Latest News

MILAN (Reuters) - An Italian court on Thursday sentenced former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to a one-year jail term for making public the taped contents of a confidential phone call in a case related to a 2005 banking scandal.

The sentence, which was read in court by the judge, came as Berlusconi is facing two other trials for alleged tax fraud and paying for sex with an underage prostitute.

Prosecutors in the wiretap case had asked for a one-year jail term for the media tycoon.

Berlusconi, who has denied any wrongdoing, can seek to have the decision overturned before a court of appeal.

Under Italian law, he is not expected to serve any prison term until all possible appeal trials have been carried out.

(Reporting by Manuela D'Alessandro, writing by Antonella Ciancio; editing by James Mackenzie)

At least 60 people, including eight Malaysian police officers, have been killed in the nearly month-long conflict over an attempt by followers of a Philippine-based sultan to assert a historic claim over parts of Borneo Island.

"The secretary-general is closely following the situation in Sabah, Malaysia," said a statement from the United Nations released on Wednesday. "He urges an end to the violence and encourages dialogue among all the parties for a peaceful resolution of the situation."

A spokesman for the Jamalul Kiram III, the leader of the group fighting in the Malaysian state of Sabah, said the sultanate was declaring a unilateral cease-fire in reaction to the call by the United Nations. He said an order was given for the group to take a "defensive position" and not to engage Malaysian troops.

"Malaysia, reciprocate the call for the cease-fire," the spokesman, Abraham Idjirani, appealed at a Thursday afternoon news briefing.

The Malaysian defense minister, Ahmad Zahid, rejected the calls by the United Nations and the sultanate.

"A unilateral cease-fire is not accepted by Malaysia unless the militants surrender unconditionally," he said in a statement, adding later: "Don't believe the cease-fire offer by Jamalul Kiram. In the interest of Sabahans and all Malaysians, wipe out all the militants first."

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters on Thursday afternoon that Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III had telephoned him after the United Nations statement to get his reaction.

"I informed President Aquino that they need to surrender unconditionally and their weapons have to be handed over to us," he said during a visit to Lahad Datu, the area where much of the fighting has taken place.

Malaysian officials have called for the extradition to Malaysia of the group's leader in Manila.

Mr. Aquino said Thursday that criminal charges are being prepared against the sultan by the country's National Bureau of Investigation and he rejected calls for an immediate extradition. The Philippines and Malaysia do not have an extradition treaty but they have a mutual legal assistance agreement that facilitates the capture and repatriation of fugitives.

"Let our citizens here in the country face the charges that we will be proffering," Mr. Aquino said. "Then we will talk about other developments after they have satisfied the requirements of our laws."

The situation began in mid-February when about 200 people from the southern Philippines arrived in a remote coastal area of eastern Malaysia and announced that they were members of a royal army in service of the Sultanate of Sulu, which ruled the southern Philppines and parts of the Malaysian state of Sabah for centuries.

The group was initially received peacefully but after multiple requests that they return to the Philippines violence soon broke out. The Malaysian authorities launched several assaults against the group, using fighter jets, mortars and several battalions of ground troops.

Militant leaders in the Philippines have said that fighters from the restive southern part of the country would try to make their way to Sabah to act as reinforcements for the outnumbered Filipino fighters. Malaysian and Philippine navy ships are patrolling the waters between the two countries to stop further incursions.

The threat from the North Korean Foreign Ministry came hours before the United Nations Security Council was scheduled to meet on the sanctions, which are  aimed at squeezing the international financing of the already isolated regime in Pyongyang.

Calling such sanctions "an act of war," North Korea has sharply escalated its threats against the United States and its allies in the last few days, declaring the 1953  armistice that stopped the Korean War null and void and threatening to turn Washington and  Seoul into "a sea in flames" with "lighter and smaller nukes."

The combative country had often warned that it had the right to launch pre-emptive military strikes against the United States, which it claimed was preparing to start a war on the Korean Peninsula. On Thursday, it ratcheted up its hostile language by talking about pre-emptive nuclear strikes for the first time, citing  the ongoing joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises as a proof that the Americans and their allies themselves were preparing for "a nuclear war aimed to mount a pre-emptive strike" on North Korea.

