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Indonesian plane: Rescuers head for suspected Papua crash site Mass clean-up after China blasts trigger cyanide fears China explosions: The fears and questions after Tianjin blasts A rugby star’s body exhumed, a ghost returns to haunt Mahinda Rajapaksa Clinton giving up server amid concerns about classified data 91-year-old charged with importing cocaine, may have been duped North Korea Placed Mines That Maimed Soldiers at DMZ, Seoul Says

Indonesian plane: Rescuers head for suspected Papua crash site
MMNN:17 Aug. 2015
Indonesian search and rescue teams are heading to a remote part of the western Papua region where a plane is believed to have crashed on Sunday. Officials have confirmed they spotted debris near the town of Oksibil.
The Trigana Air flight was heading to the town from provincial capital, Jayapura, when it lost contact at 14:55 local time (05:55 GMT) on Sunday. The plane was carrying 44 adult passengers, five children and infants, and five crew members. It is not yet known if anyone survived.
Indonesia's postal office has told the BBC that the plane was also carrying four bags containing cash, about 6.5 billion rupiah ($486,000; £300,000), for villagers living in remote places in Papua.
"Our colleagues carry those bags to be handed out directly to poor people over there," said the head of Jayapura's post office, Haryono, who goes by only his first name.
'Pray together'
The head of Indonesia's national search and rescue agency, Bambang Soelistyo, said a search plane had spotted suspected debris and billowing smoke at 8,500 feet above sea level, about 50km (31 miles) from Oksibil Airport. About 50 search and rescue workers, soldiers, and policemen are making their way from Oksibil to the site.
The ATR42-300 twin turboprop plane took off from Sentani airport in Jayapura at 14:21, but lost contact with air traffic controllers half an hour later.
Bad weather is believed to have been a possible reason for the crash. A search plane was forced to turn back on Sunday because of dangerous flying conditions.
Villagers had earlier told officials that a plane had crashed into a mountain. Bad weather and rugged terrain are said to be hampering efforts to reach the site.
Oksibil, which is about 280km south of Jayapura, is a remote, mountainous region, which is extremely difficult to navigate. Indonesian President Joko Widodo has expressed his condolences on Twitter and called for the country to "pray together" for the victims.
On blacklist
Trigana Air has had 14 serious incidents since it began operations in 1991, losing 10 aircraft in the process, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
It has been on a European Union blacklist of banned carriers since 2007. All but four of Indonesia's certified airlines are on the list. Indonesia has suffered two major air disasters in the past year.
Last December an AirAsia plane crashed in the Java Sea, killing all 192 people on board - and in July a military transport plane crashed in a residential area of Medan, Sumatra claiming 140 lives.

Mass clean-up after China blasts trigger cyanide fears
TIANJIN (China):MMNN:17 Aug. 2015
Rescue personnel battled to clean up hundreds of tonnes of cyanide at the site of huge explosions in northern China on Monday, as state-run media lambasted officials over their response to the blasts which killed 114.
The August 12 explosions at the hazardous goods storage facility in the port of Tianjin set off a giant fireball, devastated a vast area and raised fears over the impact of toxic pollutants.
The company operating the site had been storing hundreds of tonnes of cyanide, reportedly nearly 30 times the allowed amount, and while officials have insisted that the air and water in the city is safe, residents and victims' relatives have voiced scepticism.
"Around 700 tonnes" of sodium cyanide was being stored at the warehouse where the blasts took place, He Shusheng, a Tianjin vice mayor, told a news conference. The Beijing News, citing storage plans it had seen, said the warehouse was only authorised to hold 24 tonnes of the substance.
A huge, "very complicated and difficult" clean-up was underway on Monday, said He, made harder by the presence of 16,500 empty shipping containers and amid fears forecast rain could release hydrogen cyanide gas.
Authorities had built up sand and earth barriers around the blasts' 0.1 square kilometre "core area" to prevent any leakage of cyanide or other pollutants, said He.
The closest water test point to the blast site revealed cyanide 27.4 times standards on Sunday, officials said without specifying the quantity, but not beyond the cordoned-off area. Sodium cyanide had been found as far as around one kilometre (0.6 miles) from the blast site.
Military chemical and nuclear experts have been brought in, as have experts from producers of sodium cyanide - exposure to which can be "rapidly fatal", according to the US Centers for Disease Control.
Environmental campaign group Greenpeace on Sunday said that it had tested surface water for cyanide at four locations in the wider city and had not detected high levels of the chemical.
Officials said on Monday the death toll from the disaster had risen to 114 with 70 people missing, but cautioned that some of those could among the 60 corpses yet to be identified.
Authorities have faced criticism over failing to uphold regulations surrounding the site's operation, notably requirements that warehouses stocking dangerous materials be at least one kilometre from surrounding public buildings and main roads.
Chinese media reports on Monday said the son of a former police chief of Tianjin port was a major shareholder in the company operating the site, Rui Hai International Logistics.
The reports in web portal Sohu and the Beijing News illustrate the oft-criticised links between business and official elites in China, which have raised concerns that firms with strong government ties face lax enforcement of regulations. A day earlier, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited the city to meet with victims and direct rescue efforts, a common move after major disasters in the country.
"The situation is very complicated," the Communist Party number two told Hong Kong's i-Cable TV. "All kinds of chemical products have been mixed." "We must investigate the accident, find the cause of the blasts and anyone who acted illegally will be severely punished."
Chinese state-run media on Monday lambasted officials for a lack of transparency over the explosions, echoing frustrations voiced by Tianjin residents, victims' relatives and netizens over what they say has been a slow release of information in the aftermath of the explosions.
"During the first dozens of hours after the blasts, there was scant information offered by Tianjin authorities," the Global Times tabloid said in an editorial. "Tianjin is not an exceptional case in terms of the inadequate disaster-response work," the paper, which has close ties to the ruling Communist Party, wrote.
The government-published China Daily, meanwhile, noted that "many questions... remain to be answered" over the blasts. "Not surprisingly, the lack of verified information has resulted in conspiracy theories emerging," it wrote.
State prosecutors on Sunday said they had launched an investigation into whether there had been any "abuse of power or dereliction of duty", Xinhua said.
The official and media comments may indicate that authorities will look to hold individuals responsible for the disaster.
But accusations of corruption were raised when more than 5,000 schoolchildren died in a 2008 earthquake in the southwestern province of Sichuan, crushed to death when their shoddily-built classrooms collapsed.
No one has been prosecuted over the Sichuan casualties.

China explosions: The fears and questions after Tianjin blasts
MMNN:14 Aug. 2015
Officials have urged patience as they are still investigating the cause of the incident. But that has not stopped many online from demanding accountability. Many censored posts on social media took issue with city planning officials.
"Who allowed a warehouse with dangerous goods be built just a few hundred metres from a residential area? Who allowed so many dangerous 'toys' to be clustered together? And which department failed to detect such a dangerous situation?" read one post by user Liu Tong.
At a press conference on Thursday, a journalist asked officials: "According to environmental regulations, what should be the distance between a residential area and [an area with] dangerous goods?"
The incident sparked heavy criticism online. Said Weibo user Parisian Taotaijun: "When will the citizens know the truth, all the answers we are getting are heavily scripted, it's so fake."
Global Times said that the minimum distance between businesses with dangerous chemicals and public buildings and transport networks is 1km, but data showed there were at least three major residential communities within that radius of the Ruihai warehouse. Contaminated water
Reports that 700 tons of sodium cyanide were stored at the Ruihai Logistics warehouse which exploded, sparked concerns that it would contaminate the water.
"If this issue isn't addressed soon, it could be even worse than the blast itself," said Weibo user Tao Weng WT, in a censored post. Officials have denied reports that there were increased levels of sodium cyanide detected in nearby drains.
They have also said the area is sealed off and hazardous material was contained at the site, in response to journalists' queries on possible leakages.
They also asked if the pollutants would drift towards other cities such as the capital Beijing, just 100km (62 miles) from Tianjin.
But government officials visibly struggled to answer the queries. Mr Wen attempted to leave several times, but was stopped by reporters who continued peppering him with questions.
He eventually said that a south-westerly wind was blowing pollutants into the sea away from populated areas, and while the particles in the air were dangerous, "so far we have observed [the pollution] has not reached a very high level".
The warehouse handled chemicals and flammable gases but the authorities were unclear about what exactly was there at the time of the blast. Some reports said all documentation had been destroyed in the fire.
Nevertheless questions have been raised about whether fire fighters were equipped well enough and whether the materials they used to battle the flames were appropriate - as certain chemicals' exposure to water could cause explosions.
At least 12 fire fighters died in the disaster. Lei Jinde, the deputy propaganda chief of China's fire department, defended the actions of fire fighters, Reuters reported, saying they did not know the location of the chemicals.

