{{Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro has invited US President Barack Obama to join him in talks aimed at resolving the problems between the two countries.}}
Mr Maduro said the meeting would help “put the truth out on the table”.
He has accused US conservatives and media organisations of plotting to overthrow his government.
Earlier on Friday Venezuela revoked the accreditations of CNN reporters covering the country’s crisis. Eight people have died in recent protests.
In a news conference on Friday, Mr Maduro said: “I call for a dialogue between Venezuela and the United States and its government.
“Let’s initiate a high-level dialogue and let’s put the truth out on the table.”
The dialogue will be “difficult and complex”, Mr Maduro said, until the American government accepted “the full autonomy and independence of Latin America”.
On Sunday Venezuela expelled three US diplomats accused of meeting violent groups linked to the opposition.
‘War propaganda’
Earlier Venezuela had revoked the accreditation of CNN’s Caracas-based reporter, Osmary Hernandez, and those of two other CNN journalists sent to Venezuela to cover a wave of opposition marches.
The government says the protests are part of a coup attempt.
US Secretary of State, John Kerry, denounced the latest action on Friday, saying: “This is not how democracies behave.
“I call on the Venezuelan government to step back from its efforts to stifle dissent through force and respect basic human rights.
“The solution to Venezuela’s problems can only be found through dialogue with all Venezuelans, engaging in a free exchange of opinions in a climate of mutual respect.”
On Thursday, Mr Maduro threatened to “take action” against CNN unless it ceased what he described as “hostile coverage”.
“I won’t accept war propaganda against Venezuela. If they don’t rectify themselves, out of Venezuela,” he said.
{{Pope Francis is due to appoint 19 new cardinals at a ceremony in Rome – the first such appointments of his papacy.}}
Cardinals are the most senior Roman Catholic clergymen below the pontiff.
Correspondents says the inclusion of prelates from places like Haiti and Burkina Faso reflects the Argentine Pope’s commitment to the poor.
The new cardinals will receive the traditional red hat and robes at a formal ceremony known as a consistory.
Sixteen of the new appointees are under 80, making them eligible to enter a conclave to elect the Pope’s successor.
The new cardinals come from 12 countries, including Spain, Italy and Germany.
Among them will be the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, Archbishop Vincent Nichols.
Five are from Latin America and the Caribbean.
They will formally be inducted at a ceremony that is due to start at 11:00 local time (10:00 GMT).
The media in Rome says Pope Francis’ appointments are being seen as a clear attempt to share decision-making in the church.
The Pope is encouraging cardinals – old and new – to think outside the box in formulating new policies for the Catholic Church, our correspondent adds.
The new recruits will join the more than 100-strong College of Cardinals, which has been meeting in plenary session behind closed doors at the Vatican for the past two days.
The 19 new Cardinals
Archbishop Pietro Parolin (Italy)
Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri (Italy)
Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Muller (Germany)
Archbishop, Beniamino Stella (Italy)
Archbishop Vincent Nichols (Britain)
Archbishop Leopoldo Jose Brenes Solorzano (Nicaragua)
Archbishop Gerald Cyprien Lacroix (Canada)
Archbishop Jean-Pierre Kutwa (Ivory Coast)
Archbishop Orani Joao Tempesta (Brazil)
Archbishop Gualtiero Bassetti (Italy)
Archbishop Mario Aurelio Poli (Argentina)
Archbishop Andrew Yeom Soo Jung (South Korea)
Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello (Chile)
Archbishop Philippe Nakellentuba Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso)
Archbishop Orlando B. Quevedo (Philippines)
Archbishop Chibly Langlois (Haiti)
Monsignor Loris Francesco Capovilla (Italy) *
Archbishop Fernando Sebastian Aguilar (Spain) *
Monsignor Kelvin Edward Felix (St Lucia) *
Google has unveiled a prototype smartphone with “customised hardware and software” that enables it to create 3D maps of a user’s surroundings.
The device’s sensors allow it make over 250,000 3D measurements every second and update its position in real-time.
Google said potential applications may include indoor mapping, helping the visually-impaired navigate unfamiliar indoor places unassisted and gaming.
It has offered 200 prototypes to developers keen to make apps for it.
Google said its Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) unit developed the phone as part of a project called Project Tango with help from researchers at various institutions.
