News Network

Chinese hackers have attacked the website of Australia's biggest film festival over a documentary about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer.

Content on the Melbourne International Film Festival site was briefly replaced with the Chinese flag and anti-Kadeer slogans on Saturday, reports said.
In an earlier protest on Friday, Beijing withdrew four Chinese films.
Melbourne's The Age newspaper says private security guards have been hired to protect Kadeer and other film-goers.
She is due to attend the screening of Ten Conditions of Love, by Australian documentary-maker Jeff Daniels, on 8 August.

'Vile language'

Chinese authorities blame Kadeer, leader of the World Uighur Congress, for inciting ethnic unrest in Xinjiang - charges she denies.
Earlier this month, around 200 people died and 1,600 were injured during fighting in the region between the mostly Muslim Uighurs and settlers from China's Han majority.

Kadeer, 62, spent six years in a Chinese prison before she was released into exile in the US in 2005. In 2004, she won the Rafto Prize for human rights.

Richard Moore, head of the Melbourne International Film Festival, told the BBC that he had come under pressure from Chinese officials to withdraw the film about Kadeer and cancel her invitation to the festival.

He said the attacks on the festival's website began about 10 days ago.

"We've been subjected to a number of these attacks and we can see behind the scenes on our website that there are hundreds, well, if not thousands, of people from outside of Australia trying to get into our website and trying to damage us," Mr Moore told the BBC's World Today programme.

"This has been going on... since obviously the call from a Chinese consular official who told me in no uncertain terms that I was urged to withdraw this particular documentary from the film festival and that I had to justify my actions in including the film in our programme," he went on.
source: bbc.com/entertainment

What is Pakistan's government up to in South Waziristan?

Since the middle of May, the army has been conducting a military offensive against Pakistan's Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud - whose hideout lies in the mountainous terrain there.

But unlike the recent operation in the Swat valley, it says it has refrained from going all out against the militants so far.

The reasons for this are not exactly clear.

The army says it wants to surround the militants and use air power and artillery to ''soften them up".

"We are just punishing them at the moment," says Maj General Athar Abbas, head of the army's public relations wing.

"This is so that when the operation starts they can't stand up to us. We have surrounded the entire area where the Taliban are based," he says.
If this is true, the army appears in a prime position to fulfil its mission to "eliminate" Baitullah Mehsud and his organisation.

But it appears in no mood to begin the much-heralded military assault which already has a name - Rah-e-Nijat or Path to Deliverance.

"We are waiting for the right time to launch the operation," says Gen Abbas.

Taliban truce?

But the fact that people have had to wait so long for a serious assault on militants has led to fears, not without precedent, about a possible deal between the army and the Taliban.

One of the allegations concerns correspondence between Baitullah Mehsud and the head of Pakistan's army.

Maj Gen Athar Abbas flatly denied the report.

"The army will not even consider such a possibility. This is utter speculation," he said.

Gen Abbas said the army was fully committed to its goal of defeating the Taliban.

source: bbc.com

Offers for help are pouring in for an eight-year-old Liberian girl disowned by her own family in Phoenix, Arizona, after being raped by four boys.

The girl is under the care of the Arizona Child Protective Service (CPS) because her parents said she had shamed them, and they did not want her back.

Phoenix police said calls had come in from all over the US offering money, or even to adopt the young girl.

The boys, Liberian immigrants aged nine to 14, have been charged with rape.

The case has sparked outrage across the US and even drawn condemnation from Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, an outspoken anti-rape campaigner.

"I think that family is wrong. They should help that child who has been traumatised," Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf told CNN.

"They too need serious counselling because clearly they are doing something, something that is no longer acceptable in our society here," she added.
source: bbc.com

Singer Amy Winehouse has been found not guilty of assaulting a burlesque dancer at a charity ball in central London.

She was accused of punching Sherene Flash after she asked the singer for a photograph at the event in Berkeley Square last September.

The singer was accused of hitting Miss Flash in the eye when the dancer's friend tried to get into the photo, the court heard.

Ms Winehouse denied assault at City of Westminster Magistrates' Court.

Summing up the evidence, District Judge Timothy Workman said all but two witnesses in the trial were drunk at the time of the incident.
source: bbc.com

The Chinese economy may be roaring back to life, but concern is growing that record lending rates are feeding a speculation bubble
While the U.S. and Western economies have faced a credit crisis, there is a credit feeding frenzy happening in China. China state banks have lent nearly $1.1 trillion in the first half of the year -- more than the $800 billion U.S. stimulus or the $586 billion the Chinese government is spending to bolster its economy. CNN's John Vause reports on China's spending »

The record lending spree -- equal to one-quarter of the nation's total economic output -- is helping China's economy grow close to 8 percent the last quarter.

While boosting domestic consumption is seen as crucial to help reduce China's reliance on exports, economists see signs of trouble ahead.

"China has a $4 trillion economy and has (public and private) loans out of $1 trillion," Jerry Lou, China strategist for Morgan Stanley, told CNN recently. "Its loan book is out of balance."

"Somewhere between a fifth and a third of total new lending may have ended up in such things as stock market speculation, real estate speculation and even a measurable amount may be showing up in the casinos in Macau," said Michael Pettis of Peking University.
source: cnn.com

Voting is under way for a new president and parliament in the autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan, with the governing coalition facing a vigorous challenge.

