| Russian troops seize Crimea airbase as Moscow consolidates control Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:16 PM PDT  By Aleksandar Vasovic and Gabriela Baczynska BELBEK AIRBASE, Crimea (Reuters) - Russian troops used armored vehicles, automatic gunfire and stun grenades on Saturday to seize a Ukrainian airbase in Crimea a day after President Vladimir Putin signed laws completing Russia's annexation of the Black Sea peninsula. Ukrainian forces also abandoned a naval base after attacks by pro-Russian protesters, and had to surrender two flagship vessels to Russian forces. The facilities at Belbek and Novofedorovka had been among the last still under Ukrainian control after Moscow's armed takeover and subsequent annexation of Crimea, which has a majority ethnic Russian population and harbors one of Russia's biggest naval bases at Sevastopol.
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| China spots new possible plane debris in southern Indian Ocean Posted: 22 Mar 2014 09:57 AM PDT By A. Ananthalakshmi and Matt Siegel KUALA LUMPUR/PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - China said on Saturday it had a new satellite image of what could be wreckage from a missing Malaysian airliner, as more planes and ships headed to join an international search operation scouring some of the remotest seas on Earth. The latest possible lead came as the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 entered its third week, with still no confirmed trace found of the Boeing 777 or the 239 people on board. The new potential sighting was dramatically announced by Malaysia's acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, after he was handed a note with details during a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, scooping the official announcement from China. "Chinese ships have been dispatched to the area," Hishammuddin told reporters. |
| U.S. forces hand over seized oil tanker to Libya Posted: 22 Mar 2014 12:18 PM PDT  By Ulf Laessing ZAWIYA PORT, Libya (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy handed over to Libyan authorities on Saturday an oil tanker carrying crude that had been loaded at a port controlled by armed rebels in defiance of Tripoli's government. The Morning Glory tanker was due to arrive later on Saturday at a government-controlled port after being seized by U.S. commandos and escorted back through international waters by the U.S. Navy, Libyan officials said. Anti-aircraft gunfire and explosions were heard overnight and after dawn on Saturday in Ajdabiya, the hometown of rebel leader Ibrahim Jathran, whose fighters seized the ports last summer to demand a greater share in Libya's oil resources. The struggle for control of Libya's vital petroleum resources is one of the key challenges facing the weak central government, which has still failed to secure the North African country three years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
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| Venezuela protest death toll rises to 33 Posted: 22 Mar 2014 02:43 PM PDT  By Diego Ore and Brian Ellsworth CARACAS (Reuters) - Two Venezuelans died from gunshot wounds during protests against socialist President Nicolas Maduro, witnesses and local media said on Saturday, pushing the death toll from almost two months of anti-government demonstrations to 33. Demonstrators complaining of soaring prices and product shortages have vowed to remain in the streets until Maduro resigns, although there are few signs that the country's worst turmoil in a decade will force him from office. Argenis Hernandez, 26, was shot in the abdomen as he was demonstrating near a barricade in the central city of Valencia and died early on Saturday in a nearby hospital, according to local media reports. A motorcyclist attempted to cross the barricade and opened fire on demonstrators when they would not let him through, wounding Hernandez.
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| Rebels battle for Syria border post near Mediterranean Posted: 22 Mar 2014 07:54 AM PDT  Islamist fighters in Syria battled President Bashar al-Assad's forces for control of a border crossing with Turkey close to the Mediterranean on Saturday, part of an offensive aimed at opening up a rebel link to the sea. They said heavy clashes continued around Kasab crossing and a nearby village of the same name - both about 5 miles from the coast - a day after rebels launched their assault. Assad's forces have already lost control of most border crossings with Turkey during the three year civil war but had held on to Kasab, gateway to the coastal province of Latakia which has remained an Assad stronghold. Syrian authorities accused Turkey of helping the fighters launch their attack on Kasab from Turkish territory, saying Ankara's army "provided cover for this terrorist attack" on the wooded and hilly border region.
