Bangladesh has set up anthrax checkpoints at cattle markets as a major outbreak of the disease spreads through the country’s dairy belt, infecting more than 400 people, officials said Wednesday. Eight districts have confirmed human and cattle anthrax infections and meat consumption ahead of the Islamic festival of Eid, set to start Friday, has fallen [...]
The head of the Directorate for Combating Economic Crimes and three police officers in Russia’s east Siberian Zabaikalsky Territory are suspected of taking bribes worth 14 million rubles (more than $450,000), a spokesman for the local investigation committee said. The suspects are accused of helping local businessmen to acquire documents to export lumber products to [...]
The CEO and major shareholder of a Russian bank was shot dead on Wednesday evening in southwestern Moscow, a spokesman for Russia’s investigation committee said. Mikael Daudov, 66, was shot in the head with a small-caliber gun while leaving his office on Leninsky Prospekt. Daudov owned an 18.34 percent stake in the small Moscow-based bank, [...]
A Russian circus touring Australia has dropped an act in which a performer swallows a live fish then regurgitates it after complaints that it was in poor taste and inhumane. Great Moscow Circus general manager Greg Hall said Wednesday that the fish-gobbling part of the show was removed on Monday after the New South Wales [...]
Mullah Omar says NATO-led forces are losing the war in Afghanistan and his fighters are close to victory. The Afghan Taliban leader has said his fighters were close to victory in driving foreign forces out of the country. In a message on Wednesday marking the end of the Muslim fasting month Ramadan, Mullah Omar called on [...]
North Korea has marked its founding 62 years ago on Thursday with patriotic songs and commentaries, and national flags decorating street corners, as speculation mounted over political succession plans. In Pyonyang, thousands marked the anniversary by placing flowers at the foot of a giant statue of Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder, and father of current [...]
Prison break by armed rebel group Boko Haram raises new fears of violence as security is tightened in country’s north. A prison break by an armed group known as Boko Haram has raised fears of renewed violence in northern Nigeria just months before elections. The group staged a raid on the prison on Tuesday night [...]
Sitting in on the Rachel Corrie trial alarmingly reveals an open Israeli policy of indiscrimination towards civilians. “During war there are no civilians,” that’s what “Yossi,” an Israeli military (IDF) training unit leader simply stated during a round of questioning on day two of the Rachel Corrie trials, held in Haifa’s District Court earlier this [...]
Since the 1930s, leprosy patients in Egypt have been rounded up and placed in the town of Abu Zaabal. The Egyptian government has now offered the inhabitants the right to return to their villages and cities. But many have refused, preferring to live and work away from the social stigma that often comes with their [...]
At least two of the five US soldiers charged in the deaths of three Afghan civilians had kept body parts taken from Afghan corpses and threatened subordinates, according to new documents released by the US army. Five soldiers – Calvin Gibbs, Adam Winfield, Jeremy Morlock and Michael Wagon, Andrew Holmes – have been charged with [...]
A blind, self-taught activist lawyer who documented forced abortions and other abuses was released from a Chinese prison Thursday and promptly locked down in his rural village with no access to communication, a relative said. Chen Guangcheng, 39, is a charismatic, inspirational figure for civil liberties lawyers who have fought to enforce the rights enshrined [...]
The decision by a divided appeals court says the risk of state secrets being exposed outweighs the alleged victims’ right to seek damages from a Boeing subsidiary they say aided in the renditions. Five foreign men who say they were kidnapped and tortured by the CIA cannot sue the Boeing Co. subsidiary that helped spirit them away [...]
The mayor of El Naranjo, Mexico, in the central state of San Luis Potosi was gunned down and killed inside his office Wednesday, officials said. Witnesses say that four armed and hooded men stepped out of a white truck at city hall, the San Luis Potosi government said in a statement. Two of the men [...]
Niko Mushi hated rats, as did most people in his village near Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro — until he learned the critters had a nose for land mines. Mushi, 32, has been working with giant African pouched rats for almost seven years. He now enjoys their company — “They’re just like my friend,” he says — [...]
There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro’s level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats (I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats) but it seemed truly striking that Castro was [...]
A simple vitamin pill could prevent millions from suffering the agony of Alzheimer’s. The tablet, costing as little as 10p a day and made up of three vitamin B supplements, cut brain shrinkage linked to memory loss by up to 500 per cent. Oxford University researchers behind the landmark study said it offered the ‘first [...]
On the night of her arrest for drunken driving, prominent Seattle attorney Anne Bremner told the sheriff’s deputy who arrested her June 4 that she was the “attorney for Seattle police,” that she was “famous,” and that this “will be bad for you guys,” according to a copy of the officer’s report. “I represent Seattle [...]
A Russian Rokot carrier rocket blasted off from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia early on Wednesday to put a Gonets-M and two Kosmos satellites into orbit, a Defense Ministry spokesman said. The launch took place on schedule at 07:30am Moscow time (03:30 GMT), Lt. Col. Alexei Zolotukhin said, adding that the satellites are [...]
Police in Russia’s Kamchatka have seized 29.5 tons of red caviar worth some 30 million rubles ($970,000) from a refrigerator found in the street in a local town, a Kamchatka police spokesman said on Wednesday. Some 1,340 plastic containers full of caviar were seized in the town of Sobolevo, the official said. A total of [...]
Authorities in more than a dozen European nations have launched a crackdown on an online file-sharing network. Swedish officials said that raids had been undertaken in 14 countries on Tuesday in a major operation that followed two years of investigations by Belgian police. The majority of the police action occurred in Sweden, according to TorrentFreak, a [...]
Afghanistan has frozen the assets of leading shareholders and borrowers at Kabul Bank, the country’s leading private bank, in the wake of the crisis sparked by the resignation of two high-level directors. Aimal Hashoor, the central bank’s spokesman, said on Tuesday the Central Bank had ordered the assets of Sher Khan Farnood, Kabul Bank’s former chairman, and [...]
It’s a huge risk meeting Taliban fighters. There’s not just the threat that they might turn on you after promising you an interview. Our producer, Qais Azimy, was returning from one of his previous visits when he was arrested by Afghan intelligence. They held him for questioning for three days. The phrase “don’t shoot the [...]
UN troops failed 242 women and children who suffered a mass rape attack in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a top UN peacekeeping official has said. Congo hosts the largest and most costly UN peacekeeping mission in the world, but the mass rape attacks happened just 30km from a UN base some time [...]
The health insurer violated state law nearly 1 million times from 2006 to 2008 after it was bought by UnitedHealth Group, the Department of Insurance says. California regulators are seeking fines of up to $9.9 billion from health insurer PacifiCare over allegations that it repeatedly mismanaged medical claims, lost thousands of patient documents, failed to [...]
Eighteen people died and several others were wounded Tuesday in a shooting at a shoe factory in San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras, police said. The incident began at 3:45 p.m., when two men carrying AK-47 assault rifles burst into the factory and began shooting, said Chief Hector Ivan Mejia of the San Pedro Sula [...]
