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PRAGUE (Reuters) - The United States signed a pact on Tuesday to build part of a U.S. missile defense shield in the Czech Republic, prompting neighboring Russia to warn it will react with military means if the shield is deployed.
admin @ July 9, 2008
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Leaders from the biggest industrialised nations are meeting their counterparts from the developing world, on the final day of the G8 summit in Japan.
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Mosul is the capital of Ninevah province, which a year ago was thought by the top American commanders in the region to be ready to be returned to Iraqi provincial control. But last fall it became clear that al-Qaida and other insurgent groups were holding sway in the western section of the city.
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The normally decadent desert town is beginning to feel the pinch as the credit crisis hits hard.
admin @ July 8, 2008
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Kate and Gerry McCann
have been given fresh hope of a breakthrough in the search for their missing
daughter Madeleine after police agreed to give them access to some of their
files on the case.
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- Sorry about that, Silvio.
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Britain was facing a deepening economic crisis today as the FTSE plunged into a so-called ‘bear market’ for the first time in five years and a series of reports laid bare the full extent of the problems facing the nation’s economy.
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World leaders are not renowned for their modest wine selections or reticence at the G8 summit’s cheese board.
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On June 27, 2008, Robert Mugabe ran for his sixth term as president of Zimbabwe, a position he’s held since the country’s 1980 independence. However, Mugabe competed in the runoff election against himself: Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who led after the first round of voting and is widely believed to have actually won outright, pulled out of the vote days before balloting, citing increasing violence and intimidation against Zimbabweans in the run-up to elections. This included the deaths of dozens of MDC members. On Election Day, militias loyal to Mugabe forced citizens to the polls.
“In the days before the vote, ZANU-PF supporters rounded up and beat scores of people in the suburbs of Epworth and Chitungwiza on the outskirts of Harare. Many people sustained serious injuries, including multiple fractures, and were hospitalized at Parirenyatwa hospital in Harare. In one incident, three people told Human Rights Watch that ZANU-PF supporters forced them to attend a rally in Epworth at which former Minister of Mines Amos Midzi spoke. He told people that they would be beaten because they supported the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC); then ZANU-PF supporters beat them with batons and sticks.
After the beatings ZANU-PF supporters informed people that if they valued their lives they would go and vote for Mugabe. The ZANU-PF supporters also told the people that they would go door to door after the vote checking peoplesÂ’ fingers for the ink.”
Amnesty International has been documenting human-rights abuses connected to the elections, as well.
However, most Zimbabweans are hoping that the AU will get tough and intervene in the crisis. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga called for the AU to deploy troops in Zimbabwe, saying, “President Mugabe went ahead with the fake elections in which he competed against himself. That was a fake victory and we do not recognize it.”
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The trial of Michel Fourniret — who reportedly enlisted his wife’s help to seize virgin girls to rape and kill — began March 27, 2008, with Fourniet refusing to speak unless court went into closed session and refusing to let the press take his photograph. The Times of London reported the gory details:
As Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier sat in a glass-fronted dock on the opening day of their trial, jurors were told chilling details of the grey-haired couple alleged to be among the most horrific criminals in the history of France. Using an image of happily-married respectability, Olivier would gain the confidence of the girls and women they had identified as prey.
After they had been bound, gagged and sometimes drugged by her husband, she would examine them to check they were the virgins he desired.
She would then hand them over to Fourniret ‘in the sole aim of allowing him to fulfil his fantasies,’ according to a report read out in the court in Charleville-Mézières, in the Franco-Belgian border region where they once lived. He would assault his victims — ‘beautiful little subjects’ was how he referred to them — before shooting or strangling them, the report by investigating magistrates said.
One, a ’serious, prudent and intelligent’ 20-year-old student, had air injected into her veins to provoke a heart attack, the magistrates said.
Fourniret, 65, is on trial charged with the murder of seven girls and women aged between 12 and 21 in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2001. He has confessed to the crimes.
Olivier, 59, who is charged with one count of murder and complicity in four other killings, has admitted helping her husband but has sought to minimise her role with a claim that she was in his psychological grip.”
The “Ogre of the Ardennes” and his wife were expected to also stand trial in the future for other slayings in which they are suspects; this trial, though, was expected to take about two months. Fourniret apparently expected to get life in prison, but Olivier was reportedly hoping for leniency on a platform of being the manipulated wife.
Fourniret was caught in 2003, when a Belgian would-be victim, 13, broke free after being kidnapped. She reportedly told police that Fourniret bragged he was “far better” than Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux.
admin @ July 8, 2008