MH370: French experts examine Reunion wing part

Experts are due to examine part of a wing that washed up on the island of Reunion last week and is thought to have belonged to missing flight MH370.

The Boeing 777 piece has been taken to Toulouse in south-west France.

An Australian transport expert is helping out in the examination at the invitation of the French authorities. Malaysian experts are also attending.

They may pronounce on the origin of the wing part either on Wednesday or later this week, officials say.

For reasons that remain unclear the Malaysia Airlines plane veered off course on its way to Beijing in March 2014 and crashed into the sea with 239 people on board.

Fifa corruption: Jeffrey Webb pleads not guilty in US

Former Fifa Vice-President Jeffrey Webb has pleaded not guilty in connection with a massive corruption scandal in the world's football governing body.

He was placed under house arrest on $10m (£6.4m) bail by a New York judge.

Mr Webb, from the Cayman Islands, is accused of accepting bribes worth millions of dollars in connection with the sale of marketing rights.

He was detained in Switzerland in May, along with six football officials, and was this week extradited to the US.

Iraq launches offensive to drive Islamic State from biggest province

Iraqi troops and Shi'ite Muslim militia forces attacked Islamic State fighters on several fronts on Monday in Anbar, the country's largest province, at the start of what is likely to be a long and fiercely contested offensive.

A spokesman for the joint operations command said the campaign, which began at dawn, brought together the army, mainly Shi'ite Hashid Shaabi militias, special forces, police and local Sunni Muslim tribal fighters.

"At 5 o'clock this morning operations to liberate Anbar were launched," the spokesman said.

Military sources in Anbar said they met heavy resistance from the insurgents, who deployed five suicide car bombs and fired rockets to repel their advance on the city of Falluja, about 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad.

Greece debt crisis: Merkel says talks 'extremely difficult'

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has called the talks on Greece's debt rescue "extremely difficult" and ruled out "agreement at any price".

She was speaking as she arrived in Brussels for a meeting of the other 18 eurozone leaders to discuss the deal.

Soon after the summit started, it was suspended to enable sideline talks with the Greek prime minister.

Greece risks being ejected from the eurozone if a deal to rescue it from financial collapse is not reached.

The eurozone leaders are considering a document of proposals, put together by finance ministers after two days of intense negotiations, which would impose new tough conditions on Athens.

Finnish Finance Minister Alex Stubb said one condition in the ministers' proposal requires Greece to implement new laws by Wednesday.

Greek referendum: ‘No’ supporters celebrate in Athens’ streets

Supporters of the ‘No’ vote in Greece’s bailout referendum celebrated in Athens on Sunday after voters rejected creditors’ demands for more austerity in return for rescue loans.

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Greece debt crisis: Tsipras in new bailout 'concessions'

Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has offered new concessions to the country's creditors.

A letter to creditors sent by Mr Tsipras says he was prepared to accept most conditions that were on the table before talks collapsed and he called a referendum.

On Tuesday, eurozone finance ministers refused to extend the previous bailout.

Germany says a new agreement on a bailout would not be possible until after the referendum this weekend.

Human rights body the Council of Europe has said the referendum, which will ask Greeks if they want to accept their creditors' proposals, would "fall short of international standards" if held as planned on Sunday.

Philae comet lander wakes up, says European Space Agency

The European Space Agency (Esa) says its comet lander, Philae, has woken up and contacted Earth. Philae, the first spacecraft to land on a comet, was dropped on to the surface of Comet 67P by its mothership, 

Rosetta, last November. It worked for 60 hours before its solar-powered battery ran flat. The comet has since moved nearer to the Sun and Philae has enough power to work again, says the BBC's science correspondent Jonathan Amos. 

Man arrested in connection with Boston terror investigation

A Rhode Island man was arrested Thursday in connection with the probe into a Massachusetts man who was fatally shot by terrorism investigators as they sought to question him about a possible plot to kill police officers.

Nicholas Rovinski is expected to appear in federal court Friday, when the charges against him will be announced, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz's spokeswoman Christina DiIorio-Sterling said.

Rovinski, of Warwick, was taken into custody Thursday night without incident, Boston FBI office spokeswoman Kristen Setera said. Federal officials searched Rovinki's house at least two days last week, but they wouldn't discuss details of the search.

Rovinski couldn't be reached for comment while in custody on Thursday night. A telephone call to his house rang unanswered, and a woman inside yelled through the front door to a reporter outside, "Get out of here."

