Reports

The Al-Qaeda threat to Egypt's Coptic Christians has run into all-round opposition ― from the country's powerful Muslim Brotherhood political group to the press. The threat had been issued by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), an Al-Qaeda outfit in Iraq. The Opposition Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report, said Muslims must protect Christian houses of worship. "The Muslim Brotherhood is stressing to all, and primarily Muslims, that the protection of holy places of...

The Singapore High Court on Wednesday found a British author guilty of insulting the city-state’s judiciary in a book on the death penalty in Singapore. Alan Shadrake, 75, would be sentenced for contempt of court next Tuesday. The Briton is likely to face a possible jail term, a fine or both. "This is a case about someone who says among other things the judges in Singapore are not impartial... (and are) influenced by political and economic situations and biased against the weak and the poor,"...

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a 3400-year-old enclosure wall around Giza's Sphinx, presumably erected to protect the celebrated landmark from desert winds. It was probably one of the earliest tries at architectural conservation. According to a statement issued by the Ministry of Culture, two sections of the enclosure wall were discovered, one 86 metres long and 75 cm high and the other 46 metres long and 90 cm high. In the statement, Supreme Council for Antiquities Secretary-General...

Sleep can help both learn a new piece of information, as well as get the brain to file it away for later retrieval. Sleep helps people remember a newly learned word and incorporate new vocabulary into their mental lexicon, according to researchers. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers taught volunteers new words in the evening, followed by an immediate test. They slept...

An epidemic, suspected to be malaria, has killed dozens of people of the Yanomami tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon. Leaders of the three villages told health workers that around 50 people have died so far, many of them children. "There are still many, many sick people," Andres Blanco told the Associated Press (AP) over telephone from Puerto Ayacucho in southern Venezuela. Blanco, a Yanomami health worker in a government program for the indigenous communities, alerted regional officials this month...

A dying mountain bear held captive at a cafe in Azerbaijan was forced to drink Coca-Cola for the amusement of customers. It died shortly, and was replaced by another bear. The incident came to light after a video of the cruel incident was released by Daryl Willard, a British sports coach who was working in the former Soviet republic. The pictures were taken last month in the city of Gabala. Willard told The Sun: "People cheered and shouted as they watched the starving bear drink from the cola...

Human rights organisations that posted on their websites clips of the shocking video of Indonesian soldiers torturing Papuan tribal people have been coming under heavy cyber attack. On Tuesday, the Asian Human Rights Commission’s (AHRC) reported that its website has been subjected to a concerted “cyber-attack” since October 28. Computers with hidden locations and identities have been used to flood the website’s servers with fake requests, in order to overload it, the organisation said. The...

As sea levels rise due to global warming, thousands of archaeological sites in coastal regions around the world could be lost due to erosion, a team of archaeologists have warned based on the findings of a recent study. Torben Rick from the Smithsonian Institution, Leslie Reeder of Southern Methodist University, and Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon have issued a call to action for scientists to assess the sites most at risk in a paper published in the latest edition of the Journal of...

Infant dinosaur footprints have been discovered in the foothills west of Denver, Colorado, near the town of Morrison. These tracks were made about 148 million years ago, before the Rocky Mountains rose, when the savanna was full of dinosaurs. According to Matthew Mossbrucker, director of the Morrison Natural History Museum, who discovered the prints, the fossil tracks represent infant sauropods. Sauropods were giant, herbivorous long-necked dinosaurs, sometimes known as "brontosaurs." The...

Most teens who engage in oral sex for the first time will have vaginal intercourse within six months, and half the teens who initiate oral sex in ninth grade will have vaginal intercourse before the end of junior year, researchers have found. The three-year study of 600 high school students by researchers at the University of California - San Francisco and University of California, Merced has found that schools need to provide more comprehensive sex education to teens if they want to be more...