watches Palestinians question 'offers' leaked by al-Jazeera

we are enjoy Palestinians question 'offers' leaked by al-Jazeera
The Palestinian Authority has accused al-Jazeera TV of distortion, after it leaked documents purporting to show offers of major concessions to Israel.

Mr Qurei (R) is said to have proposed concessions over East Jerusalem

President Mahmoud Abbas said the leaks had deliberately confused Palestinian and Israeli negotiating positions.

The documents suggest the Palestinians agreed to Israel annexing all but one settlement in occupied East Jerusalem - an offer Israel apparently rejected.

The BBC has been unable to verify the documents independently.

Al-Jazeera says it has more than 1,600 confidential records of meetings, e-mails, and communications between Palestinian, Israeli and US leaders covering the years 2000-2010.

The Palestinians are reported to have proposed an international committee to take over Islamic and Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem, and limiting the number of returning refugees to 100,000 over 10 years.

The papers are believed to have originated from the Palestinian side.

Mr Abbas, who is due to hold talks on the peace process on Monday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, said negotiations had been carried out openly, and his fellow Arab leaders were aware of their contents.
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Exited French transport slowed by strike

French transport slowed by strike


Sarkozy's pension reform has triggered a showdown with unions that sunk a previous effort 15 years ago [REUTERS]
French workers are staging a one-day strike against the government's plans to raise the retirement age, in what is the fourth major action against the reforms in a month.

Rail, sea port and flight workers went on strike across the country on Tuesday, while the Paris metro was slowed to a minimum.

Up to half the flights at Orly Airport and a third of flights from Charles de Gaulle-Roissy in Paris are expected to be cancelled, although airlines had already re-booked many passengers ahead of the strike.

The action, which comes a day after the French senate voted to raised the country's official minimum retirement age from 60 to 62, is threatening to turn into a showdown between the unions and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.

This time, the unions have threatened to stretch Tuesday's strikes past the usual 24-hours.

High turnout expected

The unions have called nationwide protest marches later in the day, and say they are expecting millions of people to turnout.

Three prior protests have attracted crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands but have not halted Sarkozy's pension reform plan.

"The government is taking the risk of a radicalisation of the movement," Francois Chereque, head of the powerful CFDT union, said. "There will be a very big turnout today."

Sarkozy faces re-election in 2012, and his opinion poll ratings are at all-time lows. David Assouline, an opposition leader, accused Sarkozy of trying to provoke a "showdown" and bring unions "to their knees".

Monday vote, which came in at a narrow The 174 to 159, shut the door on the most controversial aspect of the reform package, which Sarkozy's administration hopes to pass by the end of the month.

The senate also voted to raise the minimum age to receive a full state pension from 65 to 67.

Strike will halt train and air transportation

While two-thirds of the high-speed TGV trains were expected to be cancelled, those running between Paris and London are set to operate normally.

The oil industry and education workers have also joined in the strike.

Employees at France's biggest oil port, Fos-Lavera, have now halted work for 15 straight days, and the education ministry predicted that more than a fourth of the country's elementary and pre-kindergarten teachers would strike on Tuesday.

One poll of around 1,000 people published in the newspaper Le Parisien found that 69 per cent of the respondents supported the new strike, while 61 per cent supported a "continuous and lasting" one.

Like other European governments looking at austerity measures, France faces a yawning deficit and a need to improve its finances if it hopes to retain a AAA credit rating, enabling the country to borrow money at a lower interest rate.

The reform bill has already been approved in its entirety by the lower house of France's parliament, the National Assembly. The senate is now voting on it piece by piece.
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Watch Hungarian factory sorry for those killed by sludge

Hungarian factory sorry for those killed by sludge


Associated Press Writer= KOLONTAR, Hungary (AP) — The owners of the metals plant whose reservoir burst, flooding several towns in western Hungary with caustic red sludge, expressed their condolences Sunday to the families of the seven people killed, as well as to those injured — and said they were sorry for not having done so sooner.

MAL Rt., which owns the alumina plant in Ajka, also said it was willing to pay compensation "in proportion to its responsibility" for the damage caused by the deluge.

But the trouble may not be over.

With the northwest corner of the storage pool still showing a hole 50 meters (yards) wide where the mix of mud and water broke through last week, officials said the collapse of at least one of the breached walls was inevitable. That, they said, would probably unleash a new deluge of toxic matter that could ooze a half-mile (1 kilometer) to the north, wreaking further havoc.

That would flood parts of the town nearest the plant — one of those already hit by the industrial waste Oct. 4 — but stop short of the next town to the north.