Bernie Sanders wants to take back “family values” from the GOP

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks to reporters at a breakfast in Washington about his 2016 agenda. (Michael Bonfigli/The Christian Science Monitor)

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders doesn’t like labels, perhaps because he’s so often asked to explain his particular brand of political thinking in a single word, but can’t.

Sanders, elected as an independent, caucuses with Senate Democrats and calls himself a “Democratic socialist.” And now that he’s running for the White House, he’d like to keep busting categories and take back a key phrase from Republicans and redefine it for the 2016 election: “family values.”

At a breakfast with reporters in Washington Thursday, Sanders previewed what he said will be a major theme of his campaign.

Gulliver’s travails at HSBC mean more job cuts

Britain’s biggest bank and Europe’s biggest lender HSBC is to slash nearly 50,000 jobs from its global workforce as the bank strives to cut costs in a fiercely competitive banking sector.

Boss Steve Gulliver says the cost-cutting drive, which includes axing the bank’s investment arm, will shear off a quarter of the bank’s assets.

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The job cuts, nearly 20 percent of the total workforce, will be less-than-evenly spread, with half coming from Brazil and Turkey alone. HSBC’s British base will shed 8000, with the rest of the world accounting for the remainder.

“HSBC’s business is still running at too high a cost and its returns are below where Gulliver has promised they should be so it has raised some questions that maybe the bank is simply too big to manage and is too complex to deliver the returns that small and nimble banks can achieve,” says Reuters banking correspondent Steve Slater.

Caitlyn Jenner sued again after deadly car crash

Olympic champion turned transgender reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner has been sued again in connection with a February car crash in Malibu in which a 69-year-old woman died. 

Jenner, 65, walked away from the accident uninjured, but in addition to the woman who died, four others were injured, including Steindorff.Talent agent Jessica Marie Steindorff filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking unspecified damages related to the four-car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in the Los Angeles metro area.

The former Olympic decathlete then still known as Bruce Jenner was driving a large SUV that collided with a smaller white car that then swerved into oncoming traffic. 

The stepchildren of the dead woman, Kim Howe, also have filed suit seeking unspecified compensation over the crash. She died on impact when her car was struck. 

Fifa scandal: Alejandro Burzaco resurfaces in Italy

                                      




An Argentine wanted by the US in connection with the investigation into allegations of corruption at Fifa has turned himself in to police in Italy.

Alejandro Burzaco was the president of Argentine sports marketing firm Torneos y Competencias and one of 14 current and ex-Fifa officials and associates indicted over the scandal.

Interpol had issued an alert requesting his arrest.

He disappeared following the arrest of seven Fifa executives on 27 May.

Swiss media reported that he was not in his room when police acting on extradition requests from US authorities raided a hotel in the Swiss city, but was having breakfast and so was not arrested.

Mr Burzaco, who also has Italian citizenship, walked into a police station in the northern Italian city of Borzano along with his two lawyers on Tuesday.

He is being held in a cell in Borzano police station, officials told Spanish news agency Efe.

The US Department of Justice alleges that Mr Burzaco conspired to win and keep hold of lucrative media rights contracts from regional football federations by paying up to $110m (£72m) in bribes.
'Fugitives'

Do this, not that: How the White House plans to work with Hillary Clinton’s campaign

In late March, White House press secretary Josh Earnest disclosed to reporters that he had been in touch with aides to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Earnest described the communications as taking place “in the context of my best efforts to try to answer your questions” about the controversy over her use of a private email server while at the State Department.

White House officials say those kinds of consultations between communications staff on either side have continued, in the words of one aide, “so that we don’t talk at cross-purposes on emails, or Benghazi, things like that.”

On the whole, this is not that surprising. Defending Clinton’s record in office amounts to defending the administration. And there is considerable overlap between the world of the former secretary of state’s 2016 White House campaign and President Barack Obama’s political orbit.

Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, held that title inside Obama’s White House. They share a political pollster, Joel Benenson. Her lead spokesman, Brian Fallon, did the same job for former Attorney General Eric Holder. 

Duggar parents placed locks on bedroom doors after fondling

Two of reality TV's Duggar sisters who were fondled by their older brother when they were kids say they weren't even aware it had happened until he confessed and their parents told them about it.

Jill and Jessa Duggar, part of the Arkansas family featured in TLC's "19 Kids and Counting," were among four sisters Josh Duggar touched inappropriately a dozen years ago, when he was a teenager. They talked about it with Fox News Channel's Megyn Kelly in an interview that aired Friday.

Jessa Duggar said her brother was "a young boy in puberty" who was "a little too curious about girls."