"Now that the U.S. is set to light a fuse for a nuclear war, the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will exercise the right to a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors and to defend the supreme interests of the country,"  a spokesman of the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a Korean-language statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. He used the acronym for his country's official name, Democratic People's republic of Korea.

The spokesman said that North Korea was no longer bound by the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War — and its military was free to "take military actions for self-defense against any target any moment" -- starting from Monday, when it declared the cease-fire was terminated.

The resolution the United Nations was about to adopt to impose more sanctions against the North "will compel the DPRK to take at an earlier date more powerful second and third countermeasures as it had declared," the spokesman added, without elaborating. 

"Given that it has become difficult to avert the second Korean war," he added. "The DPRK strongly warns the U.N. Security Council not to make another big blunder like the one in the past when it earned inveterate grudge of the Korean nation by acting as a war servant for the U.S. in 1950."

In the past, whenever the United Nations considered more sanctions, North Korea's typically strident rhetoric had grown harsher with threats of war. The threats were just that, and analysts said the message was meant as much for its home population, to whom they said the young leader Kim Jong-un sought to  inspire a sense of crisis, as it was meant to unsettle the region to force Washington to engage it with concessions.

Photos filed by news agencies from Pyongyang and carried in South Korean media Thursday showed buses covered with military camouflage and university students rushing out of their classroom building in military uniforms in a military exercise.

Few analysts believed that North Korea would launch a military attack at the United States, which would be suicidal for the regime. But officials in Seoul feared that North Korea might  attempt an armed skirmish to test the military resolve of Park Geun-hye, South Korea's first female president, who took office less than two weeks ago.

On Wednesday, in an uncharacteristically  blunt  response to North Korea's threat, a South Korean army general called a news conference and warned that if provoked, South Korea would strike back at the top North Korean military leadership. The two Koreas' front-line units exchanges artillery fire after North Korea launched a barrage against a South Korean border island in 2010.

In the same year, 46 South Korean sailors were killed when their navy corvette sank in an explosion the South blamed on a North Korean torpedo attack.

With the United States standing behind it, South Korea has since vowed to strike back with a deadlier force if North Korea provokes again.

Despite such warnings, however, officials in Seoul feared that Kim Jong-un, an inexperienced leader eager to build his credentials and gravitas as leader of his "military-first" country might have been emboldened by his country's recent successful tests of a long-range rocket and nuclear device  to believe that he could try an armed provocation with impunity.

In North Korea, where pronouncements are carefully choreographed and timed, its on Tuesday to use "lighter and smaller nukes" was read on North Korean television by Gen. Kim Yong-chol. General Kim, the head of the North's military intelligence, is one of the hard-liners that South Korean officials suspected was deeply involved in the 2010 attacks.

Mr. Brennan, whose nomination is expected to be eventually approved by the Senate, will take charge at the agency where he worked for 25 years just as it faces a sweeping indictment of its now-defunct interrogation program — a blistering, 6,000-page Senate study that includes incendiary accusations that agency officials for years systematically misled the White House, the Justice Department and Congress about the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding that were used on Qaeda prisoners.

By the account of people briefed on the report, it concludes that the program was ill-conceived, sloppily managed and far less useful in obtaining intelligence than its supporters have claimed.

"It's a potential minefield for John Brennan," said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former assistant C.I.A. director and former House Intelligence Committee staff director.

The still-classified report by the Senate Intelligence Committee will place Mr. Brennan squarely in the cross-fire between Democratic critics of what they call a morally and practically disastrous experiment in torture, and some Republican defenders who say the report is biased and fault President Obamafor banning coercive interrogations. And it could place Mr. Brennan in a difficult position inside the agency's headquarters in suburban Virginia.

If he endorses the Senate report, he will be criticizing the many C.I.A. officers who worked on the program and challenging the stance of former directors, notablyGeorge J. Tenet, who oversaw the brutal interrogations, andMichael V. Hayden, who has fervently defended them.

"The career work force will be watching," saidJohn A. Rizzo, a top agency lawyer for 30 years before retiring in 2009. "Hundreds who were part of the seven-year E.I.T. program — and who still believe it was the right and essential thing to do — are still there," he added, referring to enhanced interrogation techniques.