Environmental State Secretary Zoltan Illes said that recently discovered cracks on the northern wall of the reservoir at the alumina plant have temporarily stopped widening because of favorable weather conditions but will continue to expand, especially at night.

Disaster agency spokesman Tibor Dobson said engineers didn't detect any new cracks overnight Saturday, and the older cracks were being repaired, but it was too soon to consider lowering the state of alert.

Protective walls were being built around the reservoir's damaged area to hold back further spills. And a 2,000-foot- (620-meter-) long dam that will be between 4 and 5 meters (yards) high was under construction to save the areas of the town of Kolontar not directly hit by last week's toxic flood.

"I would describe the situation as hopeful, but nothing has really changed," Dobson told The Associated Press. "The wall to protect Kolontar is planned to be finished by tonight, but it will likely be several days before residents may be able to move back."

Nearly all of Kolontar's 800 residents were evacuated Saturday, when Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the north wall of the massive storage pool — which is 24.7 acres (10 hectares) in size — was "very likely" to collapse because cracks that had appeared at several points.

The roughly 6,000 residents of neighboring Devecser, just north of Kolontar, were told by police Saturday to pack a single bag and get ready to leave at a moment's notice.

"This hasn't changed," Dobson said. "We are still on guard in case of any more spills."

Illes said that, since it would be impossible to transfer the 2.5 million cubic meters (568 million gallons) of red sludge still in the damaged reservoir anywhere else, he had set a 2-month deadline for closing up the huge opening.

"The hole is 50 meters (yards) wide and 23 meters high," Illes said. "The job, including pouring enough concrete to raise three 10-story buildings, will have to be done from the air. This is unprecedented."

Red sludge is a byproduct of the refining of bauxite into alumina, the basic material for manufacturing aluminum. Treated sludge is often stored in ponds where the water eventually evaporates, leaving behind a largely safe red clay. Industry experts say the sludge in Hungary appears to have been treated insufficiently, if at all, meaning it remained highly caustic.

Illes, commenting to reporters during a tour of the affected villages and the damaged reservoir, confirmed that the red sludge stored in Hungarian reservoirs had not been treated to reduce its alkalinity.

A five-member European civil protection team will start work in Hungary, helping to assess and advise on the impact of the sludge on the environment, in particular on agricultural land, surface and underground water supplies, and the flora and fauna. The team will also anticipate risks and suggest solutions about how to restore nature as well as the agricultural and urban land affected.

"The quick selection of this team ... clearly shows that European solidarity is working," Kristalina Georgieva, the EU crisis response commissioner, said Sunday.

Last week, the sludge flooded three villages in less than an hour, burning people and animals. At least seven people were killed and at least 120 were injured. Several of those who were hospitalized were in serious condition. Around 184 million gallons (700,000 cubic meters) of the caustic red sludge was released.

The sludge devastated creeks and rivers near the spill site and entered the Danube River on Thursday, moving downstream toward Croatia, Serbia and Romania. But the volume of water in the Danube appeared to be blunting the sludge's immediate impact.

Illes said that neutralizing chemicals poured into primary and secondary tributaries of the Danube, as well as efforts to remove as much red sludge as possible from the waterways, was able to prevent ecological damage to Europe's second-longest river.

In Romania, local authorities were testing the water Sunday every four hours in the village of Bazias where the Danube enters Romania from Serbia, and will continue to carry out tests all this week, said Adrian Draghici, director of Romanian water for Mehedinti county.

Romanian fishermen sailed out into the Danube and villagers fished on the banks of the river for pike, which is plentiful in the Danube. They seemed unperturbed by any potential hazards.

But local authorities warned residents about letting animals drink from the Danube and urged them to be careful about fishing.

MAL Rt., the company that owns the factory, is under investigation. Hungarian police have seized company documents, and the National Investigation Office is looking into whether on-the-job carelessness was a factor in the disaster.

State Secretary Illes said the fines accumulated so far by MAL because of the damage caused to waterways and the pollution spread by the flood totaled at least 19.2 billion forints ($97.3 million).

---

Associated Press writer Alison Mutler in Bucharest, Romania and Robert Wielaard in Brussels contributed to this report.

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Watches Dutch queen OKs government backed by Geert Wilders

Dutch queen OKs government backed by Geert Wilders
Dutch Queen Beatrix has asked the leader of the Liberal VVD party to form a cabinet backed by the party of anti-Islamist populist Geert Wilders.

Party leaders, from left, Geert Wilders, Mark Rutte and Maxime Verhagen, have reached agreement
Mark Rutte will now head a centre-right coalition with the Christian Democrats (CDA).

