Weekend News Digest

In response to a female questioner, al-Qaida No. 2 leader Ayman Al-Zawahri said in April that the terrorist group does not have women. A woman’s role, he said on the Internet audio recording, is limited to caring for the homes and children of al-Qaida fighters.

His remarks have since prompted an outcry from fundamentalist women, who are fighting or pleading for the right to be terrorists. The statements have also created some confusion, because in fact suicide bombings by women seem to be on the rise, at least within the Iraq branch of al-Qaida.

The confirmed death toll from China’s worst quake in three decades was raised Saturday to 68,977, an increase of about 120 people from a day earlier. Another 17,974 people were still missing, the State Council said. The increase was the smallest since the government started issuing a daily death toll shortly after the quake hit.

Hundreds of Chinese troops have been working around the clock to drain Tangjiashan lake in Sichuan province. The lake formed above Beichuan town in the Mianyang region when a hillside plunged into a river valley during the May 12 quake that killed more than 68,000 people.

Meanwhile, Washington has what appears to be fresh evidence that Venezuela supported Colombian guerrillas that the U.S. considers terrorists. Yet the terrorism list does not include Venezuela, a major oil supplier to the United States.

Nearly three decades after its inception, the state sponsors of terrorism list is not just about terrorism. It has become a diplomatic tool to win concessions from U.S. adversaries eager to end the stigma and sanctions that come with the designation. It may also be too blunt a tool to be used against strategically important countries, even if the terrorism link appears clear-cut.

“Of course the list is political,” said Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

Human rights groups have lambasted Myanmar’s military rulers, accusing them of kicking homeless cyclone survivors out of shelters. The U.S. defense secretary said the junta’s blockage of international help has cost “tens of thousands of lives.”

The sharp criticism came a day after a U.N. official reported the government was evicting cyclone victims from camps and “dumping” them near their destroyed villages with virtually no supplies a month after the storm unleashed its fury.

Widespread opposition to the deal has raised doubts that negotiators can meet a July target to finalize a pact to keep U.S. troops in Iraq after the current U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.

The U.S. military, meanwhile, said an American Marine died Friday in a non-combat related incident in Iraq, pushing the number of Americans killed this month to 21 as May draws to a close.

“Suspending enrichment is not negotiable … Depriving Iran of its right cannot be on offer,” Gholamhossein Elham, the government spokesman, told a weekly news conference.

Iran has agreed to a visit by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to submit the package of incentives, in exchange for a full suspension of uranium enrichment.

State District Judge Barbara Walther in San Angelo adjourned a hearing without signing an order presented to the court earlier in the day that would have returned the children to their families as early as this weekend. The children were removed from the ranch in remote west Texas by state officials last month after allegations of abuse.

Walther told the court all parties must agree on terms of the deal over the weekend following objections lodged by some parties. She said she would reconsider the matter on Monday.

The organizers of the candle-lit vigil said 100,000 people were at the rally that stopped traffic on the 16-lane central Seoul main thoroughfare, after more than a week of daily protests against President Lee Myung-bak.

South Korea, once the third-largest importer of U.S. beef until a 2003 outbreak of mad cow disease in the United States, said it would start quarantine inspections of U.S. beef, a move that opens its market fully for the first time in four years.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates criticised the military regime’s delay in allowing in foreign aid, saying US ships and aircraft could have swiftly brought much-needed relief to the cyclone-hit nation.

“Our ships and aircraft awaited country approval so they could act promptly to save thousands of lives — approval of the kind granted by Indonesia immediately after the 2004 tsunami and by Bangladesh after a fierce cyclone just last November,” Gates told a top-level security forum in Singapore.

The warning came from about 30,000 prominent US cancer researchers gathered in Chicago this weekend for the 44th annual conference of the American Society of Oncology (ASCO).

“I want to reinforce that today cancer research faces a very, very significant funding crisis,” said Friday Doctor Nancy Davidson, a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University and current chairwoman of the society.

