Japan said Wednesday it will run "stress tests" on all its nuclear reactors in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi accident sparked by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disaster. The ongoing crisis, the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl 25 years ago, has ignited debate in Japan about the safety of nuclear power, which before the disaster accounted for a third of its electricity needs. The centre-left government ordered a round of initial tests on the country's other atomic power plants after the disaster, and said the new stress tests aimed to reassure the public that t...
Published On: 2011-07-06

Australian police Wednesday said they had discovered the skeletal remains of a woman in an inner-Sydney house who had been dead for up to eight years. The grim find, at a Surry Hills home long assumed by neighbours to be deserted, followed a call from a sister-in-law -- her only living family -- from whom she had been estranged since a 2003 feud. "Upon entering an upstairs bedroom at the residence, police located skeletal remains on the floor," police said. "The remains have not been formally identified. However, police believe they belong to a woman who would have been 87 ne...
Published On: 2011-07-06

UNITED NATIONS: The U.N. Security Council plans to discuss in July the possibility of Palestine becoming a United Nations member state, the Security Council president said on Tuesday. The Arab League has said it would request U.N. membership for a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital at the U.N. General Assembly in September. An open debate on the Middle East has been scheduled for July 26 according to a provisional calendar for the Security Council for July. "I think (that) will be an occasion to explore the various options that mig...
Published On: 2011-07-06

BRUSSELS: NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen is to meet Libyan opposition members in Brussels next week, an alliance diplomat said today, their first invitation to NATO headquarters. The meeting called by Rasmussen was agreed by ambassadors of the 28-nation alliance and will take place on July 13, said the diplomat. “NATO countries agreed to invite the rebels because there is no NATO representation in Benghazi yet,” the diplomat said on condition of anonymity. Separately, a European diplomat said a member of the Transitional National Council (TNC) is likely to meet with senior Eur...
Published On: 2011-07-05

QUETTA: Attacks killed nine Pakistani soldiers today, targeting troops in the militant-infested tribal badlands near Afghanistan and further south on the border with Iran, officials said. The deadliest attack killed five paramilitary troops travelling in a routine convoy between the towns of Turbat and Mand, some 680 kilometers southwest of Quetta, the capital city of Baluchistan province. “Five paramilitary soldiers were martyred and five others were wounded in the bomb blast,” a paramilitary commander said. The convoy was en route to a remote border base near the town of Mand,...
Published On: 2011-07-05

NICOSIA: The residents of Hama have mobilised to keep the army out of the flashpoint city which has become a centre of the anti-regime revolt in Syria, activists said today. The activists, contacted by telephone, said a child was among three people shot dead by security forces yesterday in districts on the outskirts of the city north of Damascus that is home to 800,000 people. “Tanks are now posted at access routes to the city except for the northern entrance,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. “Residents have mobilised. ...
Published On: 2011-07-05

BEIJING: China has jailed dozens of ethnic Uighurs in the far western region of Xinjiang for speaking out about riots in the regional capital two years ago, Amnesty International said today, part of a broader campaign against voices of dissent nationwide. In July 2009, the capital city of Urumqi was rocked by violence between majority Han Chinese and minority Uighurs that killed nearly 200 people. Many of the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs, who call Xinjiang home, chafe at Beijing’s rule. Since then, China has executed nine people it blamed for instigating the riots, detained and p...
Published On: 2011-07-05

PARIS: A fresh attempted rape suit against former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn threatened today to wreck his hopes of returning to frontline French politics if acquitted at his New York trial. Tristane Banon, 32, planned to lodge “a complaint for attempted rape” around eight years ago against Strauss-Kahn, her lawyer David Koubbi told the news magazine L’Express on its website today. She had already publicly accused Strauss-Kahn of trying to force himself on her “like a rutting chimpanzee” but said she was persuaded at the time that no one would take her wor...
Published On: 2011-07-05

TOKYO: An earthquake with preliminary magnitude 5.4 jolted Wakayama prefecture in western Japan on Tuesday, the Meteorological Agency said, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damages and no tsunami warning was issued. The earthquake caused strong shaking in the area near the epicentre, to the south of Japan’s third-largest city of Osaka. The focus of the quake, at 7.18 pm was 10 km below the surface in northern Wakayama, 460 km west of Tokyo. No nuclear power plants are located near the epicentre. Tycoon derides Putin MOSCOW: Russian tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, wh...
Published On: 2011-07-05

At least 19 people were reported missing after their boat capsized on the Ugandan side of Lake Albert, police said Tuesday. The small boat set off on Sunday from the Hoima region on the shores of the lake which straddles Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and police said there was little chance of finding survivors. "It is most unlikely that there are any survivors by now because the boat capsized on Sunday and we are yet to get the wreckage," said Charles Oringa, a police officer. The accident occurred two weeks after eight people drowned on the same lake when their boat...
Published On: 2011-07-05