A rugby star’s body exhumed, a ghost returns to haunt Mahinda Rajapaksa
Colombo:MMNN:14 Aug. 2015
When Wasim Thajudeen’s charred body was discovered inside a burnt car on May 17, 2012, police said it was an accident. Now in the last days of the campaign for the parliamentary elections, the star rugby player’s death, which has been declared a murder, is threatening to singe Mahinda Rajapaksa as investigations cut close to the former first family. “I had my suspicions that it was a case of unnatural death and when the judge asked me during the court hearing, I told him that the circumstances in which he was found were suspicious,” Wasim’s elder sister Ayesha said.
“But we did not have any suspects in mind. I couldn’t think of anybody who could have done this,” she told The Indian Express. No one in the Thajudeen family thought that the 28-year-old Wasim, popularly known as the “gentle giant” and one of Sri Lanka’s most popular rugby players, could have any enemies.
Earlier, this week, Wasim’s body was exhumed from a Muslim burial ground in Colombo after the Criminal Investigations Department of the Sri Lankan police, which took over the case in January this year, told the court that it was murder and quoted the post mortem report to say he was abducted and tortured before he was killed with a blow to his neck.
The CID is also investigating a vehicle used in the suspected abduction of Wasim before his death. At the time of the incident, it was in use by an NGO run by Shiranthi Rajapaksa, the wife of the former President. A senior minister in the Sirisena government told a press conference that the investigation had found the involvement of three personnel of the Presidential Security Guard, which reports directly to the President. At a campaign rally, another minister linked the former President’s two sons, Namal and Yositha, to the case.
Ayesha said she would not comment on the allegations. She said she did not know anything about Yositha and her brother having a falling out. “But I can say that Namal and Yositha went to the same school as Wasim. They were friends. During their school days, those two have even come to our home,” she said. Rajapaksa, who is campaigning to become Prime Minister eight months after he was defeated as President of Sri Lanka, has hit out at the allegations. Sri Lanka will vote on August 17 to elect 225 members of Parliament. The United People’s Freedom Alliance, of which he is a candidate, is pitted against the United National Front for Good Governance, headed by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
The election also pits Rajapaksa against President Maithripala Sirisena, who heads the UPFA. His projection of himself as the prime ministerial candidate is a challenge to Sirisena, who defeated him in the presidential election and to the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe alliance for government formation immediately after. “This election is all about the unfinished business of January,” said P Saravanamuttu of the Centre for Policy Alternatives.
With Rajapaksa and his possible return the only issues in the election, the re-investigation “holds explosive implications”, Saravanamuttu said, “even though we are going to hear more about it only after the elections”. As the details play out in the local media and in the election campaign, the case recalls the dark side of the Rajapaksa era, which was marked by killings, disappearances and thuggish incidents. “First, they tried to portray us as thieves and when they have no proof of corruption to produce after seven months of investigations, they are now trying to say that we murdered people. This is why bodies are being exhumed in the middle of an election,” Rajapaksa, who faces corruption allegations, told the The Island, a Sri Lankan daily.
“The way they levelled allegations at us before the presidential election would make anyone think they were already in possession of all the evidence of corruption they needed. But, the people could see that after the election, they had no evidence at all and more than seven months later they still have not found any evidence of corruption. This is why they are trying desperate expedients like exhuming bodies,” he said. A former minister in the Rajapaksa cabinet also told the media that Wasim’s family had opposed the exhumation on religious grounds. Ayesha, a dental surgeon who helped in the identification of her brother’s body by a small metal pin-like object inserted in his knee after a surgery, said it was painful to the family to see her brother’s death being politicised.
“We don’t have any political involvement. But I want everyone to know we fully support the investigation. It is false to say that we came under political pressure for the exhumation of Wasim’s body. We have full faith and confidence in the CID. We want justice done for Wasim’s death in a court of law,” she said. Ayesha said the family had struggled to get a death certificate for her brother because the “cause of death report” did not come for 18 months as a court heard the police case for identification of the body and their reasons for Wasim’s death.
“Although the police wanted us to believe it was an accident, they gave no compatible cause of death,” Ayesha said. There was also a long wait for the Judicial Medical Officer’s post mortem while the case was being heard. While the family awaited the court’s verdict, the government changed. For the Thajudeen family, hope now rests in President Sirisena, whose “clean-guy” reputation has only increased over the last eight months.
“In January, the new government took the case away from the police and handed it to the CID. Since then, there is an active investigation, and we have full trust in the CID and President Sirisena”. Even if Rajapaksa is elected, said Ayesha, she has faith the President would continue with the investigation. “The President is not going to change. He will continue. And we believe he will do the right thing,” she said.

Clinton giving up server amid concerns about classified data
WASHINGTON:MMNN:12 Aug. 2015
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign casts her decision to turn over her personal email server to the Justice Department as cooperating with investigators. Her Republican critics suggest that the move and new revelations about classified information points to her malfeasance as secretary of state.
Two emails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were subsequently given one of the government’s highest classification ratings, a Republican lawmaker said.
Federal investigators have begun looking into the security of Clintons’ email setup amid concerns from the inspector general for the intelligence community that classified information may have passed through the system. There is no evidence she used encryption to prevent prying eyes from accessing the emails or her personal server.
“It’s about time,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement after the front-runner for the Democratic nomination announced that she was directing that the server be relinquished. “Secretary Clinton’s previous statements that she possessed no classified information were patently untrue. Her mishandling of classified information must be fully investigated.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said: “All this means is that Hillary Clinton, in the face of FBI scrutiny, has decided she has run out of options. She knows she did something wrong and has run out of ways to cover it up.”
For months Clinton refused calls to give up the home-brew email server she used in her suburban New York City home to send and store email through a private account. She has defended her use of the server, saying she used it as a matter of convenience to limit the number of electronic devices she had to carry. She has said the server account never held classified information.
Officials are investigating whether classified information was improperly sent, though it’s not clear if the device will yield any information. Her attorney said in March that no emails from the main personal address she used while secretary of state are on the server or back-up systems associated with it.
Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Tuesday that she has “pledged to cooperate with the government’s security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.”
In March, Clinton said she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and were discarded. She turned over the other half to the State Department last December. The department is reviewing those emails and has begun the process of releasing them to the public.
On Tuesday, Clinton attorney David Kendall gave to the Justice Department three thumb drives containing copies of work-related emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via her private server.
Kendall gave the thumb drives, containing copies of roughly 30,000 emails, to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.
Also Tuesday, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said two emails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were deemed “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information” — a rating that is among the government’s highest classifications. Grassley said the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence community had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.
Those two emails were among four that had previously been determined by the inspector general of the intelligence community to have been classified at the time they were sent. The State Department disputes that the emails were classified at that time.
“Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby. “They were not marked as classified.”
The inspector general for the intelligence community had told Congress that potentially hundreds of classified emails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.
Earlier this week, Clinton said in a sworn statement submitted to a federal judge that she has turned over to the State Department all emails from the server “that were or potentially were federal records.” The statement, which carries her signature and was signed under penalty of perjury, echoed months of Clinton’s past public statements about the matter.

91-year-old charged with importing cocaine, may have been duped
Sydney:MMNN:12 Aug. 2015
A 91-year-old retired surgeon has been charged with importing cocaine hidden in soap into Australia, prompting police to warn travelers to beware they are not tricked into becoming drug mules.
Victor Twartz, of Sydney, was released on bail when he appeared in court charged with importing a commercial quantity of cocaine last month. He did not enter a plea and next will appear in court Oct. 6.
The retired oral surgeon faces a potential life prison sentence if he is convicted of importing 10 pounds of the drug into Sydney Airport on a July 8 flight from New Delhi.
A search of Twartz's luggage found 27 packages of soap that tested positive for cocaine, police said.
Police say it appears Twartz was scammed by a group of people he had befriended online before his trip. David Stewart, the organized crime commander with the Australian Federal Police, declined to say whether Twartz had been promised anything by the group, but said he had been in contact with them over several months.
Police were tipped off by Twartz's family about the email exchanges but did not stop him from leaving Australia, Stewart said.
"There were warnings issued to him about his activities both here and overseas," Stewart told reporters, ". . . but you can only provide people with certain warnings."
Twartz told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that he met people in New Delhi whom he had befriended online. As he was about to board his plane to return to Sydney, he was handed a bag that he was told contained gifts for someone in Australia, he said.
As Twartz left court Tuesday, a reporter asked if he had been taken advantage of. Twartz replied: "Always, always."
Federal Police manager Wayne Buchhorn warned that unwittingly bringing drugs into Australia could result in charges.
"People can expect they will be charged if they knowingly bring drugs into Australia, or are reckless or willfully blind to the fact that there could be narcotics concealed inside their luggage or items they are carrying," Buchhorn said in a statement.

North Korea Placed Mines That Maimed Soldiers at DMZ, Seoul Says
SEOUL, South Korea:MMNN:10 Aug. 2015
North Korean soldiers sneaked across the heavily guarded border with South Korea and planted land mines near a South Korean military guard post, and two southern soldiers were maimed after stepping on them, the South Korean Defense Ministry said on Monday.
The two South Koreans, both staff sergeants, triggered the mines last Tuesday just outside their post, within the South Korean half of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer separating the two Korean armies.
One lost both legs in the first blast, involving two mines. The other soldier lost one leg in a second explosion as he tried to help his wounded colleague to safety, the ministry said.
“This is a clear provocation by the North Korean military,” said Kim Min-seok, a spokesman for the South Korean military. “We swear a severe retaliation.” Investigations showed that the mines were planted by North Korean soldiers to target South Korean troops, Maj. Gen. Koo Hong-mo said during a news briefing. They were typical North Korean land mines using wooden boxes, he said.
The mines were found just outside the South Korean guard post, which is 1,440 feet south of the military demarcation line, the official border that bisects the DMZ. They exploded as the soldiers opened the gate of a barbed-wire fence to begin a routine morning patrol, said Brig. Gen. Ahn Young-ho, a military investigator.
The explosions on Tuesday were the first of their kind in 48 years, South Korean officials said.
The American-led United Nations Command, which oversees the Korean armistice and investigated the mine incident together with the South, said it “condemns these violations” of the armistice and called for a generals’ talk with the North.
Both the command and the South Korean military ruled out the possibility that the mines were old ones that had drifted from their original placements because of rain or shifting soil.
The DMZ was created in 1953 as part of the Korean War armistice. The armistice has never been replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the divided Korean Peninsula technically in a state of war.
Both Koreas guard their side of the DMZ with guard posts, barbed-wire fences and minefields. So many mines were strewn there during and after the war that wild deer sometimes step on them, causing blasts. Old mines loosened by floodwaters also pose a risk for soldiers serving in the zone.
In recent years, several North Koreans have crawled across the DMZ to defect to South Korean guard posts.

Earthquake of 6.9-magnitude hits off Solomon Islands
Sydney:MMNN:10 Aug. 2015
A 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the Solomon Islands on Monday but there was no Pacific-wide tsunami warning issued for the tremor-prone region, the US Geological Survey said.
The shallow quake was centred some 186km southwest of Dadali and 214km from the capital Honiara. The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which also measured the quake at 6.9, said "a destructive Pacific-wide tsunami is not expected".
Australian officials estimated the undersea quake at magnitude 6.8 and also said there was no tsunami threat.
"They would definitely have felt it over quite a wide area, over hundreds of kilometres," Geoscience's duty seismologist Hugh Glanville said of residents of the Solomon Islands. "But there shouldn't be a tsunami and hopefully not too much damage," he told AFP.
Glanville said the fact that the epicentre was some distance from the Solomons' main population centres and was undersea rather than on land would also limit any impact. The Solomons are part of the Pacific "Ring of Fire", a zone of tectonic activity known for its frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and Glanville said these kinds of tremors were "common in the region".
It is one of the most active seismic regions in the world with a 7.0-magnitude quake striking last month off the coast of the island chain. No damage from that tremor was reported.
However, in 2013, 10 people died and thousands were left homeless when buildings were destroyed after the Solomons were hit by a tsunami following an 8.0-magnitude quake.

