Alan Rickman, Harry Potter and Die Hard actor, dies aged 69

Actor Alan Rickman, known for films including Harry Potter, Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, has died at the age of 69, his family has said.

The star had been suffering from cancer, a statement said.

He became one of Britain's best-loved acting stars thanks to roles including Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films and Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Harry Potter author JK Rowling led the tributes, describing him as "a magnificent actor and a wonderful man".

She wrote on Twitter: "There are no words to express how shocked and devastated I am to hear of Alan Rickman's death."

She added: "My thoughts are with [Rickman's wife] Rima and the rest of Alan's family. We have all lost a great talent. They have lost part of their hearts."

Emma Thompson, who appeared with Rickman in productions including Love Actually and was directed by him in The Winter Guest, said he was "the finest of actors and directors" and "the ultimate ally".

She wrote in a statement: "Alan was my friend and so this is hard to write because I have just kissed him goodbye.

"What I remember most in this moment of painful leave-taking is his humour, intelligence, wisdom and kindness.

"His capacity to fell you with a look or lift you with a word. The intransigence which made him the great artist he was - his ineffable and cynical wit, the clarity with which he saw most things, including me, and the fact that he never spared me the view. I learned a lot from him."

She added: "He was, above all things, a rare and unique human being and we shall not see his like again."

Announcing his death on Thursday, a family statement said: "The actor and director Alan Rickman has died from cancer at the age of 69. He was surrounded by family and friends."

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe said Rickman was "undoubtedly one of the greatest actors I will ever work with".

He wrote on Google Plus: "Working with him at such a formative age was incredibly important and I will carry the lessons he taught me for the rest of my life and career.

"Film sets and theatre stages are all far poorer for the loss of this great actor and man."

Sir Michael Gambon, who appeared with Alan Rickman in Harry Potter as well as on stage, told BBC Radio 4 he was "a great friend".

He added: "Everybody loved Alan. He was always happy and fun and creative and very, very funny. He had a great voice, he spoke wonderfully well.

"He was intelligent, he wrote plays, he directed a play. So he was a real man of the theatre and the stage and that's how I think of Alan."

Director Ang Lee, who cast Rickman opposite Kate Winslet in 1995's Sense and Sensibility, called him a "brilliant actor… a soulful actor… [and] a great human being."

Actor Richard E Grant wrote on Twitter: "Farewell my friend. Your kindness and generosity ever since we met in LA in 1987 and ever since is incalculable."

TV star and Bafta ceremony host Stephen Fry wrote: "What desperately sad news about Alan Rickman. A man of such talent, wicked charm and stunning screen and stage presence. He'll be sorely missed."

Actor David Morrissey also paid tribute. He said: "So sad to hear the news of Alan Rickman. A wonderful actor and lovely man. Tragic news."

The London-born star began his career in theatre, including with the Royal Shakespeare Company, before winning roles in TV dramas like Smiley's People and The Barchester Chronicles in the 1980s.

His performance as the manipulative seducer the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway in 1986 brought him the first of two Tony Award nominations.

It also brought him to the attention of Die Hard producer Joel Silver, who offered him his film debut as a result.

He went on to become best known for playing screen villains - including the Sheriff of Nottingham in 1991's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, for which he won a Bafta award, and Judge Turpin opposite Johnny Depp in 2007's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

But he showed his gentler side in films like 1990's Truly Madly Deeply, in which he played Juliet Stevenson's ghost lover and which also earned him a Bafta nomination.

Further Bafta nominations came for his roles as Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility and the calculating Irish politician Eamon de Valera in 1996's Michael Collins.

The following year, he won a Golden Globe for best actor in a miniseries or television film for the title role in Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny.

Other film credits ranged from Tim Robbins' 1992 political satire Bob Roberts to Richard Curtis's 2003 romantic comedy Love, Actually, 1999's sci-fi spoof Galaxy Quest and the voice of the Blue Caterpillar in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

He also moved behind the camera in 1997 directing Thompson and her mother, Phyllida Law, in The Winter Guest.

