Category: news

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Refugees have been advised to leave the camps, but many have nowhere to go

Haiti has been placed on high alert as a powerful storm sweeps in, threatening thousands of earthquake survivors still living in camps.

Forecasters say Tropical Storm Tomas is gaining strength and will begin to lash Haiti by late Thursday, reaching full force by Friday.

Some camps are being evacuated and officials have told those living in tents to move to stronger shelter.

Health workers fear heavy rain will exacerbate Haiti’s cholera epidemic.

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan in Port-au-Prince says many trees have been cut down for charcoal and deforestation, meaning that heavy rains could trigger mudslides.

On Thursday, Tomas was churning across the Caribbean south-west of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, with maximum sustained winds of 85km/h (50mph), the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

The NHC warned of hurricane conditions for Haiti, the south-eastern Bahamas, the Caicos Islands and the Cuban province of Guantanamo.

It also issued a tropical storm warning for Jamaica and the Cuban provinces of Santiago de Cuba and Holguin.

Tomas is expected to pick up speed over the next 48 hours, and experts warn it could again develop into a hurricane.

Those staying in the camps are making their shelters as strong as possible

“On the forecast track, the centre will pass near Haiti or extreme eastern Cuba (late Thursday) and early Friday,” the NHC said.

The storm is expected to dump as much as 38cm (15in) of rain over Haiti and the neighbouring Dominican Republic, with more heavy rain over Jamaica and Cuba.

Miloudy Vincent, a senior aide in Haiti’s education ministry, said schools would close temporarily to be used for shelters.

Civil protection official Nadia Lochard said radio stations were being used to tell those living in camps they should “move to a place that is secure”, such as the homes of friends or relatives.

However, correspondents say fear and confusion have swept through many of the camps, where many have nowhere else to go.

At the Corail-Cesselesse relocation camp, fighting broke out on Wednesday when officials tried to explain a planned voluntary evacuation of nearly 8,000 people.

Aid agencies have been stockpiling supplies ready for the storm and the US has deployed the USS Iwo Jima to help with any humanitarian emergency.

Medecins Sans Frontieres says it has moved patients from tented wards to stronger shelters and positioned helicopters in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Doctors have warned that torrential rain could flood sanitary installations and contaminate drinking water, worsening a cholera epidemic in the country.

On Wednesday health officials said there had been a 40% jump in the number of new cholera cases and the death toll was 442, with 105 more deaths since Saturday.

An estimated 1.3 million survivors of January’s devastating earthquake are still living in tent camps in and around Haiti’s capital.

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The Clock is a new film by British-based video artist Christian Marclay consisting of thousands of old movie clips in which the time on screen matches real-life time where the movie is playing

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The parcel bomb plot has been blamed on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a group which the government in Yemen is struggling to contain.

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Picket lines are expected at BBC locations around the country

Members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) are set to stage a 48-hour strike at the BBC in a dispute over proposed pension plan changes.

The NUJ, which has 4,100 members at the BBC, voted to reject the corporation’s “final” offer on pensions.

Broadcasting union Bectu, which includes technical and production staff, voted to accept the deal.

The journalists’ union is planning to take further industrial action on 15 and 16 November.

NUJ members at the BBC are also set to observe an indefinite work to rule from Sunday, ensuring they take full breaks and only work their minimum prescribed hours.

The dispute stems from the BBC’s plans to reduce a £1.5bn pensions deficit by capping increases in pensionable pay at 1% from next April.

Under the BBC’s revised offer, the amount employees BBC staff to stage strike actionwould have to pay into the pension scheme has been reduced from 7% to 6%.

In return, they would get a career-average benefit pension – based on the average salary over an employee’s entire career – that would be revalued by up to 4% each year. The previous offer was 2.5%.

When employees draw their pension, payments will increase automatically each year in line with inflation, by up to 4% – again up from a previous offer of 2.5%.

NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said in response to the deal’s rejection that, “NUJ members across the BBC have consistently dubbed the proposals a ‘pensions robbery’. That hasn’t changed.

“The BBC have now left members with no choice but to take action to defend their pensions.”

The NUJ said it “expected widespread support” from its members to take industrial action.

Bectu members said after last month’s ballot that the amended offer was “the best that can be achieved through negotiation”.

But it added their position could be reviewed if the pensions deficit turned out to be less than £1.5bn.

In an e-mail to BBC staff, director general Mark Thompson said the action “may manage to take some output off the air or lower its quality.

