Dozens of airport in Europe are Closed: Air traffic woes

Authorities say a volcanic ash cloud sweeping across Europe will continue to disrupt air travel this weekend.

Analysts estimate the chaos is costing the industry some 150 million euros per day.

Air traffic controllers say 28,000 flights normally operate daily in Europe. Just 11,000 took off on Friday.

A volcano in Iceland erupted on Wednesday, spewing out an ash cloud that is drifting eastwards across the continent.

Euronews correspondents at Brussels Zaventem airport and London Heathrow said check-in areas were completely deserted as officials cancelled all flights.

The shutdown of northern Europe’s airspace is also having a knock-on affect across the continent. There were bottlenecks at Istanbul airport on Friday where passengers face at least another 24 hours of delays.

National carrrier Turkish Airlines cancelled more than 80 flights to 14 countries over safety fears.

More than 1,000 dead in China quake

Originally used for a horse racing festival, a field on China’s remote and mountainous Tibetan plateau is being used as a temporary shelter for some who survived Wednesday’s deadly earthquake.

A lack of supplies and medical facilities mean tough conditions for those who have already lost their homes, belongings and, in many cases, loved ones.

Official Chinese media sources are now reporting more than 1,100 lives lost in the 6.9 magnitude quake, its epicentre in Yushu county. Some survivors say people from outside the quake-hit zone have been stealing tents destined for them.

But as tensions rise, rescue teams have found more survivors in the rubble.

As heavy equipment starts to arrive, Tibetan monks continue to use their bare hands to help. But with nearly 300 people still missing, as time passes, the chances of finding anyone else alive are diminishing.

Bhutto murder investigation flawed: UN

Pakistani police deliberately failed to properly investigate the 2007 assassination of former prime minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto — a political murder that could have been prevented, a UN report says.

A special United Nations commission began looking into the assassination last July as part of a deal with the Pakistani government. It delivered its conclusions Thursday afternoon.

"There was little to no focus placed on investigating those further up the hierarchy in the planning, the financing and the execution of the assassination," Chile's UN ambassador, Heraldo Munoz, who chaired the commission, said at a news conference.

Munoz also said the Pakistani government "failed in its primary responsibility to provide protection" to Bhutto on the day of her death, despite clear warnings of threats on her life.

Bhutto, whose family constituted a political dynasty in Pakistan, served as prime minister from 1988-1990 and 1993-96 before she went into exile amid corruption allegations. She returned to her homeland in October 2007 to lead the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party in a parliamentary election campaign.

On Dec. 27, 2007, Bhutto had just finished addressing thousands of supporters at a rally in the city of Rawalpindi, about 18 kilometres south of Islamabad, when a man stepped from the crowd and shot her before blowing himself up. Bhutto was hit in the neck and chest, and 23 other people died in the ensuing suicide blast.

The government at the time of Bhutto's murder, led by President Pervez Musharraf, blamed the killing on Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani militant commander with reported links to al-Qaeda. Officials at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency also said Mehsud was the chief suspect.

But the Pakistan People's Party repeatedly hinted that Musharraf or his allies were involved and demanded a UN probe, asserting it was the only way the whole truth would be revealed.

Munoz on Thursday refrained from directly inculpating Musharraf, but he said a new, proper criminal investigation into Bhutto's death needs to look at not only the possible involvement of al-Qaeda, Mehsud and the Taliban but also the Pakistani establishment, including the military, intelligence agencies and the country's business elite.

"The criminal investigation of the assassination … must include a focus on those who might have been involved," Munoz said. "It should follow all leads and explore all reasonable hypotheses."

'Hindered and prejudiced'

The UN report levels 15 major criticisms at the Pakistani government's actions around the Bhutto assassination, including that the subsequent murder investigation was deliberately slipshod.

Video footage of Benazir Bhutto's last moments shows a man in a crowd aiming a gun (circled) at the Pakistani opposition leader. A suicide bomb went off seconds later. (CBC)

Pakistani officials announced just 24 hours after the killing that Mehsud was their primary suspect, "well before" it was reasonable to do so, the UN report says. This "hindered and prejudiced the subsequent investigation," Munoz said, adding that, to this day, police still have not seriously rethought whether Mehsud was involved, despite his denials.