Wildlife enthusiast Jimmy Hoffman, 50, scours the vegetation around his home in the Costa Brava, Spain, looking for praying mantises. After finding his subjects, Mr Hoffman can spend up to two hours waiting to get the perfect shot. He said: “My favorite picture is of a mantis about to catch a butterfly. Unfortunately for the [...]
The lives of US troops could be put at risk by a Florida church’s threat to burn copies of the Koran to mark the September 11 attacks, the top US commander in Afghanistan has warned. Gen David Petraeus said that the plans by the evangelical Dove World Outreach Centre to destroy the Muslim holy book [...]
Several homes are fully-engulfed in flames in several different locations in Detroit. On Detroit’s east side, multiple homes are on fire on Moenart near Mound and McNichols. At least twenty homes were fully-engulfed near Quinn and Van Dyke. Multiple homes are on fire on Robinwood Street and Van Dyke, near the fires on Quinn and [...]
Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s killer, was denied parole for the sixth time Tuesday, according to the New York State Division of Parole. A three-member panel of parole board commissioners conducted a video conference interview with Chapman from their offices in Rochester. In their written comments, the commissioners told Chapman they had concerns “about the [...]
An American couple in Belize struggled Tuesday to figure out their future, their dreams literally up in smoke after a mob of indigenous Mayans burned down their animal sanctuary in the belief the foreigners fed two missing children to crocodiles on their property. Cherie and Vince Rose moved to the tiny Central American nation in [...]
A Florida pastor told CNN on Tuesday that while his congregation still plans to burn Qurans to protest the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the church is “weighing” its intentions. Terry Jones, pastor of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, who was interviewed on CNN’s “American Morning,” said the congregation is taking seriously the [...]
The murder of a Italian mayor by suspected mafia gangsters, believed to be the first such killing in 30 years, has been condemned as a “brazen attack on the state” by senior Italian politicians. Police suspect that Angelo Vassallo, 57, was gunned down by the Naples-based Camorra mafia because of his outspoken defence of the [...]
A few weeks ago, my friend, the designer Jean Paul Gaultier, launched with Elle magazine a special t-shirt he has designed for the Born HIV Free campaign, included with copies of Elle magazine sold in France during August. This campaign, for the Global Fund, is about letting the world know that ending the transmission of HIV between [...]
Galina Litvyak had stopped by the kiosk down the road, wandered through nearby supermarkets and badgered friends for the latest rumors. Nobody knew where to find it. All over her middle-class neighborhood, the stores were filled with an ample selection of goods, reflecting just how much Moscow has changed over the last two decades. With [...]
Three icons, one of which contained relics of one of Russia’s most venerated saints, have been stolen from a church in a village north of Moscow, a police source said on Sunday. The theft was apparently committed on Saturday afternoon. Priests discovered that the icons of St. Sergiy of Radonezh, Elijah the Prophet, and St. [...]
George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, plans to announce on Tuesday that he is giving $100 million to Human Rights Watch to expand the organization’s work globally. It is the largest gift he has made, the largest gift by far that Human Rights Watch has ever received, and only the second gift of $100 million [...]
The Congolese are particularly interested in pigeons, having exterminated nearly all the mammals, such as elephants and hippopotamuses, who used to come to the mudflats. The hunting of pigeons has not been controlled, and as a result the number of African Green Pigeons has fallen dramatically. Hunting these pigeons was legal up to two years [...]
French unions are striking nationwide as lawmakers begin debating President Nicolas Sarkozy’s bill to raise the retirement age. Transport workers began walking off the job last night, and many schools, post offices and government offices will be closed today. Demonstrations are planned in 137 cities. Sarkozy has vowed not to compromise on the key plank [...]
Silicon Valley technology giant Oracle Corp has hired Mark Hurd, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co who resigned amid a scandal, as president. Hurd, a close friend of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will replace Charles Phillips, who has resigned, Oracle said in a statement on Monday. Phillips was co-president alongside Safra Catz, who remains [...]
Officers stand watch in Westlake neighborhood the day after police shot a man they said was wielding a knife and not obeying their orders. Tensions flared Monday in the immigrant neighborhood of Westlake as dozens of protesters and Los Angeles police faced off at the site where a day laborer was fatally shot by police [...]
A third man survived last month’s massacre of 72 migrants by suspected drug traffickers in Mexico and is now in the United States, Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes said Sunday. “We know of a Salvadoran who is in the United States and who fortunately avoided getting killed,” Funes said. “His testimony will be key in solving [...]
Soldiers opened fire on a family’s car at a military checkpoint in northern Mexico, killing a 15-year-old boy and his father, authorities and relatives said Monday. It is at least the second time this year that a family has been caught up in a shooting involving Mexico’s military, which has come under intense criticism for [...]
The U.S. government is considering substantially increasing funding for Mexico’s drug war beyond the $1.4-billion Merida Initiative, Paul Richter reports from our Washington bureau. Citing an unnamed source in the White House, Richter reports that the Obama administration sees its joint anti-drug effort with Mexico as a top priority. At the same time, the administration [...]
The state, which still has the nation’s highest number of union jobs, is losing them at a faster clip than any other state, a UCLA study finds. The recession is taking a toll on union jobs, which are disappearing in California at a faster rate than anywhere else in the country, according to a UCLA [...]
Israel’s hard-line foreign minister said Monday that his party will try to block any extension of Israel’s settlement slowdown, a move that could derail the recently launched Mideast peace negotiations. Avigdor Lieberman said the Israeli government must keep its promise to voters that the 10-month slowdown, declared last November under U.S. pressure in order to [...]
It looks like a meteor strike: From out of nowhere, a huge clearing appears in the jungle — a deep rust-colored pit surrounded by mounds of dirt and thick stands of trees pushed to the side in dense piles of overturned soil. But this is no act of nature. It is the result of the [...]
Jefferson Thomas, who as a teenager was among nine black students to integrate a Little Rock high school in the nation’s first major battle over school segregation, has died. He was 68. Mr. Thomas died Sunday in Ohio of pancreatic cancer, according to a statement from Carlotta Walls LaNier, who also enrolled at Central High [...]
Vladimir Putin hinted that he would run for a third and possibly even a fourth term as Russian president as he likened himself to former US President Franklin D Roosevelt. The 57-year-old Russian Prime Minister appeared to deliberately fan speculation on Monday when he met with foreign academics and journalists at the Black Sea resort [...]
Condoleezza Rice ordered George Bush not to return to Washington after the 9/11 attacks before hanging up the phone, the former national security advisor revealed in a documentary interview. In a heated exchange, Ms Rice had to argue with the US President in Florida not to return to the White House because it was a [...]
A Lyons stone mason has provoked a row after creating a gargoyle for the city’s cathedral in the image of his Muslim foreman with a sign saying “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) in both Arabic and French. The 12th century Saint-Jean cathedral of Lyons, southeastern France, has hundreds of gargoyles around its roof whose traditional [...]
