The country resembled a grim, statistical dart board on Saturday as law enforcement and media reported the deaths from various regions, including 26 in Ciudad Juarez, 13 in and around Mexico City and 10 in the city of Chihuahua.

More than 6,500 drug-related killings made 2009 the bloodiest year since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels in late 2006 and deployed 45,000 soldiers to fight organized crime, according to death tallies by San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute.

Two weeks into 2010, gang bloodshed is becoming more grotesque as drug lords ramp up their attempts at intimidation. Last week a victim’s face was peeled from skull and sewn onto a soccer ball. On Monday, prosecutors in Culiacan identified the remains of a former police officer divided into two separate ice chests.
Using their so-called Narcobarometer, researchers at the University of Trans-Border Institute track and analyze murders in Mexico, hoping to find ways to quell the violence. Their tally? Over 20,000 murders since 2001, more than half in the past two years.

As Mexico tries to develop, the killings jeopardize its international reputation, said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington.

Iran’s state-run Press TV reported that Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, who lectured on neuron physics at Tehran University, was killed in a booby-trapped motorbike blast on Tuesday. The motorcycle was parked next to the scientist’s car near his home in northern Tehran. The bomb apparently went off as Mr. Mohammadi was getting into his car.

Press TV, quoting officials, said the equipment used and the configuration of the system suggested that the explosion was the handiwork of foreign intelligence agencies, particularly Israel’s Mossad.

Earlier, state television Irib said “anti-revolutionary and arrogant powers’ elements” were responsible for the assassination.

Iran uses the term “arrogant powers” in reference of to the United States and its closest allies.

The official news agency, IRNA, described Mr. Mohammadi as a “committed revolutionary professor at the Physics Faculty of Tehran University.”

Press TV said “kidnap and assassination of Iranian scientists is on the agenda of the United States.” It pointed to the mysterious disappearance earlier of Shahram Amiri, another Iranian nuclear scientist.

Mr. Amiri went missing while on pilgrimage in Medina, Saudi Arabia, in June 2009. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast said on record in December that Tehran had information that Saudi authorities had handed over the scientist to the United States. Mr. Amiri is among 11 Iranian nationals that the U.S. authorities have detained in their prisons, the spokesman said.

The test on Monday of a “ground-based, mid-course missile interception technology” had “achieved the expected objective,” the official Xinhua news agency said.

“The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country,” the agency said in a brief report.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) stepped up its modernization in the 1990s after studying U.S. use of high-technology weapons and systems in the first invasion of Iraq.

China jumped to second place in the list of the world’s biggest military spenders in 2008, behind only the United States, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported last year.

Its estimated military spending reached $85 billion, one-seventh of the estimated U.S. spending, the institute said.

During a parade to mark the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, the PLA showcased more than a dozen missile systems.

Among those identified were Dongfeng 21C medium-range ballistic missiles, Dongfeng 15B and Dongfeng 11A short-range missiles, Hongqi coastal defence and ship-to-air missiles, and Hongqi 12 surface-to-air missiles.

Strange as it may seem for a film that pits greedy, immoral humans against noble denizens of a faraway moon, Avatar is being criticised by a small but vocal group of people who allege it contains racist themes — of a white hero once again saving primitive natives.

Since the film opened to widespread critical acclaim three weeks ago, hundreds of blog posts, newspaper articles, tweets and YouTube videos have made claims such as that the film is “a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people” and reinforces “the white Messiah fable.”

The film’s writer and director, James Cameron, says the real theme is about respecting others’ differences.

In the film (Warning: spoilers ahead) a white, paralysed Marine, Jake Sully, is mentally linked to an alien’s body and set loose on the planet Pandora. His mission: persuade the mystic, nature-loving Na’vis to make way for humans to mine their land for unobtanium — a mineral worth $20 million per kilo back home.

Like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves and Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai or as far back as Jimmy Stewart in the 1950 Western Broken Arrow, the hero (Sully) switches sides. He falls in love with the Na’vi princess and leads the bird-riding, bow-and-arrow-shooting aliens to victory over the white men’s spaceships and mega-robots.

