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Web posts suggest lonely, depressed terror suspect
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
LAGOS, Nigeria - Internet postings purportedly written by a Nigerian charged with trying to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day suggest a fervently religious and lonely young man who fantasized about becoming a Muslim holy warrior.
Throughout more than 300 posts, a user named "Farouk1986" reflects on a growing alienation from his family, his shame over sexual urges and his hopes that a "great jihad" will take place across the world.
While officials haven't verified that the postings were written by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, details from the posts match his personal history.
For example, the username also matches the alleged bomber's middle name and birth year. Farouk1986 says he is from Nigeria, the home nation of the man who allegedly tried to bring down the Detroit-bound flight. And the suspect's father says Abdulmutallab broke off ties with the family.
Search for answers, tighter security after attack
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
DETROIT - The U.S. government tightened airline security as it searches for answers to how a 23-year-old Nigerian man eluded extensive systems intended to prevent attacks like his botched Christmas Day effort to blow up a Northwest flight from overseas.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who claimed ties to al-Qaida, was charged Saturday with trying to destroy a Detroit-bound airliner, just a month after his father warned U.S. officials of concerns about his son's religious beliefs.
Airports worldwide tightened security a day after the passenger tried to detonate a device that contained a high explosive on a flight into Detroit. After that attack, passengers have had to contend with extra pat-downs before boarding, staying in their seats without blankets or pillows for the last hour of the flight and more bomb-sniffing dogs.
Aides to President Barack Obama are pondering how terror watch-lists are used after the botched attack, according to officials who described the discussions Saturday on the condition of anonymity so as not to pre-empt possible official announcements.
Argentina's 'disappeared:' Justice at last or reneging on amnesty?
By KIRK WRIGHT, Associated Press Writer
Buenos Aires - Just outside Buenos Aires, in the depths of the Rio de la Plata and the South Atlantic, lie the remains of thousands of bodies.
A generation ago, officials from Argentina's Naval Mechanics School, known by its Spanish acronym, ESMA, secretly loaded drugged prisoners into aircraft and threw them out over the brown and frigid waters. As many as 5,000 people were "disappeared" at the hands of ESMA, perhaps the most horrifying symbol of South American repression in the 1970s.
Earlier this month, more than 30 years after these crimes were committed, 19 officials from ESMA finally appeared in court.
The trial is the product of a debate emerging all across Latin America: Should amnesty laws passed a generation ago to shield authorities from Latin America's repressive dictatorships from prosecution still be respected? If so, why?
Plane overshoots Jamaica runway; more than 40 hurt
By KIRK WRIGHT, Associated Press Writer
KINGSTON, Jamaica - An American Airlines flight carrying 154 people skidded across a Jamaican runway in heavy rain, bouncing across the tarmac and injuring more than 40 people before it stopped just short of the Caribbean Sea, officials and witnesses said.
Panicked passengers screamed and baggage burst from overhead bins as Flight 331 from Miami careened down the runway in the capital, Kingston, on Tuesday night, one passenger said.
The impact cracked open the fuselage, crushed the left landing gear and separated both engines from the Boeing 737-800, airline spokesman Tim Smith said.
Crews evacuated dazed and bloodied passengers onto a beach from a cabin that smelled of smoke and jet fuel, passengers said. Rain poured through the plane's broken roof, one said.
Russia Communists: don't slight Stalin on his bday
By SIMON SHUSTER, Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW - The Russian Communist Party asked the nation Monday for a daylong moratorium on criticizing Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as they celebrate his 130th birthday.
Despite overseeing political purges and widespread famine that killed millions of Soviet citizens, Stalin is still embraced by many Russians nostalgic for Soviet times.
His popularity has even risen in recent years amid a Kremlin-backed campaign to burnish his image as the man who led the nation to victory in World War II.
Hundreds of Communists on Monday laid flowers at his grave on Moscow's Red Square, and about 3,000 people attended an evening concert in his honor. In his home town in the southern nation of Georgia, a few hundred admirers including his grandson marched to a towering statue of the dictator in the main square.
