Bekele wins record sixth cross-country title

EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia won a record sixth title at the world cross-country championships Sunday despite briefly losing a shoe, while Tirunesh Dibaba won the women’s race.

Bekele finished the 7.5-mile race in 34 minutes, 36 seconds, while Leonard Patrick Komon of Kenya was second in 34:41, followed by last year’s champion, Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea, in 34:43.

The 25-year-old Bekele surpassed the mark of five titles he shared with Kenyans John Ngugi and Paul Tergat.

Bekele was leading in muddy conditions when his left shoe came off about seven minutes into the race.

He fell about 25 yards behind the leaders, allowing Tadese to pull ahead, but was able to put his shoe back on and get back into the race.

I was expecting not to win after losing my shoe, Bekele said. But it’s not so tough to get back in the race. If it had been in the last two laps it would have been harder, because I would have been more tired.

Bekele’s compatriot Dibaba won her third world cross-country title.

She finished the five-mile women’s course in 25:10, while fellow Ethiopian Mestawet Tufa was second in 25:15, followed by Linet Chepkwemoi Masai of Kenya in 25:18.

I felt a stitch in the middle of the race and that’s when I fell back, Dibaba said. But it was after I recovered from that that I was able to move to the front.
Bekele wins record sixth cross-country title – found here.

Plane hits residential area in England

LONDON, England (CNN) — UK police have confirmed to CNN that a private aircraft has crashed into a residential area in the town of Farnborough in Kent, south-east of London.

The crash happened at 1437 local time (0937ET), police told CNN. Emergency services are said to be on the scene at Broadwater Gardens, the UK’s Press Association has reported.

Pictures from local media show large plumes of smoke billowing from homes in the area, with houses extensively damaged.

Television pictures show that the scene of the crash is close to woods and open land.

There are no reports yet of casualties on the aircraft or on the ground. The nearby Princess Royal Hospital has been put on major incident standby.

London Fire Brigade has told CNN that at the moment it has six fire engines and an urban search and rescue team at the scene.

It has no word on casualties.

Witnesses, speaking to local media, have spoken of a very loud engine sound and then an explosion just before the crash.

Resident John Crane, one of those on the scene, told Sky News: When I got there there was just as massive red fireball and two or three explosions.

It was so fierce you couldn’t get near it.

His wife Jackie told the station that she saw the plane coming in erratically over the area, with its tail lower than its nose.

Sky News also reported that a man known only as John, who was flying at the same time, said he heard a distress call from a Cessna to the control tower at nearby Biggin Hill airfield that indicated the pilot was having severe engine vibrations. E-mail to a friend

Plane hits residential area in England – found here.

‘Open Skies’ heralds new era in air travel

LONDON, England (CNN) — The first plane has landed under the Open Skies agreement between the United States and Europe, heralding what many hope will be a new era in air travel.

The Continental Airways flight from Newark to Heathrow touched down under rainy London skies at dawn on Sunday morning.

Jeff Smisek, president of Continental, was onboard the flight. He told CNN that Heathrow landing rights had cost the airline $200 million — but that it had been money well invested.

The business traveler wants to come to Heathrow, Smisek told CNN’s Richard Quest, who was also on the flight. We have been locked out of Heathrow for decades and it is the most important business market in the world. We are delighted to be here.

Quest said other airlines were already landing at Heathrow, including a US Airways flight from Philadelphia and Northwest Airlines from Minneapolis.

The new deal means that passengers on both sides of the Atlantic will now have more options when it comes to nonstop flights.

Under the old agreement, governments on both sides of the Atlantic had to negotiate access for airlines to airports on a city-by-city basis. It also meant that a European carrier could not fly to the United States direct from another European nation.

Under the new deal, however, Air France can fly direct to Los Angeles from Heathrow, rather than rerouting via Paris, while British Airways can fly direct to New York from Paris.

National boundaries will no longer determined where planes can fly, Quest said before today’s flight.

Daniel Calleja, Director of the Air Transport Directorate of the European Commission said before the flight that you are going to have more possibilities in terms of choice, in terms of reduction in the price of tickets.

