NEWS IN BRIEF
Bill Clinton regrets three strikes bill
BBC, London
Former US President Bill Clinton has admitted his three strikes crime bill introduced in the 1990s contributed to the problem of overpopulated prisons.
Speaking to a civil rights group, he said: I signed a bill that made the problem worse and I want to admit it.
It put 100,000 more police officers on the streets but locked up minor actors for way too long, Mr Clinton said. President Barack Obama launched a renewed effort to reform the criminal justice system this week.
He visited a federal prison in Oklahoma on Thursday, becoming the first sitting president to do so.
Speaking at the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, Mr Obama said the criminal justice system needs to distinguish between young people who make mistakes and those who are truly dangerous.
Some of the young prisoners he met at the prison had made mistakes not that different from those he made in his youth, Mr Obama said.
On Wednesday, Mr Clinton told the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) convention in Philadelphia that he had faced a roaring decade of rising crime.
Enslaved German teen case shakes Romania
AFP, Bucharest
German teens treated like slaves, tied with ropes and forced to pull carts alongside animals: these are the allegations facing a Germany-funded social programme in remote northern Romania.
On Tuesday, riot police backed by a helicopter stormed a farm in Viseu de Sus village where a German couple set up the programme some 15 years ago to help dozens of troubled minors.
But now the German man and four Romanians stand accused of keeping children in slavery-like conditions, using barbaric methods amounting to torture and treating them in humiliating and degrading ways, prosecutors say.
They say the children were forced to do exhausting physical labour, deprived of food and beaten repeatedly under Projekt Maramures named after the county where it is based.
UN chief visits DR Congos restive Ebola-hit east
AFP, Goma
UN chief Antonio Guterres arrived yesterday in the troubled east of DR Congo, expressing solidarity with a region ravaged by violence and an Ebola epidemic.
The secretary general started his three-day tour of Africas largest country in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, which is trying to roll back a major epidemic of Ebola that has claimed more than 2,000 lives since August last year.
He was received by Leila Zerrougui, his special representative in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The two did not shake hands in line with protocols aimed at curbing the spread of the highly infectious and potentially fatal disease.
Guterres said he had come to express his support with the armed forces of DRC in the fight against terrorism which represents a threat not only for the Congo but the whole of Africa.
