Create your own free news widgets.

Criminologists' research shows surveillance cameras are 'at their most effective' in cutting vehicle crime in car parksThe use of closed-circuit television in city and town centres and public housing estates does not have a significant effect on crime, according to Home Office-funded research to be distributed to all police forces in England and Wales this summer.The review of 44 research studies on CCTV schemes by the Campbell Collaboration found that they do have a modest impact on crime overall but are at their most effective in cutting vehicle crime in car parks, especially when used alongside improved lighting and the introduction of security guards.The authors, who include Cambridge University criminologist, David Farrington, say while their results lend support for the continued use of CCTV, schemes should be far more narrowly targeted at reducing vehicle crime in car parks.Results from a 2007 study in Cambridge which looked at the impact of 30 cameras in the city centre showed

The Obama Administration is pressing the Libyan government to explain the reported prison death of a former CIA detainee-an incident that U.S. officials fear could reopen questions about the agency's 'extraordinary rendition' program and further complicate the president's plans to shut down the Guantánamo Bay detention center. According to human-rights groups, the body of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi-once one of the U.S. government's prize captives-was turned over to family members last week after they were told he had committed suicide at Tripoli's Abu Salim prison by hanging himself with a bedsheet. But U.S. officials are skeptical about the supposed suicide, which was first reported in a newspaper owned by Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi's son. Two weeks earlier, al-Libi was visited for the first time by human-rights workers investigating allegations that he had been tortured into making false claims connecting Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda. (Those claims, which al-Libi later retracte

Zenit.org ).- According to a Vatican spokesman, Benedict XVI accomplished the mission he had proposed in the Holy Land: to make peace resound in the religious, social and political spheres.Jesuit Fath...

PROMINENT Jewish actress Miriam Margolyes has been dropped from appearing at a fundraiser hosted by Jewish Care in Melbourne following her involvement in a controversial play about israel.Margolyes ha...

As Benjamin Netanyahu heads to the White House for his first meeting with Barack Obama, both leaders must be hoping that history is not about to repeat itself

International News: Film is adaptation of A.B. Yehoshua's novel -- Italo auteur Gianni Amelio will shoot an adaptation of celebrated Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua's 'Friendly Fire,' a novel set in Tel Aviv and in Tanzania that interweaves contempo life in israel and South Africa.

Every serious peace plan is premised on israel returning to its pre-1967 frontiers and a Palestinian state on the remaining 22 per cent of colonial Palestine. Now is the time to get the deal done

After the most demanding high wire act of his papacy, a grueling week that saw the 82 year old pontiff deliver 28 speeches while shuttling among Jordan, israel and the Palestinian Territories, it seem...

Democritus's atomic theory and Aristarchus's heliocentric model of the universe are not subjects that can often be said to delight audiences at the Cannes film festival.But Alejandro Amenabar's Agora did just that in its premiere today, with Rachel Weisz starring as the 4th-century mathematician and astronomer Hypatia, who was killed by an angry Christian mob in Romano-Egyptian Alexandria.The film, part of the festival's official selection but not competing for the Palme d'Or, received cheers. According to Edward Gibbon, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hypatia's 'flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells'. Amenabar spares his heroine quite such a grim end - but he does portray her as an areligious, Enlightenment heroine destroyed by brutal fanatics.'Once we started researching the film we recognised a lot of echoes with contemporary times and realised we could make a film about the present,' he said. Some viewers have even likened the depicti

In an interview published ahead of his meeting with Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday, US President Barack Obama reiterated comments made by other top officials, saying that he understands w...