The report, according to statements from some senators and descriptions from others who have reviewed it, documents in exhaustive detail how C.I.A. officials and consultants who ran the program gave top Bush administration officials, members of Congress, the American public and even their own colleagues — possibly including Mr. Brennan himself — a deeply distorted account of its nature and efficacy. After a bipartisan start in 2009, Republican staff members refused to participate in the writing of the report, making the four-year effort largely the work of Democratic committee staff members.

The agency missed a Feb. 15 deadline to complete a review of the report, which has 35,000 footnotes referring to 6 million documents from C.I.A. files. It now appears likely that the response, offering the committee any factual corrections or broader judgments, will be delayed until Mr. Brennan's arrival.

Because Mr. Obama famously said he preferred to look forward, not back at his predecessor's counterterrorism programs, the Senate report is by far the most thorough examination of how the United States came to use nudity, cold, sleep deprivation, stress positions, wall-slamming and waterboarding, methods it had long condemned as abuse or torture.

Mr. Brennan will have to decide whether to support making a redacted version of the interrogation report public, as the committee is likely to support after the C.I.A. completes its review and as a United Nations human rights adviser urged this week. Several Democratic senators and at least one Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who was tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, have said that a declassified version must be released, and Mr. Brennan said he would give the request "serious consideration."

He will have to decide whether to convene what the agency calls an accountability board to recommend punishment for current or former officials accused of mismanaging or misrepresenting the interrogation program. If he tries to keep the peace by dismissing the dispute as history and a distraction from the agency's current challenges, he will face strong resistance from the Senate committee's Democratic majority and Mr. McCain.

But Emile A. Nakhleh, a former top C.I.A. analyst on political Islam who once worked for him, said Mr. Brennan's work as Mr. Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, intimate knowledge of the agency and blunt style equip him well to handle the task.

"It will be challenging, but if there's any person who can take this on, it's Brennan," Mr. Nakhleh said. "He may say some harsh things about the program, and some people won't like it. But the institution will benefit."

In the month since Mr. Brennan's public confirmation hearing, the interrogation issue has been largely overshadowed by disputes over the targeted killings of terrorism suspects that Mr. Brennan has overseen from the White House.

On Wednesday, the day after the Senate committee approved Mr. Brennan's nomination in a bipartisan 12-to-3 vote, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, joined by a handful of other senators, carried out a filibuster on the nomination, protesting the Obama administration's refusal to rule out drone strikes on American soil in a national emergency. He ended the filibster Thursday morning, and approval of the nomination is expected soon.

But as the public debate over torture in the movie"Zero Dark Thirty"has shown, the interrogation issue still casts a long shadow over the Central Intelligence Agency nearly a decade after the last waterboarding.

SenatorJohn D. Rockefeller IV, who as the Intelligence Committee's senior Democrat battled to exercise oversight over the interrogation program in its early years, called the new report "the most in-depth and substantive oversight that the committee has undertaken in its entire history" and said it revealed "severe problems at the C.I.A."

Mr. Rockefeller, of West Virginia, said he had spoken with Mr. Brennan at length about the report's findings. "I know that he's as appalled by many of the facts in the report as I am," he said. "John has the expertise, knowledge of the workings of the C.I.A., and the will to make sure that nothing similar ever happens again."

But Mr. Brennan has already been caught between opposing partisan currents. Senator Saxby Chamblissof Georgia, the committee's Republican vice chairman, said at Mr. Brennan's Feb. 7 confirmation hearing that the nominee had told him the report "was not objective" and called it "quote, 'a prosecutor's brief written with an eye toward finding problems.' "

If the C.I.A. pronounces the report "wrong," Mr. Chambliss said, he hoped Mr. Brennan would be willing to stand up for such a conclusion.

For his part, Mr. Brennan said at his hearing that if the report's 350-page executive summary was right, he had himself been misinformed about the program. That would be an extraordinary development, since he was deputy to the agency's third-ranking official in 2002 and 2003, when the program was at its height. He has said that he had no role in running the program and that he expressed disapproval of the brutal methods privately to unidentified colleagues.

"I don't know what the facts are or the truth is. So I really need to look at that carefully and see what C.I.A.'s response is," he said.

"What I'm most interested in, is finding out what went wrong — if this report is, as stated, accurate, what went wrong in the system where there were systemic failures, where there was mismanagement or inaccurate information," Mr. Brennan said. "I would need to get my arms around that, and that would be one of my highest priorities if I were to go to the agency."