John Travolta has requested that charges be dropped against two people accused of trying to extort $25 million from him over the death of his son Jett. The actor said the legal case had already caused “unbelievable stress and pain” to his family. Jett, 16, who was autistic, died of a seizure in January 2009 [...]
Police in Mozambique have arrested nearly 150 people following violent protests which have resulted in 13 deaths over the government’s decision to increase bread prices by 30 per cent. There was little sign of a reoccurrence of the protests in the capital Maputo, mainly by young men who were assembled in part by anonymous text [...]
More than 80 years ago, Germany sold tens of thousands of bonds to American investors in an effort to recover financially from World War I. Later, Adolf Hitler used some of the money raised by those bonds to build the powerful Nazi war machine that would ravage Europe during World War II. Now, a half-dozen [...]
Lebanon’s prime minister has said he was wrong to accuse Syria of killing Rafik al-Hariri, his father, in 2005 and said the charge against Damascus had been politically motivated. Saad al-Hariri’s comments to Asharq al-Awsat, a London-based newspaper, published on Monday, repudiate his earlier accusation that Syria was behind the Beirut bombing which killed his [...]
North Korea has finished preparing for a key meeting of its ruling communist party, a South Korean official has said, but there it was still unclear when it would get under way. The Workers’ Party Convention, the first of its type since 1966, is widely expected to confirm the youngest son of leader Kim Jong-Il as [...]
The rearrest and trial of Iranian human rights activist and journalist Shiva Nazar-Ahari adds another name and face to a long list of those targeted by the government there, charged with a list of extraordinary offences and subjected to an opaque justice system. Hers is not an exceptional case, as the government continues to expand [...]
One in 10 people in Argentina have been found to live in areas where levels of arsenic in the water are above the legal limit. Campaigners there are calling on the government to take action, but as Craig Mauro reports from the province of Buenos Aires, people are already seeing the effects of several decades [...]
President Barack Obama has unveiled an ambitious plan to revamp the US transport infrastructure in a bid to kickstart the country’s ailing economy ahead of forthcoming mid-term congressional elections. Obama is expected to face intense pressure over the economy in the run-up to the November 2 election, which could see his Democratic Party lose control of Congress under [...]
A scientist in the UK has said that the cockroach could hold the answer to beating new diseases resistant to currently available antibiotics. A researcher at Nottingham University said in a press release on Monday that he has found molecules in the brain and nervous system of cockroaches that kill superbugs. Superbugs have gained notoriety in [...]
Grand Isle – Several gulf residents have tested positive for oil in their blood as documented by Matt Smith and Heather Rally on the Intel Hub Radio Show last Thursday. Further testing is currently being preformed to find out if the chemical dispersant Corexit, made by Nalco, has entered the bloodstreams of gulf coast residents. [...]
Mark and Linda Wilfong are dealing with a problem inside their home that you wouldn’t believe. The smell of natural gas infests the air and even their water after a water well was drilled on their property. “We never thought, we just figured when they drilled we would have good drinking water. You never knew [...]
As college students gear up once again to taste the sweet freedom of the college campus, there’s one thing they’re not likely not focusing on: the probability that one out of four female college students will be raped before receiving a diploma. A recent study from the Department of Justice estimated that 25 percent of college [...]
The Dutchman charged with killing a 21-year-old Peruvian woman and suspected in the disappearance of U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway has acknowledged extorting money from Holloway’s parents and says he did it to get back at them. In an interview published Monday, the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf quoted Joran van der Sloot as confessing to taking [...]
A security check on Chinese airlines has uncovered 200 pilots flying with falsified qualifications, it emerged on Monday. The Chinese Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) began the wide-ranging safety investigation in the wake of last month’s air crash in Yichun, in which 42 people died. Combing through the pilot records of China’s major airlines, officials discovered [...]
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has accused Chinese billionaires of refusing an invitation to a gala event because they are nervous about being buttonholed for donations to charity. The dinner on September 29 had planned to gather “dozens” of China’s richest people together in order to support the Gates Foundation, which funds Aids charities [...]
A court in northern Japan found two Greenpeace activists guilty Monday for stealing whale meat, but suspended their sentences, Greenpeace Japan said. The Aomori District Court ruled that the activists, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, will only have to serve one-year terms if they commit a crime in the next three years, Greenpeace said. In [...]
A leading pet product company has issued a voluntary recall of nearly 75,000 bags of dog treats due to salmonella concerns, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The move by Hartz Mountain Corp. came after random sample testing by the FDA indicated the presence of salmonella organisms in one or more 8-ounce bags [...]
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has called for the speedy creation of an independent Palestinian state with the capital in East Jerusalem and pledged to do his best to unite the Palestinians. “We cannot allow the peace process to make no headway, progress to give way to failures, and tensions to follow relaxation,” Mubarak said in [...]
The Russian and Israeli defense ministers, Anatoly Serdyukov and Ehud Barak, are planning to sign on Monday an agreement on military cooperation between the countries during talks in Moscow, the Russian defense minister’s spokeswoman has said. Barak will arrive in the Russian capital on a two-day visit later on Monday. “This agreement will regulate cooperation [...]
A Japanese freelance journalist released at the weekend after five months’ captivity in Afghanistan said in an online posting Monday that his kidnappers were not Taliban but corrupt Afghan soldiers. Kosuke Tsuneoka, 41, who had been missing in northern Afghanistan since April, has been under the protection of the Japanese embassy since Saturday, and was [...]
A suicide bomber rammed his car into a police station in northwest Pakistan on Monday killing at least 17 people, police said, in the third in a string of attacks by al Qaeda- and Taliban-linked militants over the last week. An official said the death toll could rise as the police station had collapsed after [...]
Mini-bus packed with explosives targets former defense ministry building in Baghdad, where security has been high. At least 12 people, including four soldiers, have been killed and 29 others wounded after five suicide bombers armed with rifles attempted to storm an army base in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Sunday’s attack came less than a week [...]
The decision, taken on Monday after 12 hours of talks between senior politicians in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition, means that some of the 17 plants will now be operational until the 2030s. Norbert Roettgen, the environment minister, said after the meeting in Berlin that the lifespans of Germany’s nuclear power stations would be extended by 12 years [...]
Iran is paying Taliban fighters a hefty sum for killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan — $1,000 per soldier, according to an investigation by The Sunday Times. The British newspaper interviewed a “Taliban treasurer” who said a Kabul-based Iranian company has paid him more than $77,000 in the last six months for attacks to sabotage U.S. [...]
A Japanese Moto2 rider has died after suffering a horrific crash during the San Marino Grand Prix. Shoya Tomizawa, 19, was travelling at full speed when he fell off on a corner and was hit violently by the bikes of Alex De Angelis and Scott Redding, who both also tumbled but looked relatively unhurt. Suter [...]
Iranian woman facing death for adultery to receive 99 lashes despite Times apologizing for using picture of another person in error. Iran has reportedly sentenced Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani – the 43-year-old Iranian woman who faces execution after being convicted of adultery – to 99 lashes in prison for “spreading corruption and indecency” after allowing an [...]
