Six In The Morning

Russian hit squad accused of murdering Chechen dissidents in Istanbul

Special Report: Startling evidence reveals how agents may 

have been sent to take out the Kremlin-backed regime's 

enemies on foreign soil. Shaun Walker reports in Turkey

Saturday, 8 October 2011

Turkish police think a hit squad working for the Russian government was behind the assassination of three Chechens in Istanbul three weeks ago.

The victims – including Berg-Khadzh Musayev, a high-ranking member of Russia's Caucasus Emirate terrorist movement – were shot in broad daylight on 16 September in a scruffy suburb on the European side of Istanbul.

The assassinations bring the number of Chechens killed in the Turkish city to six in three years. They fit into a pattern of killings in cities across the world targeting Chechens who have opposed the Kremlin-backed regime of Ramzan Kadyrov.

Tank fire wakes Libyan city of Sirte day after advance

The BBC's Jonathan Head in the centre of Sirte: "Those Gaddafi remnants are proving very tough to beat"

The Libyan city of Sirte has woken to tank fire, a day after interim authority forces fought their way into the centre, meeting fierce resistance.

A BBC correspondent says pro-Gaddafi forces are putting up extraordinary resistance in one of the last towns not in transitional government control.

The troops launched the assault on Col Gaddafi's birthplace on Friday, taking most of it street by street.

At least 12 people were killed and more than 190 injured, doctors said.

Thousands of civilians have left Sirte but many remain behind

The Irish Times - Saturday, October 8, 2011

How Ireland managed to end up part of the 'New Third World'

LARA MARLOWE

THE US financial journalist and author Michael Lewis has a favourite metaphor for the global economic crisis: what do people do when they find themselves alone in a dark room full of money?

Lewis was all over the airwaves this week, launching his book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. Like most of his previous 11 books, it’s sure to be a bestseller. Lewis studied economics at the London School of Economics and sold bonds for Salomon Brothers. The Huffington Post calls him “the darling of Wall Street traders, politicians and writers alike”.

Chinese sceptics see global warming as US conspiracy

John Garnaut

October 8, 2011

It's not only Western leaders like Julia Gillard and Barack Obama who face fierce resistance from climate sceptics as they try to lay out policies to tackle global warming.

In China, where carbon emissions have surged despite tough government constraints and targets, President Hu Jintao is having to stare down claims that human-induced climate change is an elaborate American conspiracy.

''Global warming is a bogus proposition,'' says Zhang Musheng, one of China's most influential intellectuals and a close adviser to a powerful and hawkish general in the People's Liberation Army, Liu Yuan.

Kidnappings hurt Kenya

JODY CLARKE 

Whereas Nairobi residents surround themselves with three-metre walls and electric fences, doors made of palm tree fibres are all that stand at the entrance of many homes along the empty sands of islands stretching far into the distance. That may be about to change.

At 3am on October 1 at least 10 gunmen landed on Manda Island and burst into the home of Marie Dedieu. A retired French journalist, the 66-year-old woman had made her home for the past 15 years on Manda, which lies across a narrow lagoon from the village of Shela on Lamu Island, a popular hangout with the rich and famous. The Kenyan navy attempted to stop the boat in which the kidnappers escaped, but despite firing ­warning shots over it they slipped back to Somalia.

CIA's vaccine ruse in Pakistan carries fallout

The phony campaign was aimed at helping find and kill Osama bin Laden, but the doctor involved now faces treason charges, and real immunization workers say Pakistanis don't trust them.

By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan— 

A phony vaccination campaign orchestrated by the CIA to help find and kill Osama bin Laden is undercutting Western-backed immunizationdrives against polio and other diseases, and now has the Pakistani doctor involved in the program possibly facing treason charges.

A Pakistani government commission investigating the U.S. raid that killed Bin Laden in May recommended late Thursday that treason charges be filed against Dr. Shakeel Afridi, who helped carry out the fake vaccination effort designed to obtain DNA evidence from the Al Qaeda leader's sprawling compound in Abbottabad.