KABUL (AP) - Security forces increased patrols on some streets in the Afghan capital and blocked others entirely Wednesday, bracing for possible militant attacks during the inauguration ceremony that will cement President Hamid Karzai’s tumultuous re-election victory.
Karzai will be sworn in Thursday for his second five-year term, with many in the international community hoping he [...]
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Somali pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama on Wednesday for the second time in seven months, though private guards on board the U.S.-flagged ship repelled the attack with gunfire and a high-decibel noise device.
A U.S. surveillance plane was monitoring the cargo ship as it steamed on to its destination.
Pirates hijacked the Maersk [...]
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iranian state television reports five people have been sentenced to death over the unrest that followed the country’s disputed June presidential election.
At least three others caught up in the turmoil have received death sentences previously.
The report on Tuesday quotes a statement by the Justice Department saying the five sentenced were members [...]
Reuters:
Guess what? It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.
Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall [...]
British paper, don’t mind the typos.
Times Online:
British forces should buy off potential Taleban recruits with “bags of gold”, according to a new army field manual published yesterday.
Wired:
The Ft. Hood shootings were so gruesome and inhuman, even Osama Bin Laden’s former spiritual mentor is condemning them — calling the massacre that killed 13 “irrational” and “empty of thought,” according to a translation provided to Danger Room by the NEFA Foundation.
Salman Al-Awdah, a Saudi cleric who played an influential role in Bin Laden’s [...]
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders on Sunday supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, but European negotiators said the move did not imply weaker action.
Some argued that legal technicalities might otherwise distract the talks in Copenhagen and it was better to focus on the [...]
Reuters: A former prostitute whose memoirs were turned into the TV series “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” has revealed her true identity — Brooke Magnanti, a British research scientist.
(AFP) Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday the “enemies” of his country’s nuclear program had been defeated ahead of the release of the latest UN report on the atomic drive.
International attention focused on the report as US President Barack Obama said “time is running out” for Iran to respond to a UN plan aiming [...]
CARACAS, Nov 15 (Reuters) - Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez says he will join a team of Cuban scientists on flights to “bomb clouds” to create rain amid a severe drought that has aroused public anger due to water and electricity rationing.
Chavez, who has asked Venezuelans to take three-minute showers to save water, said the Cubans [...]
Don’t tell Obama, less he get an idea for Gitmo and start recruiting terrorists into his administration.
LONDON (AP) - Two of Britain’s most high-profile Muslim extremists have been given free rein to recruit fellow inmates in prison and are spreading propaganda from behind bars, a think-tank founded by two former Islamic radicals said Monday.
London-based Quilliam [...]
Boston.com
PRESIDENT OBAMA was too busy to attend the celebrations in Germany this week marking the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. But he did appear by video, delivering a few brief and bloodless remarks about how the wall was “a painful barrier between family and friends’’ that symbolized “a system that denied people [...]
Times Online:
Less than half the population believes that human activity is to blame for global warming, according to an exclusive poll for The Times.
The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as [...]
Los Angeles Times:
How low will the new American president go for the world’s royalty?
This photo will get Democrat President Obama a lot of approving nods in Japan this weekend, especially among the older generation of Japanese who still pay attention to the royal family living in its downtown castle. Very low bows like this are [...]
LONDON (Reuters) - Britons are among the ugliest people in the world, according to a dating website that says it only allows “beautiful people” to join.
Fewer than one in eight British men and just three in 20 women who have applied to BeautifulPeople.com have been accepted, an emailed statement from the website showed.
Existing members of [...]
FOX News:
A 5-year-old girl from the U.K. must take a daily cocktail of drugs to avoid the cells in her body from turning to crystal, the Daily Mail reported.
Lillie Sutcliffe from Castleford, West Yorkshire in England suffers from a rare condition called cystinosis. The condition causes an amino acid, cystine, to accumulate in various [...]
