Man killed in deadly terror attack in London street
• Alleged attacker is filmed brandishing knife and cleaver
• Two suspects shot by armed police
• Ministers holding emergency Cobra meeting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2...t-attack-video

Dramatic footage has emerged of the suspected terrorist attack near the London barracks that left one man dead, showing a suspect with blood-covered hands using jihadist rhetoric to justify the violence.

On Wednesday night the prime minister, David Cameron, vowed that Britain will "never buckle" in the face of terrorist incidents, and condemned the "absolutely sickening" killing in Woolwich.

As the government's emergency committee Cobra convened in central London to assess the implications of the incident, ITV News broadcast footage of one of the alleged attackers.

Brandishing a cleaver and a knife, and with the body of the victim lying yards away, the man said: "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

"We must fight them. I apologise that women had to witness this today.

Map showing the exact location of the incident:



"But in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don't care about you."

The man then walks away and talks to another suspected attacker.

Later footage shows the aftermath after the two suspects were shot by police.


Police at the scene in Woolwich, south London, where a man was killed and two others were taken to hospital with gunshot wounds following a 'serious incident'. BBC screengrab:




It is believed the person died after suffering knife injuries, possibly around the head area.

Two people have been taken to hospital after they were shot by armed police.

There were reports that the man who was fatally attacked was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt.

The Woolwich and Greenwich MP, Nick Raynsford, said it was his understanding that one person, a serving soldier, was dead but there was no immediate confirmation of this from the Ministry of Defence.

The prime minister said: "Tonight, our thoughts should be with the victim, with their family, with their friends."

"People across Britain, people in every community, I believe, will utterly condemn this attack.

"We have had these sorts of attacks before in our country and we never buckle in the face of them."

Cameron was speaking at a Paris press conference with French president Francois Hollande but confirmed he would cut short the visit to return to the UK tonight to chair a meeting of the Government's Cobra emergency committee in the morning.

Chiefs at the Woolwich barracks were understood to be trying to account for military personnel, amid reports the dead person may have been connected to the military. The incident happened 300-400 metres from the perimeter of the barracks.

The barracks is home to the Princess of Wales regiment and the Kings Troop, which is a ceremonial unit, that relocated to Woolwich last year.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating the shooting by police, which is standard in cases where officers open fire.

In a statement the IPCC said it had "been made aware by Metropolitan Police Service of an incident in Woolwich, south London. IPCC investigators have been deployed to the scene and to the post-incident process. The IPCC has declared this as an independent investigation."

Earlier Raynsford said: "The incident occurred early afternoon. One individual is dead, two others are seriously injured and in hospital.

"We think a serving soldier was the victim. We don't know the circumstances surrounding the incident.

"We do know a number of weapons have been seized. They include a gun, various knives, and a machete, apparently."

A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize's largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late last week. The ceremonial centre dates back at least 2,300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.

"It's a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill,'' Awe said. "It's like being punched in the stomach, it's just so horrendous.''

Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field, and lacked the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids. But Awe said the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet tall, for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat.

"These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It's just bloody laziness'', Awe said.

Photos from the scene showed backhoes clawing away at the pyramid's sloping sides, leaving an isolated core of limestone cobbles at the centre, with what appears to be a narrow Mayan chamber dangling above one clawed-out section.

"Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines,'' said Awe. "To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can't these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It's mind-boggling.''

Belizean police said they are conducting an investigation and criminal charges are possible. The Nohmul complex sits on private land, but Belizean law says that any pre-Hispanic ruins are under government protection.

The Belize community-action group Citizens Organized for Liberty Through Action called the destruction of the archaeological site "an obscene example of disrespect for the environment and history.''

It is not the first time it's happened in Belize, a country of about 350,000 people that is largely covered in jungle and dotted with hundreds of Mayan ruin sites, though few as large as Nohmul.

Norman Hammond, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Boston University who worked in Belizean research projects in the 1980s, wrote in an email that "bulldozing Maya mounds for road fill is an endemic problem in Belize (the whole of the San Estevan centre has gone, both of the major pyramids at Louisville, other structures at Nohmul, many smaller sites), but this sounds like the biggest yet.''

