Officials fear ship breaking apart on Barrier Reef
Associated Press
BRISBANE, Australia – A coal-carrying ship that ran aground and was leaking oil on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was in danger of breaking apart, officials said Sunday.
The Chinese coal carrier Shen Neng 1 ran aground late Saturday on Douglas Shoals, a favorite pristine haunt for recreational fishing east of the Great Keppel Island tourist resort. The shoals are in a protected part of the reef where shipping is restricted by environmental law off the coast of Queensland state in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
Authorities fear an oil spill will damage the world’s largest coral reef off northeast Australia, listed as a World Heritage site for its environmental value.
The ship hit the reef at full speed, nine miles (15 kilometers) outside the shipping lane, State Premier Anna Bligh said.
North Korea’s personal shopper has tales to tell
Kim Jong Ryul emerges from years of lying low in Austria as he launches a book about his former work procuring luxury items for the ruling Kims as their people suffered. He fears for his life.
By Julia Damianova
April 4, 2010
Reporting from Vienna – Kim Jong Ryul is a slightly built and lively 75-year-old with large glasses and a gray suit that seems several sizes too big. But Kim wears it anyway. It is virtually his only connection to his past.“This is the suit I had on,” the North Korean native explains, “when I escaped.”
About 15 years ago, Kim says, he exchanged his upper-echelon North Korean government job for a lonely underground existence in Austria, where he remains in constant fear of assassination.
USA
New adversary in U.S. drug war: Contract killers for Mexican cartels
By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 4, 2010CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO — A cross-border drug gang born in the prison cells of Texas has evolved into a sophisticated paramilitary killing machine that U.S. and Mexican officials suspect is responsible for thousands of assassinations here, including the recent ambush and slaying of three people linked to the U.S. consulate.
The heavily tattooed Barrio Azteca gang members have long operated across the border in El Paso, dealing drugs and stealing cars.
Critics Say Firm Weakens Safety Net as It Fights Jobless Claims
By JASON DePARLE
Published: April 3, 2010
WASHINGTON – With a client list that reads like a roster of Fortune 500 firms, a little-known company with an odd name, the Talx Corporation, has come to dominate a thriving industry: helping employers process – and fight – unemployment claims.
Talx, which emerged from obscurity over the last eight years, says it handles more than 30 percent of the nation’s requests for jobless benefits. Pledging to save employers money in part by contesting claims, Talx helps them decide which applications to resist and how to mount effective appeals.
Europe
A ringside seat to the Russian revolution
Kyril and Elena Zinovieff lived through the days of Rasputin, mutinying soldiers, and widespread famine. On the anniversary of Lenin’s return to Russia in 1917, Leo Hornak interviewed them
Sunday, 4 April 2010
Some sights still trouble Elena de Villaine. “Even now, I can’t bear the sight of snow,” she says. “For me, snow is blood. And I think my brother Kyril is the same.” She is talking about events in her childhood more than 90 years ago, when she and her brother were growing up in St Petersburg in the midst of the Russian revolution.This month sees the anniversary of Lenin’s return to Russia in 1917, the event that signaled the beginning of the end for the old regime. Kyril and Elena are now some of the last people alive who lived through that time and can still remember it in detail.
Pope Benedict to give Easter message amid abuse crisis
Pope Benedict XVI has begun celebrating Mass – and is to deliver a key Easter message amid a child sex-abuse scandal that has engulfed the Catholic Church.
The BBC Sunday, 4 April 2010
The Pope did not refer to the crisis during Saturday’s three-hour Easter vigil Mass in Saint Peter’s basilica.
Some Catholic leaders have defended the Pope against what they describe as defamatory attacks by the media.
But senior clerical figures in Europe have called on the Church to be more transparent over the crisis.
Pope Benedict has not made any explicit comment on the issue since he penned a letter apologising for child-abuse in the Irish Church late last month.
Middle East
Gunmen in military garb kill at least 24 in Sunni area south of Baghdad
By Leila Fadel and Jinan Hussein
Sunday, April 4, 2010
BAGHDAD — Gunmen pretending to be Iraqi security forces and U.S. soldiers killed at least 24 people here, shooting some and slitting others’ throats as they moved from house to house, officials and residents said Saturday.The victims of the hour-long incident included women and children, but most were members of the Awakening, Sunni paramilitary forces also known as the Sons of Iraq that battled insurgents at the behest of the U.S. military.