After the fondling, the sisters said, their parents restricted the children from playing games like hide and seek and placed locks on bedrooms where the girls and boys slept separately. Jill Duggar said she was 12 when the abuse occurred, and Jessa Duggar said she was 9 or 10. Both women are now married.

Death toll in in Yangtze River capsizing hits nearly 400

Disaster teams searched the Yangtze River on Saturday for dozens of bodies of the Eastern Star's missing passengers and crew, as the death toll in the cruiser's capsizing rose to nearly 400, making it China's deadliest boat disaster in nearly seven decades.

Authorities have attributed the overturning of the ship late Monday to sudden, severe winds, but also have placed the captain and his first engineer under police custody.

Passengers' relatives have raised questions about whether the ship should have continued its cruise after the storm started in a section of Hubei province and despite a weather warning earlier in the evening.

Heavy rains in the Yangtze area over four days beginning Monday have killed 15 people and left eight others missing, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said.

Hundreds more bodies from the Eastern Star were found overnight and Saturday, bringing the death toll to 396, Hu Kaihong, the vice director-general of the press bureau of the State Council Information Office, told a news conference. A total of 46 people were still missing, and authorities had requested that river traffic and others along the river alert them if they noticed any floating bodies.

ISIS is using chlorine as a weapon, Australia’s Foreign Minister says

Islamic State militants have used chlorine as a weapon and are recruiting highly trained technicians in a serious bid to develop chemical weapons, Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop warned.

In a speech to an international forum of nations that works to fight the spread of such weapons, Bishop said the rise of militant groups such as ISIS, also known as Daish, posed “one of the gravest security threats we face today.”

“Apart from some crude and small scale endeavors, the conventional wisdom has been that the terrorist intention to acquire and weaponize chemical agents has been largely aspirational,” Bishop told a meeting of the Australia Group in Perth. The speech on Friday was posted online.

“The use of chlorine by Daish, and its recruitment of highly technically trained professionals, including from the West, have revealed far more serious efforts in chemical weapons development,” she said.

Fake orca used to scare sea lions out of Oregon port

The fake whale was brought overland from neighbouring Washington state

Port officials in an Oregon city have gone to creative lengths to see off hundreds of sea lions from their docks - by shipping in a fake orca whale.

The 32ft-long fibreglass whale was brought to rid Astoria's port of the sea lions after they failed to leave as expected once the weather got warmer.

Officials say the sea lions are putting thousands of jobs in the city at risk.

First attempts to use the fake orca ran into trouble on Thursday, after its motor became flooded.

Yangtze ship disaster: Chinese salvagers right Eastern Star

Chinese salvagers have fully righted the ship which capsized on the Yangtze River, on which more than 400 people are thought to have died.

The Eastern Star overturned late on Monday after being caught in a storm.

Just 14 of the 456 passengers and crew are known to have survived what looks set to be China's worst shipping disaster in more than 60 years of Communist rule.

Authorities say the chances of finding anyone still alive were "slim".

"In a situation in which the overall judgment is that there is no chance of people being alive, we could start the work of righting the boat," Transport Ministry Spokesperson Xu Chengguang had told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.

Eight out of 10 Malala suspects 'secretly acquitted'

Malala Yousafzai was seriously injured in a 2012 assassination attempt

Eight of the 10 men reportedly jailed for the attempted assassination of Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai were acquitted, it has emerged.

In April, officials in Pakistan said that 10 Taliban fighters had been found guiltyand received 25-year jail terms.

But sources have now confirmed to the BBC that only two of the men who stood trial were convicted.

The secrecy surrounding the trial, which was held behind closed doors, raised suspicions over its validity.

The court judgement - seen for the first time on Friday more than a month after the trial - claims that the two men convicted were those who shot Ms Yousafzai in 2012.

It was previously thought that both the gunmen and the man who ordered the attack had fled to Afghanistan.

Muneer Ahmed, a spokesman for the Pakistani High Commission in London, said on Friday that the eight men were acquitted because of a lack of evidence.

Saleem Marwat, the district police chief in Swat, Pakistan, separately confirmed that only two men had been convicted.

Hillary Clinton’s not like the rest of us? Good!

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton visits a decidedly homespun restaurant — Kiki’s Chicken and Waffles in Columbia, S.C. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)

After more than 200 years of contributing pretty much nothing to American democracy other than some inspired ice cream and a buffer against Canadian aggression, Vermont has apparently decided that once a decade it should send out some scrappy, leftist presidential candidate who will take it to the elitist Democratic establishment. This time it’s Bernie Sanders’ turn.