Two years ago, he also directed period saga A Little Chaos, in which he co-starred with Kate Winslet.

Meanwhile, he continued to be a major presence on the stage in London and New York.

Another Tony nomination came for Private Lives in 2002, in which he appeared opposite Lindsay Duncan on Broadway following a transfer from London.

He recently revealed he had married Rima Horton in secret last year. The couple had been together since he was just 19 and she was 18.

Source: Kathmandupost

British astronaut swaps family Christmas for space mission

BAIKONUR, KAZAKHSTAN: Astronaut Timothy Peake, set to become the first Briton to travel to the International Space Station, said on the eve of his departure that he would look down on Earth at Christmas time and think of his family — hopefully while tucking into some Christmas pudding himself.

The former army major — a European Space Agency flight engineer — is blasting off from Baikonur in Kazakstan on Tuesday with two American and Russian colleagues for a 171-day mission at the orbiting research outpost.

“We’ve been so busy focusing on this mission I forgot that Christmas is just a week away,” Peake told reporters at the Cosmonaut Hotel in Baikonur on Monday.

“We’ll be enjoying the fantastic view of planet Earth and our thoughts will be with everyone on Earth enjoying Christmas and with our friends and family.”

The 43-year-old added that he would be able to call his relatives from space to wish them a merry Christmas.

“I also heard that a Christmas pudding went up on orbital four so we will have treats as well,” Peake said to laughter in the press room.

The experienced air pilot will become only the eighth Briton to enter the cosmos after Tuesday’s rocket launch, which is scheduled for around 1100 GMT.

He has vowed to take part in the London marathon from space on April 24, harnessed to a running machine on the ISS some 400 kilometres (250 miles) above Earth.

His fellow crew members, Russian space veteran Yuri Malenchenko and NASA’s Tim Kopra, have already spent 641 and 58 days in space respectively.

The trio will join up with the three astronauts already at the ISS — Scott Kelly of NASA and Russians Sergei Volkov and Mikhail Kornienko.

Three other astronauts -NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko- returned to Earth on Friday in a rare nighttime landing.

The ISS space laboratory has been orbiting the Earth at roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour since 1998.

Space travel has been one of the few areas of international cooperation between Russia and the West that has not been wrecked by the Ukraine crisis.

Source: SabKura News Pvt. Ltd.

Islamic extremist arrested in Germany on terror charge

BERLIN: Authorities in Germany have arrested one of the country’s most prominent Islamic extremists on suspicion of supporting a foreign terror group, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Sven Lau was arrested Tuesday in the western city of Moenchengladbach, federal prosecutors said in a statement.

Lau is suspected of four counts of supporting the group Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, or JAMWA, which was designated a terrorist organization by the United States last year.

Prosecutors alleged that the 35-year-old was the go-to contact for extremists wanting to fight for JAMWA in Syria and provided financial and material support to the group under the cover of humanitarian aid shipments.

The top security official in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Lau was arrested, described him as “one of the leading figures in the Salafist scene” in that state.

Lau, a convert to Islam, made headlines last year when he attempted to establish a “Sharia police” in the city of Wuppertal to enforce a strict interpretation of Islam.

“With their propaganda glorifying violence and their alleged help for suffering people in war zones, Salafist preachers such as Lau provide a breeding ground for the radicalization of young men,” said Ralf Jaeger, North Rhine-Westphalia’s interior minister. “They are inciting young people to join jihadist terror groups in Syria and Iraq.”

Lau’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Source: SabKura News Pvt. Ltd.

South Sudanese commanders use child soldiers as “cannon fodder”

NAIROBI: More than a dozen senior commanders and officials who children say recruited them as soldiers in South Sudan should be investigated, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday.

The United Nations says 16,000 children have joined armed groups since South Sudan’s civil war erupted two years ago.

“It’s the brutal recruitment that is the most heart wrenching,” Skye Wheeler, the report’s author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Forces come through their village and grab them and force them into fighting. It’s an absolute negation of their basic rights as children, but also as people, not to be treated just as cannon fodder.”

