New threats in rivalry between Hamas, Fatah

New threats in rivalrybetween Hamas, Fatah
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Palestinian police thwarted an attack Sunday on a security commander -- the second ally of President Mahmoud Abbas targeted in two days -- as the rivalry between his moderate Fatah Party, above in a march, and the Hamas militant group threatened to explode. Abbas called on both sides to do everything possible to avoid violence and said he would open talks with Hamas later this week to end the dangerous power struggle. "Civil war is the red line that nobody dares cross, no matter which side they are on," Abbas told reporters at the World Economic Forum in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik. Abbas met Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni there -- the first high-level talks between Israelis and Palestinians since Hamas beat Fatah in January parliamentary elections.
Detainee in Holloway case
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- Dutch police have detained a man on suspicion of participating in the kidnapping and killing of Natalee Holloway last year in Aruba, the suspect's lawyer said Sunday. Gerard Spong said his client, whose name was not disclosed, was accused of "assisting in the murder, heavy battery and kidnapping" of Holloway. He also told Dutch national TV broadcaster NOS that the suspect was a croupier at the casino in the hotel where Holloway was staying. The Mountain Brook, Ala., woman was 18 when she went missing in May 2005 during a high school graduation trip to the Dutch Caribbean island with classmates..
57 trapped in China mine
BEIJING -- A senior Chinese official charged today that illegal operations by a northern China coal mine led to an accident that has trapped as many as 57 miners, the official Xinhua News Agency reported today. Rescuers rushed more pumping equipment to the Xinjing Coal Mine in Shanxi province Sunday night and raised their estimates of the numbers trapped to 57, from 44, Xinhua said. Li Yizhong, director of the State Administration of Work Safety who went to the accident scene, said the miners were working in a coal seam beyond the mine's approved limits and the area flooded, Xinhua said.
Divorce crisis in Europe
ROME -- When the Vatican looks at the state of the Western European family, it is alarmed. It sees parents and children at the mercy of overly secular nations awash in laws and practices that liberalize "evils," from abortion to gay marriage. Church officials now have another trend to fret about. Divorce has been marching ever upward everywhere in Europe, but nowhere more so than in the continent's three most Roman Catholic countries. Portugal, Italy and Spain, in that order, have registered the highest jump in divorce rates in the past decade, a new study says. Marriage, says Eduardo Hertfelder, the study's director, "is in crisis." In Portugal, divorces rose 89 percent from 1995 to 2004, according to Hertfelder's Institute for Family Policies, a nongovernmental organization based in Madrid; the jump was 62 percent for Italy, and 59 percent for Spain.
5 dead in church shooting
BATON ROUGE, La. -- A man opened fire Sunday morning at a church, killing four people before abducting his wife, whom he later shot to death at another location, authorities said. The suspect, Anthony Bell, 25, of Baton Rouge, was captured at an apartment complex near the church. Three children abducted with the woman were all found safe. "This is going to be one of the worst days in the history of our city," Police Chief Jeff Leduff said after Bell was captured and his wife's body was found at the apartment complex. Church member Kenneth Green who watched and wept from a nearby building as investigators examined evidence at the church, said he was related to all of the victims. He said his mother, Deloris McGrew, 68, his cousin Darlene Mills, 47, and his aunt and uncle, Gloria, 72, and Leonard Howard, 78, were killed. He said he also is a cousin of Bell's slain wife, whom he identified as 24-year-old Erica Bell. He said Erica Bell's mother, the Rev. Claudia Brown, pastor of the church, was wounded. Investigators did not know the motive for the shooting at The Ministry of Jesus Christ church.
Combined dispatches