KARACHI: A motorcycle bomb exploded Tuesday near the venue of a major political rally in Pakistan's largest city Karachi, killing four people and injuring 42 others, officials said.
The bombing appeared to be targeted at buses carrying supporters of the city's dominant political party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which organised the rally attended by thousands of people.
"The latest report we have collected from hospitals said that four people have been killed and 42 are injured," provincial health minister Saghir Ahmad told AFP, updating the earlier toll of two dead and 25 injured.
Another health official at Karachi's Abbasi Shaheed hospital confirmed the new toll.
"The bomb was planted in a motorcycle," said Asif Ijaz, a senior police official.
Imran Shokat, a police spokesman in the southern Sindh province of which Karachi is the capital, said the motorcycle was parked in a congested neighbourhood near the venue of the rally.
"Bomb disposal experts are investigating but preliminary reports said it was a remote-controlled bomb," Shokat told AFP.
Karachi, the commercial capital of Pakistan with an estimated population of 18 million, is in the grip of a long-running wave of political and sectarian violence.
Its Arabian Sea port is used by the United States and NATO to ship supplies to the war in neighbouring, landlocked Afghanistan.
(Credit: Apple Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)
However walled your garden, rodents still pad around, cockroaches still shuffle.
One can only, therefore, feel sympathy for Apple's new ad for the iPhone 5.
It features the mysterious and wonderful Williams sisters. They are in a dream. They are playing the dreamy Jeff Daniels at ping-pong.
And yet the ad also features the phone's "Do Not Disturb" feature, which users can switch on to silence in-coming calls, alerts, and notifications, or set up to perform such silencing during a preordained period of time. And who would want to be disturbed during such a high-level game of table tennis?
The slightly unfortunate aspect is that, as 9to5Mac glumly recognizes, there were reports overnight that this feature did actually disturb.
By not switching itself off.
The forums at MacRumors, for example, were adorned by iPhone users mystified that they had missed vital events such as, who knows, an invitation to a spontaneous brunch or a call informing them they had removed their pants in public last night.
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The problems was reported in Spain, Australia, and even the home of all things current and disturbing, Brooklyn.
I have contacted Apple to see whether this has been noticed by the company and whether this might be mere operator error or something more disturbing.
There will be some who, excited by the slight disturbance over Apple's maps -- not to mention last year's alarm-clock stumble apparently also caused by the New Year rollover -- will be snorting that this is another example of Cupertino's imperfection.
They will sniff in jest that all these people must have been holding their iPhones wrong when they set them not to disturb.
I prefer to imagine that this is all the work of Siri.
She knew what each of these iPhone owners had been through and done on New Year's Eve.
She just wanted to offer them extra rest before reality knocked upon their foreheads and muttered: "Have you any idea what you put in your ear last night?"
ABIDJAN, Ivory CoastA crowd stampeded after leaving a New Year's fireworks show early Tuesday in Ivory Coast's main city, killing 61 people — many of them children and teenagers — and injuring more than 200, rescue workers said.
Thousands had gathered at the Felix Houphouet Boigny Stadium in Abidjan's Plateau district to see the fireworks. It was only the second New Year's Eve fireworks display since peace returned to this West African nation after a bloody upheaval over presidential elections put the nation on the brink of civil war and turned this city into a battle zone.
With 2013 showing greater promise, people were in the mood to celebrate on New Year's Eve. Families brought children and they watched the rockets burst in the nighttime sky. But only an hour into the new year, as the crowds poured onto the Boulevard de la Republic after the show, something caused a stampede, said Col. Issa Sako of the fire department rescue team. How so many deaths occurred on the broad boulevard and how the tragedy started is likely to be the subject of an investigation.
Many of the younger ones in the crowd went down, trampled underfoot. Most of those killed were between 8 and 15 years old
"The flood of people leaving the stadium became a stampede which led to the deaths of more than 60 and injured more than 200," Sako told Ivory Coast state TV.
