Teen Killed After Objecting To Man Urinating

A man described as a "jobless vagabond" killed a young girl in rage after she found him urinating near her home.

A man shot dead his teenage neighbour after she objected to him urinating near the gate of her New Delhi home, police have said.

Yusra Khan, 17, was killed by a 21-year-old man, described by Indian police as a "jobless vagabond", who broke into her home and also critically injured her mother.
"During the day, Yusra objected to him urinating at the gate of the building in which both lived," said additional police commissioner Ajay Chaudhry.
Mr Chaudhry said the man then returned with a handgun the same evening and shot Yusra twice and her mother in a bedroom of their working-class home in the Nizamuddin district of the city.
The man quickly disappeared through the narrow lanes of the neighbourhood, firing in the air while fleeing, according to reports.
Police have launched a major hunt to arrest the unnamed suspect.
"He is absconding but he is somewhere out there and we will get him," Mr Chaudhry said.
Yusra's father, Aslam Khan, who was not present at the time of the shooting, told journalists that the suspect left "in a fit of rage" after his daughter had raised objections and threatened her with "dire consequences".
He said his daughter "had died on the spot" while his wife was admitted to hospital and was battling for her life.
The Indian capital saw a spate of shootings in September. In one incident, a 23-year-old shot dead his ex-girlfriend and her landlady and then drove to a suburb to kill her father and sister before turning the gun on himself.
A few days later, two friends went on a shooting rampage which left three women and two young girls dead.
Figures for gun seizures in New Delhi show a rising trend.
Police in 2009 seized 573 illegal weapons, in 2010 there were 634 and in 2011 the number touched 770. In the first nine months of this year, officers have already recovered 594 guns.

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New corruption scandal rocks Brazilian government

BRASILIA, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, moving quickly to nip a new scandal in the bud, ordered the dismissal on Saturday of government officials allegedly involved in a bribery ring, including the country's deputy attorney general.

Federal police raided government offices in Brasilia and Sao Paulo on Friday and arrested six people for running an influence peddling ring that sold government approvals to businessmen in return for bribes.

Among those under investigation are the former personal secretary of ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Rosemary de Noronha, who has headed the regional office of the presidency in Sao Paulo since 2005.

The bribery scandal erupted on the heels of Brazil's biggest political corruption trial that sentenced some of Lula's closest aides to prison terms for buying support in Congress for his minority Workers' Party government after taking office in 2003.

Rousseff, Lula's chosen successor, was not affected by the vote-buying scandal and she has built on his popularity by gaining a reputation for not tolerating corruption. But the ruling Workers' Party was rocked by the scandal which tarnished Lula's legacy even though he was not implicated.

The new corruption case could further hurt the standing of Lula, who remains Brazil's most influential politician.

Friday's arrests included two brothers who were recommended for positions in the federal government by Lula's former secretary, Noronha: Paulo Rodrigues Vieira, director of the National Water Agency and Rubens Carlos Vieira, director for airport infrastructure at Brazil's Civil Aviation Agency.

Police accused the brothers of recruiting second-tier government employees who would be open to bribery, while a third brother also under arrest, Marcelo Rodrigues Vieira, contacted businessmen willing to pay for false or speeded-up approvals.

Police have been investigating the bribery ring since 2010 when an official in the government accounting office who was offered $150,000 for a favorable report got cold feet, returned the money he had been paid and blew the whistle.

Early on Friday, police seized computers and data from the Brasilia office of Deputy Attorney General Jose Weber de Holanda Alves, who has been dismissed and is under investigation along with a dozen other people, including a former senator.

"By presidential decision, all the government employees under investigation by the Federal Police will be dismissed or fired from their positions," a statement form Rousseff's office said. She ordered all agencies mentioned in the police probe to open internal investigations.

Police are investigating possible bribery cases at several other federal agencies, including the Ministry of Education.

While Noronha served as chief of staff of the president's regional office in Sao Paulo, Rousseff had inherited her as a Lula appointee.

Veja news magazine reported that Noronha, who was very close to Lula and traveled with him abroad when he was president, received bribes for influence peddling that included a luxury cruise trip and plastic surgery.

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Basque separatists Eta 'ready to disband'

Eta have suffered a spate of arrests, including that of Izaskun Lesaka, suspected of heading the group's military operations.

Basque separatist group Eta has said it is ready to disband, give up its weapons and enter talks with the French and Spanish governments.

According to a summary of a statement published on a Basque newspaper website, the group wants to negotiate a "definitive end" to its operations.

Eta has fought a 45-year campaign for Basque independence, but has lost support in recent years.

Last year it announced an end to its campaign of violence.

The new statement suggests the organisation wants to go a step further by disbanding completely and turning in its weapons.

The full statement is due to be published on Sunday.

The summary published on the website of the Basque newspaper Gara suggests Eta is ready for talks, but will attach conditions to disbanding.

They include the transfer of Basque prisoners to prisons closer to their homes - a long-standing Eta demand.

The Basque country straddles the border between Spain and France.