“We are physical beings that live in a 3D world. Yet, our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen,” the firm said.
“The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.
“We’re ready to put early prototypes into the hands of developers that can imagine the possibilities and help bring those ideas into reality,” it added.
{{Ukraine’s parliament has voted to speed up the release of jailed opposition figure Yulia Tymoshenko, without needing presidential endorsement.}}
Meanwhile, President Viktor Yanukovych’s whereabouts are unclear, a day after he agreed a pact with the opposition.
Opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko tells parliament the president has left Kiev. He calls for elections by 25 May.
The opposition protesters appear in full control of the government district in Ukraine’s capital Kiev.
Worth noting that Arsen Avakov, just elected as acting interior minister, is also a close ally of jailed opposition figure Yulia Tymoshenko.
Opposition Fatherland MP Arsen Avakov has been elected acting interior minister, official TV channel Rada has reported.
Ukraine’s News 24 channel is showing footage from outside President Yanukovych’s residence just outside Kiev. There are shots of the extensive grounds and lakes with groups of people and camera crews outside the main house, which appears to be abandoned.
{{Italian centre-left politician Matteo Renzi has been sworn in as prime minister.
At 39, the Democratic Party leader is Italy’s youngest-ever PM.}}
On Friday he formally accepted the mandate to lead a new government and named his cabinet.
He ousted Prime Minister and party colleague Enrico Letta in a vote earlier this month. Mr Renzi said his coalition would give “hope” to the economically-stagnant country.
He has promised to overhaul the jobs market and the tax and education systems within four months.
Half of the new cabinet are women.
Announcing his team on Friday, he said: “It’s a government that will start to work from tomorrow morning.”
Confidence vote
The new finance minister will be Pier Carlo Padoan, a senior economist at the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Angelino Alfano, who heads the New Centre Right party, one of the Democratic Party’s coalition partners, remains as interior minister.
The government will have to win a vote of confidence in parliament, expected on Monday, before it starts work officially.
Mr Renzi came to prominence as mayor of Florence, but he has no experience of government at the national level.
The reporters in Rome say that – more than anything – he will be judged on whether he can re-energise the economy.
Mr Letta, who led Italy for just 10 months, was ousted in a vote called by Mr Renzi at a party meeting on 13 February.
Mr Renzi had argued that a change of government was needed to end “uncertainty”.
He had accused Mr Letta of a lack of action on improving the economic situation, with unemployment at its highest level in 40 years and the economy shrinking by 9% in seven years.
Mr Letta was also accused of failing to implement promised reforms of what is seen as an often corrupt and wasteful bureaucracy.
Above: {Kenyan Children’s Department official holds the baby who was abducted en route to Juba, South Sudan last year.}
{{A Kenyan baby stolen from its mother just four days after birth returned to the country Friday after a court ordered that he be brought back.}}
The boy who was in the company of Kenya Mission in South Sudan and Children’s Department officials remained playful, at one time grabbing a journalist’s microphone, but his parents are yet to be identified.
The baby looked healthy. He had been in the custody of the Kenyan Embassy for four months, before he was finally flown in.
His story begun on September 30 when a woman in her forties boarded a Simba Coach bus destined for Juba in from Nairobi.
The woman, who has since been jailed for child abduction, took on the bus indicating that she was the real mother of the infant.
But in a road journey that takes more than 20 hours, the cat was always going to get out of its bag.
The abductor passed through Kenya-Uganda border but got arrested after crossing into Uganda-South Sudan borders without notice.
{{CRYING BABY}}
The baby had been crying. The passengers got concerned that despite the yelling, the mother was neither feeding it nor cuddling it to calm down.
The following day at the Namule border point in South Sudan, the passengers notified the police who questioned the woman. Here is when she started speaking from two sides of her mouth.
“She initially said she was the mother, but later she changed saying she had only been given the baby to bring to South Sudan. Through the South Sudanese authorities, we arrested two other women, one woman from Kenya and another South Sudanese national,” Lawrence Chemonges, the Foreign Affairs Senior Assistant Secretary for Diaspora service told reporters at the airport.
The ministry had been notified of the incident in October, but relied on South Sudanese authorities to trace the woman’s movements. It appears her phone records helped.
“The passengers in the bus had suspected that the child is stolen because the baby had been crying all the way from Nairobi and she was not breastfeeding him,” a dispatch from the Kenyan Embassy in Juba describes how the Mission got wind of the information.