Adding to the racial dynamic is that the main Na’vi characters are played by actors of color, led by a Dominican, Zoe Saldana, as the princess. The film also is an obvious metaphor for how European settlers in America wiped out the Indians.

Robinne Lee, an actress in such recent films as Seven Pounds and Hotel for Dogs, said that Avatar was “beautiful” and that she understood the economic logic of casting a white lead if most of the audience is white.

But she said the film, which remained No. 1 at the box office domestically for the fourth straight weekend with $48.5 million and is second among all-time top-grossing films worldwide, still reminded her of Hollywood’s “Pocahontas” story — “the Indian woman leads the white man into the wilderness, and he learns the way of the people and becomes the savior.”

“It’s really upsetting in many ways,” said Lee, who is black with Jamaican and Chinese ancestry. “It would be nice if we could save ourselves.”

Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the sci-fi Website io9.com, likened Avatar to the recent film District 9, in which a white man accidentally becomes an alien and then helps save the aliens, and Dune (1984) in which a white man becomes an alien Messiah.

“Main white characters realise that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, aka people of color … (then) go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed,” wrote Newitz, who is white. “When will whites stop making these movies and start thinking about race in a new way?”

Black film professor and author Donald Bogle said he can understand why people would be troubled by Avatar although he praised it as a “stunning” work.

“A segment of the audience is carrying in the back of its head some sense of movie history,” said Bogle, author of Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films.

Bogle stopped short, however, of calling the movie racist.

‘We should respect other races — humans or otherwise’

Writer/director Cameron, who is white, said in an email to The Associated Press that his film “asks us to open our eyes and truly see others, respecting them even though they are different, in the hope that we may find a way to prevent conflict and live more harmoniously on this world. I hardly think that is a racist message.”

There are many ways to interpret the art that is Avatar.

What does it mean that in the final, sequel-begging scene, Sully abandons his human body and transforms into one of the Na’vi? Is Saldana’s Na’vi character the real heroine because she, not Sully, kills the arch-villain? Does it matter that many conservatives are riled by what they call liberal, environmental and antimilitary messages?

Is Cameron actually exposing the historical evils of white colonisers? Does the existence of an alien species expose the reality that all humans are actually one race?

Although the Avatar debate springs from Hollywood’s historical difficulties with race, Will Smith recently saved the planet in I Am Legend and Denzel Washington appears ready to do the same in the forthcoming Book of Eli.

Bogle, the film historian, said that he was glad Cameron made the film and that it made people think about race.

“Maybe there is something he does want to say and put across” about race, Bogle said. “Maybe if he had a black hero in there, that point would have been even stronger.”

London: Detectives investigating the life of serial killer Peter Tobin said they would continue to examine dozens of other unsolved cases after his conviction yesterday for the murder of a teenage hitchhiker.

It took a jury just 15 minutes to find the 63-year-old handyman guilty of drugging and then strangling A-level student Dinah McNicol after she accepted a lift in his car on her way home from a music festival in 1991.

Tobin was ordered to spend the rest of his life in jail by the judge at Chelmsford Crown Court at the end of a three-day trial in which he offered no defence. He has already been convicted of raping and murdering a 23-year-old Polish student, Angelika Kluk, in a Glasgow church in 2006, and was last year sentenced to a further 30 years in jail for killing Vicky Hamilton, 15.

He also has convictions for raping and sexually assaulting two 14-year-old schoolgirls in Hampshire in 1994, for which he served 10 years in prison. He was released early, only to kill again.

Miss McNicol’s body was found alongside that of Miss Hamilton buried in the backyard of Tobin’s former home in Margate, Kent. Yesterday the fathers of both girls, whose bodies had lain alongside each other undiscovered for 16 years, were together in court. The teenagers remains were only discovered after a nationwide cold-case review and searches of Tobin’s old addresses.

Tobin, who was sent to reform school at the age of seven and has been married three times, has persistently refused to acknowledge his guilt. But police said the successful conviction would now see them follow up 1,400 lines of inquiry which it is hoped could lead to the resolution of some of Britain’s most notorious unsolved murders. Police believe Tobin used a number of different aliases and was linked to 38 mobile phone SIM cards.