“But strikes aren’t going to reduce the pension deficit or make the need for radical pension reform go away,” he added.

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Kids eating bugs, a chimney sweeping dog and chewing gum art.

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Steven Gerrard comes off the bench to inspire Liverpool to a win against Napoli in their Europa League group game.

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Foreign Office Minister Jeremy Browne has been dubbed a racist by a heckler in the Question Time audience, over comments he made about the French army.

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Mark Webber reopens the controversy about favouritism at Red Bull by saying the team support Sebastian Vettel more than him.

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The Prison Service said a “disturbance” started on the site at 1930 GMT

Inmates are involved in a third night of rioting at a prison complex in South Yorkshire.

A prison source told the BBC prisoners were rioting in the adult section at Moorland prison, near Doncaster.

Fire engines, police and ambulances were at the scene and extra prison officers were seen entering the jail.

Violence flared at the adjacent Moorland Young Offenders Institution after inmates refused to return to their cells on Tuesday and Wednesday.

As a result of damage caused to the buildings, 86 inmates were earlier transferred to other prisons.

A Prison Service spokesman confirmed a “disturbance” started on the adult side of the site at 1930 GMT.

He said: “Trained prison service staff are dealing with the disturbance and Tornado teams (prison officers in riot gear) are on their way to the establishment.

“This is a very serious matter and a high level review will be started tomorrow.”

More than 80 inmates from the young offenders institution have been transferred to other prisons

A spokesman for the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) said: “The incident is taking place at this very moment and we don’t know what we’re dealing with. No two incidents are the same.

“It is being dealt with by prison officers and it’s all hands to the pump tonight.”

Wednesday night’s incident at the young offenders’ unit started when about 55 prisoners refused to return to their cells at 1830 GMT.

They surrendered more than eight hours later after the Tornado teams were called in.

One inmate was taken to hospital with head injuries but no prison officers were injured.

On Tuesday night, three members of staff at the prison were assaulted and a female officer sustained a fractured jaw when more than 40 young offenders refused to return to their cells after a fight broke out at 1900 GMT.

The rioting at Moorland on Tuesday happened at the same time as about 60 offenders aged between 15 and 18 refused to return to their cells at Warren Hill in Woodbridge, Suffolk.

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World stock markets have opened higher and the US dollar has fallen as investors digest the announcement from the Federal Reserve that it will pump $600bn (£373bn) into the US economy.

The move was widely expected, although most analysts had predicted a lower figure of $500bn to be injected.

Leading share indexes in London, Paris and Frankfurt were all up more than 1% in morning trading.

The dollar fell against the euro, the pound and the Japanese yen.

The euro bought $1.4138 in Thursday morning European trading, up from $1.4103 in New York late on Wednesday.

The pound climbed to $1.6146 from $1.6107, while against the Japanese currency the dollar slipped to 81.02 yen from 81.29 yen.

On the stock markets, the FTSE 100 rose 102 points to 5,851.

In Paris, the Cac added 74 points to 3,916.95, while Germany’s Dax was 92 points higher at 6,710.

Earlier, Asian shares had also closed higher, with Japan’s Nikkei index gaining 199 points to finish at 9,359 and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rising 391 points to close at 24,536.

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Mr and Mrs Large won $10.9m in July but say they have spent nothing on themselves

A Canadian couple who won $10.9m (£6.7m) in lottery winnings in July say they have given away $10.2m of the prize to groups in their community.

Allen and Violet Large said they were plain country folks who needed no more than “what we’ve got”.

The two said they had donated about 98% of the cash after helping their family.

The elderly pair gave the money to churches, fire departments, cemeteries, the Red Cross and hospitals, where Ms Large has undergone cancer treatment.

“We haven’t bought one thing. That’s because there is nothing that we need,” Mr Large, 75, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Mr Large, a retired welder from Canada’s Nova Scotia province, added that he and his wife were quite content with their 147-year-old home and everything else they already owned.

“You can’t buy happiness,” he said.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Refugees have been advised to leave the camps, but many have nowhere to go

Haiti has been placed on high alert as a powerful storm sweeps in, threatening thousands of earthquake survivors still living in camps.

Forecasters say Tropical Storm Tomas is gaining strength and will begin to lash Haiti by late Thursday, reaching full force by Friday.

Some camps are being evacuated and officials have told those living in tents to move to stronger shelter.

Health workers fear heavy rain will exacerbate Haiti’s cholera epidemic.

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan in Port-au-Prince says many trees have been cut down for charcoal and deforestation, meaning that heavy rains could trigger mudslides.

