Australia ( Large objects floating in remote seas off Australia )

SYDNEY/KUALA LUMPUR: Aircraft and ships ploughed through dire weather on Thursday in search of objects floating in remote seas off that Malaysia’s government called a “credible lead” in the trans-continental hunt for a jetliner missing for nearly two weeks.
The large objects, which Australian officials said were spotted by satellite four days ago in one of the remotest parts of the globe, are the most promising find in days as searchers scour a vast area for the plane lost with 239 people on board.

A Norwegian merchant ship arrived in the area on Thursday, but officials cautioned it could take days to confirm if the objects were part of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777. Malaysia’s government said the search would continue elsewhere despite the sighting in the southern Indian Ocean.
The area where the objects were spotted is around 2,500 km (1,500 miles) southwest of Perth, roughly corresponding to the far end of a southern track that investigators calculated the aircraft could have taken after it was diverted.
“Yesterday I said that we wanted to reduce the area of the search. We now have a credible lead,” Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters in Kuala Lumpur.
A search for the plane that began in the tropical waters off Malaysia’s east coast has now switched to the vast, icy southern oceans between Australia, southern Africa and Antarctica.
Two Royal Australia Air Force AP-3C Orions, a US Navy P-8 Poseidon and a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3K2 Orion were involved in Thursday’s search which was called off late in the evening and will resume on Friday.
There have been many false leads and no confirmed wreckage found from Flight MH370 since it vanished from air traffic control screens off Malaysia’s east coast early on March 8, less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
Hishammuddin said the information on the objects received from Australia had been “corroborated to a certain extent” by other satellites, making it more credible than previous leads.
The larger of the objects measured up to 24 meters (79 ft), long and appeared to be floating in water several thousand meters deep, Australian officials said. The second object was about five meters (16 feet) long. Arrows on the images pointed to two indistinct objects apparently bobbing in the water.
“It’s credible enough to divert the research to this area on the basis it provides a promising lead to what might be wreckage from the debris field,” Royal Australian Air Force Air Commodore John McGarry told a news conference in Canberra.
The satellite images, provided by US company DigitalGlobe , were taken on March 16, meaning that the possible debris could by now have drifted far from the original site.
Australian officials said an aircraft had dropped a series of marker buoys in the area, which will provide information about currents to assist in calculating the latest location.
The captain of the first Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion plane to return from the search area described the weather conditions as “extremely bad” with rough seas and high winds.
A Norwegian car carrier diverted from its journey from Madagascar to Melbourne and had arrived in the search area, the ship’s owner said. A Royal Australian Navy ship equipped to recover any objects was also en route.
China’s icebreaker for Antarctic research, Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, will set off from Perth to search the area, Chinese state news agency Xinhua cited maritime authorities as saying. About two-thirds of the 227 passengers on Flight MH370 were Chinese nationals.
Chinese President Xi Jinping told Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a telephone call that he hoped Australia would do all it could to search the area and offer assistance to Chinese search ships, China’s Xinhua news agency reported.
“At present, search and rescue work is quite difficult, and the situation in the relevant seas is complex. As long as there is a thread of hope, we must put in 100 percent effort,” Xinhua quoted Xi as saying.

KABUL ( Taliban kill 10 police officers early on Thursday)

KABUL, Afghanistan: Taleban insurgents carried out a brazen early morning assault Thursday on a police station in the country’s east, killing 10 police officers and a civilian, officials said.
The spectacular attack in Jalalabad, the capital of the eastern Nangarhar province, was the latest in the countdown to next month’s presidential elections.

The assault involved a suicide bomber, two remotely detonated bombs and seven insurgents and set off a four-hour gunbattle with the police.
By the time it was over, all seven insurgents involved in the multi-pronged attack were killed, said Deputy Interior Minister Gen. Mohammed Ayub Solangi.
The attack began with a suicide bomber detonating his explosives-laden car outside the police station, located near the palatial residence of the province’s Governor Attahullah Ludin.
After the blast, six gunmen stormed into the station simultaneously as two bombs were detonated nearby, presumably by remote control — one hidden in a motorized three-wheel rickshaw and another in a vegetable cart.
Solangi said the insurgents were armed with heavy weapons and automatic machine guns. The battle was fierce — with the Afghan troops fighting their way out and chasing the attackers down the street — and when it ended, 10 policemen, including a district police chief, were dead.
The one civilian who was killed was a university student caught in the cross-fire, said police.
Doctors at nearby hospitals said as many as 20 civilians were wounded, mostly from shrapnel from the initial suicide car bombing, but that the majority were treated and released quickly. Two of the wounded were said to be in serious condition.
The nearby state-run Afghan radio and television building was badly damaged in the first suicide bombing.
In an e-mail in Pashto — the language most often spoken by the Taleban — the insurgent group’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the Taleban had staged the attack in Jalalabad.
The Taleban have carried out numerous attacks in Jalalabad and the country’s east, which is their traditional stronghold, along with southern Afghanistan.
They have threatened a campaign of violence to disrupt the April 5 vote, which will choose a new Afghan president to lead the country as foreign troops prepare to end their combat mission by the end of the year.

