Category: news

In an attempt to reach people who do not normally go to the cinema, Shetland film festival is targeting their pets.

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Worshippers are believed to be trapped after an explosion and fire at a Hare Krishna temple in Leicester.

A third of the terraced property on Thoresby Street has been destroyed and is too unstable for crews to enter.

Specialist rescue teams and equipment, including search dogs and thermal imaging cameras, are being used to establish if any casualties are inside.

A wide cordon is in place around the building, which is still on fire, according to eyewitnesses.

A spokeswoman for Leicestershire Fire Service confirmed they have had reports people were inside the temple at the time of the blast.

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Labour politicians have urged fresh inquiries into phone hacking claims surrounding the News of the World.

Lord Prescott said he would go to court to find out if his phone had been tapped. Alan Johnson said last year’s police inquiry might need reviewing.

A former reporter on the paper told the BBC he had been asked to hack into phone messages by Andy Coulson, then editor, now an aide to David Cameron.

No 10 said Mr Coulson “totally and utterly” denied the allegations.

The News of the World said the claims by Sean Hoare, who it said was dismissed from the paper, should be treated with “extreme scepticism”.

The paper’s royal editor was jailed for conspiracy to access messages in 2007 but the paper maintained that that was an isolated case.

Calls for further action by Labour politicians were prompted by allegations in the New York Times about the extent of phone hacking which went on at the News of The World.

Last year, the Metropolitan Police chose not to launch an investigation into claims, made by the Guardian newspaper, that a host of public figures – including Lord Prescott – had had their messages hacked by journalists.

At the time, it said the evidence did not warrant it and suggested Lord Prescott’s phone had not been tapped.

MPs who investigated the case last year were critical of the conduct of News of The World’s journalists but found no evidence that Mr Coulson was aware of their practices.

Mr Coulson resigned after former royal editor Clive Goodman – and a private investigator – were jailed in 2007, saying he took responsibility for the incident while insisting he was not aware of what the journalist had done and never sanctioned his activities.

He told the committee that he never “used or condoned” phone tapping and was deceived by the journalist concerned.

No 10 has said Mr Coulson has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in relation to the case or the conduct of journalists while he was the paper’s editor.

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Eleven football hooligans who took part in the worst destruction Manchester has suffered “since the Blitz” will be going to jail, a judge has said.

Hundreds of Rangers fans caused “mayhem” at the Uefa cup final held in the city two years ago.

Two police officers were caught by the crowd, surrounded and battered.

Judge Andrew Blake indicated 11 of 12 fans would be jailed. A fire alarm then caused Manchester Crown Court to be evacuated.

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A cargo plane has crashed near a major motorway in Dubai, according to local officials and media reports.

There is no word yet on casualties.

The plane came down near the Emirates Road, setting some cars on fire, al-Arabiya television reported.

An official quoted by the channel said a fire had broken out in the plane as it attempted to land at Dubai airport.

No details on the model or size of the aircraft were provided.

The official news agency WAM said the plane had come down in an unpopulated area on Friday evening.

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Two women who were arrested after trying to take a dead relative on to a plane will face no charges.

Gitta Jarant and her daughter, Anke Anusic, were arrested at Liverpool John Lennon Airport when it emerged Curt Willi Jarant, 91, was dead.

The women – his widow and stepdaughter – protested their innocence and said they thought he was asleep.

Greater Manchester Police revealed on Friday the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had decided not to prosecute.

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A 7.2-magnitude earthquake has struck off New Zealand’s South Island, the US Geological Survey has said.

The epicentre was 30km (20 miles) north-west of Christchurch, at a depth of 16.1 km (10 miles), it added.

There have so far been no reports of any damage or casualties. Christchurch is New Zealand’s third largest city with a population of about 342,000.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning centre has reportedly said that “no destructive widespread tsunami threat” exists.

The Christchurch-based newspaper, The Press, said aftershocks were ongoing and that the electricity supply appeared to have been knocked out across much of the city.

The earthquake struck at 0435 on Saturday (1635 GMT on Friday), when most people would have been asleep.

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HSBC may move from London if the UK government decides to break up big banks, a senior executive has said.

Stuart Gulliver, head of the firm’s investment banking division, made the warning at a banking conference, according to newspaper reports.

He said he was “genuinely concerned” that the UK’s banking commission would recommend splitting up banks.

“[That] has significant implications clearly for where we may choose to headquarter our institution.”

“I want to be crystal clear. Our preference is to be headquartered in the UK,” added Mr Gulliver.

