MEXICO CITY ( Frenchman Who Disappeared in Mexico Found Slain )

 MEXICO CITY – DNA tests confirmed that remains found earlier this week in the southern state of Guerrero correspond to a French citizen who was reported missing in February, Mexican authorities said Friday.

Harry Devert, 32, disappeared in the western Mexican state of Michoacan while traveling from the United States to Brazil by motorcycle.

“The discovery of this gentleman took place a few days ago, today, unfortunately, we can confirm that it is him (Devert),” Guerrero state Attorney General Iñaky Blanco told reporters in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco.

Plastic bags containing body parts were found along with the wreckage of a motorcycle on a road near the coastal city of Zihuatanejo, northwest of Acapulco, the attorney general said.

Devert disappeared in January in Michoacan, which borders Guerrero.

Joel Moreno Rojas, a resident of Zitacuaro, Michoacan, went to authorities on Feb. 5 to report Devert missing.

Moreno told police he had not heard anything from Devert since the motorcyclist left Zitacuaro on Jan. 25, headed for Zihuatanejo.

The Frenchman’s girlfriend, Sarah, received a text message from Devert on Jan. 25 saying that he had been “escorted” for 90 minutes through an area “that was too dangerous for me.”

“Apparently, there is another military escort waiting for me in another city ... I am being delayed by all these crazy things of the soldiers ... I hope to have a chance to speak with you guys tonight when (with luck), I finally get there,” Devert said in his text message.

Michoacan and Guerrero are among the most dangerous regions in Mexico due to the presence of rival criminal outfits battling for control of drug trafficking and other lucrative rackets.

Dodging cops, 6 maids killed in road inferno

Seven persons, including six expat women, were charred to death in a fiery crash as they attempted to jump a police checkpoint 185 km from Taif on Saturday.
All six women, believed to be Ethiopians working as housemaids, were illegal who were on their way to Riyadh when the accident occurred.
“Road security forces attempted to stop a speeding vehicle, but the driver failed to stop, prompting security forces to fire multiple shots in the air,” said Lt. Aati Al-Qurashi of the Makkah regional police headquarters in a statement. 
“The speeding car then vanished, but a mere 15 minutes later, police received a report stating that the car had tried to avoid the speed bumps ahead by driving into the opposite lane, only to crash into three cars and then an electricity pole, setting fire to a nearby fuel tanker.” 
He said: “The car was gutted with all seven passengers inside by the time Civil Defense teams arrived at the scene.”
He added: “We can confirm that the victims were all illegal expats.” 
Acting Ethiopian Consul-General Sherif Osman told Arab News that his consulate was not made aware of the incident.
Sources told Arab News that some of the victims’ relatives came to Al-Moya Hospital, where two of the bodies had been shifted, confirming their nationalities, while five bodies had been shifted to a general hospital in Zulm.
Sources also confirmed that all of the bodies would be transferred to a morgue in Taif.
Ethiopian men and women routinely infiltrate the Kingdom from the southern borders, heading to Riyadh and other cities in search of work.
Five illegal Ethiopians were killed when their car crashed on the way to Riyadh from Najran three months ago.

Gaza massacre termed ‘war crime’