The police probe was also marred by the involvement of the country's intelligence agencies, which meddled in crime-scene evidence gathering and drew hasty conclusions about the culprits that "pre-empted, prejudiced and hindered the subsequent investigation," Munoz said.

"The pervasive reach, control and clandestine role of intelligence agencies in Pakistani society," he continued, "has undermined the rule of law and distorted civil-military relations. At the same time it has contributed to widespread public mistrust."

The UN panel concludes that the assassination is still "shrouded in mystery and controversy" and desperately needs a fresh criminal investigation to end continuing impunity.

Police in Pakistan arrested five suspects, including a 15-year-old boy, in the months following the incident, alleging that they were part of a hit team of 12 militants. Three of the remaining conspirators are now dead, while four are at large, Pakistani officials say. Mehsud was assassinated last summer by the CIA.

In the wake of Bhutto's death, her party won parliamentary elections and eventually forced Musharraf to resign. Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, became president in September 2008.

Tea Party features 'core group' against him: Obama

President Barack Obama says he believes the Tea Party is built around a "core group" of people who question whether he is a U.S. citizen and believe he is a socialist.

But beyond that, Obama tells NBC he recognizes the movement involves "folks who have legitimate concerns" about the national debt and whether the government is taking on too many difficult issues simultaneously.

In an interview broadcast Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show, Obama said he feels "there's still going to be a group at their core that question my legitimacy." But he said he didn't want to paint Tea Party activists "in broad brushes" and he hopes to win over members who have "mainstream, legitimate concerns."

US mom: Daughter held in Ireland 'lost her mind'

Before her daughter disappeared last fall, Christine Mott recalls that the 31-year-old who had been held in connection with an alleged assassination plot announced she had converted to Islam and told her family they'd go to hell if they didn't follow in her steps.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez also began talking about Jihad with her Muslim stepfather and spent most of her time online as she withdrew from her family, Mott said.

"We were enemies," Christine Mott said. "We couldn't even speak to each other."

Last year, on Sept. 11, Paulin-Ramirez left Leadville, Colo., an old silver mining town west of Denver that was Colorado's second-largest city during its heyday. She took her 6-year-old son with her, her mother said.

A U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Saturday that Paulin-Ramirez had been detained in Ireland in connection with an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had offended many Muslims.

Irish police said later Saturday that they had released without charge an American woman, who they didn't identify, and three others arrested in Ireland over an alleged plot to assassinate the cartoonist, Lars Vilks.

Paulin-Ramirez's arrest is one of four developments in the past week that have involved Americans in alleged terror plots abroad.

Al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn appeared in a video, Sharif Mobley of New Jersey tried to escape his detainment in Yemen, and Colleen LaRose, who allegedly went by the name "Jihad Jane" to recruit others online to kill Vilks, was named in a federal terror indictment.

Smoking as she sat on her living room couch in Leadville, Christine Mott said she hadn't eaten in days. The 59-year-old described her daughter as a troubled single mother who had the "mentality of an abused woman" and who, in trying to escape her loneliness, may have spiraled into the depths of Islamic extremism.

Mott told The Associated Press that she learned of her daughter's arrest in the case from the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.

Denver FBI officials said Saturday they couldn't confirm that the FBI had contacted Mott about the case.

Paulin-Ramirez told her family after she left in September that she went to Ireland with her 6-year-old son and married an Algerian whom she met online, Mott said.

Before abruptly leaving Colorado, Paulin-Ramirez had been a straight-A nursing student and had worked at a clinic in Edwards, about 40 miles west of Leadville, her mother said. She moved to Leadville from Denver six years ago. Phone calls to the clinic in Edwards went unanswered Saturday.

Mott said her daughter told her family during Easter last year that she converted to Islam, and renamed her son. Mott said her daughter was teaching him to hate Christians as she grew more distant from her family.

When she discussed jihad with her stepfather, George Mott, who has been a Muslim for more than 40 years, she told him "she'd strap a bomb for the cause," Christine Mott said.

