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Yahoo's board has approved a deal to buy New York-based blogging service Tumblr for $1.1bn (£725m), US media reports say.
State TV says troops have captured key buildings in the town centre, a claim strongly denied by activists.
A debate by Afghan MPs about beefing up a law to prevent violence against women has been halted amid angry scenes.
About 100,000 protesters, led by trade unionists, have rallied in the Italian capital Rome
A senior female Pakistani politician has been shot dead in the southern port city of Karachi.

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DMK blackmailing India over Sri-Lanka's Tamils human rights issues

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 20:35

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DMK on Tuesday night withdrew its support to the UPA over the Sri Lankan Tamils issue and ruled out any reconsideration, a move that makes the government vulnerable despite its assertions of having a parliamentary majority.

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Six men to appear in India court over gang-rape of Swiss

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 08:52

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Six men were due to appear in court on Monday over the gang-rape and robbery of a Swiss cyclist holidaying in India, an assault which has raised alarm about the safety of tourists, AFP reports.

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India warned Italy to face grave consequences

Thursday, 14 March 2013 19:10

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A diplomatic rift between India and Italy over two Italian marines accused of killing two Indian fishermen widened Thursday when India's Supreme Court ordered the Italian ambassador to New Delhi, Daniele Mancini, to ''not leave the country''. The order follows the Italian government's decision not to send the marines back to India after they were granted a permit to come home to vote in last month's general elections.

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Drought hit Indian state fall victim to irrigation scam

Thursday, 14 March 2013 06:00

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As the drought situation in Maharashtra worsens, allegations of siphoning off of relief funds have surfaced. The leader of the opposition in the state Assembly on Wednesday claimed bogus beneficiaries of fodder schemes. This came as the Centre granted Rs 1,200 crore as a drought relief package.

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Terror strikes again in Kashmir valley - 2 militants neutralized and 5 soldiers died

Wednesday, 13 March 2013 07:07

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Five jawans were killed and another six injured in an attack by militants on a CRPF camp in Srinagar this morning.

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India angry on Italy - Envoy may be asked to leave the mission

Tuesday, 12 March 2013 21:13

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PM Manmohan Singh described Italy's provocative decision to not send back the two marines accused of killing Kerala fishermen as unacceptable, and the government lodged a "strong protest" with the Italian ambassador and asked for the duo's return.

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Plague of pigs in Shanghai river

Monday, 11 March 2013 15:33

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More than 1,000 dead pigs have been found floating in Shanghai's main waterway, the Chinese city's government said Monday, as residents expressed fears over possible drinking water contamination, AFP reports.

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Star Brazilian footballer sentenced to 22 years in prison for murdering his girlfriend and having her dismembered and fed to his pet Rottweilers

Saturday, 09 March 2013 13:04

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A star Brazilian footballer has been jailed for more than two decades for ordering the kidnap and murder of his girlfriend, who was dismembered and fed to his pet dogs.

Bruno Fernandes de Souza, 28, who was tipped to play for Brazil at the 2014 World Cup, was sentenced to 22 years and three months in prison for the murder of Eliza Samudio, whom he apparently had killed to avoid paying child support after she gave birth to his love child.

Judge Marixa Fabiane Rodrigues said the goalkeeper, who played for Brazil's biggest team Flamengo, had 'meticulously calculated' Ms Samudio's execution.

He told the court in Contagem, south-east Brazil, that the footballer was 'twisted' and had 'instilled in his personality a total misunderstanding of values.'

He added: 'Bruno believed that, by making the body disappear, he could ensure total impunity.'

The former player had previously denied any knowledge of what happened to the 25-year-old, but told a court this week how his best friend Luiz Henrique Romao had paid someone to kill her.

He admitted that although he hadn't ordered his former lover to be killed, he had 'accepted' it.

The goalkeeper is accused of planning Ms Samudio's abduction and murder with eight others including his wife Dayane, another former lover, a cousin and former policeman Marcos Santos.

It has been alleged that he watched as Santos tortured her and then helped him to chop her body.

Parts of the woman's corpse are alleged to have been fed to Bruno's pet rottweillers, while the rest was buried in concrete.

At an earlier trial, Romao was found guilty of Ms Samudio's murder and jailed for 15 years. Santos will be put on trial next month.

