Roadside bombs kill five in Pakistan

ROADSIDE bombs have killed five people and wounded 10 in two blasts in Pakistan's lawless tribal zone near the Afghan border, officials say.

One of the improvised explosive devices was planted along the route of an army convoy in the Mir Ali area 35 kilometres east of Miranshah, the main town in the North Waziristan district, they said.

"The explosion killed at least two soldiers and injured seven others," a security official in Miranshah said.

Another local security official confirmed the attack and said two of some 10 to 15 vehicles in the convoy were severely damaged.

In the Shin Qamar area of the Khyber tribal region, at least three labourers were killed and three wounded on Sunday in an explosion caused by a roadside bomb, said senior local official Nasir Khan.

He said the bomb went off as the labourers, who were carrying construction materials on mules, passed by.

Local intelligence officials also confirmed the incident.

Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt is made up of seven districts. In North Waziristan, Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked militants have carved out strongholds used to plot attacks across the border in Afghanistan.

The al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network in North Waziristan, blamed for some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan, is one of the thorniest issues in relations between Islamabad and Washington.

Washington has long demanded that Pakistan take action against the Haqqanis, which the then-top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, last year described as a "veritable arm" of the Pakistani intelligence service.

Pakistan says it will act according to its own needs and priorities and not on the wishes of a foreign government.

08.29 | 0 komentar | Read More

Majority of Britons would vote to leave EU

A MAJORITY of Britons would vote to leave the European Union if given the chance, according to a survey.

The Optimum Research poll in The Observer newspaper found that 34 per cent would definitely vote to quit the 27-member bloc and 22 per cent would probably do so, giving a total of 56 per cent that would opt to leave the EU.

Eleven per cent would definitely vote to remain in the union, while a further 19 per cent said they would probably cote to stay in - a total of 30 per cent.

Some 14 per cent said they did not know.

Some 28 per cent of those polled said Britain's membership of the EU was generally a good thing, while 45 per cent said it was generally a bad thing.

EU leaders gather in Brussels on Thursday to try to thrash out the bloc's budget for the 2014-2020 period, at which Britain will argue for a real terms freeze.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is pushing for a freeze in the trillion-euro budget, having threatened to veto any rise in spending.

Voters from Cameron's Conservative Party were the most in favour of leaving the EU (68 per cent), followed by the opposition Labour Party (44 per cent) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats (39 per cent).

The Conservatives and the Lib Dems form Britain's coalition government.

The poll also found that 39 per cent would vote for Labour in a general election. The Conservatives were on 32 per cent, the anti-EU UK Independence Party on 10 per cent, the Lib Dems on eight per cent and other parties on 11 per cent.

Optimum Research surveyed 1957 adults online from Tuesday to Thursday.

08.29 | 0 komentar | Read More

Chinese street kids found dead in dumpster

THE bodies of five street children have been found in a dumpster in southwest China after they climbed inside it to escape the night-time cold, state media report.

The five boys aged about 10 died of carbon monoxide poisoning after apparently burning charcoal inside the trash container to keep warm, Xinhua news agency said.

A trash collector discovered the bodies on Friday morning in the dumpster in the city of Bijie in Guizhou province, according to the Beijing News.

Autopsies showed carbon monoxide poisoning was the cause of death, Xinhua quoted sources in a local branch of the ruling communist party as saying.

It said leftover burnt charcoal was found inside the dumpster, indicating that the boys might have been burning charcoal for heat before they died.

Calls to Bijie police and city officials on Sunday went unanswered.

The Friday night low temperature in the mountainous city was 6C.

Photos uploaded onto the internet showed that the dumpster is about 1.5 metres by 1.3 meters and has an airtight lid, Xinhua reported.

The tragedy has sparked an outcry on the net, it said. A post on Sina Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like microblogging service, had more than 2.5 million hits as of Sunday evening.

While some users accused the local government of negligence, others said the parents of the children were also to blame, according to the news agency.

"It reminded me of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. Isn't it that such things only happen in fairy tales?" wrote one user called Saludika.

"What a cold world this must be for the five children!" said another, Lu_Yao.

08.29 | 0 komentar | Read More

Myanmar announces new prisoner amnesty

THE president of Myanmar (Burma) has ordered a new prisoner amnesty ahead of a historic visit to the country by US President Barack Obama.

State television said President Thein Sein had ordered 66 detainees released, but it was not clear whether any political prisoners would be among them.

A Home Ministry official said Thein Sein signed the amnesty order on Friday, but the prisoners will be freed on Monday.

The presidential amnesty was the second announced this week.

On Thursday, Thein Sein announced an amnesty for 452 prisoners, but the move did not include prisoners of conscience and prompted activists to step up calls for the government to release those believed to remain behind bars.

Myanmar's government has long insisted that all prisoners are criminals and does not acknowledge the existence of political detainees. However, the reformist new government, praised for its moves toward democracy, has released hundreds of people this year who were jailed under the former military junta.

A separate press release, issued on Sunday, said the government would initiate "initiate a process between the Ministry of Home Affairs and interested parties to devise a transparent mechanism to review remaining prisoner cases of concern by the end of December 2012".

The news came one day ahead of a visit on Monday by Obama, who will become the first sitting American president to visit the once-pariah nation.

Obama is due to meet Thein Sein, as well as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi before flying to Cambodia later in the day.

