BEIRUT, Lebanon (CNN) — The fiery leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant movement assured Lebanon on Monday that his movement will cooperate in the country’s political life.

Hassan Nasrallah said: “We don’t want to have control over Lebanon, or to have governance over Lebanon or to impose our ideas over the people of Lebanon, because we believe Lebanon to be a special and diverse country that needs the collaboration of everyone.”

Nasrallah spoke a day after Lebanon’s parliament elected Michel Sleiman the country’s president after a six-month vacancy in the position.

Nasrallah, speaking at a packed stadium, told his followers: “I renew my appeal and invitation for a true national partnership with no eliminations or impositions. The national unity government is not the victory of the opposition against the pro-government. It is the victory of all Lebanese.”

He said Sleiman’s election “renews the hope amongst the Lebanese people to a new era and a new start.”

“I must say that there are deep wounds from our side and theirs, we are both in front of two choices; either to expand the wounds and add salt to them or try to cure them for the sake of Lebanon and we prefer the second choice.”

The parliament had tried 19 times to vote on a new president, but failed because of disagreements over how to share power in a new Cabinet.

Lebanon’s Western-backed government and the Hezbollah-led opposition reached a deal last week aimed at ending an 18-month political crisis that pushed the country to the brink of civil war, and paved the way for Sleiman’s election.

The agreement, reached in Doha, Qatar, calls for a consensus government in which the Cabinet would be comprised of 30 posts — 16 for the majority, 11 for the Hezbollah-led opposition and three set aside for the president to nominate.

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written by Andrew

(CNN) – NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet’s surface on the first day of its three-month mission “to taste and sniff the northern polar site’s soil and ice,” the space agency said.

The first pictures, which the lander began taking shortly after touching down near Mars’ north pole — the end of a 422 million-mile trek — showed a pattern of brown polygons as far as the camera could see.

“It’s surprisingly close to what we expected and that’s what surprises me most,” said Peter Smith, the mission’s principal investigator. “I expected a bigger surprise.”

He added: “We see the lack of rocks that we expected, we see the polygons that we saw from space, we don’t see ice on the surface, but we think we will see it beneath the surface. It looks great to me.”

The Sunday landing on the Red Planet’s arctic plains — which ended a 296-day journey — was right on target, a feat NASA’s Ed Weiler compared to landing a hole-in-one with a golf ball from 10,000 miles.

The landing — dubbed the “seven minutes of terror” — was a nerve-wracking experience for mission managers, who have witnessed the failure of similar missions.

In mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, they celebrated the lander’s entry.

“It was better than we could have imagined,” Barry Goldstein, project manager for the Phoenix mission, said.

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written by Andrew

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) – In these hallowed halls, Indiana Jones almost seems out of place.

A banner with a two-dimensional cutout of the swashbuckling archaeologist swings through the lobby of Industrial Light and Magic, where life-size replicas of Darth Vader and Bobba Fett from “Star Wars” stand guard.

The home of George Lucas’ visual effects company is a high-tech temple to everything from the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” to the talking robots in “Transformers.” But Indy can’t take credit for the digital wizardry for which ILM has become famous over the last couple of decades.

Not yet, anyway. That’s because he hasn’t been around for 19 years, a time in which special effects has mostly migrated from soundstage to server.

The first three Indy films were gritty, sweaty and tactile affairs, largely because everything onscreen physically existed somewhere. Not so with “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — though that was almost the case.

When first approaching the latest “Indy,” director Steven Spielberg considered dusting off his old-school approach.

“He thought maybe we should just go back to the way we did things before, like matte paintings on glass and things like that,” said visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman. “We entertained that idea for a little bit, but we realized we could serve the story better by using our digital tools.”

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written by Andrew

MIAMI BEACH, Florida (AP) – Charity Simon is sharing a bedroom and a bathroom with two other young women she has never met during her stay at the Tropics Hotel & Hostel in Miami Beach. But that’s fine with her since she is saving a ton of money every night.

Simon, who is from Germany, used to stay in four-star hotels until she found out about hostels, which offer low-price lodging and the chance to make new friends.

“It started with I wanted to travel around the world as much as possible,” said Simon, who declined to give her age. “I asked what is it all about? They said a hostel is where you save first of all a lot of money, where you meet a lot of people international from all over.”

With its Art Deco buildings, bikini-clad women and late-night party scene, experts say South Beach is becoming a hot tourist destination for young travelers looking to spend less money on where they are going to sleep and more on sightseeing.

