Kenya says 'defeated' mall militants, death toll 67

By Richard Lough and Edmund Blair

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's president said his forces had "defeated" Islamists from Somalia's al Shabaab on Tuesday, shooting dead five and capturing 11 others suspected of killing 67 people during a four-day siege at a shopping mall.

"The operation is now over," Uhuru Kenyatta told Kenyans in a televised address, adding that more bodies, seemingly both gunmen and hostages, remained under rubble after three floors in part of the Westgate center collapsed late in the mission.

"We have ashamed and defeated our attackers," he said.

Police said those who stormed into restaurants and shops at a busy lunchtime on Saturday, spraying bullets and grenades, were now either dead or in custody: "Now it is for the forensic and criminal experts," said a police spokesman, Masoud Mwinyi.

The Red Cross said earlier on Tuesday that 63 people were unaccounted for. About 60 civilians were already confirmed dead in the first days of violence. Kenyan officials declined to say late on Tuesday how many more may have died later, with gunmen who had vowed to kill hostages and go down fighting if attacked.

It also remained unclear who the attackers were, beyond their loyalty to al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab, which had demanded Kenya pull troops out of Somalia. The president said he could not confirm they included two or three Americans or a British woman who might be the widow of a London suicide bomber.

However, al Shabaab themselves, on Twitter, denied that any women took part. After days of trumpeting defiance on behalf of those holding out in the mall, however, the group's silence on their fate late on Tuesday suggested their mission had ended.

"There are several bodies trapped in the rubble, including the terrorists," Kenyatta said. He put the confirmed death toll so far at 61 civilians and six security personnel, as well as five of the militants. The official toll previously stood at 62.

Bill Clinton reflects on foundation employee kille …Play video."

Officials said the gunmen had set a major fire on Monday in a supermarket. On Tuesday, a thin trail of smoke drifted into a soggy sky as darkness fell, the result, rescue volunteers said, of soldiers detonating locked doors in a search for militants.

Police were letting some people retrieve cars left behind when shoppers fled in panic as gunmen, whom officials had said numbered about a dozen or more, burst upon them. But journalists and others were still kept well away behind a security cordon.

FOREIGNERS

The president said he could not confirm intelligence reports of British and American militants, adding that forensic tests were being carried out to establish their nationalities. On Monday, the government denied speculation of women being among the guerrillas, but said some had been dressed as women. That may have been a ploy to smuggle more weapons past mall guards.

It would be unusual for Islamist militants to put women on the frontline and al Shabaab categorically denied it. British media have speculated about the involvement of the "White Widow", the fugitive British wife of one of the four men who blew themselves up in the 7/7 bombings in London in July 2005.

"We have an adequate number of young men who are fully committed & we do not employ our sisters in such military operations #Westgate," al Shabaab said on its Twitter feed.

Making no mention of gunmen still in the mall, it also drew a link to the most recent Islamist attack in London, when a soldier was stabbed to death on a busy street in May in the suburb of Woolwich. Michael Adebolajo and a fellow British Muslim convert of Nigerian descent face trial for murder.

"It's an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth...' Remember Mujahid Adebolajo? This is what he meant. His was #Woolwich, #Westgate ours!" another al Shabaab Twitter post read.

Kenyatta said: "These cowards will meet justice as will their accomplices and patrons, wherever they are."

Kenyan Foreign Minister: 2 or 3 Americans Involved …Play video."

KENYATTA

He thanked other leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, for support and used his address to both praise the response of the Kenyan people and call for national unity, six months after his election was marked by ethnic tensions.

"Kenya has stared down evil and triumphed," he said.

Kenyatta's focus on Kenya's troubles, and of his role in a global campaign against terrorism, was a reminder that he faces trial at The Hague in a few weeks time for crimes against humanity over violence that followed a previous election, in 2007. The International Criminal Court adjourned the trial of his vice president this week because of the Westgate crisis.

The president and his government have urged the ICC to drop the case and warm words for the Kenyan leadership from Western allies during the siege may have encouraged their hopes that the court might be pressed to shelve proceedings in the interests of shoring up an important partner in the fight against al Qaeda.