GAZA CITY: Palestinian civilians in Gaza suffered the highest death toll since Israel’s aggression began, with around 100 killed on Sunday.
President Mahmoud Abbas said the deaths in the Shejaiya district were a “massacre.” Witnesses spoke of bodies lying in the streets. Television pictures have been showing horrific, bloody scenes of dead elderly women and children.
At the Shifa hospital, there is a traffic jam of emergency vehicles by the entrance. “The hospital was totally overloaded. For many of us, these were the worst scenes we’ve ever had, not only for the density of patients and total overwhelming of our capacity but because of all this pain and agony,” said Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, who has been working in the emergency ward.
“There were children in enormous pain. Totally devastated families were bringing their dead children in and lying on the ground screaming.”
Also on Sunday, the Israeli Army said 13 soldiers were killed in fighting inside the enclave.
Meanwhile, the UN warned it was running out of supplies to help more than 50,000 Palestinians who have sought shelter at its schools in Gaza.
The head of the Cairo-based Arab League, Nabil Elaraby, described Israeli attacks as a “war crime.”
“Elaraby ... considered Israel’s terrible shelling and ground attack operations in the neighborhood of Shejaiya as a war crime against Palestinian civilians and a dangerous escalation,” the Arab League said.
A Palestinian cameraman and a paramedic were among dozens of people killed in the district. “Cameraman Khaled Hammad and paramedic Fuad Jaber were killed in a strike on an ambulance, while they were trying to evacuate the wounded from Shejaiya,” emergency services spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra said.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday called on its NATO ally the US to engage in “self-criticism” after it labeled his comments on Israel’s Gaza assault “offensive.”
“If America still says ‘Israel is using its right to self-defense’ it is America that needs to engage in self-criticism,” Erdogan told the TGRT news channel.
Erdogan said Sunday he was sticking to his comments, accusing Israel of using “disproportionate force” and killing Palestinians “mercilessly.”
“How can we ignore this? How can a country like the United States turn a blind eye to this?” he asked. “As a member of the UN Security Council, it needs to act fairly.”
As the violence raged, Abbas arrived in Qatar to discuss a cease-fire with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, with UN chief Ban Ki-moon due there later at the start of a regional tour to push truce efforts.
Meanwhile, French youth defying a ban on a protest against Israel’s Gaza aggression have set fire to cars and garbage cans in a Paris suburb after a calm demonstration. Tension mounted as scores of Jewish youth, some armed with iron bars, encircled a synagogue to “protect” it.

Man accused of using company check to pay hooker

SLIDELL, LA - Police in a New Orleans suburb say a health-food store worker is accused of using a $200 company check to pay a prostitute after a back-room encounter.

Surveillance cameras showed it all. That's what Slidell Police spokesman Detective Daniel Seuzeneau said in a news release. It all came to light when the store's manager reviewed surveillance footage after finding that a company check was missing.

Seuzeneau said 24-year-old Charles West remained jailed Thursday after being booked Wednesday on charges of theft, forgery and soliciting prostitution. Seuzeneau said he did not know whether West has an attorney.

Police say they plan to arrest the woman for prostitution once they identify her.

Chief Randy Smith said, "We can't make this stuff up ... I'm at a loss for words!  This is unbelievable."

Iraq ( Islamic State ultimatum sparks Christian exodus )

KIRKUK, Iraq: Thousands of Christians poured into Kurdistan as they fled a Saturday ultimatum by jihadists who overran northwestern Iraq last month and proclaimed a caliphate.
As militants attempted to break government defenses in strategic areas and edge closer to Baghdad, Christians joined hundreds of thousands of Shiite and other refugees into Kurdistan.
Their flight to the safety of the neighboring autonomous region coincided with the expected homecoming of Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, after 18 months of medical treatment in Germany.
The Islamic State (IS) group running Mosul had already demanded that those Christians still in the city convert, pay a special tax or leave but messages blaring on mosques’ loudspeakers appeared to spark an exodus.
An earlier statement by Mosul’s new rulers had said there would be “nothing for them but the sword” if Christians did not abide by those conditions before noon (0900 GMT) on Saturday.
“Christian families are on their way to Dohuk and Arbil” in Kurdistan, Chaldean patriarch Louis Sako, who heads Iraq’s largest Christian community, told AFP.
“For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians.”
Most Christians in the northwestern Nineveh province fled in terror after jihadist-led militants enforcing an extreme version of sharia — or Islamic law — launched an offensive on June 9.
But many of the poorest families returned when the fighting stopped and IS started administering the city. Sako put the number of Christians who were still in Mosul on Thursday at 25,000.
The Islamic State “seems intent on wiping out all traces of minority groups from areas it now controls in Iraq,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement Saturday.
Other minorities rooted in the same province of Nineveh have suffered even more than the Christians, according to crimes HRW documented against the Yazidis, as well as the Turkmen and Shabak Shiite communities.