20,000 evacuated as Philippine volcano oozes lava
By JIM GOMEZ, Associated Press Writer
MANILA, Philippines - The Philippines most active volcano oozed lava and shot up plumes of ash Tuesday, forcing thousands of people to evacuate their homes and face the possibility of a bleak Christmas in a shelter.
State volcanologists raised the alert level on the cone-shaped, 8,070-foot (2,460-meter) Mayon volcano overnight to two steps below a major eruption after ash explosions.
Dark orange lava fragments glowed in the dark as they trickled down the mountain slope overnight. Renato Solidum, head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, said the activity could get worse in coming days.
More than 20,000 people were evacuated to safety by nightfall Tuesday, said Gov. Joey Salceda of Albay province, where Mayon is located about 210 miles (340 kilometers) southeast of Manila.
Soros: Climate financing dispute could wreck talks
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
COPENHAGEN - The $10 billion a year proposed by rich nations to help the poor adapt to climate change is "not sufficient" and the gap between what's offered and what's needed could wreck the Copenhagen climate conference, American billionaire George Soros said Thursday.
At a European Union summit in Brussels, meanwhile, wealthier members of the 27-nation bloc were having to press poorer, reluctant neighbors in Eastern Europe to contribute to the $10 billion fund.
"Europe should take its fair share" of the $5 billion to $7 billion a year target sum for 2010-2012, said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency.
The EU is expected to announce later Thursday the amount of money it will offer to impoverished, developing nations.
Jones: Bin Laden still spends time in Afghanistan
WASHINGTON - National security adviser James Jones said Sunday that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden still spends some time inside Afghanistan. Most recent U.S. estimates have placed Osama Bin Laden inside Pakistan. But James Jones, a retired general, said the best estimate is that Osama Bin Laden "is somewhere in North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border."
James Jones described it as "very, very rough, mountainous area. Generally ungoverned and we're going to have to get after that to make sure that this very, very important symbol of what al-Qaida stands for is either, once again, on the run or captured or killed."
Earlier, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. hasn't had any good intelligence for years on bin Laden's whereabouts. He said he couldn't confirm reports that Osama Bin Laden had been seen recently in Afghanistan.
"If, as we suspect, he is in North Waziristan, it is an area that the Pakistani government has not had a presence in, in quite some time," Gates said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said it was important to kill or capture bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders, "but certainly you can make enormous progress absent that."
South Africa to treat all HIV-positive babies
By DONNA BRYSON, Associated Press Writer
PRETORIA, South Africa - South Africa announced ambitious new plans Tuesday for earlier and expanded treatment for HIV-positive babies and pregnant women, a change that could save hundreds of thousands of lives in the nation hardest hit by the virus that causes AIDS.
President Jacob Zuma - once ridiculed for saying a shower could prevent AIDS - was cheered as he outlined the measures on World AIDS Day. The new policy marks a dramatic shift from former President Thabo Mbeki, whose health minister distrusted drugs developed to keep AIDS patients alive and instead promoted garlic and beet treatments. Those policies led to more than 300,000 premature deaths, a Harvard study concluded.
The changes are in line with new guidelines issued a day earlier by the World Health Organization that call for HIV-infected pregnant women to be given drugs earlier and while breast-feeding. By treating all HIV-infected babies, survival rates should also improve for the youngest citizens in South Africa, one of only 12 countries where child mortality has worsened since 1990, in part due to AIDS.
Russia says bomb caused deadly train crash
By Denis Sinyakov
UGLOVKA, Russia (Reuters) - A bomb caused a Russian train crash that killed dozens of people and injured 100 more, officials said on Saturday, stoking fears of an upsurge in attacks in Russia's heartland.
The 14-carriage Nevsky Express, with around 700 people on board, was jolted off the rails on Friday night on the main line between Moscow and Russia's second city, St Petersburg.
Three carriages of the luxury train, which is popular with officials and business executives, lay battered beside the rails after the blast.
It was the worst Russian bomb attack outside the mainly Muslim North Caucasus since a spate of suicide attacks in 2004.
"A bomb equivalent to 7 kg (15.4 lb) of TNT was detonated," the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) domestic intelligence agency, Alexander Bortnikov, told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, citing the results of a preliminary investigation.