Bruno, who before his arrest had been linked with a multi-million pound transfer to AC Milan, has always claimed Ms Samudio was alive and had left the country. Her body has never been found.

But he told the court in Contagem that his cousin, Jorge Rosa, who had witnessed the murder, had told him what had happened.

He claimed that after kidnapping Ms Samudio, Romao had taken her to a house in Belo Horizonte where hired killer Santos was waiting.

He said: 'There he held her hands and asked [Romao] to tie them in front of her, and put a tie around her neck.

'And [Romao] even kicked Eliza's legs away. That's what Jorge told me. And that they had chopped up her body, that they had thrown her body for the dogs to eat.'

The former star admitted that he feels 'guilty' for her death despite instisting that he never oredered the killing.

Ms Samudio, who had previously claimed to have had an affair with Real Madrid ace Cristiano Ronaldo, met Bruno at a footballers' party in May 2009 and fell pregnant by accident, it is claimed.

The goalkeeper demanded she have an abortion but she went ahead with the pregnancy, instead insisting that he assume paternity of the child.

Before her disappearance on June 4, 2010, Ms Samudio had approached police claiming she had been held captive by Bruno and his associates, who forced her to take an illegal abortion drug.

Bruno allegedly put a gun to her head and told her: 'You don't know who I am or what I'm capable of - I'm from the favela.'

The baby, Bruninho, was born in February 2010, but the player refused to acknowledge he was the father.

Prosecutors allege that Bruno ordered Ms Samudio's murder after she told him she would take legal action to force him to pay child support.

In a statement to police, the footballer's teenage cousin Jorge Rosa claimed he and Romao picked up Ms Samudio and her son from a Rio de Janeiro hotel after she accepted an invitation by the footballer to talk about the paternity claims.

He said they drove her 220 miles to a property in Belo Horizonte which Bruno and his wife used as a weekend retreat, where she was held captive for six days.

Ms Samudio was then allegedly handed over to former military policeman Santos, who committed 'barbaric tortures' on her before strangling her to death with a neck tie in front of her four-month-old son.

Santos, who was allegedly paid £8,000 to murder her, played loud music on a stereo to drown out the woman's screams, it is claimed.

Edson Moreira, a detective who investigated the case, said: 'His acts were almost impossible to describe without breaking down - images from the worst nightmare you could imagine.'

Police later found Ms Samudio's four-month-old baby in a Belo Horizonte slum, alleged to have been abandoned there by Bruno's wife Dayane. DNA tests later proved the footballer's paternity.

The child is now being looked after by Ms Samudio's mother.

Bruno's trial, which began on Monday, is expected to conclude today. If found guilty he could be jailed for up to 41 years.

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Sanctions against N. Korea not 'fundamental': China

Saturday, 09 March 2013 12:07

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Sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear programme are not "the fundamental way" to resolve the crisis, China's foreign minister said Saturday, days after the UN tightened measures against Pyongyang, AFP reports.

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Bolshoi dancer Dmitrichenko 'confesses' to acid attack

Saturday, 09 March 2013 11:30

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A Bolshoi Ballet soloist and two other men have confessed to an acid attack on the company's artistic director, Moscow police say.

Dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko - the alleged mastermind of the attack - was detained on Tuesday with Yuri Zarutsky, who is suspected of carrying it out.

A man accused of driving a getaway vehicle is also being held.

Sergei Filin's eyesight was badly damaged when a masked attacker threw sulphuric acid in his face in January.

After a series of operations on his eyes, he has been moved to Germany, where doctors have expressed hope that months of further treatment may be able to restore good vision.

The 42-year-old also suffered facial disfigurement during the 17 January attack, outside his Moscow home.

Photo: Sergey Filin before and after the attack

Mr Dmitrichenko, who has been with the troupe since 2002, is not one of the half-dozen very senior male dancers at the company, known as premiers, but he is a leading soloist one level down.

He has been performing the lead role in Sergei Prokofiev's Ivan The Terrible.

It is unclear whether Mr Zarutsky or the alleged driver have any connection to the Bolshoi.

Police have questioned several Bolshoi employees as potential witnesses.

The attack spurred a round of vicious allegations among some of the leading lights of the theatre.

Suspicions were cast on dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze, who was accused by Bolshoi manager Anatoly Iksanov of inspiring the attack, if not being behind it. Mr Tsiskaridze was questioned, but denied any involvement and has not been charged.