Desperate parents went to the city morgue, the hospital and to the stadium to try to find missing children. Mamadou Sanogo was searching for his 9-year-old son, Sayed.
"I have just seen all the bodies, but I cannot find my son," said a tearful Sanogo. "I don't know what to do."
State TV showed a woman sobbing in the back of an ambulance; another was bent over on the side of the street, apparently in pain; and another, barely conscious and wearing only a bra on her upper body, was hoisted by rescuers. There were also scenes of small children being treated in a hospital. One boy grimaced in pain and a girl with colored braids in her hair lay under a blanket with one hand bandaged. The death toll could rise, officials said.
After the sun came up, soldiers were patrolling the site that was littered with victims' clothes, shoes, torn sandals and other belongings. President Alassane Ouattara and his wife Dominique visited some of the injured in the hospital. Mrs. Ouattara leaned over one child who was on a bed in a crowded hospital ward and tried to console the youngster. The president pledged that the government would pay for their treatment, his office said.
The government organized the fireworks to celebrate Ivory Coast's peace, after several months of political violence in early 2011 following disputed elections.
This is not Ivory Coast's first stadium tragedy. In 2009, 22 people died and over 130 were injured in a stampede at a World Cup qualifying match at the Houphouet Boigny Stadium, prompting FIFA, soccer's global governing body, to impose a fine of tens of thousands of dollars on Ivory Coast's soccer federation. The stadium, which officially holds 35,000, was overcrowded at the time of the disaster.
A year later, two people were killed and 30 wounded in a stampede at a municipal stadium during a reggae concert in Bouake, the country's second-largest city. The concert was organized in the city, held by rebels at the time, to promote peace and reconciliation.
Ivory Coast is the world's largest cocoa producer, growing more than 37 percent of the world's annual crop of cocoa beans, which are used to make chocolate.
The students and staff of Sandy Hook Elementary School will return to school on Thursday for the first time since the shooting rampage that left 20 young students and six adults dead. The students will be in a new building where their old classrooms have been completely recreated.
Instead of returning to the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., they will be going to the building that used to be the Chalk Hill Middle School in Monroe, about six miles away.
Sandy Hook school was shut since Adam Lanza carried out his massacre shortly before Christmas.
Since principal Dawn Hochsprung was one of the victims of the shooting, the school will be led by interim principal Donna Page. Page was the school's prior principal who retired in 2010.
"Please know the inspiration you and your children have been to my staff and me as we connect with you at Chalk Hill," Page wrote in a letter posted on the school's website. "Be assured that the towns of Monroe and Newtown are working night and day to ensure the facility is safe, secure, and fully operational for our return," Page wrote.
The school will host a walk-through for families on Wednesday and "Opening Day" will be Thursday.
"I want to reassure you that we understand many parents may need to be near their children on their first day(s) of school and you will be welcome," Page wrote.
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The school is encouraging students to take the bus in order to help them return to familiar routines and said parents may come to the school's classrooms or auditorium throughout the day after the 9:07 a.m. opening. They are asking that no more than one adult family member accompany each child in order "to ensure a safe and secure environment."
In addition to a parental presence at the school, comfort dogs will be returning to brighten the day. Small armies of golden retrievers spread out all over Newtown in the days following the shooting to comfort mourners young and old.
Chicago's Lutheran Church Charities' K-9 Parish Comfort Dogs were in Newtown after the shooting and are traveling back to Connecticut today. Nine dogs and their handlers gathered at their building at 1 a.m. this morning to board a caravan of one RV and two vans heading to Connecticut.
"The community of Newtown will be going through the healing process for a very long time," the group wrote on their website. "The LCC K-9 Comfort dogs will be returning to Newtown...They will be there to greet children as they return to school."
The rest of the Newtown school district resumes classes on Wednesday.
Furniture and supplies from Sandy Hook were moved to Chalk Hill in order to recreate the classrooms just as they were.
