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Weekend News Digest 
Sat Mar 13, 2010 at 13:06:52 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Tuna, tuskers, tigers headline wildlife trade meet
by Anne Chaon, AFP
28 mins ago
| DOHA (AFP) - Atlantic bluefin tuna is in crisis and meets the criteria for a total ban on international trade, the head of the UN wildlife trade organisation said on Saturday in opening a 13-day meeting.
The 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), convening for the first time in the Middle East, is the only UN body with the power to outlaw commerce in endangered wild animals and plants.
Besides the sharply disputed proposal on bluefin, the Convention will debate the status of African elephants, polar bears and tigers. |
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 13:02:15 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Icelanders refuse to foot bill for bank collapse
by Marc Preel, AFP
Sat Mar 6, 10:10 pm ET
| REYKJAVIK (AFP) - Iceland's socialist government was surveying the damage Sunday after a referendum rejected a deal to pay Britain and the Netherlands billions for losses in the collapse of the Icesave bank.
As expected, Icelanders overwhelmingly voted down the deal in Saturday's referendum, with some 93.6 percent of voters lined up on the "no" side after more than 50 percent of the votes had been counted.
Only 1.5 percent of voters had so far voted "yes" to the Icesave deal, said RUV public broadcaster which compiles all electoral statistics. |
"You're basically sending the bill to tax payers for the failure of a private bank"
Fuck you banksters.
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Sat Mar 06, 2010 at 13:00:07 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Bank payback plan faces failure as Iceland votes
by Marc Preel, AFP
45 mins ago
| REYKJAVIK (AFP) - Icelanders headed to the polls in drizzling rain Saturday in a referendum set to reject a bank repayment deal worth billions that many here consider a foreign diktat, but a "nei" vote is expected to plunge the country deeper into crisis.
"I will vote 'no' simply because I disagree very strongly with us... having to shoulder this burden" from the 2008 collapse of the online Icesave bank, Ingimar Gudmundsson, a 57-year-old truck driver, told AFP.
The issue is whether Iceland should honour an agreement to repay Britain and the Netherlands 3.9 billion euros (5.3 billion dollars). |
Go Vikings!
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Sun Feb 21, 2010 at 13:02:27 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
Now with 30 Top Stories.
(Off to work on my early evening update for Olympic Alternatives VI. I'll try to get back to this when I have a chance.)
Update Complete. Now on Late Evening Update.
40 Top Story Final.
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 AP finds all Baptist group's 'orphans' had parents
By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press Writer
Sun Feb 21, 8:24 am ET
| PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Although a U.S. Baptist group said it was trying to rescue 33 "orphans" by taking them out of earthquake-ravaged Haiti, all the children have close family still alive, The Associated Press has found.
A reporter's visit Saturday to the rubble-strewn Citron slum, where 13 of the children lived, led to their parents, all of whom said they turned their youngsters over to the missionary group voluntarily in hopes of getting them to safety.
Similar explanations were given by parents in the mountain town of Callabas, outside Port-au-Prince, who told the AP on Feb. 3 that desperation and blind faith led them to hand over 20 children to the Baptist group. |
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Sat Feb 20, 2010 at 14:04:37 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Haitians return to find family as commercial flights restart
by M.J. Smith, AFP
Fri Feb 19, 4:00 pm ET
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Haitians arrived Friday on the first commercial flight into their country since last month's earthquake, desperately hoping to find family members alive and their homes still standing.
"I want to see my wife," said Jean Felix as he waited to board the plane before takeoff in Miami.
"She's living in the street and she's told me by phone that we lost everything... I'm going there with my heart broken." |
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Sat Feb 13, 2010 at 14:21:53 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
Now with 36 Top Stories.
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Emotional gatherings mark one month since Haiti quake
by Andrew Beatty and M.J. Smith, AFP
Fri Feb 12, 10:23 pm ET
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Haitians gathered at tearful ceremonies in sprawling homeless camps, churches and alleyways to mark one month since a huge quake shattered their country and killed more than 200,000 people.
President Rene Preval, who has rarely appeared in public since the January 12 disaster, spoke emotionally in memory of the victims on Friday, declaring Haiti "will not die" and acknowledging he could not find words to express his pain.
