SIx In The Morning Sunday March 1

Boris Nemtsov murder: Thousands set to march in Moscow

Thousands of people are expected to take to the streets of Moscow to honour opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead on Friday.

He was due to lead an opposition march on Sunday but his supporters will now be marching to mourn his death.

President Vladimir Putin condemned Mr Nemtsov's murder as "vile and cynical" and vowed to find the killers.

Mr Nemtsov's allies call it a political killing linked to his opposition to Mr Putin and the Ukraine conflict.

Opposition supporters are due to gather in central Moscow at 14:00 local time (11:00 GMT) on Sunday, before marching to the spot on Great Moskvoretsky Bridge where Mr Nemtsov was killed.

Moscow city authorities had previously approved a march for up to 50,000 people but organisers said more people might now attend following the murder.

Forget Madonna – Malawi’s parents find their own way of keeping girls in school

The superstar’s much-hyped bid to set up a girls’ academy failed. Now villagers are ensuring their daughters stay in education, and success is built on small steps - like making sure pupils have lunch

Tracy McVeigh in Liwonde, Malawi

Sunday 1 March 2015 00.05 GMT

On weak-legged plastic chairs under the partial shade of one of the schoolyard’s two vast acacia trees, there is a lot of counting on fingers going on.

Their children might be well beyond basic maths now at Likwenu secondary, but these mothers, sharp as they are, have had little experience of formal arithmetic; there’s rarely money around to count.

Eventually there is murmured agreement and Molley Kalino, chair of the mothers’ support group at the school, deep in the countryside of southern Malawi, speaks up: “So a small field in a good year will bring you in 10 50kg bags of maize – six or seven in a bad year.

Revealed: How torture was used to foil al-Qaeda 2010 plot to bomb two airliners 17 minutes before explosion

Exclusive: Information from terror suspects about 2010 plot was used in a 'Jack Bauer real-time operation'

JAMIE MERRILL  , JAMES HANNING , MARK LEFTLY , NICK CLARK

 

 

Sunday 01 March 2015

The former head of MI6 has said torturing suspected terrorists produces “useful information”, as The Independent on Sundayreveals that “real-time” intelligence understood to have been obtained by torture in Saudi Arabia helped to thwart a terrorist bombing on British soil.

In his first interview since stepping down from Secret Intelligence Service in January, Sir John Sawers told the BBC yesterday that torture “does produce intelligence” and security services “set aside the use of torture… because it is against the values” of British society, not because it doesn’t work in the short term. Sir John defended the security services against accusations they had played a role in the radicalising of British Muslims, including Mohammed Emwazi, who it is claimed is the extremist responsible for the murder of hostages in Syria.

Spectacular insights into the early life of galaxies

Astronomers at the Very Large Telescope have taken the best 3D-pictures of the early universe ever. They discovered objects emitting so little light that the Hubble Telescope could not find them.

Astronomers, who want to look deep into the universe and back in time must focus their telescopes on the same place in the sky for as long as possible. This is how researchers take so-called deep-field pictures.

The most well known of them come from the Hubble Space Telecope. In 1995 astronomers first focused on a region of the skies in the Northern Hemisphere to research galaxies that are extremely far away and in early stages of their development.

Three years later, the astronomers selected a region of the skies in the Southern Hemisphere where they repeated the observation procedure for ten days.

China's president Xi Jinping presents China by the numbers, again

March 1, 2015 - 5:41PM

Philip Wen

China correspondent for Fairfax Media

With an audacious anti-corruption campaign still very much the centrepiece of his two years in power, President Xi Jinping has shown a willingness to deviate from the norm. 

But in other areas he has adhered more to long-held Communist Party convention. Last week, he unveiled a numbered list of vaguely defined slogans caked in political jargon which received blanket media coverage across official media. 

Mr Xi's "four comprehensives" – emphasising the need to "comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society, comprehensively deepen reform, comprehensively govern the nation according to law and comprehensively be strict in governing the party" has immediately drawn comparison to other numbered edicts, like former President Jiang Zemin's "three represents" and Zhou Enlai's "four modernisations". 

ISIS to release 29 Assyrian Christians, monitoring group says

By Melissa Gray, CNN

(CNN) ISIS in northern Syria plans to release 29 Assyrian Christian hostages among more than 200 captured by the Sunni extremist group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday, citing an Assyrian commander.

The Syrian Observatory said a self-proclaimed ISIS court ordered the release, and told the commander that the fate of the other kidnapped Assyrians has yet to be decided by ISIS Sharia jurists.

ISIS captured at least 220 Assyrians, all Christians, on February 23 during an attack on the villages around the town of Tal Tamer in the northern Syrian province of al-Hasakah.

The Syrian Observatory said its information indicates ISIS has taken the hostages to the Mount Abdelaziz area, southwest of Tal Tamer.