But some experts caution that more airlines crossing the Atlantic does not necessarily mean cheaper tickets, thanks to the high cost of oil as well as the expense of securing landing slots. Pricing on transatlantic economy flights is also seen as comparatively cheap compared to say flights within Europe.

Kevin Done, aerospace correspondent at the Financial Times, added: The idea that prices are going to be drastically reduced is well over done.

Deloitte UK aviation industry expert Graham Pickett told the UK’s Press Association: The Open Skies agreement could lead to greater competition between airlines for flights from Heathrow.

However, airlines keen to rival the incumbent players may find it difficult to secure slots … and alliances between carriers are seen as the best way to open up routes from Heathrow to the USA.

Further negotiations on Open Skies are due to be held by 2010, when it is expected the Europeans will want the right to fly within the United States itself, as well as be allowed to buy US airlines.

Elsewhere at Heathrow, the UK’s transport minister has said that the government is willing to help sort out the chaos caused by the new state-of-the-art $8.6 billion Terminal 5 that has left flights cancelled and delayed and passengers without their luggage, agencies report.

Ruth Kelly, the transport secretary, said in a statement that Everything possible must be done to deliver a better service for passengers who are unfortunately still facing disruption and delays to their journeys, in comments reported by The Associated Press.

The agency added that extra staff had been brought in Sunday by British Airways, the sole occupant of T5, to help deal with an estimated 15,000 bags that had yet to be reunited with their owners. It also reported Sunday the cancellation of 37 domestic and European flights, bringing the total since the terminal opened Thursday to 245.
‘Open Skies’ heralds new era in air travel – found here.

Opposition cries foul as Zimbabwe votes

(CNN) — Zimbabwe’s capital of Harare was quiet Saturday night after polls began closing for elections that will decide the future of longtime President Robert Mugabe.

Results were not expected until Sunday.

The main opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, alleged widespread irregularities and promised to release its own election results, defying a government order.

Critics of the government have predicted that the elections will be rigged or marred by fraud, though the government has promised that they will be free and fair.

At a news conference in Harare, Movement for Democratic Change Secretary-General Tenda Biti said that some of the party’s agents have been chased away from polling stations.

The party also said the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission claimed to have lost the accreditation for agents at 19 stations and refused to let them in.

Biti said there was a massive deployment of soldiers and police at most stations. Journalists inside the country reported a heavy presence of the army and police but disagreed with Biti’s description of it as massive.

Police said they were investigating the bombing of a house in Harare belonging to a parliamentarian candidate from Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party.

The bombing happened early Saturday, and it was not immediately clear whether it was connected to the elections, police said. No one was inside the home at the time.

The Zimbabwean government has denied CNN and other international news organizations permission to enter the country to report on the elections. Read about reporting on the elections.

The elections are posing one of the toughest challenges to Mugabe’s 28-year rule. Two candidates, both from different factions of the opposition party, stand a good chance of unseating him.

One opposition contender is Movement for Democratic Change founder Morgan Tsvangirai, who fought hotly contested challenges against the president in 2000, 2002 and 2005.

The other is Mugabe’s former finance minister, Simba Makoni. He was a member of the Zanu-PF party until he announced his bid to unseat Mugabe and the party kicked him out.

Voter turnout was high after the polls opened at 7 a.m. (1 a.m. ET), journalists reported, but it tapered off throughout the day.

Shortly before polls closed at 7 p.m. (1 p.m. ET), there was a rush of people to put in their last-minute votes in some places, media rights activist Reyhana Masters said.

Biti also said police were assisting many voters in casting ballots. The opposition has spoken out against assistance in the voting booth, calling it an intimidation tactic, but Mugabe passed a presidential decree this week that said police could help those voters who are elderly or infirm.

The government has warned the opposition not to release its own election results, saying that doing so is the role of the electoral commission and could spark violence of the kind seen in Kenya after elections there late last year.

Some Zimbabweans reported irregularities in Saturday’s voting.

Eddie Matsangaise of the Zimbabwe Exile Forum said he had heard that the names of long-dead white colonialist leaders were on voter lists, but voters who thought they were registered were turned away.

Iden Wetherell, editor of the newspaper Zimbabwe Independent, said the opposition had found large numbers of voters registered at one address where there isn’t a building.