Detective Superintendent David Swindle of Strathclyde Police, who set up Operation Anagram to look at other cases involving Tobin, said new addresses would be searched should fresh evidence arise: “Every day there is new information about his movements and I am confident that as more information comes to light, it will [help us] identify other victims.”

Among the new leads made public for the first time yesterday were pictures of women’s jewellery recovered from Tobin’s various homes, which, it is believed, could be trophies kept from his other victims. Police are busy reconstructing the killer’s movements from the 1960s onwards, during which he lived an itinerant existence travelling extensively on the motorway network.

The unsolved cases to which he has so far been linked include Glasgow’s so-called “Bible John” killings in 1968 and 1969 in which three women died. He has also been investigated in connection with the murders of girls and women in London, Sussex and Northern Ireland.

Miss McNicol, from Tillingham in Essex, was murdered six months after Vicky Hamilton, whose dead body Tobin cut in half and brought with him when he moved from Scotland to Kent in 1991. Neighbours spotted him digging a deep trench in his back garden but he dispelled suspicions by telling them he was building a sandpit for his son.

The family of Miss McNicol, who had to sit through evidence twice after the first trial was abandoned when the slightly built Scot was taken ill earlier this year, welcomed the verdict. Her half-sister Sara Tizard said: “After all these years, we at last know the truth and justice has prevailed. We would like to put the trial behind us and remember Dinah as the unique and inspiring daughter and sister that she was.”

One friend of the family waved a sign at Tobin as he was led away from the dock which said: “May all your dreams be nightmares.”

Michael Hamilton, father of Vicky, said he had come to support Ian McNicol, Dinah’s widower father. He said of Tobin: “I’m glad he’s going to be in prison for the rest of his life. I hope he lives to be 100.”

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk

Melbourne: Two more teenage boys have been charged in relation to the alleged gang rape of two schoolgirls in a park in Melbourne’s north in October.

A 16-year-old from Broadmeadows has been charged with four counts of rape and a 17-year-old from Coolaroo with two counts of rape over the alleged attack in Roxburgh Park on October 24.

Two boys, a 15-year-old from Broadmeadows and 16-year-old from Meadow Heights, have already been charged.

The recently charged teens will face a Children’s Court this afternoon.

Police have alleged up to 10 boys could have been involved in the planned assault.

The alleged victims, both aged 15, were lured to the park after being followed from Broadmeadows railway station to a McDonald’s restaurant, police allege.

Source: http://www.theage.com.au

London: A Worcestershire gynaecologist, who is being sued by a female patient over an alleged sexual assault during an examination, has denied trying to start an affair with the woman.

Bibi Giles, 50, brought the civil action against Angus Thomson following a six-month course of treatment for a prolapse at Droitwich Spa Hospital.

She claims she was sexually assaulted and sexually harassed by the 40-year-old medic and wants £50,000 in damages.

At the hearing at Worcester County Court, her barrister Mark Lyne claimed the father-of-three had repeatedly tried to initiate sexual contact with his client over a series of consultations and phone conversations between November 2006 and May 2007.

He said: “You were engaged in a situation where you had sexual contact with Mrs Giles and sexual conversations with her and you were implying and suggesting that things could go further.

“The nature of your conversations with her was such that you were implying there could be something more but you wanted her to make the first move.”

Mr Angus, whose wife Lucy was in court with him, disputed the allegations saying all he had done was try to act professionally and in the best interests of his patient.

He claimed she kept ringing him outside of office hours wanting to have a relationship but he told her he was not interested, becoming increasingly frustrated at the contact.

He said: “I told her I did not want anything to happen because I was happily married and had three children.

“When she called me I checked if she was medically well, I ran through a few things with her and then told her she should stop calling me.

“She was calling me perpetually, when she made these calls there seemed to be no real reason for this.

“I was extremely frustrated at the situation and told her I wanted her to stop.”

Asked why he continued to see Mrs Giles as a patient despite reporting her to doctor’s legal aid group the Medical Defence Union in February, he added: “I felt that she would be gone from my life if I saw her for that last consultation.

“I didn’t believe this would happen, I have never been in this situation before.

