Archbishop embarrassed by links to lender

ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury Justin Welby says he was irritated and embarrassed to discover the Church of England had invested in a high-interest loan company he had earlier promised to destroy.

The spiritual leader of the world's 85 million Anglicans had vowed to "compete out of existence" Britain's best-known payday lending company, Wonga, by supporting other forms of community-led lending.

But Welby, who took office in February, said he had now been made aware that the Church had indirectly invested STG75,000 ($A125,722) in Wonga, out of total investments of STG5.2 billion.

In an interview with BBC radio on Friday, the archbishop admitted he was "irritated for a few minutes" after hearing the news, first revealed by the Financial Times.

"It shouldn't happen, it's very embarrassing. But these things do happen. We have to find out why and make sure it doesn't happen again," he said.

The Church claims to have a strong ethical investment policy which explicitly bans companies involved in payday lending, so-called because they offer short-term loans to help customers out until they get paid.

But they have been criticised for their huge interest rates - in Wonga's case, typically the equivalent of 5853 per cent annually, although most loans are agreed for up to six weeks.

Lambeth Palace, the archbishop's office in London, said an independent inquiry would probe how "this serious inconsistency" in its investments occurred.

Welby said it was not clear whether the Church had broken its own rules, noting that it was allowed to invest in a company where less than 25 per cent of its business was in payday loans.

Wonga insists it is a responsible lender and that it has been "instrumental" in helping to raise industry standards.

As part of its ethical investment policy, the church last year sold its shares in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp following the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.

20.48 | 0 komentar | Read More

Spain train driver detained over crash

The driver of a train that derailed in Spain is being questioned after admitting to speeding. Source: AAP

SPANISH police have announced they have formally detained the driver of a fast-moving train that flew off the tracks, killing at least 78 people, saying he was suspected of "recklessness".

"He has been detained since 8.00pm (on Thursday). He is accused of crimes related to the accident," Jaime Iglesias, the police chief in the northwestern region of Galicia where the accident happened, told reporters, on Friday.

Asked at a news conference in Santiago de Compostela why the driver was being detained, Iglesias said: "For recklessness."

A Spanish judge on Thursday ordered police to question the hospitalised driver following reports he was going twice the speed limit when the train derailed on a sharp bend on Wednesday evening just outside the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela.

The driver - identified by local media as 52-year-old Francisco Jose Garzon Amo - has since been under police surveillance in hospital while being treated for light injuries sustained in the accident.

He has not yet been charged with a crime and police are still waiting to question him.

The driver, while trapped inside his cab immediately after the accident, told railway officials by radio that the train had taken the curve at 190km/h, unidentified investigation sources told leading daily El Pais.

The speed limit on that section of track is 80km/h.

The grey-haired driver, pictured in the media with blood covering the left side of his face after the crash, has been with Spanish state railway Renfe for 30 years and has 13 years' experience as a driver, the rail firm said.

The train's data recording "black box" and other documents were passed over to the judge in charge of the investigation on Thursday.

Attention has so far centred on Garzon Amo, one of two drivers on the train, after media reports described him as a speed freak who once gleefully posted a picture on his Facebook page of a train speedometer showing it was travelling at 200km/h.

The El Pais newspaper, citing sources close to the investigation, said the driver stated immediately after the crash that he had been travelling at 190km/h on a curve with a speed limit of 80km/h.

"I am going at 190! I hope no one died because it will weigh on my conscience," he reportedly told supervisors over the radio while trapped inside the cab after the eight-carriage train flew off the tracks on a curve at 8.42pm.

Dramatic video footage from a security camera showed the fast-moving train, which was travelling from Madrid to the port of Ferrol, slamming into a concrete wall at the side of the track as the engine overturned.

On Friday, the paper reported the driver was unable to brake in time.

"The railway warning systems detected that Francisco Jose Garzon Amo, the driver of the Alvia train that departed Madrid, was travelling at 190 kilometres an hour when it should not exceed 80," El Pais wrote.

"The driver acknowledged that the alarm went off in the control panel and he tried to brake but was not able to avert the tragedy," the newspaper added.

Spanish police slightly lowered the death toll to 78, saying they had identified 72 of the fatalities.

"At the moment the figure is 78 dead, 72 have been identified and six remain to be," Galicia police chief Jaime Iglesias told a news conference in Santiago de Compostela on Friday.

Forensic police were working with "mangled bodies", he said, some of which where hard to identify because of the injuries sustained.

Police said the lower death toll arose because some body parts had been wrongly identified in the initial stages as coming from several people when they were from the same person.

Three foreigners are among the dead - an American, an Algerian and a Mexican, the head of the Spanish national police force's forensics department, Antonio del Amo, told the news conference.

Police used DNA samples, dental records and fingerprints to identity the dead and would now use "other tactics" to identify the six remaining victims, he added, without giving details on what the other methods were.

The crash injured more than 100 people, of whom 81 remain in hospital, 31 of them - including three children - in a serious condition, Galicia health services said.

