South Africa's corruption-tainted police force gets first female chief

n is whether someone who has no background in policing and the police as an organisation will be able to establish themselves to deal with the many difficulties the police have both internally and externally.

"Her appointment is a vote of no confidence in the senior police management. There are many good, honest and hard-working officers in the senior ranks, and this is a slap in the face. It's humiliating to have someone brought in from outside."

Burger accused the ANC of appointing police commissioners on the basis of allegiance to the party rather than their ability to fight crime. "Part of the problem was the need to transform; it came at a price. They decided the only way they could control the police was to appoint someone from the ranks of the ruling party rather than the police itself.

"It's wasn't even about race: there were some very talented and experienced black and coloured police officers but they chose to appoint someone from the governing party. Once you appoint them, then they make similarly poor appointments."

Iraq bombs kill scores of Shia pilgrims and police

Scenes of devastation after bomb blasts in Baghdad and cities in southern Iraq in which at least 57 people were killed Link to this video
Bombings and shootings targeting Shia Muslim pilgrims in Baghdad and police across Iraq have killed at least 66 people in apparently co-ordinated attacks during a major religious festival.

Violence in Iraq has eased off since the height of the war, but Islamists tied to al-Qaida are still a potent threat, often targeting Shia pilgrims in attempts to inflame the sectarian tensions that drove Iraq close to civil war in 2006 and 2007.

In the latest attacks in the capital, at least 18 people were killed when four bombs struck Shia pilgrims across Baghdad as they gathered to mark the anniversary of the death of the imam Mousa al-Kadhim, a great-grandson of the prophet Muhammad.

One of those blasts killed at least nine people as pilgrims passed through a police checkpoint in central Baghdad.

"A group of pilgrims was walking and passed by a tent offering food and drinks when suddenly a car exploded near them," said Wathiq Muhana, a police officer whose patrol was stationed near the blast in Karrada district.

"People were running away covered with blood, and bodies were scattered on the ground," he said.

Extra security and checkpoints have been in place this week as thousands of pilgrims arrive in Baghdad to meet at a shrine in the capital's northern Kadhimiyah district for the Shia religious festival.

In a separate attack on Wednesday in the mainly Shia southern city of Hilla, police said two car bombs, including one detonated by a suicide bomber, had exploded outside restaurants used by security forces, killing 22 people and wounding 38.

"When a minibus packed with policemen stopped near the restaurants, a car exploded near the bus," said Maitham Sahib, owner of a restaurant in Hilla near the blast. "It's heartbreaking. It is just sirens, and screams of wounded people."

Two more car bombs killed four people in the Shia city of Balad, a car bomb in Kerbala killed three and wounded 17, and another car bomb in Haswa, 30 miles (50km) south of Baghdad, killed one person and wounded four.

Five soldiers were also killed by gunmen in an attack on an army checkpoint in the south of the capital, police said.

Wednesday's attacks came at a sensitive time. On Sunday, at least six people were killed and 38 wounded when two mortar bombs struck a square packed with Shia pilgrims in Baghdad's Kadhimiyah district.

Earlier this month, 26 people were killed and more than 190 wounded when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive-rigged car outside a Shia religious office in the capital.

Al-Qaida's Iraqi affiliate, Islamic State of Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attack on the religious office.

Political tensions have been high in Iraq since the last American troops left in December, with the fragile government – split among Sunni-backed, Shia and ethnic Kurdish blocs – feuding over their power-sharing accord.

The Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is fending off attempts by Sunni, Kurdish and some Shia rivals to organise a vote of no confidence against him. Critics accuse him of trying to consolidate his position and failing to fulfil promises to share power among the blocs.

Syria crisis: Russia denies Hillary Clinton claim over helicopters

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov at this week's press conference in Tehran. Lavrov denies Hillary Clinton's claim, saying the US are supplying arms to Syrian opposition. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Russia has rebuffed US accusations that it is supplying armed helicopters to Syria as the regime of President Bashar al-Assad reported that its forces had defeated rebels in Latakia province.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, flatly denied a claim by his US counterpart Hillary Clinton that the aircraft were being delivered. Lavrov made clear that the supply of what he called "anti-air defence systems" was legitimate.

The US in turn denied Russian claims that it was arming anti-Assad rebels.

"We are not violating any international law in performing these contracts," Lavrov said during a visit to Iran. "They (the US) are providing arms and weapons to the Syrian opposition that can be used in fighting against the Damascus government."