The attack has come at a time when several violent Islamist groups from Mali to Algeria, Nigeria to Kenya - tapping into local grievances but all espousing an anti-Western, anti-Christian creed - are striking at state authority and international interests.

Kenyatta had rejected demands that he pull Kenyan troops out of its northern neighbor. As part of an African peacekeeping force in Somalia, those soldiers have pushed al Shabaab on to the defensive over the past two years.

Its attack on an Israeli-built complex that symbolized the rise of an affluent class of Africans alongside expatriate Westerns may now help the movement to a position of prominence in the widening constellation of international jihadists.

Images from closed-circuit television inside the mall during the attack showed two militants, casually dressed and wearing ammunition belts. One held an assault rifle. Al Shabaab confirmed he pair were part of the group that attacked Westgate.

NYPD: More Police Around Shopping MallsPlay video."

Kenyan Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed said earlier that "two or three Americans" and a British woman were among the militants. She said the Americans were "young men, about between maybe 18 and 19" years old. She said they were of Somali or Arab origin and had lived in "in Minnesota and one other place".

Al Shabaab, which said it had been in communication with its members in the mall, dismissed the minister's comments.

"WHITE WIDOW?"

A British security source said it was possible that Samantha Lewthwaite, widow of 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay, was involved in the Nairobi siege in some way. "It is a possibility. But nothing definitive or conclusive yet," the source said.

Lewthwaite is thought to have left Britain several years ago and is wanted in connection with an alleged plot to attack expensive hotels and restaurants in Kenya.

President Obama, whose father was Kenyan, said he believed the country - scene of one of al Qaeda's first big attacks, in 1998 - would continue to be a regional pillar of stability.

Somalia's prime minister appealed in Geneva on Tuesday for international support to combat al Shabaab but said a military solution to their insurgency alone was not enough.

Abdi Farah Shirdon said: "We still have a difficult journey ahead of us. A military solution alone is not enough, promotion of rule of law, greater regional cooperation and economic stability and provision of public services are all key factors."

British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said he believed six Britons had died in the attack. Other known foreign victims are from China, Ghana, France, the Netherlands and Canada.

(This story has been corrected to add dropped word "to", paragraph 14)

(Reporting by James Macharia, Duncan Miriri and Matthew Mpoke Bigg in Nairobi, Pascal Fletcher in Johannesburg and Steve Holland in New York; Writing by Edmund Blair and James Macharia; Editing by Giles Elgood and Alastair Macdonald)

Kenya declares standoff at mall is over

President Uhuru Kenyatta says his security forces have "ashamed and defeated" the armed terrorists.
Three floors of building 'collapsed'

Quake kills 45 in Pakistan, creates new island in sea

By Gul Yusufzai

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - A major earthquake hit a remote part of western Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 45 people and prompting a new island to rise from the sea just off the country's southern coast.

Tremors were felt as far away as the Indian capital of New Delhi, hundreds of miles to the east, where buildings shook, as well as the sprawling port city of Karachi in Pakistan.

The United States Geological Survey said the 7.8 magnitude quake struck 145 miles southeast of Dalbandin in Pakistan's quake-prone province of Baluchistan, which borders Iran.

The earthquake was so powerful that it caused the seabed to rise and create a small, mountain-like island about 600 meters (yards) off Pakistan's Gwadar coastline in the Arabian Sea.

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7.7 magnitude earthquake hits Pakistan, killing dozens

Television channels showed images of a stretch of rocky terrain rising above the sea level, with a crowd of bewildered people gathering on the shore to witness the rare phenomenon.

Officials said scores of mud houses were destroyed by aftershocks in the thinly populated mountainous area near the quake epicenter in Baluchistan, a huge barren province of deserts and rugged mountains.

Abdul Qadoos, deputy speaker of the Baluchistan assembly, told Reuters that at least 30 percent of houses in the impoverished Awaran district had caved in.

The local deputy commissioner in Awaran, Abdul Rasheed Gogazai, and the spokesman of Pakistan's Frontier Corps involved in the rescue effort said at least 45 people had been killed.