Trump complains of 'much tougher' treatment at Republican debate
MMNN:7 Aug. 2015
A shock of blond hair was just visible, offering the only clue to who stood at the center of the mass of jostling bodies, elbows, and television cameras.
The arrival of Donald Trump into the packed Republican debates spin room caused a press scrum that sent bodies crashing to the ground.
Reporters stood on their tiptoes, arms outstretched, pushing forward their tape recorders to capture the words of The Donald as he painted himself as the victim of an attack by the Fox news moderators on the stage a few moments earlier. “The questions to me I think were much tougher than they were to anybody else,” Mr. Trump said.
Despite his complaints, the real estate mogul and television show host inevitably concluded his comments, with characteristic ego, with a declaration of victory. The scene came at the end of one of the most high-drama, high-energy debates in recent American political history.
It was politics injected with show business: a vibrant and eclectic mixing of serious policy, spanning from national security to the economy, and pure television entertainment of jokes and mudslinging.
For two hours the some 4,500 strong audience, the hundreds of journalists crammed into the pressroom next door, and the approximately 22 million viewers watched, captivated, as the Republican hopefuls battled it out on the debate stage.
Electrified and engaged, some of the audience booed at Mr Trump when he raised his hand when asked if anyone would not pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee whoever that might be. “I can’t say that I’ll have to respect the person who wins," the Donald, said with a shrug. "I can promise that if I’m the nominee, I’ll run as a Republican.”
That brought passionate interjection from Senator Rand Paul. “This is what’s wrong!” he said, sending a frisson through the crowd.
"He buys and sells politicians of all stripes, he’s already hedging his bet on the Clintons. ...He’s already hedging bets because he’s used to buying politicians.” “Well,” Trump replied, “I’ve given you plenty of money.”
After the candidates had had their chance at convincing the audience of why they would make a good Republican nominee, it was the turn of their spin-doctors. In the ‘spin room’, an area close to the vast press section, they stood under giant red cardboard arrows bearing the name of their would-be nominee.
Energetically they worked to convince the journalists that, regardless of what they had seen on stage, it was their man who had actually won. Scott Walker had four lobbyists frantically working to change the narrative of the Wisconsin governor’s, solid, if at times flat, performance.
“He was definitely energetic enough. He is one of the leading candidates, so he doesn’t need to shout and yell,” one of his men told a pack of journalist, sweating from evident stress.
Mr Walker was best on substance, and when the gunpowder settled, his performance would come out on top, said another. He quickly added: “he did great,” tonight though, lest his comment sound like he was making excuses.
Meanwhile, a few meters to the right, two lobbyists for Ted Cruz earnestly assured any journalist who would listen that it was their man who had won the debate.
One spin-doctor enthused about the Texas senator’s “succinct” responses.
Another waved a graph on his iPhone, showing that, despite the showmanship of Donald Trip, it was Mr Cruz who was the most Googled candidate in the first part of the debate.

London Underground services resume after 24-hour Tube strike
London:MMNN:7 Aug. 2015
The industrial action by four unions began on Wednesday evening as part of a dispute over the Night Tube, which is due to start next month.
The unions are unhappy at conditions offered to drivers who will be working on the new service. Talks between the unions and London Underground (LU) are due to resume next week.
The latest strike was the second time Tube stations across the capital have closed in the current dispute, following a 24-hour walkout on 8-9 July.
The Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association (TSSA), Unite and the train drivers' union Aslef took part in the action.
The unions turned down a new offer from LU which included a 2% salary increase this year, an extra £200 per night shift for drivers for a limited time and a £500 bonus for Night Tube staff when the service is introduced in September.
The RMT union said rotas drawn up for the new Night Tube were "rosters from hell" that would disrupt the work-life balance of staff.
London Mayor Boris Johnson accused the unions of "holding a gun" to Londoners' heads.
Questions have been raised over whether the dispute will be resolved in time for the night service to begin on its planned date. Mr Johnson has said he is "not fussed" about the night service starting on 12 September as planned, as long as it started in the autumn.

Atomic bomb still scars Hiroshima, seven decades later
Tokyo:MMNN:5 Aug. 2015
Charred bodies bobbed in the brackish waters that flowed through Hiroshima 70 years ago this week, after a once-vibrant Japanese city was consumed by the searing heat of the world`s first nuclear attack.
The smell of burned flesh filled the air as scores of survivors with severe burns dived into rivers to escape the inferno. Countless hundreds never emerged, pushed under the surface by the mass of desperate humanity.
"It was a white, silvery flash," Sunao Tsuboi, 90, said of the moment when the United States unleashed what was then the most destructive weapon ever produced. "I don`t know why I survived and lived this long," said Tsuboi. "The more I think about it... the more painful it becomes to recall."
Seven decades since the attack, the city of 1.2 million people is once again thriving as a commercial hub, but the scars of the bombing -- physical and emotional -- still remain.It was 8:15 am on August 6, 1945 when a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay flying high over the city released Little Boy, a uranium bomb with a destructive force equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT.
Just 43 seconds later, when it was 600 metres (1,800 feet) from the ground, it erupted into a blistering fireball burning at a million degrees Celsius (1.8 million Fahrenheit). Nearly everything around it was incinerated, with the ground level hit by a wall of heat up to 4,000 degrees Celsius -- hot enough to melt steel.
Stone buildings survived, but bore the shadows of anything -- or anyone -- that was charred in front of them. Gusts of around 1.5 kilometres (one mile) a second roared outwards carrying with them shattered debris, and packing enough force to rip limbs and organs from bodies.
The air pressure suddenly dropped due to the blast, crushing those on the ground, and an ominous mushroom cloud rose, towering 16 kilometres above the city. About 140,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the attack, including those who survived the bombing itself but died soon afterwards due to severe radiation exposure.
Tsuboi, then a college student, was about 1.2 kilometres from the hypocentre and was literally blown away by the blast and blinding heat. When he picked himself up, his shirt, trousers and skin flapped from his burned body; blood vessels dangled from open wounds and part of his ears were missing.
Tsuboi remembers seeing a teenage girl with her right eyeball hanging from her face. Nearby, a woman grasped at her torso in a futile attempt to stop her intestines from falling through a gaping hole. "There were bodies all over the place," he said. "Ones with no limbs, all charred. I said to myself: `Are they human?`"
Many died of their terrible injuries over the following hours and days; lying where they fell, desperate for help that would never come, or even just for a sip of water.For those that survived, there was the terrifying unknown of radiation sickness still to come.
Gums bled, teeth fell out, hair came off in clumps; there were cancers, premature births, malformed babies and sudden deaths. As tales of the new, unknown illness spread through the war-ravaged country, survivors were shunned out of fear they might bring infection.
For years afterwards, many found it difficult to get jobs, or to marry. Even today, 70 years on, some "hibakusha" (nuclear survivors) avoid talking openly about their experience for fear of discrimination.
Hiroshima mayor Kazumi Matsui, 62, whose mother survived the bombing, said he has only recently begun discussing the personal effects of the attack. "I know personally how a single bomb changed many people`s lives," said Matsui, a father of four and grandfather of six.
Three days after Hiroshima, the US military dropped a plutonium bomb on the port city of Nagasaki, killing some 74,000 people. The twin bombings dealt the final blows to imperial Japan, which surrendered on August 15, 1945, bringing an end to World War II.
Supporters of the bombings say that while the toll of the attacks was high, they ultimately saved people because they helped to avert a ground invasion that some forecast would cost millions of lives.
But the bombs` terrible destruction had a curious side effect on history, offering Japan a new self-narrative in place of the expansionist aggressor that was the cause of the Pacific War.
"When talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is tendency for Japanese people to identify themselves as victims" of the global conflict, said Masafumi Takubo, Japanese nuclear expert.Political leaders in the rebuilt cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long campaigned for global nuclear disarmament -- a role Frank von Hippel, a nuclear arms control expert at Princeton University says is vital.
A global "taboo" about the use of atomic bombs has protected the world since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said. "We have come a long way, I think. We cannot give up on nuclear disarmament. The danger is too great," said von Hippel, a former White House official.
"The atomic bomb should never have been dropped, it should never even have existed," said Keiko Ogura, who as an eight-year-old was blown into the middle of the street and knocked out by the Hiroshima blast.
As for Tsuboi, he hopes to see a day when the world`s leaders -- including a serving US president -- visit his city to hear for themselves what it was like under the mushroom cloud.
He does not want an apology, he says, he just wants to make sure it never happens again. "We must not forget," Tsuboi said.

Barack Obama celebrates 54th birthday at Washington restaurant
Washington:MMNN:5 Aug. 2015
The President of the United States Barack Obama celebrated his 54th birthday at a popular restaurant in Washington,
accompanied by the First Lady and a few close relatives.
Giving Obama company was Michelle, who was spotted wearing a knee-length black and white dress,
his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and her husband Konrad, his niece Leslie Robinson and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.
It is not known what the POTUS ordered for his birthday dinner, but Rose's Luxury is reknowned for its pork and litchi salad.
Obama turned 54 on Tuesday.
According to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, Obama kicked off his birthday celebrations last weekend with his friends at Camp David.
The first family plan to leave for their annual summer vacation at the Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Iran's reformists hope regime will temper its harshness
IRAN:MMNN:3 Aug. 2015
Former presidents are under siege, journalists languish behind bars and 694 people were hanged between January and July.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard and the intelligence ministry are still persecuting enemies of the regime – whether real or imagined – despite the arrival of President Hassan Rouhani's moderate government. Yet Iran's reformists are cautiously hopeful that the worst of the human rights abuses will be curbed after the nuclear agreement.
For now, they note a paradox: senior reformist politicians are under pressure, but ordinary people have more freedom. The atmosphere has improved for everyone except the regime's oldest adversaries.
This latter category includes men who once governed Iran. Somewhere in Tehran, a former prime minister, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and an ex-Speaker of parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, live under house arrest. They have been confined since they ran for the presidency in 2009 and dared to say the election had been rigged.
Meanwhile, the Iranian media are forbidden from mentioning the name of a twice-elected president, Mohammad Khatami, who is banned from leaving the country or attending public events. The local press must refer to him obliquely as the “reformist leader” or the “head of the government between 1997 and 2005”.
Another former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was sent a pointed message when the authorities jailed his son and daughter. “The reformist leaders are under siege and under pressure not to come to the public. Many of them are banned from many things,” said Mohammad-Reza
Khatami, a leading reformist who served as Deputy Speaker until he was banned from seeking re-election in 2004. His party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, was shut down six years ago.
When Mr Khatami, the younger brother of the former president, tried to visit Turkey last September, his passport was confiscated at the airport.
Iran will hold parliamentary elections next February. Mr Khatami believes the Guardian Council, a powerful committee which screens all candidates, will follow its usual habit and disqualify leading reformists from contesting the poll.
"We have open files at the judiciary and every other week we go there and they put pressure on us that ‘you should not have any activities, you should not participate in the next elections’,” he said.
But Mr Khatami stressed how the situation had improved for everyone else. Ordinary supporters of the reformist movement, along with social activists, have benefited from greater freedom since Mr Rouhani succeeded Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2013.
“After eight years in the time of Mr Ahmadinejad, I think the people have this chance to breathe in a better atmosphere. Young people, ordinary people, all feel these changes,” said Mr Khatami.
“Young activists, young people, parties, journalists, have more chance to do everything that they want, but again by obeying the red lines. The red lines are still there, but some of the red lines have been pushed back.”
After the nuclear agreement, Mr Khatami predicted the “red lines” would be pushed back still further. “But we should be patient: with the passing of time, we are optimistic that many things will be changed," he said.

