generalspeaking

World News Today

• Baghdad - Saddam Hussein's former deputy was hanged before dawn today for the killings of 148 Shiites, an official with the prime minister's office said. Taha Yassin Ramadan, who was Saddam's vice-president when the regime was ousted four years ago, was the fourth man executed in the killings of 148 Shiites following a 1982 assassination attempt against the former leader in the city of Dujail. Around Iraq, meanwhile, bombs tore through a Shia mosque during prayers in Baghdad and struck several targets in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk yesterday, killing at least 26 people. Late yesterday, U.S. and Irraqi troops engaged in a major operation as part of a crackdown in the volatile Hurriyah neighbourhood in northern Baghdad. Witnesses said there were many people reported holed up in two Shia mosques, surrounded by U.S. forces. The state-run Iraqiya network said six civilians had been killed.
• United Nations - The threat of a new international showdown over Kosovo erupted yesterday as the Russian United Nations ambassador appeared to storm out of a UN Security Council meeting discussing the UN-run Serbian province. "He was preaching for independence" Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said of the UN's Kosovo administrator. Against the backdrop of Slavic solidarity, Russia sympathizes with Serbia's resistance to accepting the UN's recently finalized proposals to hand extensive powers over to Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian Muslim majority.
• Rome - An Italian journalist held for two weeks in Afghanistan said after his release yesterday that he saw his captors cut off the head of one of the two Afghans kidnapped with him and thought he would be the next to die. He said the kidnappers threw the Afghan to his knees and suffocated him in the sand as they cut his head off. "Then they wiped the knife on his clothes. I was shaking. Obviously, I thought, 'it's my turn now'," Mr. Mastrogiacomo said.
• Sydney - A new appraisal of 16th century maps offers evidence that a small Portuguese fleet charted much of Australia's coast as early as 1522 - 250 years before Captain Cook stepped on to the shores of Botany Bay. It has long been known that Cook, who sailed from England, was preceded by Dutch navigators, whose ships were wrecked on the coast of western Australia.
• Moscow - A methane gas explosion in a Siberian coal mine yesterday killed at least 78 people, with about 39 others still trapped as of late evening, authorities said. About 200 people were underground when the blast ripped through the Ulyanovskaya mine, which opened in 2003 and had modern gas detection devices, Russian media reported. The explosion reportedly was triggered after the roof of a mine shaft collapsed, releasing methane gas. Rescue teams were working to save those still trapped underground last evening.
• Egypt - Egypt's parliament yesterday approved a controversial set of amendments to the constitution defended by President Hosni Mubarak, but that the opposition has denounced as a blow to democracy, saying the changes will restrict judicial supervision of elections they call vital to preventing vote fraud. The amendments also write permanently into the constitution strong security powers for the president they fear will be abused.
• Pakistan - Five judges resigned yesterday and hundreds of lawyers demonstrated to protest President Pervez Musharraf's removal on March 9 of Pakistan's chief justice, deepening a political crisis for the military leader. "I have waited a few days before addressing you, in the hope something will be done to remedy the harm done to the judicial organ of the state. It seems I have waited in vain", Lahore High Court judge Jawad S. Khawaja said in a resignation leader sent to General Musharraf.
• South Africa - South Africa yesterday called for a 90-day "time out" on sanctions against Iran and said a resolution drafted by six world powers should drop an embargo on arms exports and financial sanctions targeting Iran's Revolutionary Guards and an Iranian bank. The proposals by South Africa, which holds the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council this month, were obtained by the Associated Press ahead of an informal council meeting.
• Cuba - Waleed bin Attash, a Yemeni captive being held at Guantanamo Bay, has confessed to recruiting the suicide bombers and buying the speedboat that blasted a hole in the side of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 200, killing 17 American sailors, according to a hearing transcript that the Pentagon released yesterday. The transcript also quotes Mr. Attash admitting that he helped plan the August 7, 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, which killed more than 200 people, most of them Africans.
• London - Scientists in the United States have engineered a species of mosquito that is resistant to the malaria infection. Its ability to block the infection suggests it could come to dominate mosquito populations if released into the wild. Malaria infects between 300 million to 500 million people each year. The mosquito parasite creates the disease that takes up to 2.7 million lives each year, chiefly in Africa.
• London - A passenger on a flight from New Delhi to London awoke to find the corpse of a woman who had died in the economy cabin being placed in a seat next to him, British Airways said yesterday. The flight's economy section was full and the cabin crew needed to move the woman and her grieving family out of that compartment to give them some privacy, the airline said.
• US - A new study by doctors at the University of Minnesota and St.Louis University says that despite claims to the contrary, duct tape doesn't vanquish the common wart. "In our study, we did not find duct tape to be effective," said lead author Dr. Rachel Wenner, a dermatology resident at the University of Minnesota. The study was published in the journal Archives of Dermatology.
  

Labels: World News

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, March 20, 2007