Arlen Chase, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida, said, ``Archaeologists are disturbed when such things occur, but there is only a very limited infrastructure in Belize that can be applied to cultural heritage management.''

"Unfortunately, they (destruction of sites) are all too common, but not usually in the centre of a large Maya site,'' Chase wrote.

He said there had probably still been much to learn from the site. "A great deal of archaeology was undertaken at Nohmul in the '70s and '80s, but this only sampled a small part of this large centre.''

Belize isn't the only place where the handiwork of the far-flung and enormously prolific Maya builders is being destroyed. The ancient Mayas spread across southeastern Mexico and through Guatemala, Honduras and Belize.

"I don't think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived,'' wrote Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University's Anthropology Department.

"Unfortunately, this destruction of our heritage is irreversible but many don't take it seriously,'' he added. "The only way to stop it is by showing that it is a major crime and people can and will go to jail for it.''

Robert Rosenswig, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Albany, described the difficult and heartbreaking work of trying to salvage information at the nearby site of San Estevan following similar destruction around 2005.

"Bulldozing damage at San Estevan is extensive and the site is littered with Classic period potsherds,'' he wrote in an academic paper describing the scene. ``We spent a number of days at the beginning of the 2005 season trying to figure out the extent of the damage .... after scratching our heads for many days, a bulldozer showed up and we realized that what appear to be mounds, when overgrown with chest-high vegetation, are actually recently bulldozed garbage piles.''

However small the compensation, bulldozing pyramids is one very brutal way of revealing the inner cores of the structures, which were often built up in periodic stages of construction.

"The one advantage of this massive destruction, to the core site, is that the remains of early domestic activity are now visible on the surface,'' Rosenswig wrote.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff secretly intervened to help Conservative Sen. Mike Duffy pay back tens of thousands of dollars in improperly claimed expenses while an external audit was still underway, CTV News has learned.

Two months before the audit was released, Harper’s top advisor Nigel Wright had a PMO lawyer work on a letter of understanding with Duffy’s legal counsel.

Sources told CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife that the deal involved Duffy reimbursing taxpayers in return for financial help and a promise from the government to go easy on him.

At one point, Duffy expected the PMO to cover all of the money he’d improperly claimed – more than $90,000.

In a Feb. 20 email, Duffy said Wright worked out a “scenario” where all of his claimed living expenses would be covered, including “cash for the repayment.”

Two days later, Duffy publicly vowed to reimburse the taxpayers, saying he "may have been mistaken" when he filled out Senate housing allowance forms, claiming a cottage in Prince Edward Island as his primary residence.

In March, Duffy repaid $90,172.

“If there is some kind of agreement that somehow Senator Duffy is going to be compensated, then I think Canadians would be appalled,” Liberal MP Ralph Goodale said.

“It doesn’t pass the smell test and the Prime Minister’s Office needs to come clean.”

The PMO and Duffy released identical statements Tuesday, saying: “Mr. Duffy had paid back the expenses in question – and no taxpayer resources were used.”

A senior official refused to comment when asked if anyone helped Duffy with the repayment, including a loan from the Royal Bank.

Records show that Duffy is carrying a $360,000 mortgage on his Ottawa-area home. His P.E.I. residence is mortgage-free.

Duffy, Liberal Sen. Mac Harb and Independent Sen. Patrick Brazeau were all audited over concerns about their housing allowance claims.

Senators can claim an annual housing allowance of up to $22,000 if their primary residence is more than 100 kilometres outside of Ottawa.

Harb has claimed as his primary residence a bungalow in Westmeath, Ont., but neighbours told CTV earlier this year that no one seems to live in the house year-round. He was ordered to repay $51,482, including interest, for the period from April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2013.

Brazeau claimed his father’s address in Maniwaki, Que., as his primary residence, despite the fact that it is believed he lived in a home in Gatineau, a short drive from Parliament Hill. He must pay back $48,744, including interest.

Both Harb and Brazeau have said that they will fight the Senate’s repayment orders.

