Newly-appointed Australia captain Steven Smith said he was ready for a "new era" as he prepared to lead them for the first time since Michael Clarke's retirement.
     Australia face Ireland in Belfast on Thursday in what will be the first one-day international since beating New Zealand in the World Cup final in Melbourne in March.
     It will also be Australia's first match since Clarke retired from all international cricket after the fifth and final Test against England at The Oval last week.
     Australia won by an innings and 46 runs but victory in south London came too late to save the Ashes, with England winning the five-match series 3-2.
     The 26-year-old Smith, who had deputised as skipper in both Test and one-day cricket when Clarke was injured, was long seen as Australia's captain in waiting and is looking forward to taking up the role full time.
     "I'm very excited," Smith told travelling Australian media in Belfast on Wednesday.
     "Obviously, I've known for a ...

Australia skipper Smith ready for 'new era'

PTI Automatic

German Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed today there would be no tolerance for "shameful and vile" anti-migrant violence, facing down a noisy far-right protest during a visit to a refugee centre.
	About 200 people massed in the eastern town of Heidenau, some booing and shouting "traitor, traitor" and "we are the mob" as she arrived at the shelter, in a show of defiance over a record influx of asylum-seekers.
	But following her visit, Merkel vowed: "There will be no tolerance of those who question the dignity of other people."
	"The more people who make that clear... The stronger we will be and the better we will be able to address this task" of caring for refugees.
	The showdown in Germany came as chaotic scenes erupted at Hungary's border town of Roszke with police firing tear gas at migrants.
	Police had sought to stop around 200 people trying to leave the country's main refugee processing centre there.
	Budapest said it would send in police reinforcements to stem a record influx of ...

Merkel faces down far-right 'mob' on refugee centre visit

Short really is sweet when it comes to scientific paper titles, according to researchers looking for the secret to academic stardom.
	A succinct title made a study more likely to be cited by fellow academics -- the gold standard for measuring its reach, the British team wrote in a study published Wednesday by the Royal Society Open Science journal.
	"These results are consistent with the intriguing hypothesis that papers with shorter titles may be easier to understand," and thus more eye-catching, according to researchers from the data science lab at Britain's Warwick Business School.
	The study itself was entitled: "The advantage of short paper titles" -- a terse offering in the verbose world of scientific publishing.
	More common are such tongue-twisters such as: "Compartmentalization of membrane trafficking, glucose transport, glycolysis, actin, tubulin and the proteasome in the Hermes Body of epididymal sperm b", the title of another paper carried by the same publishing group.
	To 

Size matters for science paper writers, study finds

A key suspect in the bombing of a housing complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 US airmen almost two decades ago has been captured, a newspaper reported today.
	Ahmad Ibrahim al-Mughassil, who is wanted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, is said to be the head of the Saudi Hezbollah's military wing, an outlawed organisation whose members are drawn from the kingdom's Shiite Muslim community.
	The 48-year-old was detained in Beirut and sent to Saudi Arabia where he is being interrogated, the Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat daily said quoting unnamed officials.
	There was no immediate confirmation from the Saudi authorities.
	The massive bomb, which also wounded more than 370 people, destroyed part of the eight-storey Khobar Towers in the eastern Saudi town of Dhahran in June 1996.
	US prosecutors have said that Mughassil drove the explosives-laden truck and parked it outside the military compound.
	The newspaper did not say when or how he was captured, but reported that he was ...

Saudi suspect in 1996 anti-US bombing arrested: report

Saudi Arabia today executed three of its citizens for murder and a Syrian convicted of drugs smuggling, a day after Amnesty International urged a moratorium on rising executions in the conservative kingdom.
	The executions brought to 127 the number this year in Saudi Arabia, compared with 87 in 2014, according to AFP tallies compiled from interior ministry statements.
	Saudi Nawaf al-Otaibi was executed in the western city of Taif after being convicted of shooting dead his father in a dispute, the interior ministry said.
	Fellow Saudis Bandar al-Ghathim and Abdulaziz Mohammed al-Zahrani were executed in the country's southwest for murder, the ministry said in statements carried by state news agency SPA.
	Syrian Ezzeddine al-Saleh was executed in the northern Jawf region for trafficking in amphetamines, the ministry said.
	Under Saudi Arabia's strict legal practices, murder, armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking and apostasy are all punishable by death.
	Most people sentenced to death .

