World News in Pictures

[Mr Lick]

Handout photo released by Nasa Earth Observatory on June 7, and taken from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), sunspot complex 1226-1227, shows the Sun unleashing an M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare, an S1-class (minor) radiation storm and a coronal mass ejection (CME) resulting in a large cloud of particles mushrooming up and falling back down giving the impression of covering an area of almost half the solar surface.

[Mr Lick]

World record attempt: 3,200 piercings





Body piercer Bill "Danger" Robinson (L) and sideshow performer Staysha Randall (C) call it quits at 3,200 body piercings, after breaking the Guinness Book record for "Most Body Piercings in a Single Sitting", at Inktoxicated Tattoos in Las Vegas, Nevada June 7, 2011. The previous record was 3,100 piercings. The record is awaiting verification by Guinness to be official.

[Mr Lick]

Yemen uprising










Armed guards walk inside the house of Yemeni tribal leader Sadeq al-Ahmar in Sanaa June 7, 2011

















An armed guard walks inside the house of Yemeni tribal leader Sadeq al-Ahmar in Sanaa June 7, 2011

[Mr Lick]

Fantastic lightening pictures from Belgrade

[Mr Lick]

F-16 fighters of the Thunderbirds, the U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron performing during 'Constanta Air Show 2011' at Mihail Kogalniceanu airfield, near Constanta, Romania, Wednesday, June 8, 2011. The US Thunderbirds squadron performed their aerobatic formation and solo flying stunts for the second time in Romania.

[Mr Lick]

Public information officer Theresa Mendoza walks on a ridge top as the Wallow Fire burns behind her outside of Eagar, Ariz. on June 8. A raging forest fire in eastern Arizona has scorched an area the size of Phoenix, threatening thousands of residents and emptying towns as the flames race toward New Mexico.









Firefighters sleep between trucks at the incident command post for the Wallow fire on June 8 in Springerville, Arizona. Hundreds of thousands of acres have burned in eastern Arizona. Smoke loomed over the twin towns of Eager and Springerville, home to about 7,000 people north of the fire.

[Mr Lick]

For most, an ocean-view home is a dream come true. But for rice farmer Katsushi Haga, a survivor of the deadly March earthquake and tsunami in Japan, it's a nightmare.

Haga is one of the leaders of a drive to move the historic, tight-knit seaside community of mostly rice farmers and fishermen to the top of this hill, which is about a mile inland and nearly 214 feet above sea level than its present location.
Given the devastation that the March 11 tsunami visited on Koizumi, he is not bothered by the lack of a sea view. In fact, he considers it a plus.
“I don’t want to see the ocean,” he said. “If I see the ocean, it reminds me of the tsunami.”






Koizumi, a town hard hit by the March tsunami, is seen from a nearby hillside. June 8, 2011

[Mr Lick]

A group of Syrians head towards Turkey from inside Syria as they wait for the authorization to cross the border near Turkish village of Guvecci in Hatay province, Turkey, Wednesday, June 8, 2011. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that his country will accept the many Syrian refugees who are fleeing violence in their country, but he urged Syria's government to adopt reforms aimed at ending the unrest. About 450 Syrian refugees, including more than 30 people who were wounded in clashes in northern Syria weekend, have already arrived in Turkey, which shares a 520-mile border with Syria.

[Mr Lick]

Traders work in the options pit on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange in New York, New York, USA, 08 June 2011. OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) announced today that it was not increasing production, pushing the price of oil higher; brent crude rose more than $1 a barrel to over $118.

[Mr Lick]

A digger mixes discarded vegetables with compost in a pile of vegetable residue at the Albahida vegetable recycling plant in Nijar, in the southern Spanish region of Almeria, June 8.






Farmer Mario Walter mulches thousands of salads on his field in Nieder-Erlenbach near Frankfurt, June 8, 2011. After an outbreak of E. coli that has killed at least 25 people and sickened hundreds in Europe, salads and other vegetables can hardly be sold in Germany.

[Mr Lick]

Lumberjacks from American Arboriar Tree Care in Lancaster work to cleanup brush and debris from a 500-year-old white oak tree in Olivedale Park that crashed to the ground during Tuesday's severe thunderstorms, on Tuesday, June 7. Portions of the tree's trunk will be taken to Alley Park for display. The tree, which was relatively healthy before it came down, is thought to predate Christopher Columbus's landing in the New World in 1492.