In the regional capital of Quetta, officials said some areas appeared to be badly damaged but it was hard to assess the impact quickly because the locations were so remote.

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People rush out their offices after they felt a major earthquake that struck Baluchistan province in …

Chief secretary Babar Yaqoob said earlier that 25 people had been injured and that the death toll was expected to increase as many people appeared to be trapped inside their collapsed homes.

Local television reported that helicopters carrying relief supplies had been dispatched to the affected area. The army said it had deployed 200 troops to help deal with the disaster.

(Writing by Maria Golovnina; Additional reporting by Mehreen Zahra-Malik in Islamabad and David Chance in New Delhi; editing by Mark Heinrich)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top scientists from a variety of fields say they are about as certain that global warming is a real, man-made threat as they are that cigarettes kill.

They are as sure about climate change as they are about the age of the universe. They say they are more certain about climate change than they are that vitamins make you healthy or that dioxin in Superfund sites is dangerous.

They'll even put a number on how certain they are about climate change. But that number isn't 100 percent. It's 95 percent.

And for some non-scientists, that's just not good enough.

There's a mismatch between what scientists say about how certain they are and what the general public thinks the experts mean, specialists say.

That is an issue because this week, scientists from around the world have gathered in Stockholm for a meeting of a U.N. panel on climate change, and they will probably release a report saying it is "extremely likely" — which they define in footnotes as 95 percent certain — that humans are mostly to blame for temperatures that have climbed since 1951.

One climate scientist involved says the panel may even boost it in some places to "virtually certain" and 99 percent.

Some climate-change deniers have looked at 95 percent and scoffed. After all, most people wouldn't get on a plane that had only a 95 percent certainty of landing safely, risk experts say.

But in science, 95 percent certainty is often considered the gold standard for certainty.

"Uncertainty is inherent in every scientific judgment," said Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Thomas Burke. "Will the sun come up in the morning?" Scientists know the answer is yes, but they can't really say so with 100 percent certainty because there are so many factors out there that are not quite understood or under control.

George Gray, director of the Center for Risk Science and Public Health at George Washington University, said that demanding absolute proof on things such as climate doesn't make sense.

"There's a group of people who seem to think that when scientists say they are uncertain, we shouldn't do anything," said Gray, who was chief scientist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the George W. Bush administration. "That's crazy. We're uncertain and we buy insurance."

With the U.N. panel about to weigh in on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of oil, coal and gas, The Associated Press asked scientists who specialize in climate, physics, epidemiology, public health, statistics and risk just what in science is more certain than human-caused climate change, what is about the same, and what is less.

They said gravity is a good example of something more certain than climate change. Climate change "is not as sure as if you drop a stone it will hit the Earth," Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said. "It's not certain, but it's close."

Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss said the 95 percent quoted for climate change is equivalent to the current certainty among physicists that the universe is 13.8 billion years old.

The president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, and more than a dozen other scientists contacted by the AP said the 95 percent certainty regarding climate change is most similar to the confidence scientists have in the decades' worth of evidence that cigarettes are deadly.

"What is understood does not violate any mechanism that we understand about cancer," while "statistics confirm what we know about cancer," said Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist. Add to that a "very high consensus" among scientists about the harm of tobacco, and it sounds similar to the case for climate change, he said.

But even the best study can be nitpicked because nothing is perfect, and that's the strategy of both tobacco defenders and climate deniers, said Stanton Glantz, a medicine professor at the University of California, San Francisco and director of its tobacco control research center.

George Washington's Gray said the 95 percent number the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will probably adopt may not be realistic. In general, regardless of the field of research, experts tend to overestimate their confidence in their certainty, he said. Other experts said the 95 percent figure is too low.

Jeff Severinghaus, a geoscientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said that through the use of radioactive isotopes, scientists are more than 99 percent sure that much of the carbon in the air has human fingerprints on it. And because of basic physics, scientists are 99 percent certain that carbon traps heat in what is called the greenhouse effect.

