Home News News by Country Top News Sport World Oddly Enough Investing Video AlertNet Humanitarian News About Thomson Reuters Danish rail firm says Sweden border checks will cost 1 million DKK a day

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Border checks on train passengers aimed at curbing the number of asylum seekers entering Sweden from Denmark will cost Denmark's rail operator DSB nearly 1 million Danish crowns (99,370 pounds) a day, the state-owned company said on Tuesday. Travellers have been able to cross borders between the two Nordic countries without passports since the late 1950s but from Jan. 4 all Sweden-bound trains will be stopped at Copenhagen Airport for mandatory identification checks. DBS said in a statement that the identification checks would cost an estimated nine million crowns a month, with an expected fall in passenger numbers likely to result in an additional loss of around 20 million crowns a month. "Combined costs for identification control and lost revenue is estimated to be around 1 million crowns a day in the first month," a spokesman told Reuters. The company also warned that if the checks remain in place for more than a month, "it might result in a fee on tickets to Sweden to cover extraordinary costs". Sweden has tightened border controls and asylum rules to try to slow an influx of migrants from war-torn Syria and elsewhere that it expects to reach 190,000 this year. The country says its traditionally welcoming asylum system cannot cope, and that other European Union states must take in more refugees. DSB said that, from Monday, it will empty all trains at Copenhagen Airport, the last stop before the bridge to Sweden, where all passengers will have to enter the terminal to show identification papers before re-boarding the train. It has established 34 staffed slots at the airport station where papers will be checked. The checks will extend travel time by up to 45 minutes, DSB said -- longer than the 34-minute train journey between Sweden and Denmark which around 16,000 people make every day. source:http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKBN0UC13G20151229?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FAFRICAWorldNews+%28News+%2F+AFRICA+%2F+World+News%29&rpc=401

Tornadoes and severe storms across southern US leave at least seven dead

At least seven people were killed in a storm system that raged across the southern US on Wednesday, as the east coast experienced record high temperatures and persistent rain. The National Weather Service said on Thursday morning that there was a diminished risk of severe storms as search and rescue efforts were underway in regions that endured the most significant storm and tornado damage. At least three people were killed in Mississippi and in Tennessee, officials said. Mississippi governor Phil Bryant declared a state of emergency on Thursday. “Mississippians are resilient in difficult times, and we will meet this challenge head on for those that are in need,” Bryant said in a statement. Michaela Remus, 18, died in Arkansas after a tree crashed into her bedroom, according to the Pope County sheriff’s office. Remus’s one-year-old sister was sleeping in the bedroom with her but rescuers were able to pull her from the home. The stories you need to read, in one handy email Read more “It’s terrible that this happened, especially at Christmas,” said Pope county sheriff Shane Jones. Thousands of people lost power from Mississippi to Michigan during the storms. Though the risk for severe storms diminished in the south, forecasters warned of a lingering chance of flash flooding, heavy rains and winds. Officials said a seven-year-old boy died in Holly Springs, Mississippi when a tornado swept through the city and tossed the car he was in. Two people were also killed and two others were missing in nearby Benton County. In Tennessee, a 22-year-old man died in Rhea County and a 70-year-old man and 69-year-old woman died in Perry County. Mississippi Emergency Management Agency spokesman Greg Flynn said that the agency had recorded more than 40 injuries, including amputations, before dawn on Thursday. Source : http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/24/tornadoes-storms-the-south-holiday-travel-deaths

Knife-wielding Santa robs KFC restaurant, police say

Police in England are searching for a Santa Claus that has clearly been naughty instead of nice. A robber dressed as St. Nick climbed through the drive-through window of a KFC restaurant in Alfreton on Saturday, raided the safe and threatened staff with a knife, authorities say. ADVERTISEMENT The masked man, described as being 5 ft. 10 and wearing a red hat, red pants and a red jacket, made off with an unspecified amount of cash, the Press Association reports. "Thankfully, the restaurant was shut and no one was hurt, but we are offering employees any support they need,” a KFC spokesman told The Derby Telegrap Source:http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/12/21/knife-wielding-santa-robs-kfc-restaurant-police-say.html

