Majority of Britons would vote to leave EU

A MAJORITY of Britons would vote to leave the European Union if given the chance, according to a survey.

The Optimum Research poll in The Observer newspaper found that 34 per cent would definitely vote to quit the 27-member bloc and 22 per cent would probably do so, giving a total of 56 per cent that would opt to leave the EU.

Eleven per cent would definitely vote to remain in the union, while a further 19 per cent said they would probably cote to stay in - a total of 30 per cent.

Some 14 per cent said they did not know.

Some 28 per cent of those polled said Britain's membership of the EU was generally a good thing, while 45 per cent said it was generally a bad thing.

EU leaders gather in Brussels on Thursday to try to thrash out the bloc's budget for the 2014-2020 period, at which Britain will argue for a real terms freeze.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is pushing for a freeze in the trillion-euro budget, having threatened to veto any rise in spending.

Voters from Cameron's Conservative Party were the most in favour of leaving the EU (68 per cent), followed by the opposition Labour Party (44 per cent) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats (39 per cent).

The Conservatives and the Lib Dems form Britain's coalition government.

The poll also found that 39 per cent would vote for Labour in a general election. The Conservatives were on 32 per cent, the anti-EU UK Independence Party on 10 per cent, the Lib Dems on eight per cent and other parties on 11 per cent.

Optimum Research surveyed 1957 adults online from Tuesday to Thursday.

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Chinese street kids found dead in dumpster

THE bodies of five street children have been found in a dumpster in southwest China after they climbed inside it to escape the night-time cold, state media report.

The five boys aged about 10 died of carbon monoxide poisoning after apparently burning charcoal inside the trash container to keep warm, Xinhua news agency said.

A trash collector discovered the bodies on Friday morning in the dumpster in the city of Bijie in Guizhou province, according to the Beijing News.

Autopsies showed carbon monoxide poisoning was the cause of death, Xinhua quoted sources in a local branch of the ruling communist party as saying.

It said leftover burnt charcoal was found inside the dumpster, indicating that the boys might have been burning charcoal for heat before they died.

Calls to Bijie police and city officials on Sunday went unanswered.

The Friday night low temperature in the mountainous city was 6C.

Photos uploaded onto the internet showed that the dumpster is about 1.5 metres by 1.3 meters and has an airtight lid, Xinhua reported.

The tragedy has sparked an outcry on the net, it said. A post on Sina Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like microblogging service, had more than 2.5 million hits as of Sunday evening.

While some users accused the local government of negligence, others said the parents of the children were also to blame, according to the news agency.

"It reminded me of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. Isn't it that such things only happen in fairy tales?" wrote one user called Saludika.

"What a cold world this must be for the five children!" said another, Lu_Yao.

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Myanmar announces new prisoner amnesty

THE president of Myanmar (Burma) has ordered a new prisoner amnesty ahead of a historic visit to the country by US President Barack Obama.

State television said President Thein Sein had ordered 66 detainees released, but it was not clear whether any political prisoners would be among them.

A Home Ministry official said Thein Sein signed the amnesty order on Friday, but the prisoners will be freed on Monday.

The presidential amnesty was the second announced this week.

On Thursday, Thein Sein announced an amnesty for 452 prisoners, but the move did not include prisoners of conscience and prompted activists to step up calls for the government to release those believed to remain behind bars.

Myanmar's government has long insisted that all prisoners are criminals and does not acknowledge the existence of political detainees. However, the reformist new government, praised for its moves toward democracy, has released hundreds of people this year who were jailed under the former military junta.

A separate press release, issued on Sunday, said the government would initiate "initiate a process between the Ministry of Home Affairs and interested parties to devise a transparent mechanism to review remaining prisoner cases of concern by the end of December 2012".

The news came one day ahead of a visit on Monday by Obama, who will become the first sitting American president to visit the once-pariah nation.

Obama is due to meet Thein Sein, as well as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi before flying to Cambodia later in the day.

Thein Sein's administration has made freedom for political prisoners one of the centrepieces of its reform agenda. Earlier prisoner releases helped convince Western nations, including the United States, to ease sanctions they had imposed against the previous military regime.

Under the now-defunct junta, rights groups said more than 2000 activists and government critics were wrongfully imprisoned.

Suu Kyi's party says at least 330 political prisoners remain incarcerated.

Obama said on Sunday in Thailand that his visit to Myanmar is an acknowledgement of the democratic transition under way but not an endorsement of the country's government.

Obama's words were aimed at countering critics who say his trip to the country is premature.

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Israel facing 'millions' of cyber-attacks

THE Israeli government has admitted it has become the victim of a mass cyber-warfare campaign with millions of attempts to hack state websites since the start of its Gaza offensive four days ago.

Speaking ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said the government was now waging war on "a second front - of cyber attacks against Israel".

Steinitz said in the past four days, Israel had "deflected 44 million cyber attacks on government websites. All the attacks were thwarted except for one, which targeted a specific website that was down for six or seven minutes."