South Sudan was plunged into a civil war in December 2013 when a political crisis triggered fighting between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and rebels allied with his former deputy Riek Machar. The conflict has reopened ethnic faultlines that pit Kiir’s Dinka people against Machar’s ethnic Nuer people.

A peace deal was signed in August but the two sides have repeatedly accused each other of violations.

A third of 74 boys interviewed who fought in the current conflict said they were forcibly recruited, often at gunpoint.

Many said they were detained until they agreed to fight or simply abducted, handed a gun and sent into battle.

“I had no experience of holding a gun before,” said one boy in the report who was abducted from school by opposition forces.

“They told us this is how you use it… Then we began fighting.”

Around half of the boys interviewed said they willingly joined armed groups to protect themselves and their communities.

“Without the protection of a gun and an armed group, many boys believed they would have been even more vulnerable to being killed,” the report said.

Half of the child soldiers interviewed fought or worked for government forces or their allies.

Among the most prominent names cited in the report is Matthew “Pul” Puljang, an ethnic Bul Nuer commander who fought in a Unity State militia before joining the government in April 2013.

South Sudan’s army spokesman Philip Aguer said its Child Protection Unit had planned to visit Unity State in 2013 to investigate allegations of Puljang using child soldiers.

“But the visit was interrupted by the violence and it has never taken place,” he said.

“We welcome all investigations to prove any allegations.”

HRW also called for another former rebel who has joined the government side, David Yau Yau, to be investigated.

Yau Yau has released 1,755 child soldiers from his ranks since he signed a peace deal with the government in 2014.

“It not going to be solved just by releasing boys,” Wheeler said. “There also needs to be accountability for commanders who have recruited and used child soldiers to end this endless cycle.”

Source: SabKura News Pvt. Ltd.

Venezuelan National Guard charged with drug trafficking

WASHINGTON: US prosecutors are preparing to unveil drug trafficking charges against the head of Venezuela’s National Guard, according to people familiar with the case, as the United States investigates the suspected involvement of senior Venezuelan officials in the cocaine trade.

Nestor Reverol, the former head of Venezuela’s anti-narcotics agency and a long-time ally of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, is named in a sealed indictment pending in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, according to the people.

Nestor Reverol would be one of the highest-ranking Venezuelan officials to face US drug charges. He could not be reached for comment by Reuters.

In recent years, he has rejected US accusations that Venezuela has failed to curb illicit drug shipments and has touted the government’s success in cracking down on the flow of cocaine from neighboring Colombia.

Also named in the US indictment is Edylberto Molina, a former deputy head of the anti-narcotics agency and currently a military attache posted in Germany, a person familiar with the matter said.

The National Guard, which is the branch of the armed forces that controls Venezuela’s borders, did not respond to an email seeking comment on Reverol and a National Guard press official contacted by telephone declined to comment.

But the National Guard did issue a series of Tweets in Reverol’s defense on Tuesday night using the hashtag #NestorReverolSoldierOfTheFatherland and saying he should be praised for capturing more than 100 drugs bosses.

“We reject the campaign from the fascist right against our Commander General,” one said.

Venezuela’s Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino also weighed in. “Stop the campaign to tarnish the Bolivarian Armed Forces and their leaders. Let the truth come out!” he tweeted.

Venezuela’s Information Ministry did not respond to an emailed request for comment on the US indictment.

It is unclear what the specific charges are against Reverol and Molina, or when they will be made public.

US Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr and a spokesperson for Brooklyn US Attorney Robert Capers, whose office is handling the case against Nestor Reverol, declined to comment. US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spokesman Joseph Moses declined to comment.

US prosecutors have unsealed indictments charging at least five former Venezuelan officials with drug trafficking crimes over the past four years, according to records from Florida and New York district courts.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro dismisses charges of official involvement in drug trafficking as an international right-wing campaign to discredit socialism in Venezuela.