French fisherman have already been on strike for two weeks, disrupting cross-Channel ferry traffic and blocking oil facilities.

Organisers of the actions in Portugal and Spain claimed a 100 percent response to the strike call, whilst more than 10,000 Italian fishermen joined the strike, according to unions.

“Compliance is total. The entire Spanish coast is at a halt,” said Jose Caparros, a spokesman for the fishing industry in Barcelona.

Almost all Portuguese trawlers were also staying in harbour, union officials said, whilst striking Italian fishermen managed to delay the start of a sailing race in the Mediterranean, ANSA news agency reported.

The rapid rise in the price of oil has pushed up the cost of marine diesel by around 30 percent since the beginning of the year, causing trawler owners to warn they face bankruptcy without increased subsidies.

It is the first large study to affirm wider anti-cancer hopes for Zometa and other bone-building drugs called bisphosphonates. Zometa, made by Novartis AG, is used now for cancers that have already spread to the bone.

The new study involved 1,800 premenopausal women taking hormone treatments for early-stage breast cancer. Zometa cut by one-third the chances that cancer would recur – in their bones or anywhere else.

The activity of macrophages is damped down by a naturally occurring compound called TGF-beta, to stop runaway reactions, and prior research has shown that brain levels of TGF-beta are increased in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, according to the report in the research journal Nature Medicine.

Some researchers believed that the high levels of TGF-beta were simply an attempt to quiet the inflammatory response associated with Alzheimer plaques. However, the new findings contradict that notion.

The Travel Industry Association, which commissioned the survey released Thursday, estimated that the 41 million forgone trips cost the travel industry $18.1 billion – including $9.4 billion to airlines, $5.6 billion to hotels and $3.1 billion – and it cost federal, state and local authorities $4.2 billion in taxes in the past 12 months.

When 28 percent of air travelers avoided an average of 1.3 trips each, that resulted in 29 million leisure trips and 12 million business trips not being taken, the researchers estimated.

Jane Clark, 37, a 12-year veteran of Fox News, a unit of News Corp, said she complained to human resources after being bitten three times between October 2007 and April 2008. She said she was ridiculed and the office was not treated for months.

Beacon Capital Partners, which owns the tower in midtown Manhattan, said in a statement that it had not been made aware of the problem and that it was the responsibility of tenants to manage infestations.

But many Iraqis as well as U.S. officials and private security analysts are uncertain whether the current lull signals a long-term trend or is simply a breathing spell like so many others before.

U.S. commanders also warn the relative peace is fragile because no lasting political agreements have been reached among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities.

Talks on returning Sunnis to the government broke down this week, and tensions among rival Shiite parties remain high despite a May 11 truce that ended weeks of bloody fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City district.

The treaty formally adopted Friday by 111 nations, including many of America’s major NATO partners, would outlaw all current designs of cluster munitions and require destruction of stockpiles within eight years. It also opens the possibility that European allies could order U.S. bases located in their countries to remove cluster bombs from their stocks.

The United States and other leading cluster bomb makers – Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan – boycotted the talks, emphasized they would not sign the treaty and publicly shrugged off its value. All defended the overriding military value of cluster bombs, which carpet a battlefield with dozens to hundreds of explosions.

Interior minister Gordana Jankulovska said a “record high number” of police officers will be deployed at polling stations, especially in areas that have been hotspots in the past.

Police said at least one helicopter and a special police unit were deployed briefly Friday in the village of Vejce, near Tetovo, in the heart of the tiny Balkan country’s restless ethnic Albanian area. Police said the unit was performing routine checks on the area before Sunday’s vote. No incidents were reported.

Food prices have risen sharply in the region’s biggest economy since a political crisis over a disputed election led to food shortages.

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“The government must subsidize the cost of food, it is not fair for the poor to be suffering with high food prices yet the government has not increased salaries,” said Tom Aosa, one of the organizers.