Teachers photographed their classrooms at Sandy Hook in order to replicate everything about them, from the pictures on the walls to the crayons left on the students' desks. This is all part of an effort to make the students feel as comfortable as possible.
Workers completely retrofitted the former middle school to fit the needs of its young students, including tearing out bathrooms that were made for teenagers and rebuilding them for elementary-aged kids.
New security systems are being installed at Chalk Hill school, and Newtown Councilman Steve Vavrek told ABC News that the school will be "the safest school in America."
For a school that has gone through so much, moving forward does not mean forgetting.
"I want parents and families enduring the loss of their precious children to know their loved ones are foremost in our hearts and minds as we move forward," Page wrote. "Your strength and compassion has been, and will continue to be an inspiration to me and countless others as we work to honor the memory of your precious children and our beloved staff."
ABIDJAN (Reuters) - About 60 people were crushed to death in a stampede outside a stadium in Ivory Coast's main city of Abidjan after a New Year's Eve fireworks display, the government said on Tuesday.
The incident took place near Felix Houphouet Boigny Stadium where a crowd had gathered to watch fireworks, emergency officials said.
One of the injured, speaking to Reuters at a hospital, said security forces had arrived to break up the crowd, triggering a panic in which many people fell over and were trampled.
"The provisional death toll is 60 and there are 49 injured," Interior Minister Hamed Bakayoko said in a statement broadcast on national television.
President Alassane Ouattara, visiting injured people at the hospital, called the incident a national tragedy and said an investigation was underway to determine what happened.
A Reuters correspondent said blood stains and abandoned shoes littered the scene outside the stadium on Tuesday morning.
"My two children came here yesterday. I told them not to come but they didn't listen. They came when I was sleeping. What will I do?" said Assetou Toure, a cleaner.
She did not know if her children had escaped unhurt.
The incident was the worst of its kind in Abidjan since 2010, when a stampede at a stadium during a football match killed 18 people.
Ivory Coast, once a stable economic hub for West Africa, is struggling to recover from a 2011 civil war in which more than 3,000 people were killed.
(Reporting by Loucoumane Coulibaly and Alain Amontchi; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
WASHINGTON: The US Treasury said the country would hit its debt ceiling on Monday as expected, forcing it to take measures to keep funding the government while political leaders battle over the deficit.
The Treasury said it would adjust its handling of civil service pension fund assets to be able to keep operating under the $16.394 trillion borrowing limit without slashing federal spending, suggesting it could do this for at least two months.
"We will reach the statutory debt limit today," a Treasury official told reporters.
In an official letter to Congress, the Treasury detailed the extraordinary measures it would undertake to keep the government afloat, which would last to February 28, 2013.
The statement came as Democrats and Republicans continued to joust over measures to correct the country's deep deficit, with a last-minute deal in the works late Monday to avert the steep tax increases of the fiscal cliff.
But the deal appeared not to include any increase in the congressionally-mandated official debt ceiling, as President Barack Obama had demanded.
That left open the possibility of another showdown like that of July 2011 over how to bridge the fiscal deficit and reduce the debt load.
The brinksmanship over the ceiling last year led to Standard & Poor's cutting the US's top-level AAA credit rating for the first time in history, putting it at AA+ with a "negative" outlook.
On Friday S&P said that any deal to fix the fiscal cliff package of economy-crunching tax hikes and spending cuts would not help the country's credit rating.
In 2011, S&P said, its downgrade was rooted in "the political brinkmanship of recent months (that) highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable".
"We believe that this characterisation still holds," it said Friday.
Mobile is key for any organization that wants to capture the attention of Americans -- even for an institution that seems as antiquated as the public library system.
The number of Americans using mobile devices to access library Web sites has more than doubled in the last three years, according to a Pew Research Center report released today.
Based on a survey of 2,300 people in October and November, Pew determined that 13 percent of Americans ages 16 and older go to a library Web site using a mobile device. That's substantially more than the meager number of people who used mobile devices to view library sites three years ago. A survey conducted in 2009 found that 6 percent of Americans had contributed to library mobile traffic.
