Ex-US missionary jailed for abusing Kenyan orphans

A former US missionary has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for sexually abusing children at an orphanage in Kenya.

Matthew Lane Durham, 21, had committed "heinous crimes on the most vulnerable victims", the US court said. 

Durham targeted orphans while working as a volunteer at the Upendo Children's Home in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, between April and June 2014. 

He is the latest charity worker in Kenya to be convicted of sex crimes. 

The BBC's Abdinoor Aden in Nairobi says that Upendo Children's Home, where Durham was accused of abusing more than 10 children - some as young as four years, has welcomed the sentence by an Oklahoma court.

It has put up a video on YouTube with the headline: "Upendo Children Celebrate Justice!!", showing the orphanage's founder telling her colleagues in Nairobi about the sentencing, which she had attended.

"It is a new beginning for them," Eunice Menja said. 

In court, Ms Menja fought back tears as she read a statement, saying that the sexual abuse carried out by Durham was "not only a betrayal of the Upendo mission but of the trust Upendo placed in him", the Associated Press news agency reports. 

"Matthew Durham defiled the children. Matthew has no remorse. After he got caught, he still denied [the charges],'' she is quoted as saying. 

'Worst nightmare'

Although Durham said he was innocent of the charges, he added that he was sorry that the accusations against him had damaged the orphanage.

"The Upendo kids do not deserve this,'' Durham said, AP reports. 

Judge David Russell said Durham, who appeared in court in a prison-issued orange jumpsuit, was the abused children's "worst nightmare come true", it reported.

The court also ordered the former charity worker, who was arrested in 2014 at the home of his parents in the US after fleeing Kenya, to pay restitution of $15,863 (£11,000).

Last year, UK charity boss Simon Harris was jailed for more than 17 years by a UK court for abusing street children between 1996 and 2013 in the agricultural town of Gilgil in Kenya's Rift Valley.

Last week, British Airways agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to children who were sexually abused by one of its pilots, Simon Wood, in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

The mystery over the @ sign

The @ character is the symbol of the internet age, crucial for emails and social networking. But no-one really knows where it came from, writes Claire Bates. 

The "at sign" was once an obscure symbol known only to book-keepers. That changed thanks to Ray Tomlinson, the man widely regarded as the inventor of the email. 

He plucked it from his keyboard in 1971 to go between the user name and destination address when sending a message between two computers in his office. Tomlinson chose @ because it was then rarely used in computing, so wouldn't confuse early programs or operating systems. In a happy coincidence, the English name of the symbol was already "at". 

"The @ symbol appeared on typewriters before the end of the 19th Century," says Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: Secret Life of Punctuation. "It seemed to be a general symbol that meant to readers 'this is this many items at this price'. It didn't have a use beyond this."

As typewriters had it, so did the first proper keyboards for computers. 

"The @ symbol made it on to keyboards because it was a business tool and had a business use," says Houston. 

Those business users understood it as a symbol to indicate unit price eg 12 batteries @ £1 each.

In 2000, the Italian academic Giorgio Stabile observed that many nations use different words for the @ symbol that describe how it looks. In Turkish it means "rose", while in Norwegian it means "pig's tail". In Greek it is "duckling", while in Hungarian it is "worm".

But Stabile noticed in French, Spanish and Portuguese, it referred to arobase or arroba - a unit of weight and volume. In Italian the name for the symbol was "amphora", referring to long-necked pottery storage jars that had been used since ancient times.

Stabile discovered a letter sent from Seville to Rome in 1536, which discussed the arrival in Spain of three ships sailing from the New World. It stated that an amphora of wine was sold and "amphora" was replaced with the @ symbol as an abbreviation. Stabile concluded the @ symbol was a common medieval shorthand for units of measure in southern Europe, even if the precise units differed.

Spanish journalist Jorge Romance then found an even earlier use. "I read about the 16th Century example of @ and remembered I had seen the symbol before when I was a history student at the University of Zaragoza. I went through my old papers and found customs records between Aragon and Castile in the 15th Century. It meant 'arroba' as a weight measure, and in this instance one arroba of wheat."

But the earliest yet discovered reference to the @ symbol is a religious one. It features in a 1345 Bulgarian translationof a Greek chronicle. Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library, it features the @ symbol in place of the A in the word Amen. Why it was used in this context is a mystery.