Congo survivor says overcrowded vessel reminded her of a ‘market in village full of people’. Two boats capsized over the weekend in separate incidents on Congo’s rivers, leaving at least 270 people feared dead, and both vessels were operating with few safety measures, officials said. Early on Saturday, a boat on a river in northwest [...]
A South Korean grandmother has become a national celebrity by passing her driving test at the 960th attempt. Cha Sa-soon, 69, whose surname coincidentally means “vehicle” in Korean, is now appearing in a prime-time advertisement for Hyundai, Korea’s largest carmaker. For three years beginning in April 2005, she took her driving test once a day, [...]
Plans by Rome city officials to demolish up to 200 illegal Gypsy camps this week have raised fears by aid workers that thousands of Roma, including women and small children, will be forced on to the streets. In the wake of France’s controversial repatriation of Romanian Gypsies last month, Italian police backed by bulldozers will [...]
Félix survived his ordeal at the hands of the Zeta cartel, one of Mexico’s most ruthless drugs gangs. But he knows of many fellow migrants who suffered the same grisly fate as the 72 who were shot at an isolated ranch 70 miles from the border city of Reynosa. “There are lots more dead migrants, they [...]
Via RealEstalker : We wrote about Candy Spelling’s magnificent manor last year, when she first announced that she was selling it for a whopping $150 Million – and that she was willing to wait instead of lowering the asking price. True to her word, the Spelling Manor officially hit the open market yesterday with the original asking price. The [...]
Group releases video saying it will not carry out armed actions three years after resuming violent campaign for independence. The armed Basque separatist group ETA today announced a ceasefire, raising hopes of a new peace process with the Spanish government but giving few clues about how that might happen. The announcement was made in a [...]
No one’s really sure how many Americans are Muslim. The estimates range anywhere from 1 million to 7 million. But what’s clear is that over the past few weeks and months, almost every poll that’s been taken on Muslims has pointed to one conclusion: anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise. The majority of Americans — [...]
On first listen, Leela James’ “Tell Me You Love Me” sounds like it could have been recorded in the ’70s, but it’s actually a cut from her latest album, released earlier this year. James’ heart lies in a bygone era of American music, to the point where she even looks like she belongs in another [...]
On the morning of Aug. 31, 2004, an employee at a Burger King in Richmond Hill, Ga., went out back to load some trash into a dumpster. Behind it lay a man in his mid-50s, stark naked. He appeared to have been beaten and had red ant bites on his body. Employees at the Burger [...]
Discrimination against women and girls takes a staggering toll around the world, says author Sheryl WuDunn. It leads to as many as 100 million fewer females than males in the world. Ending the oppression of women is the great moral challenge of the 21st Century, a cause she compares to fighting slavery in the 19th [...]
Two prominent, popular brothers who operate the second-largest vegetable farm in Hawaii will be sentenced in federal court this week on human trafficking charges — they pleaded guilty — but two former state governors, community groups, fellow farmers and other supporters are trying to keep them out of prison. The brothers were convicted of shipping [...]
No one seemed to notice the gunfire inside Pacific Rim Bank. Even when two dozen panicky people rushed out onto the plaza at Restaurant Row, heads barely turned. But when Alex O’Loughlin, Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park stepped up to save the day in this scene from the new “Hawaii Five-0″ — each in [...]
Kyrgyz Interim President Roza Otunbayeva will sign a decree pardoning persons who had committed economic crimes over the last two years, a spokesman for the Kyrgyz government said. The document will relieve from criminal liability persons who had committed commercial or official crimes between March 24, 2005 and April 7, 2010, Kyrgyz Justice Minister Aida [...]
The Belarusian Prosecutor General’s Office will inquire into the death of opposition journalist and human rights activist Aleh Byabenin, whose hanged body was found on Friday. Byabenin, 36, was one of the leading figures of the human rights organization Charter97 and ran the Charter97 website. The journalist’s relatives found his corpse hanged in his summer [...]
Hundreds of Chinese residents, deported to Japan during the World War II, will sue Japan’s Mitsubishi motor corporation, the Xinhua news agency said on Sunday. Some 40,000 people were deported from China to Japan during the World War II, the majority of them worked at the Japanese heavy industries. At least 7,000 of those deported [...]
Los Angeles-based Global Horizons Manpower CEO Mordechai Orian, 45, surrendered to federal authorities in Honolulu earlier Friday, a day after the FBI had tried to arrest him at his Southern California home but found he wasn’t there. The Israeli head of a labor recruiting company accused of exploiting 400 workers from Thailand and forcing them [...]
Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear watchdog chief, has accused the Egyptian government of publishing pictures of his daughter in a swimsuit in response to his call for democratic reforms in the country, a newspaper has reported. ElBaradei returned to Egypt earlier this year to begin a campaign calling for electoral reform and constitutional amendments [...]
Bahrain has accused 23 Shia Muslim activists of forming a “terror network” aimed at toppling the Arabian Gulf state’s government, the official BNA news agency says. The agency, citing the charge sheet on Saturday, said the suspects allegedly held secret meetings in Bahrain and abroad in order “to change the political regime through illegal means”. [...]
Thousands of people have attended demonstrations in Paris and other French cities to protest against tough new security measures introduced by the government which they say are being used to target the country’s Roma community. France began clearing large numbers of illegal Roma camps in July, after Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, announced a series [...]
The United Nations says that three million people affected by floods in Pakistan have yet to receive the food aid they desperately need. Martin Mogwanja, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Pakistan, said flooding was still reaching into new areas in the southern Sindh province. “Hundreds of thousands of people are moving out of the areas of [...]
Engineers in Chile have assembled a faster drilling machine for the operation to rescue 33 miners trapped underground since August 5. The arrival of the new machinery, which will be used to enlarge an existing supply shaft, brought new hope to relatives camping day and night outside the mine. Onlookers waved flags as a procession of [...]
Unrelenting rains and severe weather have lashed Guatemala, leaving at least 21 people dead over the past 24 hours, in what the country’s president calls a “national tragedy”. Twelve people were killed, and another dozen injured on Saturday when a rain-triggered landslide buried a bus on a major highway near central Chimaltenango city. Guatemala’s national radio [...]
Violent clashes in Sudan’s Darfur region have left more than 40 people dead this week, according to international peacekeepers. The joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur (UNAMID) said clashes between different armed groups left six people dead and another 33 people injured on Saturday. Citing witnesses at refugee camps where the fighting took place, [...]
An outbreak of cholera in Chad has killed at least 41 people, according to medical sources. Mahamat Mamadou Adji, a health official, said on Friday that there had been nearly 600 confirmed cases in the Central African nation. Neighboring Cameroon and Nigeria are also battling outbreaks of the fast-moving infection that causes diarrhoea in victims, leading [...]
