Iraq ( Iraqi leaders wife and family " killed and beheaded " )

SAMARRA, Iraq: Heavily-armed militants attacked the home of an anti-Qaeda militiaman north of Baghdad Sunday, killing and decapitating his wife and two sons and killing another person in a brutal pre-dawn assault.

The militia leader, Abu Salim, was not in the house at the time of the attack, which involved more than a dozen vehicles and fighters armed with heavy machine guns and other weapons and also left two of his young sons wounded.
Fighters attacked the militia leader’s house in Jilam, a suburb of the predominantly Sunni city of Samarra, at around midnight on Saturday, and killed Abu Salim’s wife, two sons and another woman, a police colonel and another officer said. They then decapitated his wife and two sons, and set off explosives around the house, injuring two other sons, aged four and five.
Policemen at a nearby checkpoint attempted to repel the assault, the officers said, but were unsuccessful and fled the scene when they ran out of ammunition and reinforcements that they had radioed for failed to arrive.
Abu Salim is the leader in Jilam of the Sahwa, or Awakening, a collection of mostly-Sunni tribal militias that from late-2006 onwards sided with US forces against their co-religionists in Al-Qaeda, helping turn the tide of Iraq’s insurgency.
But as a result, they are regarded by militants as traitors, and are regularly targeted in attacks.
In the Baghdad area on Sunday, meanwhile, a bombing and two shootings killed three people, security and medical officials said.
The latest bloodshed came a day after five car bombs were set off in commercial areas of the Iraqi capital, killing 15 people and wounding more than 50 others.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the bloodshed, but Sunni militants, including those linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), are often blamed for carrying out coordinated mass-casualty bombings.
Iraq is grappling with its worst prolonged period of violence since it emerged from a bloody sectarian war that left tens of thousands dead in 2006-07.
More than 250 people have been killed already this month, according to an AFP tally.
Analysts and diplomats have urged the government to reach out to the Sunni community, who allege they are mistreated by the government and security forces.
But with elections looming on April 30, political leaders have been loath to be seen to compromise.

Bangladesh ( senior opposition leader sent to jail )

DHAKA: A Bangladesh court sent the country’s second most senior opposition leader to jail on Sunday, a prosecutor said, a move set to trigger renewed protests in the politically volatile nation.
The court in Dhaka denied bail to Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, secretary-general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), who is charged with murder during violence in the run-up to a controversial general election in January.
“The metropolitan magistrate rejected bail for Alamgir and two other BNP officials and sent them to jail,” prosecutor Abdullah Abu told AFP.
The detention comes amid a government crackdown on the BNP and its 18 smaller allies, all of whom boycotted the violence-plagued election and allowed the ruling Awami League to win an absolute majority.
The BNP, which was blamed for much of the pre-poll violence that left hundreds dead, has announced nationwide demonstrations for Monday to protest at the court’s decision.
“These are false, fabricated and politically motivated cases. They are part of the government’s ongoing crackdown on the opposition,” said BNP spokesman Rizvi Ahmed.
Alamgir and thousands of other BNP officials and supporters were detained for months before the elections after being charged with various offences.

Mexico ( Torture or "water board video " ) Mexican police

China ( 5 people killed "stabbed over food stall at market " )

Five people were stabbed to death Friday morning at a market in the capital of Hunan Province in central China. Local media report that several Uighur “naan peddlers”suddenly went on a knifing rampage after a disagreement among food stall owners escalated into violence.

Police shot dead one of the knife-wielding assailants and arrested another, the AP reports.

The killings recalled a Chinese massacre from earlier this month when 29 people were knifed to death — and another 140 injured — at a train station in southern China. Authorities quickly pinned the “terrorist attack” on “Xinjiang separatist forces.” Xinjiang is a far northwestern province of China populated by the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group.

Early Friday morning it wasn’t clear whether the attack was an act of terror. The South China Morning Post reported that the assailants owned a local baked naan shop, and at 10 a.m. an argument they had with several local residents ignited.

Xinhua says five attackers slashed passersby. Early photos uploaded to the Chinese social media website Weibo show several bodies laying in the middle of the street or on stairs, soaked in blood. Another shows a mustachioed man in handcuffs. The authenticity of the photographs could not be immediately confirmed.

One of the dead, AP reports, was an elderly vendor and another man who “was slashed and stabbed repeatedly as he lay bleeding on the ground.”

This most recent attack is likely to exacerbate tension in a nation already rattled by the knife attacks two weeks ago. Unrest in Xinjiang has killed at least 100 people last year, and Beijing has moved to clamp down on the ethnic group, which has oftenopposed the cultural and religious restrictions shackling them.

Pakistan ( Taliban kill 19 people on Friday )

PESHAWSAR/QUETTA: Two separate bomb attacks targeting security forces in Pakistan killed 19 people on Friday, officials said, the latest violence to hit peace talks between the government and Taleban militants. 


The suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a police vehicle killing people including a woman and a child, police said.
A suicide attack in the suburbs of the northwestern city of Peshawar, close to the lawless tribal areas that are a haven for Taleban and other militants, was followed a few hours later by a bombing in the southwestern city of Quetta.
The attacks took place as the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tries to engage Pakistani Taleban militants in talks to hammer out a permanent cease-fire agreement and end years of violence.
A series of attacks and counter-attacks by insurgents and government forces has dampened expectations that peace talks could ever yield any result.
In Peshawar, police chief Faisal Kamran said the target of the attack was an armored personnel carrier. 
In Quetta, “ten people were killed and 31 injured. Around eight are in critical condition,” the city police chief Abdul Razzaq Cheema told AFP, adding that eight to 10 kilos of explosives were used in the bomb.
Doctor Rashid Jamal at the government-run civil hospital in Quetta confirmed the number of dead and wounded.
The city has been hit by numerous attacks in recent years, including two devastating bombings early last year targeting minority Shiite Muslims that killed nearly 180 people.
The latest armed insurgency rose up in 2004 and separatist groups still regularly attack Pakistani forces.
Rights groups accuse the military and intelligence agencies of kidnapping and killing suspected Baluch rebels before leaving their bodies by the roadside. Friday’s attack was the deadliest attack to hit the province since Jan. 22, when a bomb targeting a bus carrying people returning from Iran killed 24 people.
The militant outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), regarded as the most extreme terror group in Pakistan and accused of killing hundreds of people since its emergence in the 1990s, claimed responsibility for that attack. No one claimed responsibility for Friday’s attacks. 
The Taleban leadership, which seems keen to hold the talks, has condemned previous attacks, distancing itself from the violence.
This has spurred speculation that the central command was not in control of the many splinter groups operating in the country, and reaching a peace deal with one of them would not stop the violence.
“The police were deployed in the armored personnel carrier to provide security during Friday prayers outside mosques when it came under attack,” he said. “The policemen luckily remained safe but innocent people were killed and injured.”
Jamil Shah, a spokesman for the city’s biggest hospital, said at least 30 were injured. Another blast on Friday in the city of Quetta killed at least five people, but there were no immediate details, Pakistani television reported.

BAGHDAD ( Bombings in Baghdad on Friday killed 7 )

BAGHDAD: Bombings in and around Baghdad on Friday, including blasts near two markets, killed seven people, the latest in a year-long surge in violence that authorities have failed to quell.
The bloodshed, at its highest level since 2008, came a day after a suicide car bomb went off in the middle of a wedding party convoy in the western town of Rawa, killing 15 people, including women and children.


The unrest, which comes barely six weeks before parliamentary elections, is driven principally by widespread discontent among Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority and by the civil war in neighboring Syria.
A car bomb Friday at a market in Baghdad’s Shuala killed three people, while another blast near a market in Rashid left one dead, security and medical officials said.
Bombings in Taji and Tarmiyah, just north of the capital, killed three others, including two soldiers. On Thursday evening, a suicide car bomb that went off in the middle of a wedding party convoy killed 15 people and wounded 17 others in the town of Rawa, desert province of Anbar.
Anbar has been roiled in recent months by unrest that has seen anti-government fighters take control of Fallujah, a city on Baghdad’s doorstep, as well as shifting areas of provincial capital Ramadi.
Violence in Iraq has reached a level not seen since 2008, when the country was just emerging from a brutal period of sectarian bloodshed in which tens of thousands of people died.
More than 200 people have been killed so far this month and upwards of 1,900 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.

Flying Tiger 739 ( 93 Disappeared on March 16, 1962 ) Never found

 Flying Tiger Line Flight 739 was a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation propliner chartered by the United Statesmilitary that disappeared on March 16, 1962 over the Western Pacific Ocean. The aircraft was transporting 93 US soldiers and 3 South Vietnamese from Travis Air Force Base, California to Saigon, Vietnam. After refueling at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, the Super Constellation was en route to Clark Air Base in the Philippines when it disappeared. All 107 aboard were declared missing and presumed dead.

The airliner's disappearance prompted one of the largest air and sea searches in the history of the Pacific. Aircraft and surface ships from four branches of the US military searched more than 200,000 square miles (520,000 km²) during the course of eight days. A civilian tanker observed what appeared to be an in-flight explosion believed to be the missing Super Constellation, though no trace of wreckage or debris was ever recovered. The Civil Aeronautics Boarddetermined that, based on the tanker's observations, Flight 739 probably exploded in-flight, though an exact cause could not be determined without examining the remnants of the aircraft.

To date, this remains the worst aviation accident involving the Lockheed Constellation series.