Saudi executes four after moratorium call

A survivor of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York who was featured in one of the most iconic photographs of the outrage has died of stomach cancer.
	She was 42.
	The family of Marcy Borders first announced her death Monday on Facebook.
	Borders, who was 28 at the time of the attacks, was just one month into a job for Bank of America in one of the Twin Towers.
	As one of the towers collapsed, she took refuge in a nearby office building, where AFP photographer Stan Honda took a haunting photo of her completely covered in a thick layer of ash, which earned her the moniker of "The Dust Lady."
	The air appeared heavy and a distraught Borders was shrouded in a cloud of dust and backlit by an eerie yellow luminescence.
	"I can't believe my sister is gone," her brother Michael Borders wrote on Facebook, asking for people's prayers.
	Her cousin Elnardo Borders wrote: "May God Comfort .Us in our time of sorrow. My emotions are all over the place right now."
	He later wrote: "She @ peace .

Dust-covered woman from iconic 9/11 photograph dies of cancer

Chinese police have summoned 11 people including a financial journalist to assist investigations related to illegal stock market activities, state media reported, as the government targets volatility on the exchanges.
	The Chinese government launched an unprecedented rescue package as the stock market plummeted 30 per cent from mid-June, which included a crackdown on short-selling and funding a state company to buy shares on its behalf.
	Authorities have accused a Caijing magazine journalist of allegedly colluding with others to manufacture and spread false information on securities and futures trading, the official Xinhua news agency reported late yesterday.
	The magazine confirmed journalist Wang Xiaolu was subpoenaed by police but defended his actions.
	Wang wrote a story in July saying the securities regulator was studying plans for government funds to exit the market.
	The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) quickly denied the Caijing story and labelled it ...

China police summon 11 over stock market activities: reports

Thousands of half-naked revellers pelted each other with tomatoes today in the town of Bunol in eastern Spain, bathing the streets with red goo in the annual "Tomatina" battle.
	A string of trucks laden with 170 tonnes of tomatoes rolled through the town's narrow streets, as teams on board distributed their load to surrounding crowds for people to throw at each other during the hour-long festivities.
	The iconic fiesta -- which celebrates its 70th anniversary and is billed at "the world's biggest food fight" -- has become a major draw for foreigners, in particular from Britain, Japan and the United States.
	The bang of fireworks set off the bedlam at 11 am. Revellers jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, many wearing just bathing suits, bent down to pick up tomatoes from the ground to throw while others lay in the pulp.
	"I am going to go three months without eating tomatoes, I'm disgusted but it doesn't matter," a Spanish woman in her 20s, who wore a red T-shirt and whose hair was covered in .

Annual tomato battle paints streets of Spanish town red

Flash floods caused by heavy rain killed 40 people in North Korea's northeastern border area over the weekend, the International Federation of the Red Cross said today.
	Particularly heavy rain accompanying Typhoon Goni battered the Rason special economic zone where the borders of North Korea, Russia and China converge, the IFRC said in a statement.
	The floods affected more than 11,000 people, with 153 houses completely destroyed and 849 houses damaged, it said, adding its report was based on information provided by North Korean authorities.
	The federation said the North's Red Cross Society had quickly sent an 80-member team to assist evacuation and hand out non-food relief goods in cooperation with IFRC officials.
	These included tarpaulins, family tents, cooking sets, water containers, shelter toolkits, quilts, hygiene kits and water purification tablets.
	"More rain is forecast in (North Korea) and many disaster-prone areas in other provinces are likely to be affected," Khaled ...

Flash floods kill 40 people in N Korea: Red Cross

Two Kenyans have failed pre-competition drugs tests at the world championships in Beijing and have been provisionally suspended, the IAAF announced today.
     Koki Manunga and Joyce Zakary "have accepted provisional suspensions following positive samples provided in Beijing on the 20th and 21st of August respectively", the IAAF said in a statement.
     Track and field's world governing body said the Kenyan pair had been tested at the athletes' hotel before their competition started as part of "targeted tests".
     Zakary clocked a national record of 50.71 seconds in Monday's first round of the women's 400m at the Bird's Nest, but did not start the semi-final yesterday for which she had qualified.
     African silver medallist Manunga, however, failed to make it out of her first round of the 400m hurdles on Sunday, timing 58.96sec to finish 35th out of 37 athletes competing.
     Kenya was rocked this year when marathon star Rita Jeptoo was banned for two years after being caught ...

