Giglio, July 14
The wreck of the luxury liner Costa Concordia was refloated on Monday ready to be towed away for scrap, two-and-a-half years after it capsized off the Italian coast, killing 32 persons.

The rusty hulk of the once-gleaming-white 290-metre ship, which ran aground on rocks near the Tuscan holiday island of Giglio while carrying out a display manoeuvre, had been resting on a temporary platform since being righted a year ago.

In what has become one of the largest salvage operations in history, air was pumped into 30 large metal boxes, or sponsons, attached around the hull of the 114,500 tonne ship. The air forced out the water in the sponsons, lifting the vessel off the underwater platform.

"The boat is now floating with its sponsons attached," said Franco Porcellacchia, the engineer in charge of the salvage.

"The ship is upright and is not listing either longitudinally or latitudinally. This is extremely positive," he told a news conference six hours after the operation began.

After the ship has been raised about two metres, later on Monday it will be further stabilised with chains and cables, and tug boats will move it about 30 metres into the harbour, where it will be prepared to be towed within days to Genoa in northern Italy, to be scrapped.

The ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, is on trial accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck as he sailed too close to shore to "salute" the port, and abandoning ship. He is fighting the charges. — Reuters 

Gaza/Jerusalem, July 14
Israel today unleashed more airstrikes on Gaza and shot down a drone used for the first time by Hamas militants even as international pressure mounted on both to end the week-long conflict that has killed 175 Palestinians.

Although Israel has delayed its ground offensive amid global calls for a ceasefire, the military continued its airstrikes, killing four people today.

The Israeli military said that it shot down the drone spotted along the Israeli coastline, near the city of Ashdod. Hamas' military wing said in a statement that it has sent a number of drones on missions inside Israel and would provide more details in due course.

About 17,000 people from the Beit Lahiya area in the northern Gaza Strip streamed for protection into UN-run facilities after Israel yesterday warned residents of the area to leave their homes.

Israeli warplanes bombarded the vacated area, hitting alleged launch sites and homes of members of extremist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The assault was carried out mostly by air, but the Israeli navy also reportedly fired shells from the sea.

Despite the concentrated attack, militants continued to fire rockets at a broad swath of Israel. A teenager became the second Israeli civilian to be severely wounded. No Israelis have been killed by the rocket strikes.

Israeli air strikes today hit three training facilities of Hamas's military wing and buildings in Gaza city, causing injuries.

By this morning, the death toll from nearly a week of Israeli airstrikes reached 175 — all of them Palestinians-with more than 1,260 wounded, according to Palestinian health authorities.

While the Israeli attacks have killed some militants, around 70 per cent of the fatalities were civilians, according to the United Nations. Of the dead, more than 30 are children, the UN reported.

Israel has massed thousands of troops on the border with Gaza amid warnings it is prepared to launch a ground invasion. — PTI

Kiev, July 14
Ukraine on Monday accused Russian army officers of fighting alongside separatists in the east of the country and said Moscow was once more building up its troops on the joint border.

A missile that downed a Ukrainian transport plane near the border was probably fired from Russia, Ukrainian officials said.

President Petro Poroshenko held an emergency meeting of his security chiefs after a weekend of Ukrainian air strikes on rebel positions near the border with Russia and charges by Moscow that Kiev killed a Russian man with a cross-border shell.

The war of words between Kiev and Moscow and intense fighting, in which Ukrainian forces say they inflicted heavy losses on the rebels, marked a sharp escalation in the conflict in which several hundred Ukrainian servicemen, civilians and rebels have been killed.

"Information has ... been confirmed that Russian staff officers are taking part in military operations against Ukrainian forces," Poroshenko said.

Poroshenko made similar complaints of Russian incursions on Sunday to the EU with an eye to pushing the bloc to exert greater pressure, and possibly more sanctions, on Moscow.

Poroshenko told his security chiefs that government forces were now facing a new Russian missile system and there would have to be a change in tactics.

Accusing Russia of embarking on a course of escalation in Ukraine's eastern regions, National and Security Council spokesman Andriy Lysenko told journalists: "In the past 24 hours, deployment of (Russian) units and military equipment across the border from the Sumy and Luhansk border points was noticed. The Russian Federation continues to build up troops on the border." — Reuters

Johannesburg, July 14
South African Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, an uncompromising moralist who became one of the most powerful voices against the injustice of apartheid, has died at the age of 90, her family said on Monday.

Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, died peacefully at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her children, Hugo and Oriane, a statement from the family said.

"She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people and its on-going struggle to realize its new democracy," the statement said.

Regarded by many as South Africa's leading writer, Gordimer was renowned as a rigid moralist whose novels and short stories reflected the drama of human life and emotion in a society warped by decades of white-minority rule.

Many of her stories dealt with the themes of love, hate and friendship under the pressures of the racially segregated system that ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president.

A member of Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), banned under apartheid, Gordimer used her pen to battle against the inequality of white rule for decades, earning her the enmity of sections of the establishment.

Some of her novels, such as ""A World of Strangers" and a ""Burger's Daughter", were banned by the apartheid authorities.

But Gordimer, a petite figure with a crystal-clear gaze, did not restrict her writing to a damning indictment of apartheid, cutting through the web of human hypocrisy and deceit wherever she found it.

""I cannot simply damn apartheid when there is human injustice to be found everywhere else," she told Reuters shortly before winning her Nobel prize.

In later years, she became a vocal campaigner in the HIV/AIDS movement, lobbying and fund-raising on behalf of the Treatment Action Campaign, a group pushing for the South African government to provide free, life-saving drugs to sufferers.

Nor did she shy away from criticising the ANC expressing her opposition to a proposed law which limits the publication of information deemed sensitive by the government. — Reuters