Thein Sein's administration has made freedom for political prisoners one of the centrepieces of its reform agenda. Earlier prisoner releases helped convince Western nations, including the United States, to ease sanctions they had imposed against the previous military regime.

Under the now-defunct junta, rights groups said more than 2000 activists and government critics were wrongfully imprisoned.

Suu Kyi's party says at least 330 political prisoners remain incarcerated.

Obama said on Sunday in Thailand that his visit to Myanmar is an acknowledgement of the democratic transition under way but not an endorsement of the country's government.

Obama's words were aimed at countering critics who say his trip to the country is premature.

08.29 | 0 komentar | Read More

Israel facing 'millions' of cyber-attacks

THE Israeli government has admitted it has become the victim of a mass cyber-warfare campaign with millions of attempts to hack state websites since the start of its Gaza offensive four days ago.

Speaking ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said the government was now waging war on "a second front - of cyber attacks against Israel".

Steinitz said in the past four days, Israel had "deflected 44 million cyber attacks on government websites. All the attacks were thwarted except for one, which targeted a specific website that was down for six or seven minutes."

His remarks came a day after the online activist group Anonymous claimed to have downed dozens of websites of Israeli state agencies and a top bank in protest over the Jewish state's deadly air assault.

It also comes as both Israel and the Palestinians try exploiting the social networks in a furious effort to win over public opinion amid the worst outbreak of Middle East violence in four years.

Steinitz did not say who was responsible, but said the government had successfully managed to deflect almost every attack, thereby avoiding serious disruption or other damage.

On Saturday, Anonymous claimed to have downed or erased the databases of nearly 700 Israeli private and public websites, including that of the Bank of Jerusalem finance house.

It also claimed to have briefly downed the foreign ministry website in protest over an alleged Israeli threat to cut the Gaza Strip's internet communications.

"For far too long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of the Palestinian people in the so called 'Occupied Territories' by the Israel Defence Force," Anonymous said in a statement.

"But when the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand."

Steinitz made no direct reference to Anonymous and failed to specify if the government was dealing with a co-ordinated attack. He also refused to disclose which countries these efforts were being conducted from.

But the minister stressed that the government had come up with back-up for "essential websites" should they be taken down.

"This is an unprecedented attack, and our success has been greater than we anticipated," Steinitz said.

08.29 | 0 komentar | Read More

Egypt's new Coptic Pope enthroned

POPE Tawadros II has been enthroned as the new leader of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority in a ceremony at Cairo's St Mark's Cathedral attended by Prime Minister Hisham Qandil.

Dozens of Coptic clerics in flowing robes took part in Sunday's ceremony, the first in four decades, as the Muslim prime minister looked on.

Tawadros received the crown and crucifix from Bishop Pachomius, who had served as the church's interim leader, before ascending the huge wooden throne of St Mark embossed with lions.

Arabic, English and Greek mingled with the ancient Coptic language of the church's liturgy in the psalms and prayers of the service and the tributes of well-wishers.

Tawadros, 60, was chosen on November 4 to succeed Pope Shenuda III, who died in March after four decades on the patriarchal throne. He was chosen after a blindfolded altar boy picked his name from a chalice, according to church custom.

He becomes spiritual head of the largest Christian minority in the Middle East and 118th pope in a line dating back to the origins of Christianity and to Saint Mark, the apostle and author of one of the four Gospels, who brought the new faith to Egypt.

Shenuda, a careful, pragmatic leader, died at a critical time for the increasingly beleaguered minority, which has faced a surge in sectarian attacks after an uprising overthrew president Hosni Mubarak in February last year.

The pope leads the Coptic Orthodox community in a country where Christians make up between six and 10 per cent of an 83 million population.

Amid increased fears about the community's future after the overthrow of Mubarak, Tawadros will be its main contact with Islamist President Mohamed Morsi.

The rise of Islamists after the revolution sparked fears among Copts of further persecution, despite Morsi's repeated promises to be a president "for all Egyptians".

Copts have suffered sectarian attacks for years, but since Mubarak's overthrow several dozen have been killed in sectarian clashes and during a protest in October last year crushed by the then ruling military.

08.29 | 0 komentar | Read More

Seven dead in Nairobi minibus attack

SEVEN people were killed and many more wounded when an apparent explosive device was hurled at a packed minibus in a predominantly Somali area of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, police and the Red Cross say.

Nairobi police chief Moses Nyakwama said the blast occurred on Sunday on a local minibus in the district of Eastleigh, where mainly Somalis or Kenyans of Somali origin live and which has been the target of other attacks in recent weeks.

"The information we have is that there were about 25 people in the bus. It looks like it is an improvised explosive device that was thrown in it," he said. "It occurred at a congested place so even people passing by got injured."

The Kenyan Red Cross said on its Twitter account that the death toll was now seven people while the number of wounded was 29.

Kenya has suffered a wave of grenade and gun attacks, often blamed on sympathisers of Somalia's al-Shabab Islamist insurgents, since its army went into Somalia last year to flush out al-Shabab.

The Eastleigh area has often been a target of violence.

On Wednesday, a suspected grenade attack in a supermarket in the district wounded one person, and two weeks earlier another explosive device went off, wounding two.

Earlier this month, attackers also hurled a grenade into a church in the northeastern town of Garissa, close to the Somali border, killing one policeman and wounding 14 people.

08.29 | 0 komentar | Read More