Two months ago the Nevada Land and Resource Company put out a press release on Business Wire, an international media relations wire service, announcing “The Nevada land rush is on!” It has since had 15,000 inquiries, some from as far away as Germany and Britain.
But as one company officialadmitted, the land in question is mostly high desert with little water, no paved roads, freezing in winter and fiery in summer, suitable mainly for growing sagebrush. “It gives new meaning to the word nowhere,” said Carmel Hopkins, real estate editor of the Las Vegas Journal-Review newspaper”It will probably be three to four hundred years before it’s worth anything.”. After heavily beating a car passenger with their batons for no apparent reason, the Brazilian police let him drive off. Then one fired two shots through the back window, killing him, according to his friends.

The Sao Paulo policemen did not know they were being filmed on an amateur video, shown on Monday on the big Globo TV channel. In a separate incident, filmed at the same roadblock on a different night, the same policemen were seen beating a man with clubs before taking him behind a wall. The video sound recorded screams and a gunshot and the cameraman said he later found the man wounded.
The latest case of brutality by Sao Paulo’s military-led police outraged but hardly surprised Brazilians. Human rights groups have long described the Sao Paulo police as one of the world’s most violent.Nine of the 10 officers seen on the videos, recorded in the city’s poor Diadema suburb, have been detained by the military police pending trial. After public fears that they would get off lightly before a military tribunal, Mario Covas, Sao Paulo’s state governor, said they would be tried by a civilian court.Mr Covas apologised to the public but sought to portray the incident as isolated Most Brazilians scoffed “This kind of stuff happens all the time. The only difference this time is that it’s down on film,” said James Cavallaro of the human rights group Americas Watch.”This was in no way an isolated incident,” added Congressman Jose Anibal “It happens all the time.

I hope this leads to an end to the impunity policemen like these have enjoyed for so long.”"They are nothing more than bandits in uniform,” said state prosecutor Luiz Antonio Marrey. “They are cops turned into criminals since they’ve committed murder, assault, extortion and abuse of authority.”Witnesses said the police had beaten drivers who refused to pay bribes to allow them through the roadblock. “The authors of this barbarity must receive exemplary punishment,” said Ricardo Balestreri of Amnesty International Brazil.Sao Paulo’s military-led police gained notoriety in 1992 when they put down an inmates’ revolt at Carandiru prison to put down an inmates’ revolt More than 100 prisoners died.. Turkey’s Islamist-led government pressed for more information yesterday about a spate of arson attacks which have killed nine Turks in Germany and the Netherlands in the last 10 days. “I am telling the West, come to your senses, stop this violence, be human,” the Turkish Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbakan, told members of his ruling Welfare Party onTuesday. Dutch and German police said it was too soon to conclude that the two worst arson attacks, in The Hague and in the west German town of Krefeld, had been motivated by racism or anti-Islamic hatred.
The Dutch blaze killed a Turkish mother, Mahi Kosedag, and five of her children in her flat on 25 March. Three Turks, a mother and two teenagers, died in their flat in last Monday’s German fire.While some Turks living in western Europe have been the targets of native right-wing extremists in recent years, other incidents of anti-Turkish violence have been attributed to Kurdish activists involved in the 13- year-old war against the Turkish armed forces in south-eastern Turkey.

Some Kurdish fighters see violence in European cities as a way of attracting attention to their cause.However, Mr Erbakan linked the latest attacks to what he called the anti- Islamic propaganda filling the media and literature of Western countries. Pointing the finger of blame at Western governments, police and judicial authorities, he said: “You are responsible for these acts, because you are not giving the necessary punishment to those responsible.”The killings in The Hague provoked particular concern because of the long-standing reputation of the Dutch for tolerance.”The thought that we could be dealing with arson with some ethnic motivation is dramatic. That would be an entirely new phenomenon in The Netherlands,” said Wim Kok, the Prime Minister.. Zairean opposition leaders said yesterday that President Mobutu Sese Seko had formally been given the name of a longtime rival as his new prime minister. Prosper Ndume, a member of parliament and spokesman for the opposition coalition, said the formal document naming Etienne Tshisekedi as parliament’s choice for prime minister were sent to Mr Mobutu yesterday. The president was expected to approve the decision yesterday AP – Kinshasa.

Just days after being recalled from his post in Washington, Chinese journalist Wei Guoqiang committed suicide in Peking last weekend after a colleague said he had been discovered preparing to defect, the New York Times reported. Mr Wei, 47, was the Washington bureau chief of the New China News Agency Xinhua. The newspaper quoted one of Mr Wei’s colleagues as saying he was recalled to Peking last month after a colleague discovered him preparing documents to support a political asylum application in the United States for himself, his wife and his daughter Reuters – New York. About 4,000 people marched through the capital of Belarus chanting “Independence”, in protest at an outline union treaty signed by the Russian and Belarussian presidents in Moscow.