20.48 | 0 komentar | Read More

Polanski victim to release memoir

The woman director Roman Polanski was convicted of raping when she was 13 is releasing her memoir. Source: AAP

THE woman whom director Roman Polanski was convicted of raping when she was 13 has released the cover of her upcoming memoir, showing her in a photo snapped by the director just three weeks before the assault.

The memoir by Samantha Geimer is due to be released in September, but made headlines on Thursday with a photo of the author as a chubby-cheeked adolescent.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Polanski took the picture at the girl's home in 1977 before coaxing her to pose topless. Three weeks later he took her to Jack Nicholson's house where he gave her sedatives and champagne before raping her, according to court testimony.

Polanski was convicted by a US court but fled to France before sentencing and has never returned to the US.

The publisher of the book, entitled, The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski, said it was the first full account of the crime from Geimer's point of view.

"Samantha, as much as Polanski, has been a fugitive since the events of that night more than thirty years ago," the publisher said.

20.48 | 0 komentar | Read More

Marilyn Monroe photos up for auction

Photographs of Marilyn Monroe will be sold with their copyrights at an LA auction house. Source: AAP

MORE than 3700 photos of Marilyn Monroe will soon be sold along with their copyrights, a Los Angeles auction house says.

The photos - plus negatives, slides and copyrights - are part of a collection of more than 75,000 images taken by fashion photographer Milton Greene in the 1950s and 60s.

They will go on the block at the auction house and online on July 27.

By pairing the images with their copyrights, buyers will be allowed to print, sell and earn royalties off the photos.

The photographer's son, Joshua Greene, recently told The Huffington Post it was "a bad business deal".

The archive also includes photos by Greene of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Farrah Fawcett, Jane Fonda, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

Some of the Monroe photos depict the starlet against a black background, covered in a black sweater that highlights her bare skin.

Other more innocent shots show Monroe in a white coat against a white background.

Greene and Monroe met in 1953 at a photo shoot for Look magazine, when the photographer was 26.

When Greene sent her a copy of the images, Monroe responded with two dozen roses and phoned to say they were the most beautiful photos she had ever seen, according to the Profiles in History auction house.

During the four years that followed the shoot, until Monroe married Arthur Miller, Greene took more than 5000 pictures of her, the auction house said on its website.

Greene worked for magazines such as Vogue, Glamour and Harper's Bazaar during his long career.

"Along with other eminent photographers such as Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Norman Parkinson, Milton Greene is credited for bringing fashion photography into the realm of fine art," the auction house said.

An online catalogue with a reproduction of the photographs can be seen on the Profiles in History website at www.profilesinhistory.com/flipbooks/Milton-Greene-Auction/index.html.

AFP dm

20.48 | 0 komentar | Read More

Qld road toll nearly doubles

Queensland's road toll of 21 deaths during the school holidays almost doubled from last year. Source: AAP

THE number of people who died on Queensland's roads during the recent school holidays is nearly double the death toll during the same time last year.

Police say 21 people died during the June and July holidays compared with 11 in that same period last year.

Police Commissioner Ian Stewart says this is unacceptable.

"When we talk about the road toll, we often get caught up in facts and figures - but the cold, hard reality is - 21 people are no longer with us," he said.

More than 900 people were injured in serious crashes in that same period.

Police fined 56,536 motorists for speeding, 886 were caught not wearing seatbelts and 1,448 people were issued with a traffic infringement notice for using a mobile phone while driving.

Of the 187,285 random breath tests conducted, 1418 motorists were detected drink driving.

20.48 | 0 komentar | Read More

Facebook surges on mobile ad results

SHARES of social networking giant Facebook have vaulted more than 25 per cent in early trading following a surprisingly good earnings report.

Facebook shares were up 26.0 per cent to $33.39 at 1354 GMT on Thursday (2354 AEST), the highest level since May 2012.

The surge came after the company's earnings report showed large increases in ad revenue from mobile technology.

Facebook shares have not appreciably moved higher since the company's high-profile public offering in May 2012.

But the company has made a priority of following its more than one billion members onto smartphones or tablets as lifestyles increasingly revolve around accessing the internet from mobile devices.

Facebook reported net income in the second quarter of $US331 million ($A362 million) compared with a loss of $US157 million in the year-ago period.

Revenue for the quarter that ended June 30 climbed to $US1.81 billion, up 53 per cent from the same period a year earlier.

Facebook said 41 per cent of its ad revenues came from mobile, compared with 30 per cent in the prior quarter and virtually nothing a year ago.

"We've made good progress growing our community, deepening engagement and delivering strong financial results, especially on mobile," said Facebook chief executive and Mark Zuckerberg .

00.21 | 0 komentar | Read More

Top Tunisian opposition figure shot dead

A LEADING opposition figure and critic of Tunisia's ruling Islamists, Mohamed Brahmi, has been shot dead outside his home near the capital, in the second such assassination this year.

The murder by unknown gunmen sparked angry street protests in central Tunis and Brahmi's birthplace of Sidi Bouzid where he served as MP.

"Mohamed Brahmi, general co-ordinator of the Popular Movement and member of the National Constituent Assembly, was shot dead outside his home in Ariana," Watanya state television and the official TAP news agency reported.