Caught by Cops, He Tried to Chew Off Fingertips to Avoid Being Identified
HOUSTON:MMNN:3 Aug. 2015
A 20-year-old Florida man arrested for driving a stolen Mercedes car tried to avoid being identified by chewing the skin off his fingertips and eating the flesh.
Kenzo Roberts is seen on surveillance video gnawing his fingers, chewing and then swallowing as he sits in the back of a patrol car.
He had been stopped by Lee County Sheriff's deputies for driving a stolen Mercedes. He also had a fake ID, three fake credits cards and a concealed firearm, reported yesterday.
Despite his self-mutilation, fingertip scanners quickly identified the suspect. Roberts was also wanted on a warrant from Broward County for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, reported.
He was charged with three counts of possessing a fake credit card, grand theft auto, possession of a concealed weapon, driving with a suspended license and giving false ID to a law enforcement officer.
The US Border Patrol said Mr Roberts was in the country illegally.

Two Turkish police killed in gun attack blamed on PKK
ISTANBUL:MMNN:31 July 2015
Two Turkish police were killed Friday in a gun attack on police headquarters in the southern region of Adana blamed on Kurdish militants, the official Anatolia news agency reported.
The gunmen fired on police headquarters in the city of Pozanti, sparking clashes which left two police as well as two militants dead, Anatolia said, quoting top local officials.
The police were hunting for those attackers who escaped, it added.
The attack is the latest to be blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which is engaged in an escalating cycle of violence with the security forces.
The military has been carrying out daily air raids on the group's camps in northern Iraq for the past few days.
The PKK's more-than-three-decade-long insurgency for greater rights and powers for Turkey's Kurdish minority has left tens of thousands dead.
According to an AFP tally, at least 13 members of the security forces have been killed in attacks blamed on the PKK since the current crisis erupted last week.

Tsipras asserts control over Syriza with congress vote
Athens:MMNN:31 July 2015
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's call on Thursday to hold an emergency party congress got the backing of his party as he seeks to assert his control over rebel lawmakers balking at new bailout talks. At a meeting of the Syriza movement's 200-member central committee held in an old cinema hall, Tsipras defended his decision to accept harsh bailout terms as the best deal anyone could win for Greece.
He threw down the gauntlet before his critics by proposing an immediate membership ballot on the bailout negotiation, but said his preference was for Syriza to hold an emergency congress in September to deliberate strategy.
After hours of debate, the committee backed his proposal in a show of hands. The emergency congress will allow Tsipras to bring in new members and capitalise on the wider public support he has secured over the past two years, making it easier to defeat the far-left camp.
"We are telling the Greek people, loud and clear and with no remorse, that this is the deal we managed to bring to them and if there is someone who thinks that they could have achieved a better deal, let them come out and say that," he told the session that included dissenters like parliament speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou.
Greece narrowly averted an exit from the euro zone when it struck an 11th-hour deal with lenders this month, but that cost Tsipras the support of a quarter of his lawmakers who accuse the party of betraying its anti-austerity roots.
Deepening Crisis
The deepening crisis within Syriza is the most serious political challenge to Tsipras, who otherwise enjoys unrivalled domination of Greek politics and remains popular despite his sudden U-turn to accept stringent bailout terms.
Failure to quash the far-left revolt could plunge Greece back into turmoil and risk derailing talks now quietly underway in Athens with the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund and the euro zone's rescue fund on a new 86 billion euro loan package.
In another potential setback for the talks, the Financial Times reported that IMF staff had recommended to the Fund's executive board that it should not take part for now in a third bailout because of Greece's poor compliance record and the unsustainable level of its debt.
Only if Athens improved its track record of implementing reforms and its euro zone partners agreed to a substantial debt restructuring would the IMF consider joining the programme at a later stage, the FT reported, citing a confidential summary of a board meeting held on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
An IMF official said the Fund would approve new loans for Greece only if Athens reached a deal with European governments that would ensure it can pay its debts, and there was "no expectation" that talks over the next couple of weeks would get to the point where the Fund could approve a new programme.
Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos is due to hold his first meeting with senior representatives of the country's creditors, including the IMF, in Athens on Friday. Germany, Greece's biggest creditor, has insisted on IMF participation in any further aid programme.
Damaged Relationship
As the all-day Syriza meeting proceeded in a rare public session, party officials spoke openly of a widening rift between those who want the country to stay in the euro area despite painful sacrifices, and leftists who would prefer a return to the drachma currency.
"At the moment there are two different strategies competing in the same party: one that wants Greece inside the euro and the other that wants Greece outside euro," Olga Gerovasili, the government spokeswoman told reporters as she arrived.
"These two can't exist together at the government level." Deputy Prime Minister Yiannis Dragasakis said the hardliners were behaving like a party-within-the-party and suggested the time may have come to part ways.
"You reap what you sow and I hope that we are heading for the refoundation of a new party." While most speakers criticised the bailout and government actions, many said the left should move on and not waste the historic opportunity of being in power.
But Left Platform leader Panagiotis Lafazanis said the bailout deal betrayed the party's principles. "Syriza is at risk of humiliation because of the bailout transformation," he told the meeting. "In this country there is no democracy but the dictatorship of the euro."
Left Platform is demanding Syriza abandon talks with lenders immediately and had proposed an ordinary party congress to determine the party's course. A regular congress would have favoured the far-left, with the same members who attended two years ago returning to vote on Syriza's future.
Forced to rely on opposition support in parliament to pass austerity and reform packages, Tsipras is widely expected to call early elections to consolidate his grip on the party once he has agreed the third bailout package with lenders.
His government wants to wrap up negotiations with lenders on that package in time for a major debt payment due on August 20, before moving on to sorting out his party's troubles.
"Our priority is the (bailout) deal," Gerovasili said. "After this we can deal with party issues."

Pakistan police kill Sunni militant leader, 13 others in gun battle
MMNN:29 July 2015
Pakistani police gunned down one of the country's most-feared Sunni militant leaders and 13 followers in a mysterious pre-dawn shootout Wednesday, killing a man believed to behind the slaughter of hundreds of the nation's minority Shiites.
Malik Ishaq, who directed the operations of the Taliban- and Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group, was so feared in Pakistan that frightened judges hid their faces from him and even offered the unrepentant killer tea and cookies in court.
Yet Ishaq, believed to be either 55 or 56, operated freely for years in Pakistan as the country's intelligence services helped nurture Sunni militant groups in the 1980s and 1990s to counter a perceived threat from neighboring Shiite power Iran.
Details of Ishaq's killing remain cloudy in Pakistan, where extrajudicial slayings by police remain common -- especially in pre-staged ambushes. Ishaq already had been detained by police, arrested two days earlier on suspicion of being involved in the slaying of two Shiites, police officer Bakhtiar Ahmed said.
Early Wednesday, as officers tried to transfer Ishaq from a prison in the city of Multan, gunmen ambushed the police convoy transporting him in an attempt to free the militant, Ahmed said. The ensuing gunbattle killed Ishaq and at least 13 of his associates, including two of his sons and his deputy, Ghulam Rasool, Ahmed said.
Shuja Khanzada, the provincial home minister in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province, where the alleged ambush took place, said the shooting wounded six police officers who "demonstrated extreme bravery." No other witnesses to the shooting could be immediately located, nor could Ishaq's family members.
"Malik Ishaq was behind many acts of terrorism and he was freed by courts in the past due to lack of evidence," Khanzada told The Associated Press. "Finally, this symbol of terror met his final fate."
Fearing violence in Punjab, long the home of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, police mounted a heavy security presence around the province and the morgue in Muzaffargarh that took Ishaq's body and those of his associates.
Ishaq helped found Laskhar-e-Jangvi, which allies itself with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. His group is blamed for scores of attacks on Shiites, regarded as infidels, and on Pakistani and U.S. interests. They've also been accused of carrying out attacks in neighboring Afghanistan. The U.S. State Department designated Ishaq as a terrorist in February 2014, ordering any U.S. assets he held frozen.
Ishaq was arrested in 1997 and accused in more than 200 criminal cases, including the killings of 70 Shiites. But the state could never make the charges stick -- in large part because witnesses, judges and prosecutors were too scared to convict.
Frightened judges treated him honorably in court and gave him tea and cookies, said Anis Haider Naqvi, a prosecution witness in two cases against Ishaq who spoke to The Associated Press in 2011. One judge attempted to hide his face with his hands, but Ishaq made clear he knew his identity in a chilling way: He read out the names of his children, and the judge abandoned the trial, Naqvi said at the time.
Despite the lack of convictions, Ishaq remained in prison for 14 years as prosecutors slowly moved from one case to the next. Ishaq proved his usefulness to the army in 2009, when he was flown from jail to negotiate with militants who had stormed part of the military headquarters in Rawalpindi and were holding hostages
A behind-the-scenes effort by the government to co-opt the leaders of militant outfits and bring them into mainstream political life, or at least draw them away from attacking the state, helped Ishaq secure his release in 2011. He had been in and out of police custody since.
Pakistan is a majority Sunni Muslim state, with around 15 percent of the population Shiite. Most Sunnis and Shiites live together peacefully in Pakistan, though tensions have existed for decades and extremists on both sides target each other's leaders.