Police are treating the attack as a premeditated act of grievous bodily harm, motivated by Mr Filin's professional activities.

Profile: Pavel Dmitrichenko

Pavel Dmitrichenko, the Bolshoi Ballet first soloist arrested over the acid attack on artistic director Sergei Filin, once said he had never wanted to be a ballet dancer.

Interviewed by Russia 24 TV last year, for a feature about fellow Bolshoi dancer Angelina Vorontsova, he recalled how his mother had persuaded him as a little boy to give up football and go to dance school in return for a Mars Bar.

"As a result I ended up in dance school against my will," he said smiling, during a break from rehearsals with Ms Vorontsova.

But when, in 2006, he took the lead role of Yashka the gangster in in the Bolshoi's production of Shostakovich's ballet The Golden Age, it settled him for a career in dance, he said.

Since then, roles as a villain have predominated - from Von Rothbart in Swan Lake to Ivan the Terrible in the ballet of the same name. In Romeo and Juliet, he had the part of the main antagonist, Tybalt.

At 29, fresh from being promoted to first soloist, he was at the peak of his powers when Moscow police arrested him over one of the most shocking crimes to have hit the ballet world in recent memory.

There is speculation that his part in the crime - he has confessed to ordering an attack but denies knowing it would involve acid - is connected, at least in part, to his feelings for Ms Vorontsova, 21, who is said to be his partner.

'Only a pretext'

Mr Dmitrichenko was born in Moscow on 3 January 1984, into a family of distinguished folk dancers.

It appears his time at ballet school was a stormy one. In a 2009 interview for Russian TV, he said he had been expelled five times for "acting the hooligan, throwing firecrackers at the teachers".

However, his excellent results kept him in school and he joined the Bolshoi in 2002.

By 2006, he had been thinking of quitting ballet "after a year or two", he told Russia 24, but the artistic director of the time, Yuri Grigorovich, persuaded him after The Golden Age that ballet was his calling.

Among the roles that followed were Spartacus in the ballet of the same name (2009) and Jose in Carmen Suite (2010).

Ivan the Terrible (2012) was seen by his tutor, Alexander Vetrov, as being potentially his "role of a lifetime".

As the soloist's career progressed, Ms Vorontsova did not achieve similar leading roles and Russian media have speculated that Mr Dmitrichenko blamed Mr Filin for blocking her advancement unfairly.

When news broke of his arrest, a police source told Izvestia newspaper: "The main motive was enmity towards Filin, who according to the suspect, had a negative attitude towards his partner.

"Dmitrichenko said that Filin was thwarting Vorontsova's artistic career and did not give her the main roles."

Sergei Filin's wife, Maria Prorvich, told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper she believed Ms Vorontsova was unlikely to have been the only cause of the conflict.

"Sergei thinks the motives of the crime are somewhat different,'' she said.

"The girl is only a pretext, but certainly not the main cause of the crime.''

A lawyer for Mr Filin, Tatyana Stukalova, suggested the atmosphere of danger at the Bolshoi ran deeper.

"Threats against people who worked and still work at the Bolshoi Theatre began long ago, two years ago," she said on state TV.

"One should not speak now of only one motive, that it all occurred because of Ms Vorontsova."

'Bad things'

The soloist himself did not say anything about Ms Vorontsova when he spoke about his motives in court.

Instead, he said he had been angered by Mr Filin's decisions on how money was allocated to dancers at the theatre.

There were, he said, "bad things" going on at the Bolshoi.

He admitted paying a man, Yuri Zarutsky (also under arrest), to attack Mr Filin, but not with acid. Judicial sources have spoken of a sum of 50,000 roubles (£1,080; $1,630; 1,250 euros).

"In regard to [accusations] that I ordered him to splash Sergei Filin with acid, this is a total lie," he said in court.

"I did not do that, absolutely no."

When he heard that Mr Filin had been splashed with acid, he was "just in shock", he added.

"I could not believe that the man who proposed beating him up went ahead and did this thing with acid," Mr Dmitrichenko said. "I did not order harm done to this man."

Prosecutors are calling for the dancer to be charged with a crime punishable by up to 12 years in prison.