His remarks came a day after the online activist group Anonymous claimed to have downed dozens of websites of Israeli state agencies and a top bank in protest over the Jewish state's deadly air assault.

It also comes as both Israel and the Palestinians try exploiting the social networks in a furious effort to win over public opinion amid the worst outbreak of Middle East violence in four years.

Steinitz did not say who was responsible, but said the government had successfully managed to deflect almost every attack, thereby avoiding serious disruption or other damage.

On Saturday, Anonymous claimed to have downed or erased the databases of nearly 700 Israeli private and public websites, including that of the Bank of Jerusalem finance house.

It also claimed to have briefly downed the foreign ministry website in protest over an alleged Israeli threat to cut the Gaza Strip's internet communications.

"For far too long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of the Palestinian people in the so called 'Occupied Territories' by the Israel Defence Force," Anonymous said in a statement.

"But when the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand."

Steinitz made no direct reference to Anonymous and failed to specify if the government was dealing with a co-ordinated attack. He also refused to disclose which countries these efforts were being conducted from.

But the minister stressed that the government had come up with back-up for "essential websites" should they be taken down.

"This is an unprecedented attack, and our success has been greater than we anticipated," Steinitz said.

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Egypt's new Coptic Pope enthroned

POPE Tawadros II has been enthroned as the new leader of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority in a ceremony at Cairo's St Mark's Cathedral attended by Prime Minister Hisham Qandil.

Dozens of Coptic clerics in flowing robes took part in Sunday's ceremony, the first in four decades, as the Muslim prime minister looked on.

Tawadros received the crown and crucifix from Bishop Pachomius, who had served as the church's interim leader, before ascending the huge wooden throne of St Mark embossed with lions.

Arabic, English and Greek mingled with the ancient Coptic language of the church's liturgy in the psalms and prayers of the service and the tributes of well-wishers.

Tawadros, 60, was chosen on November 4 to succeed Pope Shenuda III, who died in March after four decades on the patriarchal throne. He was chosen after a blindfolded altar boy picked his name from a chalice, according to church custom.

He becomes spiritual head of the largest Christian minority in the Middle East and 118th pope in a line dating back to the origins of Christianity and to Saint Mark, the apostle and author of one of the four Gospels, who brought the new faith to Egypt.

Shenuda, a careful, pragmatic leader, died at a critical time for the increasingly beleaguered minority, which has faced a surge in sectarian attacks after an uprising overthrew president Hosni Mubarak in February last year.

The pope leads the Coptic Orthodox community in a country where Christians make up between six and 10 per cent of an 83 million population.

Amid increased fears about the community's future after the overthrow of Mubarak, Tawadros will be its main contact with Islamist President Mohamed Morsi.

The rise of Islamists after the revolution sparked fears among Copts of further persecution, despite Morsi's repeated promises to be a president "for all Egyptians".

Copts have suffered sectarian attacks for years, but since Mubarak's overthrow several dozen have been killed in sectarian clashes and during a protest in October last year crushed by the then ruling military.

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Seven dead in Nairobi minibus attack

SEVEN people were killed and many more wounded when an apparent explosive device was hurled at a packed minibus in a predominantly Somali area of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, police and the Red Cross say.

Nairobi police chief Moses Nyakwama said the blast occurred on Sunday on a local minibus in the district of Eastleigh, where mainly Somalis or Kenyans of Somali origin live and which has been the target of other attacks in recent weeks.

"The information we have is that there were about 25 people in the bus. It looks like it is an improvised explosive device that was thrown in it," he said. "It occurred at a congested place so even people passing by got injured."

The Kenyan Red Cross said on its Twitter account that the death toll was now seven people while the number of wounded was 29.

Kenya has suffered a wave of grenade and gun attacks, often blamed on sympathisers of Somalia's al-Shabab Islamist insurgents, since its army went into Somalia last year to flush out al-Shabab.

The Eastleigh area has often been a target of violence.

On Wednesday, a suspected grenade attack in a supermarket in the district wounded one person, and two weeks earlier another explosive device went off, wounding two.

Earlier this month, attackers also hurled a grenade into a church in the northeastern town of Garissa, close to the Somali border, killing one policeman and wounding 14 people.

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Obama calls for more Myanmar reform

PRESIDENT Barack Obama has flexed US power in Asia on a regional tour that will make history when he lands in Myanmar (Burma), calling on its leaders to step up their startling political reform drive.

Obama touched down in Air Force One in Bangkok on Sunday, sending a message that relationships like the six-decades-old treaty alliance with Thailand will form the bedrock of US diplomacy as the region warily eyes a rising China.

On Monday Obama will become the first sitting US president to visit formerly isolated Myanmar. He will praise President Thein Sein for ending a dark era of junta rule, but also prod him to go much further towards genuine democracy.

Then, in a stark illustration of how far Myanmar has come, the US leader will stand side-by-side with democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi at the lakeside villa where his fellow Nobel laureate languished for years under house arrest.

