Rebels in Sudan seize Russian helicopter..[ 1534 ]

Rebels in Sudan seize helicopter with nine aboard

By the CNN Wire Staff

July 27, 2010 -- Updated 1621 GMT (0021 HKT)

(CNN) -- Rebels in the Sudanese territory of Darfur have seized a helicopter with four Russian crew members and five Sudanese passengers, Russia's Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

The helicopter belongs to the Russian UTair airline, which operates in Sudan under a U.N. contract.

The craft was carrying out a flight for the joint peacekeeping mission by the United Nations and the African Union in Darfur.

According to preliminary information, nobody was injured, and the helicopter was not damaged.

The Russian Embassy in Khartoum is working to resolve the situation and help Sudanese authorities facilitate the release of the Russian citizens who are being detained by the rebels.

Conflict in the Darfur region has uprooted as many as 2.7 million Darfurians and left about 300,000 people dead over the past seven years.

Earlier Tuesday, the German Foreign Ministry announced the release of two German nationals who were kidnapped last month.

They made him mad ..[ 1533 ]

Italian man fires shots in vuvuzela rage

An Italian man fired shots from a rifle and rammed his car into a bar after being driven mad by the incessant blowing of vuvuzela trumpets, the noisy instruments which became notorious during the World Cup in South Africa.

The vuvuzela: love it or hate it Photo: EPA

Nick Squires in Rome
Telegraph co.uk., 12:05PM BST 27 Jul 2010

The 51-year-old, who has not been named, exploded with rage after enduring hours of listening to the plastic horns being blown in the Coco Bamboo bar in the village of Pievebelvicino near Vicenza, in north-eastern Italy.

He first grabbed a rifle and fired shots into the air, but the warning had no effect on those in the bar.

So he then jumped into his car and rammed it at least three times through the windows of the drinking hole, sending drinkers inside scattering in panic. Miraculously, no one was hurt.
The man fled the scene but later turned himself into a local hospital.
He was arrested by police and will undergo treatment in a psychiatric unit.

The Romania crash site.. [ 1532 ]

Team of IAF pilots, servicemen secures Romania crash site

By YAAKOV KATZ JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT 
07/27/2010 09:19

Medical and rabbinical teams to arrive on Hercules plane from Tel-Nof base in afternoon to identify bodies; IAF Brig. Gen. Nimrod Shefer to lead research team examining the cause of the crash.

Talkbacks (1)

  ROMANIA - An Israeli team of pilots and IAF servicemen on Tuesday morning succeeded in reaching the crash site of the Yasour helicopter which went down during a training exercise in Romania on Monday.

The IAF team descended from a helicopter near the remote crash site and then trekked the rest of the way on foot. They secured the area and were awaiting the arrival of the search-and-rescue team from Tel-Nof air force base, set to reach Romania later on Tuesday.


Access to the crash site had been seriously limited by the rugged terrain, which had prevented vehicles from reaching the site and impeded Romanian and Israeli search efforts.

Romanian Defense Ministry spokesman Constantin Spanu said on Monday night that Romanian officials were scrambling to reach the accident site near the town of Zarnesti, some 120 kilometers northwest of Bucharest.

Spanu said the helicopter had been flying at low altitude when radio contact with it was lost mid-afternoon Monday.

Romanian Defense Minister Gabriel Oprea immediately established a committee to probe the cause of the accident.

An IAF Hercules aircraft was set to arrive in Romania on Tuesday afternoon with medical teams, as well as officers from the IDF Rabbinate to assist in identifying the bodies.

IAF Brig.-Gen Nimrod Shefer, deputy commander of the air force, is heading the Israeli research team, the army said.

Shefer said that all possibilities were being looked into, including a technical malfunction or a human error that may have caused the cras

USA. Massive leak of secret military records ..[ 1531 ]

Leaked archive fuels doubts on Afghan war

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange holds up a copy of a newspaper during a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London, July 26, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Andrew Winning

By Susan Cornwell and Andrew Quinn

 

WASHINGTON | Mon Jul 26, 2010 6:12pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration scrambled on Monday to manage the explosive leak of secret military records that paint a grim picture of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and raise new doubts about key ally Pakistan.

The release of some 91,000 classified documents is likely to fuel uncertainty in the Congress about the unpopular war as President Barack Obama sends 30,000 more soldiers into the battle to break the Taliban insurgency.

The documents, made public by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, detail allegations that U.S. forces sought to cover up civilian deaths as well as U.S. concern that Pakistan secretly aided Taliban militants even as it took billions of dollars in U.S. aid.

The White House condemned the leak, saying it could threaten national security and endanger American lives. The Pentagon called the release a "criminal act" and said it was reviewing the documents to determine the potential damage to U.S. and coalition troops.
"It poses a very real and potential threat to those who are working every day to keep us safe," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

The leaked documents, a collection of field intelligence and threat reports from before Obama ordered the troop surge in December, illustrate the Pentagon's own bleak assessment of the war amid deteriorating security and a strengthening Taliban.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, told a news conference in London on Monday his group has held back 15,000 of the documents as it decides whether their publication has security implications.