Palestinian, 14, Emerges Unharmed
By FARES AKRAM
Published: April 3, 2010
GAZA – A 14-year-old boy thought to have been killed either by Israeli gunfire or from internal Palestinian violence last week turned up unharmed at his family’s house after trying to sneak into Egypt via smuggler tunnels and being held by Egyptian security officials, his parents said Saturday.The boy, Muhammad al-Farmawi, disappeared on Tuesday when Palestinian demonstrators clashed with Israeli forces along the Gaza border. It was Land Day, the anniversary of the 1976 protests against Israeli land expropriation in northern Israel in which six Israeli Arab citizens were killed in confrontations with Israeli security forces.
Asia
Tamils want an end to Sri Lanka discrimination after election
Discrimination dominates ethnic group’s voting for this week’s elections
Jason Burke in Jaffna
The Observer, Sunday 4 April 2010
Vanaja Uma Khanta is waiting for the 794 bus to Kodikamam. It has been a long time coming. The queue for the bus stretches all the way down the yellow concrete shelter and mixes with that for the 794 for Kanakamuydady. Despite the crushing heat and the delay – in part caused by the arrangements for a political rally attended by newly re-elected president Mahinda Rajapaksa – the crowd waits quietly.Khanta, a 45-year-old seamstress, has not attended the rally, which comes ahead of parliamentary elections on Thursday. “I am not interested in politics,” she says, before contradicting herself with long and impassioned sentences. “We must have our rights. In whatever system, our rights must be safeguarded.”
Wall of water could engulf Shangri-La
A landslide has dammed Pakistan’s Hunza River, creating a vast lake which now threatens 45,000 people downstream
By Rina Saeed Khan Sunday, 4 April 2010
A seven-mile lake formed by a massive landslide in north-east Pakistan is threatening to burst its banks and sweep through a valley, wiping out villages and endangering 45,000 people who live downstream.Engineers are racing to build a channel at the top of the natural dam, formed by a landslide in early January which killed 19 people and blocked the Hunza River. This would let the water drain from the lake gradually. But they do not have much time.
Africa
White supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche is hacked to death after row with farmworkers
Two suspects held over killing of South Africa’s Nazi-inspired AWB leader as he slept in his bed
David Smith, Johannesburg
The Observer, Sunday 4 April 2010
A notorious white supremacist who once threatened to wage war rather than allow black rule in South Africa was hacked to death at his farm yesterday following an argument with two employees. Eugene Terre’Blanche’s mutilated body was found on his bed along with a broad-blade knife and a wooden club, police said.“He was hacked to death while he was taking a nap,” one family friend, who did not wish to be named, told Reuters.
Robert Mugabe’s dirty diamonds
Every day millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds leave Zimbabwe from the world’s richest diamond field. But none of that money reaches the country’s desperate poor. Who are the men plundering a nation’s future?
Jon Swain From The Sunday Times
April 4, 2010
One night in February, eight men armed with AK-47 assault rifles raided the Zimbabwe headquarters of a British-based diamond company. Overpowering its four guards, they stole computers, files and a pick-up truck that they dumped in a nearby hotel car park, its keys still in the ignition. Then they vanished into the night as swiftly as they had come.It was a raid carried out by hard men who knew their business and wanted this to look like an ordinary robbery. They were not regular thieves, however, but agents of the shadowy Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), and this was the latest development in a David-and-Goliath struggle that pits one man against a cabal of corrupt figures at the summit of the Zimbabwean state.
Latin America
In Haiti, Deep Skepticism About a U.N. Rescue Plan
By JESSICA DESVARIEUX / PORT-AU-PRINCE
A simple turn of the radio dial, and news of the reconstruction plan dominates Haiti’s airwaves. At the U.N. donor conference on Wednesday, the international community pledged more than $5 billion dollars to support Haiti for the next 18 months and almost $10 billion for the next five years. These are enormous figures aimed at transforming the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, which has become even more dire after the catacylsmic Jan. 12 earthquake. But as crucial as the donor news was, many Haitians made homeless by the temblor, like Patrick Nordeuse, 43, have simply tuned out. “I used to listen to the radio after the earthquake, but it would just depress me when I saw nothing was being done,” says Nordeuse.