LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Sixteen schoolchildren and a teacher burned to death in eastern Pakistan early Saturday when a short-circuit near a leaking gas tank caused their minibus to burst into flames, police said.
Police officerIjaz Ahmad said five children were also injured, three of whom were listed in critical condition, in the blaze in Gujrat about 200 kilometers (120 miles) northwest of the capital, Islamabad. The children were aged between 6 and 12, he said.
Earlier, police had blamed an exploding natural gas cylinder for the incident. The bus was powered with both types of fuel.
TV footage showed the charred minibus and victims of the relatives crying outside a hospital.
A schoolgirl told Pakistan‘s Geo news channel that the driver escaped when the vehicle went up in flames. Authorities said they were trying to track him down and arrest him.
Ahmad said the driver could have saved many lives. “We have been told that he fled from there when the children were crying for help,” the officer said.
In a statement, President Asif Ali Zardari expressed “deep shock” over the incident and directed authorities to provide the best medical care to the injured children.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — A pair of suspected militant attacks killed nine people in two different areas of northwest Pakistan on Friday, police said.
In the deadlier of the two attacks, suspected militants armed with heavy weapons attacked a police convoy in Mattani, 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of the main northwest city of Peshawar, killing six policemen and wounding seven others, said senior police officerShafiullah Khan.
In the second attack, a suicide bomber walked up to a vehicle owned by an Afghan religious leader in Peshawar and set off his explosives, killing three people, said police officer Riaz Ali Shah. The leader, Haji Hayatullah, was not harmed in the attack because he was in a nearby mosque attending Friday prayers. Hayatullah’s driver and guard were killed, said Shah.
A passerby was also killed and two others were wounded, said Peshawar police chief Liaquat Ali Khan.
There are more than 1 million refugees in Pakistan from neighboring Afghanistan.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Some drugs taken to protect the heart may increase the risk of developing type-2 diabetes, according to researchers in Canada.
Their study of 1.5 million people, in the British Medical Journal, suggested powerful statins could increase the risk by 22% compared with weaker drugs.
Atorvastatin was linked to one extra case of diabetes for every 160 patients treated.
Experts said the benefits of statins still outweighed any risks.
Statins are a group of commonly prescribed drugs that lower the levels of bad cholesterol in the blood. This reduces the chances of a heart attack or stroke.
All drugs come with side-effects, but a team of researchers from hospitals in Toronto said there had been controversy around the risk of diabetes with different statins.
They looked at medical records of 1.5 million people over the age of 66 and compared the incidence of diabetes between people taking different statins.
Their report said: “We found that patients treated with atorvastatin, rosuvastatin, or simvastatin were at increased risk of new onset diabetes compared with those treated with pravastatin.
“Clinicians should considers this risk when they are contemplating statin treatment for individual patients.
“Preferential use of pravastatin… might be warranted.”
Benefit
Commenting on the study, Prof Risto Huupponen and Prof Jorma Viikari, from the University of Turku, in Finland, said: “The overall benefit of statins still clearly outweighs the potential risk of diabetes.”
However, they said, the different statins should be targeted at the right patients.
They said: “The most potent statins, at least in higher doses, should preferably be reserved for patients who do not respond to low-potency treatment, but have a high total risk of cardiovascular disease.”
Maureen Talbot, from the British Heart Foundation, said: “Statins are taken safely by millions in the UK and protect those at high risk of developing coronary heart disease.
“Although this study suggests an increased risk of older people developing diabetes when taking certain statins, other risk factors like being overweight, family history and ethnicity may have played their part.
“There are benefits and risks with all medicines so if you’re worried, discuss your concerns with your GP.”
The men are now known as Michael Adebolajo, left, and Michael Adebowale
Preventing the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby outside Woolwich Barracks would have been “incredibly hard”, an ex-senior intelligence officer has said.
The UK’s security services face a Commons inquiry after it was confirmed the two men arrested over his murder were known to MI5 for eight years
They are now known to be Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale.
Ex-MI6 counter-terrorism head Richard Barrett said little can be done to stop attacks that are not carefully planned.
His warning came as video footage, obtained by the Daily Mirror, emerged showing the moment police shot Mr Adebolajo, 28, originally of Romford, Essex, and Mr Adebowale, 22, of Greenwich, south-east London.
It shows one of the men charge at police sitting in a patrol car. He drops a knife as he is shot and falls to the ground.
Further arrests
The other man is shown aiming a gun at officers as he runs in a different direction. Police are heard firing eight shots in total at the two men.
