No civil claim against Oscar Pistorius

PRETORIA: The parents of Reeva Steenkamp will not pursue a civil claim against Oscar Pistorius for killing their daughter and will pay back around $10,000 that the athlete gave them in monthly instalments to help with living expenses, they said in a statement on Wednesday. 

Lawyer Dup de Bruyn said he had also advised Barry and June Steenkamp to remain "neutral" with regard to Pistorius' sentence for negligently killing Reeva Steenkamp by shooting her multiple times in his home. 

Relatives of victims sometimes testify to their suffering in sentencing hearings, but de Bruyn suggested Steenkamp's parents would not. However, de Bruyn said the parents were "quite surprised" that Pistorius's lawyers had raised the issue of payments when the athlete had asked the Steenkamps that they be kept confidential. 

Judge Thokozile Masipa will decide Pistorius's punishment after finding him guilty last month of culpable homicide and has wide latitude with the sentence. The judge could send the double-amputee Olympic runner to prison for as many as 15 years, or order a fine and a suspended sentence. House arrest is also an option, and has been suggested by two social workers during this week's hearing. 

Pistorius was convicted of acting negligently in Steenkamp's death on Feb. 14, 2013 but acquitted of murder. 

De Bruyn released the statement on behalf of the Steenkamps ahead of the third day of the sentencing hearing Wednesday, saying they had accepted monthly payments of $550 from Pistorius from March 2013 — weeks after their daughter's shooting death — until last month. 

"After Miss Steenkamp (the deceased) was killed ... the parents were in financial difficulties," the parents' statement issued by their lawyer said. 

"We were contacted soon afterwards by Pistorius's lawyers with an offer that Pistorius would contribute an amount ... towards the parents' rental and living expenses." 

Revelations over payments to the Steenkamps by Pistorius were made in court on Tuesday, when the chief prosecutor said the Steenkamps had refused a separate settlement offer of $34,000 from Pistorius and considered it "blood money." 

"When the parents were made aware of this offer, they considered it carefully but decided, for various reasons, that they did not want any payment from Pistorius," the Steenkamp lawyer statement said. "This is also why we were instructed to advise that no civil claim would be instituted." 

De Bruyn said he had approached Pistorius's legal team over a possible civil settlement. Pistorius apparently then made the $34,000 offer after selling what he said was his last asset, a car. The parents considered it and turned it down. 

The world-famous athlete has had to sell many of his assets, including the house where he killed Steenkamp, to pay his high-powered defense team during a lengthy murder trial. 

Sri Lanka military to return jewellery to Tamil civilians

COLOMBO: Sri Lankan military has identified 2,377 "legitimate claimants" to handback a considerable stock of gold and jewellery it seized in the final battle against the LTTE more than five years ago.

Rejecting accusations levelled against it by the Tamil diaspora, the Lankan military on Tuesday said it has invited the rightful owners to contact the civil coordinating offices in the former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) regions to receive their items on verification of ownership.

The military said a considerable stock of gold jewellery had been recovered from the Tamil Eelam Banks and Eelam Pawning Centres run by the LTTE.

"All those recoveries of jewelleries were duly documented, properly catalogued and detained for safe keeping under the custody of the security forces on the directions of the President," an army statement said.

So far 2377 "legitimate claimants" have been identified to such jewelleries pawned by them to the LTTE, it said.

The military said President Mahinda Rajapaksa has started the process with a symbolic return of gold jewellery to 25 claimants on Sunday.

The move has refuted "a string of unfounded and venomous allegations that have been hitherto levelled by various elements including LTTE rump groups and others with vested interests over their destiny and safekeeping practices," it said.

The army said if the legitimate owners are not found the gold and jewellery would be vested with the Central Bank of Sri Lanka.

Tamil groups had said a great deal of gold and jewellery had fallen in the hands of the military during the final battle in 2009.

Nearly 300,000 civilians fled their homes and took refuge in government welfare camps in the final phase of the conflict. 

Pak Taliban’s top 6 leaders pledge ISIS allegiance

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistani Taliban are on the verge of collapse, as their six top commanders have announced allegiance to the ISIS, a video released on Tuesday revealed.

The announcement came at a time when the terror conglomerate has been experiencing divisions in its ranks.

"I am confirming my allegiance to (ISIS chief) Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi and would abide by all his decisions. Whatever is the situation, I will follow and obey his every instruction," Taliban spokesman Shaidullah Shahid said.

"This allegiance is neither from the Taliban or its leader Mullah Fazlullah. This is only from me and five other leaders," said Shahid. "I appeal to al-Baghdadi to accept my allegiance," Shahid said. Fazlullah has supported ISIS but has not declared his allegiance, which lies with Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

The fresh defection is a serious setback for the Taliban. It had earlier lost tribal Mehsud faction, which had provided some of toughest foot soldiers and major monetary support to the organization before the military offensive in North Waziristan. 