The 5,541-feet- (1,690-metre-) high Cerro Azul mountain started spewing lava on Thursday after 10 years of inactivity on the largest island of the Galapagos archipelago, a chain formed from volcanoes thrusting from the Pacific Ocean.

“There is no threat to the local human population … nor for the tortoise population because lava rivers are flowing in the opposite direction,” the Galapagos Park said in a statement after its rangers flew over the mountain to assess the eruption.

Most of those detained belonged to the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the country’s two main political parties.

“It was confirmed that the detainees were trying to instigate the people against the interim-government,” a senior officer of the joint forces said on Saturday without giving details.

The Awami League and BNP are seeking the release of their respective leaders, former prime minister Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia respectively. Both parties have threatened to launch countrywide protests if their leaders were not released.

But Georgia accused Moscow of trying to annex the impoverished Black Sea region after Russia sent unarmed troops on Saturday to rebuild a railway in Abkhazia.

Russia called the deployment “humanitarian aid.” Georgia said on Friday it had stopped spy plane flights over Abkhazia to quell Western fears that tensions between Tbilisi and Moscow could degenerate into war.

Four more International Security Assistance Force soldiers and five civilians were wounded in the blast in Jalalabad, a thriving city 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the Pakistan border, the alliance and Afghan government said.

The 40-nation ISAF would not release the nationalities of its casualties, according to policy. Most foreign troops in eastern Afghanistan are US nationals.

The new deaths bring to 67 the number of international soldiers who have died in Afghanistan this year, most of them in hostile action.

Kouchner arrived in Nasiriyah in southern Iraq at the start of a two-day trip during which he held talks with Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi, said a diplomatic source who asked not to be named.

Mahdi, a Shiite Francophone who lived in exile in France, is one of the leaders of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), a key member of the governing coalition.

In the week after this clinic was opened by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, nearly 300 children like Alfiya were admitted for severe malnutrition. In the poor farming villages around Shashemene, in drought-ravaged southern Ethiopia , aid workers believe that hundreds and perhaps thousands more children are starving.

A serious drought and the worldwide surge in food prices are fueling one of Ethiopia’s gravest hunger crises in years, with 6 million children younger than five urgently needing food, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund , or UNICEF . Relief workers say scores of children already have died.

The Status of Forces Agreement and an economic and political accord are expected to be completed by July and must pass the parliament before being finalized. Already voices of dissent are in the air.

The United Nation’s mandate that allows foreign forces to occupy Iraq will not be renewed at the end of the year. So any future U.S. military involvement in the war-torn nation can only continue with such an agreement.

The referendums scheduled in Beni and Pando provinces are the latest in a wave of autonomy votes that present the socialist president with his strongest challenge since taking office in January 2006 . The votes have also sparked fears that this impoverished nation of 9.1 million may be on the verge of division or civil war.

Beni and Pando are sparsely populated, agricultural provinces stretching across Bolivia’s northern tip, with a combined population of about 450,000 people. They are expected to vote for autonomy.

Musharraf’s demise is now considered almost a foregone conclusion in Pakistan , but Bush’s intervention appeared to be a powerful signal that Washington wouldn’t welcome Musharraf’s exit.

“The president reiterated the United States’ strong support for Pakistan , and he indicated he looked forward to President Musharraf’s continuing role in further strengthening U.S.-Pakistani relations,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in Washington .

That drop, combined with the Iraqi forces’ growing capabilities, has some military experts wondering whether the Pentagon could accelerate the drawdown of its troops.

“Do we really need 155,000 troops to support the Iraqis?” asked one senior military official at the Pentagon who didn’t want to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

Think about the frog. The pig. Or even the rat.

That’s what animal rights activists in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle had in mind when they donated interactive software that replicates a frog dissection to Wheeling Park High School.

Marilyn Grindley, a member of the Ohio County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said dissecting animals “desensitizes kids. It tells them that we do not have any respect for any animal.” She wants to end the practice.