He also noted that no other country was looking at breaking up banks in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Mr Gulliver made his comments in response to an audience question at the financial industry conference on Thursday in London.

The UK’s coalition government set up the independent banking commission in June with a broad remit to consider possible reforms of the banking system.

The Liberal Democrats campaigned during the election in favour of splitting up the banks, separating their traditional commercial banking activities from their riskier investment banking business.

The commission could also consider other structural reforms, such as breaking up High Street banks to increase competition, or forcing the banks to simplify their international structures to make any future bankruptcies easier.

The Liberal Democrat Business Secretary, Vince Cable, is the commission’s deputy chairman.

Many economists and policymakers concluded in the wake of the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers that the large international banks had become “too big to fail”.

If a bank is so big that its collapse would bring down the entire financial system, governments would always be forced to rescue them.

The concern is that if banks know that governments will always come to their rescue, they may be encouraged to take on too much risk.

HSBC moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to London in 1991 after its acquisition of Midland Bank.

It currently occupies one of the largest tower blocks in Canary Wharf.

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Keith Fahey’s 76th-minute goal earns the Republic of Ireland victory in a tense opening Euro 2012 qualifier against Armenia in Yerevan.

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Officials in northern Bangladesh are battling to contain an anthrax outbreak that has infected more than 250 people.

It is thought to have been caused by people slaughtering anthrax-infected cattle and selling or eating the contaminated meat.

The outbreak was first detected in the district of Sirajganj in late August. It has now spread to four out of the country’s 64 districts.

Some north-western areas have repeated anthrax outbreaks.

But for the first time, it has been detected in the district of Kushtia.

Often deadly, anthrax exists naturally in the soil and commonly infects livestock, especially during or after the monsoon when water brings it up to the surface.

Officials say all the cases in Bangladesh are cutaneous, or skin anthrax, which causes wound-like lesions.

“This type of anthrax is not that much dangerous to humans because there’s treatment available,” Mahmudur Rahman, director of Bangladesh’s Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research, told the BBC.

“There’s no man-to-man transmission of this anthrax.”

The latest outbreak has already caused concern in the capital, Dhaka, where sales of beef and mutton have slumped.

A meat seller in central Dhaka said: “I used to sell about 200kg of beef every day, but now I am selling only 20-25kg. People are scared to buy beef because of anthrax.”

The government has already launched a vaccination drive for cattle, so that the disease does not spread.

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Seven defendants in a paedophilia trial in Portugal have been found guilty of sexually abusing children in the care of a network of state-run homes.

The six men and one woman include Carlos Cruz, a former TV presenter, and Jorge Ritto, a former ambassador.

Between them they had been accused of hundreds of charges over the rape and abuse of 32 boys in the 1990s.

The boys, now aged between 16 and 22, were all in the resident at the Casa Pia children’s home in Lisbon.

The judges in the case are still reading the full verdict in each of the hundreds of accusations, but the court has ruled that the vast majority of sexual abuse has been proven.

The main suspect was a former driver from Casa Pia, whom the court has found abused boys on hundreds of occasions.

He then began offering them to men, including Cruz, for cash.

The case is one of the longest-running in Portuguese history, lasting more than five years, with testimony from hundreds of people.

During the trial, the 32 victims, now aged between 16 and 22 years old, gave gruesome testimony about being raped by adults in dark cellars, cars and secluded houses.

One of the victims, now in his early 20s, was so seriously abused that he is now incontinent.

Almost all of them identified their abusers by pointing them out in the courtroom.

However, the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford in Lisbon says it is thought that there may be many other victims who are still too frightened to speak out.

The alleged abuse at Casa Pia is said to have started in the mid-1970s, but was not discovered until 2002, when the mother of a boy place at one of the state-run homes in Lisbon said he had been abused by staff there.

Casa Pia is 230-year old institution which cares for about 4,500 need children through a network of 10 homes.

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A 19-year-old man has been arrested after a serious assault in North Lanarkshire in which a man was attacked with a power drill.

James Hanlon, 26, was left with serious head injuries after the attack in Cumbernauld Road, Stepps, on 22 August.

His twin brother Bryan was later attacked in Glasgow by a gang wielding weapons including hammers and a chisel.

The twins are said to be associates of Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Caroll, was who shot in a suspected gangland attack in January.

The 19-year-old is expected to appear at Airdrie Sheriff Court on Monday.

James Hanlon was attacked by a group of men after two cars slammed into his vehicle.

He was treated in hospital for head injuries and later released.

