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Thursday, March 10, 2016

Two People Killed In Police-Chase Crash

Two people have been killed in a car crash following a police chase in Leicester.
A Peugeot car collided with a Ford Transit van just before midnight on the corner of Fosse Road South and Upperton Road, Leicestershire Police said.
An unmarked police car had been following the Peugeot prior to the collision, the force confirmed.
Two passengers in the car were pronounced dead at the scene, while the driver was seriously injured and remains in hospital.
The two people in the van also sustained minor injuries.
A shop was also damaged in the incident.
Upperton Road remains closed at the junction with Fosse Road South and motorists have been advised to avoid the area.
The incident has been referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
:: Anyone who may have witnessed the crash or the events leading up to it have been asked to contact the police on 101,quoting incident 782 of 9 March.

Who Are The Britons In The Islamic State Files?

Britons are among tens of thousands of names on Islamic State registration forms that have been obtained by Sky News.
:: Abdel Bary
The 26-year-old man from London joined Islamic State in 2013 after visiting Libya, Egypt and Turkey.
He is designated as a fighter but is better known in the UK as a rap artist. His whereabouts are unknown.
He was once thought to have been the masked militant Jihadi John who appeared in a number of videos of foreign hostages being killed.
But Jihadi John was later revealed to be Mohamed Emwazi.
According to reports last July, Bary left IS and went on the run in Turkey.
It was unclear why he had apparently has fallen out with IS.
But he was reportedly among a number of disillusioned Westerners to have quit the jihadist group following coalition airstrikes.
Bary was reported to have disguised himself as a refugee and escaped as IS fled Tal Abyad near the Turkey-Syria border last June.
IS Islamic State fighter on allied 'Kill List'
:: Reyaad Khan
The 21-year-old from Cardiff was killed in an RAF drone strike on 21 August, 2015.
He was said to be part of a jihadi internet warfare cell and presented a "clear and present danger" as he was the target of the strike.
He is believed to have travelled to Syria in late 2013.
Khan appeared in an IS video in June 2014, wearing a headscarf and armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, and called for Westerners to fight in Iraq and Syria.
IS Islamic State fighter on allied 'Kill List'
:: Junaid Hussain
Hussain was killed by a US drone strike on 24 August, 2015, near Raqqa, the "Caliphate's" capital in Syria.
The 21-year-old hacker-turned-jihadist from Birmingham ran the IS information and recruitment arm from Syria.
He was identified by the US Secret Service as a top-five target for elimination by drone strike.
Hussain and Khan were thought to have been actively involved in orchestrating a number of plots to attack high-profile public commemorations.
One of the planned attacks, uncovered by a Sky News investigation, was aimed at August’s VJ Day celebrations in London.
IS Islamic State fighter on allied 'Kill List'IS Islamic State fighter on allied 'Kill List'
Hussain's widow is 46-year-old Sally Jones from Birmingham.
A former punk from Chatham, Kent, she travelled to Syria with her husband and has been actively dealing with female IS-supporting jihadists.
She uses her Twitter account to recruit women to the terrorist organisation and has provided practical advice on how to travel to Syria.

India’s ‘King of Good Times’ Has Left the Country While Owing Over $1 Billion

Indian liquor tycoon and onetime aviation magnate Vijay Mallya — popularly known in India as the “King of Good Times” — has left the country, the government said Wednesday, with debts of over $1 billion in relation to his now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines.

A group of 17 banks that asked India’s Supreme Court to stop him from leaving was told Thursday that the 60-year-old billionaire had departed on Mar. 2, Indian broadcaster NDTV reports.

They were also told that Mallya had received more than half of a $75 million settlement from British firm Diageo, which acquired his company United Spirits Ltd. in 2014. The banks argue that the money should have gone to them first to cover loans used to finance Kingfisher Airlines, named after the globally popular Indian beer Mallya’s company makes. The loans reportedly continued even after the airline went bust in 2012.

The high-profile businessman, who owns a franchise in India’s glitzy domestic cricket league as well as Formula 1 team Force India, is famous as much for his lavish lifestyle as he is for his massive fortunes. Forbes magazine reports that he threw a massive 60th birthday party in December at his mansion in the coastal town of Goa — featuring, among other things, a performance by Latin pop star Enrique Iglesias. It took place even as the banks were calling for his arrest.