Both the men remain under armed guard in separate London hospitals in stable conditions with non-life-threatening injuries.
Detectives are also interviewing a man and a woman at a south London police station after they were arrested on Thursday night on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.
Former MI6 officer Richard Barrett told BBC Two’s Newsnight programme he thought the two suspects “probably didn’t have any intention to commit a crime like this until relatively recently”.
“I assume that these people are probably coming out of a small group without, necessarily, any overseas connections or any other broader connections in the United Kingdom which could come to the attention of the security services more than they did,” he said.
“When does a person who expresses radical views, who joins a radical group, flip over to over to be a violent extremist?
Video has emerged of suspect Michael Adebolajo at an Islamist protest in 2007 (Left, in white clothes)
“To find the signals, the red flags as it were, I think is enormously hard.”
While the security services must have had an indication “these guys were a problem in order to note their names”, it was “quite another thing to take invasive action to track their movements”, he added.
The BBC has uncovered its own footage of Mr Adebolajo taking part in an Islamist demonstration in April 2007 against the arrest of a man from Luton, holding a placard reading “Crusade Against Muslims”.
He is shown standing next to then-leader of the now banned al-Muhajiroun organisation, Anjem Choudary, who has said Mr Adebolajo went his own way in around 2010.
Shortly after killing Drummer Rigby on Wednesday, Mr Adebolajo, was filmed by a passer-by saying he carried out the attack because British soldiers killed Muslims every day.
Mr Choudary appeared on Newsnight on Thursday and said Mr Adebolajo had made comments that “I think not many Muslims can disagree with”.
The radical Islamist preacher was asked on several occasions by presenter Kirsty Wark whether he “abhorred” what had happened in Woolwich but he instead he was “shocked” by what had happened.
Anjem Choudary said he encountered one of the suspects at a number of Islamist demonstrations
He also said: “One man killed in the street does not equate to the hundreds and thousands and millions, in fact, who’ve been slaughtered by the British and American foreign policy.”
Meanwhile, thousands of members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community are expected to gather in London to offer prayers for the dead soldier and his family and to “express solidarity against extremism”.
National president Rafiq Hayat said: “We hope that the perpetrators of this crime, that is based on a twisted and warped ideology, are brought to justice.”
And Canon Philip Miller, who will lead prayers for Drummer Rigby in his home town of Middleton, Greater Manchester, on Friday morning said: “We feel for Lee, who’s lost his life with so much ahead of him and so much potential and so much of his life to live, a brave young man like that.
“So we feel for him but we also feel for Mum and Dad and the rest of the family and what they must be going through, and we can only imagine.”
1 of 4. IMF chief Christine Lagarde waves as she leaves after a hearing by French magistrates in Paris May 23, 2013. IMF chief Christine Lagarde was questioned in court by French magistrates on Thursday over her role in a 285-million-euro ($ 366 million) arbitration payment made to a supporter of former president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Credit: Reuters/John Schults
Thu May 23, 2013 4:07pm EDT
PARIS (Reuters) – IMF chief Christine Lagarde was questioned in court by French magistrates on Thursday over her role in a 285-million-euro ($ 366 million) arbitration payment made to a supporter of former president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Lagarde, in court the entire day, risks being placed under formal investigation when the hearing wraps up on Friday for her 2007 decision as Sarkozy’s finance minister to use arbitration to settle a court battle between the state and businessman Bernard Tapie.
Under French law, that step would mean there exists “serious or consistent evidence” pointing to probable implication of a suspect in a crime. It is one step closer to trial but a number of such investigations have been dropped without trial.
Such a move could prove uncomfortable for the International Monetary Fund, whose former head, Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn, quit in 2011 over a sex assault scandal, and for a woman rated the most influential in France by Slate magazine.
In Washington, the IMF reaffirmed its confidence in her.
“The board has been briefed on the matter a few times, including recently, and continues to express its confidence in the managing director’s ability to effectively carry out her duties,” IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said.
Lagarde smiled and waved at reporters crowded outside the court as she arrived in the morning and as she left at 9 p.m. (1900 GMT), some 13 hours later, with a breezy: “See you tomorrow.”
Her lawyer made no comment on the day’s proceedings. The decision on whether to place her under investigation or give her “supervised witness” status will be announced at the end of the hearing on Friday.
The case goes back to 1993 when Tapie, a colorful and often controversial character in the French business and sports world, sued the state for compensation after selling his stake in sports company Adidas to then state-owned bank Credit Lyonnais.