His Socialist Party says drug interdiction efforts have improved since Venezuela expelled the DEA in 2005.

ACCUSATIONS

Venezuelan opposition leaders have for years accused high-level government officials of involvement in the drug trade or of turning a blind eye to the role of military officers in narcotics trafficking.

The US State Department said in its annual narcotics control report this year that Venezuela has become one of the main transit routes for illegal drugs from South America due to the country’s porous border with neighboring Colombia, its “weak judicial system, sporadic international counter narcotics cooperation, and permissive and corrupt environment.”

Up to a quarter of all cocaine exported from South America in 2011 departed from Venezuela, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Members of Venezuela’s National Guard have been heavily involved in the drug trade, according to Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations.

“The National Guard has been key to opening up the doors into Venezuela for Colombian drug trafficking organisations and subversive groups,” he said. “They have transformed Venezuela into a massive pipeline for cocaine into the United States and Europe.”

Two other former officials with the National Guard have been indicted on US drugs charges in recent years.

Relatives of Venezuelan first lady Cilia Flores have also been caught up in US anti-drug-trafficking efforts.

Two of her nephews, Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas and Efrain Antonio Campo Flores, were arrested in Haiti last month and indicted in federal court in Manhattan on cocaine trafficking charges. Lawyers for the nephews did not immediately respond to requests for comment. They have previously said the pair would plead not guilty.

US officials said those arrests were not an effort to go after Maduro’s government but a case of US law enforcement seeking to prosecute suspected wrongdoing.

Source: SabKura News Pvt. Ltd.

Plane in Nashville rolls off runway, injuring 8

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE: Officials say a plane has rolled off a runway at Nashville International Airport, injuring eight people.

Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Emily Samuels said in an email Tuesday night that Flight 31 from Houston Hobby Airport to Nashville went off the taxiway around 5:20 pm as it approached the arrival gate.

She said the 133 passengers and five crew members evacuated the plane safely and were bused to the airport, where employees were helping them.

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said the Boeing 737 rolled into grass and got stuck while taxiing to the gate. She said the FAA is investigating.

News media outlets quote fire department spokesman Brian Haas as saying eight people were transported to a hospital, most with minor injuries and one with chest pain.

No information about what caused the aircraft to leave the runway was immediately available.

Source: SabKura News Pvt. Ltd.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Kingsman: The Secret Service is the 2015 British spy action and comedy movie that is directed by the Matthew Vaughn & based on comic book entitled as The Secret Service, created by the Dave Gibbons & Mark Millar. The screenplay is written by the Vaughn & Jane Goldman. It has follow recruitment & training of the potential secret agents, Gary “Eggsy” Unwin, into the secret spy of organization. Eggsy had join the mission for tackling the global threat from the Richmond Valentine, the wealthy eco-terrorist. The movie “Kingsman: The Secret Service” had star Mark Strong, Colin Firth & Michael Caine.

Kingsman: The Secret Service had premiered at the Butt Numb A Thon on the 13 December 2014 & was the theatrically release on the United Kingdom on the 29 January 2015. The movie had receive positive review & has gross over the $406 million worldwide, becoming the Vaughn’s most commercially successful movie to date.

The movie is announce on the late October 2012 after Vaughn drop out of the directing X-Men: Days of the Future Past for adapting the Mark Millar comic books The Secret Service. In the month of March of 2013, the 20th Century Fox has confirm the movie & set the 14 November 2014 as release date for movie worldwide, with the production to be begin in following of August. Colin Firth had join the cast to the lead the movie on the 29 April 2013. In the June 2013 it has been reported that the Leonardo DiCaprio was in the talk for playing the villain. In the September 2013, Vaughn had cast Sophie Cookson for female lead, preferring to the newcomer over obvious candidate like the Emma Watson & Bella Heathcote. Mark Hamill had cast in the cameo role as the Professor James Arnold, the reference to character in source comic book being the named as “Mark Hamill”.

Source: SabKura News Pvt. Ltd.