[Mr Lick]

A black bear cools off in a homeowner's hot tub, northeast of Orlando, Fla., on Friday.

[Mr Lick]

International Space Station crew blast off from Kazakhstan




The next crew of the International Space Station (ISS), from left to right: US astronaut Michael Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergey Volkov and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa walk to their bus at the send-off ceremony in Baikonur, Kazakhstan



A Russian Orthodox priest blesses the crew


















The rocket booster trails flames as the Soyuz TMA-02M accelerates into the night sky

[Mr Lick]

Tony Blair issues Arab spring warning to west



Tony Blair warns the west today that it urgently needs a wider plan to respond to the Arab spring, including a warning to autocratic leaders across the Middle East "to change or be changed".

His call for a clearer strategic approach comes in a new foreword to the paperback edition of his bestselling autobiography, The Journey.

The former prime minister also praises Europe, and by implication David Cameron, for showing leadership in Libya, saying it would have been inconceivable to leave Muammar Gaddafi in power.

He said that if America and Europe had done nothing, "Gaddafi would have retaken the country and suppressed the revolt with extraordinary vehemence. Many would have died."

If he had been left in power while the west was willing to see President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt deposed, "the damage to the west's reputation, credibility and stature would have been not just massive but potentially irreparable. That's what I mean by saying inaction is also a decision."

Blair does not call for immediate military intervention across the region, saying instead that "where there is the possibility of evolutionary change, we should encourage and support it. This is the case in the Gulf states."


Iraq being the shining example of his success whilst PM

[bobo746]

#3451 nice shot mate.

[Mr Lick]

Rowan Williams: no one voted for coalition policies




Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, has issued a broadside against the coalition government, claiming it is forcing through "radical policies for which no one voted".

He also challenges the 'big society' project and criticises the government for continuing to blame the country's difficulties entirely on the deficit it inherited from Labour.

The comments come in an editorial he has written as guest editor of this week's New Statesman magazine.

Full extracts are not available , but Williams says the "anxiety and anger" felt by voters is a result of the coalition's failure to expose its policies to "proper public argument".

He writes: "Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions at present."

Williams accepts that the government's big society agenda is not a "cynical walking-away from the problem". But he warns there is confusion about how voluntary organisations will "pick up the responsibilities shed by government", and says that the big society is seen with "widespread suspicion".

"The uncomfortable truth is that, while grass-roots initiatives and local mutualism are to be found flourishing in a great many places, they have been weakened by several decades of cultural fragmentation," Williams writes.

He also criticises the chancellor,George Osborne, saying: "It isn't enough to respond with what sounds like a mixture of 'This is the last government's legacy,' and 'We'd like to do more, but just wait until the economy recovers a bit.'"

The archbishop challenges the government's approach to welfare reform, complaining of a "quiet resurgence of the seductive language of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor".

In comments directed at the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, Williams criticises "the steady pressure" to increase "punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system".

Westminster politics "feels pretty stuck" he warns, adding that his aim is to stimulate "a livelier debate" and to challenge the left to develop its own "big idea" as an alternative to the Conservative-Liberal Democrat alliance.

[Mr Lick]

Gaddafi faces new ICC charges for using rape as weapon in conflict



The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) is likely to add rape to the war crimes charges against Muammar Gaddafi on the back of mounting evidence that sexual attacks on women are being used as a weapon in the Libyan conflict.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo told reporters at the UN in New York last night there were strong indications that hundreds of women had been raped in the Libyan government clampdown on the popular uprising and that Gaddafi had ordered the violations as a form of punishment.

The prosecutor said there was even evidence that the government had been handing out doses of Viagra to soldiers to encourage sexual attacks. Moreno-Ocampo said rape was a new tactic for the Libyan regime. "That's why we had doubts at the beginning, but now we are more convinced. Apparently, [Gaddafi] decided to punish, using rape."