Millions of Kenyans flocked to the polls on Monday in an anxiously awaited presidential election and a winner was supposed have been announced by now but a breakdown in computer equipment has spawned long delays and mushrooming anxieties.

"We have evidence that the results we are receiving have been doctored," said Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, Mr. Odinga's running mate. "The national tallying process lacks integrity and has to be stopped."

The election commission did not comment immediately and Mr. Odinga's campaign officials said they were considering seeking a court injunction to immediately halt the tallying process. His campaign also said that it wanted to start the tallying process again from the beginning, with observers watching every step.

Partial results, with about half the votes counted, show Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya's first president and a divisive politician who has been charged with crimes against humanity, leading Mr. Odinga by 53 to 41 percent. That margin has remained about the same since the first results began to trickle in. This is Kenya's first presidential election since 2007, when widespread evidence of vote-rigging set off ethnic clashes that killed more than 1,000 people.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court accuse Mr. Kenyatta, along with his running mate, William Ruto, of organizing some of the violence. Kenya has undertaken many major reforms since then, including passing a new constitution and overhauling its election process.

In this election, votes were supposed to be transmitted directly from tallying centers to election headquarters in Nairobi, the capital, via encrypted data messages over a mobile phone network. But the computer servers at the election headquarters crashed on Tuesday and now election officials are tabulating results manually, based on signed sheets of paper from centers around the country.

Helicopters and planes have been dispatched to pick up election officials from all corners of Kenya, from the Indian Ocean coastline to the arid deserts of the north. In the past 36 hours, election officials have trudged into the election center in Nairobi carrying locked black briefcases with the election results.

Mr. Musyoka cited a list of complaints, saying that the biometric computer equipment used to verify voters' identities had failed in most parts of the country and that some areas were reporting results that exceeded 100 percent of voter registration.

"Total collapse" is what he called it and he warned that after the violence of the last election, "Kenyans can't take another problem of this sort." But he urged supporters not to take "mass action" and instead to wait for a peaceful resolution of the election dispute.

Israel first announced that it was on "locust alert" on Monday, after large swarms were spotted in the Cairo area. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned that wind and climate conditions increased the chances of an entomological cross-border invasion.

The Ministry of Agriculture set up a hot line for swarm sightings. By Tuesday, grasshoppers the size of small birds were reported on balconies and in gardens in central and northern Israel. But the largest concentration, an ominous black cloud of millions, settled for the night near the tiny rural village of Kmehin in Israel's southern Negev desert, not far from the border with Egypt.

Potato farmers in the area complained that their fields were being ruined. Drivers said they could not see through their windshields for all the bugs flying in their direction.

On the up side, some considered the curse almost a blessing. The popular Channel 2 television news showed delighted Thai agricultural workers frying up locusts for a crunchy snack. The Israeli television crew munched on a few too, noting that locusts are considered kosher.

The Agriculture Ministry said it was the first time that Israel had seen locusts since 2005, and recalled an even worse invasion in the 1950s.

Stav Talal, a researcher from Tel Aviv University who went south to gather samples of the invaders, told the Hebrew news Web site Ynet that the locusts had originated from the deserts of Sudan and had moved north in search of food. But he added that the conditions in Israel were not ideal for the locusts, the relative cold making it hard for them to multiply.

"As I understand it," Mr. Talal said, "they did not come here in droves."

However, as in the time of Moses, Egypt was deeply afflicted. While the country's political chaos has been grabbing international attention, the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture has been combating locust swarms countrywide: in Cairo, Upper Egypt, the Canal area, the Red Sea governorate, El Arish and other border areas in the Sinai Peninsula.

Monitoring stations have been established in areas suspected as possible destinations for the locusts, the state newspaper Al-Ahram reported. While the ministry maintained that there were no material losses, the Bedouin of Upper Egypt said the locusts had destroyed their cumin crop and asked the government for compensation.

The Jewish holiday of Passover commemorates the biblical story of the Israelites' liberation from slavery in Egypt. Divine punishment in the form of 10 plagues afflicted the Egyptians as the Pharaoh refused the entreaties of Moses and Aaron to let their people go. An east wind brought the locusts that devoured what was left of Egypt's crops. Locusts also appear in the Koranic version of the tale.