NEW DELHI ( Outrage after Indian girl, 6, raped at her school )

NEW DELHI: Thousands of people angry over alleged police inaction after a 6-year-old girl was raped at her school in southern India rallied Saturday to demand that authorities arrest those responsible for the attack.
More than 4,000 parents and relatives of children who attend the school in Bangalore, India’s technology hub, shouted slogans against the school’s administration and demanded that police arrest those involved in the July 2 incident, which was reported only this past week.
They carried placards that read “Enough is enough” and “We want justice,” and walked more than 4 kilometers (2 miles) to one of the Bangalore’s main police stations.
Police said the girl was assaulted when she left her classroom to go to the restroom. They said she was recovering from the incident, but did not give further details.
The rape has raised questions about the safety of India’s schoolchildren and sparked nationwide outrage over rampant sexual violence against girls and women. The school has refused to take responsibility for the crime.
Angry lawmakers discussed the incident in the state assembly on Friday and demanded that the government of Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital, punish the school principal and other administrators who allegedly tried to hush the matter.
The parents have said they will keep their children out of school until steps are in place to ensure their safety.
Police said eight members of the school’s staff had been detained for questioning. The protesters squatted outside a police station and refused to move until the city’s police chief assured them the suspects would be arrested.
Official statistics say about 25,000 rapes are committed every year in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people. Activists, though, say that number is just a tiny percentage of the actual number, since victims are often pressed by family or police to stay quiet about sexual assaults.
Indian officials, who for decades had done little about sexual violence, have faced growing public anger since the December 2012 fatal gang rape of a young woman on a moving New Delhi bus, an attack that sparked national outrage.
The nationwide outcry led the federal government to rush legislation doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalyzing voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women. The law also makes it a crime for officers to refuse to open cases when complaints are made.

Israel steps up Gaza ground offensive, civilian casualties grow

GAZA/JERUSALEM: Israel stepped up its land offensive in Gaza with artillery, tanks and gunboats on Friday and declared it could “significantly widen” an operation Palestinian officials said was killing ever greater numbers of civilians.
Israeli gunboats lit up the sky with their fire before dawn while helicopters fired into the coastal enclave. Hamas fired mortar rounds at the invading troops and rockets across the border at the southern Israeli towns of Ashdod and Ashkelon.
Palestinian health officials said 27 Palestinians, including a baby, two children and a 70-year-old woman, had been killed since Israel poured ground forces into the densely-populated strip of 1.8 million Palestinians on Thursday.
The action followed 10 days of barrages against Gaza from air and sea and hundreds of rockets fired by Hamas into Israel.
“We chose to start this operation after we exhausted other options and reached the conclusion that without it we could pay a much higher price,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters before a special cabinet session at Tel Aviv military headquarters. “The main goal is to restore quiet.”
“My instructions...to the Israeli army, with the approval of the security cabinet, is to prepare for the possibility of a widening, a significant widening of the ground operation.”
He did not say what form a widened operation might take. Israel says its forces have focused so far on seeking out tunnels Palestinian militants might use for cross-border raids.
One such infiltration was narrowly thwarted on Thursday, with the army saying it had repelled 13 Hamas gunmen after they emerged from a tunnel close to an Israeli farming community.
To back up regular forces, Israel said it was calling up 18,000 military reservists, adding to 30,000 already mobilized
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri responded with defiance to the Israeli escalation, saying: “Netanyahu is killing our children and will pay the price. The ground invasion doesn’t frighten us and the occupation army will sink in Gaza’s mud.”
Hamas wants Israel and Egypt, whose military-backed government is at odds with the Palestinian Islamists, to lift border restrictions that have deepened Gaza’s economic hardship and unemployment.