French Foreign Minister Arrives in Tehran for Talks
DUBAI:MMNN:29 July 2015
France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius arrived in Tehran for a one-day visit today and was due to meet President Hassan Rouhani and several ministers, Iran's state news agency said.
He is the first French foreign minister to visit Iran for 12 years and his trip comes after a landmark nuclear deal between major powers and Tehran under which Western sanctions are to be lifted in exchange for limits on Iran's nuclear programme.
Fabius took a particularly tough line with Iran ahead of the deal. He was quoted by IRNA as saying a high-ranking French economic and business delegation would visit Iran in September.
France hopes to secure business deals in Iran once international sanctions are lifted, and Fabius said last week that his hard line in the nuclear negotiations would not stand in the way of French business opportunities.
Besides Rouhani, Fabius was due to meet his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif, Industry Minister Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh, and Masoumeh Ebtekar, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said.
He has said he expects to have talks "on all subjects" during the visit.

At least 13 dead in al Shabaab attack on Somali hotel
MMNN:27 July 2015
Somali militant Islamist group al Shabaab attacked a Mogadishu hotel on Sunday, driving a car packed with explosives through the hotel gate and killing at least 13 people, a first responder and the rebel group said.
The blast happened outside the Jazeera hotel.
“We have carried 13 dead people and 21 others who were injured, some seriously,” an ambulance worker Abdikadir Abdirahman told.
China’s official Xinhua news agency said that a Chinese national was among the dead and three others were injured, though it gave no details.
The Chinese embassy, whose offices are in the hotel, was damaged in the blast, Xinhua said.
A police officer, Major Nur Osoble, told reporters a suicide car bomb had rammed the gates of the hotel, damaging the facade.
Al Shabaab, which said it was behind the blast, frequently stages bomb and gun attacks in the capital in its bid to topple Somalia’s Western-backed government. The nation is trying to rebuild after two decades of conflict and chaos.
“It is a response to attacks and helicopter bombing against al Shabaab by Amisom and the Somali government,” Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab’s military operations spokesman, told Reuters.
Amisom, the African Union’s force in Somalia, has been battling the Islamist rebels with the Somali army. Al Shabaab has been pushed into increasingly smaller pockets of territory by a military offensive this year.
The popular Jazeera hotel has been targeted on previous occasions. The blast on Sunday sent a plume of smoke rising above the coastal capital. Sporadic gunfire was heard shortly after the attack.
Al Shabaab, which wants to impose its strict interpretation of Islam on Somalia, killed a lawmaker, his bodyguard and an official from the prime minister’s office on two attacks on Saturday.

US embassy employee gunned down in Islamabad
ISLAMABAD:MMNN:27 July 2015
An employee of the US Embassy in Islamabad was gunned down on Sunday.
According to the police – the deceased identified as Iqbal Baig worked for US Drug Enforcement Agency.
The motive for the attack is still unclear and the US Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“US Embassy security officials visited the scene of crime,” police officer Khalid Awan – who confirmed Baig’s slaying – said.
Baig belonged to the minority community, Ismaili.
At least 45 people – including women and children – belonging to the Ismaili community were killed when around a half a dozen gunmen sprayed them with bullets in execution style inside a bus near Safoora Chowrangi in Karachi on May 13 this year.

Barack Obama says failure to change gun laws his 'biggest frustration'
New York:MMNN:24 July 2015
Barack Obama has said that the biggest frustration of his presidency has been his failure to pass laws tackling America's gun problem.
Speaking on the day of yet another mass shooting in the US - at a cinema in Louisiana - the president said it was "distressing" that he had so far not been able to tackle gun violence.
"If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it's less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it's in the tens of thousands," he told BBC.
"For us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing."
Despite repeated efforts, America's powerful gun lobby has thwarted Mr Obama's attempts to introduce legislation tackling how easy it is for anyone to buy a firearm.
He bemoaned the failure of Washington to pass "common-sense gun safety laws" in the US "even in the face of repeated mass killings".
Following the shooting of nine African American people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, last month, Mr Obama said it was "in our power to do something about it", before adding that "the politics in this town (Washington) foreclose a lot of those avenues right now”.
On race relations, Mr Obama said that recent allegations of racism by the police are "legitimate and deserve intense attention".
Mr Obama also used the interview to call on Britain to remain in the European Union.
The US president said that Britain was America’s “best and most important partner” because of its willingness to go beyond its "immediate self-interests to make this a more orderly, safer world".
But in his strongest warning to date, he said that for Britain to maintain its global influence, it must stay within the EU.
The EU has "made the world safer and more prosperous", and having Britain in it was crucial for America’s “transatlantic union” both with Britain and the rest of Europe, he said.

Jindal calls for prayers for families of US shooting victims
WASHINGTON:MMNN:24 July 2015
Indian-American Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has called for a prayer for the victims of the shooting at a movie theatre in his state that killed three people, including the shooter.
The gunman, according to the police, was a 58-year-old white man who opened fire from his weapon at a movie theatre in Louisiana on Thursday evening.
Later he shot himself, the Lafayette City Police chief Jim Craft told reporters. Jindal, who has been busy in his presidential campaign most of the week rushed to the scene to personally lead the post-shooting effort.
"I'm on my way to Lafayette right now. Please say a prayer for the victims at Grand Theatre and their families," Jindal wrote on twitter. At least seven people have been injured in the shootout, some of them with life threatening wounds, the police said.
The shooter died of self-inflicted wounds. The police say they have located the shooter's car across the street from the theatre parking lot and out of an "abundance of caution" called in the bomb squad.
"The best thing anybody can do right now is to think about them, pray for them, shower them with your love is the most important thing we will get through this," Jindal told reporters during a news conference.
"We will get through this. We are a resilient community. This is an awful night for Lafayette. This is an awful night for Louisiana. This is an awful night for the United States," he said.
Jindal visited one of the three hospitals treating injured persons. According to him, two teachers were in the theatre - one of them jumped in front of her colleague and was shot, but still managed to pull a fire alarm that alerted authorities.
"Even the worst of times bring out the best in people," he said. Jindal said the teacher, who was shot in the leg, saved other people's lives through her actions.
In an interview to BBC before the shooting, US President Barack Obama said his biggest frustration was the failure to pass "common-sense gun safety laws".
"Even in the face of repeated mass killings. And you know, if you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it's less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it's in the tens of thousands," he said.
"And for us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing. But it is not something that I intend to stop working on in the remaining 18 months," Obama said.

North Korea prepares to launch new long range rocket: Yonhap
SEOUL:MMNN:22 July 2015
North Korea is preparing to launch a new, long range rocket, possibly in October, having completed an upgrade at its main satellite launch base, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Wednesday.
Any such launch would almost certainly be viewed by the international community as a disguised ballistic missile test and result in the imposition of fresh sanctions.
Quoting an unnamed government source, Yonhap cited "credible intelligence" that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un had ordered the launch of a satellite to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the North's ruling Workers' Party on October 10.
"We think (the North) will carry out a provocation around the 70th anniversary," the source said. The South Korean Defence Ministry declined to confirm or deny the Yonhap report.
"As to the construction of North Korea's long range missile launching facilities, we've been watching the North's moves very closely," a ministry spokesman said.

Oldest fragments of the Koran found in Birmingham library
MMNN:22 July 2015
Some of the world's oldest fragments of the Koran have been found by the University of Birmingham.
Radiocarbon analysis found the manuscript, written on sheep or goat skin, dated back to between AD 568 and 645, making it at least 1,370 years old and among the earliest in existence.
The pages of the Muslim holy text are said to have been kept with a collection of other Middle Eastern books and documents and remained unrecognised in the university library for almost a century.
For many years, they had been misbound with leaves of a similar Koran manuscript, which is datable to the late seventh century. But when a PhD researcher studied the two parchment leaves, she concluded that they should be properly examined.
The tests, carried by the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, placed the leaves close to the time of the Prophet Muhammad, who is generally thought to have lived between AD 570 and 632, with around 95 per cent accuracy.
Susan Worrall, the University of Birmingham's director of special collections, said: "The radiocarbon dating has delivered an exciting result, which contributes significantly to our understanding of the earliest written copies of the Koran. We are thrilled that such an important historical document is here in Birmingham, the most culturally diverse city in the UK."
Professor David Thomas, professor of Christianity and Islam, added: "The radiocarbon dating of the Birmingham Koran folios has yielded a startling result and reveals one of the most surprising secrets of the University’s collections. They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam."
"According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Koran, the scripture of Islam, between the years 610 and 632, the year of his death." Dr Muhammad Isa Waley, the British Library's expert on such manuscripts, said: "This is an exciting discovery."
Researchers said the manuscript was among the earliest written textual evidence of the Koran known to survive. It is part of the university’s Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, held in the Cadbury Research Library.

Greeks will find banks open, but restrictions still in place
ATHENS, Greece:MMNN:20 July 2015
Greeks will finally see their banks reopen at 8 a.m. local (0500 GMT) Monday morning, but many restrictions on transactions, including cash withdrawals, will remain.
Also, many goods and services will become more expensive as a result of a rise in Value Added Tax approved by Parliament last Thursday, among the first batch of austerity measures demanded by Greece's creditors.
The parliament also agreed to deep reforms in the pension system including a gradual phasing out of all early retirement options.
In a decree published on Saturday, the Greek government kept the daily cash withdrawal limit at 60 euros ($65) but added a weekly limit. For example, a depositor who doesn't withdraw cash on Monday can withdraw 120 euros ($130) on Tuesday, and so on, up to 420 euros ($455) a week.
Bank customers will still not be able to cash checks, only deposit them into their accounts, and will not be able to get cash abroad with their credit or cash cards, only make purchases. There are also restrictions on opening new accounts or activating dormant ones.
The decree also pushes back by a month, to August 26, the deadline for filing income tax returns.
The decree came on the same day as Greece's coalition government swore in its new, reshuffled cabinet. Five prominent dissidents from the radical left Syriza party, the senior coalition party, were replaced. Four of them had voted against the agreement with Greece's creditors Thursday and the fifth had resigned before the vote.
The most urgent business for the reshuffled government is to pass another batch of austerity measures by Wednesday or early Thursday.
Among the goods that Greeks will find more expensive Monday morning are some meats, coffee, tea, cooking oils other than olive oil, cocoa, vinegar, salt, flowers, firewood, fertilizer, insecticides, sanitary towels and condoms. All these will see the VAT rise from 13% to 23%.
Services whose VAT also goes up from 13% to 23% include restaurants and cafes, funeral parlors, taxis, cramming and tutorial schools " very popular with Greek students who want to make up for the deficiencies of the school system " language institutes and computer learning centers. Public transport fares are expected to rise early next month.
Greece closed its banks beginning June 29 to prevent a bank run after the European Central Bank did not increase emergency funding as Greece's second bailout expired. After the Greek Parliament passed an agreement Thursday to seek a third bailout, the ECB raised its emergency funding to the cash-strapped Greek banks.
Also, on Friday, the European Union decided to release a short-term loan of 7.16 billion ($7.75 billion) to help Greece pay back a loan due Monday to the ECB plus arrears owed to the International Monetary Fund.

