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[OMEN]

The Montreal businessman who became a cause célèbre as he suffered through 10 months of deplorable conditions in an Indian prison returned to Canadian soil on Friday afternoon.

Saul Itzhayek, 42, was met at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal by his family and supporters, as well as a mob of journalists.

He had an emotional reunion with his family in the airport's baggage area before emerging to talk to reporters.

Saying he was exhausted, he still took time to thank people who helped secure his release from prison, including reporters, politicians, and church activists.

Itzhayek said he was thrilled to be home with his family, and that he'll fight to clear his name in India.

He said he didn't do anything wrong, and he doesn't want to continue to have a record in India.

Even though the courts released him on Tuesday, his conviction for entering India on an expired visa still stands.

Itzhayek did not take any questions from reporters.

"I've been on the road for 80 hours. I'd really like to take a shower and get some rest," he said.

Itzhayek had been in Nepal on business when he was arrested in May 2007 and accused of crossing the border into India on an expired visa.

He was sentenced to three years in prison in October in spite of his claim that he was entrapped by Indian police at the border.

Itzhayek has said he sent his driver into India to pick up some money that was being wired to him. He said police stopped the driver at the border and seized documents that included Itzhayek's passport and visa.

Itzhayek has filed sworn statements that say Indian police offered him safe passage back into India to collect his documents, but instead arrested him for entering the country illegally.

He alleges he was asked to pay a bribe for his freedom.

"In the first three months of his incarceration, he lost 30 kilos," his sister, Sylvia Itzhayek, said earlier in the week.

"He suffered a prison riot, he [saw] this one murder. He's been contaminated by the water. He suffered food poisoning. He slept on the floor; he suffered rats and scorpions all around, sewage, he suffered a lot.

"He's aged considerably, he's really aged."

Concern about his safety arose earlier in March after he narrowly avoided injury in a pair of explosions that rocked the prison where he was being held.

He had reportedly not left his cell since the two bombs killed a local gangster. His family had feared he would be caught up in a prison gang war.

On Tuesday, Itzhayek's appeal on the charges was denied, but an Indian court released him because of the time he had already spent in jail.

On Wednesday, a Canadian consular official took him by car to Kathmandu in Nepal. From there, he flew to Montreal.

CBC

[JohnCenaFan28]

Thanks for the news.

[OMEN]

Simba Makoni, an independent presidential candidate, walks past campaign posters for Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe in Harare on Friday.
Security forces in Zimbabwe went on full alert Friday, a day before elections that are the most serious challenge yet to the 28-year rule of President Robert Mugabe.

The country's national police chief, Augustine Chihuri, told a news conference in the capital Harare that the security forces would not let violence, coercion or protests disrupt the voting.
Israeli-made armoured personnel carriers patrolled the streets of Harare and Chinese-made fighter jets screamed overhead as the police chief was speaking.

A divided opposition is facing Mugabe's ZANU-FP party, which is blamed by many observers for Zimbabwe’s dismal economic performance in recent years.

Inflation in the once relatively prosperous southern African country is running at 100,000 per cent. Eighty per cent of the adult population is unemployed and nearly 4,000 people die every month from HIV/AIDS.

Mugabe, 84, led Zimbabwe to independence from rule by a tiny white minority in 1980. In recent years, his government has become increasingly authoritarian, redistributing land from white-owned farms by force and ejecting slum dwellers from shanty towns around Harare.

Opposition political parties, human rights activists and journalists have been harassed, arrested and beaten up.

Mugabe resoundingly won the last elections — in 2005 — in what most observers believe was a massively rigged poll.
Opposition fears rigging

There are widespread fears among Zimbabweans and international agencies of a similar strategy planned for this election.

CBC's Adrienne Arsenault is one of a small number of western journalists allowed into Zimbabwe to cover the elections and she says people are highly skeptical that the voting will be free and fair.

"President Robert Mugabe has been handing out cars to doctors, tractors to farmers and that's seen here as a classic attempt to buy more votes," Arsenault said.

"There are 5.9 million people registered to vote but nine million ballot papers printed," she said from Harare. "People believe this is simply a matter of the ruling ZANU-PF filling in what they want to grab this election yet again."

The main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has said he would win a free and fair vote, and he has warned of the possibility of violence similar to the bloodshed in Kenya after last year’s disputed polls there.

"He [Mugabe] knows that if he goes that blatant route what happens the day after?" Tsvangirai told London’s Financial Times newspaper on Friday.

"He can declare himself the president of the country [after a rigged election] but the following day the crisis will be looking him straight in the face," the opposition leader said.

Mugabe is equally bellicose in warning his opponents not to protest if they lose.

"Just they dare try it," he said at an election rally the week.

Human rights organizations are watching the elections closely, but from the outside. No well-known international groups are being allowed into Zimbabwe to monitor the vote.

Alexis Kontos of Amnesty International Canada said he is particularly concerned with the behaviour of the security forces in the run-up to the vote.

Kontos said in one incident, opposition campaigners were forced by police to take down election posters and chew and swallow them in front of armed officers.

CBC

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[JohnCenaFan28]

Dozens of detainees at a police station in the Angolan capital, Luanda, have been taken to hospital after the six-storey building collapsed.

There are no reports of deaths, but teams of rescue workers have been sifting through the rubble, where the cries of victims can he heard.

The Angolan police criminal investigation department building collapsed at dawn.

It is not known how many officers and detainees were there at the time.

"The most seriously wounded have been taken to the military hospital and others to the Sao Paolo prison hospital," Commander Eugenio Laborinho told AFP news agency.