India ( Tigress has killed "10 people" in India ) Man eater

MANIWALA, INDIA –  She lies in wait while her victims are collecting firewood, or taking cattle to graze, or working in the fields. She has grabbed people in broad daylight, carrying them away silently into the forests or the sugarcane fields. By the time the victims are found, often little is left but a pair of shoes, unspeakable gore and a ring of drying blood.

Over seven weeks she has traveled, almost completely unseen, for more than 120 miles. She has crossed villages, small towns and at least one highway.

A killer is stalking the villages of north India. She has killed at least nine people, all of them poor villagers living on the fringes of one of the world's last wild tiger habitats. They are people who cannot afford a day off work, people who have no indoor plumbing and must use the fields as their toilets. They are people who know little about India's recent successes in tiger conservation.

But with the sudden appearance of one tiger, they look at an animal so beloved to outsiders and see only a monster.

"She has turned into a man-eater," said Vijay Pal Singh, whose neighbor, a 22-year-old farm laborer named Shiv Kumar Singh, was killed as he worked at the edge of a sugarcane field in January. In an area where nearly everyone works outside, this means life has been completely upended. "People are afraid to go into the fields," said Singh. "Everything has changed."

While hunters are brought in to kill man-eating tigers every year or so in India, it has been decades since a tiger killed as many people as this one, or stayed on the run so long.

"She won't stop now. She'll keep killing," said Samar Jeet Singh, a hunter with an aristocratic pedigree, a curled-up moustache and a high-powered heirloom rifle. For almost a month he has been tracking the female tiger, most recently through the forests and dried riverbeds near where she made her last kill, cutting down an elderly buffalo herder last week. Searchers found just part of one arm and one leg. The tiger left the buffalos unharmed.

WASHINGTON ( CIA chief " sent home " for hostile work environment )

WASHINGTON — The CIA's chief of Iran operations was placed on paid administrative leave and sent home from agency headquarters after an internal investigation found he had created an abusive and hostile work environment that put a crucial division in disarray, according to current and former officials.

Officers and analysts in the Iran operations division, which coordinates spying on Iran and its nuclear program, were informed at a meeting last week at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., of the decision to suspend Jonathan Bank, a veteran officer and member of the senior intelligence service.

Three former officials said the Iran operations division was in open rebellion to Bank's management style, with several key employees demanding transfers.

"Iran is one of most important targets, and the place was not functioning," one of the former officials said.

In 2010, Bank was pulled out as CIA station chief in Islamabad after newspapers in Pakistan, India, England and elsewhere published his name in connection with a court case, and the agency said he had received death threats. U.S. officials believe Pakistan's intelligence service leaked the name in a dispute over CIA drone attacks in the country's tribal belt.

Bank, now 46, previously served at CIA stations in the Balkans, Moscow and Baghdad, former agency officials said. He also was a top assistant to James Pavitt, who from 1999 to 2004 headed the CIA's operations arm, now known as the National Clandestine Service.

The former CIA officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter. Bank is technically undercover, but his name has been public since the 2010 incident. He did not respond to email messages requesting comment.

Dean Boyd, the agency's chief spokesman, said he could not comment on a personnel issue.

"As a general matter, the CIA expects managers at all levels to demonstrate leadership skills and foster an environment that helps their employees perform at the highest levels to achieve agency objectives," Boyd said. "Whenever that doesn't happen, we examine the situation carefully and take appropriate action."

Several former CIA officials said they could not remember a senior manager being suspended over workplace issues, but management problems are a recurring challenge at the agency.

According to a Los Angeles Times report in July, an internal CIA workplace survey in 2009 found that those who left the spy agency frequently cited bad management as a factor, particularly in the clandestine service. In interviews, former officers said they felt poor managers suffered no consequences.

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-cia-workplace-20140317,0,2858175.story#ixzz2wKxDq6tz

Sri Lanka ( Human rights activists arrested and a catholic priest )

COLOMBO: The Sri Lankan government should release two human rights defenders, including a priest, because their arrests are an attempt to silence criticism, human rights groups aid.
A joint statement issued by Amnesty International, Forum Asia, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group and the International Commission of Jurists called Sunday’s arrest and detention of Ruki Fernando of the Colombo-based INFORM and Father Praveen Mahesan, a Catholic priest, “arbitrary.”
Police say they were arrested and detained under powerful anti-terror laws for trying to create communal disharmony and disturbance.
Sri Lanka faces criticism for cracking down on rights activists and has rejected calls for an international inquiry into the conduct of the final months of a decades-long civil war that ended in 2009.
Government forces defeated separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, but have been accused of causing large numbers of civilian deaths during the last few months of the war.
The UN Human Rights Council is reviewing Sri Lanka’s record, including the issue of missing persons and its failure to investigate war crimes allegations against both government soldiers and Tamil Tiger rebels.
The US has sponsored a third resolution on Sri Lanka at the rights council calling for an international probe on alleged war crimes if the island nation fails to conduct one of its own.

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.