Two Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip, medics and security sources say. Another person has been critically injured. The Israeli army launched three raids in the south of Gaza on Saturday after Palestinian fighters fired a rocket over the border. The flare-up of violence on the Israel-Gaza border came [...]
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is once again in the position of pledging a commitment to peace with Palestinians while resuming the construction of settlements in disputed territories. The talks, which are dismissed by many as posturing and lauded by few as a sustained challenge of Israel’s policies by the US, are the second round [...]
Police in El Salvador have found two buried oil drums stuffed with millions of dollars in cash possibly linked to the illegal drug trade, authorities said Saturday. The first barrel was found Thursday on a ranch in the town of Penitente Abajo, about 40 miles (62 kilometers) from the capital. After three days counting the [...]
A crane hoisted a key piece of oil spill evidence to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, giving investigators their first chance to personally scrutinize the blowout preventer, the massive piece of equipment that failed to stop the gusher four months ago. It took 29 1/2 hours to lift the 50-foot, 300-ton [...]
Vijay Iyer’s story is not uncommon in modern jazz. He’s mostly self-taught (although he did study the Suzuki method for violin) and played in rock bands as a kid before turning to the piano and jazz. But as a highly trained scientist who holds degrees in mathematics and physics, including an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Technology [...]
When it comes to staving off dementia, new evidence suggests that the “use it or lose it” dictum holds true — at least for a while. But it also appears that mentally stimulating lifestyles may speed up dementia once it hits in old age. “We do think that a cognitively active lifestyle is protective up [...]
Paul Conrad, the political cartoonist who won three Pulitzer Prizes and used his pencil to poke at politicians for more than 50 years, died Saturday, his son said. He was 86. Conrad died before dawn at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes surrounded by his family, David Conrad said. He [...]
Presented by President Hugo Chávez as an instrument to make shopping for groceries easier, the “Good Life Card” is making various segments of the population wary because they see it as a furtive attempt to introduce a rationing card similar to the one in Cuba. The measure could easily become a mechanism to control the [...]
The U.S. State Department Thursday flatly denied reports that the Obama administration is considering swapping the “Cuban Five” spies in U.S. prisons for a U.S. government subcontractor jailed in Havana. The denial came a day after Cuban-Americans in Congress expressed concern over reports of a deal to free Alan Gross, held without charges since his [...]
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory located a cosmic “ghost” that scientists think is evidence of a huge eruption produced by a supermassive black hole equal in power to a billion supernovas. The source, HDF 130, is over 10 billion light years away and existed at a time 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies [...]
European scientists say they’ve figured out the recipe for water in space: Just add starlight. They made the discovery while examining a dying star that is 500 light-years away from Earth, using an infrared observatory launched by the European Space Agency last year. “This is a good example of how better instruments can change our [...]
The judge declared a mistrial in the sham marriage trial of Mexican soap opera actress Fernanda Romero on Friday after jurors said they were deadlocked with no hope of agreeing. The U.S. Attorney’s office did not immediately say if the case will be retried, but the judge set a hearing for January to discuss the [...]
Lebanon submitted a protest to the United Nations over a list of 141 suspected Israel spies that have operated within its frontiers. Beirut wants the role of the suspected agents to be debated at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York later this month. “Lebanon has complained over Israel having set up an espionage [...]
While Amanda Knox languishes in an Italian prison after being convicted of a brutal murder, a retired FBI special agent familiar with the case has come forward to say he firmly believes the 23-year-old American college student is innocent. FBI veteran Steve Moore told “Today” that the evidence in Knox’s case was “flawed and manipulated,” [...]
Exquisite artworks hidden under 2,000 years of soot and grime in a Jordanian cave have been restored by experts from the Courtauld Institute in London. Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been [...]
Some 600,000 Muslims crowded into the Grand Mosque in Islam’s holiest city of Mecca for prayers on the last Friday of Ramadan. In all more than a million worshippers were in the mosque and surrounding areas, Said al-Mansoori, a spokesman for the commission governing Mecca and Medina said. The two cities have swollen with worshippers [...]
The machine gun that Al Pacino used in the 1983 film Scarface and which his character referred to as “my little friend” is expected to fetch $150,000 at auction. The Hollywood star, who played Tony Montana in the gangster movie, was a method actor and insisted his weapon was the correct weight – so he [...]
Tokyo police responded to a record 2,444 Internet crime cases nationwide in the first half of this year, a National Police Agency survey showed today. The number, up 586 or 31.5 per cent from a year earlier, represented a new high since the NPA started gathering statistics for Internet crimes, defined as crimes which use [...]
In the first of a three-part investigation, Rory Carroll reports from the gateway to America, at the centre of drug cartel violence that has claimed 28,000 lives. The events which have no name scythe through the valley like invisible reapers. They slice east to west, west to east, a homicidal pendulum. No one sees anything. [...]
A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into the purchase of child pornography online turned up more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department — including some with the highest available security clearance — who used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations. But the Pentagon investigated [...]
Former prime minister claims in memoir that U2 frontman could have ended up in No 10 if he hadn’t chosen pop over politics. In a memoir filled with profound navel-gazing, political bombshells and a few purple-prose love scenes, Tony Blair has also found time to salute U2′s activist frontman, claiming he “could be … prime minister”. [...]
For almost three decades, indie rock icon Morrissey has made almost as many enemies as devoted fans willing to hang on his every melancholy-drenched lyric. Described by one high court judge as “devious, truculent and unreliable”, the former Smiths frontman is no stranger to controversy and criticism. But tomorrow he reignites a simmering row about his [...]
Portuguese TV presenter among six convicted over child prostitution at Casa Pia state-run orphanages. One of Portugal’s most famous television presenters and a former ambassador were among six men found guilty yesterday of involvement with a paedophile prostitution ring that exploited children from state-run orphanages. The guilty verdicts handed down to TV presenter Carlos Cruz [...]
Thilo Sarrazin, a director on the board of Germany’s Central Bank, who caused a monumental stir by accusing immigrants and Muslims of diluting his country’s intellectual and economic strength, was on Friday sacked from the Bundesbank’s Governing Board. In a book entitled Germany is Destroying Itself, published earlier this week, Mr. Sarrazin repeatedly criticises both Germany’s [...]
Rather intriguing, the story of the arrest of Hindu India documentary filmmaker Vijay Kumar at a Houston airport on August 20th. According to a Houston Chronicle report, Kumar is behind bars until a September 8 hearing. Kumar, on his way to Canada, was arrested at a Houston airport after officials noticed Kumar “acting suspiciously” and [...]
A powerful predawn earthquake struck New Zealand on Saturday, causing water mains to break and some buildings to crumble, though there were no immediate reports of deaths or major damage, emergency officials said. Roughly 100 people were being treated for minor bumps and cuts, and two people suffered more serious injuries, hospital officials said, just [...]
A United Parcel Service cargo plane crashed in an unpopulated area near the Dubai airport, killing the two crew members on board, UPS officials said Friday. The 747-400, a UPS-operated cargo plane, crashed with two pilots about 8 p.m. as it took off for Cologne, Germany, UPS officials reported Friday. “Safety is a key priority [...]