Mercury Found In Fog Off California Coast

Fog is a hazard to ships, but it might also be a problem for the food web. Today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, researchers discussed new evidence that the amount of coastal fog is not only increasing, but in some areas of California at least, it contains a surprising amount of a form of mercury called monomethylmercury. Although monomethylmercury can be hazardous to human health, there's not enough of it in the fog to be dangerous. Marine fog typically arrives in the summer months in areas where ocean surface temperatures are cold, but the air above is warmer. Clive Dorman of San Diego State University said that by analyzing the records of ships in the coastal areas in northern California and Oregon, he was able to show that between 1960 and 2007 the number of days with fog on the coast went up by 7.4 percent, a finding that mirrors other high-fog areas around the world, like the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, which also have a considerable amount of fog that has likewise been increasing. The increase matters, not only to ships, but to ecosystems on land. Kenneth Coale of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and Peter Weiss-Penzias from UC Santa Cruz found that levels of a kind of mercury called monometylmercury were 19 times higher in fog than in rain, even in the same area. Mercury gets into the oceans from smokestack emissions and other industrial sources. It is a public health concern because it tends to build up in the food chain, as animals with low levels of mercury in their bodies are eaten by carnivores. The carnivores, which may eat many mercury-contaminated prey, end up with a lot of mercury in their bodies. The most worrying form of mercury is monomethylmercury, a kind of mercury linked to severe health effects in humans, including kidney failure, birth defects, and neurological impairment. Previous research by the team had found that the fog had just five times the levels of monomethylmercury as rain. Now, in addition to noticing even higher concentrations, they think they may have figured out where the monomethylmercury is coming from. The answer is another form of mercury--dimethylmercury, a gas that is also present in ocean water, and which comes from smokestacks and mining. It turns out that most fog is slightly acidic, and the acid is enough to convert the gaseous dimethylmercury that emerges from the oceans into the more solid monomethylmercury. The fog then carries it inland where it is deposited on various surfaces and eventually enters the food chain. So what does that mean for us? Nothing much right now. The levels of mercury in the fog, though higher than that of the rain, don't reach a level where they are an immediate public health risk. But the results are worrying in a larger sense. Mercury has been measured in terrestrial plants and animals, and might have an impact on land-based food webs. "I would definitely not eat any spiders from foggy areas," Coales joked at a press conference. Spiders in the area have been measured as having mercury levels above the FDA's accepted limit. Humans generally don't eat spiders, but birds and other animals do. Coales and Weiss-Penzias plan to continue their work looking into how mercury from fog affects the food web on land, and hope to eventually be able to use drones to monitor the fog as it comes in. Source http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/mercury-found-in-fog-off-california-coast/ar-BBnDVct?li=BBnbfcL

Can APC wipe out PDP from the North?

As the Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja begins hearing in the appeal filed by Governor Darius Ishaku to upturn his removal by the Taraba State Election Petition Tribunal, the question on the lips of many political analysts is: Can the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) survive the attack by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC)? After losing power in the 2015 general elections, PDP has watched its stature diminish in a matter of seven months, with many Nigerians raising the fear that there is a plan to turn Nigeria into a one-party state by the APC. Since APC came into power in May, virtually all the judgments given by the election petition tribunals have been against PDP. The governorship poll in Rivers State was annulled by the election tribunal and the Court of Appeal upheld this decision on Wednesday. Chief Nyesom Wike, the governor of the state, has vowed to pursue his case up to the Supreme Court to get justice, but his chances are not bright. The latest PDP state to lose at the election petition and the Appeal Court is Akwa Ibom. Governor Udom Emmanuel is equally heading to the Supreme Court to seek justice. Several PDP federal lawmakers, notably former Senate President David Mark, have also lost their cases at the tribunals. The election in Bayelsa was declared inconclusive and the fate of the PDP governor is uncertain. It is against this background and other developments that many were very critical of the November 7 judgment of the Taraba Election Petition Tribunal annulling the election of Ishaku and ordering that Hajia Aisha Alhassan, the candidate of the APC, should be sworn-in on the grounds that Ishaku was not properly nominated by the PDP in the governorship primary. Besides Taraba, the only other state still in the hands of the PDP in the 18 northern states is Gombe. The others are effectively APC – controlled. The Justice Musa Danladi Abubakar-led tribunal ruled that Ishaku was not properly nominated as PDP’s governorship candidate, pointing out that the party did not conduct its primary in Jalingo, the state capital. The tribunal upheld the testimony of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Head of Election Monitoring Source www.vanguardngr.com/2015/12/can-apc-wipe-out-pdp-from-the-north/

