Six In The Morning

Palestinian family loses its Jerusalem home to Israeli settlers

　


JERUSALEM -- After more than 25 years of legal battle to keep its home, a Palestinian family of four was forced Sunday to leave its one-room house in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras el-Amoud after an Israeli court ordered their eviction. The family must turn the house over to its new owners, Israeli settlers. The settlers led by Florida millionaire Irving Moskowitz, who made his money from gambling, have been after two brothers from the Hamdallah family in Ras el-Amoud since 1985 to get them to leave a plot of land they have lived on for decades. After dozens of court hearings and back-and-forth lawsuits and appeals, an Israeli court decided in 2005 that Moskowitz was the legal owner of the plot located in the heart of the Arab neighborhood and ordered the younger of the Hamdallah brothers to evacuate his house while allowing the older to stay.

August the bloodiest month so far in Syrian conflict
About 5,000 people were killed across Syria in the last month, according to an activist group. This makes August 2012 the deadliest month in the conflict, which has raged for nearly a year and a half.


The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts August's death toll at over 5,000, while the Local Coordination Committees, an umbrella group of local commitees monitoring violence on the ground, puts the figure at just under 5,000. The Observatory also says more than 26,000 thousand people have been killed since the beginning of the uprising against Syria's President Bashar Assad. The figures come on a weekend of escalating violence in Damascus.

Fur flies in Belarus's teddy bear wars
Belarus's tyrannical leader is angry – and all because of a Swedish PR stunt. Shaun Walker reports from Minsk

Monday 03 September 2012
In the past few weeks, the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has fired the chief of his air force and border guard patrol; has shut down the Swedish Embassy in the country and kicked out the ambassador; and just last week fired his long-serving foreign minister. The reason? Teddy bears. In early July, Tomas Mazetti, a marketing executive with the Swedish firm Studio Total, took off in a single- engine propeller plane from an airfield in Lithuania, donned a furry bear mask, and headed for Belarus. When his plane was inside the country, known as the last dictatorship in Europe, he released his cargo: several hundred teddy bears carrying slogans calling for democracy and increased freedom of expression.

UK accused of dragging heels on Mubarak regime assets
The British government has come under fire for allowing members of the former Egyptian dictatorship to retain assets in the UK.


Britain has allowed key members of Egypt's toppled dictatorship to retain millions of pounds of suspected property and business assets in the UK, potentially violating a globally-agreed set of sanctions. The situation has led to accusations that ministers are more interested in preserving the City of London's cosy relationship with the Arab financial sector than in securing justice. Hosni Mubarak, the ousted former president, was sentenced to life in jail in June.

How Chinese officials covered-up tale of playboy, his Ferrari and dead semi-naked women


John Garnaut September 3, 2012 - 6:37PM
A sordid tragedy involving a 20-something playboy, two scantily-clad women and a two-seater Ferrari has once again exposed the Communist Party’s challenges in hiding its dirty laundry in the information age. The black Ferrari Spider 458, reportedly bought for close to $1 million, was travelling so fast along Beijing’s North Fourth Ring Road that it split in two when it smashed into the Baofusi bridge, about 4am on Sunday, March 20. A photograph of the tangled, smouldering engine block - resting far from the main car body – was published in the Beijing Evening News and immediately spread across the internet.

Indian woman's 24-year fight to prove she is alive
This is the story of an Indian woman who married at the age of 12, became a mother at 19, was deserted by her husband at 23 and was declared dead at the age of 40.

By Amarnath Tewary Rohtas, Bihar
Asharfi Devi, now 64, fought a 24-year-long battle to prove that she was alive and her efforts paid off finally in May 2012 when a village council court ruled that she was indeed alive. Asharfi Devi's parents married her to a local farmer, Ram Janam Singh, of Barun village in Rohtas district of the northern state of Bihar in 1960. In rural India, weddings are almost never registered and Asharfi Devi doesn't have any documents to prove her marriage, but she vaguely recalls that she was around 12 when she married.