Student to fight extradition
A student will launch an appeal against a court ruling to extradite him to Greece over the death of a promising teenage hockey player.
Andrew Symeou, 19, is accused of hitting Jonathan Hiles, 18, with such force that he fell off a nightclub stage suffering fatal head injuries on the island of Zakynthos in July last year.
District Judge Quentin Purdy, sitting at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court, ordered Symeou, from Enfield, London, be sent to Greece to stand trial.
Talented roller hockey player Mr Hiles from Llandaff North, Cardiff, was taken to hospital in Athens but died on July 22.
Bournemouth University student Symeou was held by the Metropolitan Police Extradition Unit in June on suspicion of manslaughter after a European arrest warrant was issued by Greek authorities.
He has always denied hitting Mr Hiles and said he knew nothing of the death until returning to the UK shortly after the alleged incident.
Two of Symeou's friends had previously told the court they had been physically and verbally intimidated by Greek police during questioning following Mr Hiles's death.
His lawyer John Jones had opposed that the 19-year-old be extradited to Greece on numerous legal grounds, but Mr Purdy said the proper place for a legal argument to be discussed was during the trial.
He told the court: "I cannot but observe that this case has attracted a degree of press and public interest. One young man sits in the dock, another is dead. Emotions inevitably run high. Allegations abound and truth is an all-too-easy casualty."
Mr Symeou appeared shaky on his feet as his extradition order was read to the court. Several of his friends and family burst into tears in the packed public gallery immediately after the verdict. Mr Symeou's father Frank, later confirmed that an appeal was to be launched against the ruling.
-Ananova
DNA profile of hairdresser's killer
Detectives are closing in on the killer of a trainee hairdresser 25 years ago as they revealed that they have his DNA profile.
Colette Aram, 16, was abducted as she walked from her home to her boyfriend's house in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire, on October 30, 1983.
She was raped and then strangled before her naked body was dumped in a field just over a mile from where she went missing. Detectives found it the next day.
Despite the case being the first ever featured on Crimewatch and hundreds of officers being deployed to hunt for the killer, he was never caught.
Now Nottinghamshire Police say they have developed a DNA profile of the man who murdered Colette thanks to advancements in forensic technology.
The profile was formed last year after items recovered during the original murder investigation were re-examined using new forensic techniques.
Since then police have ruled out 1,500 possible suspects, including 800 men who were eliminated after the DNA profile of the killer was compared to their own mouth swabs.
Detectives have also investigated suspects who have died since the murder, as well as Robert Black, who is serving life for the rape and murder of three young girls in the 1980s. Following his conviction in 1994 he was implicated in Colette's murder.
Police want the public to come forward with the names of suspects who could be swabbed in what detectives describe as a "simple process".
As part of the investigation, officers will start a publicity campaign, during which they will spend the next three weeks distributing leaflets reminding people about Colette's murder to 15,000 homes in south Nottinghamshire.
-Ananova
Author, activist Studs Terkel dies at 96
CHICAGO – Studs Terkel captured the essence of Chicago in the pages of his best-selling oral histories, chronicling common people and celebrities alike.
Along the way he became an ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Terkel died Friday at age 96.
"He found his home in Chicago and he found it in the gritty aspect of Chicago life," said Russell Lewis, chief historian at the Chicago History Museum. "The ne'er-do-wells, the outcasts, the bums, all these people were people he was curious about. They intrigued him."
Dan Terkell said his father died at home, and described his death as "peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted."
"My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life," Terkell, who spells his name with an extra letter, said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close friend Thom Clark.
Terkel was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its "carbuncles and warts," as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go." He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and "never met a picket line or petition I didn't like."
"A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,'" Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. "Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope."
The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession," and, in 1995, "Coming of Age," recollections of men and women 70 and older.
He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death — in his 2001 "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith," and hope, in his 2003 "Hope Dies Last."
Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War," remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in "Division Street: America," 1966; limned the Depression in "Hard Times," 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in "Working," 1974.
Said Andre Schiffrin, Terkel's longtime editor, publisher and close friend: "He liked to tell the story of an interview with a woman in a public housing unit in Chicago. At the end of the interview, the woman said, `My goodness, I didn't know I felt that way.' That was his genius."
He also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.
Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy.
Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.
He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.
Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.
His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place and would go looking for it in Chicago.
The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.
Alton Miller, an associate dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago and a friend of Terkel's for more than 20 years, said Terkel hoped to live to see Barack Obama elected president.
Obama called Terkel a Chicago institution and national treasure.
"His writings, broadcasts, and interviews shed light on what it meant to be an American in the 20th century," Obama said in a statement Friday night. "He will be deeply missed by all who knew him, all who loved him, and all whose lives were enriched by the American stories he told."
In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.
"She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active than I. ... Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so."
Yahoo.
A 12-year-old boy has been shot and killed while celebrating Halloween in America
The youngster was trick-or-treating with his family when he was gunned down in South Carolina.
They had approached a home at about 8.30pm local time and thought they heard fireworks, Sumter Police Chief Patty Patterson said.
But a man was firing from inside the property and hit the boy.
The youth's father and brother were also wounded by the gunfire.
They were taken to the hospital but their injuries were not life-threatening.
A suspect has been taken into custody.
Mrs Patterson has not released the man's name or the victim's details.
The police chief said she was in disbelief and did not know why the shooting occurred.
Elsewhere, in Tijuana, authorities banned Halloween masks on teenagers and adults amid rumours of possible attacks in a city plagued by drug violence.
Police spokesman Juan Mora said that older people wearing masks in public would be detained and could be fined up to 1,000 pesos ($79).
Assailants in Tijuana, near San Diego, California, often wear ski and other masks to commit crimes. More than 500 people have been killed in the city year.
Officials blame the violence on cartels fighting over lucrative smuggling routes.
Sky News.
The death toll from a string of bombs in the Indian state of Assam branded "an act of
A total of 12 bombs went off within the space of about one hour, six of them in the city of Guwahati. More than 300 people were injured.
The chief minister of Assam Tarun Gogi, who confirmed the number of dead, described the attacks as "an act of cowardice... designed and carried out to spread terror".
Guwahati was worst-hit but there were also deaths in Kokrajhar and Barpeta, officials said.
Sky's India correspondent Alex Crawford said of the bombs: "They went off within minutes of each other and were planted in crowded markets, inside court complexes and administrative blocks."
Dramatic footage of the aftermath of the bombings showed rows and rows of burned-out cars, injured people and large plumes of smoke.
Firefighters were attacked for arriving too slowly, Crawford added.
Dozens of people stoned vehicles and set fire to at least two fire engines on the streets of Guwahati.
Police imposed a curfew on the city and shut down roads leading in and out of the area.
The Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh said after the blasts: "People should fight terrorism unitedly."
Police in Assam are on high alert and are searching for more unexploded bombs, deputy inspector of general police NI Hussain said.
"There may be more blasts. You never know," he said.
The Assam region, famous for its tea-making, is torn by dozens of militant separatist groups.
Source- Sky News.
Teen Jailed Over 'Gangsta Granny'
Michael Alfinez, 18, pleaded guilty to charges of elderly abuse and discharging a firearm from a vehicle.
His 85-year-old grandmother Marie Huertas is seen in the video holding a handgun, wearing a black mask and threatening to shoot "all the pigs".
Alfinez said he got the idea from a Gangstas And Thugs video and "knew (his) grandmother could be like that, too, or better".
Authorities in Florida seized the tape in April during a routine traffic stop.
The teenager, from Lake Worth, and two of his friends were seen in the video shooting a pistol.
He admitted to investigators that he dressed up his gran, told her what to say and asked her to flash money for the video, according to a sheriff's report.
Sky News
