Thievery Comes After Carnage at Kenya Mall
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, NICHOLAS KULISH and JOSH KRONNAIROBI, Kenya — Mannequins were stripped clean, jewelry cases smashed, racks of expensive suits carted off, dozens of cash registers cracked open and at least one member of the Kenyan security services arrested, caught with a bloody wallet.
The looting of the Westgate mall, thescene of a siege in which scores of people were killed last month, appeared to have the scope and organization of a large-scale military operation, and many Kenyans are asking if that is what it was.
From the first hours after Islamist militants burst into the mall on Sept. 21, killing men, women and children, until a week later when shopkeepers were let back in to sweep up the broken glass, very few people were allowed inside the mall except the Kenyan security forces, mainly the army.
More than 300 feared drowned after boat sinks off Sicilian island
Rescuers believe migrants set fire to sheet to attract attention after vessel broke down
Paddy Agnew
More than 300 people, mainly Somalian or Eritrean, yesterday drowned or were feared dead less than half a mile off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa.
The “boat people” ship, containing an estimated 450 to 500 men, women and children, sank after a fire broke out as it came close to the shoreline.
Last night 104 bodies had been accounted for, with some 200 people still missing. It was not clear last night just how the fire broke out, but rescue workers believe that it may have been accidentally started by the migrants when they set fire to a large sheet in order to attract attention after the ship broke down.
LIBYA
Porous borders turn Libya into radical sanctuary
Libya has morphed into the Wild West of northern Africa just two years after the fall of the Gadhafi regime. In particular, the Libyan Desert has become a sanctuary for radical forces.
In the middle of nowhere in the Sahara Desert in the town of Isseyen, time seems to stand still. Now that voter registration is over for the upcoming municipal elections, tranquility has returned to the simple offices of the town hall. Visitors only come by for the satellite Internet connection, one of the very few public services provided in this remote area of post-revolution Libya.
But the calm is deceptive. Located southwest of the Tuareg town of Ghat, Isseyen is the last outpost before the Algerian border, a route used to enter the country by smugglers and Tuareg fighters from Mali, including members of AQIM, Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb.
Africa's population to balloon
The world's population will rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 from the current level of 7.1billion and India will overtake China as the world's most populous nation, a French study predicts.
Africa will be home to a quarter of the world's population in 2050, with 2.5billion people, more than double the current level of 1.1billion.
A report by the French Institute of Demographic Studies has projected that there will be 10billion to 11billion people on the planet by the end of the century.
The projections run parallel to forecasts by the UN, the World Bank and other national institutions.
A UN study in June said the global population would swell to 9.6billion in 2050 and the number of people aged 60 and above would catapult from 841million now to 2billion in 2050 and nearly 3billion in 2100.
South Asia
Oct 4, '13
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Afghanistan down the memory hole
By Ann Jones
Will the United States still be meddling in Afghanistan 30 years from now? If history is any guide, the answer is yes. And if history is any guide, three decades from now most Americans will have only the haziest idea why.
Since the 1950s, the US has been trying to mold that remote land to its own desires, first through an aid "war" in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union; then, starting as the 1970s ended, an increasingly bitter and brutally hot proxy war with the
Soviets, intended to pay them back for supporting America's enemies during the war in Vietnam. One bad war leads to another.
From then until the early 1990s, Washington put weapons in the hands of Islamic fundamentalist extremists of all sorts - thought to be natural, devoutly religious allies in the war against "godless communism" - gloated over the Red Army's defeat and the surprising implosion of the Soviet empire, and then experienced its own catastrophic blowback from Afghanistan on September 11, 2001. After 50 years of scheming behind the scenes, the US put boots on the ground in 2001 and now, 12 years later, is still fighting there - against some Afghans on behalf of other Afghans while training Afghan troops to take over and fight their countrymen, and others, on their own.
World rankings: Top 10 universities in 2013
If you're attending one of the world’s top universities, chances are high you're an English-speaking student on a leafy campus in the United States or the United Kingdom.
Britain’s leading higher education publication, The Times Higher Education, released its 2013-2014 version of the annual global ranking of the world’s top universities. Schools in the US and the UK take all top 10 spots and over half of the top 100.
Switzerland earned the top-ranked school outside of the US or UK at number 14, and Japan’sUniversity of Tokyo landed as the highest Asian school at number 23. India and Russia continue to struggle, placing no institutions in the top 100 for the second year in a row.
The editor of the rankings, Phil Baty, pointed to a pattern of “clustering” among elite universities:Boston, Mass. has more universities on the list than China, Switzerland, or Australia. And Londonhas more than all of Japan. Mr. Baty notes fears that regional schools may be slipping while elite institutions thrive.
The study’s methodology relies on data from Thomson Reuters’ Global Institutional Profiles database, and measures schools on their teaching, research, industry income, and international outlook.
Here are the top 10 schools:
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