Hundreds of Kenyan teachers sacked over sex abuse

More than 1,000 teachers have been sacked in Kenya for sexually abusing girls over the past two years, the authorities say.

Senior government official Ahmed Hussein told the BBC that most of the victims were aged between 12 and 15.

He said a nationwide confidential helpline set up to help victims had revealed that the problem was much more widespread than previously thought.

Most of the cases have occurred in rural primary schools.

 Last year, 600 male teachers were dismissed and so far this year 550 teachers have lost their jobs for either kissing, touching or impregnating girls.

"A number of [the teachers] have been taken to court, and they have been sentenced accordingly," Mr Hussein, from the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development, told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

Canada will lead G7 in economic growth: IMF

OTTAWA — Despite the recent slowdown, the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday it still sees Canada will be the leader in economic growth among major industrialized countries this year and next.

The finding is contained in the organization’s latest world economic outlook, released Wednesday, which suggested growth in the emerging markets would advance three times faster than rich nations next year.

The IMF forecast indicated the Canadian economy is set to grow 3.1% this year and 2.7% in 2011, which would be tops among major industrialized economies. Plus, next year’s expected advance of 2.7% would be ahead of the average 2.2% growth anticipated for the other big industrialized economies, such as Japan, the United States and Europe.

The Bank of Canada had anticipated 3.5% growth this year and 2.9% in 2011, although those projections are expected to be revised downward when the central bank releases its updated economic outlook on Oct. 20.

American, Japanese scientists share Nobel Prize for chemistry

STOCKHOLM — An American and two Japanese scientists won the 2010 Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for a tool that makes it easier to build complex chemicals, including those that could help in the fight against cancer.

Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki shared the prize for the development of “palladium-catalysed cross-coupling”, the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

“Palladium-catalysed cross-coupling is used in research worldwide, as well as in the commercial production of, for example, pharmaceuticals and molecules used in the electronics industry,” the committee said.

The tool allows scientists to build complex chemicals such as the carbon-based ones that are the basis of life.

Such chemicals include one that is naturally found in small quantities in a sea sponge, which scientists hope can be used to fight cancer cells.

Thanks to the scientists’ tool, researchers can now artificially produce this substance, called discodermolide.

“In order to create these complex chemicals, chemists need to be able to join carbon atoms together. However, carbon is stable and carbon atoms do not easily react with one another,” the committee said.

It said this meant scientists had to make carbon atoms more active, but this also produced more byproducts when more complex molecules were being created.

“Palladium-catalysed cross coupling solved that problem and provided chemists with a more precise and efficient tool to work with,” the committee added.

The prize of US$1.5 million was the third of this year’s Nobel prizes, following awards for medicine on Monday and for physics on Tuesday.

New Coca-Cola Enterprises shares start trading

NEW YORK —

New shares of Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. opened trading on Monday, reflecting a $10-per-share dividend from the completion Sunday of the $3.4 billion sale of its North American operations to Coca-Cola Co.

THE SPARK: Coca-Cola, the world's biggest soft drink maker, closed on the deal on Sunday. It also includes about $8.8 billion in assumed debt, bringing the transaction's total value to almost $12.3 billion.

Coca-Cola Enterprises bought certain Coca-Cola bottling operations as part of the deal, and its shareholders get stock in a new company and $10 per share. The new CCE is a Coke bottler in Belgium, France, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Enterprises are both based in Atlanta.

THE BIG PICTURE: The transaction is part of a soft drink industry trend to gain more control over distribution. Soft drink makers make concentrate and then sell it to bottlers, who make and distribute the products. By owning bottlers, the companies can better control where their products go and how they are displayed. They are also able to get products to market more quickly.

SHARE ACTION: Coca-Cola Enterprises' stock was trading at $21.90 by midday Monday, down $9.90 from the old shares' $31.80 close, a reflection of the special dividend. The old shares traded in a 52-week range of $18.75 to $31.80.

Supreme Court to hear NASA privacy case

The Supreme Court is set to hear a privacy case against NASA.

More than two dozen engineers and scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued in 2007, saying the background checks invaded their privacy.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that NASA should be blocked from conducting security checks on low-risk employees at JPL.

The space agency appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hear the oral arguments on Tuesday.

The high court's decision in this case could throw into question the background checks routinely done on all federal government workers.