She said she believes her daughter was lonely and "got sucked in" and brainwashed by other people.

"To go blow somebody up?" said Paulin-Ramirez's mother, who is not Muslim. "That's never been Islam."

Growing up, Paulin-Ramirez was "the kid in the class everyone picked on and made fun of," Mott said. She was married three times before she left for Ireland, and her first husband used to beat her, she said.

Her second husband, the 6-year-old's father, was an illegal immigrant from Mexico and was deported years ago, Mott said.

Paulin-Ramirez liked going on fishing and camping trips but grew distant before her departure, Mott said. She spent much of her time on the computer, she said.

Qualys Launches Free Website Scanning Service

QualysGuard Malware Detection employs behavioral analysis
Qualys, a global provider of on-demand vulnerability scanning and standards compliance certification, has launched a new malware detection service aimed at webmasters. Named QualysGuard Malware Detection, the free service can identify infections in Web pages and alert website owners.
Web infections have risen up to become one of the major conduits of malware distribution on the Internet. Tens of thousands of legit Web pages are compromised each day and riddled with malicious IFrames or scripts that load exploit cocktails from remote servers.

The purpose of these attacks is generally to silently install malware onto visitors' computers, a technique known as a drive-by-download. This is done by exploiting vulnerabilities in outdated versions of popular software such as Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Most of the times, websites are infected through cross-site scripting weaknesses or SQL injection vulnerabilities, but other methods, such as using stolen FTP credentials, have also been observed. While the new service announced by Qualys at the RSA conference on Monday will not determine how the website was compromised, it promises to detect any suspicious behavior on websites with a low false positive rate.
QualysGuard Malware Detection uses two methods of analysis – static and behavioral. The static type involves scanning the source code for known malware patterns, while for the behavioral analysis, the Web page is loaded with a vulnerable browser in a virtual environment and observed.

The service will scan websites on a daily basis and will notify the admin of any suspicious behavior or code snippets. "We created QualysGuard Malware Detection as a way to fight against cybercrime and to make the Web a safer place for everyone. This is a comprehensive free solution that arms businesses of all sizes to monitor malware threats on their web sites and take steps to remediate vulnerabilities," commented Qualys' Chairman and CEO, Philippe Courtot.

Public Wi-Fi Connections to Be a Thing of the Past in the UK

Pro-copyright lobbyists backed by old media-content companies, meaning mostly movie studios and record labels, are trying to change copyright law all over the world in order to prop up their obsolete business models. And just because they don't get any luck on the web, they want to make sure the experience is just as miserable for the rest of us. The latest example is the attempt to outlaw public Wi-Fi's in the UK lest they become a haven for hardened criminals like p2p users.

Tucked away in the hotly disputed Digital Economy Bill (DEB), which is filled with controversial measures not the least of which is the provision to disconnect repeated illegal file-sharing offenders, the so-called 'three-strikes' rule is another measure that defies common sense, will hurt businesses and regular people alike, but has media execs rubbing their hands in joyous anticipation.

According to official advice released last week, small businesses, universities and even libraries won't be exempted from the provisions of the DEB, which basically makes ISPs responsible for what their users download or upload or at least for regulating that. This means that, if someone were to download Avatar from a BitTorrent site by using a free Wi-Fi connection offered by a local pub, a very likely thing to happen, the pub in question would be liable for the crime.

If this goes through, most cafes and other small establishments offering free Internet connections to lure in customers would have to stop, since the alternative, setting up a system that registers and tracks all the users, is not only highly impracticable, but also prohibitively expensive. So, no more free Internet.

The misguided logic behind the move is that, if these operators were allowed to offer open Wi-Fi and not be liable for any presumable infringements, it would create a loop-hole in the system, which merciless pirates would abuse to get their kicks.

Anyone with a modicum of tech literacy or just plain common sense, in fact, anyone who has ever used a free Wi-Fi connection realizes how out-of-touch these media-industry people must be if they imagine anyone is going to spend two hours at a coffee shop sharing a 2 Mbps connection with 20 other people to get the latest Lady Gaga album. They'd probably spend more on the coffee than they would buying the album from iTunes or, better yet, buying a Spotify premium account.