The documents show evidence of potential war crimes, Assange said. But U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said he saw nothing in the material to back up such charges.
The leak came as the Taliban said they were holding one of two U.S. servicemen who strayed into insurgent territory and that the other had been killed. The reported capture could further erode public support for the war in the United States ahead of congressional elections in November.

FOCUS ON PAKISTAN

U.S. officials said the leaked information was uncorroborated and outdated and they stressed that U.S. ties with Pakistan and Afghanistan were on a "positive trajectory."
"Most of these documents are several years old and may well reflect situations and conditions and circumstances that have either been corrected already or are in the process of being corrected," Crowley said.
But some analysts said the revelations could be damaging as the White House seeks to maintain public support for the war while setting the stage to start withdrawing U.S. troops by Obama's target date of July 2011.
"No democratic government can function effectively on a stage in which every private conversation and classified document is second-guessed by a peanut gallery of unqualified loudmouths," said Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute.
Pakistan, which came in for particular scrutiny in the archive, said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible, while a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the documents underscored concerns about Pakistan's involvement in his country and the civilian death toll.
The documents suggest representatives from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy service met directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize militant networks fighting U.S. soldiers.
Jeff Sessions, a conservative Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said suggestions that even rogue elements of the ISI were seeking to confound the U.S. war effort were troubling.
"That would be very disturbing if they were participating in strategies to fight U.S. soldiers. It would be unacceptable," Sessions told reporters.
Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit dismissed the reports as "far-fetched and skewed."

CIVILIAN DEATHS

Along with doubts about Pakistan, the documents said coalition troops have killed hundreds of Afghan civilians in unreported incidents and often sought to cover up the mistakes that have shaken confidence in the war effort among many in Afghanistan.
At least 45 civilians, many of them women and children, were killed in a rocket attack by the NATO-led force last week during fighting with Taliban insurgents in the southern province of Helmand, Afghan government spokesman Waheed Omer said.
But Omer said there have been reductions in civilian deaths over the past year and a half and there was a common understanding about the negative impact such incidents have.
Violence in Afghanistan is at its highest level since the war began nearly nine years ago as thousands of extra U.S. troops crank up a campaign to oust insurgents from their heartland in the south.
Last month was the deadliest for foreign troops since 2001, with more than 100 killed, and civilian deaths have also risen as Afghans are increasingly caught in the cross-fire.
The rising violence comes as the House of Representatives prepares to take up legislation this week on funding the Afghan war, which could see more public doubts aired about a conflict driving deep rifts in Obama's Democratic Party.
"At a time of pressing domestic needs, American citizens are understandably questioning the human and financial cost of this war," said Democratic Representative Nita Lowey, who last month temporarily froze more than $3 billion in aid to Afghanistan due to persistent reports of corruption.
Under the heading "Afghan War Diary," the 91,000 documents collected from across the U.S. military in Afghanistan cover the war from 2004 to 2010, WikiLeaks said in a summary.
The documents were provided first to The New York Times, Britain's The Guardian newspaper and the German weekly Der Spiegel.
In Washington, much of the concern focused on the breach of security represented by the leak.
"The damage to our national security caused by leaks like this won't stop until we see more perpetrators in orange (prison) jumpsuits," said Kit Bond, the Republican vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

(Additional reporting by Alister Bull and Adam Entous in Washington and Chris Allbritton in Islamabad; Writing by David Fox and Andrew Quinn; Editing by Patricia Wilson and John O'Callaghan)

Nagasaki A-bombing in 3D digital map ..[ 1530 ]

Horror, destruction of Nagasaki A-bombing detailed through 3D digital map on new Web site

A screen shot of the digital map-based Website, "Nagasaki Archive."

 

(Mainichi Japan) July 27, 2010

A new Web site aimed at helping the world learn about the horror and destruction of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, using a 3-D digital satellite map, has been launched.

The site, dubbed "Nagasaki Archive" (http://nagasaki.mapping.jp/), shows photographic portraits of A-bomb survivors and the locations of destroyed buildings on a 3-D map of Nagasaki, allowing users to view the victims' A-bomb stories and photos of the buildings by clicking them.

"We want to save these tragic past experiences as accessible digital data and hand them down to future generations," said a member of the site's production committee.

The committee is comprised of Hidenori Watanabe -- a Tokyo Metropolitan University associate professor specializing in Web art -- and former members of a leading high school student peace group in Nagasaki. Now that 65 years have passed since the bombing and the average age of the survivors is hovering over 75 years old, Tomoyuki Torisu, the head of the production committee, had requested Watanabe's cooperation in preserving A-bomb survivors' historical testimonies.

The digital map of Nagasaki shows A-bomb survivors' photographic portraits and photos of major destroyed buildings, including the Nagasaki Prefectural Government office. When clicked on, the photos display the stories of survivors' experiences or close-up shots of buildings taken soon after the bombing. The 3-D cityscape can be seen not only from the sky but from horizontal angles.
Local newspaper company Nagasaki Shimbunsha had interviewed 100 survivors and compiled the stories of their A-bomb experiences.

"When an A-bomb survivor told us that we would be able to lead viewers to capture the whole picture by presenting the various experiences of each survivor, I became convinced that use of a digital map would be meaningful," says Watanabe.

Click here for the original Japanese story

Nagasaki Archive http://nagasaki.mapping.jp/