The sharp public exchanges on Syria began on Tuesday when Clinton warned that Russian helicopters would "escalate the conflict quite dramatically".

Evidence is mounting that the Free Syrian Army, the opposition's main armed wing, has started receiving more and better weapons from Saudi Arabia and Qatar that are being delivered via the Turkish border. The US has been described as "co-ordinating" those efforts.

In violence on the ground the Syrian Revolution General Commission meanwhile reported 34 people killed across the country on Wednesday, mostly in shelling of Homs, Deraa and Deir ez-Zor.

Britain's foreign secretary William Hague, is to discuss Syria with Lavrov in a meeting in Pakistan on Thursday and will raise Russia's role in the crisis.

Hague said: "Syria is on the edge of a collapse, or of a deadly sectarian civil war. Of course there is room for debate about what constitutes a full civil war. But I think what we are trying to say is that its on the edge of something even worse."

France's foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, meanwhile echoed a senior UN official in stating explicitly that Syria was now in a state of "civil war". Fabius also said he would call on the UN security council to make mediator Kofi Annan's Syria peace plan mandatory. Annan's six-point plan is all but dead in the absence of a ceasefire or the implementation any of its other elements.

Tuesday's statement by Herve Ladsous, the UN's head of peacekeeping operations, was rejected out of hand by both the Syrian opposition and government.

The Syrian Revolution General Commission, an opposition body, complained that Ladsous's view "does not reflect the reality and does not represent the Syrian people". The announcement, it said, "makes the killer and the victim equal and ignores all the massacres committed by the Assad regime". It also masked "the real demands of the Syrian people who are only asking for freedom and dignity".

There was agreement, for different reasons, from the foreign ministry in Damascus: the remarks by Ladsous, it said, "did not reflect the reality" of what it happening in Syria. That is "war against armed groups that have chosen terrorism".

Syrian state TV reported that government forces have retaken control of the Haffa region near the Mediterranean coast after eight days of shelling and clashes. Hundreds of FSA fighters were believed to have been holed up there and pulled out after intense fighting.

Greek crisis: precarious funding pushes health and social services to extremes

Use of volunteers and donations at state-funded refugee centre and psychiatric hospital reveal impact of low cash and high debts

Immigrant families and homeless people receive food from members of a humanitarian group at a housing complex in Athens, Greece. Photograph: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images

As the volunteers unpack their shopping bags of rice, milk and cooking oil, Goman Badder retreats to the room he lives in with his wife and their one-year-old son. For the 28-year-old Syrian Kurd, the deliveries are a mixed blessing: he is relieved that his family will not go hungry, but humiliated that it has come to this. He had hoped for better things for his son, asleep on the neatly made bed.

"When I left Syria, I felt I didn't want him to be like me," he says. "But I never thought for him it would be like this: people bringing him Pampers and milk. If I'd known it would be like this I would never have brought him to this world."

His friend Salah Muhamed, a Kurdish teacher who fled the "hell" of Syria six months ago, did not mince his words. "In Syria, we will be killed by guns," he says. "Here, we will be killed by the economy."

For the past six months, this state-funded centre for asylum seekers has received no funding from the state. Its 25 staff members have not been paid since January. Due to its debts, the centre has "huge problems" with suppliers and the usual food deliveries stopped two weeks ago.

Some of the 225 residents thought the staff had gone on strike over pay but, as director Vasilis Lyritzis explains, they could simply not go on: "We just stopped cooking because we didn't have anything to cook. The moment that we have food, we cook again."

Even now, the inhabitants of the Lavrio centre, about 40 miles from Athens, are among the most fortunate of Greece's tens of thousands of asylum seekers, most of whom receive no support from the state and sleep rough in large, unsanitary slums in cities such as Athens.

But, as the debt crisis takes its toll on state services and the unpaid bills to suppliers mount up, Badder and Muhamed are being pushed to the extremes. And they are not the only ones. Across the country, some of Greece's most marginalised and vulnerable people who rely directly or indirectly on the state to feed them are now facing the possibility of having to turn to their neighbours for help.

On the island of Leros in the Dodeccanese, the governor of a psychiatric hospital has, in the past two weeks, like Lyritzis, found himself having to plead with suppliers to keep bringing food, despite an almost complete inability to pay them. Yiannis Antartis's suppliers stopped for a week, after which he found enough money to pay them each €15,000 (£12,000) – enough to encourage them to restart but far from enough to cover the hospital's total debts to them of €1.25m.

