Rescued teens on way home

All of Tokelau, all 1200 people scattered across three atolls, is celebrating the rescue of three young teenagers who survived 50 days adrift on the South Pacific – but the trio will face some hard questions on their return.

Tokelau’s Ulu or leader, Kuresa Nasau, told Stuff that he never doubted the boys would survive, but he said there were a lot of rumours and unanswered questions about them.

The boys, Samuel Perez and Filo Filo, both 15, and Edward Nasau, 14, disappeared Atafu Island on October 5.

An extensive search by a RNZAF Orion failed to find any trace of them.

On Wednesday, a New Zealand fishing boat in a lonely part of the ocean spotted the tiny boat carrying the three.

Their story was that they had eaten just one seagull in 50 days adrift.

Sanford tuna boat San Nikunau first mate Tai Fredricsen, of the Bay of Islands, said it was a miracle the tuna boat found the boys.

Early this morning the Fiji Navy took the boys from the San Nikunau – which is heading for Auckland – and they will arrive in Suva this afternoon.

Nasau, who is a cousin of all the boys and is also the Faipule or representative of Atafu, said the boys would be flown to Samoa tomorrow and will leave for Tokelau – which has no airport – on December 16.

While the rescue has prompted international headlines around the world, there is an intense local story which Nasau conceded was raising questions.

Nasau said there were rumours about what the boys had really been up to.

"I was concentrating on their safety and there will be time for investigation later."

“There are always rumours, I am not sure if it was true. They will have to answer some questions when they get back.”

It was a miracle they had survived and Atafu had exploded into celebration at the news.

“Not only on Atafu, also on the other islands.

“They’ve held special services thanking the Almighty for his protecting. And they are still celebrating.”

Tokelau is a New Zealand territory, 30 hours sailing north of Samoa. The New Zealand High Commission in Suva is taking care of the boys until they reach Apia where there is a large Tokelauan community.

Mr Fredricsen was on the helm of the tuna boat, just west of Uvea in the French territory of Wallis and Futuna and northeast of Fiji.

"We saw a small vessel, a little speedboat on our bows, and we knew it was a little weird," he said. "We had enough smarts to know there were people in it and those people were not supposed to be there."

The boys started waving.

"I pulled the vessel up as close as I could to them and asked them if they needed any help they said `very much so'. They were ecstatic to see us.

"They were very skinny, but physically in good health, compared to what they have been through."

Mr Fredricsen knew to be careful not to feed them or give them water quickly, and instead put them on an intravenous drip.

But they were able to sip water and soon wanted real food.

"They are in incredibly good shape for the time they have been at sea."

The boys had a couple of coconuts on board but no water.

"Somehow they caught a bird, I don't know how, but they caught it. They ate it, that is what is recommended."

But that was all they got. Occasionally it rained, but in the days leading to this week's miracle, there was no rain.

"They were having little sips of seawater, which wouldn't have been a great idea, but they had only done it for the last couple of days."

He agreed that with drinking seawater the boys had only days to survive.

"It was a miracle we got to them."

After the boys had some food, they phoned home.

Joe Suveinakama of the Tokelau office in Apia said that the news had been passed on to all 1200 people on Tokelau's three atolls.

"There is absolute jubilation on Atafu, tears of joy, but it is all tempered by the tragedy from Greymouth."

The San Nikunau had been in Kiribati waters and its crew would normally off-load the catch in American Samoa. Instead they were on their way home.

"We generally don't take this route and we were following the fastest line to New Zealand."

Read More

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/south-pacific/4391476/Rescued-teens-on-way-home

Rio police carry out operation to arrest drug gangs

Police from the Special Operations Battalion enter the Vila Cruzeiro slum with M113 war tanks, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Nov. 25, 2010. Police raided gang-ruled slums and said a number of suspected criminals died in gun battles on Wednesday as authorities tried to stop a wave of violence in the Brazilian city.


With the assistance of the Brazilian Navy, the Rio police are carrying out a mega raid in one of the city's largest shantytowns, Vila Cruzeiro, to arrest the criminals responsible for the crime wave that has been devastating the city since last weekend.

A total of 350 policemen, as well as 30 marines, are participating in the raid. Four police armored vehicles, nine Navy M113 armored personnel carriers and a helicopter are providing support to the officers. A local TV station managed to film dozens of criminals trying to escape the shantytown through a back entrance.

The crime wave started on Sunday. Since then, at least 55 vehicles, including buses and trucks, were set on fire. The criminals also shot at several police cabins. The attacks left the city in complete chaos, the bus lines stopped circulating and schools and shops were closed in several neighborhoods.

According to the police, the attacks show the despair of the criminals, who have been losing territory with the establishment of permanent police units in several shantytowns in the past year. The criminals want to incite panic in the population, the police stated.