“I honestly believed it would stop if I was courteous and dealt with clinical matters.”

Earlier in the hearing Mrs Giles claimed she had two “leg buckling” orgasms during an examination on November 30 by the doctor at the hospital.

She told how she was horrified at what had happened especially as a nurse had been standing just feet away.

Following the examination she said she rang her husband in tears about what happened but had continued use Mr Angus to treat her condition as she didn’t want to have to find a new gynaecologist.

The court also heard how she sent a lewd text message to the doctor saying ‘the new arrival needs christening with Angus beef sausage’ – a reference to her body following the operation.

Mrs Giles said she regretted sending the text message which has just been designed to get Mr Giles to ring her.

The case continues.

Source: http://www.birminghampost.net

Sarasota: Grammy nominated Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton will fight a drug charge against him in Tampa instead of Miami.

Banton waived his bail hearing Wednesday in Miami federal court. His case is being prosecuted in Tampa, where he will be transferred.

U.S. Magistrate Judge William Turnoff issued a temporary order of detention for the 36-year-old singer, whose real name is Mark Anthony Myrie.

Banton did not speak at the hearing, except to reply, “Yes, sir,” to the judge’s questions. Like the other 10 jail inmates waiting in the courtroom, he wore a beige jail jumpsuit over a white T-shirt, with his long dreadlocks tied up off his neck and his hands shackled in front of him.

“He believes that because the indictment was filed out of Tampa, that’s where the case should be defended,” Banton’s attorney, Herbert E. Walker III, said after the hearing.

Banton has been in federal custody since last Thursday. He is charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine.

Walker said the charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

According to a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration affidavit, Banton and two others traveled to Sarasota last week to purchase a large amount of cocaine from an undercover law enforcement officer. The DEA was tipped off by a confidential informant who agreed to wear a recording device during the drug negotiation session.

Banton’s attorney said the singer is “completely innocent” of the charges against him.

“He’s a very spiritual person,” Walker said. “He has a lot of faith in God. He’s confident he’s going to be exonerated.”

The husky-voiced Banton has been a major star in his native Jamaica since the early 1990s with brash dancehall music and, more recently, a traditional reggae sound. His career has been stunted in the United States because of some song lyrics that advocated violence against gay men.

Earlier this month, Banton’s ninth album, “Rasta Got Soul,” was nominated for a Grammy for best reggae album. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation launched an online petition protesting the nomination.

BANTON ARRESTED IN MIAMI

Famed reggae singer Buju Banton has been arrested by federal agents after he and others tried to purchase 20 kilograms from undercover officers in Sarasota, according to court records.

The singer — a controversial star whose albums are hugely popular but who is often criticized for anti-gay lyrics — was picked up Thursday in Miami.

According to a criminal complaint filed by Drug Enforcement Administration officials, the 36-year-old Banton and two associates arranged last week to buy cocaine.

They met with a confidential informant and undercover Sarasota police officers at three local restaurants to arrange the deal, the complaint says.

Banton — whose real name is Mark Anthony Myrie — faces 20 years in prison. He is in court this morning for a bond hearing and could be transferred to a federal detention center in Tampa later this week.

Source: http://www.heraldtribune.com

Washigton: America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on Thursday strongly refuted reports that Pakistani-origin US national David Coleman Headley, charged for criminal conspiracy in the 26/11 terror attacks, was its agent at any point of time.

“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation, but any suggestion that this individual worked for the CIA is flat wrong,” CIA spokesperson Marie E Harf said when specifically asked about Headley and his links with CIA. 

Headley, who is presently in a Chicago jail, was arrested by the FBI on October 3 when he was planning to go to Pakistan via Philadelphia. He has been charged by the federal prosecutors for being involved in the planning of the Mumbai terrorist attack. 

News reports from India, quoting unnamed officials from investigating agencies, and several news reports in the US in the past few days have said that Headley may well have been a “double agent” working for the CIA as well as Pakistani terror groups including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which carried out the Mumbai attacks. 

Besides refuting any links between Headley and CIA, the spokesperson refrained from making any comment on the Headley-Rana case arguing that it is an ongoing investigation.

(Agencies)