A Malaysian man pleaded guilty to wildlife smuggling after his bag bursting with 95 live boa constrictors broke open on a luggage conveyer belt at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, an official said Friday. Keng Liang “Anson” Wong, 52, who was previously convicted of wildlife trafficking in the United States, was charged Wednesday in a district [...]
Sixty people were killed and more than 100 were injured in a bomb attack targeting a Shia Muslim rally in Quetta on Friday. The bomb appeared to target a rally being held for Al-Quds day, an international annual event held by the Shia community opposing Israel’s control of Jerusalem and showing solidarity with Palestinian Muslims. [...]
President Alexander Lukashenko’s remarks suggesting Russia could have been behind an attack on its own embassy in Minsk are “obscene”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday. A day after Russia strongly condemned the attack, Lukashenko retaliated by saying that “thugs and scoundrels” from Moscow may be to blame. “I do not want to [...]
Eight iPad tablet computers have replaced traditional menus in the restaurant of Milan’s La Scala theatre, the italia-ru.it web site said on Friday. In the Il Marchesino restaurant, iPads serve as the menu, displaying photos of the dishes, nutritional values, calories and other useful information. If the customer has an allergy to one of the [...]
A clash between soldiers and gang members in Mexico has left 25 dead, according to reports. The soldiers had stormed a training camp set up by suspected drug gang members near Mexico’s border town of Monterrey which has seen an escalation of violence in recent months, including the massacre of 72 migrants last week. The [...]
Confidence in China’s food safety standards has taken another battering after it emerged that authorities in central China covered up the discovery of cancer-causing chemicals in a batch of cooking oil for more than five months. Food safety monitors in Hunan province found high levels of the carcinogen ‘benzoapyrene’ in 42 tons of Camellia oil [...]
Toshiba has announced the voluntary recall of about 41,000 notebook computers worldwide at risk of overheating and burning users. The recalled models are the Satellite T135, Satellite T135D and Satellite ProT130 notebook computers, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Consumers are asked to immediately download the latest version of a software program called [...]
Japan has imposed new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme. The measures – which go beyond than those imposed by the UN Security Council – ban transactions with some Iranian banks, and also target energy-related investments. Japan approved sanctions against Iran last month, but US officials have been urging Tokyo to adopt tougher measures. [...]
A Russian businessman accused of being responsible for the death of 156 people in a horrific night club fire last December has been arrested while on the run in Spain. Konstantin Mrykhin is wanted in his native Russia on charges of involuntary manslaughter in connection with a blaze that tore through the Lame Horse night [...]
Six recruiters were accused of luring 400 laborers from Thailand to the United States and forcing them to work, according to a federal indictment Thursday that the FBI called the largest human trafficking case ever charged in U.S. history. The indictment alleges that the scheme was orchestrated by four employees of labor recruiting company Global [...]
Burger King said Thursday that it has agreed to be acquired by investment firm 3G Capital in a deal valued at $4 billion. New York-based 3G Capital will buy the fast food chain for $24 a share. That marks a 46% premium over Burger King’s closing price of $16.45 on Tuesday, the day before news [...]
An offshore oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill. A commercial helicopter company reported the blast around 9:30 a.m. CDT Thursday, Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel said. Seven helicopters, two airplanes and four boats were en route [...]
Tens of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate islands off the eastern coast of the United States, as Hurricane Earl closes in on a large swath of the Atlantic region. Authorities issued mandatory evacuation orders for visitors of North Carolina’s barrier islands, where Earl, a powerful category four storm, was on course to [...]
The US president has called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders not to let the chance for peace slip away as he opened a US-sponsored summit to re-launch direct talks. Barack Obama promised to put the “full weight” of the United States behind the effort to forge peace in direct talks between the two sides that [...]
The ghosts of the “Russian spies” roam the foggy Albion – at least, that is what keeps appearing before the British counterintelligence officers. MI5 officers believe they are on a trail of a “new Anna Chapman” – this is the nickname given by the media to Liberal Democrat Mike Hancock’s legislative aide, 25-year-old Katya Zatuliveter. [...]
A Russian Proton-M carrier rocket with three GLONASS satellites blasted off early on Thursday morning from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. The rocket was launched at 4:53 Moscow time (0:53 GMT), Lt. Col. Alexei Zolotukhin, a spokesman for Russian Space Forces said. Glonass – the Global Navigation Satellite System – is the Russian equivalent [...]
Wealthy landowners in Pakistan have allegedly diverted waters from the country’s devastating floods away from their own properties and into villages, the country’s UN ambassador said Thursday. Abdullah Hussain Haroon called for an inquiry into claims that embankments had been allowed to burst to protect commercial crops. “Over the years, one has seen with the [...]
US prosecutors have charged the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, for the plot that killed seven CIA employees at an American base in Afghanistan last December, the US Justice Department said on Wednesday. Mehsud was charged with conspiracy to kill Americans overseas and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. On Dec. [...]
Nacho-fueled Super Bowl bashes and multi-course wedding banquets may hark back to a time when preagricultural people devoured wild animal meat at their comrades’ gravesides. That’s what happened 12,000 years ago at Hilazon Tachtit cave in Israel, say zooarchaeologist Natalie Munro of the University of Connecticut in Storrs and archaeologist Leore Grosman of Hebrew University [...]
Prominent scientists dispute kinship’s role in self-sacrifice among highly social creatures. A furor has broken out among biologists over ant specialist E.O. Wilson’s latest attack on a concept used to explain the origins of self-sacrifice in the dog-eat-dog world of evolution. The debate centers around an idea called kin selection, which biologists use to understand [...]
The Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded. The scientist has claimed that no divine force was needed to explain why the Universe was formed. In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of [...]
A golfer managed to set fire to a course when he accidentally struck a rock with his iron, sending sparks into the Californian rough. His hacking in the rough caused a spark that lit the rough ablaze and spread, destroying 12 acres, although no homes were destroyed. The fire, at the exclusive Shady Canyon Golf [...]
A New York art courier entrusted with helping to sell a $1.3 Million painting is being sued after it vanished while he was on a night out. James Carl Haggerty is now being sued by one of the owners of “Portrait of a Girl” by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. According to the legal claim [...]
A man who jumped more than 400ft after leaping off a New York apartment block survived after crashing feet first into a parked car. Thomas Magill, 22, is said to be in a stable condition after the jump, suffering only two broken legs and a bruised lung. He only suffered two broken legs and a [...]
Ferrari has recalled all its 458 Italia models following reports of the car catching fire. Five of the cars have burst into flames since leaving the company’s factory at Maranello near Bologna, northern Italy. Incidents have been reported in California, Paris, China and Switzerland. None have taken place in Britain. The recall involves 1,248 cars [...]
Relatives of a mentally ill West Boca Raton man are upset. They say their cousin, who suffers from a paranoia disorder, was taken advantage of. They claim he handed over the deed of his house to his neighbors for $10. The attorney for the neighbors says he can’t talk about what he calls a valid [...]
