collar, immigrant Oxnard, there is no gay community to speak of and generally very little public discussion of gay issues, at least until Larry's murder happened. One teacher was very protective of Larry, his English teacher, Mrs. Boldrin. To help Larry feel better about moving to Casa Pacifica, she brought Larry a present: a green evening dress that once belonged to her own daughter. Before school started, Larry ran to the bathroom to try it on. Then he showed it to some of his friends, telling them that he was going to wear it at graduation.
And then there was Valentine's Day. A day or two before the shooting, the school was buzzing with the story about a game Larry was playing with a group of his girlfriends in the outdoor quad. The idea was, you had to go up to your crush and ask them to be your Valentine. Several girls named boys they liked, then marched off to complete the mission. When it was Larry's turn, he named Brandon, who happened to be playing basketball nearby. Larry walked right on to the court in the middle of the game and asked Brandon to be his Valentine. Brandon's friends were there and started joking that he and Larry were going to make "gay babies" together. At the end of lunch, Brandon passed by one of Larry's friends in the hall. She says he told her to say goodbye to Larry, because she would never see him again.
The friend didn't tell Larry about the threat—she thought Brandon was just kidding. There are many rumors of another confrontation between Larry and Brandon, on Feb. 11, the day before the shooting. Several students and teachers said they had heard about a fight between the two but they hadn't actually witnessed it themselves. The next morning a counselor at Casa Pacifica asked Larry what was wrong, and he said, vaguely, "I've had enough." When he got to school, his friends quizzed him about his noticeably unfabulous appearance. He said that he ran out of makeup and hair gel (which wasn't true) and that he had a blister on his ankle (this was true—he'd just bought a new pair of boots). Larry walked alongside Boldrin to the computer class and sat in front of a computer. A few minutes later, a counselor summoned him to her office. She told him that his grades were so low, he was at risk of not graduating from the eighth grade. He went back to his computer. He had written his name on his paper as Leticia King. Most of the campus heard the gunshots. Some described it like a door slammed shut very hard.
On March 7, the school held a memorial service for Larry. Epstein stood at the podium with students who read from notecards about what they liked best about Larry: he was nice, he was unique, he was brave. The band played "Amazing Grace," and two dozen doves were released into the sky. Averi read a poem about how her friend was like a garden seed that grew, and died; Larry's mom wept in the front row. Deep in the audience, an eighth grader turned to one of Brandon's friends and whispered, "That's so gay."
The obvious question now is whether Larry's death could have been prevented. "Absolutely," says Dannenberg. "Why do we have youngsters that have access to guns? Why don't we have adequate funding to pay for social workers at the school to make sure students have resources? We have societal issues." Many teachers and parents aren't content with that answer. For them, the issue isn't whether Larry was gay or straight—his father still isn't convinced his son was gay—but whether he was allowed to push the boundaries so far that he put himself and others in danger. They're not blaming Larry for his own death—as if anything could justify his murder—but their attitude toward his assailant is not unsympathetic. "We failed Brandon," a teacher says. "We didn't know the bullying was coming from the other side—Larry was pushing as hard as he could, because he liked the attention."
Greg King doesn't feel sympathy for Brandon, but he does believe his son sexually harassed him. He's resentful that the gay community has appropriated his son's murder as part of a larger cause. "I think the gay-rights people want it to be a gay-rights issue, because it makes a poster child out of my son," King says. "That bothered me. I'm not anti-gay. I have a lot of co-workers and friends who are gay." That anger was made worse when he heard this summer that Epstein would be promoted to principal of an elementary school. "This is a slap in the face of my family," Greg says. Many teachers wonder if the district moved her because she had become a lightning rod for criticism after Larry's death. Dannenberg, the superintendent, says that she was the most qualified person for the new principal job.
The school has conducted its own investigation, though its lawyer won't make it public. But it will likely be brought up when Brandon goes to trial. He is charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime, and is scheduled to be arraigned this week. Hundreds of his classmates have signed a petition asking that he be tried in juvenile court. The district attorney wants him tried as an adult, which could result in a prison sentence of 51 years to life. "Brandon was being terrorized," says Bill, who has set up a public defense fund in his son's name. "He was being stalked almost, to the degree of the school should have never let this happen." What happened to Larry and Brandon was certainly extreme, but it has implications for schools across the country. "If we're going to be absolutely sure this isn't going to happen again," says Elaine Garber, 81, who has served on the school's board for 48 years, "this has got to be discussed some more."
