Chile :Trapped miners alive, ..[ 1689 ]

Trapped miners alive, Chilean president says

By the CNN Wire Staff

August 22, 2010 -- Updated 2107 GMT (0507 HKT)

Relatives of the miners trapped in the San Esteban gold and copper mine wait for news in Chile on Sunday.

(CNN) -- The thirty-three miners trapped underground for more than two weeks in a Chilean mine are alive and in a shelter, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said on Sunday.

Rescuers retrieved a note from the mine that said that all of the miners are alive, he said. The handwritten note was tied to a probe authorities had sent underground earlier on Sunday.

"Now we know the most important thing. They are alive," said Pinera, who spoke outside the mine.

The miners have been trapped since the mine caved in on August 5.

Andres Sougarret, who is in charge of rescue operations, said he hoped to make further contact with the miners Sunday afternoon, though he cautioned it could take several months to rescue them.

He added rescuers would next send down a camera and microphones in hopes of learning more about the miners' conditions.

Family members of the trapped miners celebrated outside of the mine, video from CNN Chile showed.

Beaming, Pinera held the note pulled from the mine for television cameras. Written in Spanish in red ink, it read simply: "The 33 of us are fine in the shelter."

The San Estebean mine is located in the Atacama region in northern Chile, the world's largest producer of coppe

The adbentures of Vang Gogh in Egypt..[ 1688 ]

Van Gogh recovered after being stolen from Egyptian museum for second time

A painting by Vincent van Gogh, 'Vase with Flowers' valued at £32 million, was seized at Cairo airport hours after being stolen from a museum for the second time.

 

'Vase and Flowers' by Van Gogh

 

By Alastair Jamieson
Telegraph co.uk.,Published: 9:10PM BST 21 Aug 2010

 

The work, which also goes by the name “Poppy Flowers”, vanished from the Mahmoud Khalil Museum on the banks of the River Nile in central Cairo.

Egypt’s minister of culture, Farouk Hosni, said airport security officials confiscated the painting from two Italians on Saturday evening.

 

He said the pair - a young man and a young woman - had been trying to leave the country and had been arrested.
It is the second time that the canvas by the Dutch-born post-impressionist has been stolen from the museum. Thieves previously made off with it in 1978, before authorities recovered it two years later at an undisclosed location in Kuwait.
The one-foot-by-one-foot painting resembles a flower scene painted by the French artist Adolphe Monticelli, whose work deeply affected the young van Gogh. The Monticelli painting also is part of the Khalil collection.
The theft of the work for the second time is embarrassing for the museum authorities, who are understood to be facing an inquiry into claims that security at the museum was lax. Exact details of the first theft of the painting have never been disclosed. When it was recovered, Egypt’s then-interior minister said three Egyptians involved in the heist had been arrested and informed police where the canvas was hidden. It remains unknown whether the thieves were ever charged or tried, or whether any kind of “ransom” was paid for the painting’s return.
Experts have said they believed the Cairo canvas was painted around 1887. Most of the canvasses for which van Gogh is remembered were painted in 29 months of frenzied activity before his suicide in 1890 at age 37.
The Khalil collection is home to one of the Middle East’s finest collections of 19th and 20th century art, put together by the politician Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil, who died in 1953.
Other works in the collection, all from the 19th-century French school, are by Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet, Francois Millet, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin.

Traces Of mr.,Obama’s Faith..[ 1687 ]

Obama's Personal Faith Leaves Public Wondering

by Don Gonyea

n.p.r.,August 22, 2010

Audio for this story from Weekend Edition Sunday will be available at approx. 12:00 p.m. ET

• Transcript

 

Enlarge Andrew Wardlow/AP

A new poll by Pew Research says that only one person in three knows President Obama is a Christian, while nearly one in five think he's a Muslim.

Andrew Wardlow/AP

A new poll by Pew Research says that only one person in three knows President Obama is a Christian, while nearly one in five think he's a Muslim.

n.p.r., August 22, 2010

A new poll this week shows a majority Americans are in the dark about President Obama's religion. The Pew Research survey says that only one person in three knows Obama is a Christian, while nearly one in five think he's a Muslim.

It's an unusual subject for people to be this uncertain on, but one reason may be what the White House calls the president's personal rather than public approach to religion.

Traces Of Obama’s Faith

President George W. Bush was a regular at Sunday church services. Obama, however, is not a regular churchgoer, which may well contribute to public confusion about his religion.

A spokesman says the president prays daily, often with others, sometimes in conference calls with spiritual leaders, including one recently aboard Air Force One. He has given speeches where he has spoken of how his faith helps him in his job, and he has spoken explicitly in Christian terms, as he did this year on Easter Sunday at a White House breakfast reflecting on Christ's final moments on the cross.

"'Father,' he said, 'into your hands I commit my spirit. Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit.' These words were spoken by our Lord and Savior, but they can just as truly be spoken by every one of us here today," Obama said.

