A leading human rights activist from the Democratic Republic of Congo said on Friday that he had narrowly escaped what appeared to be an assassination attempt when gunmen infiltrated his home, took his children hostage and killed a security guard in a spray of bullets before fleeing in the family car. (from nytimes.com)

On Thursday evening, four or five unidentified gunmen entered the home of the activist, Dr. Denis Mukwege, 57, while he was out, forced his two daughters and their friend onto the floor, confiscated their telephones and threatened to shoot them if they made any noise, according to a statement from Physicians for Human Rights, a humanitarian organization based in the United States, and a neighbor.Dr. Mukwege, one of Congo’s most high-profile personalities and a past Nobel Peace Prize nominee, said in a telephone interview on Friday that when he pulled up to the gate at his home in Bukavu, in eastern Congo, about an hour later, he saw “very strange people.” The gunmen forced their way into his car, and one stepped out and trained his gun on the doctor. Then one of his security guards appeared out of nowhere. The gunman menacing Dr. Mukwege whirled around and opened fire on the guard instead, Dr. Mukwege said, then fired at him. “They were shooting bullets in my direction,” he said. He scrambled to get away, and the assailants ran out of ammunition without hitting him. “And then they just jumped again in the car.”

The three children were also unharmed, but Dr. Mukwege’s security guard — Papa Djef, as he was known to the family — was killed. “He was like my child,” Dr. Mukwege said. “He was really a brave man. He just paid his life to save mine.”

Hurricane Sandy raged through the Bahamas early Friday after leaving 21 people dead across the Caribbean, following a path that could see it blend with a winter storm and reach the U.S. East Coast as a super-storm next week. (from yahoo.com)

Sandy knocked out power, flooded roads and cut off islands in the storm-hardened Bahamas as it swirled past Cat Island and Eleuthera, but authorities reported no deaths in the scattered archipelago.

“Generally people are realizing it is serious,” said Caroline Turnquest, head of the Red Cross in the Bahamas, who said 20 shelters were opened on the main island of New Providence.

Sandy, which weakened to a category 1 hurricane Thursday night, caused havoc in Cuba early in the day, killing 11 people in eastern Santiago and Guantanamo provinces as its howling winds and rain toppled houses and ripped off roofs. Authorities said it was Cuba’s deadliest storm since July 2005, when category 5 Hurricane Dennis killed 16 people and caused $2.4 billion in damage.
Sandy also killed one person while crossing Jamaica on Wednesday and 10 in Haiti, where heavy rains from the storm’s outer bands caused flooding in the impoverished and deforested country.

Early Friday, the hurricane’s center was about 145 miles (235 kilometers) east-southeast of Freeport, Bahamas. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph) and was moving north-northwest at 13 mph (20 kph). Forecasters warned that Sandy will likely mix with a winter storm to create a monster storm in the eastern U.S. next week whose effects will be felt along the entire Atlantic Coast from Florida to Maine and inland to Ohio.

Sandy, which crossed Cuba and reached the Bahamas as a category 2 hurricane, was expected to maintain its category 1 storm status for the next few days.

In the Bahamas, power was out on Acklins Island and most roads there were flooded, government administrator Berkeley Williams said.
On Ragged Island in the southern Bahamas, the lone school was flooded. “We have holes in roofs, lost shingles and power lines are down,” said Charlene Bain, local Red Cross president. “But nobody lost a life, that’s the important thing.”

Steven Russell, an emergency management official in Nassau, said docks on the western side of Great Inagua island had been destroyed and the roof of a government building was partially ripped off.

Sooner Halvorson, a 36-year-old hotel owner from Colorado who recently moved to the Bahamas, said she and her husband, Matt, expected to ride out the storm with their two young children, three cats, two dogs and a goat at their Cat Island resort.

In an announcement at the end of Cuba’s Thursday night newscast, Cuban authorities said the island’s 11 dead included a 4-month-old boy who was crushed when his home collapsed and an 84-year-old man in Santiago province.
Santiago, Cuba’s second largest city near the eastern tip of the island, was spared the worst of the storm, which also slammed the provinces of Granma, Holguin and Las Tunas.

In Haiti, Joseph Edgard Celestin, a spokesman for the civil protection office, said the country’s death toll stood at nine, including three people who died while trying to cross storm-swollen rivers in southwestern Haiti. He did not provide specifics of how other people died.
Officials reported flooding across Haiti, where many of the 370,000 people still displaced by the devastating 2010 earthquake scrambled for shelter. More than 1,000 people were evacuated from 11 quake settlements, according to the International Organization for Migration.

With storm conditions projected to hit New Jersey with tropical storm-force winds Tuesday, there was a 90 percent chance that most of the U.S. East Coast would get steady gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and maybe snow starting Sunday and stretching past Wednesday, U.S. forecaster Jim Cisco said.
There were no reports of injuries at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but there were downed trees and power lines, said Kelly Wirfel, a base spokeswoman. Officials canceled a military tribunal session scheduled for Thursday for the prisoner charged in the 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer USS Cole.

Weather trackers say the hardest-hit areas could span anywhere from the coastal Carolinas up to Maine, with New York City and the Boston area potentially in harm’s way.

Duncan had been in a Los Angeles hospital since July 13 following a heart attack and died on Monday morning after close to two months of treatment.

Duncan was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his role as gentle giant prisoner John Coffey in “The Green Mile,” also starring Tom Hanks. Duncan won the role, in part, due to a recommendation by Bruce Willis, who he worked with on 1998’s “Armageddon.” Duncan went on to appear with Willis in three more films — “Breakfast of Champions,” “The Whole Nine Yards” and “Sin City.”

Before he broke into acting, Duncan worked as a bodyguard for stars including Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Jamie Foxx, LL Cool J, and The Notorious B.I.G. — whose 1997 death prompted him to quit that line of work.

Angola’s ruling party was declared the winner of weekend elections Sunday after taking nearly three-quarters of the vote. With about 85% of the boxes counted, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) had 73% of the nearly 4.9 valid votes cast, according to figures from the country’s National Electoral Commission. (from cnn.com)

The MPLA’s nearest rival, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), trailed far behind with 18%. Seven other parties split up the rest of the vote. The win means a new term for President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has held power since 1979, the state-run Angola News Agency reported. Under the terms of a constitution approved in 2010, the leader of the party that won Friday’s parliamentary vote automatically becomes Angola’s president. Friday’s election was only Angola’s third since it gained independence from Portugal in 1975. The country was wracked by civil war for the next 27 years, and the vote was widely viewed as an indicator of the country’s progress after a decade of peace. Elections in 1992 were abandoned midway and led to an outbreak of further violence. The MPLA won a 2008 parliamentary vote with a landslide 82%, with UNITA, its former civil war enemy, the leading opposition in the 220-seat National Assembly. UNITA saw its share of the vote nearly double from the 10% share it won in 2008.

Angola, sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer, pumps out more than 1.9 million barrels per day and boasts an expanding investment portfolio in its former colonial power, Portugal, and in other parts of Africa. But despite big spending on infrastructure and social programs since the end of its brutal civil war in 2002, corruption, poor governance and economic inequality remain serious issues for much of the country’s population of about 18 million.

After peace was established, the country faced the challenge of reestablishing civil institutions, rebuilding damaged infrastructure, clearing land mines and demobilizing large numbers of former fighters.