The World Food Programme has warned that flood-ravaged Pakistan faces a “triple threat” after the worst disaster in the country’s history left eight million people dependent on aid to survive. Torrential rains triggered massive floods that have moved steadily from north to south over the past month, engulfing a fifth of the country and affecting [...]
Preliminary drilling works have begun to carve a tunnel through solid rock to free 33 workers trapped some 700 metres below the surface in a Chilean mine. A giant 31-ton drill bored about 15 metres into the rock on Monday - the first step in the week-long effort - as the miners’ ordeal equalled the longest known [...]
Dozens of Afghan asylum seekers have broken out of a detention centre in northern Australia and held a sit-in near a major highway to protest against the long delays in processing their refugee applications, police say. More than 70 men were peacefully taken back into police custody after their protest, while five others were taken to a [...]
Four Greenpeace activists have scaled an oil rig off the coast of Greenland, forcing a British energy company to shut down its drilling operation in the Arctic. The environmental campaigners managed to breach a 500 metre security perimeter around the Stena Don rig, climb the structure and fasten themselves to it, police said on Tuesday. [...]
Tony Blair, Britain’s former prime minister, said he did not foresee the “nightmare” that unfolded in Iraq and wept for the war’s victims, in memoirs released on Wednesday. The war-time leader repeated his conviction that the 2003 invasion was justified, but said he regretted “with every fibre of my being the loss of those who [...]
Afghanistan’s central bank has taken control over the country’s most powerful and politically connected private bank, Afghan bankers and officials say, as fears of insolvency and financial mayhem grow. Kabul Bank, which has taken $1 Billion in deposits from ordinary Afghans and handles salary payments for Afghan soldiers, police and teachers, has engaged in a [...]
A Japanese man has broken the world record for calculating the value of Pi, reaching 5 trillion digits on a computer that he built himself. Shigeru Kondo, a 55-year-old systems engineer for a food company based in northern Japan, easily surpassed the previous record of 2.7 trillion digits, set late last year by a French [...]
The body of one of Russia’s top spies has washed up on the Turkish coast after he disappeared close to a sensitive Russian naval facility in neighboring Syria. Major-General Yuri Ivanov, 52, was the deputy head of Russia’s foreign military intelligence arm known as GRU which is thought to operate the biggest network of foreign spies [...]
A UK man suffered flash burns after he accidentally blew himself up trying to kill a spider. The 28 year-old suffered severe burns after attacking the arachnid with an aerosol can at his home in Clacton in Essex. The man was summoned by his wife to deal with a spider she had seen scuttling behind [...]
The British spy Gareth Williams who was found dead in a holdall in his bath in London had been padlocked into the bag, an inquest has heard. Williams, 31, was found dead in his flat in Pimlico half a mile from MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall, on Monday August 23rd. After colleagues reported him missing, police [...]
The owners of the mine where 33 Chilean men are trapped have begged for forgiveness. Appearing before a parliamentary committee to answer questions, Alejandro Bohn, of the San Esteban mining group said: “The pain caused by this unwanted and unforeseen situation means we must ask forgiveness for the anguish being felt at this time. “This [...]
When Diana, the ‘People’s Princess’ died, Tony Blair felt a duty to ‘protect the monarchy from itself’. Diana, Princess of Wales, was down to earth, charming and intelligent, but also stubborn and prone to be over-emotional, says Mr Blair. He recalls meeting the Princess at Chequers in July 1997, the month before she died, saying [...]
Mafia kingpins from the former Soviet Union have moved into the French Riviera and are taking over with “quasi-military” precision. Their grip on the region is now so tight that Riviera detectives expect an eastern connection to almost every crime. “Everything from burglary and money laundering to vice is controlled by the Mob from former [...]
A senior Swedish prosecutor is reopening a rape investigation against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – the latest twist to a case in which prosecutors of different ranks have overruled each other. The case was dropped by a Stockholm prosecutor last week who said there was nothing suggesting Assange had raped a Swedish woman who reported [...]
Tony Blair uses his new book to expose Gordon Brown as a manipulative figure who lost a winnable election by abandoning the principles of New Labour. The former prime minister’s memoir discloses that a “maddening” Mr Brown effectively blackmailed him while he was in No 10. He suspects the then chancellor of orchestrating the investigation [...]
An American medical agency said gunmen fired on a private plane carrying international aid workers in eastern Congo who were forced to seek refuge in the jungle. The International Medical Corps said UN peacekeepers were en route to save the three Americans and one Georgian and two Congolese staff. The group was at the landing [...]
A transient, who was nicknamed “The Box Cutter,” was sentenced to more than 400 years in prison for a knifing rampage against several California women. Charles Juan Proctor was convicted this month of 22 charges including robbery and attempted murder in connection with the slashing spree, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said. On [...]
A Pakistani military delegation became the latest victim of the paranoia permeating US airports on Monday night, when US security officials detained a brigadier at Washington’s Dulles airport on a complaint by a passenger who said he did not feel safe sharing the flight with the delegation. The brigadier was removed from the United Airlines [...]
A judge spared a convicted murderer from death row, but the inmate decided to end his life anyway. George Smithey, a 70-year-old convict at San Quentin, hanged himself with a noose made of bed sheets in his cell over the weekend. Prison spokesman Lt. Sam Robinson said Smithey should have been moved from San Quentin [...]
President Obama declared that “the American combat mission in Iraq has ended” in his prime-time address Tuesday. “Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country,” he said. The mission officially drew to a close at 5 p.m. Tuesday. Obama said the winding down of [...]
A former Osama bin Laden aide who stabbed a federal prison guard in the eye was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison after telling the court he’s not a terrorist and hearing his victim tell him he will go to hell. U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts said Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, 52, deserved a life sentence [...]
A doctor involved in an “on-again, off-again” relationship apparently tried to force her way into her boyfriend’s Bakersfield, Calif., home by sliding down the chimney, police said Tuesday. Her decomposing body was found there three days later. Dr. Jacquelyn Kotarac, 49, first tried to get into the house with a shovel, then climbed a ladder [...]
A suburban Dallas man used a thin blade from a safety razor to slit his throat in an apparent suicide attempt Tuesday in the courtroom where a judge had just sentenced him to 40 years in prison. Marcial Anguiano, 47, of Duncanville, was taken from the Dallas County courthouse on a stretcher with his neck [...]
Federal investigators are at San Francisco International Airport trying to figure out what caused a blown engine that lead to an emergency landing at SFO Tuesday morning. Hundreds of passengers were on their way to Australia when literally the sparks started flying. Qantas Airways Flight No. 74 departed SFO around 11:10 p.m. with 212 passengers [...]
A Marin County man has filed suit against the Marin County Sheriff’s Department for an incident in which he says law enforcement officers went too far. Peter McFarland was Tased inside his own home as his wife watched, begging officers to stop. On June 29, 2009 McFarland and his wife Pearl were returning home from [...]