Antartis believes he has about a month to find money to pay the debts and protect the 400 patients, who have a range of mental illnesses, from depression to dementia and schizophrenia. Owed about €13m by its debt-ridden health insurance funds, the hospital, which is already sending samples to private labs for want of sufficient facilities, will soon be struggling for the basics, he said.

"If we don't receive money within three to five weeks we're going to have a real problem – for food, for medicines, for hospital supplies, bandages, even the basics," he says. "All levels of the hospital are going to start breaking down.

"My primary concern is to receive enough money to pay some outstanding bills in order to keep the hospital going, from the insurance funds, from the state, from wherever, just to be able to keep the hospital going. I am really worried about the fact that the hospital will not be able to function normally if we don't receive payment."

His position will be met with sympathy by the director of a state hospice in the Kypseli neighbourhood of Athens, who said last week that, as well as medicine shortages and an inability to pay energy bills, the institution had had no meat or chicken since 1 June.

Antartis has been the hospital's governor on and off since the 1980s, when it was revealed to be keeping patients naked and chained to their beds. He is adamant the institution bears no semblance to its former self. In 1988, he says, 1,600 patients were "piled up" in wards and looked after by fewer staff than today. Now, 120 of the 400 patients live relatively normal lives outside the hospital.

But, last week, Antartis was so concerned about supplies that he wrote to the health ministry and major political parties warning that patients were being poorly fed. Since then, he has managed to get the supplies coming in again and has met Greece's caretaker health minister, who, he says, showed understanding and promised a €150,000 payment by the end of June.

"But he [the minister] emphasised that the insurance funds do not have any money and that the hospitals have to keep every penny in order to keep going," Antartis says. Given the size of the debts and the interest rates on them, €150,000 "doesn't cover anything".

The inability of health insurance funds to pay their debts has caused chaos in the healthcare system, contributing to a shortage of medicines and the closure of dozens of commercial pharmacies.

Antartis is relieved the hospital managed to resolve – albeit temporarily – the problem with food supplies without the patients realising anything was wrong. But he remains concerned, particularly about medical supplies, as that is one area in which Leros's community, as active and kind as it is, will not be able to help. "I think the local people will help with food," he says. "But even that is going to be a problem at some point because for how long are they going to be able to help?"

One place where Greeks have reportedly already stepped in to fill the gap left by the state is Corinth, where the prison has had food shortages and people have started collecting goods for the inmates. Another is Lavrio, where donations have been keeping food on the table for the asylum seekers and refugees, among whom Lyritzis estimates there are 75-80 children. Some of the volunteers are hardly well-off themselves: Nadia, one of the members of a people's assembly from Athens which dropped off food at the weekend, is on Greece's new unemployment benefit of €360 a month and has had to go back to live with her mother.

"€40 or €50 just means I won't go out for a couple of days," she shrugs, loading bags of groceries into a waiting car.

Lyritzis, an employee of the Hellenic Red Cross which runs the centre, says the finance ministry has been unable to tell him when, or if, its funding might come. He says the centre had an estimated five days of food supplies left and he is in a very bad psychological state.

For Badder, who came to Greece in 2010 after alleged persecution due to his Kurdish ethnicity, that would be good news.

But if the situation is not alleviated, he would like to see the responsibility for his centre fall to a power outside Greece. He says: "The Greek people are very, very good. They look after us. But the Greeks have no money. Why must the Greeks bring us food? We are in Europe, not just Greece."

As the volunteers busied themselves in the courtyard, unpacking tins, toiletries and cartons of milk, he says: "The people here are so nice. We can't tell them: 'Don't bring food because we are ashamed'. We must say 'Thank you'. But we feel bad."

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Part of Keystone XL pipeline to go ahead

(Image: KPA/Zuma/Rex Features )

Remember the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, which Barack Obama rejected last month because environmental concerns hadn't been properly addressed? Well, a chunk of it is going to be built regardless - with Obama's approval.

Canadian company TransCanada will build a pipeline running from Cushing, Oklahoma to Houston and Port Arthur in Texas. According to a statement:

...what had been the Cushing to U.S. Gulf Coast portion of the Keystone XL Project has its own independent value to the marketplace and will be constructed as a stand-alone Gulf Coast Project, not part of the Presidential Permit process. The approximate cost is US$2.3 billion and subject to regulatory approvals, we anticipate the Gulf Coast Project to be in service in mid to late 2013.
In the same statement, TransCanada also announced that it would reapply to construct the remainder of the proposed pipeline.

