Alleged CIA suicide bomber calls for attacks

The suicide bomber who killed CIA agents in Afghanistan had made a video calling on militants to avenge the death of the Pakistani Taliban leader by carrying out attacks in and outside the United States.

A pilotless US drone aircraft strike killed Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud last year.

Al Jazeera reported on its website that the video was left as a message to the US and Jordan by the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, in which he tells them: ‘We say that we will never forget the blood of our Emir Baitullah Mehsud, God’s mercy on him.’

Balawi blew himself up on 30 December inside Forward Operating Base Chapman, a well-fortified US compound in Khost province in southeast Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, killing seven CIA officers.

It was the second-most deadly attack in CIA history.

Al Jazeera quotes the former Jordanian doctor as saying it was the obligation of all of Mehsud’s fighters ‘to retaliate for his death in the United States and outside the United States.

Three held after terror alert at London’s Heathrow airport

A Dubai-bound Emirates flight with more than 300 passengers on board was grounded minutes before it was due to take off from Heathrow airport on Friday night after three men sparked a terror alert when they reportedly made a “verbal threat”, though it was not known what exactly they said..

Armed officers stormed the plane and the men — all white and aged 58, 48 and 36 — were arrested on suspicion of making a bomb threat. The plane was then moved to a safe area and evacuated.

Passengers, who had to wait for nearly four hours on the stranded plane, were put up in a hotel for the night as the flight was rescheduled for Saturday.

Police with sniffer dogs searched the plane but found nothing suspicious.

There were suggestions that the trio, who had been drinking before boarding the plane, may have made the threat in jest but security officials denied they had over-reacted saying they were not prepared to take any chances.

“We have zero tolerance for those kinds of comments,” one official was reported as saying.

The incident occurred as the plane was taxiing along the runway before the take-off. One passenger, sitting a few rows from one of the alleged suspects, told Sky News: “Police just swarmed the guy and rushed him out. I think he was a white male. There was another one but I didn’t see him.”

The incident came amid heightened security at British airports following the Christmas Day bomb plot in which a Nigerian youth Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab, a former student at a London university, allegedly attempted to blow up a plane over Detroit in America.

New measures, including full body-scans, are to be introduced at Heathrow and other major airports by the end of this month as part of an overhaul of airport security.

Heavy snowfall in northern China

Heavy snowfall in northern China is testing the country’s disaster preparedness and prompting fresh questions about Beijing’s efforts to alter its weather.

A massive blizzard over the past week has dumped some of the heaviest snow in five decades on China’s usually arid north, clogging highways and collapsing buildings in seven provinces. The storm, which began Monday, had caused at least $650 million in damage as of Friday afternoon and killed more than 40 people in traffic accidents or building collapses triggered by the snow and ice, the government said.

This week’s storm follows an unusually early snowfall that blanketed Beijing on Nov. 1. Government media attributed the intensity of that storm to the Beijing Weather Modification Office, which is responsible for cloud-seeding operations in the capital, whose downtown area is surrounded by farmland. The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted a top official at the office saying it had created 16 million metric tons of additional snow. “We won’t miss any opportunity [for] artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought,” the official, Zhang Qiang, was quoted as saying.

Alastair Campbell defends Iraq dossier

Tony Blair’s ex-spokesman Alastair Campbell has said he “defends every single word” of the 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

He told the UK’s Iraq war inquiry that parts could have been “clearer” but it did not “misrepresent” Iraq’s threat.

The UK should be “proud” of its role “in changing Iraq from what it was to what it is now becoming”, he argued.

But he said Mr Blair told President Bush privately in 2002 the UK would back military action if necessary.

Critics of the war have called for private correspondence between the two leaders about their views on Iraq to be published.

Malawi gay couple face jail

A Malawian court Wednesday ordered a gay couple arrested at the weekend for holding the country’s first same-sex public wedding ceremony to stay in jail for a further police probe.

“I want the two to remain in custody for police to make thorough investigations,” police prosecutor Dickens Mwambazi told the court.

Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, the first Malawian gays to publicly wed in a symbolic ceremony on Saturday appeared before a magistrate in a packed courtroom in the commercial capital Blantyre.

The couple is facing three counts bordering on “indecent practices” and they both pleaded not guilty.

Mawiya Msuku, one of the two lawyers who represent the couple, argued that there was no justification for police to continue holding them in custody.