Two Kenyans fail drugs tests at Beijing worlds

Hungary's migrant crisis escalated today as police fired teargas at its main processing centre and the government announced it was sending 2,000 "border hunters" to stem the flow of record numbers of people entering from Serbia.
	A police spokesman said police used the teargas to disperse around 200 migrants who had refused to be fingerprinted and trying to leave the processing centre at Roszke near the border with non-EU Serbia, along which Hungary is erecting a fence.
	The spokesman, Szabolcs Szenti, said "police are trying to calm the situation, but the migrants are continuing to shout."
	An AFP correspondent at the scene said the situation has since calmed down. Another spokesman said the migrants wanted to leave the centre after news circulated that Germany was easing asylum rules for people fleeing the civil war in Syria.
	Police said meanwhile that more than 2,500 people, the highest ever daily total, poured across Hungary's southern border with Serbia near the town of Roszke ..

Hungary migrant crisis escalates as police fire teargas

Two refugee shelters in Germany have been attacked, police said today, hours before Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to visit a centre for asylum-seekers that was hit by violent far-right protests.
	A man was seen flinging a Molotov cocktail into a refugee home in the eastern city of Leipzig which was due to house 56 asylum-seekers from today, police said in a statement.
	Only a mattress was burned as a witness was able to raise the alarm swiftly.
	Meanwhile in the town of Parchim, also in eastern Germany, police arrested two men who had charged into a refugee shelter wielding a knife.
	Several residents, who were outside when the incident took place, alerted the police after noticing that one of the two suspects was holding an eight-inch knife.
	Both were shouting anti-migrant comments. Police ran blood tests on them for alcohol levels.
	German authorities have been alarmed by a wave of attacks targeting refugee centres, as the country braces to host a record 800,000 asylum-seekers, ..

Two new attacks hit refugee centres in Germany

Australia's city of Newcastle, which claims to be the world's biggest coal export port, said Wednesday it will pull money out of fossil fuel industries and invest in more sustainable enterprises.
	Newcastle City Council, which manages a Aus$268 million (US$191 million) investment fund for Australia's seventh largest city, voted late Tuesday to move progressively towards "environmentally and socially responsible investments".
	"Coal undoubtedly makes up a really significant portion of our local economy, but we're also increasingly becoming an energy hub more broadly," councillor Declan Clausen told AFP.
	"Coal exports are going to continue... But we'll also be focusing our investment away from really large, new, environmentally damaging resource projects towards things that are more sustainable in line with the changing expectations of the broader community."
	Newcastle, 170 kilometres (106 miles) north of Sydney, is one of the biggest councils in Australia to vote to divest from ...

Australia's coal city backs green future

Thailand destroyed more than two tonnes of ivory today -- a victory for animal rights groups fighting against the trade in a country renowned for being a hub for illegal tusks.
	The ceremony, in which 2,155 kilogrammes of raw tusks and carved trinkets were fed into an industrial rock crusher before being incinerated, was presided over by the Thai junta leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha and is the first time the kingdom has taken steps to destroy part of its stockpile.
	"This is to show the Thai government's strong determination to oppose ivory trafficking and that Thailand will comply with international rules," he said during the ceremony.
	Animal rights campaigners have long accused successive Thai civilian and military administrations of turning a blind eye to the lucrative trade.
	They have pushed for Bangkok to destroy its stockpile to signal its determination to stamp down on the trade and avoid the risk of seized ivory finding its way back onto the black market through corrupt ...

Thailand destroys ivory stockpile amid junta crackdown

One of the American servicemen who helped subdue the gunmen on the attempted attack on a Thalys train in France over the weekend will receive the US Army's highest honor for non-combat activities.
	Aleksander Skarlatos, a member of the Oregon National Guard who had recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan, will receive the Soldier's Medal "for extraordinary heroism above and beyond the call of duty," the US Army said yesterday.
	Along with two friends, one of whom is a member of the US Air Force, and two other passengers, Skarlatos helped wrestle a gunman who had emerged from a bathroom wielding a Kalashnikov assault rifle and other weapons aboard the high-speed train.
	"Skarlatos' actions that day epitomize what we mean by a soldier of character -- one who lives by a personal code where dedication to duty and taking care of others is sacred," Secretary of the Army John McHugh said in a statement.
	Skarlatos' friend Spencer Stone has been nominated for the Air Force's top ...

French train hero to earn US Army's top non-combat award

Shanghai stocks closed down 1.27 per cent in volatile trading today, extending days of falls despite a central bank interest rate cut aimed at boosting the flagging economy and slumping shares, dealers said.
	China's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index fell 37.68 points to 2,927.29 on turnover of 461.8 billion yuan ($72.1 billion). It surged up to 4.29 per cent and was down as much as 3.85 per cent during the day.
	The Shenzhen Composite Index, which tracks stocks on China's second exchange, dropped 3.05 percent, or 53.31 points, to 1,695.76 on turnover of 432.2 billion yuan.