Kelly Slater says his friend 'clearly' saw a shark hours before Mick Fanning was attacked
MMNN:20 July 2015
Kelly Slater says his friend "clearly" saw a shark in the water four hours before Mick Fanning was attacked, as footage emerges of what appears to be a shark metres from where the Australian was surfing earlier in the championship event in South Africa overnight.
During Fanning's heat at the J-Bay Open, television cameras were able to pick up a dark shadow and what could be the dorsal fin of a shark a little further out from where Fanning was paddling four hours before he punched a three-metre shark.
A shark swimming in the ocean is hardly news to anyone, but given the chilling attack on the three-time world champion, one cannot help but wonder if it was the same shark lurking in the water waiting to launch an attack on Fanning.
Slater, the 11-time world surfing champion, said he received an email from a friend who saw the shark during the quarter-finals. It would be difficult to prove it was the same shark, but Slater said he was just happy the 34-year-old Australian was alive.
"I got an email from a friend tonight who said he clearly saw a shark figure in a wave during the quarter-finals from a drone shot," Slater wrote on an Instagram post accompanying a photo of he and Fanning hugging after the terrifying ordeal.
"Glad to know this guy and even happier that he swam/walked away unscathed. There were multiple water photogs (sic) swimming all day. I believe good things come to good people and although you can't say this was 'good', the outcome was amazing.
"@mfanno's instincts kicked into high gear and his scramble to face the shark and keep the board between them may have saved him. "The scariest moment was when he turned around to face where the shark would be coming from after swimming 20 meters towards shore. I can't even imagine the vulnerability he must've felt. Great job by the contest announcers (and) water safety for getting right on it."
The attack was shown live on television as Fanning punched the shark twice before swimming to the safety of competition officials out in the water. "I was just about to start moving and then I felt something grab [and] get stuck in my leg rope," said Fanning of the moment he could well have lost a limb or his life.
"And I instantly just jumped away and it just kept coming at my board. I was just started kicking and screaming. Wow! "I just saw fin, I didn't see the teeth. I was waiting for the teeth to come at me as I was swimming."

Guards entered drug lord's cell 18 minutes after escape
MEXICO CITY:MMNN:17 July 2015
It took 18 minutes for prison guards to go into Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's cell after they noticed that he vanished from his cell, the interior minister said Thursday.
Interior minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said guards who monitored the surveillance cameras inside Guzman's cell "immediately" sounded the alarm when they noticed that "he was no longer there" late Saturday.
"The arrival of guards (in the cell) took place 18 minutes later," Osorio Chong said after meeting with Congress's security committee.
Prosecutors are investigating whether the prison's protocols were properly followed, he said.
It was the first time that officials said how long it took for guards to respond after Guzman disappeared into a hole on the floor of his shower.
Closed-circuit camera footage released by the government this week showed that Guzman paced in his cell before bending down behind a short partition wall in the shower.
The Sinaloa cartel chief then rode on a motorcycle with two carts rigged on a rail system inside a 1.5 kilometer (one-mile) tunnel built for his second escape in 14 years.
Authorities have held 22 prison officials for questioning since Sunday but have yet to file any charges amid growing suspicions over inside help.

Nine workers feared dead in Philippine coal mine collapse
Manila:MMNN:17 July 2015
Three people died and six others are believed to have also been buried and presumed dead after part of a coal mine collapsed in a remote central Philippine island on Friday, the provincial governor said.
Nine workers were using heavy machinery to remove sea water from the open-pit mine when a wall collapsed and buried the miners, governor Rhodora Cadiao said.
Heavy rains had also reportedly drenched the area, she added.
"Nine people were buried and presumed dead. We recovered three bodies and we're looking for six more," Cadiao told radio DZBB.
Mining operations were suspended following the incident and an investigation has been launched.
Five people were killed during a similar episode at the same mine in 2013.
"Precautionary measures should have been in place," the governor said. "This will undergo (an) investigation. I hope there is no negligence on the part of the contractor."
The open-pit mine is on an island around four hours by boat from the central island of Antique, a fishing province in the Visayas islands, and one hour by plane from the Philippine Capital Manila.

A fine 'new chapter' or 'historic mistake'? Here's what the Iran nuclear deal means for the world
Vienna:MMNN:15 July 2015
Overcoming decades of hostility, Iran, the United States, and five other world powers struck a historic accord on Tuesday to check Tehran's nuclear efforts short of building a bomb. The agreement could give Iran access to billions in frozen assets and oil revenue, stave off more US military action in the Middle East and reshape the tumultuous region.
The deal sets in motion years-long test of Iran's willingness to keep its promises to the world — and the ability of international inspectors to monitor compliance. It also sets the White House up for a contentious fight with a wary Congress and more rocky relations with Israel, whose leaders furiously opposed the agreement.
Appealing to skeptics, President Barack Obama declared that the accord "offers an opportunity to move in a new direction. We should seize it." Under terms of the deal, the culmination of 20 months of arduous diplomacy, Iran must dismantle much of its nuclear program in order to secure relief from biting sanctions that have battered its economy. International inspectors can now press for visits to Iran's military facilities, though access is not guaranteed. Centrifuges will keep spinning, though in lesser quantities, and uranium can still be enriched, though at lower levels.
In a key compromise, Iran agreed to continuation of the UN's arms embargo on the country for up to five more years and ballistic missile restrictions for up to eight years. Washington had sought to keep the arms ban in place, while Russia and China joined Iran in pushing for an immediate suspension.
On the streets of Tehran, Iranians honked their horns and celebrated in the city's main square. President Hassan Rouhani said a "new chapter" had begun in his nation's relations with the world, even as he denied Iran had ever pursued a nuclear weapon. While the US partnered in the talks with Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, the decades of tensions between the US and Iran put the two countries at the forefront of the negotiations.
Whether the nuclear rapprochement will spark a broader thaw is unclear. Nearly 40 years after Iran's Islamic revolution and the hostage-taking at the US Embassy in Tehran, the country's hardliners remain hostile toward Washington. The US and its allies also have deep concerns about Iran's support for terrorism in the Middle East and its detention of several American citizens.
With key restrictions on Iran's nuclear program required for only a decade, opponents of the deal say it simply delays Tehran's pursuit of the bomb. Critics also say Iran will use new wealth from sanctions relief to double-down other destabilizing activities in the region.
Iran stands to receive more than $100 billion in assets that have been frozen overseas and benefit from an end to various financial restrictions on Iranian banks. Iran could also sell more oil, bringing down crude prices.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who lobbied unceasingly against a deal, called it a "stunning historic mistake" and warned that his country would not be bound by it. Netanyahu strongly hinted that Israeli military action to destroy Tehran's nuclear program remains an option.
Obama and Netanyahu, who have long had a cool relationship, spoke by phone on Tuesday. White House officials said Obama also called King Salman of Saudi Arabia, one of the many Sunni Arab rivals of Shiite Iran who have expressed concerns about the deal.

Obama critic Indian-American filmmaker ordered psych counselling
Washington:MMNN:15 July 2015
A New York Judge has ordered Dinesh D`Souza, an Indian-American conservative scribe and Obama critic filmmaker, to do community service for four more years for breaking campaign-finance laws and undergo further counselling.
Judge Richard Berman clarified Monday that under the sentence he handed down after D`Souza pleaded guilty last year, he has to do eight hours each week for the entire five years he`s on probation and not just the eight months he was confined to a halfway house.
The Manhattan federal court judge also read aloud a report from a court-appointed psychologist who called D`Souza "arrogant" and "intolerant of others` feelings," according to the New York Post.
"In my mind it was never contemplated that the eight hours only applied to the period of home confinement," Berman was quoted as telling defence attorney Ben Brafman.
He later read out a report from a psychologist who saw D`Souza, the maker of the anti- Obama film "2016: Obama`s America", and then ordered him to continue attending weekly sessions, the Post said.
"The client tends to deny problems and isn`t very introspective," the psychiatrist wrote. "The client tends to deny problems and is arrogant and intolerant of others` feelings."
But so long as D`Souza stays on track with his community service, he will be allowed to visit his daughter in London and his elderly mother in India later this year, Berman said.
D`Souza pleaded guilty last year to illegally shelling out $20,000 in contributions in the name of others for Republican Wendy Long`s failed 2012 bid to defeat Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

Top Mexican drug lord held last year makes movie-like tunnel escape
Mexico:MMNN:13 July 2015
Mexican security forces hunted early on Monday for top drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman - the world's richest and most powerful trafficker before his arrest last year - as authorities investigated whether he had inside help to escape prison through a tunnel under his cell's shower.
It was the second time in 14 years that Guzman, the head of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, managed to flee a maximum-security prison, dealing an embarrassing setback to President Enrique Pena Nieto. Guzman was recaptured in 2014 after his first Hollywood-esque escape from a maximum security facility hidden inside a laundry basket.
Troops and police were deployed to find Guzman after he vanished late on Saturday from the Altiplano prison, some 90km west of Mexico City, after just 17 months behind bars.
Guzman was able to slip out even though surveillance cameras were trained on his cell. After he never returned from the shower, guards found a hole 10 meters deep with a ladder in it, officials said. The gap led to a 1.5km long tunnel with a ventilation and light system that was apparently dug with the help of a motorcycle mounted on a rail to transport tools and remove earth.
The tunnel led to a gray brick building on a hill surrounded by pastures in central Mexico State.
Prosecutors released a video showing the hole inside the building's dirt-covered floor. A bed and kitchen were in the facility, indicating that people may have lived there.
As investigators tried to figure out how Guzman fled again, police and troops manned checkpoints and searched cars and trucks on nearby roads.
"If he's not captured in the next 48 hours, he will have completely regained control of the Sinaloa cartel," Mike Vigil, a retired US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) international operations chief, said.
"If he is able to make his way to Sinaloa, his native state, and gets into that mountainous range, it's going to be very difficult to capture him because he enjoys the protection of local villagers."
Several states, including Sinaloa, set up checkpoints on roads. Central Puebla state said it was using X-ray technology at toll booths to see through cars.
Troops in Guatemala launched a special operation at the border with Mexico. It was in that country that Guzman was first arrested in 1993.