As if anyone has stopped talking—and arguing—about Larry King. He had an entire page devoted to him in the E. O. Green yearbook. On the Internet, he's become a gay martyr, and this year's National Day of Silence, an annual event created to raise awareness of homophobia, was dedicated to Larry. And in Averi Laskey's bedroom, she still keeps a handmade purple get-well card she made for Larry on the day after he was shot. At the time, there was still hope he would pull through. He had survived the night, which the doctors said was a good sign. Averi rounded up dozens of teachers and friends between classes to sign messages of encouragement. "Larry, I miss you. Get better," Boldrin wrote in blue ink. "Keep up your spirit. A lot of people are rooting for you to get better," the principal wrote. Some of Larry's classmates apologized for how he had been treated. A few even left their phone numbers, so he could call them if he ever needed to talk to someone. But when Averi got home that day, she learned that Larry had suffered a fatal stroke. Larry was pronounced brain-dead that afternoon, and the family decided to donate his organs. The following day, Feb. 14, doctors harvested his pancreas, liver, lungs and the most important organ of all, which now beats inside the chest of a 10-year-old girl. On Valentine's Day, Larry King gave away his heart, but not in the way he thought he would.
In the five months NEWSWEEK spent examining Larry King's death, we spoke with several dozen people, including faculty, students and parents. All students named were interviewed with their parents' permission. Some of our sources would speak only anonymously; the school's staff was instructed not to speak to the media because of the criminal proceedings and the possibility of civil litigation. While they agreed to be interviewed on the record, Jerry Dannenberg, the district superintendent, and Joy Epstein, E. O. Green's former assistant principal, were limited in what they could say for the same reasons.
With Andrew Murr and Jennifer Ordoñez
© 2008
newsweek.com
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:07 PM
Sad news...
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:07 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:07 PM
OMG, that's shocking... but that's semi-common down here.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:08 PM
Thanks for the read.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:08 PM
Interesting read, thanks.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:08 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:08 PM
That's awful...:no:
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:08 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:09 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:09 PM
Thanks for the news.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:09 PM
That's awful...
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:10 PM
Interesting read, thanks.
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:20 PM
Parliamentarians in France have backed plans by President Nicolas Sarkozy to rewrite the country's constitution - by the slimmest of margins.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44850000/jpg/_44850099_7b0e60e5-adcc-41aa-a04f-64ad63a48656.jpg
The reform bill was backed by 539 votes to 357 - exactly the 60% majority of the combined Assembly and Senate required to pass the reforms.
Mr Sarkozy says the reforms will strengthen France's parliament, which is often seen as weak.
But Mr Sarkozy's critics say they will turn the country into a "monocracy".
Socialist senator and former justice minister Robert Badinter said the reforms would be the equivalent of crowning Mr Sarkozy king.
"It's 'monocracy' - the power of a single man," he said last week.
Touch-and-go
Mr Sarkozy, while on a trip to Dublin to discuss the future of the EU's Lisbon Treaty, hailed news that his reforms had passed as "a victory for French democracy".
Members of the National Assembly and the Senate teamed up for the vote at a special session at the Chateau of Versailles.
The reform bill represents the biggest shake-up in the way France is run since the constitution was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, observers say.
The most contentious part of the bill has been a plan to allow the president to address parliament, opening up the possibility of a US State of the Union-style address.
That has not been permitted since 1875, in an attempt to keep the executive and legislative branches separate.
Late concessions
Mr Sarkozy, however, says the measures will actually strengthen parliament and make the president more accountable.
The bill sets a two-term limit for presidents, gives parliament a veto over some presidential appointments, ends government control over parliament's committee system, allows parliament to set its own agenda, and ends the president's right of collective pardon, the AFP news agency reports.
The bill was dependent on cross-party support, leaving the outcome unclear right up to the vote.
Mr Sarkozy spent the weekend on a break with his wife Carla Bruni in Morocco, but was reported to have been calling France frequently to try to consolidate support for the moves.