Throughout Port-au-Prince and beyond, Haitians dressed in white or their Sunday best raised their hands in prayer at countless ceremonies, many in camps where more than a million people now live after losing their homes. |
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Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 10:45:43 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
Early Puppy Bowl VI Edition
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 US vows to stay course as Haiti battles hunger
by Andrew Beatty, AFP
Sat Feb 6, 4:15 pm ET
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - The battle-stretched US military Saturday vowed to help Haiti as long as needed, as the Caribbean nation struggles to feed up to a million people left destitute by a huge quake.
Colonel Gregory Kane, the US Joint Task Force Haiti operations officer, said US involvement in the earthquake-shattered country would last as long as their presence was required.
But he said military operations could end as little as 45 days after they began in the aftermath of the January 12 quake. |
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Sat Feb 06, 2010 at 13:02:33 PST
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( - promoted by ek hornbeck)
Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Bill Clinton apologizes for slow Haiti aid effort
by Andrew Beatty
Fri Feb 5, 10:11 pm ET
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Former US president Bill Clinton pledged to try to get aid flowing as he was met by angry Haitians protesting the slow arrival of help since last month's quake.
Clinton said he was sorry that the aid efforts had been so slow, adding he also wanted to understand why more than three weeks after the January 12 quake supplies were still not getting through to desperate Haitians.
"I'm sorry it's taken this long," Clinton said, adding he and other relief workers were working hard to ease the suffering. |
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Sun Jan 31, 2010 at 13:00:04 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
Now with World News and Time Magazine Haiti Supplement.
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 US airlift halt sparks fears for Haiti victims
by Alex Ogle, AFP
Sat Jan 30, 6:55 pm ET
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Haiti's injured earthquake victims suffered a potentially deadly setback Saturday after the US military suspended evacuation flights because of a dispute over medical care costs.
Flights that have carried more than 500 people with spinal injuries, burns and other wounds ended Wednesday after the governor of Florida asked the government to share the financial burden on his state's hospitals.
"Apparently, some states were unwilling to accept the entry of Haitian patients for follow-on critical care," US Transportation Command spokesman Captain Kevin Aandahl told AFP. |
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Sat Jan 30, 2010 at 13:05:25 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Haiti faces long, difficult road to recovery
By Patricia Zengerle, Reuters
Sat Jan 30, 10:52 am ET
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti's leaders can point to progress since a powerful earthquake devastated the country but just surviving the first weeks' chaos, hunger and overwhelming loss may be the easiest part of a long recovery.
Since the January 12 catastrophe killed up to 200,000 people and left around 1 million homeless in the nation of 9 million, authorities and aid workers have cleared tens of thousands of bodies from the rubble, provided water supplies for makeshift refugee camps and developed a system of food distribution.
Some police are back in the streets, schools in unaffected areas will open on Monday, communications are working and some businesses have reopened their doors. |
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Sun Jan 24, 2010 at 13:46:33 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
Between Games Edition.
Colts 30 - 17.
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Bulldozers move into Haiti capital as victims pray
by Jordi Zamora and Charles Onians, AFP
2 hrs 35 mins ago
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Thousands of Haitian voices rose in prayer from ruined churches Sunday, as recovery teams began to bulldoze the capital's devastated centre and a French ship carrying supplies arrived.
Twelve days after a catastrophic earthquake razed much of the city, hundreds of thousands of Haitians remained in desperate need of food, water and shelter, despite a large-scale US military intervention and UN-run aid program.
In Port-au-Prince, morning prayers and song gave way to apocalyptic scenes as earthmovers cleared downtown rubble, spewing rotting corpses into the streets and opening new routes for looters to swarm through the ruins. |
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Sat Jan 23, 2010 at 14:40:46 PST
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( - promoted by buhdydharma )
A Weekend News Digest Supplement
I apologize for not maxing out on my news pieces recently, but I've been busy with Administrative issues and creating other content.
Not to mention real life.
I've looked at Time Magazine for the first time in a while and I discovered a backlog of pieces on Haiti that I thought I'd present as a supplement for you.
