Six In The Morning

Death takes no holiday: Tracking gun violence over one long January weekend

By Bill Dedman
Investigative Reporter, NBC News

It was after midnight, early on a Saturday in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, and student Jason "Cowboy" Monson was at the police station to get back his Desert Eagle .45-caliber handgun.
In McDonough, Ga., about the same time, two teenage brothers were still awake. A friend was sleeping over, and their mother had let the boys handle her .38-caliber revolver, which was unloaded. She'd gone to bed.

In South Valley, N.M., it was quiet at the Griego household as 15-year-old Nehemiah waited for his father to come home from the night shift at a homeless shelter. The son was holding his father's AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

 In the next few hours, the freshman in Idaho, one of the brothers in Georgia, and most of the Griego family would be dead, victims of three forms of gun violence — suicide, accident and murder — that are everyday occurrences in the United States.

The truth about Romania's gypsies: Not coming over here, not stealing our jobs

New Neightbours of 2014, Part 1: Right-wing politicians and media are stoking fears that Romanian Gypsies plan to flock to Britain. But the reality is very different, the residents of the country's worst slums tell Jerome Taylor

 Monday 11 February 2013

A freezing wind sweeps in across the Romanian countryside. The sweet stench of garbage catches at the back of the throat, and feral dogs chase one another over the heaps of filth. This rubbish dump, for Claudia Greta and her family, is home, her house a ramshackle single-storey shack. Claudia, 40, is one of more than 1,500 Roma Gypsies who live in a sprawling, fetid encampment on a landfill site outside Romania's second-largest city Cluj-Napoca. The residents of Pata Rat – half of them are children – have been forcibly moved there over the past 15 years. Claudia opens the shack door to a room little bigger than a caravan and sighs: "Look where we live. We live on top of garbage."

 Many Romanians have been perplexed by the British Government's determination to dissuade them from coming to the UK. Next year, the quotas which let EU countries limit the number of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants crossing their borders will be lifted – allowing 29 million people free travel and working rights across Europe. But Britain wants to deter them from crossing the Channel.

Burma journalists hit by 'state-sponsored' hacking

February 11, 2013 - 1:49PM

Thomas Fuller

 

Bangkok: Several journalists who cover Burma said Sunday that they had received warnings from Google that their email accounts might have been hacked by "state-sponsored attackers."

The warnings began appearing last week, said the journalists, who included employees of Eleven Media, one of Burma's leading news organisations; Bertil Lintner, a Thailand-based author and expert on Burma's ethnic groups; and a Burmese correspondent for The Associated Press.

Taj Meadows, a Google spokesman in Tokyo, said that he could not immediately provide specifics about the warnings, but said that Google had begun the policy of notifying users of suspicious activity in June.

"I can certainly confirm that we send these types of notices to accounts that we suspect are the targets of state-sponsored attacks," Mr Meadows said.

 

Cattle raid kills 103 in South Sudan

Sapa | 11 February, 2013 08:19

 

More than 100 people were killed in a violence-prone region of South Sudan when one tribe attacked another while cattle were being moved across land, officials said Sunday.

Kuol Manyang Juuk, the governor of Jonglei state, said 103 people died in the Friday clash in Akobo County. Juuk said 17 of the attackers were killed and that 14 soldiers from South Sudan's military, the SPLA, who were accompanying the cattle-moving tribe also died.

Jonglei County has been wracked by massive bouts of tribal violence for years. The United Nations says more than 2,600 violence-related deaths were reported in Jonglei from January 2011 to September 2012, and account for more than half of reported deaths in South Sudan, a country that is emerging from the shambles of a decades-long war. Jonglei state covers northeastern South Sudan.


11 February 2013 Last updated at 06:50 GMT

Kumbh Mela: 'Overcrowding' led to Allahabad stampede

A stampede at a railway station in the northern Indian city of Allahabad in which at least 36 people died may have been caused by overcrowding, India's railway minister has said. 

Pawan Kumar Bansal said there were "too many people on the platforms".
The victims were among the 30 million Hindu pilgrims returning home after attending the Kumbh Mela gathering.

At least 31 others were injured in the stampede on Sunday evening. Most of the victims were women and children.

Sunday was the most auspicious of six bathing days at the Kumbh Mela, which is billed as the world's biggest human gathering.

The festival, which is held every 12 years, expects 100 million bathers in total across its 55 days.

Damascus on Edge as War Seeps into Syrian Capital

By an employee of THE NEW YORK TIMES in DAMASCUS SYRIA and ANNE BARNARD

Published: February 10, 2013

DAMASCUS, Syria — Unkempt government soldiers, some appearing drunk, have been deployed near a rebel-held railway station in the southern reaches of this tense capital. Office workers on 29th of May Street, in the heart of the city, tell of huddling at their desks, trapped inside for hours by gun battles that sound alarmingly close.

Soldiers have swept through city neighborhoods, making arrests ahead of a threatened rebel advance downtown, even as opposition fighters edge past the city limits, carrying mortars and shelling security buildings. Fighter jets that pounded the suburbs for months have begun to strike Jobar, an outlying neighborhood of Damascus proper, creating the disturbing spectacle of a government’s bombing its own capital. 

On Sunday, the government sent tanks there to battle rebels for control of a key ring road.