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| Egyptian judge cuts short mass Islamist trial over 'disruptive' lawyers: source Posted: 22 Mar 2014 09:13 AM PDT  A mass trial of members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood began in Egypt on Saturday, but proceedings were abruptly cut short by the judge who said defense lawyers were being disruptive and "discussing politics", a judicial source told Reuters. Judge Saeed Youssef Mohamed would announce his ruling on Monday and requested the lawyers of the 545 defendants to submit their written defense within 24 hours, the source said, declining to be identified. The charges against the group, on trial in the province of Southern Minya, include storming a police station, attacking persons and damaging public and private property. Most were arrested during clashes which erupted in Minya after the forced dispersal of two Muslim Brotherhood protest camps in Cairo on August 14.
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| Electrical engineering is child's play with littleBits Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:43 PM PDT  Ayah Bdeir is out to make creating Internet Age gadgets as fun and easy as playing with LEGO blocks. The engineer behind littleBits kits that make a game of piecing together modular circuitry used a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference to debut a piece to the puzzle that lets creations talk to the Internet.
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| Anti-austerity protest turns violent in Spanish capital Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:39 PM PDT  By Inmaculada Sanz MADRID (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards rallied in Madrid on Saturday against poverty and EU-imposed austerity in a largely peaceful protest later marred by violent clashes in which police fired rubber bullets. Some protesters started to throw stones and bottles at the large numbers of riot police present and attacked cashpoints and hoardings. The police fired rubber bullets to disperse them, according to video footage seen by Reuters. Central government representative Cristina Cifuentes said 19 protesters had been arrested and 50 police officers had been injured, one of them very badly, in the clashes.
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| Defoe does it again as Toronto blanks DC Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:31 PM PDT  Toronto (Canada) (AFP) - Former Tottenham striker Jermain Defoe scored in the 60th minute Saturday to give Toronto a 1-0 victory over DC United in the Canadian Major League Soccer club's home opener. It was the first time in club history that Toronto had opened a campaign with back-to-back wins, following a 2-1 triumph last week at Seattle. Defoe netted both goals in the first half at Seattle and once again made the difference, swiping a failed clearance attempt in the penalty area and beating United goalkeeper Bill Hamid. The 31-year-old Englishman netted 143 goals in two stints at Spurs to rank fifth on the London side's all-time scoring list and left the English Premier League side last month to join Toronto in time for this month's start of the MLS campaign.
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| Athletic compounds Getafe's misery with 1-0 win Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:29 PM PDT MADRID (AP) — Athletic Bilbao provisionally stretched its fourth-place advantage while compounding Getafe's miserable run with a 1-0 victory in the Spanish league on Saturday. |
| Chelsea routs Arsenal as ref dismisses wrong man Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:24 PM PDT  LONDON (AP) — Unlike the Bundesliga, where Bayern Munich is close to wrapping up the title, the English Premier League remains anything but predictable and full of drama.
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| Uruguay, US draw 27-27 in 1st leg of 2015 playoff Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:23 PM PDT MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) — Uruguay blew a 19-6 lead and had to score a late try to draw with the United States 27-27 in the first leg of their Americas playoff on Saturday in qualifying for the 2015 Rugby World Cup. |
| China satellite detects object in jet search area Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:22 PM PDT  KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — While possible clues about the fate of a Malaysia Airlines jet missing for more than two weeks keep coming from satellite images, it has been as frustrating as ever to turn the hints from space into actual sightings.
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| Far right set to surge in French local elections Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:18 PM PDT  France goes to the polls on Sunday in the first round of local elections set to represent a landmark for women in politics and, possibly, the far-right National Front. The first nationwide vote since Francois Hollande's 2012 election as president takes place with the ruling Socialists battling record unpopularity and the main opposition UMP party grappling with scandals embroiling former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Against that backdrop, polls have suggested around one in four voters are considering casting their votes for Marine Le Pen's National Front (FN), setting the scene for what could be a breakthrough election for the anti-immigration, anti-EU party led by the daughter of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
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| Hollande braces for pain in French local vote, far right set for gains Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:14 PM PDT  By Dominique Vidalon PARIS (Reuters) - France's ruling Socialist party is bracing for potentially heavy losses in mid-term local election on Sunday, a vote that could jeopardize reforms and hand major gains to the far-right National Front. Dissatisfaction with President Francois Hollande's rule - his approval rate is at record lows of 19 percent in opinion polls - and a string of legal issues involving opposition conservatives are seen hitting turnout and helping the anti-immigrant Front (FN), which hopes to win outright in a record number of towns. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault this week called on the opposition conservative UMP party to urge its voters to back Socialist candidates in towns where it stood no chance of election, promising the Socialists would do the same in a joint effort to keep out the FN out. "Abstention remains the main adversary of the left," Socialist deputy Jean-Jacques Urvoas told Le Figaro daily newspaper.