Last-minute concessions failed to win the support of the opposition Socialists, the Greens and the Communists, who all said they would vote against. Nevertheless, the bill achieved the 538 votes needed, with one to spare.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
07-21-2008, 07:22 PM
A former driver of Osama Bin Laden has pleaded not guilty at the first war crimes trial to be held in the US prison in Guantanamo Bay.
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Yemeni national Salim Hamdan, 37, is accused of conspiracy and supporting terrorism, and faces life in prison if he is convicted.
The right of the military tribunal to try him was earlier unsuccessfully challenged by his lawyers.
About 270 suspects remain in detention in Guantanamo Bay.
The US considers the prisoners to be enemy combatants, not entitled to the legal protection given to soldiers and civilians.
America's attorney general has appealed to Congress to help find a way of allowing Guantanamo detainees a civilian court appeal against their detention.
Mr Hamdan, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, is the first prisoner to be tried by the US for war crimes since World War II.
Despite the seriousness of the charges he faces, his three-week trial may be little more than a curtain-raiser for the military tribunal system at Guantanamo, the BBC's Jack Izzard reports from Washington.
Among the dozens of other inmates due to be tried there in the coming months are men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks.
Human rights campaigners have accused the court of operating in a legal black hole and they and the other accused will be watching the proceedings closely, our correspondent notes.
Jury of officers
Mr Hamdan appeared in court in a khaki prison jumpsuit.
The trial judge, Navy Captain Keith Allred, began proceedings by ruling that some of the evidence obtained by interrogators while Mr Hamdan was still in Afghanistan would not be allowed during the trial.
"This military commission is assembled," he said after the jury pool was sworn in.
"You must make your determination whether or not he is guilty based solely on the evidence presented here in court and the instructions I will give you."
The trial jury is being selected from a pool of 13 US military officers and must comprise at least five members.
The verdict will require a two-thirds majority.
'Coercive techniques'
Mr Hamdan was captured at a roadblock in Afghanistan during the US-led invasion in 2001, two months after the 9/11 attacks on America.
Prosecutors say he belonged to Osama Bin Laden's inner circle, and was heading for a battle zone when he was arrested, allegedly with two surface-to-air missiles inside his car.
Mr Hamdan has acknowledged working for Bin Laden in Afghanistan from 1997 to 2001 for $200 (£99) a month, but denies being part of al-Qaeda or taking part in any attacks.
Mr Hamdan's defence lawyers have argued that the statements were tainted by what have been called "coercive techniques", and he was not advised of his right against self-incrimination.
His lawyers have tried to halt the trial on grounds of legality.
In June, the US Supreme Court ruled that detainees had to be able to challenge their detention in civilian courts.
But a judge ruled last week that the military tribunal could begin as scheduled on Monday without contradicting the Supreme Court.
In a speech on Monday, US Attorney General Michael Mukasey said the Supreme Court had "left many significant questions open" in its ruling.
Although the court did rule that detainees had the right to appeal in civilian courts against their detention without trial by the military, Mr Mukasey said, it "stopped well short of detailing how the habeas corpus proceedings must be conducted".
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
07-22-2008, 09:52 PM
A Palestinian in a mechanical digger has rammed traffic in west Jerusalem, injuring at least 10 people before being shot dead, Israeli police say.
A bus and a number of cars were hit during the incident. Some cars were crushed and one was turned on its roof.
Witnesses say an armed civilian first shot at the driver, before he was killed by border police.
Three weeks ago a Palestinian man went on a deadly rampage in a heavy vehicle in Jerusalem, killing three Israelis.
A BBC correspondent says it is thought the 2 July attacker was simply a disturbed man without political motivation - but Israelis will worry Tuesday's incident was a copycat attack and that this could now be a new tactic.
Police identified the perpetrator as 22-year-old East Jerusalem resident Ghassan Abu Tir. It is not known if he was connected to any militant group.
Gunshots
The latest attack took place in a busy part of central West Jerusalem, close to the King David Hotel where US presidential candidate Barack Obama will be arriving within hours.
As the incident was unfolding, Israeli President Shimon Peres was for the first time receiving Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at his official residence in Jerusalem, which is also nearby.
"I was going home when I saw the tractor going into a bus four or five times. All the windows of the bus exploded," said a 16-year-old Israeli at the scene.