One Kenyan woman on the bus who had talked to her later called the Mission in Juba to report the incident.
According to the narrative, when they asked her why she was neither cuddling nor breastfeeding the baby, she told them she had only adopted it.
It is a curious incident given that normally, an adult travelling in the company of a minor across the borders must declare the identity of the child.
Foreign Affairs could not determine whether she had declared her details at the Kenyan border.
Border officials later demanded that her breasts be checked to determine if she had breastfed at all. It is from here that they updated their National Security agencies in Juba.
The Mission further updated Nairobi that the suspect, only identified as Hellen Syokau, had initially indicated that she was from Tanzania before her identification documents betrayed her.
“She informed the passengers that she was from Tanzania but upon producing her documents, they found out that she is from Kenya, Eastern Province and Kamba by Tribe.”
The baby now identified as Marua Munene alias Baby Lucky Juba, though his real name is yet to be known, was returned to Nairobi by Kenyan Foreign Affairs officials following a court order in Juba that the baby be brought back.
{{ABDUCTORS JAILED}}
According to the Embassy, the baby’s three would-be abductors have since been jailed with the Kenyan getting a year behind bars for abduction and trafficking.
Foreign Affairs declined to identify the other Kenyan woman and her south Sudanese accomplice saying further investigation was going on.
“We still don’t know the baby’s parents because there was no identification or birth certificate on the woman. We managed to trace other suspects using the woman’s previous telephone calls and she later admitted to have stolen the baby in Kenya,” Mr John Mariera, the Secretary in the Kenyan Mission in Juba said.
Foreign Affairs could not name the children’s home the baby will be hosted, but have asked anyone who lost a baby of this age to report the matter to the police or contact the ministry urgently.
{{A Libyan air force medical plane crashed south of Tunis early on Friday, killing all 11 people on board, Tunisian officials said. }}
The aircraft crashed in a field on the edge of the village of Nianou, around 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the capital, but managed to avoid any houses, local media reported.
The Libyan flag was still visible on the tailplane amid the charred wreckage of the aircraft. “The plane crashed at 1:30 am (0030 GMT)… with 11 people on board — three doctors, two patients and six crew members,” emergency services spokesman Mongi El Kadhi said.
“The whole plane was completely burnt out. The emergency services went to the crash site and recovered the charred bodies.”
There was no immediate word on the identities of the two patients on board or why they were being flown to Tunis-Carthage international airport from a military airfield near Tripoli.
Tunis air traffic control official Sofiene Bejaoui said the aircraft was a Soviet-designed twin-propeller Antonov-26. “According to the air traffic controller who spoke to him last, the pilot’s final message was ‘Engine on fire’,” he said.
“The plane is a Libyan air force Antonov-26, registration number Five Alpha Delta Oscar Whiskey,” Bejaoui said.
Nearly 1,400 of the military transport aircraft were built between 1969 and 1986, 420 of them for export, according to the manufacturer’s website.
At daybreak, teams began searching for the aircraft’s black box flight recorders in a bid to establish the cause of the apparent engine failure.
{{Prosecutors who have accused Oscar Pistorius of murder now admit he may not have had his prostheses on when he fired the shots that killed his girlfriend, removing a key argument for premeditation.}}
According to a document obtained by local television news channel eNCA, the State’s own ballistics expert believes Paralympic star Pistorius was “most likely” on his stumps when he shot Reeva Steenkamp through the bathroom door.
During an extensive bail hearing, prosecutors had argued that Pistorius took time to put on his prosthetic legs before firing the shots through the locked bathroom door, showing he was not panicked by the prospect of an intruder.
Pistorius, who goes on trial on 3 March, denies the charge of murder and says he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder.
eNCA also reported that prosecutors believe security guards at Pistorius’s gated community called the Olympian after the shooting to see if everything was okay, and that he said it was fine and did not require assistance.
They also believe that a neighbour who lives less than 100m away, heard shouting on Valentine’s Day, the night of Steenkamp’s death.
The National Prosecuting Authority said it had not leaked the documents.
“The defence has access to everything, to the docket and all evidential material we have,” said spokesperson Nathi Mncube.
“We don’t give anything to any other person other than the defence and if it gets leak, it won’t be us, we can’t do that because it’s damaging to our case.”