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| Australia PM sees "increasing hope" of finding out MH370 fate Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:11 PM PDT  Sydney (Australia) (AFP) - Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott voiced increasing hope Sunday of finding out what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the 239 people on board after unidentified debris was sighted in the search zone.
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| Rio police step up favela action after fatal shooting Posted: 22 Mar 2014 04:08 PM PDT  A policeman was shot in the throat and killed in a Rio slum on Saturday, a day after the federal government stepped in to bring violent favelas under control before the World Cup. On Friday, Rio state governor Sergio Cabral held emergency talks with President Dilma Rousseff after a spate of similar attacks, with Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo later confirming that the federal government in Brasilia had agreed to provide army support for Rio police. The government will reveal Monday the exact scope of its promised support for Rio, where city authorities have been battling gang violence for decades.
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| Tear gas fired in fresh Venezuela protests Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:54 PM PDT  Venezuelan security forces fired tear gas and made several arrests as 20,000 people marched on Saturday in the capital Caracas against what they see as President Nicolas Maduro's heavy-handed repression of dissent. At least 31 people have been killed in more than six weeks of student-led protests against the government, representing the biggest challenge yet to Maduro, the elected socialist heir to longtime late president Hugo Chavez. Demonstrators partly blame Caracas's close ties to Cuba, the only Communist one-party state in the Americas. Saturday's colorful rally in Caracas was peaceful until a group of masked youths attempted to block a busy highway, triggering a brief intervention from riot police and security forces who fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse them.
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| Marseille loses 1-0 at home to Rennes in Ligue 1 Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:49 PM PDT  Marseille couldn't escape its poor run of form in a 1-0 loss at home to relegation-threatened Rennes in the French league on Saturday.
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| Immobile's hat trick helps Torino beat Livorno 3-1 Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:45 PM PDT  MILAN (AP) — Ciro Immobile netted a hat trick to help Torino beat relegation-threatened Livorno 3-1 and make him Serie A's top scorer on Saturday.
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| Hawthorn open AFL title defense with a win Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:42 PM PDT MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Luke Breust and Jarryd Roughead both kicked five goals as Hawthorn opened its defense of the Australian Football League title with a hard-won 48-point win over Brisbane in the second part of a split first round. |
| Malaysian plane search widens on new images of 'debris' Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:42 PM PDT  Perth (Australia) (AFP) - The search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was set to resume Sunday with greater resources and boosted by a new satellite image of unidentified floating debris. Coordinating the hunt in the vast southern Indian Ocean, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said overnight "further attempts will be made to establish whether the objects sighted are related to MH370," on Sunday. A grainy March 18 photo released by China's State Administration of Science Technology and Industry showed an object measuring 22.5 metres by 13 metres (74 by 43 feet) in the southern Indian Ocean. The location was just 120 kilometres (75 miles) distant from where March 16 satellite images -- released by Australia on Thursday -- had detected two pieces of possible wreckage in the remote ocean about 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) southwest of Perth.
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| John Love, Bataan Death March survivor, dies at 91 Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:25 PM PDT  ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (AP) — John E. Love, a Bataan Death March survivor who led a campaign to change the caption on a historic photo from The Associated Press, has died. He was 91.
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| Report: NSA targeted Chinese tech giant Huawei Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:22 PM PDT BERLIN (AP) — U.S. intelligence agencies hacked into the email servers of Chinese tech giant Huawei five years ago, around the time concerns were growing in Washington that the telecommunications equipment manufacturer was a threat to U.S. national security, two newspapers reported Saturday. |
| Video shows gunmen in deadly Afghan hotel attack Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:15 PM PDT  KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Security guards searched four attackers — twice — before allowing them to enter an Afghan hotel where the young men proceeded to the restaurant and killed nine diners, including four foreigners and an AFP journalist, his wife and two children, according to chilling closed-circuit video broadcast Saturday by a local TV station.