18 killed in Russian military barrack collapse in Siberia
MMNN:13 July 2015
Eighteen Russian soldiers have been killed after their military barracks collapsed in Siberia, a Russian defence ministry spokesman said on Monday, adding that five troops remained missing.
"Thirty-seven servicemen have been pulled out of the debris, 18 of them have died," Igor Konashenkov said in televised remarks.
"The search is ongoing for five soldiers. Nineteen have been hospitalised."
The accident happened on Sunday evening near the city of Omsk, at a training facility for Russian paratroopers.
In footage shown on Russian television, one section of the four-story building had completely fallen through and soldiers formed a chain to pass bricks and other debris from one to another in order to clear the mountain of rubble.
"Half of the heap has been cleared now," said acting commander of Russian paratroopers Nikolai Ignatov in remarks to Rossiya 24.

Pope Francis gifted 'Communist' crucifix by Bolivian president; sparks anger among Catholic officials
MMNN:10 July 2015
Pope Francis has been gifted a hammer and sickle sculpture with a figure of a crucified Christ by Bolivia's leftist president Evo Morales, sparking anger among Catholic officials.
The pontiff looked bemused when Mr Morales handed him the unusual gift at a meeting on Wednesday night.
The blending of the symbol of communism — under which many Christians were persecuted in the former Soviet bloc and still are in some communist countries — has caused a stir among some senior members of the church. "The culmination of arrogance is to manipulate God for the service of atheist ideologies," Spanish bishop Jose Ignacio Munilla wrote on Twitter.
Other Church officials and some Bolivian opposition politicians accused Mr Morales, the country's first indigenous leader, of using the occasion to push his anti-Western views and provoke the Pope.
The general interpretation was that Mr Morales had commissioned the design of the wooden sculpture, but the Vatican said it was surprised to discover it was designed by a priest killed in 1980.
Bolivian reporters said they recalled the original author of the sculpture was Jesuit father Luis Espinal Camps, a strong supporter of the rights of miners who was killed by a right-wing paramilitary squad 35 years ago.
Mr Morales' chief of staff, Juan Ramon Quintana, confirmed on Thursday the sculpture was a replica of a design carved by Fr Espinal.
The Argentine-born pontiff is on the second stop of his tour of three of the poorest South American countries. Shortly after his arrival in La Paz, Pope Francis stopped to pray at the site where the priest's body was dumped along a road.
"It's true. This is something Espinal did. The pope didn't know about it. I did not know about it. A lot of people didn't know about it," Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said at an unscheduled briefing on Thursday.
Fr Lombardi, a Jesuit himself as is the Pope, said Pope Francis had not "expressed any judgement" on the sculpture, the original of which was made in a period when many Catholic priests were involved in Liberation Theology movements in defence of the poor.
He said the president gave it to Pope Francis because it showed the Church was compatible with the communist fight for the rights of the poor and workers.
Fr Lombardi said Bolivian Jesuits had told him the sculpture was "not a Marxist interpretation of religion but an opening to dialogue with others who were looking for justice and liberation."
"I don't think I would put this symbol on an altar in a church however," Fr Lombardi said.

Saud al-Faisal, Saudi foreign minister for 40 years, dies
Riyadh:MMNN:10 July 2015
Former Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal died on Thursday, Saudi Arabian sources and media close to the kingdom's ruling family reported, two months after he was replaced following four decades in the job.
Prince Saud, who was 75, was the world's longest-serving foreign minister when he was replaced on April 29 by Adel al-Jubeir, the then-ambassador to Washington. The Al-Arabiya channel, which is close to King Salman's branch of the ruling family, confirmed the news.
Prince Saud retained an influential position in Saudi foreign policy circles even after his replacement, serving as an official adviser to King Salman, who took power in January. He was sometimes present when foreign leaders met the monarch.
In Washington, US President Barack Obama expressed his deep condolences on Prince Saud's death.
"As the world's longest-serving foreign minister, Prince Saud witnessed some of the most challenging periods in the region. At each turn, he advanced the goals of peace, whether negotiating the end to Lebanon's civil war or helping to launch the Arab Peace Initiative," Mr Obama said.
Even before the 2011 "Arab Spring," when Saudi Arabia faced unprecedented tumult throughout the Middle East, Prince Saud was a significant player in regional diplomacy, a landscape that had changed radically since he was appointed in October 1975.
Egypt and Israel had not yet made peace, Yasser Arafat led the Palestine Liberation Organisation from shell-pocked refugee camps in Lebanon, Iran's shah ruled from his Peacock Throne, and in Iraq, a young Saddam Hussein was plotting his path to power.
Prince Saud's tenure covered Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978, 1982 and 2006, the Palestinian intifadas that erupted in 1987 and 2000, Iraq's invasion of Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990, and a US-led coalition's occupation of Iraq in 2003.

Taliban, Afghan officials end peace talks agreeing to meet again
Islamabad:MMNN:8 July 2015
The first officially acknowledged peace talks between the Afghan Taliban and the government in Kabul concluded with an agreement to meet again after the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Pakistan said on Wednesday.
Pakistan hosted the meeting in a tentative step towards ending more than 13 years of war in Afghanistan, in which the Taliban have been fighting the government in hopes of re-establishing their hard-line Islamist regime that was toppled by the U.S.-sponsored military intervention in 2001.
Officials from the United States and China were observers in the first official talks held on Tuesday at Murree, a hill resort on the outskirts of Islamabad, a statement from Pakistan's foreign ministry said.
"The participants agreed to continue talks to create an environment conducive for peace and the reconciliation process," the statement said.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who has pushed for the peace process and has encouraged closer ties with neighbouring Pakistan in a bid to achieve this goal, first announced the talks on Tuesday.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif described the talks as a "breakthrough", adding: "This process has to succeed."
Sharif cautioned in remarks released by his office that the effort would be difficult and said Afghanistan's neighbours and the international community should make sure "that nobody tries to derail this process".
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the United States welcomed the talks, calling them "an important step toward advancing prospects for a credible peace".
In the past several months, there have been informal preliminary talks between Taliban representatives and Afghan figures, but Tuesday's talks were the first official meetings.
The Taliban's official spokesman has in the past disavowed the tentative peace process, saying those meeting with Afghanistan's government were not authorised to do so.

PM Arrives in Russia Today for 2 Key Summits, Likely to Meet Xi Jinping and Nawaz Sharif
MMNN:8 July 2015
On the sidelines of the summits, he is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping today and Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Friday, July 10.
BRICS, which is an acronym for its five member countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - will launch its new development bank with a $100 billion contingency reserve. The first head of the bank is noted Indian banker KV Kamath.
With President Xi, the PM will discuss bilateral ties at a time when India has expressed unhappiness over the proposed $46 billion economic corridor that would pass through Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, and also over China's support to Pakistan over the release of Mumbai attacks mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi.
"I expect positive outcomes in economic cooperation and cultural ties among the BRICS nations," PM Modi said as he left Delhi on Monday.
At the summit of the SCO, a security bloc led by China and Russia, India and Pakistan are expected to be accorded full membership of the six-nation grouping that currently also includes former Soviet republics Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
India has so far only had Observer status in the grouping, the focus of which is boosting connectivity, counter-terrorism cooperation, bolstering cooperation in the energy sector, enhancing trade and dealing with drug trafficking.
All eyes will however be on PM Modi and Mr Sharif's expected meeting. Officials have been tight-lipped on the details and structure of the meeting. Mr Modi and Mr Sharif last met at the SAARC summit in Kathmandu last November; they did not hold formal talks.
At the Ufa meeting, sources say, PM Modi is expected to raise India's concerns on terrorism, including the release of Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, the 26/11 mastermind who has walked free earlier this year.
Sources have said PM Modi's phone call to Mr Sharif at the start of the holy month of Ramzan set the tone and broke the ice. However, sources have said this is no way indicates the resumption of dialogue just yet.
PM Modi is on a eight-day visit of Central Asian countries. He has visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and will visit Kyrgystan and Tajikistan after the two summits in Russia.

Suicide bomber kills five in Nigeria church: police, witness
MMNN:6 July 2015
According to a police officer and witness told AFP the attacker entered the Redeemed Christian Church of God in the Jigawa area on the outskirts of Potiskum and detonated his explosives.
Four worshippers died instantly with a fifth succumbing to her injuries shortly afterwards in hospital, a police officer who helped remove the bodies told AFP.
"The victims included a woman and her two children, the pastor and another worshipper," added the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Witness Garba Manu told AFP that the bomber arrived on a motorised rickshaw, adding that "as soon as he entered a loud explosion ripped through the church which is under construction."
"I saw him walking in and he didn't raise any suspicion," Manu said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Potiskum, the commercial capital of Yobe state, has been hit repeatedly by Boko Haram Islamists during their six-year insurgency, including in suicide attacks.
The insurgents have also launched a series of attacks on mosques, villages and markets in neighbouring Borno state in the past few days, claiming more than 200 lives. Washington strongly condemned the attacks, a State Department spokesman said, adding that the US "will continue to support Nigeria's efforts to bring those responsible... to justice".
Boko Haram are keen to prove they are not a spent force despite a four-nation military offensive running them them out of several towns and villages they had controlled. The use of improvised explosive devices and suicide bombings has increased since May 29 when Buhari took office vowing to crush the rebellion.
According to an AFP tally, at least 450 people have lost their lives since Buhari's inauguration. A statement from the president's office on Sunday quoted him as condemning "the resumption of attacks by terrorists on places of worship which are highly revered places of prayer and communion with God for most Nigerians."
"Nigerians are a very religious people and President Buhari believes that the terrorists who wantonly attack our places of worship have wilfully declared war on all that we value, and must therefore be confronted with all our might and collective resolve," it said.
It said the president would do "everything possible to eradicate Boko Haram, terrorism and mindless extremism from Nigeria in the shortest possible time." Also on Sunday, the police said there were two blasts in the central city of Jos.
"I can confirm that there were two explosions in Jos this evening. One happened at the Bauchi motor park and the other at Yantaya, near the mosque," Plateau state police spokesman Abuh Emmanuel told AFP. He could not immediately say if there were any casualties but added that police officers had been sent to the scene.
The army said on Sunday that its troops "must have" killed more than 600 insurgents in the northeast in the past one month. "Over 600 terrorists must have been killed in the last one month while other insurgents are finding life extremely difficult," the army said in a statement.
It said despite "guerrilla tactics of using vulnerable girls and young men for suicide attacks on soft targets, we ensure that their fighters do not escape as they continue to meet their Waterloos in the hand of the troops." The army said it had also ensured that the Islamists had not captured any territory since Buhari came to power.
"Since the emergence of (the) new administration of President Muhammadu Buhari no single territory in Nigeria is being occupied or proclaimed by the terrorists as their 'Caliphate' even as their leaders are either being killed, captured or on the run," it added. The spike in violence has sparked concern that earlier gains by the armies of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon against the militants are being eroded.
A coalition of the four countries -- all of which border Lake Chad, a focal point of Boko Haram unrest -- launched military operations against the jihadists early this year to try claw back some of the territory they had seized.