Voter confusion was also a problem. The elections are not just for president but also for parliamentary, senate and local council seats, meaning voters have to cast a number of ballots in a limited amount of time.

Limited voter education means many registered voters were not told which ward to go to and may turn up at the wrong polling stations. Watch claims of dead voters still on the rolls

The absence of international media and independent observers has heightened critics’ concerns. The United States this week warned of a possible unfair election, and New York-based Human Rights Watch warned this month that the elections were likely to be deeply flawed.

Human Rights Watch said in a report that Zimbabwe’s electoral commission is partisan toward Zanu-PF and lacks both expertise and resources to run the elections properly.

An MDC official said this week that leaked correspondence from the electoral commission showed it had asked for 3.3 million more ballots than there are registered voters, including 250,000 extra postal ballots for soldiers and police.

Tenda Biti, the opposition’s secretary-general, said it was an indication of fraud.

A hero of the country’s civil war against the white Rhodesian government, Mugabe became the country’s first black prime minister in 1980. But nearly three decades later, he has consolidated his rule over all aspects of Zimbabwean life, and the country does not appear better for it.

His country was once revered for offering its citizens some of the best education and health care in Africa, but now, schooling is a luxury and Zimbabwe has one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.

Zimbabwe was once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa, but now it is difficult to get even basic food supplies. Inflation has skyrocketed to more than 100,000 percent while food production and agricultural exports have dropped drastically. Watch reasons for meltdown of Zimbabwe’s economy

Part of the economic freefall is traced to Mugabe’s land redistribution policies, including his controversial seizure of commercially white-owned farms in 2000. Mugabe gave the land to black Zimbabweans who he said were cheated under colonialist rule, and white farmers who resisted were jailed.

In 2005, Mugabe launched Operation Clean Out the Trash, in which he razed slum areas across the country.

Mugabe denies mismanagement and blames his country’s woes on the West, saying that sanctions have harmed the economy.
Opposition cries foul as Zimbabwe votes – found here.

Cheetahs attack woman at cat sanctuary

WELLINGTON, Florida (AP) — Authorities say the owner of a Florida wildlife sanctuary has been hospitalized after she was attacked by two cheetahs.

The Palm Beach County sheriff’s office says Judy Berens has about 40 puncture wounds to her extremities and back.

She was airlifted to Delray Medical Center, but it appears that her injuries are not life-threatening.

Berens owns and operates Panther Ridge Conservation Center, which provides homes for exotic cats.

She was conducting an exhibition with two male cheetahs in a cage when one became distracted by a ball being bounced outside. The cheetah moved toward the ball quickly and knocked her to the ground.

The cheetah then pounced on her and began biting and clawing her, said Gabriella Ferraro, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokeswoman. At some point, the other cheetah attacked her as well, Ferraro said.

Several people entered the enclosure and rescued her, authorities said.

Ferraro said the cheetahs remain on the property in cages.

Wildlife officers are investigating the attack, but so far it appears that there no violations and that no laws were broken, Ferraro said. E-mail to a friend

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Cheetahs attack woman at cat sanctuary – found here.

Opposition cries foul as Zimbabwe votes

(CNN) — Zimbabwe’s capital of Harare was quiet Saturday night after polls began closing for elections that will decide the future of longtime President Robert Mugabe.

Results were not expected until Sunday.

The main opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, alleged widespread irregularities and promised to release its own election results, defying a government order.

Critics of the government have predicted that the elections will be rigged or marred by fraud, though the government has promised that they will be free and fair.

At a news conference in Harare, Movement for Democratic Change Secretary-General Tenda Biti said that some of the party’s agents have been chased away from polling stations.

The party also said the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission claimed to have lost the accreditation for agents at 19 stations and refused to let them in.

Biti said there was a massive deployment of soldiers and police at most stations. Journalists inside the country reported a heavy presence of the army and police but disagreed with Biti’s description of it as massive.

Police said they were investigating the bombing of a house in Harare belonging to a parliamentarian candidate from Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party.

The bombing happened early Saturday, and it was not immediately clear whether it was connected to the elections, police said. No one was inside the home at the time.

The Zimbabwean government has denied CNN and other international news organizations permission to enter the country to report on the elections. Read about reporting on the elections.

