Author: xaurav

A sailor charged with murder and three counts of attempted murder after a shooting on board a nuclear submarine has appeared in court.

Lt Cdr Ian Molyneux, 36, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, was shot dead on HMS Astute while it was docked in Southampton on 8 April.

A second man, Lt Cdr Christopher Hodge, was also shot and remains in hospital.

Able Seaman Ryan Samuel Donovan, 22, appeared at the city’s magistrates court and was remanded in custody.

He is due to appear at Winchester Crown Court on Wednesday.

The Royal Navy serviceman of Dartford, Kent, has also been charged with the attempted murders of Petty Officer Christopher Brown, 36, Chief Petty Officer David McCoy, 37, and Lt Cdr Hodge, 45.

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Action will be taken against those responsible for the troubles at Kabul Bank, which caused a financial crisis in Afghanistan last year, President Hamid Karzai says.

Shareholders who fail to repay loans and bank managers responsible for negligence will be prosecuted, he said.

But Mr Karzai also blamed poor advice from foreigners for the crisis.

Fraud, bad loans and mismanagement brought the bank close to collapse as Afghans rushed to withdraw savings.

The bank has almost $1bn (£600m) in outstanding loans.

Afghanistan’s international allies have warned that billions of dollars in aid are at risk if reforms are not undertaken.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has indicated that it could also pull its support from Afghanistan. A recent IMF report said the bank should be placed in receivership.

Britain has already suspended a $140m (£85.6m) payment in aid to the country following the crisis.

The BBC’s Quentin Somerville in Kabul says that the bank lent freely and wildly to leading figures in Afghanistan – including the relatives of the president and a vice-president.

President Karzai said that Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, lacked the necessary banking experience to oversee the institution. He also criticised foreign advisers to the bank.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid to these [foreign] individuals and organisations to help the banking system of the country and they failed in their task,” Mr Karzai is quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.

But Mr Karzai said he was determined to ensure that those responsible are subject to criminal investigations.

“They [‘rogue’ shareholders] will not have shares in the bank and the loans they have taken they must pay back within one month,” Mr Karzai said.

“If they are paid back within one month, excellent. If not, they’ll be legally pursued by the government of Afghanistan.”

Kabul Bank, Afghanistan’s largest private bank, handles most of the government payroll, including salaries for policemen and teachers.

The central bank sacked Kabul Bank’s top executives and took control of its finances in September.

Among three senior Kabul bank executives and shareholders under investigation is the brother of Afghanistan’s First Vice-President, Mohammad Qasim Fahim.

Another major shareholder is Mahmoud Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, but Mahmoud Karzai is not being investigated.

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A woman has been detained in France at a protest against a ban on Muslim woman concealing their faces behind a veil when in public.

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Shane Watson smashes a world-record 15 sixes on his way to recording the highest individual one-day innings by an Australian as Bangladesh are crushed by nine wickets.

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Notts County appoint Martin Allen as their new manager on a one-year rolling contract.

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Rangers defender Madjid Bougherra turns down a two-year contract extension and expects to leave Ibrox in the summer.

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Almost nine out of every 10 UK parents say children are having to grow up too early, with nearly half unhappy with pre-watershed TV, a survey suggests.

The research is part of a government-commissioned review into the sexualisation of children, conducted by Mothers’ Union head Reg Bailey.

Most parents said music videos and celebrity were encouraging children to act older than they were.

Mr Bailey is due to publish a full report in May.

Of the 1,025 parents of five- to 16-year-olds surveyed, 40% said they had seen things in public places, such as shop window displays and advertising hoardings, that they felt were inappropriate for children to see because of their sexual content.

And 41% of parents said they had seen programmes or adverts on television before 9pm that they felt were unsuitable for similar reasons.

The review is also conducting focus groups, and Mr Bailey said emerging areas of concern included adult-style clothing aimed at young children, as well as toys and games they felt were inappropriate.

Parents were “struggling against the slow creep of an increasingly commercial and sexualised culture and behaviour, which they say prevents them from parenting the way they want”, he said.

He said parents “had little faith in regulators or businesses taking their concerns seriously”, but also were put off complaining be fears they would be seen as “prudish or out of touch”.

The review is exploring whether the should be restrictions on retailers selling sexualised products aimed at children – such as “Porn star” T-shirts or padded bras.

A code of conduct on “age appropriate” marketing and a new watchdog are among plans being considered by the review.

Items that have been criticised include pencil cases and other products with the Playboy logo.

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A member of parliament from an Islamic party which promoted anti-pornography legislation has resigned after being caught watching porn in parliament.

Mr Arifinto of the Islamic Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) was photographed looking at the images on Friday.

He said he had inadvertently opened an email link which led him to the images.

Pornography has become one of the testing grounds of conservative Islam’s influence over politics in Indonesia.

“For the recent developing media coverage, I apologise to all members of the party and parliament,” Mr Arifinto – who goes by one name – told a news conference.

“I will continue to work for my party. I’m also going to continue to better myself, by repentance, reading the Koran and asking for guidance.”

The BBC’s Kate McGeown in Jakarta says the PKS was the driving force behind anti-pornography legislation, so that when one of its lawmakers was caught out, he was shown no mercy.

