19 May 2013
Last updated at 05:57 ET
Syrian government forces have surrounded the rebel stronghold of Qusair and are storming it from several directions, says Syrian state TV.
Fighting has gone on around the town, near the Lebanese border, for weeks.
Syrian opposition activists said government air strikes and heavy shelling had killed at least 16 people in the town so far.
Opposition groups say militants from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement are fighting alongside government forces.
The fighting came as Syrian President [...]
Syria army ‘storms’ rebel-held town
19 May 2013
Last updated at 05:57 ET
Syrian government forces have surrounded the rebel stronghold of Qusair and are storming it from several directions, says Syrian state TV.
Fighting has gone on around the town, near the Lebanese border, for weeks.
Syrian opposition activists said government air strikes and heavy shelling had killed at least 16 people in the town so far.
Opposition groups say militants from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement are fighting alongside government forces.
The fighting came as Syrian President [...]
Toyota Auris Hybrid: car review
Price from £21,745MPG up to 74.3Top speed up to 112mph
It’s almost a year since the mother of all traffic jams entered the record books – Beijing’s 60-mile, 12-day monster. It spawned its own micro economy with food sellers and laundry workers plying the lines of trapped drivers, while the rich abandoned their cars and paid others to sit in their static vehicles.
The jam put into context the paltry three-hour tailback I was stuck in over the bank holiday. We lay on the grass embankment and chatted to our new neighbours about t [...]
Is Kagame Africa’s Lincoln or a tyrant exploiting Rwanda’s tragic history?
Paul Kagame is angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Rwanda‘s president is famously direct with his critics. His contempt for governments he’s crossed swords with, led by the French, is only marginally less vitriolic than his view of human-rights groups daring to lecture him, the rebel leader whose army put a stop to the 1994 genocide of 800,0000 Tutsis. But now even friends are regarded with suspicion to the point of hostility. Take London and Washington accusing Rwanda of perpetuating the interminable and bloody conflict ac [...]
The Somali pirates ‘jailed in paradise’
18 May 2013
Last updated at 19:46 ET
By Anthony Denselow
Seychelles
There are more than 1,000 convicted Somali pirates in prisons around the world. Some of them end up in a UN-funded jail on the tiny island nation of Seychelles.
The Indian shopkeepers along the beach have never heard of the prison at Montagne Posee, but a villager tells me to drive above a deep ravine full of banana trees.
As the sea becomes a distant horizon and the road winds steeply, I stop to ask f [...]
N Korea urged to end missile tests
19 May 2013
Last updated at 04:55 ET
Ban Ki-moon said the UN was willing help North Korea get back to the negotiation table
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called on North Korea to refrain from carrying out any further missile tests.
His comments came a day after Pyongyang test-fired three short-range missiles from its east coast.
Speaking in Russia, Mr Ban called on North Korea to lower the tensions in the region and “resume dialogue” over its nuclear programme.
Tensions were high across the region earli [...]
‘Sole winner’ nets record US jackpot
19 May 2013
Last updated at 03:59 ET
The record amount drew large numbers of people buying lottery tickets ahead of the draw
The largest Powerball lottery jackpot in US history, more than $590m (£388m), has been won by a ticket-holder in Florida, local lottery officials say.
They said the winning ticket was sold in a supermarket in the Florida city of Zephyrhills, which has a population of at least 10,000.
It was not clear if anyone had yet come forward to claim the record win.
Forty-two US states, the District of Columbi [...]
Moshi Monsters founder: the shift to mobile caught us by surprise
London-based Mind Candy was stalling five years ago, but took a punt on an idea for a social networking game site for children.
By 2013, the children’s game network had become ubiquitous at every supermarket checkout and at every toy store – a runaway brand extension success.
Founder Michael Acton-Smith insists that revenues are holding up, but admits the company has struggled with the speed at which children are switching to tablets and mobiles, and has yet to release its tablet app.
On the eve of Moshi’s fifth [...]
Will computing speed make a quantum leap?
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,” wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, “not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.” Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics – or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title – is weird to the power of n, where n is a very large integer.
Consider some of the things that particle physicists believe. They accept without batting an eyelid, for example, t [...]
Paul Kagame: I asked America to kill Congo rebel leader with drone
Rwanda‘s president, Paul Kagame, has rejected accusations from Washington that he was supporting a rebel leader and accused war criminal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by challenging a senior US official to send a drone to kill the wanted man.
In an interview with the Observer Magazine, Kagame said that on a visit to Washington in March he came under pressure from the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carson, to arrest Bosco Ntaganda, leader of the M23 rebels, who was wanted by the international criminal c [...]
Driverless cars, pilotless planes … will there be jobs left for a human being?
Suddenly a robotised, automated economic reality is moving off the science fiction pages and into daily life. The growing use of unmanned battlefield drones is encouraging the growth of pilotless commercial aircraft – the first ever flew in British airspace last month. Google’s driverless car is completing ever more trials ever more successfully: the world’s major car companies are all hot in pursuit, working on their own prototypes of their own versions. The automated checkouts at supermarkets are becoming as familiar as bank [...]
Imran Khan blames rival for killing
19 May 2013
Last updated at 03:25 ET
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The shooting happened on the eve of a highly-contested vote
Imran Khan, the leader of Pakistan’s PTI party, has blamed one of his political rivals for the killing of PTI vice-president Zahra Shadid Hussain.
She was shot dead outside her home in Karachi by gunmen on a motorcycle.
On his Twitter feed, Mr Khan said he was holding the leader of Kar [...]
A look back at NASA’s planet-pinpointing space ‘scope
(Credit:
NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech)
NASA announced this week that a key piece of gear on its Kepler space telescope has run into trouble. And though the space agency hasn’t given up on a jump-start, the mission may well be at risk.
It’s already gone well beyond its planned duration, however, and presented us with many fascinating discoveries.
In this gallery, we take a look back at that mission — at Kepler’s intriguing quest to find Earth-like, life-friendly planets among the Milky Way’s many stars.
Requ [...]