The elections are posing one of the toughest challenges to Mugabe’s 28-year rule. Two candidates, both from different factions of the opposition party, stand a good chance of unseating him.

One opposition contender is Movement for Democratic Change founder Morgan Tsvangirai, who fought hotly contested challenges against the president in 2000, 2002 and 2005.

The other is Mugabe’s former finance minister, Simba Makoni. He was a member of the Zanu-PF party until he announced his bid to unseat Mugabe and the party kicked him out.

Voter turnout was high after the polls opened at 7 a.m. (1 a.m. ET), journalists reported, but it tapered off throughout the day.

Shortly before polls closed at 7 p.m. (1 p.m. ET), there was a rush of people to put in their last-minute votes in some places, media rights activist Reyhana Masters said.

Biti also said police were assisting many voters in casting ballots. The opposition has spoken out against assistance in the voting booth, calling it an intimidation tactic, but Mugabe passed a presidential decree this week that said police could help those voters who are elderly or infirm.

The government has warned the opposition not to release its own election results, saying that doing so is the role of the electoral commission and could spark violence of the kind seen in Kenya after elections there late last year.

Some Zimbabweans reported irregularities in Saturday’s voting.

Eddie Matsangaise of the Zimbabwe Exile Forum said he had heard that the names of long-dead white colonialist leaders were on voter lists, but voters who thought they were registered were turned away.

Iden Wetherell, editor of the newspaper Zimbabwe Independent, said the opposition had found large numbers of voters registered at one address where there isn’t a building.

Voter confusion was also a problem. The elections are not just for president but also for parliamentary, senate and local council seats, meaning voters have to cast a number of ballots in a limited amount of time.

Limited voter education means many registered voters were not told which ward to go to and may turn up at the wrong polling stations. Watch claims of dead voters still on the rolls

The absence of international media and independent observers has heightened critics’ concerns. The United States this week warned of a possible unfair election, and New York-based Human Rights Watch warned this month that the elections were likely to be deeply flawed.

Human Rights Watch said in a report that Zimbabwe’s electoral commission is partisan toward Zanu-PF and lacks both expertise and resources to run the elections properly.

An MDC official said this week that leaked correspondence from the electoral commission showed it had asked for 3.3 million more ballots than there are registered voters, including 250,000 extra postal ballots for soldiers and police.

Tenda Biti, the opposition’s secretary-general, said it was an indication of fraud.

A hero of the country’s civil war against the white Rhodesian government, Mugabe became the country’s first black prime minister in 1980. But nearly three decades later, he has consolidated his rule over all aspects of Zimbabwean life, and the country does not appear better for it.

His country was once revered for offering its citizens some of the best education and health care in Africa, but now, schooling is a luxury and Zimbabwe has one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.

Zimbabwe was once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa, but now it is difficult to get even basic food supplies. Inflation has skyrocketed to more than 100,000 percent while food production and agricultural exports have dropped drastically. Watch reasons for meltdown of Zimbabwe’s economy

Part of the economic freefall is traced to Mugabe’s land redistribution policies, including his controversial seizure of commercially white-owned farms in 2000. Mugabe gave the land to black Zimbabweans who he said were cheated under colonialist rule, and white farmers who resisted were jailed.

In 2005, Mugabe launched Operation Clean Out the Trash, in which he razed slum areas across the country.

Mugabe denies mismanagement and blames his country’s woes on the West, saying that sanctions have harmed the economy.
Opposition cries foul as Zimbabwe votes – found here.

Iraq fighting death toll nears 300

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — A strict curfew was extended indefinitely in the Iraqi capital Sunday as the death toll mounted from clashes between government troops and Shiite Muslim militants.

Fighting sparked by a government-led push against outlaw militias in the southern city of Basra had left more than 280 people dead by Saturday, according to Iraqi authorities.

The unrest has stretched across southern Iraq’s Shiite heartland up to Baghdad, where a ban on pedestrian and vehicle traffic was kept in place just hours before it was due to expire Sunday morning.

U.S. warplanes and British artillery struck targets in Basra on Saturday, a British spokesman said.