Anywhere between three to 14 travelers are cramped in one room at a hostel, sleeping on bunk beds. A room with 12 beds can run for $18 a night per person; an eight-bed room is $18; $30-$40 for smaller rooms.

At Jazz on South Beach Hostel, some rooms are divided by gender (four or six-bed rooms for women) while other rooms are mixed. Depending on occupancy, and if there are any empty rooms, people who are traveling together can request to room together - just like they would in a hotel.

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written by Andrew

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraqi soldiers rounded up six teenagers in northern Iraq who were being trained, against their will, to carry out suicide bombings for al Qaeda in Iraq, the Interior Ministry said Monday.

Troops conducting house-to-house searches in Mosul found six teens, ages 15 to 18, who were being trained to perpetrate attacks against Iraqi security forces, said ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf.

Insurgents had threatened to kill the boys or their families if they refused to comply with the training, Deputy Interior Minister Kamal Ali Hussein told reporters.

“The Saudi insurgent threatened to rape our mothers and sisters, destroy our houses and kill our fathers if we did not cooperate with him,” one of the youths told The Associated Press in Mosul.

The boys were rounded up as part of the Mother of Two Springs operation targeting al Qaeda in Iraq in Mosul and Nineveh province. The offensive has netted the detentions of more than 1,300 suspects.

The teens had been trained in recent weeks, Khalaf said.

A Saudi national — a suspected al Qaeda in Iraq operative — had been one of their trainers, but he was believed to have died in a military operation, Khalaf said. It is not known where or when he was killed.

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written by Andrew

CHARLEVILLE-MEZIERES, France (AFP) - The trial of French serial killer Michel Fourniret and his wife heads for a verdict this week, with prosecutors seeking life in jail for the couple described as a “devil with two faces.”

Fourniret, a 66-year-old machine operator, and Monique Olivier, a 59-year-old nurse, will be sentenced on Wednesday at the end of a two-month trial exposing one of France’s most gruesome cases in recent years.

Dubbed the “Ogre of the Ardennes”, the bespectacled grey-haired Fourniret has admitted to murdering, raping and kidnapping seven young girls and women between 1987 and 2001.

His wife is accused of helping him trap victims including 12-year-old Elizabeth Brichet, who was kidnapped while walking home from a friend’s house in 1989, strangled and buried on the grounds of Fourniret’s chateau — a plastic bag over her head.

Olivier is also charged as an accomplice to the murder of 13-year-old Natacha Danais who was lured into the couple’s van in the parking lot of a supermarket and stabbed during an attempted rape.

Among the most disturbing accounts, the court heard testimony from a coroner suggesting Fourniret sexually assaulted Danais after killing her. The body was found on beach on the French Atlantic coast in 1990.

Describing the couple as “inhuman and cruel criminals, the likes of which our country could have never imagined”, state prosecutor Francis Nachbar demanded the maximum sentence of life in prison for Fourniret, with no possibility of parole.

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written by Andrew

CHENGDU, China - A powerful aftershock destroyed tens of thousands of homes in central China on Sunday, killing six people and straining recovery efforts from the country’s worst earthquake in three decades. More than 500 others were injured.

Meanwhile, soldiers rushed with explosives to unblock a debris-clogged river threatening to flood homeless quake survivors.

The fresh devastation came after a magnitude 6.0 aftershock — among the most powerful recorded since the initial May 12 quake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The China National Seismic Network said the aftershock was the strongest of dozens in the nearly two weeks after the disaster.

The new tremor killed two people in Sichuan province and injured more than 480 others, 41 seriously, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The news agency said Monday that the aftershock also killed four people and injured 20 others seriously in neighboring Shaanxi province.

Some 71,000 homes that had survived the original quake were leveled, and another 200,000 were in danger of collapse from the aftershock that caused office towers to sway in Beijing, 800 miles away.

Xinhua did not give any details on whether the houses were occupied.

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written by Andrew

HORMIGUEROS, Puerto Rico - Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday offered a spiritual defense for continuing her presidential campaign, as she sought to put to rest the uproar over her comments about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Speaking to a full congregation at the Pabellon de la Victoria evangelical church, Clinton spoke in measured terms about faith in the face of adversity.

“There isn’t anything we cannot do together if we seek God’s blessing and if we stay committed and are not deterred by the setbacks that often fall in every life,” Clinton said.

Clinton is campaigning for Puerto Rico’s primary on June 1, which offers 55 pledged delegates to the national Democratic convention. The New York senator is expected to win the contest, thanks partly to her ties to the large Puerto Rican community in her home state.

