Weekend News Digest

In a report released in Kampala, HRW said 250 others, including at least 80 children, were abducted in the December 14-17 Lord’s Resistance Army attack in the remote Makombo area of northeastern Haut Uele district.

A Catholic clergyman at Isiro-Niangara in the same district, speaking before the report was issued, confirmed that 30 members of the rebel LRA attacked a dozen villages of Haut Uele, which is in Orientale province.

The premier refused to bow to the red-shirted demonstrators’ demand to call snap elections, but both sides agreed to meet the next day at 6:00 pm (1100 GMT) to continue discussions.

“House dissolution can only happen if we see it is not only the way out for the Reds but for the whole country also,” Abhisit told three Red Shirt leaders across a meeting table as he sat flanked by two of his senior staff.

The Unite trade union, which represents 12,000 BA cabin crew, is staging its second walkout in a week and says there are likely to be more strikes ahead unless BA makes them an acceptable offer.

Amid conflicting reports about the impact of the walkout, Unite claimed more than 130 flights had been cancelled by mid-morning. BA has said it expects 75 percent of passengers booked during the strike period to fly.

The deal ends more than a decade under the ownership of Ford Motor Co. which saw the up-market Swedish carmaker become a loss-making thorn in the side of the US giant, burdened with its own woes.

Geely chairman Li Shufu said he saw huge untapped potential for Volvo in international markets and especially in China, which has not only the biggest but also one of the fastest growing car markets in the world.

If you are expecting to find leprechauns nestling in a mock Irish valley, you are likely to be disappointed — instead the ultra-modern museum in Dublin aims to give visitors a view of the world from a leprechaun’s eye-level.

You are cut down to size in a living room complete with a giant armchair and table and chairs and “shrunk” in a visual trick inside a long tapered tunnel.

Button, who switched from Brawn GP as the reigning world champion, seized on brake failure for Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel mid-race to storm to a 12-second victory in a highly eventful second GP of the season.

The 30-year-old Briton comfortably held off Polish Renault driver Robert Kubica and Ferrari’s Felipe Massa of Brazil to claim his eighth win in 172 GPs and back-to-back Australian victories.

The trip, shrouded in secrecy until his arrival amid security concerns, opened with talks with President Hamid Karzai at his Kabul palace, which Obama used to press for a stepped up fight against corruption and the drugs trade.

Obama landed in Afghanistan amid a spike in deaths of foreign troops in the escalating war, and as the first big offensive of his new strategy unfolds in Helmand province, with Taliban strongholds in Kandahar among future targets.

The Vatican, which dismissed a New York Times report Friday that Benedict had failed in 1980 to stop a priest accused of sexually abusing children, put up a brave front amid mounting criticism in newspapers and magazines.

“The recent media attacks have without doubt caused damage,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told Italy’s ANSA news agency.

“It’s going to change the market,” said the 34-year-old Cypriot, while crowds gathered around the machine as it sliced the meat off a huge doner kebab spit, at tremendous speed, and, as he put it, “without ever getting bored.”

The robot has a digital camera to sense the changing thickness of the meat, producing a perfect, tasty, wafer-thin slice every time. FFDR-V1004 is also phenomenally efficient, creating as many as 120 portions of kebab in an hour.

The 82-year-old pontiff led tens of thousands of people in a sunny St. Peter’s Square in a Palm Sunday service at the start of Holy Week events commemorating the last days in Jesus’s life.

While he did not directly mention the scandal involving sexual abuse of children by priests, parts of his sermon could be applicable to the crisis he and the Roman Catholic Church are facing.

Abhisit held almost three hours of televised talks with leaders of the movement, who broadly support twice-elected former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, but there was no sign of progress toward ending the deadlock.

The embattled premier, who has spent much of the past two weeks at a military base, has refused to bow to demands for a new election, arguing that the country is too divided to go to the polls.

Life, in the form of bustling pedestrians, chaotic traffic and teeming street markets, has indeed bounced back in the city after the devastating January 12 quake that killed maybe more than 300,000 and turned streets into jumbles of rubble.

But a massive task of reconstructing the quake-shattered capital and its dependent nation — a small Caribbean state that was already a byword for poverty in the Western Hemisphere — now faces Haiti’s government and donors when they meet in New York on Wednesday to pledge funds and agree to strategies.

Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002.

The Salt Pit death was the only fatality known to have occurred inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. The death had strong repercussions inside the CIA. It helped lead to a review that uncovered abuses in detention and interrogation procedures, and forced the agency to change those procedures.

Primary care physicians already are in short supply in parts of the country, and the landmark health overhaul that will bring them millions more newly insured patients in the next few years promises extra strain.

The new law goes beyond offering coverage to the uninsured, with steps to improve the quality of care for the average person and help keep us well instead of today’s seek-care-after-you’re-sick culture. To benefit, you’ll need a regular health provider.