A BBC correspondent says turnout is expected to be high, with queues of people outside polling stations before they had opened.

Incumbent President Masood Barzani and the ruling parliamentary coalition are both expected to win re-election.

But the two main parties, the KDP and PUK, are fighting off reformists.

The outcome is being watched closely in Baghdad, in the light of long-running tensions with the Kurds over land, oil, and power.

Some 20,000 troops have been stationed at polling stations, with 2.5 million people are registered to vote.
source: bbc.com

A Saudi Arabian man was arrested after bragging about his sex life on television, local media reported.

Mazen Abdul Jawad appeared last week on a show on Lebanese channel LBC, where he went into "graphic details about his sexual conquests," according to Arab News, an English daily.

A segment of the show "Red Line" posted on YouTube shows the 32-year-old talking about sex and foreplay. He also discusses losing his virginity to a neighbor while he was 14.

In deeply conservative Saudi Arabia, pre-marital sex is illegal and unrelated men and women are not allowed to mingle.

A government official told the newspaper that discussing sex in public is a punishable offense that may affect anyone involved in the broadcast.

"It is wrong to host people on television to speak publicly about vice and issues against our religion," said Ahmad Qasim Al-Ghamdi, director of Mecca's branch of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, also known as the religious police.

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- An Indian judge Friday allowed prosecutors to summon five foreigners, including FBI agents, to testify in connection with the Mumbai terror trial.
Special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam told CNN that the identities of the witnesses would not be disclosed.

Prosecutors have argued that they need time to examine more witnesses despite confession of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the alleged gunman captured alive from last year's Mumbai's terror assaults.

The judge has accepted Kasab's dramatic guilty plea, but has declined to pronounce the verdict, allowing the trial to go on at least until all evidence is complete.

Prosecutors insist that examination of more witnesses would help them shed light on why foreigners -- among others -- were targeted in the November siege.

Kasab is one of 10 Pakistani nationals who police said unleashed terror on India's financial capital for four days and three nights, beginning November 26. The other suspects were killed during the attacks.
source: cnn.com/asia

Humiliation and comedy have always been natural bedfellows, but the one doesn't guarantee the other, as poor Katherine Heigl discovers in this crude, sub-par stab at a modern screwball comedy.

Katherine Heigl plays the sophisticated female boss of Gerard Butler in "The Ugly Truth."
The "Grey's Anatomy" and "Knocked Up" star plays Abby, a supposedly intelligent producer on a local Sacramento TV news show.

We're repeatedly assured that she's good at her job, though there's little or no evidence for that in what we see, and apparently the ratings are in the toilet.

That's why her boss drafts controversial cable clown Mike (Gerard Butler), whose bargain basement show "The Ugly Truth" gives viewers the real dope on the opposite sex.

Mike's straight talk isn't exactly edifying -- or original. It boils down to this: men are only interested in one thing, and it's not your IQ score.

His advice to women: swallow your pride -- and anything else that might come up.
source: cnn.com/entertainment

Usain Bolt gave further evidence if any was needed of his superlative form ahead of the world championships with an outstanding victory over 100 meters in the London Grand Prix on Friday night.

Bolt crosses the line in the 100m in London with Powell left trailing.
The Jamaican superstar ran a blistering 9.91 seconds into a strong 1.7 meter headwind to leave a world class field, including arch-Jamaica rival Asafa Powell trailing.

Compatriot Yohan Blake finished second in 10.11 seconds with Antigua's Daniel Bailey third. Powell faded to sixth in 10.26 seconds.

But the performance was overshadowed by a doping controversy in Jamaica, with the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) confirming that five athletes from the Caribbean island had tested positive.

The athletes, four men and a woman, are not thought to be any of the high-profile medal winners from the Beijing Olympics and after his heat at Crystal Palace, Bolt shrugged off the reports.
source:cnn.com

In an unusual step, NASA scientists interrupted testing of the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope to aim the orbiter's camera at Jupiter and capture an image of the planet's mysterious new scar.
The resulting picture, taken Thursday, is the sharpest visible-light photo of the dark spot and Hubble's first science observation since astronauts repaired and upgraded it in May, NASA said.

Earth-based telescopes have been trained on Jupiter since an amateur astronomer in Australia noticed the new mark, probably created when a small comet or asteroid plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere and disintegrated, early Monday.

But in its rarified orbit 347 miles above the Earth, the Hubble has a better view of the gaseous planet.

This week's event marks only the second time scientists have recorded debris colliding with Jupiter, the fifth planet from the sun and the largest in our solar system. The appearance of the impact spot is changing day to day in the planet's cloud tops, making it a priority for scientists to document it quickly.
source: cnn.com

WASHINGTON : -- President Obama said Friday he spoke with the police officer who arrested a Harvard professor and told the officer he did not mean to malign the Cambridge Police Department when he said police acted stupidly.
The president acknowledged that his words "helped to contribute to ratcheting" up the situation when he criticized the manner in which Sgt. James Crowley arrested professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

"I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically," Obama told reporters. "I could have calibrated those words differently, and I told this to Sgt. Crowley." Watch Obama describe talk »

Obama spoke about two hours after police unions in Massachusetts called on him to apologize. He did not apologize for his remark but repeated that he believed his choice of words was unfortunate.

He reiterated his assertion that he believes police overreacted, but said Gates "probably overreacted as well."

"My sense is you have got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved," he said. source: cnn.com