Facebook hits 1 trillion page views? Nope.

The news stormed across blogs and headlines this week: Facebook had become the first website to rack up a mind-boggling 1 trillion monthly page views.

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35 killed in series of attacks across Iraq

A series of bomb attacks throughout Iraq left 35 people dead and scores injured, officials with Iraq's Interior Ministry and police said Sunday.

At least 28 people were killed in a suicide bombing attack in a Sunni mosque in the Ghazaliya neighborhood in western Baghdad late Sunday, an Interior Ministry official said. At least 37 others were wounded in the attack. A Sunni member of Parliament, Khalid al-Fahdawi, was among the dead.

In Tarmiyah, about 40 kilometers north of Baghdad, two people were killed and five were wounded after a bomb exploded near a Sunni mosque as worshippers finished up a nightly prayer for the celebrations of Ramadan, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

Also Sunday, an bomb explosion killed two people in the Baghdad's Shiite-majority neighborhood of Jadriya, the spokesman said.

In Mosul, six roadside bombs exploded in the town's center, wounding five police officers and two civilians.
Also, on the highway that connects Mosul to Syria, a roadside bomb exploded on an Iraqi army convoy, leaving two wounded.

In a separate incident, one man was killed after being attacked by gunmen. Two people were killed in Fallujah, officials said.

Some of the attacks appeared to target policemen, the spokesman said.
According to intelligence analysts with SITE, the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) vowed to step up attacks in the country to avenge the death of Osama bin Laden.
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Car bombing in Nigeria kills 18 at UN base

Nigeria - A suicide bomber rammed his vehicle packed with explosives into the UN headquarters yesterday, destroying several floors in a thunderous blast that killed at least 18 people, witnesses and officials said.

Boko Haram, a shadowy Nigerian Islamist insurgency group with possible links to Al Qaeda’s affiliates in the region, claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to the BBC. If confirmed, it would signal a significant leap in the scope of Boko Haram’s focus, which until now had taken aim exclusively at domestic targets as part of an ill-defined aim to establish strict Islamic law in the country’s north.

The Nigerian government has come under repeated attack by Boko Haram in the north and by militants in the south. Foreign oil companies and their workers have also been a common target of southern insurgents, who demand a greater share in the nation’s oil profits. But the deadly strike on the United Nations, the first on its offices in Nigeria, was a surprising turn.

“This act provides a new dimension to threats on the domestic front,’’ said Joy Ogwu, Nigeria’s ambassador to the United Nations, who called the attack a “transnational crime’’ and urged renewed efforts to fight terrorism in her country.

If indeed the work of Boko Haram, the attack lends substance to new concerns of officials and analysts that an inward-looking organization is increasingly adopting the methods and aims of global terrorists. The bombing, capping months of small-scale explosions and assassinations, mostly in the country’s north, is the most brazen attack yet.

“The logic of Boko Haram has been essentially inward looking,’’ said Chidi Anselm Odinkalu of the Open Society Justice Initiative, in Abuja. “To now seek to attack the UN entirely departs from the narrative they have so far constructed. That’s the most worrying thing about this. It makes Boko Haram an international threat.’’
for more detail visit boston.com

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GANG ATTACKS AND SETS FIRE TO A CASINO IN MEXICO, 53 KILLED

Two dozen gunmen burst into a casino in northern Mexico on Thursday, doused it with gasoline and started a fire that trapped gamblers inside, killing at least 45 people and injuring a dozen more, authorities said.

The fire at the Casino Royale in Monterrey, a city that has seen a surge in drug cartel—related violence, represented one of the deadliest attacks on an entertainment center in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006.

“This is a night of sadness for Mexico,” federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire said in a televised address. “These unspeakable acts of terror will not go unpunished.”

Calderon tweeted that the attack was “an abhorrent act of terror and barbarism” that requires “all of us to persevere in the fight against these unscrupulous criminal bands.”

Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said the number late Thursday had risen to at least 45.