While a good chunk of Americans still own, and use, their library cards to borrow materials, the Pew study shows that only 25 percent of Americans ages 16 or older visited a library Web site in the last year. Most visitors -- 82 percent -- searched the site's catalog for materials. (This includes audio books, e-books, CDs, and DVDs.)
Other popular library services accessed included:
• 72 percent looked for basic information like hours of operation, branch location, or directions;
• 62 percent reserved materials;
• 51 percent, particularly members aged 30 to 40 and those with young children, renewed materials;
• 51 percent, particularly members aged 18 to 29, used an online database.
LAKE FOREST, Ill. The Chicago Bears fired coach Lovie Smith on Monday after the team missed the playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons.
Smith was informed of the decision by general manager Phil Emery on the day after the Bears beat Detroit to finish 10-6 but still didn't make the playoffs.
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Smith led the Bears to a Super Bowl, but also saw his team collapse in the second half of the past two seasons. Hired in 2004, Smith led the Bears to three division titles, two NFC title games and a 2007 Super Bowl appearance in his nine seasons. His record is 81-63, and he leaves with one year left on his contract.
The Bears scheduled a news conference Tuesday to discuss the move.
Even though Chicago closed with a win, the Bears needed a loss by Minnesota to get into the playoffs. The Vikings, though, beat Green Bay to clinch a postseason spot, leaving Chicago as the second team since the postseason expanded to 12 teams to miss out after a 7-1 start. The other was Washington in 1996.
CBS Sports NFL Insider Jason La Canfora reported Sunday that Smith's tenuous hold on his job "would be further imperiled should his team fail to get into the postseason."
But Smith, who had one year remaining on his current deal, shouldn't have any trouble finding work. League sources told La Canfora that Smith should land head-coaching interviews with other NFL teams.
Smith's record ranks third on the Bears' all-time list, behind George Halas and Mike Ditka.
The highlight of his tenure was the run to the title game that ended with a loss to the Indianapolis Colts. It was the first time two black coaches met for the championship, with Smith going against his mentor Tony Dungy.
The Bears made the playoffs just three times and posted three postseason victories under Smith. The 2010 team beat Seattle after the Seahawks won their division with a 7-9 record, but the Bears lost to Green Bay in the NFC title game at Soldier Field.
There was speculation Smith would be let go following the 2011 team's collapse, but he got one more year while general manager Jerry Angelo was fired.
Ultimately, the struggles on offense did him in.
Known for solid defenses, Smith oversaw a unit that was consistently effective and at times ranked among the league's best with stars such as Brian Urlacher, Lance Briggs and later Julius Peppers. Smith emphasized taking the ball away from the opposition, and no team did it more than the Bears with 310 during his tenure.
But on the other side, it was a different story.
Smith went through four offensive coordinators in Terry Shea, Ron Turner, Mike Martz and Mike Tice. He never could find the right formula, even as the Bears acquired stars such as quarterback Jay Cutler and receiver Brandon Marshall over the years.
The offensive line has struggled in a big way over the past few seasons after age took its toll on a group that was a strength during the 2005 and 2006 playoff seasons. The Bears were never able to replenish, spending first-round picks on Chris Williams (2008) and Gabe Carimi (2011) that did not pan out.
Williams had his contract terminated in October, ending a disappointing run, and Carimi struggled this season after missing most of his rookie year with a knee injury.
While Angelo took the fall after last season, Smith was not without blame in the personnel issues over the years. He pushed to bring in former Rams offensive lineman Orlando Pace and safety Adam Archuleta, players who succeeded in St. Louis when Smith was the defensive coordinator there but were busts with the Bears.
He had no bigger supporter than team matriarch Virginia McCaskey, but the fans seemed split on him. To some, he was a picture of calm, a coach who never lost his composure and never criticized his players in public, the anti-Ditka if you will.