A strict quality assurance program has virtually wiped out salmonella in California henhouses, but it makes locally produced eggs more expensive. Amid a rolling landscape of browning chaparral and battered trailers, Alan and Ryan Armstrong’s metal henhouses line up like military barracks. Keeping their 450,000 birds safe — and Salmonella enteritidis out of their henhouses [...]
About 60 child deaths tied in confidential court filings to abuse or neglect by Los Angeles County child protective services workers are under review because they were not disclosed publicly in potential violation of state law, according to an independent auditor. Michael Gennaco, chief attorney for the Office of Independent Review, presented his findingsTuesday to the [...]
Two violent incidents in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, have led to the deaths of at least 14 people. Eight people were killed and 14 others wounded in a roadside bomb blast on Tuesday. Five men and three women were killed in the explosion, Ali Muse, the head of the city’s ambulance service, said. Ahmed Adma, the driver of the [...]
A Pakistani air strike targetting fighters believed to have been preparing for imminent suicide attacks has killed between 40 to 45 people in a northwestern the country. “Security forces today carried out a successful operation against militants in the Tirah valley of Khyber Agency,” a senior Pakistani security official told AFP news agency on Tuesday. “Militant hideouts, a training [...]
Russian police have arrested more than 100 people, including Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, who were taking part in anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow and St Petersburg. Opposition leaders and rights activists have been converging at the capital’s Triumph Square on the 31st of each month, symbolising the right to free assembly guaranteed in Article 31 of Russia’s constitution. [...]
Palestinian gunmen opened fire Tuesday on an Israeli car in the West Bank and killed four passengers on the eve of a new round of Mideast peace talks in Washington. The Islamic militant group Hamas claimed responsibility. Assailants firing from a passing car riddled the vehicle with bullets as it traveled near Hebron – a [...]
Her son Sajad says she was told she would be hanged at dawn on Sunday and visits by her family and lawyer have been denied. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning, was told on Saturday that she was to be hanged at dawn on Sunday, but the sentence was not [...]
Spanish activist Carmen Roger of the organization Saharacciones arrives at Los Rodeos airport on the Spanish Canary Island of Tenerife, on August 30, 2010. Spanish activists of the organization Saharacciones, who said they suffered physical abuse at the hands of Moroccan authorities, arrived in Tenerife, after being arrested and later relased by Moroccan police on [...]
Sacramento’s FOX affiliate KTXL “FOX40″ is known for delivering many firsts to the Sacramento area. The station was first with a satellite news truck, first on social media websites Twitter and Facebook, and first with local, national and global breaking news. Monday morning will see another first — the first paid advertisement for a medical [...]
Two civil liberties groups sued the federal government on Monday to try to block its targeted killing overseas of a U.S.-born cleric believed to have inspired recent attacks in the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia [...]
The Russian Embassy in Minsk was the target of a violent attack late on Monday night, when unknown assailants hurled fire bombs at the building. “At around 10:50 p.m. local time (19:50 GMT), two fire bombs were thrown onto the territory of the Russian Embassy,” a local emergencies spokesman told RIA Novosti. “One of them [...]
The Russian Mir-2 mini-sub has found several shiny metal objects on the bottom of Lake Baikal that could be the legendary Tsarist gold lost during the Russian civil war, the Fund for the Protection of Lake Baikal said. Explorers have long been searching for the Tsarist gold that was allegedly carried by Admiral Alexander Kolchak [...]
The Government Pension Investment Fund, which manages the reserves for the National Pension and Employees’ Pension Insurance, said Monday it incurred an investment loss of ¥3.59 trillion in the April-June quarter. The fourth-largest quarterly loss on record was largely due to stock price falls both at home and abroad resulting from the sovereign debt crisis [...]
The Japan Football Association on Monday named former AC Milan and Juventus manager Alberto Zaccheroni to lead the national team. The 57-year-old, who becomes the first Italian and sixth foreigner to take the job, is set to be unveiled at a news conference on Tuesday. Reports on Monday said Zaccheroni had agreed to a two-year [...]
The former editor in chief of “Playboy Indonesia” missed a deadline to begin serving a two-year jail term for indecency, vowing to fight his conviction, the Jakarta Globe reported. The boss of the now-defunct publication, Erwin Arnada, was acquitted of charges of indecency by the South Jakarta District Court in April 2007, but prosecutors said [...]
Nyjah Huston pocketed the biggest payday in skateboarding, $150,000, Saturday in Glendale, Arizona the inaugural Street League skateboarding contest, The DC Pro, at the Jobing.com arena. He edged out new sensation, Shane O’Neal, and Torey Pudwill. Street Leage Skateboarding is MTV realtiy television star, Rob Drydek’ s new business venture that has been years in [...]
Federal police on Monday captured a Texas-born alleged drug kingpin who faces trafficking charges in the U.S. and has been blamed for a vicious turf war that has included bodies hung from bridges and shootouts in central Mexico. The arrest of Edgar Valdez Villarreal, alias “the Barbie,” was the culmination of a yearlong intelligence operation, [...]
The suspect in the shooting death of a Utah sheriff’s deputy was captured early Monday near the Utah-Arizona border after a resident reported an armed prowler, authorities said. Law officers arrested Scott Curley, 23, shortly shortly before 1 a.m. local time near Kanab, said Jim Driscol, chief deputy of the Coconino County Sheriff’s Department in [...]
Italy’s health minister traveled to Sicily on Monday to apologize to a new mother for an operating room fistfight between two doctors that led to her botched delivery. Laura Salpietro, 30, had to have her uterus removed and her son Antonio suffered heart problems and possible brain damage following his birth Thursday in Messina’s public [...]
A Saudi employer and his wife, who are accused of torturing a Sri Lankan housemaid by hammering nails into her body, have been arrested in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, officials at the Sri Lankan External Affairs Ministry said Monday. Saudi Arabian authorities could not be reached immediately for verification. No further details were available. The two [...]
Four African Union (AU) peacekeepers have been killed in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, after al-Shabab fighters fired a mortar at the presidential palace. “A mortar was fired at one of our positions, and it killed four soldiers and injured eight,” said Ba-Hoku Barigye, a spokesman for the peacekeeping force. Barigye said the dead soldiers are all [...]
India’s government says it has withdrawn its threat to ban Blackberry services for at least two months after the smartphone’s maker agreed under pressure to give security officials “lawful access” to encrypted data. The country’s interior ministry, which wants real time access to corporate emails and instant messaging, said on Sunday it would review Research in Motion (Rim)’s, the [...]
Bangladesh Anthrax Spreads, Public PanicsTop Police Official In Siberia Accused Of Taking $450,000 In BribesRussian Banker Shot Dead In MoscowRussian Performers Drop Fish-Eating Circus ActTaliban Chief Says Victory ImminentNorth Korea Marks 62nd Founding DayFear Of Fresh Violence In NigeriaRachel Corrie Trial: During War There Are No Civilians
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