 The first prosecution witness has appeared at the latest trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and six others on war crimes charges. The witness described a chemical weapons attack which he says was carried out on his village. Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants are being tried over the Anfal campaign in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq in the late 1980s. The prosecution alleges that up to 180,000 civilians were killed. The witness, Ali Mustapha Hama, said eight to 12 jets bombed his village of Balisan in April in 1987. Two of the defendants told the court that Anfal was a campaign targeting Iranian troops and Kurdish guerrillas supporting them. The Iran-Iraq war was not yet over. ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk
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Editor - 08:16:00 08-22-06
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 Somali Islamists ban animal trade |
The Islamic courts that control large parts of Somalia have banned the export of charcoal and wild animals. The courts warned businessmen involved in the trade that they will be dealt with firmly if arrested. Charcoal exports have stripped areas of woodland, causing drought and soil erosion, while many wild animal species are becoming rarer. Somali companies and individuals run the trade, with exports going mostly to the United Arab Emirates. Birds of prey, trapped and exported live, form a significant part of the trade. The exports have been going on since the collapse in 1991 of Somalia's last effective national government...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5274620.stm
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Editor - 08:14:00 08-22-06
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| Mexico teachers extend protests |
Striking teachers seized 12 private radio stations in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca and set buses on fire, as a long-running protest worsened. They acted after unidentified gunmen opened fire on a government radio station already under their control. The strikers used the stations to tell parents to ignore Monday's start of the school year and keep children at home. Teachers have been striking since May to demand higher wages and Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz's resignation. The shooting began at a government-owned radio station already in the hands of the striking teachers. ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5272462.stm
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Editor - 08:00:00 08-22-06
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| Reclusive Russian Wins, Then Refuses, Math's Highest Honor for Breakthrough on Study of Shapes |
A reclusive Russian won the math world's highest honor Tuesday for solving a problem that has stumped some of the discipline's greatest minds for a century but he refused the award. Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, won a Fields Medal often described as math's equivalent of the Nobel prize for a breakthrough in the study of shapes that experts say might help scientists figure out the shape of the universe. John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, said that he had urged Perelman to accept the medal, but Perelman said he felt isolated from the mathematics community and "does not want to be seen as its figurehead." Ball offered no further details of the conversation. Besides shunning the award for his work in topology, Perelman also seems uninterested, according to colleagues, in a separate $1 million prize he could win for proving the Poincare conjecture, a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space. ...
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2342232
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Editor - 07:57:00 08-22-06
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| Eleven airline plot suspects appear in UK court |
Eleven British Muslims charged with being involved in a plot to blow up U.S.-bound transatlantic airliners have been remanded in custody after appearing in a London court on Tuesday. Eight have been charged with conspiracy to murder and with plotting to detonate homemade explosives on planes after smuggling the components on board while three others were charged with other terrorism-related offences.Abdullah Ahmed Ali, Waheed Arafat Khan, Umar Islam, Tanvir Hussain, Assad Ali Sarwar, Adam Khatib, Ibrahim Savant and Waheed Zaman, spoke only to confirm their names and addresses.There was no application for bail and all eight were charged with conspiracy to murder and remanded in custody until September 4 when they will appear at the Old Bailey.Hussain's lawyer Mohammed Zed told the court that "all allegations are denied," while lawyers for the other seven made no comment about a plea...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060822/ts_nm/security_britain_dc
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Editor - 07:54:00 08-22-06
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| The Poincare Conjecture: a Century-Old Brain-Twister Now Solved |
The Poincare conjecture involves topology, a branch of math that studies shapes. It essentially says that in three dimensions you cannot transform a doughnut shape into a sphere without ripping it, although any shape without a hole can be stretched or shrunk into a sphere. There is a catch: the space has to be finite. Imagine an ant crawling on an apple in a straight line. It can only walk so far before it's back where it started. That surface is two-dimensional. In three dimensions, shapes are harder to determine because people cannot directly 'see' them and there are many more possible types of holes. The conjecture is named for French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare, who proposed it in 1904. An analogous conjecture was proved for spaces of more than three dimensions over 20 years ago. But the specific 3-D case flummoxed mathematicians for years. ...
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2342247
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Editor - 07:52:00 08-22-06
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