Benedict made no direct mention of the scandal in his Palm Sunday homily. But one of the prayers, recited in Portuguese during Mass, was “for the young and for those charged with educating them and protecting them.”

Jesus Christ, Benedict said in his homily, guides the faithful “toward the courage that doesn’t let us be intimidated by the chatting of dominant opinions, towards patience that supports others.”

The talks marked a civilized pause after weeks of demonstrations and fiery rhetoric that prompted Abhisit to seek refuge at an army base.

The two sides sat across a conference table from each other and shook hands. With strained smiles, they reiterated their sharply different stances and adjourned three hours later no closer to a resolution. They agreed to meet again Monday evening.

The attack adds to fears of postelection violence as the bitter election rivals enter what are expected to be drawn out talks on forming the next government that will rule Iraq as U.S. troops leave by the end of 2011.

Sunday’s blasts took place in the town of Qaim, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) west of Baghdad and on the border with Syria, the police official said.

Obama says difficult days lie ahead in the 8-year-old war and he says there will be setbacks. But he says the U.S. doesn’t quit and will prevail.

The president spoke to about 2,500 U.S. forces at Bagram Air Field after talks earlier Sunday in Kabul with Afghan leaders.

Moore scored 16 of her 25 points in the opening 9 minutes and seemingly invincible UConn took it from there to roll over Iowa State 74-36 in a regional semifinal Sunday.

“Connecticut is certainly as good as advertised,” Iowa State coach Bill Fennelly said. “I don’t think I’ve had a whipping like that since I was a little kid and I broke something of my mom’s.”

No one has been found since an initial rescue of 58 sailors from the 1,200-ton Cheonan that sank early Saturday near the tense border with North Korea. No bodies have been discovered either. Still, President Lee Myung-bak refused to give up hope.

The ship had been on a routine patrol with other vessels in the Yellow Sea off South Korea’s western coast. The exact cause of the explosion – one of South Korea’s worst naval disasters – remained unclear and officials said it could take weeks to determine.

The move immediately deepened the divide between the Democratic president and Republicans in the Senate following a long, bruising fight over health care. Obama revealed his decision by blistering Republicans, accusing them of holding up nominees for months solely to try to score a political advantage on him.

“I simply cannot allow partisan politics to stand in the way of the basic functioning of government,” Obama said in a statement.

On summer weekends, some 150,000 exhibitionists and gawkers flock to the neighborhood to see and be seen in a Bohemian rhapsody of bongo-bangers, dreadlocked artists and acrobatic gymnasts.

In recent months, though, that freewheeling hippie circus has gotten edgy thanks to a stubbornly sour economy heightening competition for the 200 peddler spaces along the 1.5-mile long asphalt strip bordering the beach.

The change would give foster families less money to pay for therapy, food and clothing and other costs. And some fear that fewer families could volunteer for the job in the future because they’d have to cover the bills themselves.

Foster parents who provide homes for special-needs children are paid up to $100 a day. Under the state’s new plan, many would receive $25 or less.

“I never even knew this was possible,” said Kadlik, 19, of Medway as epees clanged, his teammates whooped in triumph, and coaches barked out instructions in the gym of Perkins School for the Blind.

“I’m on Twitter, and I mentioned to my followers and friends that I was going to be in a fencing tournament and I had ten replies saying ‘Blind people can fence? Really? No way!’ Yeah, anything is possible.”

San Francisco police thought the same with a father and son team they suspected of abusing the state’s medical marijuana law by allegedly operating an illegal trafficking operation.

But both cases were tossed out along with many other marijuana possession cases in recent weeks because of a California Supreme Court ruling that has police, prosecutors and defense attorneys scrambling to make sense of a gray legal area: What is the maximum amount of cannabis a medical marijuana patient can possess?

What newcomers at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC) hear is hardly “Christianity for Dummies.” Nor is it “Extreme Makeover: Born-Again Edition.” Instead, a young woman named Kasey Gurley describes her disobedience and suffering in Old Testament terms.

“I worship my own comfort, my own opinion of myself,” she confesses. “Like the idolatrous people of Judah, we deserve the full wrath of God.” She warns the women that “we’ll never be safe in good intentions,” but assures them that “Christ died for us so we wouldn’t have to.” Her closing prayer is both frank and transcendent: “Our comfort in suffering is this: that through Christ you provide eternal life.”

But Mr. Colangelo-Bryan, a Manhattan corporate litigator doing pro bono work for Mr. Dossari, needed more: “Certainly I’m not going to conclude that someone is a terrorist on the basis of Google,” he said. He’d faced accused war criminals before, working with the United Nations on the prosecution of war crimes in Kosovo. But Guantánamo, the US naval station in Cuba where detainees in the war on terror are held, was new territory.

“This kind of offshore penal colony is not something that we do very often,” he says. He was drawn initially to the legal challenge – “the novelty and cutting-edge aspect of it. There was also what seemed like the fundamentally unfair notion that the government was holding people just because it said they should be held, without any form of due process … so there were important principles at stake.”