The move came as Gaddafi's forces responded to Nato's intensified aerial bombardment of Tripoli on Tuesday by launching a heavy attack on rebel positions outside the liberated city of Misrata, unleashing a barrage of Grad rockets and mortars against rebel positions to the east, west and south of Misrata early on Wednesday morning, and followed up with an infantry assault. The Hikma hospital reported at least 10 rebel fighters died and 26 were wounded.

The attack came asLiam Fox, the defence secretary, expressed increasing frustration with the slow progress of the western-led military campaign, forcefully telling fellow Nato ministers at a meeting in Brussels they should contribute more.

[Mr Lick]

Russia defies growing consensus with declaration of 'total war on drugs'



Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.

Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.

Russia has as many as 6 million addicts (one in 25 people). Every year 100,000 people die from using drugs, Gryzlov said in a newspaper. The scale of the problem "threatens Russia's gene pool", he said. "We are standing on the edge of a precipice. Either we squash drug addiction or it will destroy us."

This year, President Dmitry Medvedev said drug abuse was cutting up to three percentage points off economic growth.

Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia's HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.

Under legislation promoted by the ruling United Russia party and now being reviewed in parliament, drug addicts will be forced into treatment or jailed, and dealers will be handed heftier custodial sentences. "The barons of narco-business must be put on a par with serial killers with the appropriate punishment in the form of a life sentence," said Gryzlov, who is chairman of the party.

Activists criticised the idea of putting addicts behind bars, pointing to a growing worldwide consensus that treating drug users as criminals has failed as a strategy.

[Mr Lick]

Bettencourt affair in new twist as L'Oréal heiress writes €170m cheque




Only months after they kissed and made up, France's richest woman, the L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, and her daughter appear to have fallen out again.

Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, the heiress's only child, is reported again to be seeking to have her mother made a ward of court after Bettencourt, 88, invested €170m (£151m) in a company belonging to one of her lawyer's clients.

The two buried the hatchet in December after a three-year estrangement over Bettencourt's decision to give a society photographer more than €1bn worth of art masterpieces, cash and life-insurance policies.

But the second act of what French newspapers call the Bettencourt affair erupted on Tuesday, after Bettencourt Meyers, 57, alerted the authorities, claiming at least one member of her mother's entourage appeared to be taking advantage of her deteriorating mental state.

Her accusations were directed at Pascal Wilhelm, Bettencourt's lawyer and the man appointed in January to manage her "interests".

The latest spat in France's long running family feud saw a judge, police officers and five doctors turn up at Bettencourt's home on Tuesday to check on her health. Their arrival at the house in the chic Paris suburb of Neuilly at 8am – at least two hours before the heiress reportedly makes her morning appearance – was prompted after Bettencourt failed to keep two medical appointments.

Le Monde revealed that in March a judge had decided that it was "impossible" for Bettencourt to act in her own interests. It quoted a legal document stating her "cognitive faculties" had changed for the worse and that she suffered from profound deafness.

Bettencourt Meyers decided to act again when she discovered her mother had written a cheque for €170m as an investment in a company run by television mogul Stéphane Courbit, who brought the Big Brother reality show to France, and is also a client of Wilhelm.

Bettencourt legally named Wilhelm to manage her fortune in January as part of the agreement with her daughter reached last December. However, Wilhelm also remained her lawyer, which Bettencourt Meyers argues is a conflict of interest.

The Bettencourt affair, as it became known, began in 2007 after Bettencourt Meyers accused the photographer François-Marie Banier, 63, of taking advantage of her mother's frailty and sued him for "abuse of weakness". Secret tape recordings suggested Bettencourt had made Banier her "sole heir".

[Mr Lick]

Phone-hacking scandal widens to include Kate Middleton and Tony Blair



Pressure is building on the Metropolitan police to expand their phone-hacking inquiry to include a notorious private investigator who was accused in the House of Commons on Wednesday of targeting politicians, members of the royal family and high-level terrorist informers on behalf of Rupert Murdoch's News International.


