Pair charged with triple murder over UK riot deaths

BIRMINGHAM: A man and a teenager were due in court Sunday, police said, charged with the murder of three men hit by a car while defending their neighbourhood against looters in Britain's second city.

They are the first people to be charged over the deaths that occurred during Britain's worst riots in decades that began in London last Saturday and spread to other major English cities.

Haroon Jahan, 20, Shazad Ali, 30, and his brother Abdul Musavir, 31, were killed early Wednesday by the entrance to a fuel station in the inner-city neighbourhood of Winson Green in Birmingham, west central England.

Joshua Donald, 26, from nearby Ladywood and a 17-year-old male from Winson Green were charged Saturday with three counts of murder, West Midlands Police said. The police cannot name those aged under 18.

They were due to appear at Birmingham Magistrates' Court at 9:00am (0800 GMT).

"Two people, aged 23 and 27, remain in custody," WMP said.

"A 16-year-old and 32-year-old have been bailed pending further enquiries."

Police said earlier that they had recovered two cars in their investigation and had obtained 400 exhibits and more than 70 witness statements.

Jahan's father Tariq has been praised for his emotional plea not to seek revenge for his son's death.

Police acknowledged that his appeal lowered the temperature, amid fears for relations between Birmingham's ethnic communities.

A total of 509 people have been arrested across the greater Birmingham conurbation following last week's disorder, which also hit the West Midlands city of Wolverhampton and the town of West Bromwich.

Besides the three deaths in Birmingham, two other people died in the wave of urban unrest.

Trevor Ellis who was found shot in his car following rioting in Croydon, south London, on Monday. A 26-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder.

Richard Bowes, a 68-year-old man, was attacked in Ealing, west London, on Monday. He died due to a head injury, a post mortem found. Police are holding a 22-year-old man on suspicion of murder. (AFP)

Chocolate improves eyesight better than carrots : Study

Chocolate

 ISLAMABAD: A study adds to previous research that suggestseating dark chocolate can make your eyesight and brain sharper. You may have already heard that dark chocolate can lower your blood pressure and also appears to have a favorable effect on cholesterol levels, platelet function and insulin sensitivity.

The authors of the latest study, from England's University of Reading, enrolled 30 men and women ages 18 to 25 and tested their vision and thinking skills a couple of hours after they ate a regular-sized chocolate bar, a health website reported.

They took the tests twice, once after eating a dark chocolate bar, and once after eating a white chocolate bar. The difference between the two chocolate bars was the amount of flavanols -- a natural compound in cocoa --they contained. Of course, the dark chocolate bar contained loads of cocoa flavanols, the white chocolate bar only a trace.

Flavanols, found in high levels in grapes, green and black teas, red wine and applies as well as cocoa, have been getting a lot of good press lately as scientists study their health benefits.

To avoid skewing their results, the researchers fudged when they told their subjects the purpose of the study: If the volunteers knew the focus was on cocoa flavanols, they might do better after eating the dark chocolate because they figured they were supposed to. Instead, study participants thought the researchers were investigating the impact of different kinds of fats.

Turns out the study participants did perform better on the vision tests and on some of the brain function tests after eating the dark chocolate, the authors report in the June issue of Physiology & Behavior.

They attribute their findings to cocoa flavanol's known ability to increase blood flow to the brain, and they speculate that the stuff might also increase blood flow to the retina of the eye.

The good news is that other research suggests cocoa flavanol's positive impact on blood flow is even greater in us folks over age 25. So the Reading researchers are conducting a similar study in older volunteers. This time they'll add caffeine and theobromine to the white chocolate bars to make sure those stimulants from the cacao plant aren't the real reason for dark chocolate's brain and vision benefits.

Police lockdown in London to prevent

 Police lockdown in London to prevent new riots

LONDON: Police in London flooded the streets on Friday in a move to prevent a repeat of England's worst riots in decades, which left city neighbourhoods smouldering and five people dead.

The number of officers in the British capital was more than doubled to 16,000 earlier this week, and Home Secretary Theresa May said the extra police would stay in place until further notice amid concerns violence could flare up this weekend.

Britain has had two quiet days following four nights of rioting and looting, which led to 1,500 arrests across the country, but politicians and police were taking no chances.

Speaking on a visit to a Sony-owned distribution centre in north London which was torched during the riots, May said: "We will be sustaining the numbers for a period of time.

"We have had some quieter nights but we are not complacent about that."

Police meanwhile said a 68-year-old man died in hospital late Thursday from injuries sustained confronting looters in west London, becoming the fifth person killed in the violence.

Police have arrested a 22-year-old man on suspicion of the murder of Richard Mannington Bowes who was set upon in the affluent London suburb of Ealing Monday as he tried to put out a fire started by a gang of youths.

The other victims of the unrest were three men in Birmingham who were run over as they defended local businesses, and a man in Croydon, south London, who was shot.

The attack on Mannington Bowes "was a brutal incident that resulted in the senseless killing of an innocent man," said Detective Chief Inspector John McFarlane of London's Metropolitan Police.

Inquests were due to open Friday into the deaths in Birmingham, England's second city, which saw three young men of South Asian origin mown down by a car as they stood guard against looters outside a petrol station.

As fears of new violence remained high, a row escalated between police and politicians as both sides sought to deflect blame for the crisis.

The police have been criticised for their reluctance to crack down hard on the first riot in the north London district of Tottenham on Saturday. Critics say the cautious approach encouraged unrest to spread across the capital and then to other English cities.

In an emergency session of parliament Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron said police would be given extra powers to prevent future trouble but also voiced criticism of their tactics.

Cameron told lawmakers the police had initially "treated the situation too much as a public order issue -- rather than essentially one of crime."

May, Britain's interior minister, has also said there were not enough officers on duty on Monday, the worst night of the unrest during which police in London arrested more than 300 people.

But senior officers hit back Friday in rare public attacks on political leaders, who last year introduced funding cuts to police forces across Britain as part of a package of austerity measures.

Tim Godwin, the acting head of the Metropolitan Police, pointedly noted that "people will always make comments who weren't there", and defended the policing of the riots in which dozens of officers were injured.

He said in the face of "unprecedented scenes", his force had "some of the best commanders that we have seen in the world... that showed great restraint as well as great courage."

Cameron and May were on holiday when the riots broke out, and returned early this week to take control, but senior officer Hugh Orde, who represents Britain's police chiefs, said their presence was an "irrelevance".

He also criticised a claim by May that she had ordered police forces across the country to cancel all holiday, saying that she "has no power whatsoever to order the cancellation of police leave."

Courts across the country, which have been working round the clock to process cases, faced another busy day on Friday to deal with the more than 500 people charged over the disturbances.

Among those hauled before the courts on Thursday was an 18-year-old girl from London who is a youth ambassador for the 2012 London Olympics. She was accused of throwing bricks at police and stealing from shops. (AFP)

Quake shakes Japan's Fukushima, no tsunami alert

Quake shakes

 TOKYO: An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.0 shook Japan's Fukushima prefecture early on Friday, public broadcaster NHK reported, but it said that no tsunami alert had been issued.

NHK also said that there were no reports of damage.

Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc reported that there had been no damage to nuclear reactors in the region.

(Reuters)