Since Sunday, at least 23 people died in the several police operations in Rio's shantytowns. At least 176 people were arrested, and over 30 weapons were seized, including rifles and grenades.

Read More

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-11/26/c_13622980.htm

North Korean Shelling Shatters Islanders' Illusion of Security

Like many of the 1,700 residents of Yeonpyeong island, Shin Seung Won had grown accustomed to the distant rumble of artillery fire by North and South Korea. This week, the tit-for-tat exercises took on a deadly reality.

“I’ve lived with the sound of shelling all my life,” said Shin, who runs a motel on the South Korean island, where the military conducts live-firing drills less than 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) away from North Korean troops. “I looked out the window after hearing a thundering sound and saw my neighbor’s house on fire,” Shin said in a telephone interview.

North Korea has sought to justify its Nov. 23 shelling of Yeonpyeong, the first such attack on South Korean soil in half a century, on what it termed “military provocation” in disputed waters. Two soldiers and two civilians died in the barrage, which triggered declines in global financial markets and drew international condemnation.

“The proximity of these islands to the western border makes North Korea feel like it’s constantly at gunpoint,” said Kim Yong Hyun, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “The disputed area also gives North Korea an easy excuse for provocation to create havoc and so get the international community’s attention.”

The MSCI World index dropped as much as 2 percent on the day of the attack and the won fell more than 1 percent. President Barack Obama, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak and Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan were among leaders who condemned Kim Jong Il’s regime. China’s Premier Wen Jiabao called for restraint without ascribing any blame to North Korea, a communist ally for the past 60 years.

Military Response

North Korea’s state-run news service yesterday said it urged the South to call off exercises in the area and warned of a military response to any infringement of its “inviolable territorial” waters. The U.S. sent the aircraft carrier USS George Washington for joint drills off South Korea’s western coast between Nov. 28 and Dec. 1. The exercises had been planned before the shelling and are “defensive in nature,” the U.S. forces in Seoul said in an e-mailed statement.

Yeonpyeong lies 2 1/2-hours by boat from the South Korean port of Incheon. The government resumed ferry services yesterday after evacuating many island residents following the attack. The island is situated about 2 miles from the western maritime border disputed by North Korea.

The sea border was demarcated by the United Nations after the 1950-1953 civil war and never accepted by the North. The area is rich in fishing, attracting boats from both Koreas and China during the crabbing season in May and June.

Naval Skirmishes

North and South Korea engaged in deadly naval skirmishes in 1999 and 2002 close to the island. The area was also where the South Korean warship Cheonan sank in March, killing 46 sailors. An international panel blamed a torpedo from a North Korean mini-submarine for the incident, a finding denied by Kim Jong Il’s regime and never accepted by China, his closest ally.

North Korea started firing artillery after the South Korean navy conducted its monthly live-fire exercises near the border. North Korea said it contacted the South at 8 a.m. on Nov. 23 to demand maneuvers be scrapped.

“Should the South Korean puppet group dare intrude into our territorial waters even 0.001 mm, our revolutionary armed forces will unhesitatingly continue taking merciless military counter-actions against it,” North Korea said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency after the shelling.

Under fire from the North, South Korean Marines took 10 minutes to pinpoint their target before counter-attacking, Lieutenant-General Joo Jong Hwa told reporters on a tour of the island yesterday. There has been no information on possible North Korean casualties.

Artillery Exchange

“North Korea argues that we fired at them first, but this is the direction that we fired,” at earlier, Joo said, pointing southwest, away from the peninsula.

Lieutenant Kim Jung Soo said his company had been conducting firing drills until just before the North Korean barrage commenced. Two members of his team wore helmets that had been scorched by the shelling.

The North’s artillery attack set 22 houses ablaze and burned at least 3,300 square meters of mountainous area, South Korea’s Ministry of Public Administration and Security said on its website. At least 740 people were evacuated from the island, according to the ministry and Coast Guard.

Washing Dishes

Yu Kyung Soon, 53, said she was washing dishes in the elementary school cafeteria on the island when the windows suddenly shattered. Together with her female co-workers, she crawled on the floor seeking a place to hide.

When we emerged from the building “it was a sea of fire, with dark smoke everywhere,” Yu said in an interview at Incheon port yesterday. “I thought ‘this is war. This is the day that I will die.’”

The school’s 90 students were immediately ushered to a bomb shelter, she said.

“The kids were loud and excited, but none of them seemed to be really scared,” Yu said. “It was just minutes after we were joking how the North Koreans would never attack us first and target the capital instead."