Alek Skarlatos: ‘I saw this guy with an AK-47, tapped my friend on the shoulder and said: Let’s go’

In mid-August, Alek Skarlatos, a specialist with the Oregon army national guard, was on a Thalys train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris, part of a European vacation he’d planned with his friends Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler to celebrate the end of his tour of duty in Afghanistan. Three hours into the journey, a 25-year-old Moroccan man with Isis connections, Ayoub El-Khazzani, began rampaging through the carriages armed with a pistol, a Kalashnikov, 270 rounds of ammunition and half a litre of petrol, eventually shooting and grievously wounding a Franco-American man, Mark Moogalian, who tried to stop him. What El-Khazzani wasn’t bargaining for was the trio of peppy Americans, who, together with 62-year-old Brit Chris Norman, overcame the attacker, Skarlatos using the butt of El-Khazzani’s own gun to beat him into submission. On the telephone from LA, Skarlatos reveals what he remembers about the attack. “Honestly, it’s really strange. The adrenaline messes with your memory. I do remember certain moments very sharply and very clearly. When I first saw the guy with the AK, that part is burned in my mind. Then I tapped Spencer on the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s go!’ and from that moment to pretty much when I grabbed the handgun was totally blank. I remember the end of the struggle very clearly and then when he was on the ground and tied up. It was 35 minutes between him beginning the attack and when we got to the station.”The all World news The Observer's faces of 2015 Alek Skarlatos: ‘I saw this guy with an AK-47, tapped my friend on the shoulder and said: Let’s go’ The off-duty soldier was one of five passengers who foiled a terrorist attack on a Paris-bound train in August • See the Observer’s faces of 2015 in full here • Nujeen Mustafa: ‘Sometimes it’s good to be unaware. Maybe I was too young to realise the danger’ Alek Skarlatos, Los Angeles ‘The adrenaline messes with your memory’: Alek Skarlatos in Los Angeles. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Observer Alex Preston Sunday 20 December 2015 09.00 GMT Share Share Share Shares 0 Comments 0 Save for later In mid-August, Alek Skarlatos, a specialist with the Oregon army national guard, was on a Thalys train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris, part of a European vacation he’d planned with his friends Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler to celebrate the end of his tour of duty in Afghanistan. Three hours into the journey, a 25-year-old Moroccan man with Isis connections, Ayoub El-Khazzani, began rampaging through the carriages armed with a pistol, a Kalashnikov, 270 rounds of ammunition and half a litre of petrol, eventually shooting and grievously wounding a Franco-American man, Mark Moogalian, who tried to stop him. What El-Khazzani wasn’t bargaining for was the trio of peppy Americans, who, together with 62-year-old Brit Chris Norman, overcame the attacker, Skarlatos using the butt of El-Khazzani’s own gun to beat him into submission. On the telephone from LA, Skarlatos reveals what he remembers about the attack. “Honestly, it’s really strange. The adrenaline