“But we could find more,” said state Attorney General Leon Adrian de la Garza, adding that a drug cartel was apparently responsible for the attack. Cartels often extort casinos and other businesses, threatening to attack them or burn them to the ground if they refuse to pay.

State police officials quoted survivors as saying armed men burst into the casino, apparently to rob it, and began dousing the premises with fuel from tanks they brought with them. The officials were not authorized to be quoted by name for security reasons. De la Garza said the liquid appeared to be gasoline.

With shouts and profanities, the attackers told the customers and employees to get out. But many terrified customers and employees fled further inside the building, where they died trapped amid the flames and thick smoke that soon billowed out of the building.

Workers continuing to remove bodies well into the night.

Monterrey Mayor Fernando Larrazabal said many of the bodies were found inside the casino’s bathrooms, where employees and customers had locked themselves to escape the gunmen.

In an act of desperation, authorities commandeered backhoes from a nearby construction site to break into the casino’s walls to try to reach the people trapped inside.

Maria Tomas Navarro, 42, stood weeping at the edge of the police tape stretched in front of the smoke—stained casino building. She was hoping for word of her brother, 25—year—old Genaro Navarro Vega, who had worked in the casino’s bingo area.

for more detail visit thehindu.com

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Gaddafi wanted dead or alive

Fighting raged Wednesday as Muammar Gaddafi's troops fought back at his Tripoli compound a day after it was captured, while rebels offered a $1.7 million reward for the elusive strongman, dead or alive.

Washington for its part said Libya's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction had been secured and that it was confident the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) could set up governing structures after overrunning Tripoli.

A group of mostly foreign journalists who had been confined to Tripoli's Rixos Hotel by pro-Gaddafi hardliners were freed but other loyalists kidnapped four Italian journalists near the capital, and two French journalists were wounded by stray gunfire at the compound but were recovering.
The rebels also made key diplomatic gains when two of Gaddafi's staunchest African allies - Chad and Burkina Faso - said they recognise the NTC as the sole representative of the Libyan people.
During the afternoon, thick smoke hung over the Bab al-Aziziya complex, where rebels and Gaddafi forces fought with light arms, heavy machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and mortars.

Fighting also spread to the nearby Abu Slim area, where loyalists were on the attack, a day after they fled as rebels overran Bab al-Aziziya.

Other pro-Gaddafi troops fired heavy Grad rockets in a bid to regain control of Tripoli's airport from a small group of rebels holding on.

But manager Arabi Mustafa said that once the security problems are resolved and water and electricity restored, the airport would be reopened.

A rebel military spokesman told Al-Jazeera television that "Libyan territory is 90 to 95% under the control of the rebellion."

for more detail visit hindustantimes.com

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Neil Armstrong urges return to the moon to train for Mars

NEIL Armstrong has urged a return to the moon to train for missions to Mars as the UN contemplates the future of its space program following the end of the shuttle era.

The first man to walk on the moon is due to address the US Congress on new directions for NASA in coming weeks.

He has previously criticised US President Barack Obama for being "poorly advised" on space matters and said it was "well known to all that the American space program is in some chaos at the present time, some disarray".
"There are multiple opinions on which goals should be the most important and the most pressing," he told a function in Sydney late Wednesday.
The US shuttle program came to an end last month with the Atlantis cruising home for a final time, 42 years after Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.

Critics have assailed NASA for lacking focus, with no next-generation human space flight mission to replace the shuttle program.

Now 81, Armstrong said the agency had become a "shuttlecock" for the "war of words" between the executive, legislative and congressional arms of US government.

"It's my belief given time and careful thought and reasoning we will eventually reach the right goal, I just hope we do it fairly quickly," he said.

The normally private and reserved space veteran said Mars should be the next frontier for exploration but urged more missions to the moon as the vital next step.
"I do favour going to Mars but I believe it is both too difficult and too expensive with the technology we have available at the current time," he said.
for more detail theaustralian.com.au

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