BODIES SEARCH: Emergency teams battled heavy rains and mud yesterday to recover bodies strewn over hills overlooking the Pakistani capital after the country’s worst plane crash. Officials said the Airblue flight from Karachi to Islamabad was apparently off-course when it slammed into the Margalla Hills, killing all 152 people on board. Soldiers and civilian rescue workers searched a large stretch of the hills scorched by the crash, but tough conditions had slowed them, said Ramzan Khalid, spokesman for the Capital Development Authority, which helps deal with emergencies. Helicopters could not fly in the heavy rain, he said. The plane’s ‘black box’ flight data-recorders had yet to be recovered. Information extracted from them would be key in determining the cause of the crash, The Associated Press said. Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar and other officials has said the Government does not suspect terrorism.
PARTING WAYS: BP chief executive Tony Hayward – who became the public face of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill – is ending his career with the oil company after 28 years. He is being replaced by BP’s U.S. chief, Robert Dudley. Mr Hayward, 54, said it was “for the good of BP”. His resignation was the only way the company he led for three years had any chance of restoring its reputation and continuing to operate in the U.S. He disputed rival oil companies’ accusations that BP’s well design was unsafe and said the facts would exonerate the company when they emerged. For three months he has been vilified in the U.S. This ill-feeling was in large part because of the scale of the initial tragedy and BP’s repeated failure to stop the oil leak that fouled the gulf. – The Wall Street Journal
GAZA CRITICISM: British Prime Minister David Cameron has called on Israel to end its blockade of Gaza, calling it a prison camp. “The situation in Gaza has to change,” Mr Cameron said in a speech to a Turkish business association in Ankara. “Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.” Mr Cameron criticised Israel’s interception of a Turkish Gaza-bound flotilla that led to the death of nine Turkish passengers, two months ago. “The Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable. I have told Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu we will expect the Israeli inquiry to be swift, transparent and rigorous.” During a news conference later he continued to criticise Israel’s blockade of Gaza. He also called on “Turkey and Israel not to give up on their friendship”. – Jewish Telegraph Agency
PAPERS LEAKED: Close to 92,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan were leaked to Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, The New York Times, and The Guardian [London] by the whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks. The three analysed the raft of mostly classified documents, and published their stories at the weekend, simultaneously with WikiLeaks’ release on the internet. Der Spiegel said that the war logs exposed the true scale of the Western military deployment. The 91,731 reports were obtained from United States military databanks. In an Op-Ed piece in the Times, Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security think-tank, writes: “ … most of the major revelations that have been trumpeted by WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, are not revelations at all — they are merely additional examples of what we already knew”.
PAINTING REVERSAL: The Vatican’s top art historian has shot down a report in its own newspaper that suggested a recently discovered painting was a Caravaggio. The head of the Vatican Museums, Antonio Paolucci, wrote in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the work was most likely a copy of an original by a Caravaggio-influenced artist. L'Osservatore set the art world aflutter last week with an article headlined ‘A New Caravaggio’, detailing the artistry behind the Martyrdom of St Lawrence, which had been discovered in the sacristy of a Jesuit church in Rome. The author, art historian Lydia Salviucci Insolera, had made it clear that more diagnostic tests were required. But L’Osservatore had given the impression that the painting was a never-before-seen Caravaggio, The Associated Press reported. The article appeared on the 400th anniversary of the master’s death.
RETRIAL ORDERED: The Utah Supreme Court has overturned polygamist Warren Jeffs’ convictions on rape as an accomplice and sent his case back for a new trial. It found ‘serious errors’ in instructions given to the jury that deprived Jeffs of a fair hearing. The justices unanimously ruled that the trial judge had erred when he rejected a defence request to instruct jurors that to convict they had to find Jeffs knew, when he performed a marriage in 2001, that unwanted sex would result and intended for a rape to occur. They also said the state had erred in giving the jury an instruction that focused on Jeffs’ actions and position as a religious leader rather than on the actions of the groom, the alleged rapist. Jeffs, 54, was convicted in September 2007. The girl in the marriage was 14. – The Salt Lake Tribune
MASS-KILLER JAILED: The Khmer Rouge’s chief jailer plans to appeal against his conviction by a United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal, which sentenced him to 35 years in prison for overseeing the deaths of up to 16,000 people. Kaing Guek Eav – also known as Duch – was convicted on Monday of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was the first major Khmer Rouge figure to face trial more than three decades after the Pol Pot regime’s brutal rule led to the deaths of 1.7 million people in the country they renamed Kampuchea. The regime was removed after Vietnam invaded in 1979. Duch will have to serve 19 years of his sentence after taking into account time already served and other factors. Tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said that Duch’s lawyer had notified the tribunal of his intent to appeal. – Bloomberg BusinessWeek
NEW FACE: A Spanish man who underwent the world’s first full-face transplant has appeared before TV cameras for the first time since his surgery, thanking his doctors and the donor’s family. Identified only as Oscar, he spoke with difficulty at a news conference at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron hospital, where he was operated on in late March. During the 24-hour surgery doctors lifted an entire face, including jaw, nose, cheekbones, muscles, teeth and eyelids, and placed it, masklike, on to the man. He has been described as a farmer who was unable to breathe or eat on his own after accidentally shooting himself in the face five years ago. Dr Joan Pere Barret, said that Oscar, 31, would need between a year and 18 months of physical therapy and was expected to regain up to 90 percent of his facial functions. – The Associated Press
PAPERS LEAKED: Close to 92,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan were leaked to 
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