society

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Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said there had been a "failure to disclose to the Australian people the qualified nature of the intelligence - for example, the pre-war warning that an attack on Iraq would increase the terrorist threat, not decrease it".

Mr Rudd, a former diplomat, also dismissed his prede- cessor's argument that Australia had been obliged to send troops to Iraq because of its long-standing alliance with the United States.

He said while he valued the alliance highly, it did not mean that Canberra should automatically accede to US requests for military support.

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Photos courtesy of AP and defenselink.mil/HomePagePhotos/

Original Source: Telegraph

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A parachute dropped by a small aircraft is observed by the U.S. Navy as it drops over the MV Sirius Star during an apparent payment via a parachuted container to pirates holding the Sirius Star off the coast of Somalia, January 9, 2009. Somali pirates then freed the Saudi supertanker seized in the world's biggest ship hijacking for a $3 million ransom - but five drowned when their boat capsized as they were making off with their share.

The crew of the hijacked Ukrainian merchant vessel MV Faina stand on the deck, under the watch of armed Somali pirates on November 9 after a US Navy request to check on their health and welfare, at sea off the coast of Somalia.

In this photo provided by the U.S. Navy, ransom money is dropped near the Ukrainian cargo ship MV Faina while under observation by a U.S. Navy ship February 4, 2009 off the coast of Somalia near Hobyo. Pirates did not leave the ship until February 5.  read more »

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(Above) Steve looks out over tent city as storm clouds gather above the makeshift community. The Great Depression had Hoovervilles. The energy crisis of the 1970s had snaking gas lines. But today’s deep recession is largely about disappearing wealth -- painful, yes, but difficult to see.

A tattered encampment of 200 men and women along the American River is a vivid symbol of a financial crisis otherwise invisible to most Americans. Officials say they will shut it down within a month.

Reporting from Sacramento -- The capital's tent city sprawls messily on a grassed-over landfill beneath power lines, home to some 200 men and women with nowhere else to go. It has been here for more than a year, but in the last three weeks it has transformed into a vivid symbol of a financial crisis otherwise invisible to most Americans.

Then this tattered encampment along the American River began showing up on Oprah Winfrey, Al Jazeera and other news outlets around the world. On Thursday, city officials announced that they will shut it down within a month. "We're finding other places to go," said Steven Maviglio, a spokesman for Sacramento's mayor. The camp is "not safe. It's not humane. But we're not going in with a bulldozer."  read more »

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Pope Benedict XVI has made an unusual public acknowledgment of Vatican mistakes and turmoil in his church over an outreach to ultraconservatives that led to his lifting the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop. In an attempt to end one of the most serious crises of his papacy, he said in a letter released Thursday that the Vatican must make greater use of the Internet to prevent other controversies.

The Vatican took the rare step of releasing the German-born pope's personal account of the incident addressed to Catholic bishops around the world. Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the letter — released in six languages — was "really unusual and deserving of maximum attention."  read more »

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Picture of three-year-old Morgan Riddick saying goodbye to his father who was being deployed during a ceremony of the 772nd Military Police Company, Massachusetts National Guard on Taunton Green. Taken by John Tlumacki, this photo was the Overall Winner in the annual Boston Press Photographers Association competition, and also won 1st Place in General News.

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Photos courtesy of John Tlumacki/Globe Staff

Original Source: Boston Globe

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While youths in Athens protest by throwing Molotov cocktails, in Paris by toppling barricades, and in Budapest by hurling eggs at politicians, protesters in Berlin rage at their economic plight by targeting the most expensive cars -- symbols of German wealth and power. At least 29 vehicles were destroyed in arson attacks this year, most of them luxury cars, according to police. The number is already about 30 percent of the total for 2008. The latest to go up in flames was a Porsche, on Feb. 14, two days after a Mercedes was set alight in a public car park.

A group calling itself BMW -- the initials stand for Movement for Militant Resistance in German -- has claimed responsibility for several attacks in left-wing magazines and Web sites, police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said. One-third of the incidents are classed as “political,” prompting officers to assign a special unit to investigate, Schodrowski said. No arrests have been made. Schodrowski attributed the arson to “a protest against the world economy and rising rents.”

German unemployment began to rise last November after almost three years of declines. Deutsche Bank AG Chief Economist Norbert Walter predicts the German economy, Europe’s biggest, may shrink by more than 5 percent this year. The worst recession since World War II is fueling anger among youths across Europe who “perceive their future as rather precarious,” said Margit Mayer, a politics professor at Berlin’s Free University.

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(Above) Two boys from a community commonly known as sea gypsies paddle their boat close to their home.

The Samah are an indigenous ethnic group from Malaysia and the Philippines who live a sea-based lifestyle in the Sulawesi Sea off Malaysia's state of Sabah.

The Sabah are one of a number of groups collectively known as Bajau, or sea gypsies.

Although sea gypsies are Muslims, they also revere the gods of the sea and make offerings when a large catch is brought in.

Originally the sea gypsies lived a nomadic lifestyle in boats. Nowadays most live in small communities, building houses on stilts in the coastal shallows without fresh water or electricity.

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