Australia's Richard Flanagan wins Man Booker prize for fiction

LONDON: An Indian lost out on winning the Man Booker prize second time in as many years as Australian author Richard Flanagan took away the literary world's most coveted prize for his book 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North'.

Flanagan's book is the story of his father as a prisoner during war in a Japanese prison and was called a literary masterpiece by the jury.

Flanagan - the Tasmanian-born author is the third Australian to win the coveted prize which, for the first time in its 46-year history, is now expanded to include entries from writers of all nationalities, writing originally in English and published in the UK.

He joins an impressive literary canon of former winners including fellow Australians Thomas Kenneally (Schindler's Ark, 1982) and Peter Carey (Oscar & Lucinda, 1988 and The True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001).

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is the sixth novel from Flanagan which centres upon the experiences of surgeon Dorrigo Evans in a Japanese POW camp on the now infamous Thailand-Burma railway.

Named after a famous Japanese book by the haiku poet Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North was described by the 2014 judges as 'a harrowing account of the cost of war to all who are caught up in it'. Questioning the meaning of heroism, the book explores what motivates acts of extreme cruelty and shows that perpetrators may be as much victims as those they abuse.

Interestingly, the book is the real story of Flanagan's father as a prisoner of war. He was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway. The author took 12 years to write it.

Ironically, Flanagan's father died the day he finished the book

Flanagan was announced as the 2014 winner by AC Grayling, chair of judges, at an awards dinner at London's Guildhall.

He was presented with a trophy from The Duchess of Cornwall and a £50,000 cheque from Emmanuel Roman, Chief Executive of Man Group.

Grayling said "The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism. 'This is the book that Richard Flanagan was born to write".



Nominees for the 2014 Man Booker prize for fiction. (AP photo)


In addition to his £50,000 prize and trophy, Flanagan also receives a designer bound edition of his book, and a further £2,500 for being shortlisted.

On winning the Man Booker prize, an author can expect international recognition, not to mention a dramatic increase in book sales.

Sales of Hilary Mantel's winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have exceeded a million copies in their UK editions. His novels have subsequently been adapted for stage and screen, with the highly acclaimed theatre productions of both novels arriving on Broadway in April 2015.

Granta, publisher of Eleanor Catton's 2013 winner, The Luminaries, has sold 300,000 copies of the book in the UK and almost 500,000 worldwide.

Kolkata boy Neel Mukherjee was among the six short listed authors for his book Mukherjee's latest novel The Lives of Others.

In 2013, Indian writer Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland lost out to Eleanor Catton who became the youngest writer to ever win a Man Booker prize.

The 28-year-old New Zealander's book The Luminaries - an 832-page murder mystery based on the gold rush in the 19th-century is also the longest novel to ever win the coveted literary prize.

"There is a very powerful cohort of contemporary American writers, but neither the longlist nor the shortlist was overwhelmed by them," he said.BANGALORE: Oracle India looks to be in the middle of yet another bribery issue, and multiple sources told TOI that Sandeep Mathur's sudden exit as managing director of the company is linked to this.

Mathur quit soon after returning from an Oracle conference in San Francisco earlier this month. Shailender Kumar, group VP-key accounts for Oracle India, has taken over as interim MD.

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Humans May Only Survive 68 Days on Mars: Study

Washington:  Space enthusiasts planning a move to Mars may have to wait to relocate: conditions on the Red Planet are such that humans would likely begin dying within 68 days, a new study says.

Oxygen levels would start to deplete after about two months and scientists said new technologies are required before humans can permanently settle on Mars, according to the study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The five-person team used data from Mars One, a Dutch-based non-profit group behind an audacious project to permanently colonize the Red Planet starting in 2024.

A shortlist of more than 1,000 people from an initial pool of 200,000 applicants will be whittled down to 24 for the mission -- an irreversible move to Mars, which is to be partially funded by a reality television show about the endeavor.

But conditions on Mars -- and the limits of human technology -- could make the mission impossible, for now at least.

"The first crew fatality would occur approximately 68 days into the mission," according to the 35-page report, which analyzed mathematical formulas on oxygen, food and technology required for the project.

Plants required to feed the space colony would produce "unsafe" amounts of oxygen, the authors said.

"Some form of oxygen removal system is required, a technology that has not yet been developed for space flight," the study concluded.

Shipping in replacement parts is an additional challenge and will likely boost the cost of the mission, which the researchers estimated to be at least $4.5 billion.

Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp agreed that sending spare parts to Mars could pose a problem.

"The major challenge of Mars One is keeping everything up and running," he told Popular Science magazine.

But he claimed the researchers used incomplete data, adding that technology for Mars colonization was nearly ready.

"While oxygen removal has never been done in space, I disagree that the technology is not mostly ready to go to Mars," Lansdorp told AFP.

"Of course, the actual apparatus that we will take to Mars still needs to be designed and tested extensively, but the technology is already there."

Many people have voiced doubts about the mission, though the project has won support from Gerard 't Hooft, the Dutch 1999 Nobel Physics prize winner.

The Red Planet lies at least 55 million kilometers (34 million miles) from Earth and it would take a minimum of seven months to get there.

