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African cash scandal hits France Former French President Jacques Chirac (right) and PM Dominique de Villepin have been accused of receiving suitcases stuffed with millions of francs on a regular basis from some African leaders. — AFP
Gaddafi’s son Saadi flees to Niger
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Pro-Gaddafi forces kill 15 at oil refinery
Now, DSK questioned over ‘rape bid’ in Paris
‘Kayani’s man ordered Shahzad’s killing’ Explosion at French N-site kills Over 120 dead in Kenyan pipeline fire Arctic sea ice melting at fastest rate in 40 years
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African cash scandal hits France
Paris, September 12 The money came from several Presidents of France’s former African colonies, and was handed over by himself to the centre-right politicians in stages between 1995 and 2005, Robert Bourgi said in an interview with Europe 1 radio. Insisting he was coming forward now because he wanted a “clean France”, Bourgi said the system of kickbacks had also existed under former presidents Georges Pompidou, Valerie Giscard d’Estaing and Francois Mitterrand. He said he could not estimate how much had been handed over before he became directly involved, but could speak about the deliveries he said he had made to Chirac’s office when he was mayor of Paris and later to Villepin. “I’d estimate at around $20 million what I handed to Chirac and to Dominique de Villepin,” he told Europe 1, fleshing out the detail of claims he had already made in a newspaper interview that appeared on Sunday. The allegations, which were furiously denied by Chirac and Villepin, come just seven months before France’s presidential election, in which President Nicolas Sarkozy could face a Villepin challenge from within the right. Villepin, a suave diplomat best remembered for leading the charge against the Iraq war at the United Nations in 2003, has said the revelations are aimed at derailing his presidential bid. Bourgi, an unofficial long-time pointman between French and African leaders, catalogued what he said were lavish gifts bestowed by African rulers on their counterparts in Paris, including memorabilia to noted Napoleon Bonaparte fan Villepin. “As president (Gabon’s Omar) Bongo and African leaders knew he liked African art and that he admired the emperor,” Villepin “received busts of the emperor, rare items to do with the emperor Napoleon and African masks,” Bourgi told Europe 1. On Sunday, Bourgi detailed other gifts, including a watch with 200 diamonds given to Chirac by Bongo. “A splendid object but difficult to wear in France,” Bourgi said. Bourgi is widely reported to be close to Sarkozy, but insisted in the interview that he was neither an official nor unofficial advisor to the president, simply someone who was sometimes consulted for an opinion. — AFP
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Gaddafi’s son Saadi flees to Niger London, September 12 Saadi crossed over from Libya’s Saharan desert border in a convoy of vehicles and has been intercepted by local troops, Daily Telegraph quoted Niger’s Justice Minister as saying last night. Marou Amadou, the Justice Minister, confirming the crossing over of Saadi said his convoy had reached the northern town of Agadez and was continuing onto the capital Niamey. His flight may prove to be blow to the confidence of troops still remaining loyal to the old regime, who are fighting what appears to be a losing battle in Gaddafi’s strongholds of Bani Walid and Sirte. — PTI
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Now, DSK questioned over ‘rape bid’ in Paris Paris, September 12 Strauss-Kahn, who returned to Paris after New York rape charges against him were dropped, wanted the interview about the alleged assault on Tristane Banon conducted as soon as possible, lawyers Frederique Baulieu and Henri Leclerc said. Strauss-Kahn spent around three hours at the Paris police station, a source close to the inquiry said. Banon came forward with her allegation in June after Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York and accused of attempted rape by a hotel maid there. — AFP
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‘Kayani’s man ordered Shahzad’s killing’ New York, September 12 “The officer made it clear that he was speaking on behalf of Kayani himself,” the extensive report on the journalist's killing, that shocked the media fraternity across the world, said. However, General Athar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani army, called this allegation “preposterous”. The report said the presence of Islamists in the Navy, and at Mehran Naval base, that was attacked by militants, was not a secret among Pakistanis. But Shahzad’s article was particularly “incendiary”. Not only did he report that sailors at the base had helped the attackers; he wrote that the Navy’s leadership was bargaining directly with Al-Qaida, the report said. “Consider the time when Saleem's piece came out. The military felt humiliated. It felt backed into a corner,” the report quoted an unnamed American official as saying who added, “When you're backed into a corner like that, you strike back.” Shahzad was a Pakistani journalist working for a portal ‘Asia Times Online’ when he went missing on May 29, soon after writing a report on the May 22 Mehran naval station terror attack that had destroyed two US made P3C Orion maritime surveillance aircraft and killed 10. — PTI
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Explosion at French N-site kills Paris, September 12 IAEA seeks information
VIENNA: The UN atomic agency is seeking information from France about Monday’s explosion at a nuclear waste treatment site. Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the IAEA’s incident and emergency centre had been activated and it had sent requests for information from French nuclear authorities. “We are working on this issue,” Amano told a news conference on the sidelines of a week-long meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation governing board. — Reuters The Centraco site is located next to another nuclear site, Marcoule, located in Languedoc-Roussillon, in southern France, near the Mediterranean Sea.“According to initial information, the explosion happened in an oven used to melt radioactive metallic waste of little and very little radioactivity,” the agency said in a statement. Officials from France’s EDF power company, whose subsidiary operates Centraco, stressed that there was no nuclear reactor on the site and that no waste treated at the site of the explosion came from a reactor. Spokeswoman Carole Trivi said a fire broke out after the explosion, but it has since been brought under control. The cause of the blast was not immediately known, and an investigation has been opened, Trivi said.