The minority cabinet will have support of Mr Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV), which will remain outside the government.

The government says it plans to ban the full Islamic veil in the Netherlands.

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Dutch coalition with Wilders near
Dutch veil ban in coalition deal
Dutch face 3.2bn euro budget cut
It also wants to cut the budget by 18bn euros ($24bn; £15bn) by 2015, imposes curbs on immigration and increase the number of police officers.

The Liberals (VVD) and CDA hold 52 seats in the 150-member parliament and will have to rely on the PVV's 24 MPs to get legislation passed.

The coalition deal has angered some CDA MPs who do not want to work with Mr Wilders.

Earlier this week, he went on trial in Amsterdam on Monday on charges of inciting hatred with his film Fitna (Division).

The film juxtaposes the Muslim holy book, the Koran, with the 9/11 attacks in which nearly 3,000 people in the US were killed in 2001.

The Netherlands has been run by a caretaker government since February when a coalition led by the CDA's former leader, Jan Peter Balkenende, collapsed after a row over military involvement in Afghanistan.

June's general election delivered a surge of support for the Freedom Party, which won the third biggest share of seats in parliament.
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Enjoy UN investigates claims of mass rape by DR Congo rebels

UN investigates claims of mass rape by DR Congo rebels
The United Nations is investigating claims that rebel fighters raped more that 150 women and baby boys in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Thousands of women are raped each year in DR Congo, the UN says
The attacks happened over four days within miles of a UN base, a US aid worker and a Congolese doctor said.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon is sending two top aides to the country to help investigate the alleged assaults in the country's volatile eastern region.

Mr Ban also urged the Congolese government to investigate the attacks.

Aid workers and UN representatives knew that rebels had occupied Luvungi town and surrounding villages in eastern DR Congo the day after the attack began on 30 July, the International Medical Corps (IMC) said on Tuesday.

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The secretary-general is outraged by the rape and assault”

Ban Ki-moon
UN Secretary-General
They could not get into the town until the rebels left, said the IMC's Will Cragin.

According to reports, the rebels gang-raped nearly 200 women and some baby boys over four days before leaving.

The region lies approximately 10 miles (16km) from a UN peacekeepers' base.

Mr Ban is sending Atul Khare, assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping, immediately to DR Congo to help investigate, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

He also ordered his special representative for sexual violence in conflict, Margot Wallstrom, to take charge of the UN's response to the attacks.

A UN joint human rights team confirmed allegations of the rape of at least 154 women by fighters from the Rwandan FDLR militia and Congolese Mai-Mai rebels in the village of Bunangiri, Mr Nesirky said.

"The secretary-general is outraged by the rape and assault. This is another grave example of both the level of sexual violence and the insecurity that continue to plague Congo," he told the Associated Press.

'World rape capital'
The victims are receiving medical and psychological care.

Ms Wallstrom condemned the rapes. She said: "It should be noted that this incident represents a very extreme case in terms of its scale and the level of organisation of the attacks.

The "terrible incident" confirmed her findings during a recent visit to Congo of the "widespread and systematic nature of rape and other human rights violations."

DR Congo has a shocking reputation for sexual violence. In April, a senior UN official said it was "the rape capital of the world".

A report by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative showed that 60% of rape victims in South Kivu province had been gang-raped by armed men.

More than than half of the assaults took place in the victims' homes, the report said, and an increasing number of attacks were being carried out by civilians.

More than 8,000 women were raped during fighting in 2009, the UN says.

Eastern DR Congo is still plagued by army and militia violence despite the end of the country's five-year war in 2003.

UN peacekeeping troops have been backing efforts to defeat the FDLR, whose leaders are linked to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and who are operating in eastern DR Congo.
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Reports of mass rape by DRC rebels

Enjoy Reports of mass rape by DRC rebels

The UN says at least 5,400 women in the DRC are believed to have been raped in 2009 alone [
Almost 200 women have been raped by rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), during a four-day seizure of a town, aid groups have said.

A US aid worker and a Congolese doctor told the Associated Press on Monday that the attacks occurred within miles of a UN peacekeepers' base

Will Cragin of the International Medical Corps (IMC) said that aid and UN workers knew fighters from Rwandan rebel FDLR group and Congolese Mai-Mai rebels had occupied Luvungi town and surrounding villages the day after the attack began on July 30.

Three weeks later, the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo issued no statement about the attacks and said on Monday that it was still investigating.

Cragin also told the Associated Press that his organisation was only able to get into the town, which he said is about 16km from a UN military camp, after rebels withdrew on their own on August 4.