Last June, the entertainment company Endemol, a major reality television producer, agreed to film the participants as they prepared for the move to Mars.

Car Bomb Kills 25, Including Lawmaker, in Shi'ite Neighbourhood of Baghdad

Baghdad, Iraq:  A suicide car bombing on Tuesday killed a parliament member and 24 others in a Shi'ite neighborhood in Baghdad, according to police and medical officials, as Islamic State attacked towns in western Anbar province.

The third straight day of bombings in Shi'ite parts of Baghdad and an offensive in Anbar province that saw strategic towns threatened by Islamic State pointed to the dire security situation in Iraq.

The blast in Baghdad, claimed by Islamic State, occurred in the late afternoon as cars lined up to enter the affluent neighbourhood, home to one of the holiest shrines in Shi'ite Islam, Imam Kadhim.

Police and medics said Ahmed al-Khafaji, a member of the Shi'ite Badr political party and a former deputy interior minister, counted among the dead.

Five police officers were also killed, police and medical officials said.

In a second attack, a roadside bomb killed three passersby on a busy street in the communally mixed district of al-Qahira in northern Baghdad, police and medical officials said.

The attack in Kadhimiya marked the third straight day of bombings there and other mostly Shi'ite neighbourhoods in the Iraqi capital and its outskirts. The blasts have killed at least 77 people since Sunday.

Islamic State, ultra-radical Sunni Muslim insurgents who have seized wide areas of northern and western Iraq, described the bombing as targeting Khafaji, according to the Site monitoring group.

Islamic State seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate spanning the borders of Iraq and Syria, where it has taken about a third of the country in the course of its civil war.

In western Anbar province, Islamic State has taken two towns this month in the mid-Euphrates river valley, Hit and Kubaisa, as it continues to push eastward in hopes of taking the Haditha Dam, where pro-government Sunnis are fighting jihadists in collaboration with the government.

If the dam falls, Islamic State will control much of the Euphrates water supply and will effectively rule from the Syrian border within range of Anbar's capital Ramadi.

In the Anbar town of Baghdadi 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Haditha Dam, Mayor Naji Arrak warned by telephone: "Baghdadi town has been surrounded by the Islamic State fighters since four days and despite appeals to military commanders in Anbar to intervene, we heard nothing."

In Amiriya Falluja, southwest of Baghdad, the area was surrounded by Islamic State late Tuesday, according to people from the town, who were frantically seeking to call in U.S. air strikes.

One man said the town was surrounded from three sides by tanks and armored vehicles. If Amiriya Falluja fell, it would create a wide opening for Islamic State to mass for a push into Baghdad, nearly 40 km away.

The Iraqi army has been badly damaged since the fall of Mosul, the north's biggest city, in June when at least four army divisions faded away.

Anbar military units have been hurting since last January when soldiers first battled Islamic State and tribes angry at the Baghdad government in the province's capital Ramadi and outside its sister city Falluja.

© Thomson Reuters 2014

Lionel Messi Scores Brace as Argentina Rout Hong Kong

On a day when Neymar put four goals past Japan, his Barcelona teammate Lionel Messi scored two in Argentina's 7-0 thumping vs Hong Kong. 

Argentina strolled to a 7-0 friendly win over Hong Kong on Tuesday, with superstar Lionel Messi and Napoli striker Gonzalo Higuain both netting a brace. (Four-star Neymar mesmerises Japan)

Coach Gerardo Martino started with a second-string side that saw Barcelona's Messi, Manchester United's Angel Di Maria and Sergio Aguero of Manchester City all on the bench.

Messi came on with half an hour of the match remaining. By then the score was already 4-0 but soon the little wizard had made it five, playing a neat one-two before dinking the ball over goalkeeper Yapp Hung-fai.

He was then instrumental in Argentina's sixth, pulling the ball back from the byline to give Nicolas Gaitan of Benfica the easiest of tap-ins from inside the six-yard box.

It was Gaitan's second goal of the match. The first came just before half-time when he cut in from the right and smashed the ball in with his left foot.

Just a minute earlier Higuain had scored his first, heading down a cross from the left.

The forward got his brace and Argentina's fourth with a simple pass into a open goal less than ten minutes into the second half.

Sevilla's Ever Banega had opened for Argentina on 19 minutes, pouncing on some woeful Hong Kong defending.

Yapp fumbled a weak effort which landed at the feet of Lee Chi-ho who scuffed a clearance straight to Banega, for the midfielder to drill the ball home.

With five minutes to go Messi scored his second and Argentina's seventh, taking the ball down beautifully with his left foot before going past three Hong Kong defenders and rifling it low into the corner.

Other stars who didn't start for Argentina included Sergio Romero, Pablo Zabaleta, Javier Mascherano, Martin Demichelis and Erik Lamela.

Manchester City's Zabaleta entered the fray on 60 minutes with Di Maria and Mascherano coming on ten minutes later -- all three coming through the match unscathed.