If it is proved that Mr Arifinto was indeed downloading a pornographic movie, as photography of his behaviour appears to show, he could find himself charged with a law of his own party’s making.

“PKS lawmakers are human. What happened to [Arifinto] could happen to anybody else,” said the head of the party’s Shariah Body, Surahman Hidayat.

Members of other faiths and ethnic groups in the sprawling nation, including many moderate Muslims, have criticised the anti-pornography laws for constraining freedom of cultural expression.

Previously, the PKS and other conservative parties had hounded the former editor of an Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine, which carried no nudity.

In January this year, one of South East Asia’s best known pop stars, Nazril Irham or Ariel as he is known, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for making and distributing sex videos on the internet. He denied distributing the videos, saying they had been stolen.

The Blackberry telephone provider, Research In Motion (RIM), has also been asked by the government to prevent pornographic content from being made available through their devices if they wish to maintain distribution in Indonesia.

Indonesia is a secular state with a long tradition of tolerance, but with more democracy in the past decade, Muslim political groups have tested their strength through morality and corruption campaigns.

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Toyota is to suspend production at its North American plants in five one-day shutdowns this month because supplies of components remain limited.

The Japanese car giant said the move was “due to parts supply difficulties” following the damage caused by earthquake in Japan on 11 March.

All 13 of Toyota’s North American plants will be affected.

Last week, Toyota head office said reports it would halt production there were a “total misunderstanding”.

That comment came after a US spokesman for the carmaker said a temporary halt was “inevitable” following the damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Toyota now says vehicle production and almost all North American engine and parts plants will be affected.

The dates of the shutdowns are 15, 18, 21, 22 and 25 April, although manufacturing at the Kentucky factory will not be stopped on 21 April.

Toyota said that no decisions had been made yet regarding production after 25 April.

Production at the company’s domestic factories has resumed, although at a reduced capacity.

Factories in Japan will be shut down again between 27 April and 9 May, although that includes the traditional Japanese Golden Week holiday.

Other companies have been affected by supply-chain problems too.

Last week, Honda said it was halving production at its factory in Swindon in the south of England.

And Nissan said it would be suspending its UK production for three days at the end of the month due to a shortfall of parts from Japan.

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By Richard Black

Europe may be starting to burrow its way under Africa, geologists suggest.

The continents are converging; and for many millions of years, the northern edge of the African tectonic plate has descended under Europe.

But this process has stalled; and at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting last week, scientists said we may be seeing Europe taking a turn.

If they are correct, this would signal the start of a new subduction zone – a rare event, scientifically fascinating.

Beneath the Mediterranean Sea, the cold, dense rock at the extreme north of the African plate has virtually all sunk under the Eurasian plate on which Europe sits.

But the African landmass is too light to follow suit and descend.

“Africa won’t sink, but Africa and Europe continue to move together; so where is this taken up?” asked Rinus Wortel from the University of Utrecht.

“It looks possible that on the appropriate timescale, we are witnessing the beginning of subduction of Europe under Africa,” he told BBC News.

The Mediterranean Sea’s geological structure and history are quite complex.

The Utrecht group’s analysis goes like this:

The slow convergence – just a few centimetres per year – was obstructed partially by collision of the two plates further East, in Turkey, and then by the fact that the lightness of the African continent prevented further subduction.

As a result, bits of the African plate that did subduct have broken off and are descending to the Earth’s mantle.

To fill this gap, bits of the Eurasian plate have been pulled southwards across the Mediterranean, such as the Balearic Islands, Corsica and Sardinia. The same thing is happening with Crete.

And computer modelling suggests the end product of all this could be the initiation of subduction in the opposite direction from the past.

Additional evidence comes from observations of earthquakes.

“We see what motion occurs in the earthquakes, and we see that the fault planes dip towards the South,” said Professor Wortel.

Although the power of subduction zones to generate enormous events has been thrown into stark light once more by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami off the Japanese coast, the geology of the Mediterranean is very different.

Nevertheless, there is some concern among scientists that European countries are putting only small amounts of money into building a tsunami warning system for the region.

At the EGU, Stefano Tinti from the University of Bologna, Italy, said the EU collectively had put only about 8m euros into tsunami research over the last five years.

Over the same period, Germany alone funded the Indonesian early warning system to the tune of about 55m euros, he said.

“There was interest just after [the Asian tsunami of] 2004, and then interest rapidly decreased again,” Professor Tinti, who until recently chaired an intergovernmental co-ordination group on tsunami in Europe, told reporters.

“It’s very political; and putting together all these member states in order to co-operate and put money in – even though the sums are very small, was a very difficult task.”

Although tsunamigenic earthquakes in the Mediterranean are smaller than the biggest ones around the Pacific rim, Magnitude 8 events have been recorded, such as the 1303 Crete quake whose tsunami devastated Heraklion and Alexandria.

Confirmation that European subduction had started could allow scientists to model the region better, and so make better assessments of earthquake and tsunami risk.

But the long timescales involved in geological processes make this a challenge.

“We’ll keep track of the seismic activity to see whether it continues to indicate this underthrusting of the Mediterranean subsurface underneath North Africa,” said Rinus Wortel.

“But it’s not going to mature in the lifetime of a scientist.”

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