On Thursday, Tomas was churning across the Caribbean south-west of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, with maximum sustained winds of 85km/h (50mph), the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

The NHC warned of hurricane conditions for Haiti, the south-eastern Bahamas, the Caicos Islands and the Cuban province of Guantanamo.

It also issued a tropical storm warning for Jamaica and the Cuban provinces of Santiago de Cuba and Holguin.

Tomas is expected to pick up speed over the next 48 hours, and experts warn it could again develop into a hurricane.

Those staying in the camps are making their shelters as strong as possible

“On the forecast track, the centre will pass near Haiti or extreme eastern Cuba (late Thursday) and early Friday,” the NHC said.

The storm is expected to dump as much as 38cm (15in) of rain over Haiti and the neighbouring Dominican Republic, with more heavy rain over Jamaica and Cuba.

Miloudy Vincent, a senior aide in Haiti’s education ministry, said schools would close temporarily to be used for shelters.

Civil protection official Nadia Lochard said radio stations were being used to tell those living in camps they should “move to a place that is secure”, such as the homes of friends or relatives.

However, correspondents say fear and confusion have swept through many of the camps, where many have nowhere else to go.

At the Corail-Cesselesse relocation camp, fighting broke out on Wednesday when officials tried to explain a planned voluntary evacuation of nearly 8,000 people.

Aid agencies have been stockpiling supplies ready for the storm and the US has deployed the USS Iwo Jima to help with any humanitarian emergency.

Medecins Sans Frontieres says it has moved patients from tented wards to stronger shelters and positioned helicopters in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Doctors have warned that torrential rain could flood sanitary installations and contaminate drinking water, worsening a cholera epidemic in the country.

On Wednesday health officials said there had been a 40% jump in the number of new cholera cases and the death toll was 442, with 105 more deaths since Saturday.

An estimated 1.3 million survivors of January’s devastating earthquake are still living in tent camps in and around Haiti’s capital.

Send your pictures and videos to [email protected] or text them to 61124 (UK) or +44 7725 100 100 (International). If you have a large file you can upload here.

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This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Deep Impact will go to 700km from the comet

A Nasa probe is about to sweep past Comet Hartley 2, acquiring a swathe of pictures to send back to Earth.

The Deep Impact spacecraft will get as close as 700km (430 miles) to the colossal block of ice and dust.

Its two visible-light and one infrared imager will endeavour to pick out features not seen on the four previous cometary encounters made by spacecraft.

This should give scientists further insight into the diverse properties and behaviours of these remarkable objects.

“The nuclei of the four comets that we have seen up close are very different from one another – both the overall shape and the kinds of features seen on the surface,” says principal investigator Mike A’Hearn from the University of Maryland, College Park.

“What we want to understand is why these differences occur when we don’t see obvious differences in the processes that should shape what we see.”

The closest approach to Hartley 2 – a roughly 2km-long, gherkin-shaped object – should occur at 1402 GMT. The probe will whiz by at a relative speed of 12.5km/s. The event is occurring just over 20 million km from Earth.

Deep Impact is on an extended mission, having been re-tasked to visit Hartley following its successful flyby of Comet Tempel 1 in 2005.

On that primary mission, the spacecraft released an impactor that crashed into Tempel’s nucleus kicking up thousands of tonnes of icy debris.

Comet Hartley 2 pictured by the Wise telescope

The new venture is known by the name Epoxi. It has required a series of deep-space manoeuvres, including three gravitational slingshots around Earth, to put the spacecraft in the right part of the sky to meet up with Hartley.

The “recycled” probe is not perfectly configured for the latest rendezvous but Nasa managers say the decision to re-use it is a very efficient way to maximise the science return from a space mission.

Deep Impact began imaging Hartley on 5 September and continued to return some 2,000 pictures a day of the object, right up to about 18 hours before closest approach.

At that point, the probe swung itself around to get its instruments in the best position to view Hartley. In doing so, the spacecraft stopped transmitting through its high-gain antenna and started using a low-gain connection to send only essential engineering information back to Earth.

That will continue until just after closest approach when the probe will be able to swivel once more to use its high data-rate link to download all the pictures.

“The closer we get to the comet, the better our image resolution; so we want to get as close as we can,” commented Tim Larson, the Epoxi project manager from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

“But we are limited by the turn rate of the spacecraft – as the comet zooms by us we have to be able to turn fast enough to track it all the way by. And then if we get too much closer than 700km, we also start getting into a denser portion of the coma that poses more threats of damage to the spacecraft due to the particles that are there.”