Mandates in 14 states, including Virginia and Maryland, that allow biology students to opt out of dissection without jeopardizing their grades are fueling interest in virtual dissection as an alternative tool for teaching anatomy.

Menu Foods was hit by more than 100 class action lawsuits last year after pet foods it distributed were found to contain toxic ingredients imported from China.

In March 2007, the company, whose products were sold under such labels as Iams, Eukanuba, and President’s Choice, recalled tens of millions of containers of wet dog and cat food.

BAE, based in Farnborough, England, picked up $9.2 billion in fiscal 2007 prime contracts, a list of the Pentagon’s top 10 contractors showed on a new White House Web site.

In fiscal 2006, its prime Pentagon contracts totaled $4.7 billion. The sole supplier of Bradley Infantry Fighting vehicles, BAE remained alone among Europe-based companies to figure as one of the Pentagon’s top 10 suppliers.

Based on census data, 13.7 million people aged 19 to 29 had no health insurance, either public or private, in 2006, up from 13.3 million in 2005, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that researches health policy.

Men and women in this age group accounted for 17 percent of the under-65 U.S. population, but made up almost 30 percent of the uninsured, according to the report. At age 65, people enter the federal Medicare insurance program.

Tariq Majeed, Pakistan’s chairman of Pakistan’s joint chiefs of staff committee, told Reuters on the sidelines of a security conference that the common goal of fighting terrorism will be the basis of the relationship between the two countries.

“We have common objectives, shared goals and common commitments, therefore I find no reason why we should not be close — even with a change of U.S. administration,” Majeed said.

His message at a conference of Asian security and defense officials appeared intended both to reassure allies and serve as a statement of intent to China, following Beijing’s rise in economic and military power in recent years.

“As someone who has served seven United States presidents, I want to convey to you with confidence that any future U.S. administration’s Asia security policy is going to be grounded in the fact that the United States remains a nation with strong and enduring interests in this region,” Gates said.

Gates told a high-level security forum here that any speculation that the United States was losing interest in the region was “preposterous.”

“Actually I think this will be an area where there will be a strong and positive legacy in the future,” he told the forum, six months before the US presidential elections.

“This is a sovereign decision for Saudi Arabia and the rest of the region’s states,” Paulson said following talks with Saudi officials, according to SPA state news agency, which quoted him in Arabic.

“The (future of the) link between these currencies and the dollar rests in the hands of these governments,” SPA reported him saying at a press conference with his Saudi counterpart, Ibrahim al-Assaf.

“It had taken too long to get those processes up and running,” Chertoff told the Oxford Union debating society at the prestigious university in the city, west of London.

“It would have been better had they been in place in 2000 and in 2003. It would have been much more desirable to do it earlier.”

In 2004 and 2006, the US Supreme Court ruled that detainees had a statutory right to contest indefinite detention before an independent judge.

It may seem like a wonkish matter that few individuals would pay attention to, but the reshuffling of the stocks that make up Russell’s indexes, including the widely followed Russell 2000 index of small companies, will have a big impact on stock and mutual fund holdings.

“Your benchmark index is going to change,” Calvasina explained. Those changes will affect some $4.4 trillion in assets that Russell says is tied to one of its indexes, which were launched in 1984.

Institutional investors such as pension funds, university endowments and sovereign wealth funds have ramped up investing in commodities as a hedge against inflation and to seek out higher returns versus stocks and bonds.

The strategy has worked – if you gauge success solely by the rising returns that come from a market where oil prices have doubled in the last year to levels above $130 a barrel and other commodities are also sharply higher.

But this story has an ironic twist: The money put into commodities is boosting the inflation investors have been trying to offset.

Consumers, gas retailers and governments are wrestling with a new energy order, where rising oil prices play a larger role than ever in the daily lives of increasingly mobile people. But as the cost of crude mounts, the effect on the price at the pump varies startlingly – from Venezuela, where gas is cheaper than water, to Turkey, where a full tank can cost more than a domestic plane ticket.