History suggests fans who are clamoring for a high-profile replacement such as Bill Cowher or Jon Gruden might be disappointed. The last time the Bears went with an experienced NFL head coach was when Halas returned to the sideline in 1958.
They might, however, go with an offensive-minded coach for the first time since Mike Ditka was fired after the 1992 season, given the issues in that area.
That the Bears would be in this spot seemed unthinkable after they ripped Tennessee 51-20 on Nov. 4. They were sailing along at 7-1 and eyeing a big playoff run after collapsing the previous season, with the defense taking the ball away and scoring at an eye-opening rate to compensate for a struggling offense, but the schedule took a tougher turn.
They dropped back-to-back games to Houston and San Francisco and five of six in all before closing out with wins at Arizona and Detroit. Injuries mounted along the way, and what looked like a playoff run slipped from their grasp, just as it did after a promising start in 2011.
That year, they won seven of their first 10 only to wind up at 8-8 after a monumental collapse sparked by a season-ending injury to Cutler.
While Angelo was fired, Smith got spared and Emery took the job with a mandate to keep the coach at least one more year.
He quickly went to work retooling the roster, landing Marshall in a blockbuster trade with Miami that reunited Cutler with his favorite target in Denver.
He also added depth in other areas, bringing in Jason Campbell as the backup quarterback after Caleb Hanie failed the previous season and teaming running back Michael Bush in the backfield with Matt Forte.
All those moves sent expectations soaring. The results were awfully familiar, though.
President Obama said an 11th-hour agreement to avert year-end tax hikes on 98 percent of Americans is "within sight" but not yet complete with just hours to go before the nation reaches the so-called fiscal cliff.
"There are still issues left to resolve but we're hopeful Congress can get it done," Obama said at a midday White House news conference. "But it's not done."
Congressional and White House negotiators have forged the contours of an agreement that would extend current tax rates for households making $450,000 or less; raise the estate tax from 35 to 40 percent for estates larger than $5 million; and prevent the Alternative Minimum Tax from hammering millions of middle-class workers, sources said.
The deal would also extend for one year unemployment insurance benefits set to expire Tuesday, and avert a steep cut to Medicare payments for doctors.
"I can report that we've reached an agreement on the all the tax issues," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in an afternoon speech on the Senate floor.
Both sides remained at odds on what to do about the other significant piece of the "fiscal cliff" -- the more than $1 trillion of automatic cuts to defense and domestic programs set to begin tomorrow.
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The White House has proposed a three-month delay of the cuts to allow more time to hash out details for deficit reduction, while many Senate Democrats want a flat one-year delay. Republicans insist that some spending cuts should be implemented now as part of any deal.
"In order to get the sequester moved, you're going to have to have real, concrete spending cuts," Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said. "[Without that], I don't know how it passes the House."
Vice President Joe Biden and McConnell, R-Ky., have been locked in behind-the-scenes negotiations for much of the day, sources said, following several "good" conversations that stretched late into Sunday night.
"We are very, very close," McConnell said today. "We can do this. We must do this."
If a deal is reached between Biden and McConnell, members in both chambers would still need to review it and vote on it later today. Passage is far from guaranteed.
"This is one Democrat that doesn't agree with that at all," Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin said of the tentative deal. "No deal is better than a bad deal, and this looks like a very bad deal the way this is shaping up."
"I don't see how you get something voted on today," Rogers said. "Even if they get a handshake deal today, you have to put the whole thing together and that's probably not going to happen before midnight. So it would make sense to roll into tomorrow to do that."
Failure of Congress to act on a tax measure by Tuesday morning would trigger income tax hikes on all Americans. The average family would pay an extra $3,446 in 2013 under the higher rates, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Regardless of the "cliff," virtually all workers are due to see less in their paychecks starting in January when the temporary 2 percent payroll tax cut will expire.
More than $1 trillion in automatic spending cuts to defense and domestic programs will also begin to take effect later this week unless Congress delays or replaces them.
"It is absolutely inexcusable that all of us find ourselves in this place at this time," Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said Sunday night on the Senate floor.