Mallya, whose current location is not known, although he is believed to be in London, released a statement on Sunday denying that he is in hiding.

“I have been most pained as being painted as an absconder,” he said, adding that he is working on a settlement with the banks. “I have neither the intention nor any reason to abscond.”

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

The Billionaire Who Founded Ikea Is So Frugal He Only Wears Second-Hand Clothes

Extreme frugality is the secret to untold wealth, if the habits of billionaire Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad are anything to go by.

The mogul is so thrifty, he stocks his wardrobe with second-hand clothes. “I don’t think I’m wearing anything that wasn’t bought at a flea market,” Kamprad says in an upcoming documentary for Swedish television, according to Agence France-Presse.

He also prefers cheap haircuts, explaining in a 2008 interview with Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan:“Normally, I try to get my haircut when I’m in a developing country. Last time it was in Vietnam.”

Kamprad, who turns 90 on March 30, said penny-pinching helped Ikea’s success. It probably also helped him amass a fortune worth more than $40 billion, according to a Bloomberg estimate.


Google Self-Driving Car Colliding With a Bus

On Valentine’s Day, a Google self-driving car collided with a public bus in Google’s hometown of Mountain View, Calif. Now there’s video footage.
The short video clip was obtained by the Associated Press and shows the Google car moving into the lane where the bus already was. The incident was the first time a Google car has been responsible for a collision, according to The Verge
The Google car had a test driver, but the driver assumed that the bus would yield to the car as it tried to merge into traffic. The collision damaged the car’s left front wheel, left fender and a driver-side sensor, but no injuries were reported.
“This is a classic example of the negotiation that’s a normal part of driving—we’re all trying to predict each other’s movements,” Google said in its monthly report on incidents with its self-driving cars. “In this case, we clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved there wouldn’t have been a collision.”
Google cars have been involved in a handful of other collisions, but Google has always previously claimed the autonomous vehicles weren’t responsible for the accidents.

Portrait of an Afghan drone victim

The food stand was completely destroyed. So, too, was the body of its owner, 21-year-old Sadiq Rahim Jan.
"My brother was torn to pieces. Almost nothing was left of him," says Islam Rahim Jan.

It was July 2012 and his death plunged his family into despair and poverty.

Sadiq was the family's main breadwinner. His income as the owner of the only food stand in the village of Gardda Zarrai, in the eastern Afghan province of Paktia, provided for his parents and four siblings.

Nobody knows why he was targeted in a drone strike. But since 2001, US drone attacks have become a near regular feature of life - and cause of death - in Afghanistan, particularly in the country's south and east.
According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Afghanistan is the "most drone-bombed country in the world". Between 2001 and 2013, at least 1,670 drone strikes took place in the country.
But accurate data about the impact of those strikes, particularly casualty figures, does not exist. There are a number of reasons for this.

On the one hand, the media seems to largely ignore drone warfare and its victims. On the other, there is little political will for transparency, be it in Washington or Kabul. In 2013, a United Nations report on drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen pointed out that the "
clandestine nature of US drone strikes hinders evaluation of their impact on civilians".
So the names and stories of many of the victims remain unknown to all but their families.

Compounding this invisibility is the fact that the limited media coverage is often inaccurate.
When Sadiq was killed, several national media outlets reported that a "Taliban commander" had been killed by a drone strike in Gardda Zarrai.
"It's really hard to pin down in these sorts of cases whether this is deliberate misinformation by someone with a malicious motive, or if it's an honest mistake," says Jack Serle of the bureau, who has spent years studying drone strikes.
"In my experience, police and army officials and provincial government officials are generally the main journalistic sources for this kind of information. But it is not often clear where they get their information [from]," says Serle. "In the past, these kinds of people have told me they get intelligence from the NDS, the Afghan intelligence service, who gets it from the US. But that's not always going to be the case."
Sadiq's family say they were outraged when Radio Azadi, an Afghan branch of the US government's external broadcast services, and other national news platforms connected their son to a group with which they say he had no affiliation. In fact, they say, Sadiq had never been involved with any armed group.
But in the days and weeks after Sadiq was killed, they say, not a single journalist visited their village to collect facts or talk to the people who knew him.