BBC News

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About 75 miners are feared dead after rainfall triggered the collapse of mines in Tanzania, the government says.

Seven bodies have so far been recovered in the Mererani region, about 40km (25 miles) south-east of Arusha in north-eastern Tanzania.

Rescuers say the flooding is hampering their efforts and there is little hope of finding anyone else alive.

The area mines Tanzanite, a valuable blue gemstone found only in a small area near Arusha.

Ten years ago more than 100 Tanzanite miners died in an accident caused by heavy rain.

Resource rich

A regional commissioner, Henry Shekifu, told Associated Press news agency the men went missing on Friday amid heavy rains.

The government is trying to deploy equipment that will drain the mines, he said.

Thousands of workers have been drawn to Mererani to mine the Tanzanite.

Tanzania is also rich in diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires and is Africa's third-largest gold producer.

The mining sector has boomed with economic liberalisation policies applied in the mid-1980s.

BBC News

[JohnCenaFan28]

Global oil prices have fallen in Friday trading on the news that an attack on an Iraqi export pipeline was not as serious as earlier thought.

The price of benchmark US light sweet crude fell $1.96 to settle at $105.62 a barrel while Brent crude lost $1.23 to $103.77 at end of London's trading day.

"The [Iraqi] problem is not as serious as we thought," said oil analyst David Johnson of Macquarie Research.

A slightly stronger dollar had also lessened demand, analysts said.

Banking worries

The attack on the pipeline in Basra came earlier in the week as Iraqi government forces continued their assault on militias in the city and surrounding areas.

Last week US light crude hit a record high of $109.72 a barrel, driven by the continuing weak dollar.

Meanwhile the dollar was volatile in Friday trading, as continuing worries over the health of the US banking sector was tempered by positive news that the rate at which commercial banks lend to each other had come down slightly.

A weaker dollar generally increases the price of commodities such as oil and gold, as investors see them as a haven for their funds.

The dollar had edged higher against the euro and the pound, erasing earlier falls.

One euro was worth $1.5797, while sterling dropped below $2 at $1.9948.

But the dollar's gains were expected to be short-lived ahead of a week brimming with key US economic data, including March employment figures.

The dollar hit a record low against the euro of $1.5904 earlier this month.

BBC News

[JohnCenaFan28]

Police in Brazil are investigating claims by a 16-year-old boy that he has murdered 12 people.

The boy made the claim after being arrested on suspicion of murder last week in the southern city of Novo Hamburgo, its police commissioner said. The teenager's identity has not been revealed because he is a minor.

Police said the boy claimed he had killed in fits of rage or to get revenge and in one case because someone wanted to date his sister.

'Trivial reasons'

The boy was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of killing a 39-year-old shop owner.

Police commissioner Enizaldo Plentz said: "The number of murders could be higher or lower.

"As of now we know that he is implicated in at least six murders. Perhaps he invented some of the murders."

Mr Plentz said the unemployed school dropout killed the six people with a shot to the head and then followed it with more shots to the body.

He said the boy had given "trivial reasons" as justification for the killings.

"He told me that he killed one man because he flirted with his girlfriend. He shot another who gave him a blow to the ear," Mr Plentz said.

"During interrogations, he spoke with the frightening cold-bloodedness of someone who enjoys killing people."

The teenager lives in a violent neighbourhood of Novo Hamburgo in Rio Grande do Sul state.

He will undergo psychological tests for the next 45 days.

BBC News

[DUKE NUKEM]

i saw this in the news paper today thats one strange kid

[OMEN]

People scan sheets of paper with preliminary election results in the Harare surburb of Mbare on Sunday.
Zimbabwe's main opposition party is claiming an early lead in elections amid a warning from a government spokesman that declaring victory prematurely would amount to an attempted coup.

"It's a coup d'état, and we all know how coups are handled," government press secretary George Charamba told the state-owned Sunday Mail after the main opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), told observers that early results showed it was headed for victory.

MDC, led by former trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai, said it's leading the race against President Robert Mugabe with 67 per cent of the votes. Its assessment is based on returns from about one-third of polling stations.
The party's secretary-general, Tendai Biti, said MDC won nearly all parliament seats in the main cities of Harare and Bulawayo as well as in some traditional ruling party strongholds.

"This far, short of a miracle, we have won this election beyond any reasonable doubt. We have won this election," Biti told a news conference early Sunday.

Preliminary results were expected by Monday. Final official result may not be known until later in the week, according to election officials.

If no candidate wins more than 51 per cent of the vote, the election will go into a second round.

Meanwhile, MDC said it's investigating reports of vote rigging by the ruling ZANU-PF party to give Mugabe a sixth term in office.

Observers say the official rolls in some districts were inflated with a large number of phantom voters. Opposition reports suggest that hundreds and possibly thousands of Mugabe's opponents were turned away at the polls.

The election has presented Mugabe, 84, with the toughest political challenge to his 28-year rule, badly tarnished in recent years with an economic collapse that has seen inflation rise above 100,000 per cent and unemployment running at 80 per cent.

People in the once-prosperous south African nation, led by Mugabe since its independence in 1980, are also coping with chronic shortages of food, medicine and fuel.

Mugabe repeatedly dismisses his opponents as stooges of former colonial power Britain and accuses the West of sabotaging Zimbabwe's economy.

While visiting Jerusalem on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said "the Mugabe regime is a disgrace to the people of Zimbabwe and a disgrace to southern Africa and to the continent of Africa as whole."

CBC