Another Basra airstrike killed 16 criminal fighters, and a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol killed 13 more fighters in southeastern Baghdad’s Suwayrah district, U.S. commanders reported.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki compared the outlaws to al Qaeda and vowed not to leave Basra, where he is personally leading the operation, until security is restored.

We will continue to stand up to these gangs in every inch of Iraq, he said.

It is unfortunate that we used to use say these very words about al Qaeda, when all the while, there were people among us who are worse than al Qaeda. Watch al-Maliki lash out

Al-Maliki has given the militants until April 8 surrender their arms to a guns-for-cash program that was scheduled to end at midnight Friday.

Supporters of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia has borne the brunt of the fighting, say they have been unfairly singled out by the crackdown.

Al-Sadr has told followers not to surrender their weapons except to a state that can throw out the occupation, a top aide, Salah al-Obaidi, said Saturday.

The violence has sparked fears that a seven-month cease-fire by the Mehdi Army — regarded as a key factor in a dramatic drop in attacks in recent months — could collapse or that the U.S. military will have to bail out the Iraqis.

Al-Sadr’s political party holds 30 seats in Iraq’s parliament and once held seats in al-Maliki’s cabinet, quitting last year after the prime minister refused to set a deadline for U.S. and coalition troops to leave.

Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and its chief oil port, has been plagued by turf wars among al-Sadr’s followers, the smaller Fadhila party and the country’s largest Shiite party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the major partner in al-Maliki’s ruling coalition.

The prime minister met Saturday in Basra with the area’s leaders, who have expressed support for the government’s efforts to impose law and save Basra from criminal gangs, according to a written statement from the prime minister’s office.

Security forces went to Basra to fight murder and smuggling gangs and outlaws, the prime minister said, and hadn’t intended to fight certain groups — apparently referring to the Mehdi Army.

Al-Sadr’s militia launched two uprisings against U.S. troops in 2004. But in August, after a series of clashes between Mehdi Army fighters and security forces linked to the Islamic Supreme Council’s Badr Brigades, he ordered his militia to suspend operations.

In an interview that aired Saturday on the Arabic-language news network Al-Jazeera, recorded before the current fighting broke out, al-Sadr compared al-Maliki to executed former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Under Saddam’s rule, we complained about how the government distanced itself from the people and operated under dictatorial terms. Now, the government is also dealing with people on such terms, al-Sadr said.

This week, President Bush called the current clashes a defining moment for Iraq and a key test for the country’s government.

But several U.S. officials said Friday that the Iraqi military push is not going as well as American officials had hoped. A U.S. military intelligence analysis found that Iraqi security forces control less than a quarter of Basra, officials in both the United States and Iraq said.

This is going to go on for a while, one U.S. military official said.

American troops have been supporting Iraqi forces with intelligence, surveillance and occasional airstrikes and raids in Baghdad, according to the U.S. military.

U.S. trainers have also accompanied Iraqi units into combat, as in Saturday’s firefight in Suwayrah.

The U.S. military dropped two bombs Saturday afternoon at a suspected Shiite militia stronghold in the Basra area, said Maj. Tom Holloway, a British military spokesman.

The strikes were followed by shelling from the British garrison at the city’s airport, aimed at mortar positions manned by militia fighters, he said.

Both attacks were in response to requests by Iraqi forces for air support, Holloway said. He added that coalition forces were investigating reports of civilian casualties but had no details.

Meanwhile, at least 40 members of Iraq’s national police turned in their uniforms and joined forces with al-Sadr’s militia in Baghdad, al-Obaidi said. They took their U.S.-supplied weapons with them, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.

Mortar and rocket attacks were directed Saturday at Baghdad’s fortified International Zone, also known as the Green Zone, where Iraqi government buildings and embassies are located. No injuries were reported, a U.S. Embassy spokesman said. Watch the mayhem in Baghdad

Other developments

Two U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday by a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad, and one was killed the same way Friday south of the city, the military said. The U.S. military death toll in Iraq now stands at 4,007.

Turkey’s military said it killed at least 15 rebels in operations in northern Iraq this week, but a spokesman for the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Security Forces denied the report, saying Turkey has not conducted any military operation or air assault there in the past two weeks.
Iraq fighting death toll nears 300 – found here.