Clinton spoke of her determination to stay in the race despite trailing Illinois Sen. Obama, who picked up three more superdelegates in Hawaii on Sunday, giving him a total of 1,977 delegates, just 49 delegates short of the 2,026 needed to clinch the nomination. Clinton still has 1,779.

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written by Andrew

NORTH BATTLEFORD, Canada (AFP) - French skydiver Michel Fournier takes his life in his hands when, weather permitting, he leaps from a balloon 40 kilometres (25 miles) above Canada’s western plains.

The 64-year-old parachutist said it was his life’s dream to make the record jump, which will begin at the outer reaches of the stratosphere — about four times higher than the cruising altitude of a commercial jet.

Fournier spent Sunday resting and making the final arrangements in the small city of North Battleford, Saskatchewan, from where he will head up into the heavens in a stratospheric balloon and then throw himself off.

He will be wearing a pressurized suit capable of withstanding temperatures of minus 100 degrees Celsius (minus 148 Fahrenheit) as he hurtles to Earth at more than 1,500 kilometers per hour.

If he succeeds, Fournier will actually break four world records: for fastest freefall, longest freefall, highest jump, and highest altitude reached by a man in a balloon. It could also someday lead to rescuing astronauts in-flight.

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written by Andrew

Din cauza nemulţumirilor faţă de părinţi, a rezultatelor şcolare sau din spirit de aventură, 3.258 de copii au decis să plece „în lume“, în decursul ultimului an. Peste 3.200 de copii au fost daţi dispăruţi din mai 2007 până în aprilie 2008, potrivit datelor furnizate de Inspectoratul General al Poliţiei Române şi Direcţia de Investigaţii Criminale. 95% dintre aceştia au plecat de acasă de bună-voie, vârsta critică pentru această decizie fiind între 11 şi 18 ani. Din numărul total al dispariţiilor de minori sesizate în 2007, numai 3,5% dintre cazuri au fost provocate de accidente auto şi feroviare, înec sau rătăciri.
Printre motivele celor 3.285 de copii care şi-au dorit să fie „singuri pe lume“ se numără certurile cu părinţii, lipsurile materiale, dorinţa de a avea mai multă libertate sau de a locui cu prietenul/prietena lor, dar şi frica de a nu fi pedepsiţi pentru notele proaste.

Din numărul total al dispariţiilor de minori sesizate în 2007, numai 3,5% dintre cazuri au fost provocate de accidente auto şi feroviare, înec sau rătăciri, iar un procent şi mai mic, de 1,5%, a fost cauzat de răpiri, sechestrări sau exploatări sexuale.

„În ultimii ani au fost înregistrate foarte multe dispariţii de copii. Am observat că nu este vorba de dispariţii îngrijorătoare, cele mai multe plecări ale acestora fiind voluntare“, a precizat Adrian Dumitrescu, şef Serviciu Urmăriri din cadrul Direcţiei de Investigaţii Criminale, Inspectoratul General de Poliţie. Un număr foarte mic de dispariţii a avut un final tragic, după cum a completat Dumitrescu. Sfatul său pentru părinţi este să anunţe poliţia imediat ce constată lipsa copilului de acasă şi să nu efectueze căutări pe cont propriu.
În urma unei analize a cazurilor înregistrate anul trecut, s-au depistat o serie de situaţii tipice care provoacă „fuga de acasă“ sau dispariţia copiilor. Printre acestea se numără violenţa fizică sau psihică şi lipsa de comunicare din familie ori din centrele de plasament, rătăcirea copiilor nesupravegheaţi, accidentarea, agresiunile şi sechestrările, cu scopul exploatării sexuale sau prin muncă.
De asemenea, printre cazurile de dispariţie se numără şi cele ale copiilor care sunt luaţi de la domiciliu de către unul dintre părinţi, fără consimţământul celuilalt.

Pentru a reduce numărul de dispariţii, reprezentanţii poliţiei române spun că se aplică o nouă metodologie de lucru, care permite atât intervenţia rapidă, cât şi colaborarea cu societatea civilă, prin intermediul instituţiilor, organizaţ iilor guvernamentale şi nonguvernamentale, voluntarilor şi mass-mediei. Astfel, poliţia poate interveni, de trei ani, imediat după ce primeşte sesizarea dispariţiei copilului. Drept dovadă, în 2008, procentul de găsire a minorilor plecaţi de acasă este, până la această dată, de 97%, conform datelor IGP.

Sursa: EVZ

written by Flory