Six In The Morning Monday August 4

Palestinians accuse Israel of breaking truce

Seven-hour pause announced by Israel after attack near school has been broken almost immediately, health official says. Last updated: 04 Aug 2014 08:21

Palestinian officials have accused Israel of almost immediately breaking a seven-hour truce by bombing a house in Gaza City.

Ashraf al-Qudra, the Gaza Health Ministry spokesman, said 15 people, mostly women and children, were wounded in the strike on Monday on a house in Shati camp.

An Israeli military spokeswoman told news agency Reuters she was checking the report.

Israel earlier declared that it was holding fire in parts of the Gaza Strip for seven hours, amid world outrage over a deadly strike on a UN school in the Palestinian territory.

Monday's limited and unilateral truce, between 0700-1400 GMT, was announced after world powers fiercely condemned the previous day's attack that left 10 Palestinians sheltering at a school dead, as Israel was pulling some of its troops from Gaza.

Shell and Nigeria have failed on oil pollution clean-up, Amnesty says

Three years on from UN study saying it will take 30 years to clean up Ogoniland oil spills, little has changed

• Associated Press
• theguardian.com, Monday 4 August 2014 08.49 BST

Little action has been taken to clean up pollution caused by oil production in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, either by the government or Shell Oil, Amnesty International and other groups charged Monday.

Oil production has contaminated the drinking water of at least 10 communities in the Ogoniland area but neither the Nigerian government nor Royal Dutch Shell’s Nigeria subsidiary have taken effective measures to restore the fouled environment, said the new report by Amnesty International, Friends of The Earth Europe, Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development, Environmental Rights Action, and Platform.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., the state-owned oil company, has not yet responded to a request by The Associated Press for reaction to the critical report. A detailed assessment of pollution in the oil-producing area was published in 2011 by the United Nations Environment Program,which said it will probably take up to 30 years to fully clean the area.

US cities’ crackdown on homeless people is ‘close to ethnic cleansing’

David Usborne reports on an insidious campaign to drive out vagrants by a combination of police harassment and increasingly draconian new ordinances

DAVID USBORNE 

His face riven with lines forged by years on the streets, Gil reaches into the top pocket of his shirt and fishes out a wedge of grimy papers. These are the precious records of his life, documents the rest of us keep in a filing cabinet at home. Eventually he finds what he is looking for, a yellow slip that looks like a parking ticket.

That, as it happens, is about right, although Gil is not a man of many possessions and certainly not a car. He does, however, have size 13 shoes. In his hands is a police citation written a few weeks ago when an officer found him sitting on the kerb with his feet touching the road. “Feet in Roadway Disturbing Traffic,” it reads.

This is Fort Lauderdale, in Broward County, Florida, between Miami and Palm Beach, and Gil’s ticket – he gives his first name only – could be Exhibit A in what civil rights activists say is a creeping and insidious campaign by this and many other American cities to drive the homeless out of their midst by a combination of police harassment and increasingly draconian new ordinances that make being homeless a criminal offence.

Mohammed Deif, the shadowy figure who heads Hamas' military wing

August 4, 2014 - 1:56PM

Sudarsan Raghavan

Gaza City: On a narrow, rubble-strewn Gaza street, where an Israeli air strike recently obliterated the home of a top Hamas leader, a group of boys and men praised a shadowy, middle-age man most Palestinians have never seen - and whom Israel is eager to kill.

“He’s a role model for us,” declared Ahmed, 32, a Hamas security guard, clutching a walkie-talkie.

“He’s a legend for the children, for everyone in Gaza.”

“He is defending our homeland,” agreed Yassin Abu Rialah, 14.

To Israelis, Mohammed Deif is enemy number one. As the top commander of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, Deif has tormented the Jewish state for three decades, deploying suicide bombers and directing the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. He has survived several attempts by Israel to assassinate him, earning him the nickname “the cat with nine lives”.

Sugar wars: 35 years of bitter feuds

COLLINS MTIKA
Illovo Malawi is locked in a dispute with farmers who claim it has occupied their land for decades

For 35 years now, more than 400 subsistence farmers at Chisita in Malawi’s central region have been traversing the country’s courts, nongovernmental organisations and the offices of the ombud in a bid to reclaim 600 hectares of land, which Illovo Malawi occupied in 1979.

The farmers claim the company, in collusion with a senior chief, pushed them off their land and illegally converted it into part of its behemoth sugar cane plantation.

“I lost three hectares which were my livelihood. They pushed us to the hills where the land is infertile. Now I am suffering,” said farmer Peter Kaunda.

World's highest rail track reaches Everest gateway Shigatse

By Daojun Wu, for CNN

August 4, 2014 -- Updated 0253 GMT (1053 HKT)

The world's highest railway rolls even closer to Mount Everest this month when China inaugurates a stretch of track connecting the Tibetan cities of Lhasa and Shigatse.

Traversing valleys, mountains and crossing the glacier-fed Brahmaputra River, the line takes in breathtaking views of snow-capped peaks and majestic plateaus as it wends from the territory's capital to its second city.

The track is an extension of the Qinghai-Tibet line -- an engineering marvel named the "closest stretch of railway to the sky" after it first carried passengers above 5,000 meters (16,404 feet) in 2006.