■ Venezuela
Chavez rallies supporters
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez rallied tens of thousands of supporters onto the streets of Caracas on Sunday as he kicked off an electoral campaign ahead of an August recall referendum on his five-year rule. In a river of bright red flags and banners, Chavez supporters packed a major Caracas avenue as bands blasted out salsa, folk songs and political slogans in support of his self-styled revolution for the poor. After a year-long opposition campaign, electoral authorities last week ruled they had secured a recall vote against Chavez, a left-leaning ex-army officer portrayed by foes as a authoritarian strongman keen to copy Cuban communism.
■ DR Congo
Peacekeepers killed
Two UN peacekeepers were killed and nine wounded in an ambush in the volatile east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said Sunday. The peacekeepers, all South African, were shot at by unknown gunmen about 40km north of the town of Goma, said a spokesperson for the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo. Witnesses told UN officials that the assailants were extremists from the Hutu ethnic group, the BBC reported. The UN could not confirm the identity of the attackers. Hutu extremists have waged war in the region since leading the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
■ France
Rape and murder trial opens
A Spanish drifter was due to go on trial in western France yesterday for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old British schoolgirl at a Brittany youth hostel nearly eight years ago. Francisco Arce Montes, 54, is alleged to have broken into the hostel in Pleine-Fougeres on July 18, 1996 and suffocated Caroline Dickinson as he sexually assaulted her in a dormitory. Arce Montes was eventually arrested in the US in March 2001 after committing a sexual assault in a Miami hotel. He was identified only thanks to a US police officer who read an article about the Dickinson case while on holiday in London and suggested a link. Prosecutors say that for 15 years Arce Montes was a serial sexual predator on young girls during lengthy travels through Europe and South America.
■ Germany
Universe horn-shaped?
Scientists in Germany believe the universe could be shaped like a horn or trumpet. A complex mathematical model called a Picard topology best fits recent observations of the "echo" left by the Big Bang at the dawn of creation. According to the model, the cosmos is stretched out into a long funnel, with one end flaring out into a bell. According to the theory from a group of German physicists led by Frank Steiner at the University of Ulm, the "trumpet" is infinitely long, but so narrow that it has a finite volume. At the other end the horn flares out, but not forever. If a spaceship were able to fly towards the flared end, at some point it would end up flying back in on the other side of the horn.
■ United States
J-Lo weds again
Call them the new Latino superstar couple. Actress-singer Jennifer Lopez has married Latin crooner Marc Anthony in a quiet ceremony in her Los Angeles home, according to US media reports. The wedding came just five months after the end of Lopez' relationship with actor Ben Affleck, and only a week after Anthony finalized his divorce from former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres. It is Lopez third marriage, and the second for Anthony.
RSS