"Then I saw the tractor going down the street pushing cars. I saw more people running and after two minutes I heard two or three gunshots," Yohanan Levine added.
A driver interviewed by Israeli TV said his car was rammed twice by the front shovel of the digger and he only just managed to swerve to avoid a third charge aimed at his head.
Photographs of the immediate aftermath show the driver's body slumped in the cab and at least eight bullet holes in the glass next to him.
Official visit
Israeli police called it a "terror attack", although there was no immediate claim of responsibility by any Palestinian militant organisation.
Police said the driver was from a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank which Israel has designated part of the enlarged Jerusalem municipality.
Mr Abbas told reporters he "condemned and rejected" the attack and said such incidents "hurt our reputation and peace in general".
It was the first time a Palestinian Authority president had visited the Israeli presidential residence, known as Beit Hanasi.
Mr Abbas was welcomed in a formal ceremony with Palestinian flags flying at the reception point. Such trappings are normally absent when Mr Abbas meets Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at his official residence.
In his remarks, Mr Peres said: "Israelis have a burning desire to reach peace with the Palestinians."
Mr Abbas has been meeting Israeli leaders regularly since attempts were made to give the peace process fresh impetus at an international conference in the United States last November.
BBC News
JohnCenaFan28
07-22-2008, 09:54 PM
Nepal's former Maoist rebels have abandoned efforts to form the country's next government, party officials say.
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Their decision follows their failure on Monday to get the candidate they were supporting elected as first president of the new republic.
The Maoists were expected to lead the new government as they won most seats in April's elections to a new constituent assembly.
But they say they are being blocked by an alliance of rival parties.
Differing ideologies
"Now we'll not go (in)to the government," the Maoists' 53-year-old leader, Prachanda, was quoted as saying after meeting party leaders.
Correspondents say that the decision by the Maoists, who won one third of the assembly seats, to go into opposition will plunge Nepal into yet more political instability.
The BBC's Sushil Sharma in Kathmandu says that there is now concern that the country may be governed by a shaky alliance of parties with differing ideologies while the Maoists - with their capacity to bring supporters onto the streets - will be watching form the outside.
On Monday, the Maoists' presidential candidate, Ramraja Prasad Singh, lost a run-off in the constituent assembly to Nepali Congress party candidate Ram Baran Yadav by 282 votes to 308.
The vote to decide the presidency was the first major decision by the assembly since lawmakers decided to abolish the 239-year-old monarchy and declare a republic, part of a peace process that ended a decade-long civil war with Maoist insurgents.
The increasingly unpopular monarchy was abolished in May, after a vote in the Maoist-led assembly.
Before then King Gyanendra had appointed a series of prime ministers before sacking the government and assuming complete control in February 2005.
Weeks of demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people secured the end of direct palace rule in April 2006.
In the same year the Maoists, who had been fighting for a communist republic, declared an end to their insurgency.
Thousands of people from the government and rebel sides died during the decade-long conflict.
By December 2006, seven parties, including the former Maoist rebels and the government party, agreed to abolish the monarchy.
BBC News
Black Widow
07-23-2008, 08:56 PM
The former partner of Shannon Matthews' mother has appeared in court accused of possessing an indecent image of a young girl on his mobile phone.
Craig Meehan, 22, denied the new charge during an hour-long hearing at Dewsbury Magistrates' Court.
The photograph is said to be of a partially naked girl, approximately 15 years of age.
Fishmonger Meehan is already accused of possessing 140 indecent images of children which were allegedly found on a computer at the home he shared with Karen Matthews.
He has denied the accusations and a five-day trial is listed to start on September 8.
It is alleged Meehan possessed indecent images of children aged between four and 16, graded at levels one to four - on a scale where one is the least serious and five is the most serious.
They were allegedly found on one of two computers at the family home in Dewsbury where he lived with Matthews, 32, for around five years.
Shannon went missing on February 19 and was discovered hidden in the base of a bed in a flat one mile from her home after a 24-day search by police.
Meehan was remanded in custody and will next appear at Dewsbury Magistrates' Court on August 13 for a pre-trial review.
sky sports
JohnCenaFan28
07-23-2008, 10:28 PM
:no:...just no...
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