Past Presidents

In 1960, John F. Kennedy was running for president and everyone knew his religion. As a Roman Catholic, he had to battle critics who said he'd be taking orders from the Vatican.

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote," Kennedy said at the time.

Then came President Johnson: His Protestant denomination, Disciples of Christ, was a non-issue. Richard Nixon was a Quaker; Gerald Ford an Episcopalian. Ronald Reagan was Presbyterian; George H.W. Bush was another Episcopalian; Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were Baptists. Carter, a self-described born-again Christian, was among the most overtly religious of recent presidents, but so too was George W. Bush, a Methodist.

During the 2000 campaign, Bush was asked to name the political philosopher who most influenced him.

"Christ," he said. "Because he changed my heart."

Challenge For Presidents

John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says the challenge for any president when he talks about religion is to be spiritual, inclusive and careful.

"It's a really difficult thing, on the one hand, to balance talking about religion versus all the other topics that the president has to talk about, but then get the religious message exactly right," Green says.

Houston pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell has been an informal spiritual adviser to Obama and Bush. He says polls that show one in five Americans think Obama is a Muslim are troubling. He says it's religious misinformation spread to defeat the president politically.

"It is fair and civil to attack the president's politics and his policies," he said. "I think it's unfair, uncivil, and even un-American to attack the man's personal, fundamental faith."

He says the president shouldn't have to respond, though politically Obama may indeed have to do what none of his predecessors have had to do while in office — continue to find ways to reinforce with the public who he is and what he believes when it comes to his faith.

Spain's ETA terror suspect was arrested in Belgium ..[ 1686 ]

Terror suspect from Spain arrested in Belgium

By the CNN Wire Staff

August 21, 2010 -- Updated 1022 GMT (1822 HKT)

 

Photo of ETA suspect Luis Maria Zengotitabengoa.

(CNN) -- One of Spain's most wanted terror suspects was arrested in Belgium on Saturday, Spanish interior ministry officials said.

Luis Maria Zengotitabengoa, an alleged member of the terrorist ETA group, was captured by Belgian police as he checked into a hotel in the city of Ostend.

Zengotitabengoa became a wanted man in January when police found evidence linking him to a van carrying explosives in the city of Zamora, near the Spain-Portugal border.

His brother Andoni was arrested in March at the Lisbon airport before boarding a plane to Venezuela using a fake Mexican passport.

According to the interior ministry, 67 alleged ETA members and collaborators have been arrested this year.

CNN's Gustavo Valdes contributed to this report.

Russia, bomber killed in a clash with security forces..[ 1685 ]

Russia kills Moscow metro attacks mastermind

Published: Saturday August 21, 2010 The modest IT teacher in her village school was identified as the second suicide bomber responsible for the attack on Lubyanka metro station in Moscow on March 29.

Russian security forces Saturday killed a top militant suspected of organising the deadly suicide attacks on the Moscow metro and who was reportedly married to one of the female bombers.

Magomedali Vagabov was killed in a clash with security forces in the Caucasus region of Dagestan that left four other militants dead, the national anti-terror committee said in a statement published by Russian news agencies.

The double bombings carried out by two female suicide bombers on the Moscow metro on March 29 killed 40 and wounded more than 100.

"Vagabov was the organiser of the suicide bombings on the Moscow metro, was actively involved in recruiting youth for the underground and organised the training for the suicide bombers," the committee said.

He was described in the official statement as the number two figure in the Islamist-inspired insurgency that has plagued the Russian Northern Caucasus over the last years, after its overall leader Doku Umarov.

The clash, described as being brief, took place in the village of Gunib -- in the mountains of Dagestan southwest of the local capital Makhachkala -- where the militants were holed up in a house.

"Once the fire from the building was put out, one of the corpses was identified as Magomedali Vagabov," the statement said.

According to some reports, Vagabov was the husband of Mariam Sharipova, one of the metro suicide bombers.

This has been strongly denied by her father in media interviews but the Russian news agency reports described her as Vagabov's "sharia wife", implying he had made her one of a number of spouses.

As well as the Moscow metro attacks, Vagabov had also planned a string of attacks against security forces and on railway infrastructure, the statement said.

It said he had received training at a militant camp in Pakistan and had contacts with a number of international terror groups who had also passed on financing.

"The annihilation of the well-known bandit Vagabov and his henchmen is a success for the security forces and shows even the most sophisticated means will not allow bandits to escape responsibility for their deeds," it said.

There were no casualties among the security forces or the civilian population in the village.

The Russian security forces had targeted Vagabov in previous special operations but had until now failed to track him down. Russian media reported at the time of the attacks he lead a 40-strong group in the forested mountains.

Umarov, who heads the Caucasus Emirate group seeking to establish Islamic rule across the Caucasus mountains, has for years evaded capture or killing by the Russian security forces.

This month he unexpectedly announced he was stepping down in favour of a younger successor but then days later withdrew the announcement and vowed to carry on killing "enemies of Allah".