messes with your memory. I do remember certain moments very sharply and very clearly. When I first saw the guy with the AK, that part is burned in my mind. Then I tapped Spencer on the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s go!’ and from that moment to pretty much when I grabbed the handgun was totally blank. I remember the end of the struggle very clearly and then when he was on the ground and tied up. It was 35 minutes between him beginning the attack and when we got to the station.” France train attack: Americans overpower gunman on Paris express Read more Since then, life has altered unrecognisably for Skarlatos. He found himself an overnight celebrity, on the cover of newspapers and magazines worldwide, the recipient of the French Légion d’honneur and the US Soldier’s Medal, the highest award for actions not taken in combat. Back home in Oregon, he was asked to join Dancing With the Stars, an American reality show similar to Strictly Come Dancing. Advertisement Skarlatos and his dance partner, Lindsay Arnold, came third in the show’s 21st season, their high point a heartfelt and patriotic waltz to America the Beautiful. So how did Skarlatos move from have-a-go-heroism to dancing off against the likes of Chaka Khan and the Backstreet Boys’ Nick Carter? “When they asked me to do it, it wasn’t even a week after the attack and I was just a bit ignorant about the whole thing,” he says. “There was so much stuff going on... For me it was like, what else was I going to do? But I just had to make sure that Spencer [Stone] and Anthony [Sadler] were OK with it. They did take a bit of convincing – they had no idea what Dancing With the Stars was; I didn’t really either.” Skarlatos’s companions on the train have been noticeably less eager to embrace their new-found fame. He remains close to his boyhood friend Stone, who was wounded in the attack and then, shockingly, two months after his return to the US, was stabbed four times outside a Sacramento nightclub, seemingly while trying to protect a young woman. Skarlatos’s voice drops at this point, reflecting on his friend’s misfortune and another attack he was unable to prevent. “While I was busy celebrating stopping a terrorist attack, there was a shooting at my college that I would have been at that day, and then a week later Spencer gets stabbed and I wasn’t there to help him either,” he says. “I felt guilty not being at my college that day and, who knows, maybe if I hadn’t been doing Dancing With the Stars, I would have been at that bar with him and maybe I would have been able to do something.” I ask Skarlatos if being so centrally involved in a terrorist attack gives him a different perspective on the atrocities in Paris and California; if he believes that the war on terror will ever be won. “Anybody who is a terrorist we should just kill,” he says. “I would rather it not be put up for debate.” Now Skarlatos is about to embark on a stadium tour as part of Dancing With the Stars live. After that, his plans are a little hazy. “I have some things in development right now but nothing certain,” he says. “It’s not quite back to square one, but I’m going to go back to Oregon and if I have other opportunities I’ll probably do them, but I’m trying to scale things down a little bit.”