It seems fitting then that the first email to be sent with the @ symbol has also been lost to time. When Tomlinson sent the first message to tomlinson@bbn.tenexa, he didn't realise what a game-changer it would be and so didn't bother writing it down.

AC/DC Halts Tour Over 'Total Deafness' Fears

AC/DC have postponed the 10 remaining shows of their US tour after lead singer Brian Johnson was told he risked total deafness if he continues to perform.

In a statement, the band said those rescheduled gigs will likely be with a guest vocalist.

The cancellations have left fans uncertain of whether the long-running group are going to play the European leg of their Rock Or Bust tour, which is due to begin on 7 May in Lisbon.

Johnson had been advised to stop touring immediately by doctors.

He had joined AC/DC in 1980 after the band's former lead singer, Bon Scott, died following a night of heavy drinking.

Concerns over the 68-year-old's hearing are the latest problem to hit the group's ageing members.

In September 2014, one founding member of AC/DC, Malcolm Young, left permanently at the age of 61 after he was diagnosed with dementia.

Last July, the band parted ways with Phil Rudd after he was convicted of threatening to kill an employee, and pleaded guilty to possessing marijuana and methamphetamine.

The drummer was sentenced to eight months of home detention by a judge in New Zealand.

AC/DC Halts Tour Over 'Total Deafness' Fears

AC/DC have postponed the 10 remaining shows of their US tour after lead singer Brian Johnson was told he risked total deafness if he continues to perform.

In a statement, the band said those rescheduled gigs will likely be with a guest vocalist.

The cancellations have left fans uncertain of whether the long-running group are going to play the European leg of their Rock Or Bust tour, which is due to begin on 7 May in Lisbon.

Johnson had been advised to stop touring immediately by doctors.

He had joined AC/DC in 1980 after the band's former lead singer, Bon Scott, died following a night of heavy drinking.

Concerns over the 68-year-old's hearing are the latest problem to hit the group's ageing members.

In September 2014, one founding member of AC/DC, Malcolm Young, left permanently at the age of 61 after he was diagnosed with dementia.

Last July, the band parted ways with Phil Rudd after he was convicted of threatening to kill an employee, and pleaded guilty to possessing marijuana and methamphetamine.

The drummer was sentenced to eight months of home detention by a judge in New Zealand.

British Bergen-Belsen Liberator Dies Aged 95

The first British officer to liberate the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp has died.

Lt Col Leonard Berney passed away on the Caribbean island of St Vincent. The 95-year-old suffered a heart attack on Monday.

His son said he was "a very kind, generous and highly intelligent man; and he lived a full and remarkable life."

'What we were met with was absolute shock and horror'

He spent the past six years sailing the globe living onboard the luxury residential ship, The World.

Leonard Berney went into the Bergen-Belsen camp on 15 April 1945. The images he saw that day haunted him into old age.

In an interview with Sky News last year, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation, Lt Col Berney said he had no idea what he was going to see.

"When we went into the camp, what we were met with was absolute shock and horror," he said. "We had no conception of what we were going to see at all.

"At the very end of the camp there was a big mass grave, about the length of a tennis court I suppose, with hundreds of corpses already in it.

"We'd been fighting battle after battle from Normandy for 10 months up to that time when we got to the camp, and we were used to seeing casualties and people killed, but never, never had we seen anything like this at all."

It is thought as many as 70,000 people died in the camp, many from typhus, after it was liberated.

"The people that were there were mostly emaciated, walking skeletons, in a complete daze," said Col Berney. "They didn't really realise they were being rescued. There were a few in a better condition, some wearing prison clothes, some wearing rags.

"I remember it was a real Dante's Inferno. I will never forget it."

Eyewitness to Hope and Hell in South Sudan

South Sudan keeps grim company. In the world of neglected conflicts it brushes shoulders with the likes of Central African Republic, among the continent’s most unstable nations, and Yemen, where a Saudi-led air campaign against the Houthi rebels has taken a severe toll on civilians. But even then, South Sudan stands out. Its independence in 2011, after southerners overwhelmingly approved splitting from the north, came as a result of American backing. There was a big ceremony, and a lot of hope.

Fast forward to December 2013, when a political dispute in the capital, Juba, between President Salva Kiir and his Vice President Riek Machar led to a countrywide battle that reignited ethnic tensions between two tribes: the Dinka, loyal to Kiir, and the Nuer, loyal to Machar. Civilians have borne the brunt of it, according to human rights organizations, from arbitrary arrests and mass looting to atrocities like rape and targeted killings. Peace deals have been negotiated, signed and broken, with violence spreading to other parts of the country.