"Something has gone terribly wrong when the biggest threat to our American economy is our American Congress," he said, echoing a frustration shared by many Americans.
Both sides say the cost of failure is high.
"If we are not able to reach an agreement, it will be dire," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "Probably at least another million jobs lost, an unemployment rate over 9 percent, and putting us back into recession."
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department made a "grievous mistake" in keeping the U.S. mission in Benghazi open despite inadequate security and increasingly alarming threat assessments in the weeks before a deadly attack by militants, a Senate committee said on Monday.
A report from the Senate Homeland Security Committee on the September 11 attacks on the U.S. mission and a nearby CIA annex, in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans died, faulted intelligence agencies for not focusing tightly enough on Libyan extremists.
It also faulted the State Department for waiting for specific warnings instead of improving security.
The committee's assessment, "Flashing Red: A Special Report On The Terrorist Attack At Benghazi," follows a scathing report by an independent State Department accountability review board that resulted in a top security official resigning and three others at the department being relieved of their duties.
Joseph Lieberman, an independent senator who chairs the committee, said that in thousands of documents it reviewed, there was no indication that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had personally denied a request for extra funding or security for the Benghazi mission. He said key decisions were made by "midlevel managers" who have since been held accountable.
Republican Senator Susan Collins said it was likely that others needed to be held accountable, but that decision was best made by the Secretary of State, who has the best understanding "of how far up the chain of command the request for additional security went."
The attacks and the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens put diplomatic security practices at posts in risky areas under scrutiny and raised questions about whether intelligence on militant activity in the region was adequate.
The Senate report said the lack of specific intelligence of an imminent threat in Benghazi "may reflect a failure" by intelligence agencies to focus closely enough on militant groups with weak or no operational ties to al Qaeda and its affiliates.
"With Osama bin Laden dead and core al Qaeda weakened, a new collection of violent Islamist extremist organizations and cells have emerged in the last two to three years," the report said. That trend has been seen in the "Arab Spring" countries undergoing political transition or military conflict, it said.
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The report recommended that U.S. intelligence agencies "broaden and deepen their focus in Libya and beyond, on nascent violent Islamist extremist groups in the region that lack strong operational ties to core al Qaeda or its main affiliate groups."
Neither the Senate report nor the unclassified accountability review board report pinned blame for the Benghazi attack on a specific militant group. The FBI is investigating who was behind the assaults.
President Barack Obama, in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, said the United States had "very good leads" about who carried out the attacks. He did not provide details.
The Senate committee said the State Department should not have waited for specific warnings before acting on improving security in Benghazi.
It also said it was widely known that the post-revolution Libyan government was "incapable of performing its duty to protect U.S. diplomatic facilities and personnel," but the State Department failed to fill the security gap.
"Despite the inability of the Libyan government to fulfill its duties to secure the facility, the increasingly dangerous threat assessments, and a particularly vulnerable facility, the Department of State officials did not conclude the facility in Benghazi should be closed or temporarily shut down," the report said. "That was a grievous mistake."
The Senate panel reviewed changing comments made by the Obama administration after the attack, which led to a political firestorm in the run-up to the November presidential election and resulted in U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice withdrawing her name from consideration to replace Clinton, who is stepping down early next year.
Rice had said her initial comments that the attack grew out of a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam film were based on talking points provided by intelligence agencies.
Lieberman said it was not the job of intelligence agencies to formulate unclassified talking points and they should decline such requests in the future.
The report said the original talking points included a line saying "we know" that individuals associated with al Qaeda or its affiliates participated in the attacks. But the final version had been changed to say: "There are indications that extremists participated," and the reference to al Qaeda and its affiliates was deleted.
The report said that while James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had offered to provide the committee with a detailed chronology of how the talking points were written and evolved, this had still not been delivered to Capitol Hill because the administration had spent weeks "debating internally" whether or not it should turn over information considered "deliberative" to Congress.