But the role of nature and all sorts of other factors bring the number down to 95 percent when you want to say that the majority of the warming is human-caused, he said.

___

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

How certain are scientists about global warming?

Experts say there's a 95 percent chance the phenomenon is real and caused by humans.
For some, that's not good enough

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian opposition groups and international relief organizations are warning of the risk of mass starvation across the country, especially in the besieged Damascus suburbs where a gas attack killed hundreds last month.

With the world's attention focused on the regime's chemical weapons, activists said six people — including an 18-month girl — have died for lack of food in one of the stricken suburbs in recent weeks.

Save the Children said in an appeal Monday that more than 4 million Syrians, more than half of them children, do not have enough to eat. Food shortages have been compounded by an explosion in prices.

"The world has stood and watched as the children of Syria have been shot, shelled and traumatized by the horror of war," said Roger Hearn, Save the Children's regional director for the Middle East. "The conflict has already left thousands of children dead, and is now threatening their means of staying alive."

Thousands of people are believed trapped in suburbs east and west of the capital that have been held for months by rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad. Regime troops are besieging the areas, and residents say food is increasingly had to find. Rebels say they are trying to break the blockade.

The suburbs were the site of the Aug. 21 attack that a U.N. report found included the use of the nerve gas sarin. They were home to more than 2 million people before the war, but it is unclear how many are there now.

In some hard-hit areas such as the western suburb of Moadamiyeh, people are running out of food and are mostly relying on lentils, olives and dried figs, according to residents and activists.

"We have no food, no milk and no medicine," said a woman from Moadamiyeh, who identified herself by her nickname Um Lujain for fear of government reprisals. "We are surviving on one meal a day"

Um Lujain said her 18-month-old daughter has lost half her weight and spends most of her days sleeping. The woman said her daughter's diet is based on the liquid she makes by boiling lentils.

"There has been no children formula or bread for about a year," the woman said. She added that sometimes rebels find expired boxes of powdered milk in abandoned shops or pharmacies, and people still give it to their children for lack of food.

According to the Moadamiyeh Media Center, six people have died of starvation over the past 20 days: two women and four children ages 18 months to 7 years. It added that 15 other children are in intensive care in clinics, suffering from malnutrition.

On Monday, the opposition Syrian National Coalition accused government forces of tightening their months-long siege. "Assad's forces are starving people to death in those areas," the coalition claimed. "Famine looms in the horizon."

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In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian citizens gather at the scene …

Rana Obeid, the 18-month-old girl, was the latest to die on Monday. An amateur video showed her lying on a bed, her ribs visible and her stomach bloated.

The video appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting on the events depicted.

Mahmoud Abu Ali, an activist in Moadamiyeh, said the suburb has been under siege for 307 days. He added that most of the cows, sheep and goats died as a result of shelling or lack of feed, and people cannot plant their land because of daily bombardment.

"People wake up in the morning and there is no food to have breakfast. At noon there is no food for people to have lunch," Abu Ali said.

Khaled Iriqsousi, head of Syrian Arab Red Crescent, told The Associated Press that the organization has not entered suburbs of Damascus for five months because of the fighting.

Iriqsousi said by telephone that one of the most serious problems is that children are not getting vaccinated. "This will affect generations," he warned.

The United States and Russia brokered an agreement for Syria to give up its chemical weapons, but U.N. diplomats are at odds over details of a Security Council resolution spelling out how it should be done and the possible consequences if Syria doesn't comply.

In a speech at the U.N. on Tuesday, President Barack Obama challenged the Security Council to hold Syria accountable if it fails to live up to its pledges.

"If we cannot agree even on this," Obama said, "then it will show that the United Nations is incapable of enforcing the most basic of international laws."

Ertharin Cousin, head of the U.N.'s World Food Program, demanded that a potential cease-fire for the benefit of the experts who will secure Syria's chemical weapons include access for aid workers.

WFP is feeding 3 million people inside Syria.

___

Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report.

'We have no food, no milk, and no medicine'

More than 4 million Syrians do not have enough to eat, according to activists and relief organizations.
Residents relying on lentils and olives