A one-time Socialist minister who later supported the conservative Sarkozy, Tapie said the bank had defrauded him after it resold the stake for a much higher sum. Credit Lyonnais, now part of Credit Agricole, has denied wrongdoing.
Lagarde is not accused of financially profiting herself from the payout and has denied doing anything wrong by opting for an arbitration process that enriched Tapie. With interest, the award amounted to 403 million euros.
However, a court specializing in cases involving ministers is targeting her for complicity in the misuse of funds because she overruled advisers to seek the settlement.
Her lawyer, Yves Repiquet, has told French media Lagarde merely approved the use of an arbitration procedure that had been decided by the state-owned holding company, Consortium de Realisation, set up to take over the debts and liabilities of Credit Lyonnais when it fell into difficulty in the early 1990s.
TAPIE UNRUFFLED
Sources close to the IMF board have said they are not worried by the affair and are confident Lagarde herself did not profit from it. But they added the board might review its position if judicial procedures took her away from her duties.
French government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said she supposed Lagarde would be asked to quit her post if put under investigation.
“Objectively, knowing the IMF and the way these institutions work, I would tend to think that if she were placed under investigation she would probably be asked to step down,” she told BFM television.
Tapie said on Thursday he was “delighted” the affair was being investigated. While earlier probes had found his settlement to be perfectly legal, further examination would show how justified he had been in seeking compensation, he said.
“If there had been anything untoward in the arbitration it would have come out a long time ago,” he told Europe 1 radio, adding: “None of these legal cases are to see if I am dishonest, they are to find out how much I was robbed of.”
Lagarde, who has worked to move the IMF on from the Strauss-Kahn scandal, has taken a firm yet pragmatic stance in the austerity-versus-growth debate as Europe struggles to pull itself out of a long economic slump.
Appointed in part for the negotiating skills she used in brokering Europe’s response to the 2008/09 global financial crisis, she has shown firmness in insisting on the need for nations to stick to budgetary rigor when possible.
Current Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici told Le Monde newspaper Lagarde retained the support of the French government, but said that it would appeal against the arbitration award if she was placed under formal investigation.
(Writing by Catherine Bremer; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Robin Pomeroy)
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s military says the soldier brutally murdered in a suspected terrorist attack was a popular drummer and machine gunner, a father, and a passionate fan of Manchester United.
The Ministry of Defense identified him Thursday as 25-year-old Lee Rigby, of 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.
It says he joined the army in 2006, and was posted in Cyprus, Afghanistan and Germany before becoming a recruiter, assisting with duties in the Tower of London.
Capt. Alan Williamson, the adjutant of the 2nd Fusiliers, calls Rigby “a cheeky and humorous man, always there with a joke to brighten the mood.”
He says the loss of Rigby “will be felt across the battalion, but this is nothing compared to how his family must be feeling.” Rigby had a 2-year-old son, Jack.
Manufacturing and export sectors have been key drivers of China economic growth in recent years
Global markets fell after weak Chinese data and worries that the US Federal Reserve may slow its monetary stimulus.
In Asia, the fall was led by Japan’s Nikkei index, which closed down 7.3%, having fallen as much as 10%.
European markets also reversed recent rises, with London, Frankfurt and Paris opening almost 2% lower.
It followed data showing a slowdown in Chinese manufacturing, and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s hint that Quantitative Easing efforts may be scaled back.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 2.5%, and South Korea’s Kospi lost 1.2%. Markets in Australia and Singapore also fell.
The China data showed that factory activity contracted for the first time in seventh months in May.
The preliminary HSBC Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for May fell to 49.6. A figure below 50 indicates a contraction.
Analysts said the figures suggest that the Chinese government’s target of achieving 7.5% growth this year may be missed.
“It’s no secret. The true picture is that China’s export sector is slowing down, and its manufacturing sector is also slowing down. That means the trade surplus is almost gone,” said Francis Lun, chief economist at GE Oriental Financial Group.
In April, the PMI had fallen to 50.6 from 50.9 in March, underlining that the economy’s pace of expansion was slowing down.
Investor sentiment had already soured on Wednesday after Mr Bernanke told a congressional committee that the central bank could scale back the pace of bond purchases later this year.
The purchases, known as Quantitative Easing, are designed to pump liquidity into the financial system to bring down borrowing rates for households and businesses, therefore shoring up the economy.
But some Fed officials have recently warned that continuing the asset purchases could lead to a spike in inflation.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has said the militant Lebanese Shia Islamist group Hezbollah and Iran are helping perpetuate President Bashar al-Assad’s “campaign of terror” in Syria.