Meanwhile, Duffy refused to co-operate with the auditors. In one email he wrote: “I stayed silent on the orders of the PMO.”

After the Deloitte audit was released, the Harper government praised Duffy for showing "leadership" and voluntarily paying back the money.

But Liberals accused the Tories of whitewashing Duffy’s expense reports. They also questioned why the audit of Duffy’s expense claims did not mention that the Senate rules were clear about primary residence claims. That was mentioned in Brazeau and Harb’s audits.

Both Liberals and the NDP also accused the Conservative chairman of the internal economy committee, Sen. David Tkachuk, of giving Duffy a heads up about improperly claimed per diems. Duffy reimbursed the Senate for that as well.

After the Deloitte audit was tabled in the Senate, government leader Marjory LeBreton said the matter would not be referred to the RCMP.

But CTV News later reported that the Mounties are poised to open a criminal investigation into the senators' expenses.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have broken through a symbolic mark.

Daily measurements of CO2 at a US government agency lab on Hawaii have topped 400 parts per million for the first time.

The station, which sits on the Mauna Loa volcano, feeds its numbers into a continuous record of the concentration of the gas stretching back to 1958.

The last time CO2 was regularly above 400ppm was three to five million years ago - before modern humans existed.

Scientists say the climate back then was also considerably warmer than it is today.

Carbon dioxide is regarded as the most important of the manmade greenhouse gases blamed for raising the temperature on the planet over recent decades.

Human sources come principally from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

The usual trend seen at the volcano is for the CO2 concentration to rise in winter months and then to fall back as the northern hemisphere growing season kicks in. Forests and other vegetation pull some of the gas out of the atmosphere.

This means the number can be expected to decline by a few ppm below 400 in the coming weeks. But the long-term trend is upwards.

It’s a flying car!

At least more than the last one was.

Terrafugia, creators of the Transition street-legal airplane, have unveiled their vision for the next generation of personal aircraft, the TF-X.

The TF-X is closer to being a direct replacement for the automobile than the Transition, which features retractable wings that allow it to be driven on public roads and is primarily intended for use as a conventional aircraft that takes off and lands from an airport runway.

It’s also a hybrid, in more ways than one.

Although it flies like a fixed-wing aircraft, the four-seat TF-X was designed to take off and land vertically with the help of collapsible, electrically-powered rotors mounted on the ends of its fold-up wings. They draw their energy from a battery pack of yet-to-be-determined size and chemistry that can either be charged via an electrical outlet, or by the gas turbine engine that powers a rear-mounted propeller when the TF-X is in flight.

On the ground, the TF-X is propelled by electric motors in the wheels that are also run off of the battery pack, or in series hybrid mode where the turbine generates electricity after the battery charge is depleted.

A pilot’s license will still be required to fly the TF-X, but Terrafugia says a five-hour training session is all it will take to learn how to operate the vehicle. However, the idea is that you won’t have to do much of the flying at all.

Thanks to the FAA’s NextGen program, which will require all aircraft to be equipped with satellite transponders sending their exact location to a centralized air traffic management system starting in 2020, the TF-X could be able to fly entirely by itself from takeoff to landing. The pilot will still be ultimately responsible for the operation of the vehicle, and can fly it manually, but shouldn’t need to do more than enter a destination into a navigation system, sit back and enjoy the ride.

A 500-mile range is planned along with a top speed of 200 mph, and a built-in parachute will bring it safely to the ground in the event of any major mechanical failures along the way.

But don’t plan to impress the neighbors by lifting off from your driveway just yet. Terrafugia says the powerful prop wash of the TF-X will require a clear 100-foot diameter zone for takeoffs and landings, which will likely need to be regulated like helicopter pads are today. Terrafugia envisions more of these being established by cities and towns with the advent of vehicles like the TF-X.

They’ll have plenty of time to sort it out. Terrafugia figures it’ll be 8 to 10 years before the TF-X makes it from the drawing board to the skies, and even the Transition is still a couple of years away from entering production. The company is aiming to start delivering the $279,000 vehicles in early 2015.