Eta is believed to be responsible for more than 800 deaths, and is considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the US.

It has been weakened in recent years by a loss of support among Basque people, and a number of arrests, including that of the group's alleged military leader in October.

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Cold Ravages Syria Refugees as Aid Falters

MDOUKHA, Lebanon — The winds spilling down off snow-covered Mount Hermon, bearing the first nip of winter, rattled the broken windows of an abandoned elementary school where Syrian refugees are huddled in this Bekaa Valley hamlet.

 Hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by the war, many of them stumbling out of Syria during the summer wearing little more than T-shirts and flip-flops, now face the onslaught of winter with inadequate shelter, senior government officials and aid organizations say.

“It will be winter outside and winter inside,” said Mohamed Khair al-Oraiby, a burly 27-year-old who fled here over the summer with his wife and two infants. “We already wake up early because it is so cold.”

With temperatures already plunging to zero overnight in the hills framing this valley, the humanitarian crisis facing millions of displaced Syrians is deepening. More than a million people in need of aid remain out of reach of international relief efforts, the United Nations says.

The inability of international aid groups to cope with the crisis, which has mushroomed in recent months, is partly a question of access to war zones.

More than 400,000 people have fled Syria, and 1.2 million have been driven from their homes within the country, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Some 2.5 million people need humanitarian assistance, and the number keeps climbing. The United Nations said it had reached only one million of them.

But efforts have also been hampered by lack of resources. The United Nations is seeking some $487 million for refugees across the region, of which about 35 percent has been collected.

“The capacity of the international donor community to support the crisis is not happening at the same speed at which the crisis is unfolding,” said Panos Moumtzis, the regional coordinator for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Neighboring countries coping with the influx are developing their own plans: Jordan is seeking about $700 million, and Turkey, which has spent $400 million of its own money on state-of-the-art camps with three hot meals daily, is also now seeking aid.

Inside Syria, conditions are even worse. The distribution of aid is plagued by problems of access, security and a lack of organizations to carry out the work, according to aid officials.

Most deploy from Damascus, where fighting has been so fierce in recent weeks that aid workers have occasionally been instructed not to leave their houses. Some areas have fallen under the sway of shadowy jihadist forces that eye Western aid organizations as espionage networks.

In November, the International Committee of the Red Cross finally negotiated brief access to the old city of Homs with the fundamentalist militia that controls it. The locals jeered the relief workers for taking more than four months to reach them.

“We’ve been besieged for months,” yelled a man wearing camouflage fatigues in a video of the visit posted on YouTube, giving the thumbs-down sign. “Now it occurs to you to come? We don’t want you, we don’t want your food, and we don’t want anything from you.”

At least 20 areas within Syria are unreachable because of fighting, aid officials said. Vast swaths of countryside are also inaccessible, including much of the north, because the roads from Damascus are too dangerous.

Families in provincial Idlib are reverting to old methods to survive. In some villages lacking electricity for months, for example, residents have built wood-fired ovens in their backyards, and daylight now sets the rhythm of their lives. They sleep soon after sunset and rise at dawn.

Relief planning is difficult because numbers are elusive and communication is haphazard. In the long-embattled city of Homs, for example, the United Nations listed 223,000 people as receiving monthly food rations, which it used as the number of people in need. But when a fighting lull enabled the Syrian Red Crescent to take a survey, 492,000 people sought assistance.

The Syrian government has allowed only eight foreign aid organizations to operate; all were already working in Syria before the uprising started in March 2011, helping Iraqi refugees. Seven employees of the Syrian Red Crescent have been killed.        

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Egypt’s judges set to fight Morsi power play

CAIRO — Egypt’s association of judges called Saturday for the judicial system to come to a halt to fight an assertion of near-absolute power by the nation’s first democratically elected president, setting the stage for a confrontation between the courts and a man who has said his will is not subject to appeal.

Judges across the country vowed to strike, and lawyers filed several legal challenges to the move by President Mohamed Morsi, who has said he is assuming broad powers temporarily to combat entrenched remnants of the former authoritarian government. The constitutional court, meanwhile, hinted that it may weigh in on the matter, directly challenging the man who has tried to sideline them.

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Greek Undercover Sting Nets Artefact Suspects

Greek police have solved a museum robbery that took place in February after a sting operation netted three suspects and recovered dozens of archaeological artefacts.

The three Greek men were arrested at a hotel in the city of Patras after one of them tried to sell a Bronze Age gold ring for 300,000 euros (£243,000) to an undercover officer posing as a potential buyer.
Officers were then dispatched to a village near Olympia, where they found the remaining artefacts buried inside a sack in a field.
"The discovery and arrest of the perpetrators of the robbery and the recovery of the stolen items are a great success," Culture Minister Costas Tzavaras said in a statement.
The stolen treasures included a 3,300-year-old gold ring, a bronze statuette of a victorious athlete, a 2,400-year-old oil jar, clay lamps, bronze tripods and miniature chariot wheels, as well as dozens of idols of charioteers, horses and bulls.

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Frozen Pool Fail

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