France is more dependent on nuclear energy than any other country in the world, with most of its electricity coming from nuclear reactors. Earlier in June, a minor and fairly common incident that involved internal leakage at EDF's Paluel 3 nuclear reactor was reported by French investigative website Mediapart, knocking 2 per cent off EDF shares briefly. — AP
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Over 120 dead in Kenyan pipeline fire Nairobi, September 12 A police commander earlier said more than 100 persons had been killed in the explosion at Nairobi’s Lunga Lunga industrial area, which is surrounded by the densely packed tin-shack housing of the Sinai slum. “There had been a leak in the fuel pipeline earlier, and people were going to collect the fuel that was coming out,” said Joseph Mwego, a resident. “Then there was a loud bang, a big explosion, and smoke and fire burst up high.” Many residents were caught up in the blaze, which started around 0530 GMT, and an AFP reporter at the scene counted scores of charred bodies around the fire. “People were trying to scoop fuel from the pipeline,” a Red Cross official confirmed by telephone, adding that the organisation had sent a team to the scene. Some of those whose clothing and hair caught fire jumped into a nearby stream to try to extinguish the flames, but many succumbed to their injuries in the water. Police have placed a net across the stream to prevent the bodies from drifting away. — AFP
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Arctic sea ice melting at fastest rate in 40 years London, September 12
According to researchers at the University of Bremen in Germany, the area covered by the Arctic sea ice shrank to 4.24 million sq km on September 8. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27 million sq km recorded on September 16, 2007, The Guardian reported. The historically low measurement is about a half per cent below the previous record and it was undoubtedly because of the human-induced global warming, said Georg Heygster, head of the Physical Analysis of Remote Sensing Images unit at Bremen University's Institute of Environmental Physics. "The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence," Heygster said. "It seems to be clear that this is a consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences. Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming, which, due to the Albedo Effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic," he said. The Albedo Effect is related to a surface's reflecting power. Whiter sea ice reflects more of the sun's heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun's heat and gets warmer. Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale. Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and re-freezes annually, but the speed of change in a generation has shocked scientists. With a decline of about 10 per cent per decade, it is now twice as great as what it was in 1972, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder. Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past half century. If the current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years -- that is up to 40 years earlier than was predicted in the last assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The last time the Arctic was incontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian. The glacier, which covers about six per cent of the icecap, is 300 km long and up to one km high. In August last year, a 260 sq km block of ice calved from the glacier, which disappeared by July this year. "I was gobsmacked. It was like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it full of water," said Hubbard. — PTI
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African leaders gave French former President Jacques Chirac and possible presidential candidate and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin $20 million in cash, including to finance elections, a lawyer with ties to African leaders said today.
Saadi Gaddafi, third son of the deposed Libyan leader, has fled the country into neighbouring Niger, leaving his two other brothers to stick by Muammar Gaddafi in his ‘self-proclaimed battle to death’.
Paris, September 12 
The order to kill Pakistani investigative journalist Saleem Shahzad came from a senior officer on Pakistan army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s staff, The New Yorker magazine said in its latest issue. "In fact, according to the American official, reliable intelligence indicates that the order to kill Shahzad came from a senior officer on General Kayani's staff.
Paris, September 12
At least 120 people burned to death today when a fuel pipeline burst into flames in a slum area in the Kenyan capital, an official said.
“The death toll from bodies counted so far is 120. It is likely to rise because of the bodies in the river,” said Philip Kisia, a Nairobi city council official.
A police commander earlier said more than 100 persons had been killed in the explosion at Nairobi’s Lunga Lunga industrial area, which is surrounded by the densely packed tin-shack housing of the Sinai slum.
Arctic may be ice-free in the summer months in 30 years Scientists blame it on human-induced global warming
African leaders gave French former President Jacques Chirac and possible presidential candidate and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin $20 million in cash, including to finance elections, a lawyer with ties to African leaders said today.
A news report posted on the website of the local Midi Libre newspaper said no quarantine or evacuation measures had been immediately undertaken.Staff at the plant reacted to the accident according to planned procedures, the Nuclear Safety Authority said in a statement.