Grenade attack in Mexico injures 12 people

The government is blaming the attack on drug gangs

MONTERREY, Mexico — Assailants tossed a grenade into a square in Mexico's northern business city of Monterrey on Saturday, injuring 12 people in an attack the government blamed on drug gangs.

Unidentified men on foot threw the grenade from the edge of a square where people had gathered in the municipality of Guadalupe, which is part of Monterrey, police said. Four children were among the injured.

"There was a loud explosion and people started screaming and running," a witness, who declined to give her name, told local radio.

The explosion was the fourth from a grenade during the weekend in Monterrey, one of Latin America's premier business cities. No one was injured in the earlier attacks.

Television images showed crying children rushed to the hospital, their heads wrapped with white bandages, but no one was seriously injured, the mayor of Guadalupe Ivonne Alvarez told local newspaper El Norte.

Mexico's Interior Ministry condemned the incident and promised a crackdown. It blamed organized crime for the grenade attack in a reference to drug cartels vying for smuggling routes into the United States and Mexico's home-grown drug markets.

Monterrey had been an oasis of calm but has been sucked into Mexico's drug war since the start of this year. One of the three grenade attacks on Friday across Monterrey came in the center of the city near the U.S. consulate, which had been targeted at least twice with grenades in 2009.

The government blames a split between the powerful Gulf cartel and its former armed wing, the Zetas, for much of the violence, which also has surged in neighboring Tamaulipas since the start of the year.

More than 29,000 people have died in drug violence since President Felipe Calderon launched his army-led offensive on drug cartels in late 2006.

Obama commemorates 9/11 with appeal for tolerance

President Barack Obama appealed to an unsettled nation Saturday to honor the memory of the Sept. 11 attacks by hewing to the values of diversity and tolerance. "We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust," the president declared.

Speaking at the Pentagon, where nine years ago a hijacked plane smashed into the west side of the building and killed 184 people, Obama conjured a solemn remembrance of that horrible day but also spoke strongly in defense of religious freedom.

"As Americans we are not - and never will be - at war with Islam," the president said. "It was not a religion that attacked us that September day - it was al-Qaida, a sorry band of men which perverts religion."

His comments came on a Sept. 11 anniversary unlike others. In years past, the day was devoted to remembrances of the nearly 3,000 who died in jetliner attacks here, in New York City and in Pennsylvania, and to vows to serve in their honor and continue to pursue the terrorists behind the attacks.

This year, the common bonds rekindled by the memory of the attacks threaten to fray amid growing suspicion of Muslims in this country and controversies about a mosque planned near ground zero in New York and a pastor's threat to burn the Muslim holy book.

As Obama, joined by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, laid a wreath at the Pentagon memorial where American Airlines Flight 77 crashed, New York City braced for protests for and against the proposed Islamic cultural center.

Rev. Terry Jones called off his widely denounced plans to burn copies of the Quran, but damage was already done. In Kabul, Afghanistan, protesters set fire to tires in the streets and shouted "Death to America." Obama and Gates had warned that Jones' planned Quran burning threatened U.S. servicemembers and interests abroad.

Against that backdrop Obama spoke forcefully.

"The highest honor we can pay those we lost, indeed our greatest weapon in this ongoing war, is to do what our adversaries fear the most," the president said. "To stay true to who we are, as Americans; to renew our sense of common purpose; to say that we define the character of our country, and we will not let the acts of some small band of murderers who slaughter the innocent and cower in caves distort who we are."

Obama did not mention the New York City mosque, or the Florida pastor, but his message was clear. "We champion the rights of every American, including the right to worship as one chooses - as service members and civilians from many faiths do just steps from here, at the very spot where the terrorists struck this building," he said. The Pentagon houses a chapel where people of different religions can pray.

Obama also has sought to cast Sept. 11 as a day of service to others, and he participated himself by traveling to the Ronald H. Brown Middle School in northeast Washington to take part in Armed Services YMCA: Operation Kid Comfort. At the school, Obama helped paint a multipurpose room, and chatted with volunteers making quilts for children of deployed troops decorated with pictures of servicemembers.

First lady Michelle Obama appeared with Laura Bush in Shanksville, Pa., where the fourth plane crashed after passengers rushed the cockpit. Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, were in New York for the ceremony at ground zero.

The White House said Obama began the day by privately observing a moment of silence at 8:46, the time when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.