Deadly Tidings Planet Earth

(BBC News) – At least six Italian soldiers have been killed in a bomb attack on a military convoy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, Italian defence officials say.

Two military vehicles were reported to have been hit by a suicide car bomb. At least three civilians were also killed and dozens injured, officials said.

The bomb went off near Kabul’s diplomatic quarter in the city centre.

Deadly attack

Witnesses say an explosives-laden vehicle rammed into the Italian military convoy on Kabul’s busy airport road.

“It was a suicide car bomb attack… It was against Italian forces,” Kabul’s chief of criminal investigations told the AFP news agency.

Indonesia’s most-wanted Islamist militant, Noordin Mohamed Top, has been killed during a raid in central Java, say police.

The man wanted for a series of deadly attacks across the archipelago was among four killed in a raid near Solo city, said the national police chief.

It is not the first time Indonesian officials have claimed Noordin is dead.

The BBC’s Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta says police are sure this time he is dead because of fingerprint tests.

“Thank God on this holy month of Ramadan – it’s Noordin M Top,” police chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri told a nationally televised news conference to cheers, reports AFP news agency. He added that alleged bomb-maker Bagus Budi Pranato, alias Urwah, was also among those killed.

“Today, God willing, the radical movement has been disabled. One of the biggest terrorist masterminds, Noordin M Top, has been shot,” said the MP, Sidarto, reports AFP.

The Guardian can reveal evidence today of a massive cover-up by the British oil trader Trafigura, in one of the worst pollution disasters in recent history.

Internal emails show that Trafigura, which yesterday suddenly announced an offer to pay compensation to 31,000 west African victims, was fully aware that its waste dumped in Ivory Coast was so toxic that it was banned in Europe.

Thousands of west Africans besieged local hospitals in 2006, and a number died, after the dumping of hundreds of tonnes of highly toxic oil waste around the country’s capital, Abidjan. Official local autopsy reports on 12 alleged victims appeared to show fatal levels of the poisonous gas hydrogen sulphide, one of the waste’s lethal byproducts.

Trafigura has been publicly insisting for three years that its waste was routine and harmless. It claims it was “absolutely not dangerous”.

It has until now denied compensation claims, and its lawyers repeatedly threatened anyone worldwide who sought to contradict its version. It launched a libel case against BBC Newsnight, forced an alleged correction from the Times, demanded the Guardian delete articles, and yesterday tried to gag journalists in the Netherlands and Norway with legal threats.

But the dozens of damning internal Trafigura emails which have now come to light reveal how traders were told in advance that their planned chemical operation, a cheap and dirty process called “caustic washing”, generated such dangerous wastes that it was widely outlawed in the west.

(Times of Malta) – An Italian mafia turncoat testifying about the dumping of nuclear and toxic waste in the Mediterranean Sea said that Malta was one of three countries where the criminal organisation deposited money coming from illegal operations.

A former member of the Calabrian Mafia (ndrangheta), Francesco Fonti admitted in front of an Italian judge that the criminal organisation had sunk ships carrying nuclear and toxic waste in the Mediterranean Sea in the 1980s and 1990s.

The accusations are not new but in the past judges had always archived suspect cases because no proof was ever provided of the sunken ships. However, this changed last Saturday when a submersible robot discovered the wreck of a ship that went down in 1992 with 120 drums of toxic waste. The drums were also visible at a depth of 487 metres.

Mr Fonti admitted he had sunk the cargo ship Cunsky off the Cosenza coast after loading its bow with explosives.

In an interview yesterday on Rainews 24, Mr Fonti said the Mafia was paid good money for running the dumping operation. He alleged that the money than found its way to Switzerland, Cyprus and Malta, without elaborating.

Italian environment group Legambiente said there were between 40 and 100 suspect cases between 1985 and 1995 of ships laden with nuclear and toxic waste that mysteriously sunk in the Mediterranean’s deepest points. In each of the cases, the ships never launched a May-day signal and the crew mysteriously disappeared.

The more notable cases include the Maltese-registered cargo vessel Anni, which sank in 1989 off the Ravenna coast in international waters.

Other ships include the Nikos I that vanished in 1985 during a voyage that started in La Spezia for Lome in Togo and sank somewhere between Lebanon and Greece.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama on Thursday dumped a Bush-era missile defense plan for Europe that Russia had bitterly opposed and offered what he said would be faster, more flexible defense systems to protect against Iran.

In a move that could spur fears of resurgent Kremlin influence, Obama said he had approved recommendations from U.S. military leaders to shift focus to defending against Iran’s short- and medium-range missiles.

“This new approach will provide capabilities sooner, build on proven systems and offer greater defenses against the threat of missile attack.”