FT Chronicle

Nine people were killed while 30 were injured after a derailed train caused by landslide in north-eastern Italy

The accident occurred in a mountain valley near the winter sports town of Merano, close to the Austrian border.

Trees prevented the train plunging into a river, and firefighters are said to have used cables to secure the wagons.

Initial investigations suggest the landslide was caused by a burst irrigation system.

The death toll had been put at 11, although this was later revised down to nine because of what provincial governor Luis Durnwalder said was a “counting error”.

But he warned Ansa news agency that the toll was not final as “there could still be someone buried in the mud”.

Rescuers were digging frantically with shovels and pickaxes in mud-filled carriages to try to reach the victims.

Skype has made an update to its Mac application to 2.8 that adds a number of new features which have recently been added to the Windows editions.

The update brings Skype Access functionality, allowing you to connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots on a pay-as-you-go system. It has Screen Sharing capabilities, letting you show the person you’re calling exactly what’s going on on your monitor in those “it’s gone funny” situations. Lastly, there’s the usual round of call quality upgrades and bug fixes.

CHICAGO (AFP)—The oldest American and second oldest person in the world died early Tuesday aged 114, local media reports said.

Neva Morris passed away at the Northcrest Community in Ames, Iowa, with her family at her side, the Des Moines Register reported.

Morris became the oldest American in early March.

“She lived a long, charitable and wonderful life. She was a private person who was very proud of her family,” said Walter Morris, Neva’s last living child in a statement cited by the newspaper.

“She was always there if you needed her. She loved her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren very much,” Morris added.

China has said Google’s move to stop censoring search results is “totally wrong” and accused it of breaking a promise made when it launched in China.

The US giant is redirecting users in mainland China to its unrestricted Hong Kong site, although Chinese firewalls mean results still come back censored.

Beijing said the decision should not affect ties with Washington.

Google threatened to leave the Chinese market completely this year after cyber attacks were traced back to China.

The White House said it was “disappointed” that Google and China had not been able to resolve their differences.

Recent research came up with a new blood biomarker that has a high accuracy of predicting the spread of prostate cancer to other parts of the body through the lymph nodes. Such spreading of cancer cells are usually not detected by conventional imaging methods like CT scans. This new blood test measures the level of endoglin, a plasma biomarker which was also studied to predict the spread of colon and breast cancer.

When cancer spreads beyond a solid tumor, it often does so at a microscopic level that typically cannot be identified by conventional imaging methods such as CT scans. The new blood test measures levels of endoglin, a plasma biomarker that has been previously shown to predict the spread of colon and breast cancer. In this study, researchers concluded for the first time that endoglin could help predict whether a patient’s prostate cancer would spread beyond the solid tumor site into their lymph nodes.

Each 1ng/mL increase of plasma endoglin increases the risk of cancer spread by 17 percent.

BAGHDAD – A suicide car bomber killed four people and wounded 29 others when his vehicle exploded in a busy street Monday during the morning rush hour in western Iraq.

The blast took place shortly before 9 a.m. near a central thoroughfare in Fallujah, 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of Baghdad. The city was once at the heart of the Sunni insurgency in the western Anbar province until tribal leaders turned against al-Qaida in Iraq, a turning point of the war.

The street was crowded with pedestrians, stalls selling tea and day laborers gathering for work when the blast occurred, a Fallujah police officer said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. Blood pooled around charred and mangled wrecks of several cars destroyed by the blast.

Think of the world’s wealthiest person, Warren Buffett? Bill Gates? Not anymore!

For the third time in three years, the world has a new richest man.

After the time in power of Bill Gates as the world’s richest 14 of the past 15 years, Carlos Slim Helu finally took No. 1 spot on Forbes World’s Billionaires list as a record 164 10-figure titans return to the ranking amid the global economic recovery.

Slim’s fortune has swelled to an estimated $53.5 billion, up $18.5 billion in 12 months. Shares of America Movil, of which Slim owns a $23 billion stake, were up 35% in a year.

Riding surging prices of his various telecom holdings, including giant mobile outfit America Movil (AMX), the Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu has beaten out Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the wealthiest person on earth and nab the top spot on the 2010 Forbes list of the World’s Billionaires.

A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only possible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs-a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.

A panel of 41 scientists from across the world reviewed 20 years’ worth of research to try to confirm the cause of the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which created a “hellish environment” around 65 million years ago and wiped out more than half of all species on the planet.

Scientific opinion was split over whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted around 1.5 million years.

The new study, conducted by scientists from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan and published in the journal Science, found that a 15-kilometre (9 miles) wide asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in what is now Mexico was the culprit.

“We now have great confidence that an asteroid was the cause of the KT extinction. This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides, which created tsunamis,” said Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, a co-author of the review.

The asteroid is thought to have hit Earth with a force a billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

Agathe Habyarimana, the widow of late Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose assassination triggered the Rwandan genocide, has been arrested in France.

Habyarimana is accused by the current Rwandan government of helping to plan the 1994 genocide, and has long been sought by prosecutors there.

Mrs Habyarimana, who has been living in France for several years, denies the accusations.

More than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died in the massacres of 1994.

French officials said Mrs Habyarimana was detained in the Paris region by police executing a Rwandan-issued international arrest warrant.

Mrs Habyarimana, who was flown out of Rwanda by the French military in the early days of the violence, has been seeking political asylum in France, without success.

Her arrest follows a visit to the Rwandan capital Kigali last week by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, when he admitted that France – and the wider international community – had make “mistakes” over the genocide.

SYDNEY—US daredevil Seth Enslow coined a world record distance on a Harley-Davidson motorbike not once, but twice, on Tuesday after media missed the first death-defying leap.

The freestyle motocross star broke Bubba Blackwell’s 11-year record by soaring 175 feet (53.3 meters) near Sydney’s famed harbour, and then went back and jumped 183.7 feet for the assembled cameras.

The heavily tattooed Enslow, a star of the Crusty Demons motorbike troupe, held his crotch and grimaced after landing “awkwardly” on the second jump, but did not suffer any serious injury, a spokeswoman said.

The record was once held by legendary US stuntman Evel Knievel, who cleared 14 buses on a Harley XR-750 at King’s Island, Ohio in 1975, just a few months after famously crashing at London’s Wembley Stadium.

Enslow now wants to jump the XR1200 past the 200 foot (60.9m) mark.  He has been spotted in Australia recently testing for this jump.  The jump is scheduled for the end of March 2009 to coincide with the Official Grand Opening of the Red Rock Harley Davidson dealer in Las Vegas.  This jump will be an amazing jump considering it will be done on a Harely in Las Vegas.