Strathclyde Police are investigating a similar attack on Mr Hanlon’s twin brother Bryan a week later.

He was driving on Maryhill Road in Glasgow at about 2330 BST on Sunday when his Audi S4 was forced off the road by another vehicle outside Kelvin Campus.

Armed men then got out of the cars and attacked him.

The 26-year-old suffered head and groin injuries in the attack.

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Three of the world’s most successful dance DJs have joined forces to pay tribute to those who died at the Love Parade festival in Germany in July.

Paul Oakenfold, Armin van Buuren and Paul van Dyk have created the track Remember Love, which will be released under the name DJs United.

Twenty-one people were killed and more than 500 were injured during a stampede at the dance music event in Duisburg.

Oakenfold said he wanted it to be akin to Band Aid or the Helping Haiti hit.

“I just thought we should do something to help them,” he said. “In many other music genres artists come together.

“So I wrote this song and contacted Armin van Buuren and Paul van Dyk. I think this is the first time this has ever been done in the dance scene, to give back, to help people.”

The song will be released on 11 September and all proceeds will be donated to the Association of Non-statutory Welfare in North Rhine-Westphalia Germany to help those who were injured and the families of those who died.

German DJ van Dyk said the track aimed to “assist those who suffered by donating all proceeds to charity”.

“It was a great honour to work with Armin van Buuren and Paul Oakenfold on this very important project. Please help us help others,” he said.

Dutch star van Buuren added: “For the first time an Englishman, a German and a Dutchman teamed up and became united in the studio, creating a track that I hope people will love and treasure.

“Our purpose was united in the sense that we wanted to pay homage to those whose lives were lost, and to have their memories live on in the spirit of our record.”

Prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation to determine whether negligent manslaughter was involved in the deaths.

The festival organisers have said that they will discontinue the Love Parade, which first started in 1989.

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Double European champion Mo Farah announces his withdrawal from the Commonwealth Games because of fatigue.

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Nasa is aiming to get closer to the Sun than ever before, with plans to plunge a car-sized unmanned spacecraft into the star’s outer atmosphere.

Scientists hope to launch the Solar Probe Plus (SPP) sometime before 2018.

Before it is destroyed by the sizzling temperatures exceeding 1,400C (2,550F), the craft will have to obtain valuable data about our parent star.

The solar probe project is expected to cost in the region of about $180m (£120m).

To withstand the temperatures and the radiation, the instruments will be protected by a huge carbon-composite heat shield that still needs to be built.

Researchers say that the Sun is one of the few places people have not yet sent a spacecraft.

“Trying to understand how the Sun influences the Earth is quite a big thing these days,” Richard Harrison, a solar physicist from the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, told BBC News.

“The one thing we’ve never done is actually go there. You think of a spacecraft flying past Mars or Venus, but with the Sun, it is a little bit different.

“[But we are capable of sending] spacecraft near the Sun and that’s the plan for the next generation of spacecraft.”

Lika Guhathakurta, Solar Probe Plus programme scientist at Nasa Headquarters in Washington DC, said that “for the very first time, we’ll be able to touch, taste and smell our Sun.”

The spacecraft will be equipped with various instruments, among them a solar wind particle detector, a 3D camera, and a device to measure the magnetic field.

The Sun’s outer atmosphere is called the corona and it is several hundreds of times hotter than the photosphere, or the visible surface of the star.

Professor Harrison said that to many people, it might seem strange that the Sun actually has an atmosphere.

But it does, he explained: “It’s this million-degree plasma [that consists of] charged particles, trapped in magnetic loops, sort of super-magnetic fields.”

One of the aims of the SPP mission is to understand the nature of the “solar wind”, the mass of charged particles that billows away from the Sun into space.

“The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics: why is the Sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the Sun’s visible surface, and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our Solar System,” said Dick Fisher, director of Nasa’s Heliophysics Division in Washington DC.

“We’ve been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers.”

The SPP is not the only project underway to get close to the Sun. Both Nasa and the European Space Agency (Esa) are working on another mission called Solar Orbiter, a satellite that may go to the star at the end of this decade also.

But Professor Harrison said that the SPP has far more ambitious goals.

“The Solar Probe will literally slice through a bit of the Sun’s atmosphere, and that’s never been done before,” he said.

“The real challenge will be making the measurements – you don’t want to just measure the effects that you’ve driven on the atmosphere [by the spacecraft].

“It’s a bit like if you’re pushing a boat through a river and measuring something about the surface – you don’t want to measure the ripples from the boat. It’s a real challenge, but it’s something that is do-able.”

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