Daily News Channel
It was "deeply distressing" and "deeply upsetting" to see the convicted Lockerbie bomber get a hero’s welcome in Libya, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Friday. The way Libya handles the return of Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi will determine its place on the world stage, Miliband said. Al Megrahi, 57, was freed Thursday from the Scottish prison where he had been serving a life sentence for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103.
At least two people were killed and 20 injured in a bombing in southern Baghdad on Friday morning, an Interior Ministry official told CNN. The bomb exploded in a market in Dora district, the official said
Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge says he successfully countered an effort by senior Bush administration officials to raise the nation’s terror alert level in the days before the 2004 presidential vote. “An election-eve drama was being played out at the highest levels of our government” after Osama bin Laden released a pre-election message critical of President George W. Bush, writes Ridge in his new book, “The Test of Our Times.” Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld strongly advocated raising the security threat level to “orange” — even though Ridge believed a threatening message “should not be the sole reason to elevate the threat level.” The former Pennsylvania governor also writes that he saw no reason for the move, which he now calls a bad idea, because additional security precautions had already been taken in advance of the election
Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, convicted of murdering 270 people by blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, two decades ago was returned to his native Libya on Thursday. He suffers from terminal prostate cancer and was freed from prison in Scotland, with Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill citing compassionate grounds for the release and saying al Megrahi was “going home to die.” “Our justice system demands that judgment be imposed but compassion available,” MacAskill said. He spoke to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the case.
President Obama took his health care message to talk radio Thursday, telling listeners of Philadelphia-based host Michael Smerconish that he wants to overhaul the nation’s ailing health care system out of necessity rather than politics.
Somali government forces have seized control of a central town from an al Qaeda-linked Islamist militia, a spokesman for Somalia’s president said Thursday.
Under the menacing threat of violence from the Taliban, Afghans headed to the polls on Thursday in the war-ravaged nation’s second-ever national election. In parts of the capital Kabul, where recent calm was brutally shattered with a series of bloody attacks leading up to election day, the streets were eerily empty early in the day, save extra security checkpoints. The Taliban has vowed to disrupt the voting and the risk factor may have been too high for some Afghans to leave home on election day
Spanish police shortened their list of most-wanted fugitives Wednesday with the capture of two suspected members of the Basque-region separatist group ETA, officials told CNN. Spanish and French police detained Aitzol Etxaburu and Andoni Sarasola in the Alpine ski resort of Le Corbier Villarembert in southeast France, the Spanish Interior Ministry said.
In the seven weeks since the military-backed bloodless coup in Honduras, several hundred people protesting against the de facto government have been arbitrarily arrested and beaten by government forces, a new Amnesty International report says. The report, released Wednesday, said the beatings were meant to punish those who opposed the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya in June. It includes testimony from, and photographs of, several people who were baton-whipped and detained by police officers who sometimes wore no visible identification and hid their faces behind bandanas as they broke up demonstrations.
John Yettaw, the American convicted in Myanmar of illegally entering the country to visit pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, left Thailand Wednesday, authorities and government officials said.