Modern Israel, however, has a greater range of tools to fight off this plague. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement that spraying pesticide from the ground and air had reduced the size of the swarm considerably.

Company executives have broadly said they want to make the News Feed, the first page every user sees upon logging in, more relevant.

In an earnings call with Wall Street analysts in January, the company's founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, offered some hints of what a reimagined News Feed might look like: bigger photos, more videos and "more engaging ads."

"Advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos, and we haven't provided those things historically," Mr. Zuckerberg said at the time.

Facebook declined to comment on the redesign, which is scheduled to be announced at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. But the adjustments will reflect the tricky balance Facebook faces now that it is a public company: to keep drawing users to the site while not alienating them with more finely targeted advertisements, which is Facebook's chief source of revenue.

The pressures are acute, given Facebook's still anemic performance on Wall Street. It came out of the box last May with an extraordinarily high valuation of $38 a share, which slumped to half last fall, and has remained for the most part under $30.

"They have to walk a fine line between the user's needs and advertiser's needs," said Karsten Weide, an analyst with IDC. The user, he went on, could use "better, more intelligent filtering," while the advertiser needs "smarter, more flexible advertising formats."

Facebook's challenge is all the more important considering some warning signs of boredom.

Earlier this year came worrying news that 61 percent of users had taken a sabbatical from the social network, sometimes for months at a time; boredom was one of the reasons cited in the survey by the Pew Research Center. Even worse, 20 percent had deactivated their account entirely.

Advertisers have for years wanted to find new ways to show targeted ads to Facebook users, based on the vast data that the social network has about them. But Facebook has at times run into problems with new advertising products.

For example, last year, just before it filed for its public offering, it began to show advertisements in the News Feed, largely in the form of the controversial Sponsored Stories, where one user's "like" for a brand was deployed to market that brand to a user's Facebook "friends."

Last fall, again in an effort to drum up new revenue, Facebook offered brands and individual users a way to pay Facebook to promote a particular post on the News Feed. Those who did not pay could expect an average post to reach about a third of their Facebook friends, according to the company's own analysis. That immediately drew criticism, including from Mark Cuban, a technology investor and owner of the Mavericks basketball team, who wrote in an angry post on his blog (http://blogmaverick.com/) last fall that Facebook had made it too expensive for a brand like the Mavericks to reach its fans.

This week, responding to fresh criticism, Facebook said it did not "artificially suppress" content to feature paid posts.

The social networking giant has tweaked its News Feed over the years. Since 2009, Facebook has filtered what every user sees on the News Feed, based on the wisdom of its proprietary algorithm, called Edge Rank, which determines which posts a particular user is likely to find most interesting.

In 2010, it allowed users to chronologically filter the contents of the scrolling feed. The next year, it introduced a separate right-hand-side ticker — Twitter-esque, some said — of everything that every "friend" and brand page had posted.

At the heart of Facebook's business is to hold the attention of its one billion users worldwide. That means keeping them entertained and on the site as frequently as possible.

It seems to be losing this battle somewhat with its youngest users. Teenagers are increasingly turning to other services, including Instagram, which Facebook now owns, so much so that David A. Ebersman, the company's chief financial officer, said last week in a conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley that Facebook considered the photo-sharing site a competitor.

Instagram is not its only worry. Americans are increasingly turning to Pinterest to share shopping desires with their friends; Tumblr is a popular forum for self-expression, and Twitter continues to grow as a platform for news and entertainment.

Many people may no longer know all their "friends" on Facebook, which makes it difficult for the company to stuff the News Feed with posts that users will find relevant. Then there are ads.

"The bigger opportunity for Facebook is in cracking the relevance nut," said Travis Katz, founder of an online travel service, Gogobot, that is integrated with Facebook.

"The noise-to-signal ratio in the feed has increased dramatically," he added, "to the point where I often miss stories that were important to me."

At the Morgan Stanley conference, Mr. Ebersman said the company's filtering algorithms get "smarter" the more a Facebook user clicks on what is displayed on the News Feed.

"So of all the information we are able to show you on Facebook, we are trying algorithmically to pick out which pieces of content to put at the top of your News Feed because we think you will find them most engaging."