"He was riddled with bullets in front of his wife and children," Mohsen Nabti, a fellow member of the small leftist movement, said in a tearful account aired on Tunisian radio.

The interior ministry, cited by TAP, said that Brahmi, a 58-year-old MP and vocal critic of Tunisia's ruling Islamists, was assassinated as he left home.

Watanya said Brahmi was struck by a hail of 11 bullets fired from point-blank range.

The February 6 assassination of Chokri Belaid, another opposition figure, in front of his home sparked a political crisis in Tunisia and charges of government involvement.

Condemning the latest killing, lawyer Mabrouk Korchid said that Brahmi was "assassinated in cold blood on the day that Tunisia is marking" the 56th anniversary of the republic's declaration.

Brahmi, a man with a bushy moustache and weather-beaten complexion, was elected MP for Sidi Bouzid, birthplace of the 2011 revolution which toppled president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

On July 7, he resigned from his post as general secretary of the Popular Movement, which he founded, protesting that it had been infiltrated by Islamists.

French President Francois Hollande, whose country was the pre-independence colonial power in Tunisia, strongly condemned Brahmi's killing and called on the country to unite behind its post-revolutionary democratic transition.

00.21 | 0 komentar | Read More

Video captures moment of Spain train crash

A VIDEO has been released showing the exact moment a train derailed in northeastern Spain, killing 80 people.

The video, which lasts just 10 seconds, shows the train negotiating a curve in the track before a number of carriages in the middle of the train come off the rails and drag the rest of the carriages off with them.

The images were first released on Spanish website Zoom News, but the video has since appeared on YouTube and a number of websites and TV stations.

According to Zoom News the video comes from a security camera of railway administrator Adif. However, a spokesman for Adif said they could not confirm the images had come from one of their cameras.

Authorities have not said what caused the accident, but it has been reported that the train was travelling at 190 kilometres an hour, more than twice the 80km/h speed limit, when it crashed.

The train was carrying 218 passengers and four crew from Madrid to the coastal town of Ferrol.

It is the deadliest rail disaster in Spain since 1944.

00.21 | 0 komentar | Read More

US durable goods orders jump

NEW orders for big-ticket US manufactured goods rose 4.2 per cent in June, led by demand for aircraft.

Orders for durable goods, long-lasting manufactured products, rose to $US244.5 billion ($A268 billion), an increase of $US9.9 billion from May, the Commerce Department said on Thursday.

Analysts had predicted a much smaller 1.8 per cent increase on average.

The May reading was revised sharply higher to $US234.6 billion from an initial estimate of $US231.0 billion.

The June reading was the fourth increase in durable goods orders in the past five months.

But transportation equipment orders, a typically volatile item, drove the increase.

Civilian aircraft orders soared 31.4 per cent and defence aircraft orders jumped 18.7 per cent.

Orders were flat excluding transportation.

Excluding defence, orders rose 3.0 per cent.

On a year-over-year basis, new orders were up 3.7 per cent.

00.21 | 0 komentar | Read More

Speed examined in horror Spain train crash

THE driver of a Spanish high-speed train that derailed, killing at least 80 people, has been named as a suspect in one of Europe's worst rail accidents.

A court in Santiago de Compostela ordered police to question Francisco Jose Garzon, 52, who had admitted to driving at 190 kilometres per hour on a curve where the speed limit was 80km/h.

The train carrying 218 passengers from Madrid to Ferrol derailed and split apart late on Wednesday at Angrois, about 4km from the regional capital, Santiago de Compostela.

Officials confirmed that the number of dead had risen from 78 to 80. Ninety-five injured people remained in hospital. Thirty-six of them, including four children, were in critical condition.

The injured included several citizens of the US and the UK, the two countries' embassies said.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who visited the accident scene and the injured in hospital, said both the government and the judiciary were investigating the causes of the tragedy.

The driver had boasted on Facebook that he sometimes defied controls by driving trains at 200km/h, the daily El Pais reported.

Garzon, who has 30 years of experience, suffered only minor injuries.

The stretch of track on which the train was travelling did not have an automatic cab signalling system, which would have stopped it in the event of excessive speed, representatives of the engine drivers' union said.

They also criticised the route of the train, which was based on a conventional - instead of high-speed - rail line and included a steep curve.

The rail management company said the train's security systems were adequate.

The train was running five minutes late, but the drivers' union said there was no pressure on staff to speed up in such cases.

The train had been inspected the day before the accident, sources at the rail company Renfe said.

People fearing for their loved ones are still waiting for about half of the fatalities to be identified. Some of the bodies were so disfigured that identification was difficult.

All of the carriages left the rails, the rear engine caught fire, and one of the wagons was hurled 15 metres. Wagons that were ripped open or smashed on top of each other were scattered around.

"We heard a noise, enormous, like never before. We went down there and saw that the convoy had split in two," said a witness.

Local residents rushed to the site, bringing water and blankets and smashing wagon windows with stones to help those trapped inside.

00.21 | 0 komentar | Read More