Deep Impact carries both medium resolution and high resolution cameras. It also has an infrared spectrometer that will give clues to the composition of the comet.

THE FOUR COMETS PASSED BY SPACECRAFT

Halley’s nucleus was by far the biggest seen – 15km in lengthComet Borrelly was about 8km in its longest dimensionWild 2’s dusty shroud (coma) was sampled by the Stardust probeTempel 1 was Deep Impact’s primary mission “target”

The giant balls of ice, rock and dust like Hartley 2 are thought to contain materials that have remained largely unchanged since the formation of the Solar System. They incorporate compounds that are rich in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.

Intriguingly these are the elements that make up nucleic and amino acids, the essential ingredients for life as we know it; and there are some who believe comet impacts in the early years of the Solar System could have seeded the Earth with the right chemical precursors for biology.

As well as Tempel 1, spacecraft have previously visited comets Borrelly, Wild 2, and Halley. All are considerably bigger than Hartley. But Hartley – it was discovered in 1986 by the Australian astronomer Malcolm Hartley – has already proved itself to be a fascinating target.

Even from a distance, scientists have seen a lot of short-term changes on the object, and it ejects twice as much gas every minute as Tempel 1.

“We’re trying to find out if all the new phenomena we saw at Tempel 1 are universal across all comets or are they special to Tempel 1,” said Dr A’Hearn.

“The other key goal is to separate out the primordial features which we think we saw on Tempel 1 in the layering of the cometary nucleus and see what that can tell us about the formation of the Solar System 4.5 billion years ago.”

Deep Impact will keep imaging Hartley for more than 20 days after the close pass. Nasa says the best pictures from the flyby should all be back on Earth by Friday.

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A corrupt Lancashire police officer helped his gangster brother by hiding weapons and intimidating witnesses, it has emerged.

Officers found £72,000 at Salim Razaq’s home

Policeman’s double life exposed

Salim Razaq pleaded guilty last month to perverting the course of justice, possessing firearms and ammunition and misconduct in a public office.

Reporting restrictions were lifted at when he was cleared of mortgage fraud at Liverpool Crown Court.

Razaq was sacked by Lancashire Police in June.

Razaq, 33, of Chorley Road, Walton-le-Dale, was caught when he plotted to help his brother Hafiz, known as “The Enforcer” and “Big Haf”, escape prosecution for his role in a turf war between drugs gangs in Preston.

His brother Hafiz, 25, of HMP Manchester, mother Gulshan Razaq, 58, of Chester Road, Preston, and three others have also admitted charges in relation to the case.

Police bugged phone calls that Hafiz made from prison to his brother while awaiting trial for kidnapping.

The pair were overheard discussing money laundering and witness intimidation plans.

Officers uncovered a gun in a suitcase at Salim Razaq’s home

Lancashire Police’s Professional Standards Department raided the sergeant’s home in March and found a Sten machine gun and two Uzi machine guns hidden under the stairs.

They also seized 228 bullets, a bullet-proof jacket and a balaclava and a knuckle duster.

A total of £72,000 was found in Razaq’s bedroom.

Razaq joined Lancashire Constabulary in March 2001 as an emergency response officer and worked his way up to the rank of sergeant, covering Nelson, in January 2009.

Razaq and the five others are due to be sentenced on 11 November.

Gulshan Razaq admitted perverting the course of justice. Hafiz Razaq admitted two counts of perverting the course of justice and money laundering.

Jason Lawrenson, 26, of HMP Preston, and Daniel Cookson, 25, of Yewtree Avenue, Ribbleton, admitted money laundering.

Louis Bamber, 22, of HMP Liverpool, admitted possession of a firearm.

Salim Razaq was also accused of inflating his £33,000-a-year police salary to get a mortgage.

But Judge Henry Globe QC, at Liverpool Crown Court, who lifted the reporting restrictions, ruled that Razaq did not break the law and ordered the jury to return a verdict of not guilty.

Andy Cooke, Assistant Chief Constable of Lancashire Police, said: “Salim Razaq was nothing short of a criminal in a police uniform and I am appalled by the fact that a police officer was involved at the level he was in this criminality.

“However, I am extremely proud of the Lancashire officers who put this case together, the quality of which is reflected in the guilty pleas.

“We are resolute in our commitment to root out any bad apples that fail to maintain the high standards of professional behaviour and integrity which the vast majority of our staff adhere to.”

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