As always, this is not all the pieces, just the ones I think long enough to quote and of interest to my readers.
1 Could the Haiti Earthquake Have Been Predicted?
By JEFFREY KLUGER, Time Magazine
Wed Jan 13, 4:10 pm ET
| The tragedy of the earthquake that struck Haiti Tuesday, Jan. 12, is easy to measure in the lives lost, homes destroyed and infrastructure wrecked. The paradox of the quake is equally evident: when a natural disaster so devastating hits, oughtn't we have some way of predicting it? Hurricanes, blizzards, even volcanoes can be forecast well before their arrival, after all, allowing governments and people to make lifesaving preparations. Earthquakes, however, are stealth disasters, geological phenomena largely undetectable until just seconds before they occur. What scientists have long wanted to know is why quakes are so sneaky and what, if anything, can be done to read their warning signs better. |
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Sat Jan 23, 2010 at 13:00:11 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Haiti calls off search for trapped quake victims
by Clarens Renois, AFP
2 hrs 21 mins ago
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Haiti officially abandoned earthquake search and rescue efforts on Saturday as survivors gathered in a ruined cathedral to mourn the country's archbishop and 110,000 other victims of the disaster.
The government's decision came despite the rescue on Friday of two people who spent 10 days buried in the rubble, but officials said it was aimed at letting aid workers focus on getting supplies to hundreds of thousands of people.
The United Nations warned meanwhile that Haiti's upcoming rainy season -- a source of other disasters that have plagued the country in recent years -- could pose a new threat to beleaguered survivors of the 7.0-magnitude quake. |
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Sun Jan 17, 2010 at 13:04:00 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Haiti tensions mount amid scramble for last survivors
by Deborah Pasmantier, AFP
42 mins ago
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Rescuers pulled three survivors from the rubble Sunday five days after the Haiti earthquake, but tensions were growing among a desperate population as police opened fire on looters, killing one man.
After hours of painstaking digging through the ruins, a team from Florida unearthed a seven-year-old girl, a man aged 34 and a 50-year-old woman in the ruins of a store as dawn broke in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Later hundreds of rioters ransacked Hyppolite market in the heart of the devastated city as survivors besieged hospitals and make-shift field clinics, some carrying the injured on their backs or on carts. |
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Sat Jan 16, 2010 at 13:05:15 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Quake survivors flee capital as aid trickles in
by Beatriz Lecumberri, AFP
2 hrs 17 mins ago
| PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Fearful Haitians fled their putrid quake-hit capital in droves on Saturday as a vast international aid drive struggled to relieve tensions threatening to boil over into riots.
President Barack Obama, speaking alongside former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at the White House, said the United States was doing its utmost to help. Haitian officials however complained that no one was coordinating the effort.
"At this moment, we're moving forward with one of the largest relief efforts in our history, to save lives and to deliver relief that averts an even larger catastrophe," Obama said. |
"A vanguard of the 10,000 US troops", umm... take another look in the cookie jar kid. That's pretty close to all there is.
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Sun Jan 10, 2010 at 12:43:11 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 CIA director defends agency against criticism
AFP
Sun Jan 10, 1:33 am ET
| WASHINGTON (AFP) - CIA Director Leon Panetta, in an article published Sunday, revealed that a Jordanian doctor who killed seven agency operatives was about to be searched before he blew himself up at a US military base in Afghanistan.
"This was not a question of trusting a potential intelligence asset, even one who had provided information that we could verify independently. It is never that simple, and no one ignored the hazards," Panetta wrote in The Washington Post.
"The individual was about to be searched by our security officers -- a distance away from other intelligence personnel -- when he set off his explosives." |
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Sat Jan 09, 2010 at 13:06:48 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Portugal MPs approve gay marriage
by Anne Le Coz, AFP
Fri Jan 8, 3:21 pm ET
| LISBON (AFP) - Portugal's parliament Friday approved plans to legalise gay marriage, less than three decades after revoking the country's ban on homosexuality, but rejected proposals to allow same sex couples to adopt.
The bill passed with limited public controversy in what has traditionally been one of Europe's most socially conservative countries.