A senior U.N. official recently saidat least 50,000 people had been killed, well above previous estimates. Nearly 3 million are severely food-insecure. And more than 2.2 million are internally displaced or have fled the country. The U.N.’s current humanitarian response plan, totaling some $1.3 billion, is only 3% funded.

Photographer Dominic Nahr was in South Sudan late last year, on assignment for Doctors Without Borders. He knows the region well, having moved to East Africa in 2009 after covering the war in Democratic Republic of Congo, and then documenting South Sudan before and after independence. It was his first time back since 2012.

He was there for a month, shuffling between towns like Leer Thonyor, Kok Island and Bentiu in Unity State, and Lankien in Jonglei State. He photographed at hospitals, displacement camps and sites where food or supplements were distributed. In a particularly powerful aerial photograph, Nahr captured thousands of people lining up for long-delayed food that had been dropped by an aid group. “Leer was completely empty before the food drops—nothing, nobody,” he recalls. “As soon as the food drops started, everybody came from all over.”

Working alongside the doctors and nurses had its effects. “There were days that I didn’t even pick up a camera, and I helped out,” Nahr says. “I didn’t want to be some invisible photographer.”

Nahr says he’s questioned the power of photography over the past few years. “Are we just all slapping each other on the back — ‘Good job, man. Good awards.’ Are we reaching the right people?” He wants to inform and influence those who aren’t as tapped into the news. “My belief when I started photography was just make pictures, just document everything and so later we can look back and figure this stuff out. I’m still kind of on that page. A history professor I once had said we cannot figure out our present until years later,” he says. “I used to agree with that statement, but in the past few years I’ve changed my mind: I think we should be able to change things now. I’m getting impatient.”

At a hospital in Lankien, Nahr met a six-year-old boy and his mother after he had been shot in the leg. The next day, before his flight to another area, Nahr photographed the amputation. The boy was quiet but “they trusted me,” he says. “I really struggled to say goodbye.”

But in a seemingly impossible coincidence, at a camp for internally displaced persons on Kok Island, Nahr again saw the boy with a bandaged leg. His mother shouted: “Lankien! Lankien! Lankien!” It had been three weeks since they had first met and somehow, in this movement of millions of people around the region, they had run into each other again. Excited to recognize one another, they each told those around them how they met. The boy was using crutches and “doing great.”

It was a poignant moment for Nahr. In his years covering conflict and its consequences, there were rarely, if ever, follow-ups. “To randomly bump into somebody is huge,” he says. The mother and son were in the camp for a night or two, just passing through, as they made their way home.

On The Run: Britons Wanted In The Netherlands

British and Dutch police have launched a joint operation aimed at tracking down fugitives believed to be on the run in the Netherlands, including some suspected of murder and serious drugs offences.

Operation Return has resulted in more than 100 people being caught by Dutch officers in the last five years and brought back to the UK to face justice.

"The National Crime Agency (NCA) and its partners will pursue fugitives relentlessly," said Dave Allen from the NCA.

"Those who believe they can use the Netherlands to evade capture or continue illegal activities soon find out that it is not a safe haven. Be our extra eyes and ears and let us know if you have any information on the whereabouts of our targets."

Photographs have been released of the suspects sought by police

Among the five new names on the 'most wanted' list is 28-year-old Shane O'Brien from Ladbroke Grove, West London, who is wanted in connection with the stabbing to death of 21-year-old Josh Hanson in a bar in northwest London last October.

"Josh was the perfect son, just a lovely lad who was out enjoying a night out with his girlfriend when he was attacked," said his mother Tracey Hanson.

"The last five months have been hell for us. We need answers and we need justice. I would urge anyone who can help the police to come forward."

Police investigating the murder have described the attack as "motiveless".

Also on the run is 29-year-old Shazad Ghafoor, who is wanted by West Yorkshire Police and Greater Manchester Police for offences including fraud, dangerous driving and a drugs charge.

David Ung, 24, from Liverpool, is also believed to be on the run in the Netherlands. He is wanted on suspicion of murder and conspiracy to supply heroin.

"No matter where you run or how far you run, we will catch you," said Mr Allen.

Some 23 fugitives from British justice were caught by Dutch authorities in 2015.