Speaking in Thailand on the eve of the visit, Obama praised Myanmar's reforms but urged the regime to do more.

"President Thein Sein is taking steps that move us in a better direction," he told a press conference. "But I don't think anybody's under any illusion that Burma's arrived."

"The country has a long way to go. I'm not somebody who thinks that the United States should stand on the sidelines and not want to get its hands dirty when there's an opportunity for us to encourage the better impulses inside a country."

After a 19-hour journey from Washington, Obama first paid homage to Thailand's ancient history with a private tour of the Wat Pho temple, which is famed for a huge, golden statue of a reclining Buddha.

"What a peaceful place," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the president, who remarked that they were having a "treat" because the normally crowded tourist attraction had been cleared for their visit.

Then Obama called at Siriraj hospital in Bangkok for an audience with revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, seen as a symbol of continuity for a kingdom with a turbulent political past.

Obama and Clinton greeted and shook hands with the frail monarch, who turns 85 next month.

He also held talks with Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra focusing on trade, regional politics, counter-narcotics issues and terrorism.

On Monday Obama will fly to Cambodia, and a likely tense encounter over human rights with Prime Minister Hun Sen, ahead of the East Asia Summit, the main institutional focus of his pivot of US foreign policy to the region.

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Order implicated in abuse scandal

A PSYCHOLOGIST who met dozens of child abuse victims claims three quarters of the Brothers from the St John of God order were suspected to be involved in the scandal.

Michelle Mulvihill has also told Fairfax that Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell helped in negotiations for a loan for the order that was later used to pay victims.

The Sydney-based psychologist was employed by the order for nine years, from 1998, to sit in on meetings between victims and representatives from the order. She left the job because of fears suspected pedophiles had too much power in the order.

Fairfax also reported that according to Dr Mulvihill, the order hid documents and did not properly supervise suspected pedophile Brothers.

She said of the 40 to 50 Brothers in the order at the time she was there, around 75 per cent had been subject to allegations.

Dr Mulvihill said the order included Brothers who had carried out "the worst examples of child abuse I have ever heard of", Fairfax reported.

There have been calls for a royal commission into sexual abuse by religious groups.

NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell has already announced a special commission to investigate allegations of child sex abuse by Catholic Church clergy in the Hunter region.

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EgyptAir stewardesses begin wearing hijab

EGYPTAIR stewardesses who campaigned to wear the Muslim headscarf have begun donning the hijab for the first time since the national carrier was founded in 1932, a company official says.

The first flight attendants dressed in the hijab, which mainstream clerics say is mandatory, worked on flights to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia on Saturday.

Under president Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled in an uprising in early 2011, the hijab was taboo for women in some state institutions such as public television and the national carrier.

But after the election of the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in June, women in television and EgyptAir campaigned for permission to wear the hijab, like most Muslim women in Egypt.

The company had agreed to allow the stewardesses to wear the hijab after a strike by cabin crew in September that also demanded better pay.

An EgyptAir official said a foreign company has been contracted to design a cap and headscarf for the estimated 250 stewardesses who want to wear the hijab, out of 900 women working for EgyptAir.

In September, an anchorwoman was the first woman to appear on state television wearing the scarf, which traditionally covers the hair and neck. Some more liberal women wear the hijab to cover only their hair.

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French gunman's brother blames parents

THE radicalisation of the French gunman who killed seven people on an eight-day shooting spree this year began at home, his brother recounts in a new book and documentary, according to media reports.

Mohamed Merah killed three Jewish children, a rabbi and three paratroopers in and around the southern city of Toulouse in March before dying in a standoff with police.

Merah claimed links to al-Qaeda and said he had received training at an Islamist paramilitary camp in Pakistan.

One of his brothers, Abdelkader, also faces preliminary charges in the case and is in police custody.

The attacks raised painful questions about whether France was failing to integrate the children of Muslim immigrants, like the Merahs, who are of Algerian origin.

Many blamed the poverty of the neighbourhoods many immigrants and their children live in for driving them to radical Islam.

But a new book by another of Merah brother, Abdelghani, says his parents, particularly his mother, are responsible for Mohamed's radicalisation.

According to excerpts published in Le Figaro and other newspapers, Abdelghani made a silent vow on the day of Mohamed's funeral to tell the world how they were raised on anti-Semitism.

"I will explain how my parents raised you in an atmosphere of racism and hate before the Salafis could douse you in religious extremism," he writes in My brother, that terrorist, due out this week. Salafis are ultraconservative Muslims.

The Merahs' mother was at one point held for questioning but has since been released.

Their father left the family for Algeria when the children were young but has since sued the French state for Mohamed's death.

A documentary featuring interviews with Abdelghani and his sister, Souad, treads similar ground.

In an excerpt, Abdelghani remembers how his mother drove home a message of anti-Semitism.

"My mother always said, 'We, the Arabs, we were born to hate Jews.' This speech, I heard it all throughout my childhood," Abdelghani says in the documentary.

Souad, on the other hand, declares how proud she is of her brother, Mohamed.

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