Systematic rape

"There was no fighting and no deaths, Cragin said, just "lots of pillaging and the systematic raping of women".

Luvungi is a farming centre on the main road between Goma, the eastern
provincial capital, and the major mining town of Walikale.

MONUC was based in the DRC since 1999 to help the government gain control of the east
Four young boys were also raped, according to Kasimbo Charles Kacha, the district medical chief.

UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said the peacekeeping mission has a military operating base in Kibua, about 30km east of the village, but villagers were prevented from reaching the nearest communication point as FDLR fighters blocked the road.

Civil society leader Charles Masudi Kisa said there were only about 25 peacekeepers and that they did what they could against some 200 to 400 rebels who occupied the town of about 2,200 people and five nearby villages.

"When the peacekeepers approached a village, the rebels would run into the forest, but then the Blue Helmets had to move on to another area, and the rebels would just return," Masudi said.

"During the attack [the rebels] looted [the] population's houses and raped several women in Luvungi and surrounding areas," Stefania Trassari, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said
on Monday.

"International Medical Corps (IMC) reported that FDLR systematically raped the population during its four-day stay in Luvungi and surrounding areas. A total of 179 cases of sexual violence were reported," Trassari said, adding all of the cases
were of rape against women.

Harrowing accounts

The IMC said it was treating the victims.

"Nearly all reported rapes were described as having been perpetrated by two-to-six armed men, often taking place in front of the women's children and husbands," it said in a statement.

The United Nations has withdrawn 1,700 peacekeepers in recent months in response to demands from DRC government to end the mission next year, but still supports operations against several armed groups in the country's east.

Roger Meece, the new head of the UN mission called MONUSCO - which replaced predecessor MONUC - said last week that the rebels were still a huge threat to the population and the UN would keep trying to wipe them out.

Margot Wallstrom, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, said in April the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from the country would make the struggle against endemic rape "a lot more difficult".

Accurate figures for sexual violence are hard to come by as many rapes are unreported but according to the UN, at least 5,400 women reported being raped in neighbouring South Kivu province in the first nine months of 2009 alone.

MONUC had been in the former Belgian colony since 1999 to help the government of the DRC as it struggles to re-establish state control over the vast central African nation.

A war from 1998-2003 and the ensuing humanitarian disaster have killed an estimated 5.4 million people in the country.
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Spanish aid workers freed by Al Qaeda in Mali

Enjoy Spanish aid workers freed by Al Qaeda in Mali



MADRID (AFP) - Two Spanish aid workers held hostage for the past nine months by Al Qaeda's North African branch have been freed in Mali, the Spanish government announced Monday.

"Albert Vilalta and Roque Pasqual are free. They have been freed after spending 268 days in the hands of their kidnappers," Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said in a brief televised statement.

The release is "very good news" and "puts an end to a terrorist action which should never have happened", Zapatero said.

Vilalta, 35, and Pascual, 50, who worked for Catalan aid group Accio Solidaria, were kidnapped north of the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott on November 29, along with a third Spaniard, 39-year-old Alicia Gamez, who was released in March.

They were handed over to the North African branch of Osama Bin Laden's terror network, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), who held them in Mali.

Their release follows the August 16 transfer from Mauritania to Mali of the kidnap mastermind, Malian national Omar Sid'Ahmed Ould Hamma, who had been jailed for 12 years by a Mauritanian court.

Hamma has strong ties to AQIM, although not a member of the group himself.

Spanish dailies El Mundo and ABC both reported on Monday that their release was the result of Hamma's transfer and a payment by the Spanish government which El Mundo put at 3.8 million euros ($4.8 million) and ABC at between 5 million and 10 million.

Zapatero made no mention of any ransom in his statement.

"It has been nine months of suffering for them and their families, days of concern and activity by the government, which stepped up the activities of its political, diplomatic and intelligence services to secure their release," he said.

The prime minister "thanked the various governments for their cooperation, especially the governments in the zone in which the kidnapping happened”.

He said the two are to arrive in Barcelona late on Monday on a special flight accompanied by close relatives and Secretary of State for Cooperation Soraya Rodriguez.

A security official in the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou said a helicopter carrying the two freed men had been due there at around 2:00pm (1400 GMT) but "their arrival has been delayed because of a refuelling" stop.

A Malian government minister said the two men were escorted via a specially secured route out of Mali.

"Mali followed the release of the hostages minute by minute, by opening a humanitarian corridor to secure the success of the operation," said the minister who requested anonymity.

He did not say where this route was or where the hostages were.

Mauritania has accused Mali of being soft on AQIM after it released four prisoners in exchange for French hostage Pierre Camatte in February.