Given the US government's support for the Oklahoma-Texas pipeline, it seems likely that the rest of Keystone XL will eventually be approved.

The Oklahoma-Texas pipeline will not cross the US-Canada border, so it does not need State Department approval. The Edmonton Journal points out that it still needs to be approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the Clean Water Act, though.

The Oklahoma-Texas section does not include the most controversial part of Keystone XL, which would pass through Nebraska. Environmentalists have raised concerns about the sensitive Nebraska Sand Hills ecosystem, and the nearby Ogallala aquifer that supplies drinking water to people in eight US states .

The Associated Press quoted White House press secretary Jay Carney as saying that Obama approved of the decision to press ahead:

Moving oil from the Midwest to the world-class, state-of-the-art refineries on the Gulf Coast will modernise our infrastructure, create jobs, and encourage American energy production.
Bloomberg explains that the new pipeline will relieve a glut of oil that has built up in Cushing:

The pipeline will help relieve oversupplies that have accumulated in the US Midwest because of a lack of pipeline capacity to carry the oil to refineries on the coast. Cushing is the delivery point for crude oil traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange. A lack of pipeline capacity between Cushing and the Gulf Coast, where most refineries are located, has caused U.S. oil to trade at a discount to imports.
If it goes ahead, Keystone XL would run alongside the existing Keystone pipeline, which carries oil from Alberta, Canada, to Cushing and also to sites in Illinois, and extend it all the way south to the US Gulf coast. The existing and proposed pipelines are shown in this map on the TransCanada website.

Apart from the risk of leaks, Keystone XL is also controversial because of its impact on the climate. The oil it would carry is derived from tar sands, so extracting and processing it requires a lot of energy. As a result, oil from tar sands produces more greenhouse gas than conventional oil.

Last week the European Union voted on a proposal to label fuel oils according to their carbon footprint, which would have effectively banned the import of oil from tar sands into Europe. However the vote ended in deadlock, so the final decision will not come for several months.

Spacecraft assembled for first private shot to ISS

Image: SpaceX)

A private spaceship is one step closer to launching to the International Space Station. SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule and Falcon 9 rocket have been assembled in Florida, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday.

The two will probably launch in late April on an uncrewed mission to test the Dragon capsule's ability to rendezvous and dock with the station. According to Jeff Foust in The Space Review:

The Dragon will carry some nonessential "demonstration cargo" that will be transferred to the ISS. It will also be loaded with station cargo for return to Earth.

Observers will be watching the launch with bated breath. In the wake of last year's retirement of the US space shuttles, the main means of ferrying supplies to the orbital outpost is Russian Progress cargo ships. Unfortunately, a Progress launch failed last year, temporarily grounding all missions to the station. Dragon would be the first commercial craft to attempt to visit the outpost (take an interactive tour of the Dragon capsule).

Earlier this month, NASA's space station programme manager Mike Suffredini said the Dragon launch would occur no earlier than 20 March. "There are no big problems being worked out but a lot of little things to wrap up," he said. Now software checks have pushed the launch back, probably to late April, Foust reports.

A giant among moths

(Image: Sandesh Kadur/naturepl.com)

ATLAS moths (Attacus atlas) are giants of the insect world. They are the largest moths known to exist, with a 25-centimetre wingspan. A common sight in south Asia, they can be found from India all the way to Papua New Guinea.

Photographer Sandesh Kadur spotted this beauty on a trip to document the biodiversity of the eastern Himalayas. Early one morning he was driving through Arunachal Pradesh in the far north-east of India, when he rounded a bend in the road and saw "a ginormous moth" sitting by a pothole.

He got out to take photos, and as he did so the moth went into a defensive posture, spreading its wings and leaning forward to make itself look as big as possible. It remained still for several minutes, so one of Kadur's colleagues was able to step behind it; the moth's wingspan was wider than his face.

As well as the moth's intimidating size, the striking patterns on its wings may also ward off predators. Venomous animals like wasps and poison frogs use similar colours to deter animals. In fact, in China the atlas moth is known as the snake's head moth, because the patterns on the tips of its wings look slightly like the heads of snakes.

Kadur eventually decided that the moth wasn't safe sitting in the road, so he manoeuvred it to the side. Some people are scared of moths but these monsters only live for a couple of weeks as adults and don't eat at all. All their feeding is done during a voracious larval stage when they go from egg to pupa in just four to six weeks - these are very hungry caterpillars indeed.