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World's biggest mall a China 'ghost town'

Thursday, 07 March 2013 18:44

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New South China Mall in Guangdong Province opened in 2005. With 5 million square feet of shopping area, the mall can accommodate 2,350 stores, making it the largest shopping center in the world in terms of leasable space -- more than twice the size of Mall of America, the biggest shopping center in the United States.

At the outdoor plaza, hundreds of palm-trees blend with a replica Arc de Triomphe, a giant Egyptian sphinx, fountains and long-stretching canals with gondolas.

Only problem is, the mall is virtually deserted. Despite the bombastic design and grand plans, only a handful of stores are occupied. "Most of it empty, with little consumer traffic and a high vacancy rate," according to a report last year by Emporis, a global building data firm. "It has been classified as a 'dead mall.'"

Walking among shattered shops -- its dusty corridors and escalators covered in soiled sheets -- is a walk through a ghost mall. Rubbish piles up along the sides, paint is coming off the walls and store signs and advertisements have faded.

The mall's indoor amusement park, staff lay half asleep over counters or kill time chatting with each other while the 1,814-foot rollercoaster roars above.

Opened for the public in 2005, developers expected to attract some 100,000 visitors a day. But eight years later, the few people that visit the mall today typically hang out at the American fast food restaurants near the entrance or at the IMAX cinema outside the mall. Some parents bring their children to the Teletubbies Edutainment Center.

Part of the problem is location. Dongguan is a factory town and most of its almost 10 million inhabitants are migrant workers struggling to make ends meet. "People coming here to work in factories don't have the time or the money for shopping or the rollercoaster," said a migrant worker in his 20s, surnamed Xiao, who works at the mall.

The deserted mall is also a symbol of China's rapid urbanization and runaway investment in real estate projects, where massive development projects have been given the go ahead without proper marketing and business research.

"To me, many of these projects are a result of easy access to capital and a combination of wishful thinking and speculative behavior rather than rational business calculations," said Victor Teo, assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong.

"This mall is not the only one that is like that. Elsewhere in China there is the phenomenon of 'Ghost Towns', that is to say infrastructure projects, both residential and commercial, with no takers."

The credit boom of post-financial crisis stimulus has resulted in a proliferation of empty commercial developments and apartments built on rampant speculation. Yet why is the Chinese economy still moving at a brisk 7% to 8% growth rate?

"What China did in the stimulus credit boom is create a lot of `ghost cities': projects without a strong commercial foundation, and projects that didn't get done," wrote Jonathan Anderson in a research note entitled "Hurray for Ghost Cities" from Emerging Advisors Group last month. "What happens next?

"In most of the economy ... nothing. You haven't created a lot of new productive capacity; you're not driving down profits and returns in manufacturing and services, and you've left plenty of room for a rebound in the market-oriented property space.

"Rather, for all intents and purposes you just took the money and poured it down a black hole," Anderson wrote. And the Chinese banking system "has surprisingly little trouble absorbing that bad debt."

But while the macroeconomic juggernaut of China marches on, there remain regional areas of woe. Dongguan is facing mounting problems as factories close down and manufacturing moves to other cities in China and abroad which offer cheaper labor.

Still, the mall has plans to boost the number of tenants, said Ye Ji Ning, head of New South China Mall's investment unit. He claims the mall has a 20% occupancy rate measured by commercial area, although Ye declined to give specifics when challenged on that number. The company's goal is to increase occupancy to 80% in 2013, he said.

"From March onwards we will have big promotional activities in order to reach our new leasing targets," Ye said.

It's not the first time the owners try to blow life into the sleeping giant. The mall was initially headed by Dongguan native Alex Hu Guirong, who became a billionaire in the instant noodle business, and later sold to the Founders Group, a conglomerate set up by Peking University.

In a 2007 relaunch, the mall changed name from "South China Mall" to "New South China Mall, Living City" and a revitalization plan was drawn up. But after the relaunch, neither shoppers nor tenants came.

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China's growing social problems

Thursday, 07 March 2013 07:01

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China's outgoing premier Wen Jiabao has warned that the world's second largest economy faced mounting social problems and "unbalanced, unco-ordinated and unsustainable" growth as he said farewell after a decade in power.

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Chechens taking active part in Syrian Revolution

Thursday, 07 March 2013 05:48

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Flanked by almost 20 men with rifles, Omar Abu al-Chechen kneels on a carpet and delivers a rousing speech urging fellow Muslims to support the 'jihad' against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

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