Read More

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-25/north-korean-shelling-shatters-islanders-illusion-of-security.html

Europeans Clash on Bailout

European leaders sparred over whether to commit more funds to rescue struggling euro-zone countries, as financial-market pressure on the region's weakest economies intensified. The European Union's executive arm, the Brussels-based EU Commission, floated a proposal on Wednesday to double the size of Europe's €440 billion ($588 billion) bailout fund for euro-zone governments, but the idea was dismissed by Germany, according to people familiar with the situation.

The disagreement between Brussels and Berlin comes amid growing fears that the crisis of investor confidence in euro-zone governments, which has already forced Greece and Ireland to seek international bailouts, could expand sooner or later to Portugal and Spain. Many investors and analysts doubt whether the EU has agreed to supply enough financing to rescue Spain if the country were to lose access to bond markets.

Support from Germany, Europe's largest economy and biggest contributor to the EU's main bailout fund, would be essential for any funding increase. Following Greece's €110 billion bailout in May, the EU set up a €750 billion rescue program together with the International Monetary Fund. The centerpiece of that effort is the European Financial Stability Facility, or EFSF, which euro-zone countries agreed to support with up to €440 billion in credit guarantees.

The remaining contributions would come from the IMF and the EU Commission. European officials said the Commission's position was that Portugal and Spain can get by without a bailout. A spokesman for the Commission said it is "absolutely not true" that it is proposing a doubling or an expansion of the bailout fund.

But other European sources say the Commission did float a plan to increase the capacity of the EFSF, and that it was quickly dismissed by Berlin. Germany's top central banker, Bundesbank President Axel Weber, hinted at the discussions going on behind the scenes when he said on Wednesday that euro-zone governments would expand the EFSF if necessary.

The German government viewed Mr. Weber's comments as badly timed, and has told the Commission that the EFSF has plenty of funds at its disposal already, according to a person familiar with the matter. Referring to the EFSF in a speech on Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: "Everything will remain as it has been agreed to." Ms. Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy discussed the euro zone's crisis in a phone call late Thursday, a spokesman for the chancellor said.

The leaders agreed that talks over aid for Ireland should come to a swift conclusion, and praised the Irish government's plan to cut its budget deficit. They also stressed that the existing European bailout plan will remain unchanged through 2013, the spokesman said. Fears that Ireland's debt and banking crisis could spread to Spain continued to weigh on European markets on Thursday.

The bond markets of Europe's weaker economies showed further signs of stress, keeping these countries' borrowing costs elevated. Traders speculated that the European Central Bank was partly counteracting the trend, by buying bonds as part of its emergency program to support the market. The premium that Spain has to pay to attract investors, compared with the rate paid by Germany, considered the euro zone's safest borrower, continued its climb, reaching nearly 2.5 percentage points on Thursday.

The cost of insuring Spain's debt against the risk of default hit a fresh closing record on Thursday: It now costs $301,000 a year to protect $10 million of Spanish government debt for five years, according to data provider Markit. However, the euro edged higher to $1.3378 on Thursday after Bundesbank's Mr. Weber reaffirmed Europe's commitment to its single currency and insisted that the bailout facilities were already big enough to cope with any likely scenario.

Spain accounts for about 10% of all economic activity in the 16-nation euro area, making it potentially far more expensive to rescue than Portugal, Ireland or Greece, the other euro-zone countries with the most acute debt problems. Unlike Ireland and Greece, Spain hasn't lost access to bond markets, but its borrowing costs have risen sharply due to investors' growing caution about buying the debt of any countries on the euro zone's struggling periphery.

Although the combined EU-IMF bailout system was billed as a €750 package, its effective lending capacity could be reduced to around €530 billion if Portugal and Spain were to join Ireland in needing a bailout. The more countries that need help, the fewer that can offer guarantees. I

n addition, the EFSF's total borrowing has to remain below the sum of its credit guarantees, so that EFSF bonds are seen as safe enough to attain a coveted triple-A credit rating. The EFSF is a Luxembourg-registered company that can issue bonds backed by credit guarantees from Germany and other solvent euro-zone countries.

Doubling the EFSF's capacity would remove any doubt about whether the facility has enough firepower to prop up Spain if the country's government can't fund itself in bond markets. But such a move likely would draw fire in Germany. Many German lawmakers and voters already are unhappy about putting taxpayers' money at risk to save euro-zone countries that have run into trouble because of unsustainable borrowing.

Increasing Germany's commitments could prove politically costly for Ms. Merkel's government, which faces a string of important regional elections next year. Ireland became the first country to apply for help from the EFSF last week. It is negotiating a bailout package from Europe and the IMF that is expected to total roughly €85 billion.