Taxes and subsidies are the main reasons for the differences, along with lesser factors such as limited oil refining capacity and hard-to-reach geography that push up prices.

Deutsche Telekom has admitted that it hired an outside firm to track hundreds of thousands of phone calls by senior executives and journalists to identify the sources of press leaks, but said the “ill-advised use of communications data” happened only in 2005 and probably 2006.

However Hans-Juergen Knoke, who was responsible for security at Deutsche Telekom from 1998 to 2004, told the Spiegel television channel that the company was already engaged in the practice under former boss Ron Sommer, who left the group in 2002.

“There is no problem of supply, the problem is much more linked to speculation,” he told a press conference with visiting French ecology and energy minister Jean-Louis Borloo.

He also said the price of oil was closely linked to the exchange rate of the US dollar, which has fallen steeply against other major currencies.

Anthropologists have known about the group for some 20 years but released the images now to call attention to fast-encroaching development near the Indians’ home in the dense jungles near Peru.

“We put the photos out because if things continue the way they are going, these people are going to disappear,” said Jose Carlos Meirelles, who coordinates government efforts to protect four “uncontacted” tribes for Brazil’s National Indian Foundation.

The problem is in a device that will analyze ice and soil dug from the planet’s surface, the scientists said Friday. The short circuit was found during testing done before the mission’s experiments get under way.

The short circuit isn’t considered critical, said William Boyton of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Boynton is in charge of the device that will heat and analyze samples scooped up by the lander’s robotic arm.

Some big cats want a high perch from which to view visitors, polar bears want to scratch for hidden caches of food, and male barn swallows could use a tail extension to appeal to potential mates, according to experts from zoos and universities meeting on Friday at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo.

Visitors who see a cheetah pacing or a polar bear swimming in circles might assume they are stressed by confinement. But they may simply be expending excess energy or soothing themselves, experts said interviews at the symposium.

Bubbles lend an airy texture to foods, cosmetics and other products, but the smaller the bubble, the more likely it is to shrink and pop, succumbing to gas pressure and surface tension.

By adding a sugary coating, Harvard University graduate engineering student Emilie Dressaire and colleagues reported in the journal Science that they made bubbles that could last up to 12 months.

The protests were organised by environmental campaigners concerned about the impact of more flights on climate change alongside local people who fear increased noise and air pollution.

Demonstrators are marching from Hatton Cross London Underground station near Heathrow, west of London, to Sipson, a village where around 700 homes will be knocked down if plans for a third runway get the green light.

The substance can absorb up to 20 times its own weight in oil and be recycled again and again for future use, while the oil itself can also be recovered and used, they reported in the specialist journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The novel material comprises wires made of potassium manganese oxide at the scale of 20 nanometres, or 20 billionths of a metre, in diameter.

Initially slated to launch Tuesday, NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is now set to launch atop a Delta 2 rocket on Thursday at 11:45 a.m. EDT (1545 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

The new launch target was selected to “give the launch team sufficient time to make sure remaining open engineering issues are resolved,” NASA officials said in a Thursday announcement.

But here’s where the story gets strange.

To publicize his efforts, Peckman held a press conference on May 30 announcing that he had definitive proof of alien visitation. This came in the form of a short video clip shot in Nebraska by a man named Stan Romanek in July 2003. At the time, Romanek was concerned that neighborhood Peeping Toms were looking at his teenage daughters. The best solution Romanek could think of was to place a video camera inside the house, aimed at a window. He taped several nights, and to his shock and amazement, the Peeping Tom was not a horny local teen but instead an extraterrestrial! Yes, Romanek claims that an alien traveled across the universe to stop by his house and look through his window at his daughters. The video footage seen at the press conference shows a dark window, behind which a strange, indistinct head pops up and down several times.