The pair were being held by a cell led by Algeria's Mokhtar Belmokhtar, nicknamed "Belawar", who paid Hamma to kidnap them.

While Belmokhtar is considered more a businessman than a religious fanatic, he is believed to be under pressure from a radical branch of AQIM led by another Algerian, Abdelhamid Abou Zeid.

Zeid has overseen the deaths of two Western hostages, Briton Edwin Dyer and Frenchman Michel Germaneau. The latter was killed after a Franco-Mauritanian raid in an attempt to find him, in which seven of Zeid's men were killed.

He is believed to have been demanding the execution of the Spaniards in retaliation for the July 22 military operation.
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Fate of Universe revealed by galactic lens

The huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 acted as a cosmic magnifying glass
Enjoy Fate of Universe revealed by galactic lens

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever.

Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos.

Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe.

Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding.

It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say.

The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is published in the journal Science.

Dark energy makes up three-quarters of our Universe but is totally invisible. We only know it exists because of its effect on the expansion of the Universe.

To work out how dark energy is spread through space, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the way that light from distant stars was distorted around Abell 1689, a nearby cluster of galaxies.

Abell 1689, found in the constellation of Virgo, is one of the biggest galactic clusters known to science.

Light bends around massive galaxy clusters, allowing distant objects to be seen
Because of its huge mass, the cluster acts as a cosmic magnifying glass, causing light to bend around it.

The way in which light is distorted by this cosmic lens depends on three factors: how far away the distant object is; the mass of Abell 1689; and the distribution of dark energy.

The astronomers were able to measure the first two variables using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, enabling them to calculate this crucial third factor.

Cold comfort
Knowing the distribution of dark energy tells astronomers that the Universe will continue to get bigger indefinitely.

Eventually it will become a cold, dead wasteland with a temperature approaching what scientists term "absolute zero".

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University, a leading cosmologist and co-author of this study, said that the findings finally proved "exactly what the fate of the Universe will be".
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music industry makes Brazil: how to make a profit by giving music away

watches Brazil: how to make a profit by giving music away
BELEM, Brazil — On the poor outskirts of Belem, the club Mansao de Forro was starting to fill up by midnight on a swelteringly humid Thursday night. Girls in tight jeans and heels sipped drinks from plastic cups while boys in long shorts circled around them.

As the hit "Amor Virtual" — Virtual Love — began to play, a dark-haired boy in blue flowery shorts spun around a tall, elegant blonde girl while her friends watched, shaking their hips. The sound of "tecno-brega," Belem’s indigenous computer pop, never fails to get the dance-floor moving. “I like it because you can dance to it,” said Jessica dos Santos, 18, a waitress. “All my friends like it.”

"Tecno-brega," literally cheesy techno, is a brash mixture of tinny electronic beats and shrill, sugary vocals. Produced locally, it has developed a unique business model. In tecno-brega, music is given away for free.

All over the remote Amazonian state of Para, from speakers strung from lamp posts in tiny villages to booming Belem car stereos, you will hear little else. “This is our sound, our rhythm,” said Jose Roberto, a computer programmer for the Brazilian Air Force who runs Belem’s bregapop website — tecno-brega’s biggest portal. “It is its own universe. That’s why I wanted to spread

Tecno-brega artists distribute their music for free via DJs, street vendors and the internet, hoping to build a reputation and gain lucrative live shows. In Brazil, pirated Hollywood DVDs and CDs by major artists are openly sold on the streets. In tecno-brega, there are no official releases — groups make and produce their own CDs. “If you don’t have an official CD,” observed Roberto, “then what is piracy?”

The model of free music distribution, which started with tecno-brega in Belem, has now spread to other "ghetto" music forms like Rio Funk.

The sound began around 2000, evolving out of an earlier local music style called "brega," or cheesy. Prompted by cheap computer technology, producers began mixing romantic Brazilian brega pop with electronic music and rhythms like reggaeton and reggae from the nearby Caribbean. Its pioneers were the group Calypso — judged the most listened-to band in Brazil in a 2007 survey —who pull in crowd of 30,000-plus for live shows.

“The crisis in the music industry is widely talked about,” said Ronaldo Lemos, from the respected Brazilian research institute Fundacao Getulio Vargas — one of the authors of an extensive 2008 study on tecno-brega’s unique industry and business model. In Brazil alone, CD sales fell from 94 million in 2000 to 52.9 million in 2005. “Tecno-brega is an industry that makes millions, but it is a completely different model of business,” said Lemos. “It doesn’t see technology as an enemy but as an opportunity.”
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