Tag: InternationalNews

{{Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who the Taliban tried to murder, is asking a graduate school not to name its institution after her.}}

Girls were afraid that attending the Malala Yousafzai Post Graduate College for Women in the Taliban-dominated Swat Valley would attract the attention of fighters like the ones who gunned down Malala and two other girls on a school bus in October, according to Kamran Rehman Khan, a top official in the Swat Valley.

The Saidu Sharif Post Graduate School briefly changed its name to recognize Malala’s brave campaign for girls’ education in Pakistan.

The Taliban are against girls being in the classroom and have threatened to kill anyone who defies them.

Several students told Khan that they respect Malala but are concerned about their safety, he said.

Malala called Khan Monday evening from her hospital room in England where she’s recovering from bullet wounds to her head and neck.

She wants the school to remove her name, but she wishes for people to continue to fight for girls to go to school, he said.

“I was so impressed that despite having threats against her life, she was talking about girls’ education in the region and against militants,” Khan said.

{{Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti handed in his resignation Friday to President Giorgio Napolitano, the Italian government press office said.}}

The move comes after Parliament approved a budget by a vote of 309-55, with five abstentions, said ANSA, the state-run news agency.

Monti will outline his plans Sunday but will not say until afterward whether he plans to run in elections expected to be held February 24, ANSA said, citing “sources.”

An economist and former European commissioner, Monti was appointed by Napolitano to fill former premier Silvio Berlusconi’s place after he resigned last year under pressure for failing to control Italy’s debt and a series of scandals.

Since then, international investors have displayed confidence in the country’s finances.

Italy’s borrowing costs have fallen this year on Monti’s efforts to bring down borrowing and the improved sentiment generated by the European Central Bank’s conditional scheme to buy bonds of struggling sovereigns.

{{On a day when global doomsday predictions failed to pan out, NASA had more good news for the Earth: An asteroid feared to be on a collision course with our planet no longer poses a threat.}}

Uncertainties about the orbit of the asteroid, known as 2011 AG5, previously allowed for a less than a 1% chance it would hit the Earth in February 2040, NASA said.

To narrow down the asteroid’s future course, NASA put out a call for more observation.

Astronomers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa took up the task and managed to observe the asteroid over several days in October.

“An analysis of the new data conducted by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shows that the risk of collision in 2040 has been eliminated,” NASA declared Friday.

The new observations, made with the Gemini 8-meter telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, reduce the orbit uncertainties by more than a factor of 60.

That means the Earth’s position in February 2040 is not in range of the asteroid’s possible future paths.

The asteroid, which is 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter, will get no closer to Earth than 890,000 kilometers (553,000 miles), or more than twice the distance to the moon, NASA said.

A collision with Earth would have released about 100 megatons of energy, several thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II, according to the Gemini Observatory.

Observing the asteroid wasn’t easy, said David Tholen, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.

The asteroid’s position was very close to the sun, so astronomers had to observe it when the sky was dark.

Tholen told CNN there was about a half-hour between when the asteroid got high enough in the sky for the telescope to point at it and before the sky became too light to observe it.

Because the astronomers were looking at the asteroid low in the sky, they were viewing it through a lot of atmosphere, which scattered some of the light and made the object fainter, he said.

“The second effect is the turbulence of the atmosphere makes things fainter,” Tholen said. “We had to keep trying over and over until we got one of those nights when the atmosphere was calm.”

Tholen and the team also discovered the asteroid is elongated, so that as it rotates, its brightness changes.

That was another challenge for the astronomers: Because they didn’t know the asteroid’s rotation period, they didn’t know when it would wax and wane, and when it would grow too faint to see.

“This object was changing its brightness by a factor of three or four — it was just enormously variable,” Tholen said.

“It was hit and miss depending on which night you observed it.”

Many predicted the end of the world would come Friday, the day on which a long phase in the ancient Mayan calendar came to an end. Some believe the day actually comes Sunday.

Modern-day Mayans say the end of the calendar phase doesn’t mean the end of the world — just the end of an era, and the start of a new one.

{{French police arrested two men who had gas masks and machetes in their car as they approached a mountain rumoured to be one of the few places where people will survive when the world supposedly ends on Friday.}}

Officials said they believed they were trying to test the security cordon thrown around the village and nearby mountain of Bugarach, where dozens of police were deployed to head off a potential influx of New Age fanatics and sightseers.

On Thursday police also arrested one man with a Taser electric shock device and another with a baseball bat near the village of 200 people, where journalists from across the world have congregated.

Police had wrongly anticipated a mass influx of visitors and blocked access to the village and the Pic de Bugarach, the mountain which some say will open on the last day and aliens will emerge with spaceships to save nearby humans.

Believers say the world will end on December 21, 2012, the end date of the ancient Mayan calendar, and they see Bugarach as one of a few sacred mountains sheltered from the cataclysm.

Above:{Police mugshots of Alexander Kinyua (left) and 37-year-old Ghanaian, Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie. Mr Kinyua is suspected of killing his Ghanian house-mate and eating parts of his body.}

{{A Kenyan man 22 years, accused of cannibalism apologised in a US court for carrying out a separate attack on a fellow student.}}

“My deepest apology and sympathies will not be able to cover up what happened,” Mr Alexander Kinyua said in pleading guilty, on Wednesday, but denied criminal responsibility in a beating that left his victim blind in one eye.

Judge Gale Rasin, presiding over a court in Baltimore, ordered Kinyua committed to a psychiatric hospital. He could eventually be released if a team of doctors and a judge deem Mr Kinyua to no longer be a menace to society.

“I don’t agree with the court system that he has a chance to be let go,” Mr Kinyua’s alleged victim Joshua Ceasar, 22, said outside the courtroom on Wednesday.

In ordering Mr Kinyua’s confinement, judge Rasin said: “The evidence is overwhelming that Mr Kinyua was suffering from a mental illness at the time of the offence,” according to the Sun’s account.

Prosecutors say they will now move ahead with a first-degree murder charge against Mr Kinyua stemming from the dismemberment of Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, a 37-year-old Ghanaian who had been living in the Kinyua family home in Maryland.

{{Iraqi President Jalal Talabani arrived in Germany on Thursday for further medical treatment after suffering a stroke, leaving Baghdad without an influential mediator able to bridge the country’s complex ethnic and sectarian rifts}}.

The ailing 79-year-old president was rushed to a hospital in the Iraqi capital late Monday because of what was described as a medical emergency.

Doctors have determined the president had a “very serious stroke,” and that he is showing signs of improvement.

“He is starting to regain his senses. He is able to feel pain, and this is a sign of progress,” Zebari said.

Talabani’s spokesman, Nasser al-Ani, said the president is able to move some of his limbs and communicate with simple signals, but is unable to speak.

The decision to move Talabani to Germany was made after his condition was stabilized and he began to show signs of improvement, according to Iraqi officials.