BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (Reuters) - December  29th, 2004

"I would not be at all surprised that we will be on 100,000 (deaths) when we know what has happened on the Andaman and Nicobar islands," Peter Rees of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.

David Nabarro, who heads the World Health Organization health crisis team, said up to five million people lacked the basic essentials to survive.

The colossal surge was triggered by a undersea earthquake of magnitude 9.0, the biggest in 40 years, off the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It spread an arc of death from Indonesia to Sri Lanka and beyond to Africa.

U.S. scientists said the quake that set off the wall of water had moved tectonic plates beneath the Indian Ocean by up to 100 feet, causing the Earth to wobble on its axis and permanently shortening the day by a fraction of a second.

UNICEF  executive director Carol Bellamy said children could account for up to a third of the dead.

In Thailand, where thousands of tourists had been enjoying a peak-season Christmas break away from the northern winter, many west-coast resorts were turned into graveyards.

The official toll in Thailand is 1,600, but 3,500 foreigners were unaccounted for, including more than 2,000 Scandinavians.

More than 1,800 bodies have been recovered from Khao Lak beach, north of Phuket island, and more than 3,000 people may have died there alone, police said. More than 300 dead had been found on Phi Phi island, made famous in the film "The Beach."

LONDON (AFP) - Less than half of all Britons now believe in God, a sharp drop from the more than three quarters of the population who said they were believers in 1968, according to a survey published.

A new YouGov survey found that only 44 percent believed in God, compared to a Gallup poll survey in 1968 which found that 77 percent believed in God.

PARIS - French journalists held hostage for four months in Iraq said their militant captors told them they wanted President Bush (news - web sites) to win re-election.

Confidential documents and sworn statements by Cardinal Roger Mahony were released last week, ending two years of legal maneuvers to shield "his eminence" from examination in the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal. The cardinal's testimony, memos and letters offer a rare glimpse into Mahony’s formative years as a priest and young bishop in Fresno and Stockton from 1962 to 1985, and reflect on his moral standing as shepherd of 5 million Catholics in Los Angeles and ranking prelate in the United States.

Mahony emerges as a man of contradictions and memory problems. A man who claims never to have known a priest to have sex before 1968, who struggles to remember steps he took — or did not take — to address a pedophilia crisis of epic proportions. A man whose fitness to lead must now be examined in light of whether he is telling the truth or not.

Compelled by the court after months of resistance, Mahony was deposed recently at his lawyer's office in downtown Los Angeles. Five lawyers representing hundreds of sex-abuse victims questioned Mahony for six hours about how he responded to accusations that priests in his charge had molested children. His stubborn refusal to answer all questions with candor was a virtual dare to his adversaries to dig deeper for the truth.

NEWS -  Sale of I.B.M. PC Unit Is a Bridge Between Cultures - December  8th, 2004

I.B.M. announced late yesterday the sale of its personal computer business to Lenovo, China's largest personal computer maker, a deal that reflects the industrial and economic ambitions of not only the two companies but also their two nations.

Under Lenovo's ownership, the I.B.M. personal computer business will continue to be based in the United States and run by its current management team. I.B.M. will take a stake of 18.9 percent in Lenovo, which is based in Beijing but plans to have headquarters in New York.

The significance of the deal may exceed the relatively modest amount that Lenovo is paying: a total of $1.75 billion in cash, stock and debt.

The transaction - The Times reported late last week that I.B.M. had put its PC business up for sale - points to the rising global aspirations of corporate China as it strives to become a trusted supplier to Western companies and consumers. The sale also signals a recognition by I.B.M., the prototypical American multinational, that its own future lies even farther up the economic ladder, in technology services and consulting, in software and in the larger computers that power corporate networks and the Internet. All are businesses far more profitable for I.B.M. than its personal computer unit.

But the move signals an acknowledgment by I.B.M. that its future in China may be best served by a close partnership with a local market leader - particularly one, as in Lenovo's case, that is partly owned by the Chinese government. The chief executive of Lenovo will be Stephen M. Ward Jr., currently an I.B.M. senior vice president in charge of the PC business. Lenovo's current chief and president, Yang Yuanqing, will become Lenovo's chairman.

Last week, President Bush directed Mr. Goss to draw up detailed plans in 90 days for a major overhaul of the agency, to address shortcomings that have become evident with intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and prewar assessments of Iraq.

MOSCOW - FOR 800 years the bones of two of the Orthodox Church's most famous saints have been held at the Vatican, a symbol of the deepest division in Christianity. Now the remains of St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory Nazianzen are to be returned to Istanbul where they were stolen by drunken soldiers attached to the Fourth Crusade who sacked Constantinople in 1204.

In 1204, Constantinople, then ruled by the last of the Roman emperors and a universally respected and fabulously wealthy Orthodox Patriarch, was sacked by Venetians and a heavily armed rabble from France, Germany, Italy and England belonging to the army of the Fourth Crusade. That army set up a Latin kingdom that ruled Constantinople for 57 years.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1204, soldiers plundered the city's treasury, palaces and churches. They attacked Orthodox priests, accusing them of heresy and sometimes witchcraft.

They raped women and children and removed vast quantities of gold and silver from palaces and churches, taking sacred vases and priceless works of art back with them to Venice and Rome.

The mosaic floors of the world's most magnificent cathedral, the Haghia Sophia, or Church of the Holy Wisdom, were polluted with blood, filth and animal excrement.

At one point drunken crusaders encouraged a prostitute to sit on the Patriarch's golden throne where she sang obscene songs and carried out lewd dances and sex acts.

"With one consent," wrote the historian Nicetas Choniates (1155-1215), "all the most heinous sins and crimes were committed by all with equal zeal."

At a historic reconciliation ceremony at the Vatican next weekend, Pope John Paul II plans to open up a new age of inter-denominational Christian co-operation when he hands back the bones.  

MOSCOW - Russia is developing a new nuclear missile system unlike any weapon held by other countries, President Vladimir Putin  said Wednesday, a move that could serve as a signal to the United States as Washington pushes forward with a missile defense system.

Putin gave no details about the system or why Russia was pursuing it, and it was unclear whether the Kremlin's cash-strapped armed forces could even afford an expensive new weapon.

"We are not only conducting research and successful tests on state-of-the-art nuclear missile systems, but I am convinced that these systems will appear in the near future," Putin said. "Moreover, they will be systems, weapons that not a single other nuclear power has, or will have, in the near future."

"We'll continue our efforts to build our armed forces and its nuclear component," he said.