Guardian inquiries reveal that the former prime minister Tony Blair is among the suspected victims of Jonathan Rees, who was involved in the theft of confidential data, the hacking of computers and, it is alleged, burglary. According to close associates of Rees, he also targeted:


• Jack Straw when he was home secretary, Peter Mandelson when he was trade secretary and Blair's media adviser Alastair Campbell;


• Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex, and the Duke and Duchess of Kent, all of whom are said to have had their bank accounts penetrated, and Kate Middleton when she was Prince William's girlfriend;


• The former commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir John Stevens, and the current assistant commissioner, John Yates, who later supervised the failed phone-hacking inquiry for 19 months;


• The governor and deputy governor of the Bank of England, whose mortgage account details were obtained and sold.


Rees, who worked for the Mirror Group as well as the New of the World, is also accused of using a specialist computer hacker in July 2006 to steal information about MI6 agents who had infiltrated the Provisional IRA. According to a BBC Panorama programme in March, Rees was commissioned by Alex Marunchak, then the News of the World's executive editor, to hack the information from the computer of Ian Hurst, a former British intelligence officer in Northern Ireland who had stayed in contact with several highly vulnerable agents. Marunchak has denied the allegations.


The Guardian has previously identified other suspected targets of Rees, including Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, George Michael, Linford Christie, Gary Lineker, Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, and the family of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe.

[Mr Lick]

The road to El Rocio



Pilgrims from the Sanlucar de Barrameda brotherhood pull horses as they make their way to the shrine of El Rocio in the Donana National Park, southern Spain, June 8, 2011.























Pilgrims from the Sanlucar de Barrameda brotherhood are seen as they make their way to the shrine of El Rocio in the Donana National Park, southern Spain, June 8, 2011.

[Mr Lick]

Ancient finds




An archaeologist cleans the tusk of a prehistoric animal at Miraflores neighborhood in Tegucigalpa June 3, 2011. According to Virgilio Paredes, director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH), the finding could correspond to the tusk of a mammoth or mastodon from 12,000 or 15,000 B.C.



The skeleton of what is believed to be a U.S. soldier possibly killed in an 1846 Mexican-American War battle is seen in this handout picture taken in Monterrey May 14, 2011 and released to Reuters on June 6, 2011. Archeologists have uncovered the remains of U.S. soldiers, some with bullet wounds and with many of their bones intact. Found at a construction site and encrusted in the desert soil in Monterrey near the Texan border, the 10 sets of skeletal remains were discovered with buttons from uniforms, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology said

[Mr Lick]

The presumed head of a cow is found at an archaeological site, where a 6,000-year-old settlement with a unique mix of central Balkans and Adriatic cultures was discovered, in Reshtan village, southwest of capital Pristina May 31, 2011. The EU sponsored talks between Kosovo and Serbia are undergoing and one of the topics is the return of archaeological museum pieces that Serb forces took with them in 1999. Kosovo is rich in archaeological sites but experts say they do not have sufficient funds to continue large scale explorations



A Kosovan archaeologist displays a part of an anthropomorphic pottery piece at an archaeological site where a 6,000-year-old settlement with a unique mix of central Balkans and Adriatic cultures was discovered, in Reshtan village, southwest of capital Pristina May 31, 2011.

[Mr Lick]

Buttons of uniforms believed to have belonged to U.S. soldiers probably killed in an 1846 Mexican-American War battle are seen in this handout picture taken in Monterrey May 14, 2011 and released to Reuters on June 6, 2011.



A skull is displayed in this handout picture distributed in Buenos Aires May 27, 2011. Customs officials from Argentina's Tax Agency (AFIP) detected three skulls and a mummy that would be remains of the Paracas culture (eighth century BC - third century AD) in a postal package that tried to enter the country from Bolivia. The pieces had been declared as replicas of Peruvian ceramics. The package came from La Paz, Bolivia, and was entered on behalf of an Argentine citizen residing in Buenos Aires. The archaeological remains have been extracted from southern Peru and the final destination would European museums and private collectors seeking textiles that surround the mummified remains, the AFIP said in a statement

[Mr Lick]

The jaw bone of a U.S. soldier possibly killed in an 1846 Mexican-American War battle is seen in this handout picture taken in Monterrey May 14, 2011 and released to Reuters on June 6, 2011.



An archaeologist shows visitors pieces of artefacts displayed on a table at an archaeological site, where a 6,000-year-old settlement with a unique mix of central Balkans and Adriatic cultures was discovered, in Reshtan village, southwest of capital Pristina May 31, 2011.