The families of the victims of the serial killer known as BTK — bind, torture, kill — on Wednesday heard and saw in graphic detail the depravity of the crimes he committed over more than 30 years. Dennis Rader terrorised and taunted the residents of Wichita, Kansas, committing 10 murders and sending rambling messages and poems to news outlets and the police.
A 4 200-year-old hoard of gold, comparable to the fabulous treasures of Troy, has been found in Bulgaria to the delight of archaeologists desperate to beat looters to tombs in the former communist country. The miniature pieces were unearthed in an ancient tomb in Dabene, 120km east of the capital, Sofia.
The British director Paul Greengrass is to direct a film based on the events of 9/11, the third film project by a major Hollywood studio to tackle the subject. With the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, Hollywood and some television networks are putting aside the reticence they have shown in dealing with the events of 2001.
Two car bombs turned a Baghdad bus station into a slaughterhouse on Wednesday and a third bomb ambushed emergency services, killing at least 38 people and wounding dozens. The coordinated strikes during the morning rush hour shattered a relative lull in the violence and were intended to maximise sectarian tension.
It was to be his last day in Gaza, but Sagi Ifrach planted himself on the roof of the only home he has ever known yesterday morning and declared that it would take the entire Israeli army to move him. His parents and siblings had left two days earlier, resigned to the futility of resisting Ariel Sharon’s determination to clear Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Israel’s dissolution of its settlements in the Gaza Strip as an irrelevancy, as some supporters of the Palestinian cause are prone to do. There is a powerful symbolism to the spectacle of Israeli troops cracking down on recalcitrant settlers, and in the fact that the architect of the withdrawals, was a prime mover behind the settlements after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
The Brazilian shot dead by police on a tube train in mistake for a suicide bomber had already been overpowered by a surveillance officer before he was killed, according to secret documents revealed this week. It also emerged in the leaked documents that early allegations that he was running from police at the time of the shooting were untrue.
The bond was forged more than 30 years ago when Israel’s security preoccupation meshed with the visions of a messianic minority to claim the spoils of war as a God-given right. The rush to establish Jewish settlements on the newly-occupied West Bank hilltops.
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About 350 small bombs exploded within an hour of each other across Bangladesh on Wednesday, killing two people and injuring more than 100 in an unprecedented attack initially linked to banned Islamic extremists. The bombs, which killed a man and a 10-year-old boy, exploded in almost all of Bangladesh’s 64 towns and cities.