Shanghai shares end down 1.27 per cent despite rate cut

Oil prices dipped today, trading near six-year lows ahead of the latest US energy report after jitters over China's faltering economy spurred heavy losses this week, analysts said.
	US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for October delivery fell 13 cents to USD 39.18 in Asian trading, while Brent crude for October eased 13 cents to USD 43.08 in late-morning trade.
	Both contracts gained on bargain-hunting yesterday, after plummeting to their lowest levels since early 2009 a day earlier as investors fret about falling demand in the face of a world supply glut.
	"US crude inventories continue to be the weekly constant mover for oil prices in this period of stagnant fundamentals," said Daniel Ang, investment analyst at Phillip Futures in Singapore.
	"If inventories turn out lower than estimates, we may see prices get more support and vice versa," he added.
	Industry group American Petroleum Institute reportedly said yesterday that US crude reserves shrank by 7.3 million barrels in the ...

Oil prices near six-year lows ahead of US energy report

Japan will help Nicaragua open a tsunami early warning centre this year that would serve all of Central America, an official said.
	The center would provide real-time earthquake and tsunami information for all countries in Central America, according to Wilfried Strauch of the Nicaraguan Seismological Office, Ineter.
	Nicaragua asked Tokyo for the assistance, he said, "because they have so much experience with the issue, and an excellent tsunami warning system."
	Hirohito Takata of the Japan International Cooperation Agency and Ineter chief Jose Blanco signed an agreement at a ceremony in Managua.
	Under the plan, Japan would provide technical aid, some equipment and train local technicians who will work at the facility.

Japan to help Nicaragua open tsunami warning center

A Boeing 777 operated by Japan's All Nippon Airways made an emergency landing in Osaka today after the plane suffered engine trouble, the airline said.
	None of the 246 passengers or 11 crew were injured, it added.
	The flight from Osaka bound for Tokyo left at 7:18 am (2218 GMT, Tuesday) but the crew soon detected engine problems and they requested to make an emergency landing.
	"It turned around and landed back at Osaka airport at 7:50 am," said ANA spokeswoman Hanae Satomura.
	All passengers and crew safely exited from the airplane after the emergency landing, she added.
	After departure, the pilots encountered power output problems with the left engine and abnormal temperatures in the engine's emissions, Satomura said.
	The airline was investigating the incident, she said.

Boeing 777 makes emergency landing in Japan: ANA

A header by Markus Rosenberg and an own goal from Dedryck Boyata condemned Scottish champions Celtic to a second successive season without the riches to be accrued from the Champions League group stage as Malmo beat them 2-0 on the night and 4-3 on aggregate in their play-off.
     They were not the only high profile casualties as last season's quarter-finalists Monaco exited yesterday despite coming from behind to beat Valencia 2-1 at home -- they have lost just once in their last 12 European club games at Stade Louis II -- but lost 4-3 on aggregate.
     Another side who reached the knockout stages last season also failed to get over the play-off hurdle this time round as Basel, who progressed at the expense of Liverpool in last season's competition, exited after a 1-1 draw in Israel against Maccabi Tel-Avi saw the hosts progress on the away goals rule, the tie finishing 3-3 on aggregate.
     Ukrainian side Shakhtar Donetsk did make it through -- they have appeared in the group ...

Celtic and Monaco fail to make Champions League grade

Australia play their first one-day international as world champions in Belfast tomorrow with a new captain and three uncapped players in the 14-man squad which meets Ireland in a one-off game at Stormont.
     Although their World Cup victory was just five months ago, it will be Steve Smith leading Australia, not Michael Clarke and Matthew Wade keeping wicket instead of Brad Haddin who has retired from one-day cricket.
     The newcomers are Joe Burns, who is in line to replace Aaron Finch at the top of the order, while the World Cup opener recovers from a fractured foot, all-rounder Marcus Stoinis who come in for the suspended James Faulkner, and the sole specialist spinner in the squad is Ashton Agar, returning to an Australia side for the first time since the 2013 Ashes tour.
     Five of the World Cup winning team - and eight of the squad - are still around despite Mitchell Johnson and Josh Hazlewood being sent home to prepare for the domestic season, leaving the world No 1 ODI ...

AFP

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