Mr Kerry said thousands of Hezbollah fighters were contributing significantly to the violence.
He added that Iran was actively supporting Hezbollah’s involvement.
Dozens of Hezbollah militants are said to have been killed fighting alongside Syrian troops in Qusair since Sunday.
Government forces have launched an offensive to recapture the strategically important rebel-held town, which is close to both the city of Homs and the Lebanese border.
On Wednesday, rebel fighters said Qusair had come under bombardment by aircraft and heavy artillery for the fourth consecutive day.
An official from the office of the governor of Homs province told the Associated Press news agency that about 80% of the town was now in government hands. The rebels have denied that they have lost any ground.
The acting head of the main opposition alliance, the National Coalition, meanwhile called on rebel commanders across Syria to send reinforcements to Qusair, citing concerns over “foreign invaders”.
“Everyone who has weapons or ammunition should send them to Qusair and Homs to strengthen its resistance. Every bullet sent to Qusair and Homs will block the invasion that is trying to drag Syria back to the era of fear,” George Sabra said in a statement.
‘Right and duty’
Members of Hezbollah’s military wing are reported to have been fighting for month alongside the Syrian army and the National Defence Forces, a pro-government militia allegedly set up and trained by Iran, as they gradually advanced on Qusair and surrounded it.
Hezbollah has denied sending any fighters into Syria, insisting that Lebanese Shia living in Syria who are affiliated to the group have been defending themselves.
However in recent days Hezbollah has held several public funerals in Lebanon for fighters believed to have been killed fighting in Qusair. Video footage was broadcast by the group’s television channel, which said they had died while carrying out their “jihadist duty”.
Rebels and troops have fought for control of Qusair for more than a year
Speaking at a news conference in Amman on Wednesday after talks with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, Mr Kerry said the US believed Hezbollah had intervened “very significantly” in Qusair.
“There are several thousands of Hezbollah militia forces on the ground in Syria who are contributing to this violence,” he said.
“In addition to that, Iranians are on the ground, and Iran is actively helping to support Hezbollah.”
“Active military support to the Assad regime simply exacerbates the sectarian tensions, and it perpetuates the regime’s campaign of terror against its own people.”
Syria’s ambassador to Jordan, Bahjat Suleiman, told reporters in Amman that it was Hezbollah’s “right and duty to defend” the dozens of villages around Qusair inhabited by Lebanese nationals, but insisted the Syrian military did not require the group’s assistance.
‘Commitment to peace’
Mr Kerry is in Jordan for a “Friends of the Syrian People” meeting, which will also attended by officials from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, the UK, France, Germany and Italy.
They will prepare for an international conference expected to be held in Geneva next month to find a political solution to the Syrian conflict, based on the final communique of the UN-backed Action Group for Syria meeting in the Swiss city in June 2012.
On Wednesday, Mr Kerry warned the Syrian president that if he was not prepared to make “a commitment to find peace in his country”, the US and others would consider increasing backing for his opponents.
Without serious negotiations, Syria faced worse bloodshed, he added.
“Our understanding [is that] if Geneva 2 were not on the horizon, all we would be looking at is the continued tragic disintegration of the county that will go down further into more violence and more destruction.”
Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad later told the Russian news agency Itar-Tass that the government would decide soon whether to participate in the Geneva conference.
The UN says that more than 80,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Assad began in March 2011. There are 1.5 million refugees taking shelter in neighbouring countries and an estimated 4.25 million internally displaced people.
Eric Joyce had arrived at Edinburgh Airport on Sunday
Scots MP Eric Joyce has been arrested in connection with an alleged breach of the peace at Edinburgh Airport.
Mr Joyce is believed to have become involved in a row with airport staff while trying to retrieve his mobile phone, which he had left on a plane on Sunday. He was unable to tell staff which flight he had arrived on.
It is understood that police were then called.
The Falkirk MP is due to appear in court at a later date.
A Police Scotland spokesman said: “A 52-year-old man has been reported to the procurator fiscal in connection with an alleged breach of the peace, which happened at Edinburgh Airport on Sunday 19 May.
“He will appear in court at a later date.”
A spokesperson for Edinburgh Airport said: “We can confirm that an incident did occur on Sunday evening and an individual was arrested for being abusive and confrontational towards airport staff and police.
“Behaviour of this nature is something we have zero tolerance for at Edinburgh Airport and police officers will act accordingly if the safety of our passengers and employees is put at risk.”