Samaras quits to underscore Syriza triumph and opposition turmoil
MMNN:6 July 2015
Greece’s ruling Syriza party hailed the overwhelming result as a triumph for its anti-austerity stance, while recriminations among Greek conservatives led to the immediate resignation of the leader of the opposition.
With counting continuing last night, former prime minister Antonis Samaras announced he was stepping down as leader of New Democracy, which had called for a Yes vote. “Our party needs a new start,” he said in a televised address.
The opposition’s turmoil completed a triumphant day for Syriza, which won more than 60 per cent support for its call for a rejection of a bailout proposal from Greece’s international lenders. It said the result would strengthen its hand to secure a better deal from EU-IMF creditors after months of fraught negotiations on a financial aid package.
Finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said creditors planned from the start to shut down banks to humiliate Greeks and force them to make a statement of contrition for showing that debt and loans were unsustainable.
“As of tommorrow, with this brave ‘No’ the Greek people handed us . . . we will extend a helping hand towards our lenders. We will call on each one of them to find common ground,” Mr Varoufakis told reporters. “As of tomorrow, Europe, whose heart is beating in Greece tonight, is starting to heal its wounds, our wounds. Today’s No is a big Yes to democratic Europe.”
Tsipras’s gamble
Prime minister Alexis Tsipras gambled the future of his six-month-old government on the vote. The opposition accused him of jeopardising the country’s membership in the euro zone and said a Yes vote was about keeping the common currency. With almost 90 per cent of the votes counted, the No side had more than 60 per cent. The interior ministry predicted that margin would hold.
As Syriza supporters celebrated outside the parliament in Athens, the country was entering uncharted territory, with its banks closed and no clear path to new funding. Greece’s immediate fate lies with the European Central Bank, which may take its cues from European Union leaders as to whether it can keep emergency loans flowing to a country without the prospect of a bailout package.
“The negotiations which will start must be concluded very soon, even within 48 hours,” government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis told Greek television.
“We will undertake every effort to seal it soon.” Euclid Tsakalotos, the government’s chief negotiator, said talks could restart as early as last night. Voting took place in extraordinary circumstances. Greek banks have been closed for the past week due to capital controls imposed to stem outflows of cash.
The banks are expected to run out of money within days unless the European Central Bank provides an emergency lifeline. Meanwhile, commerce has slowed to a crawl and pension payments are being rationed. Greeks can each withdraw a daily maximum of €60, and there have been queues at cash machines.

Islamic State takes sledgehammer to 'irreplaceable' ancient Palmyra ruins

London:MMNN:3 July 2015

Militants from Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil) are feared to have begun destruction of Syria’s Roman city of Palmyra as the head of Unesco warned of "cultural cleansing" by the extremist group.
Maamoun Abdelkarim, Syrian antiquities minister, said on Thursday the militants had destroyed a 15 tonne statue of a lion, known as the Lion of Al-Lat. "It's the most serious crime they have committed against Palmyra's heritage," Mr Abdelkarim told AFP news agency. Isil seized Palmyra's ruins from
Syrian government control in May, prompting widespread fears that the group could destroy the a Unesco World Heritage site as an act of propaganda. The jihadists have destroyed cultural treasures across the Middle East and North Africa, often describing the sites as idolatrous.
Although Isil was reported to have mined sections of Palmyra last month, the ruins were thought to have been left undamaged in an attempt to curry favour with local residents as it consolidated power in a nearby town bearing the same name. On Thursday Isil posted photos of a civilian being forced to destroy what appeared to be priceless statues plucked from Palmyra’s undulating ruins.
One image, apparently taken in the Syrian city of Aleppo, showed the jihadists flogging a resident as he smashed a statue for the gathered crowd. In others, the militants joined in the public destruction themselves. The accompanying text said the ‘contraband’ artefacts were found in the possession of a lone smuggler.
Since sweeping to power across large swathes of Iraq and Syria last year, Isil has tried to establish a monopoly on the smuggling of artefacts. It has even established a ministry of antiquities to regulate the process.
The Telegraph has obtained Isil-stamped licences from branches in Aleppo and Deir Ezzor permitting residents to excavate archaeological material, apparently in return for a sum of money.
Involvement in the trade has reportedly raised the extremist group tens of millions of pounds, a similar sum to that raised through the kidnap and ransom of Western hostages.
Irina Bokova, the head of the UN cultural agency Unesco, said on Tuesday that one fifth of Iraq's estimated 10,000 official sites had been heavily looted under Isil control.
Some sites in Syria had been ransacked so badly they no longer had any value for historians and archaeologists, she said, describing the damage as “cultural cleansing”.
Archaeologists monitoring developments in Isil-held areas said they began to see evidence of pillage on a level unseen throughout the previous three destructive years of Syria’s intractable civil war.

The Latest on Indonesia: 2 Sisters Among Plane Victims

Indonesia:MMNN:1 July 2015

2:15 p.m.
Among the 122 people aboard Indonesia's C-130 military transport plane that crashed into a residential neighborhood were two sisters, their bodies locked in an embrace.
A group of students from a Catholic high school in Medan screamed hysterically when a body bag was opened, revealing the badly bruised corpse of classmate Esther Lina Josephine, 17, clasping her 14-year-old sister.
"She looks like she wanted to protect her younger sister," says the school's principal, Tarcisia Hermas. "We've lost kind and smart students who had so many creative ideas."
Hermas said the sisters were traveling during school vacation to see their parents on the remote Natuna island chain, where the father of the teenagers is stationed with the army.
12:50 p.m.
Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo says he has ordered the defense minister and the armed forces commander to undertake a "fundamental overhaul of the management of military weaponry."
In the wake of the c-130 plane crash that killed more than 140 people, Jokowi said Wednesday the weapons procurement system should be changed. He says, "we can no longer simply buy weapons, but should think to modernize our weapons systems."
12:30 p.m.
Indonesia's air force chief, Air Marshal Agus Supriatna, says he expects no survivors from the plane that crashed on Tuesday.
The air force initially said there were 12 crew members on the plane. But the figures for the people on board have been repeatedly raised since then, indicating lax controls and raising questions about whether the plane was accepting paying passengers despite previous promises to crack down on the practice.
Hitching rides on military planes to reach remote destinations is common in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago that spans three time zone Witnesses said flames and smoke streamed from the plane before it crashed.
Supriatna has said the pilot told the control tower that he needed to turn back because of engine trouble and that the plane crashed while turning right to return to the airport.
10:50 a.m.
Several rows of wooden coffins are lying outside the hospital in Medan, Indonesia's third-largest city, where remains of victims of the C-130 Hercules plane crash are being brought in ambulances.
Officers wearing face masks and white gloves are seen carrying the coffins with the bodies that have been identified into trucks for transport to families.
The death toll from Tuesday's crash jumped to more than 140, indicating a growing list of victims from the neighborhood where the plane went down shortly after takeoff.
The air force says there were 122 people on the plane including military personnel and their families.
A backhoe has been digging at the crash site, which has been turned into a pile of smoldering concrete. The tail of the plane is still standing in the middle of the neighborhood.

Clinton struggled to fit in with Obama's White House, emails show

Washington:MMNN:1 July 2015

Hillary Clinton struggled to fit into the government of President Barack Obama after being appointed Secretary of State in 2009, according to emails released by the State Department on Tuesday.
They showed Clinton turning up for meetings that had been canceled and worrying about how much time she had with her new boss, revealing growing pains in the relationship between her and former election rival Obama in the early months of her time as America's top diplomat.
In an email to two aides on June 8, 2009, Clinton was unsure if the White House had held a Cabinet meeting and whether she should attend. "I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?" Clinton wrote.
A State Department official wrote back that the government was holding a meeting, but not a full cabinet meeting that she needed to be at.
As Clinton sought to navigate her relationship with the Obama White House, she corresponded with several former aides and advisers to her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
They included Sidney Blumenthal, a former White House speech writer, Sandy Berger, the former National Security Adviser and Mark Penn, who served as a political adviser to both Bill Clinton and to Hillary Clinton's 2008 White House bid.
As the Obama administration was conducting a review of its policy in Afghanistan, for example, Penn emailed her and advised her not to ignore the threat posed by the Taliban.
While they were fierce competitors on the campaign trail Clinton and Obama eventually struck up a cordial working relationship in the four years she spent as secretary of state.
As she runs for the White House again at the November, 2016 election, Clinton's relationship with her fellow Democrat will come under further scrutiny.
While she has aligned herself with the Obama administration on issues that are popular with the base of Democratic supporters such as immigration reform, she has also tried to make her own mark by distancing herself from Obama on trade.
Back in 2009, there were a few misunderstandings, according to an email Clinton sent about what she thought was a meeting at the White House.
"I arrived for the 10:15 mtg and was told there was no mtg," she wrote to aides. "This is the second time this has happened. What's up???" she asked.
The emails released on Tuesday are among some 30,000 work emails relating to Clinton that a judge has ordered to be released in batches after a controversy broke out earlier this year when she acknowledged using a personal email account rather than a government one for State Department business.
As she began her tenure, Clinton worried about perceptions that she was not meeting enough with the president, given that former President Richard Nixon used to see his secretary of state Henry Kissinger daily.
"In thinking about the Kissinger interview, the only issue I think that might be raised is that I see POTUS at least once a week while K saw Nixon everyday," she said in an email to a spokesman, using Washington shorthand for President of the United States.
"Do you see this as a problem?” she asked spokesman Philippe Reines.