The family turned to the local police and army. But, although they expressed their regret over Sadiq's death, they told his family not to take any further action.

"In fact, they just want to silence my family because such war crimes show the Afghan government and the United States in a bad light," says Farhad Khan, Sadiq's cousin who lives in Germany and now tries to provide financial support to the family.
Until today, Sadiq's family have not received any explanation as to why their son was killed or why he was subsequently classified as a member of the Taliban.
"He welcomed me like a brother [when I would visit Afghanistan]," Farhad remembers, adding that they became best friends.

"The whole village, from young to old, respected and loved Sadiq. He was a charming and charismatic person who believed in peace, love and freedom," Farhad says.

"For that reason, it feels so wrong for all these people that he is just remembered as a terrorist by the rest of the world."

Photographing the victims

It was cases like Sadiq's - the nameless, faceless drone victims described as members of the Taliban with no supporting evidence - that made Noor Behram, a photojournalist from North Waziristan, the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, set out to explore the scenes of drone strikes.
"I started with my investigation in 2007, when it was reported that an aerial attack killed al-Qaeda-linked militants," Behram says. "But I found torn women's clothing, which was evidence that civilians were killed too."
From that time on, he has visited the site of drone strikes as soon after an attack as possible. Travelling on a motorbike, he photographs the scene and victims and speaks to witnesses.

He noticed that all that seemed to be required for the Pakistani and international media to describe a male victim as a member of the Taliban was that he had long hair and a beard - a common look among many Pashtun men on either side of the border.
"After conversations with editors and journalists, I understood that if a drone strike killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a fruit seller or food vendor, the victim's long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant."

Sadiq had long hair and a beard. But even that isn't always a requirement.
A four-year-old victim
In April 2013, Naqibullah took his son, four-year-old Amir, to the city of Asadabad, in the eastern province of Kunar, for medical treatment. Naqibullah told his brother, 25-year-old Abdul Wahid, to take his son back to their village while he stayed in the city.

When he telephoned home to find out if they had returned safely, he was told they had not.

"Locals told me that my brother and my son had been killed by a drone strike," Naqibullah remembers.

"I couldn't bear the news. I lost all sense in this moment," he says. "Suddenly, all the pictures of my son and my brother came to my mind while my tears could not stop."
According to Naqibullah, government officials insisted that his son and brother were Taliban fighters. They said the onus was on him to prove otherwise.

Today, Naqibullah cares for Abdul Wahid's children. He says one of them, Hilal, is always asking about this father.
Unreported

According to a recent report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), more than 11,000 civilians were killed or wounded in the country in 2015
While armed groups and the Afghan military are thought to have been responsible for 98 percent of these incidences, 2 percent of civilian casualties were attributed to international forces, mainly in the form of air strikes. 
However, the report points out that civilian casualties caused by international military forces and the Afghan air force increased by 83 percent in 2015, causing 296 civilian casualties, of which 149 were deaths. Fifty-seven percent of those were caused by international forces.
According to UNAMA, the main reason for the increase was the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz on October 3.
The US government data does not distinguish between classic aerial attacks and drone strikes. For that reason, it isn't clear how many drone strikes really took place in Afghanistan.
But with three different sources required to confirm a single casualty, the families of many of those killed say their relatives have not even made it into that count.

"You will not find my cousin and other victims like him in these reports," says Sadiq's cousin, Farhad.

Critics of the UN report say that without journalists or human rights activists present in the country's most war-torn areas, killings often go unreported and unsubstantiated, never making it into formal records.
"Most war-torn areas of Afghanistan, especially where drone strikes take place regularly, are not visited by journalists or activists. They are considered as too dangerous, as dead zones," says Waheed Mozhdah, a political analyst based in Kabul.

Besides, records of civilian casualties only begin from 2009, eight years after the war started.
In fact, the very first recorded incident of a strike by a weaponised drone took place on October 7, 2001, when US forces targeted the late Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar in Kandahar. 

Omar was not killed on that day - but many ordinary civilians, just like Sadiq, have been in the years since.

Floods Cause Travel Chaos In Central England

Torrential rain and flooding have brought travel chaos to central England and caused a standoff between police and rail passengers in London.

Some motorists needed rescuing from cars submerged in floodwater in the Midlands.