After less than three hours' debate, Friday's parliamentary vote went mainly along party lines, with the left-wing majority backing the measure proposed by Prime Minister Jose Socrates and the right-wing opposition voting against. |
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Sun Dec 27, 2009 at 13:00:00 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
This Sunday's Edition is being brought to you, one more time, by TMC. Hopefully ek hornbeck has survived the Holiday in Stars Hollow and will return to the news to its regular format. It was fun. ;-)
The Top News Story
No sign Detroit flight incident in larger plot: U.S.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - There is no initial evidence that the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a U.S. passenger jet was involved in a larger plot, a senior U.S. official said on Sunday.
But al Qaeda involvement is a "subject of investigation" in Friday's incident, U.S. homeland security chief Janet Napolitano said after U.S. authorities on Saturday charged Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, with attempting to blow up the plane by setting alight an explosive device attached to his body.
The suspect, who was being treated for burns at a Michigan hospital, was overpowered by passengers and crew on the Northwest Airlines plane from Amsterdam on Christmas Day with almost 300 people on board.
"Well, right now we have no indication that it is part of anything larger. But obviously the investigation continues. And we have instituted more screening and what we call mitigation measures at airports," U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told CNN's "State of the Union" program.
Asked whether al Qaeda was involved in the incident, Napolitano told ABC's "This Week" program, "That is now the subject of investigation, and it would be inappropriate for me to say and inappropriate to speculate. So we will let the FBI and the criminal justice system now do their work."
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Sat Dec 26, 2009 at 14:00:00 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
This Saturday's Edition is being brought to you by TMC, so ek hornbeck can sleep late on his GrandDad's red leather couch at his family's Lake House for the Holiday. Buhdy, E.K., NPK, Mishima, OTB & All you DharmaDarlings, Happy Holiday to you and your families.
The Top News Story
Asia marks tsunami's fifth anniversary with prayer
PATONG, Thailand (Reuters) - Thousands of candles lit up Thailand's Patong beach, thousands of saffron-robed Buddhist monks marched and people held vigils as Asia marked the fifth anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami on Saturday.
Hundreds of lanterns floated into the sky at Patong in one of many events across the region in memory of one of history's worst natural disasters when towering waves crashed ashore with little warning, killing 226,000 people in 13 countries.
"We came here to remember those who died," said Sainamphueng Kachan, 32, who lost 20 friends in the tsunami and was among the tourists, mourners and tsunami survivors gathered in bustling Patong to light candles dug into holes in the beach.
In Indonesia's Banda Aceh, about 100 people took part in a prayer ceremony close to a fishing boat that landed on the rooftop of a two-storey house after being swept miles inland.
Indonesia was the worst hit with more than 166,000 dead and missing. Massive reconstruction aid in Banda Aceh has rebuilt a new city on top of the ruins but survivors are only now putting memories of the disaster behind them.
I have a personal interest is the anniversary of this disaster since I spent 5 months there.
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Sun Dec 20, 2009 at 13:00:00 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
This Sunday's Edition is being brought to you by TMC, so ek hornbeck can bake cookies.
The Top News Story
East Coast hammered by severe winter storm
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A weekend nor'easter buried much of the U.S. East Coast on Saturday and Sunday, disrupting public transport and air travel and hampering holiday shoppers on the last weekend before Christmas.
Up to 22 inches of snow was expected by Saturday night in the Baltimore-Washington area, more than any snowstorm to hit the region since February 2003, as the storm system moved north into New York and New England.
With snow falling at a rate of two inches an hour, most flights were canceled at the three major Washington-area airports before two of them, Reagan and BWI, were closed until Sunday morning. Delays and cancellations also hit Philadelphia's international airport.
The driving snowstorm did not stop U.S. senators from convening and Democrats secured the pivotal 60th vote of holdout Senator Ben Nelson needed to ensure passage of the healthcare overhaul bill by Christmas.
But the storm could take a big bite out of retail sales on one of the busiest shopping weekend of the year.
Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty declared a snow emergency and asked District of Columbia residents to keep off the streets as the U.S. capital faced what one TV station dubbed "The Shopper Stopper Storm."
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March on Washington
Saturday, March 20
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