generalspeaking

World News, April 2009

A suicide bomber struck a Shia Muslim mosque outside the Pakistani capital Sunday, killing 22 people, and wounding 40, the latest sign of rising sectarian violence and the growing reach of the Islamic insurgency. The attack took place in Shakwal, south of Islamabad. It came less than 24 hours after at least eight paramilitary troops were killed in a bombing in their capital and six days after militants stormed a police training centre in the eastern city of Lahore. A Taliban-linked group claimed responsibility for Sunday's bombing.

Dubai police accused a deputy prime minister of Chechnya of masterminding the assassination of former Chechen military commander Sulim Yamadayev in an underground car park. The attack on Yamadayev, a foe of Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov, was carried out with a Russian-made gold-coloured handgun, police said. Yamadayev was shot on March 28 in the car park of a luxury seaside apartment block in Dubai.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is facing criticism for its policies after it emerged that the organization put down 96 percent of the abandoned animals received at its U.S. headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. Of 2,216 animals taken in last year, 2,124 were killed - almost six a day. PETA has euthanized more than 20,000 pets in the past decade, according to figures it has supplied to Virginia state officials.

Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has suffered another family tragedy shortly after taking office, with the death of his infant grandson. The two-year-old child drowned in a swimming pool at the prime minister's Harare home. Mr. Tsvangirai was himself injured in a car crash in March that killed his wife of 31 years. Her death raised questions over how quickly he could recover and take on the urgent task of rescuing the ruined country after he was sworn in to office in a new unity government with President Robert Mugabe.

A Washington state man shot and killed his five children, between the ages of seven and 16, then turned his gun on himself, after his wife told him she was leaving him. In the third mass shooting since Friday in the United States, James Harrison, 34, killed his children early Saturday inside his mobile home in Graham, 200 kilometres south of Seattle, then drove to a nearby casino and shot himself inside his car.

An ice bridge linking a vast shelf of ice to two islands in Antarctica has snapped, providing the latest evidence of rapid climate change. Satellite images have disclosed that a 25-mile strip of ice, which was believed to have pinned the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place since the beginning of recorded history, had broken at its narrowest point. Without it, ice would be able to flow more freely between Charcot and Latady islands on the western side of the Antarctic, eventually moving into the open seas. The Wilkins, which is half the size of Scotland, was the largest of ten shelves to have shrunk or collapsed in recent years on the Antarctic Peninsula as temperatures rose in the region.

Sri Lanka's military said yesterday troops had confined the Tamil Tiger rebels to a no-fire zone, where the last act of the 25-year separatist war will play out with tens of thousands of civilians still trapped. Three separate units killed at least 420 rebels after surrounding them in a triangle-shaped single square kilometre during a three-day battle, the military said. The remaining rebel-held area is less than 20 square kilometres of coconut groves on the Indian Ocean island's northeast coast where the United Nations has said the Tigers have kept more than 100,000 civilians as human shields.

The UN Security Council emerged from closed-door talks to say it had reached no agreement, but would talk more - an outcome that fell short of U.S. demand for North Korea to be 'punished', in reaction to the reclusive Stalinist state's launch of a long-range missile. Veto-bearing members of the 15-country Security Council, Russia and China, blunted U.S. and Japanese-led efforts to impose new sanctions on North Korea based on the presumption of violation of a resolution limiting North Korea's military testing.

A jury in Hamilton, Ontario has found Johnson Aziga guilty on two counts of first-degree murder, ten counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of attempted aggravated sexual assault. Mr. Aziga was found to have intentionally caused the death of two of his former co-workers by having unprotected sex while knowing he was HIV-positive and failing to inform the women of his condition. He is the first person in Canada to be convicted of murder for fatally infecting a sexual partner. One of his victims died in 2003, the other in 2004.

Labels: Human Fallibility, Science, Societal Failures, World News

posted by Pieface @ Monday, April 06, 2009