Source http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/20/alek-skarlatos-us-soldier-foiled-paris-train-attack#img-1

Winners and losers in the 3rd Democratic presidential debate

The three Democrats running for president gathered in New Hampshire Saturday night for their third and final debate of 2015 . It was a feisty affair with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley aggressively attacking each other at almost every turn. I picked a handful of winners and losers from the night that was. They're below. Winners * Hillary Clinton : The former Secretary of State was the only one on stage Saturday night who looked like she could step into the presidency tomorrow. Her knowledge on foreign policy -- from ISIS to Syria and beyond -- was significantly greater than her rivals, and it showed. (ABC moderator Martha Raddatz was the only one on stage confident enough in her own knowledge of foreign policy to go after Clinton.) Clinton also demonstrated her ability to play to local interests -- she touted Market Basket, which is based in Tewksbury, Massaschusetts, for example. She repeatedly turned the focus away from the differences among the candidates on stage and instead pointed out the differences she (and the other Democratic candidates) have with controversial Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. She showed a sense of humor; asked by ABC moderator David Muir whether "corporate America should love Hillary Clinton " "Everyone should," she responded to raucous applause in the room. And, she demonstrated a willingness to whack away at O'Malley (on his acceptance of corporate dollars as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association) and Sanders (on the cost of his proposals) -- showing that she was not content to sit back and play defense. Clinton's performance proved, yet again, how gifted she is as a debater. And, it made me wonder, yet again, why her campaign seems to want to limit debates in this primary. She shines in them -- and did so again tonight. Her closing statement -- invoking the new "Star Wars" movie -- was the cherry on top of a tour de force performance.* Donald Trump : No one loves attention more than The Donald. And, his name was invoked over and over again on Saturday night -- by, most notably, Clinton. I could almost imagine Trump sitting in Trump Tower -- he never leaves there, right? -- grinning broadly every time Hillary attacked him. I guarantee you Trump will weave the amount he was attacked by Clinton into his stump speech as evidence that Democrats are obsessed with him. * Martha Raddatz : Raddatz moderated the debate alongside "World News Tonight" anchor David Muir. But, she was the star of the show. ABC's chief global correspondent did exactly what a good moderator should: She let the candidates mix it up when it made sense for them to and injected herself into the conversation when a candidate said something that she knew wasn't right. Raddatz made a very strong case for the reporter-moderator tonight; she is someone who knows her subject matter inside and out -- a sort of knowledge that allowed her to fact-check the candidates in real time. She made this debate considerably better. Period. * "Jeopardy!": Because I thought the debate started at 8 pm eastern, I tuned in to ABC about 15 minutes beforehand and was treated to "Double Jeopardy! and "Final Jeopardy!". Did you know T.S. Eliot's nickname was "Old Possum"? I didn't either until I watched "Jeopardy!" That is still a damn good show. Losers * Martin O'Malley : The former Maryland governor came into the debate with a plan: Lump Sanders and Clinton into a heap as Washington politicians -- not to mention old -- and distinguish himself as the youthful guy who has never spent a minute in the nation's capitol. The problem with that plan was two fold: (1) it made him too scripted and (2) it felt super-forced. After Clinton and Sanders had a kumbaya moment over the Democratic National Committee data breach that roiled the race over the last 24 hours, O'Malley condemned the bickering between the two. Um, what? O'Malley's low point, however, came when he mentioned that he came from a different generation than the other two candidates on stage -- a not-so-subtle attempt to call Sanders and Clinton old. (Sanders is 74 years old, Clinton is 68; O'Malley is 52 years old.) The crowd got what he was doing -- and booed. O'Malley's status in the race -- way, way, way behind the top two -- makes debates almost too-pressure-filled for him. He looked so desperate to make a mark or make a moment on Saturday night that he couldn't get out of his own way and often came across as unlikable. * Bernie Sanders : Sure, if you already liked the Vermont Senator, nothing you heard in the debate will make you like him any less. But, every Sanders's answer seemed to devolve into shouting and outrage -- not a great look when it comes to persuading on-the-fence voters to be for you. Clinton cut Sanders deeply when she bashed the massive costs associated with his proposals, raising the point -- without exactly raising it -- that Sanders would be a massive risk as the Democratic nominee. On Saturday night, Sanders looked less like a legitimate threat to Clinton and more like a niche candidate operating at the fringes of the party. * Democratic National Committee: There's simply no justification for hosting a debate on a Saturday night six days before Christmas. Unless the goal is to ensure that said debate is lightly-watched and, therefore, any mistakes made by the presumptive frontrunner are lessened. (As I mentioned above, I am not sure why her allies think Clinton needs to be sheltered from debates -- she's outstanding in them.) And, as if that wasn't bad enough, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) had to sit stone-faced -- with a camera trained on her! -- while Sanders excoriated the party committee over its handling of the data breach. Awkward. * ABC : Look. I am an adult. Just tell me when the debate starts. I, like everyone else who planned to watch the debate, was under the impression that 8 pm eastern was when things got going. Except that the first 30 minutes of ABC's coverage was a roundtable of analysts talking about what might happen.

Source http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/winners-and-losers-in-the-3rd-democratic-presidential-debate/ar-BBnKj7V?li=BBnb7Kz