Pistorius, 27, whose legs were amputated below the knee when he was a young boy, is known worldwide as the “Blade Runner” for competing on two carbon-fibre blades and running against able-bodied athletes in the London 2012 Olympic Games.
{{A top Johannesburg school has been left red-faced after a fun day plunged the school into controversy.}}
On so-called “Moustache Day”, a boy at St John’s College went on stage wearing a moustache similar to the one worn by the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.
He then did the Nazi salute to which a large number of boys in the audience jumped up and spontaneously returned the salute, The Times reported.
But a fellow pupil was deeply distressed by this and wrote a letter to school principal Roger Cameron, saying he was a Jewish boy who had family members killed by the Nazis.
In the letter, the boy wrote: ”The reason that I was so disgusted was because the entire school seemed to bear no second thought when seemingly admiring this man. Whether you are Jewish or not does not matter. Because of the evil things he did in his life – no one can possibly argue that Adolf Hitler was a man to be admired by anyone.”
The school apologised to pupils and parents and in a letter on the school website, the principal said the incident had been used to educate pupils.
“St John’s College apologises unreservedly for the offence caused by this incident,” said Cameron.
Wendy Kahn of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies said they were satisfied by the manner in which the school had dealt with the incident.
{{When you’re trying to figure out if you are going to be able to make your relationship work out, you’ve got to establish love rules to follow, especially in a difficult relationship. }}
None of my relationships have been easy and it takes a lot of work to be with someone who might be opposite to you. It’s worth it though; you just have to make sure that you are paying attention to the love rules that each of you lay down. Are you ready to see how to make a difficult relationship work? Take a look below!
{{Respect Each Other}}
Respect is something that is huge – and I mean huge in any relationship, but it is especially huge in a difficult relationship. This should absolutely be the first of many love rules to follow in your relationship, especially if you are completely the opposite of each other.
Respect that neither of you are going into this relationship easily and appreciate the differences (which we’ll get into) that each of you have!
{{Work on Understanding}}
A difficult relationship is never easy to slip into, but if you work on understanding not just each other, but on understanding the entire relationship dynamic, it will make it better.
Lyndsie and I, over 7 years have finally figured out exactly what works and exactly what is hard for us to work through. Sure, we still have problems, but we’ve definitely worked out a lot of our issues through understanding each other better.
{{Know Boundaries}}
In a relationship that is not rainbows and sunshine all of the time, you’ve got to understand boundaries. They are going to be what saves your relationship and what makes sure that you don’t end up fighting constantly.
I didn’t know any boundaries when I first got into a relationship with Lyndsie and now? I understand when she’s in a bad mood, don’t constantly question it or don’t constantly try to come up with solutions for every problem.
{{Get The Differences}}
Remember that I said we’d get to the differences? Well, here we go! Differences are what make up any great relationship and they are truly what you should appreciate about each other – but they can be frustrating.
I can’t tell you how many times Lyndsie does something that I don’t understand at all … but after a while, I’ll appreciate it because it was different than the way I would do it. Appreciate the differences, don’t get frustrated by them.
{{Go into It Knowing It’s Hard}}
So many people slip into a relationship with their opposite type thinking that it is going to be easy – it isn’t. It is going to be hard and you’ve got to understand that.
You’ve got to realize that any relationship you get into is going to be worth fighting for – and while you might end up fighting a lot in the beginning, it’s all growing pains.
{{Don’t Take Each Other for Granted}}
The biggest problems in a lot of relationships is that you get comfortable and you just start to take for granted that your boy or girlfriend is going to stick around, no matter what.
You can’t expect your difficult relationship to improve unless you put in the work and nobody is going to stay in a relationship where they aren’t happy – keep that in mind!
{{Learn Quirks}}
Quirks, moods, reactions are all things that you’ve got to learn and understand whenever you are in a relationship like this.
You don’t want to say something that you find funny that your partner might take offense to, or poke fun at something that you think would be okay to poke fun at but they get upset about it. Learn the reactions, the quirks and all of their moods!
So, there you have it! Just a few of the different relationship love rules to follow if you are in a difficult relationship.
It’s hard to be in a relationship like this – I know, but trust me when I tell you, it’s utterly worth it. So, what type of relationship are you in now? Could you use any of these rules?