Under a political understanding between the EU and the Washington-based IMF, the latter would lend roughly half as much money to crisis-hit euro members as the EU. Germany and other euro members have made the granting of loans from the EFSF conditional on the IMF also being involved in any bailouts.

Read More

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704638304575636580416827208.html

Mammals Grew Big After Dinosaurs Died Off: Analysis

Mammals began to grow much larger after dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, a new study suggests.

An international team of researchers analyzed the fossils of major groups of land mammals on each continent and found that their size increased from a maximum of about 10 kilograms (22 pounds) when they shared the Earth with dinosaurs to a maximum of 17 tonnes (18.7 U.S. tons) after dinosaurs became extinct.

"Basically, the dinosaurs disappear and all of sudden there is nobody else eating the vegetation. That's an open food source and mammals start going for it, and it's more efficient to be an herbivore when you're big," study co-author Jessica Theodor, an associate professor in the biological sciences department at the University of Calgary, said in a university news release.

The findings also show that the global ecosystem is able to reset itself relatively quickly.

"You lose dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and within 25 million years the system is reset to a new maximum for the animals that are there in terms of body size. That's actually a pretty short time frame, geologically speaking. That's really rapid evolution," Theodor said.

Read More
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/646543.html

Siddle Takes Hat Trick in First Ashes

Australian Peter Siddle grabbed a dramatic hat-trick on his 26th birthday to reduce England to 197 for seven midway through the final session on the first day of the first Ashes test on Thursday.

The Victorian had already taken the wickets of Kevin Pietersen and Paul Collingwood in eleven balls in his second spell after lunch but better was to come in the third session.

His first victim was opener Alastair Cook, who had held the England innings together with a dogged half century before the bustling right-arm quick had him caught by Shane Watson at second slip for 67.

Siddle then produced a venomous full delivery that took out wicketkeeper Matt Prior's middle stump and sent him back to the dressing room with a golden duck, bringing the Gabba crowd to their feet as Stuart Broad walked out to the crease.

Siddle produced another brilliant swinging full delivery that struck the batsman on the toe, umpire Aleem Dar raising his finger for lbw with his decision upheld after Broad appealed to the television umpire.

Graeme Swann managed to fend off the last delivery of the over and Siddle was given a standing ovation as he returned to his fielding position on the boundary as only the 11th Australian to take a hat-trick in a test match.

Read More

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/25112010/2/cricket-siddle-takes-hat-trick-first-ashes-test.html

Police Cop Flak For Student Protest Tactics

Demonstrators hanged an effigy of the Deputy Prime Minister

Police were forced to "kettle" hundreds of protesters for more than six hours near the Houses of Parliament as tensions ran high. The last demonstrators were released late at night.

Westminster bore the brunt of the trouble with two police officers and 15 people injured, and 32 arrests in total.

A stranded Metropolitan Policevan was ransacked and looted a short distance from the entrance to Downing Street, with buses and bus shelters also vandalised, windows broken and graffiti sprayed.



The tactic was widely criticised after around 5,000 people were penned in outside the Bank of England during the G20 protests last year.

A day of co-ordinated action across Britain came after the Millbank riot two weeks ago in London, when police were caught off guard by an attack on the complex of buildings housing the Tory party headquarters.

It saw senior officers deploy hundreds of extra officers reserves in the capital yesterday.

Protesters had planned to demonstrate outside the Liberal Democrat Westminster headquarters, after leaders said they will break a pledge to abolish tuition fees.

Broken glass, discarded placards and piles of litter covered Parliament Street as many of the student protesters refused to go home.

Transport Commissioner Peter Hendy said the damage caused to London's transport network was "outrageous".

"Buses have been deliberately vandalised, bus shelters damaged and many road users and bus passengers have faced delays and disruptions to their routes when
travelling around the city this evening.

Police defended their use of containment tactics during the capital's student protests, saying it was necessary to control the crowd after some demonstrators became violent towards officers.

Chief Inspector Jane Connors of the Metropolitan Police said "kettling" was used "as a last resort".

"It's a valid tactic," she said. "Police officers came under attack and we needed to make sure the violence didn't spread out across the London streets.

"In these circumstances containment was necessary to ensure that the protest was peacefully managed."

But Sophie Battams, 17, from Dagenham, Essex, said: "The kettling is causing the violence.

"If you put a lot of angry people in one area, it will escalate to this."

And Rachel Tijani, 18, also from Dagenham, added: "It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they coop people up like caged animals, they'll act like caged animals."

Read More

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Police-Under-Fire-For-Kettling-Of-Student-Protesters-In-London-On-November-24/Article/201011415828806?lpos=UK_News_Top_Stories_Header_1&lid=ARTICLE_15828806_Police_Under_Fire_For_Kettling_Of_Student_Protesters_In_London_On_November_24