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| 2 more deaths in Venezuela before dueling marches Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:13 PM PDT  CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Two more people were reported killed in Venezuela as a result of anti-government protests before supporters and opponents of President Nicolas Maduro took to the streets in new shows of force Saturday.
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| Protesters in Chile keep heat on Bachelet to make good on reforms Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:08 PM PDT Tens of thousands of protesters marched in Chile on Saturday to press center-left President Michelle Bachelet to follow through with the ambitious reforms she pledged before assuming power less than two weeks ago. The protest in downtown Santiago, dubbed "the march of all marches," was the first of Bachelet's new term and the biggest political demonstration in the world's top copper exporter since massive student protests in 2011. Organizers said at least 100,000 people turned out, even without core groups of student protesters active in the past. The march underscored lingering frustrations in Chile, which has one of the region's widest inequality gaps despite a decade-long mining boom. |
| Britain says allies should consider long-term cuts in arms sales to Russia Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:06 PM PDT LONDON (Reuters) - Britain and its allies should consider imposing lasting limitations on arms sales as part of a new relationship with Russia following the "outrageous" annexation of Crimea, Foreign Secretary William Hague said in an article posted on the website of the Telegraph newspaper on Saturday. "This would involve Russia being outside some international organizations, facing lasting restrictions on military cooperation and arms sales, and having less influence over the rest of Europe," he wrote. (Reporting by Costas Pitas; Editing by Kevin Liffey) |
| Algeria's Bouteflika says health won't prevent election bid, vows reforms Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:04 PM PDT  By Patrick Markey ALGIERS (Reuters) - President Abdelaziz Bouteflika said in a letter addressed to Algerians on Saturday his poor health would not prevent him from running for a fourth term and promised constitutional reforms if he wins the April 17 election. Bouteflika, 77, registered his candidacy earlier this month despite suffering from a stroke last year that opponents say has left him unfit to campaign or govern the North African oil producer for another five years. In the letter published by APS state news agency, Bouteflika gave his most detailed remarks yet about his intentions although he has spoken and appeared rarely in public since the illness that put him into a Paris hospital for months. I decided not to disappoint you and offer myself as a candidate for the presidential election ... and give all my energy to fulfilling your wishes," the letter said.
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| Chelsea routs Arsenal 6-0 in Wenger's 1,000th game Posted: 22 Mar 2014 03:02 PM PDT  LONDON (AP) — Chelsea handed Arsene Wenger one of his most demoralizing defeats as Arsenal manager as his 1,000th game ended in a 6-0 rout, and the referee also endured embarrassment at Stamford Bridge on Saturday.
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| Protests break out in Brazil Posted: 22 Mar 2014 02:54 PM PDT  Demonstrators from both ends of Brazil's political spectrum clashed briefly Saturday in Rio, where leftists came to blows with a group commemorating 50 years since the military coup. More than 2,000 people meanwhile demonstrated in Sao Paulo, sending out a message to President Dilma Rousseff which read, "Dilma, listen, there will be fighting at the (World) Cup," and there were smaller protests in various other Brazilian cities. Right-wing elements in Rio had called for a reenactment of a 1964 "March of Families for God and Freedom," which came just days before a military coup that lasted until democracy's restitution in 1985. "Democracy doesn't exist in Brazil -- we don't have a majority but a slew of minorities, such as Indians and feminists, with Dilma in charge," activist Felipe Paulomo told AFP.
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| Horse sculptures by Scottish artist come to NYC Posted: 22 Mar 2014 02:53 PM PDT  NEW YORK (AP) — It's all part of New York City events celebrating all things Scottish.
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| Miami, NY restaurant owner's body found in India Posted: 22 Mar 2014 02:51 PM PDT MIAMI (AP) — The founder of a popular Argentine restaurant in Miami and New York City was found dead in a river in India after he jumped in to help a man struggling in the current, according to a statement released Saturday by his restaurant group. |
| Sharks, Chiefs no longer unbeaten in Super Rugby Posted: 22 Mar 2014 02:46 PM PDT WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A budding partnership between Wallabies fullback Israel Folau and midfield star Kurtley Beale is transforming the New South Wales Waratahs into serious contenders in a Super Rugby title race made more even by the loss of its last two unbeaten teams in the sixth round. |
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