SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Ready, set, withdraw. Banks reopened in Cyprus today for the first time since the government agreed to a punishing EU bailout. Armed guards manned the doors as account holders were allowed into their banks for the first time in 12 days. They're forbidden to withdraw more than 300 euros per day, to prevent money flooding out of the island's tottering banking system.

You'd be forgiven for asking whether Cyprus' rescue looks very much different from the "unruly bankruptcy" that the EU insisted its terms would avoid. As the Cypriot economy faces up to a 20-percent contraction, GlobalPost asks whether the EU's botched bailout has left another fine mess.

WANT TO KNOW

Get well soon, Nelson Mandela. South Africa's 94-year-old national hero wasreadmitted to hospital last night with a recurrence of the lung infection that kept him there for 18 days last December.

President Jacob Zuma asked "the people of South Africa and the world to pray for our beloved Madiba and his family and to keep them in their thoughts." You've got it.

Biggest cyber attack ever? Net watchers say that the internet has been under unprecedented virtual fire for more than a week. The apparent target is spam blocker Spamhaus, which has made some powerful enemies by blacklisting suspected spammers. Those enemies have mounted a furious distributed-denial-of-service attack bigger than ever any seen before – and millions of ordinary netizens have been caught in the crossfire.

Thankfully that crossfire has so far been limited to making the internet "a bit more sluggish." Experts warn, however, that an attack of this scale could set a dangerous precedent.

Malala's story. The 15-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to say girls should go to school, Malala Yousafzai, has signed a book deal for a rumored $3 million. Her autobiography will be published next year under the title 'I Am Malala.'

Now attending school in the UK, she says she wants to tell not just her own story, but also "the story of 61 million children who can't get education."

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Here's something that will put you off your breakfast burger. Tests on processed meat in South Africa revealed a queasy-making quantity of unwelcome species' DNA, including donkey, water buffalo and even – shudder – human. (Though it behooves us to stress there's no suggestion that people are being ground up to make sausages.)

On the upside, however, testers said they found not a trace of horse. Buffalo bobotie all round!

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) - Classes are set to resume Tuesday in Newtown, Conn. -- everywhere but at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman shot and killed 20 children and six adults on Friday.

The school has been closed indefinitely, authorities said Monday, while law enforcement officials process the crime scene, a grim task that could take months.

But what happens after the investigation to the site at 12 Dickinson Drive remains in unclear. Whether it can -- or should -- reopen to serve 525 kindergarten through fourth-graders depends on how the community and the children respond, experts say.

For now, some local parents say it’s too soon to tell.

“I haven’t even given it any thought,” said Andrew Paley, 40, of Sandy Hook, father of 9-year-old twins Ben and Ethan, both Sandy Hook students who were at the school during Friday’s rampage.

Students from Sandy Hook are set to begin classes soon at Chalk Hill School in nearby Monroe, district officials said. The building has not been used as a school for 18 months, according to local press reports, and is being renovated quickly to accommodate the Sandy Hook classes. Though there is no firm date for them to start in the new site, being together in class should help students begin to heal, experts said.

It’s important for young children to resume normal routines as quickly as possible, said Amy Smith, president of the National Association of School Psychologists.

“For kids to recover from an event like this, they need to be safe and they need to believe they are safe,” Smith said.

But whether the student Sandy Hook students at those kids -- or any children -- can return to the Sandy Hook site, a building where youngsters and adults were shot, most multiple times, is doubtful, said Dr. Liza Gold, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School.

“You have to think about what’s going to help these kids most in terms of regaining a sense of safety and minimizing the effects of trauma,” Gold said. “You can’t bring them back to that school. You have to think of it as a place that has been contaminated.”- www.shfaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) — The campuses University of Texas at Austin and North Dakota State University in Fargo, N.D. were evacuated earlier this morning after the schools received apparently unrelated bomb threats from unnamed callers. UT’s campus re-opened today at noon central time, although classes are cancelled for the remainder of the day; NDSU reopened at 1 p.m. local time and classes will resume at 2 p.m.

A message posted at 9:53 a.m. on UT’s website instructed students and anyone else on campus to leave immediately and “get as far away as possible.” Text message alerts were also sent to the 69,000 people the university says have signed up for them. (The university has about 51,000 students enrolled, and 24,000 staff and faculty, according to the New York Times.)

The evacuation came after a man claiming to be from al-Qaeda called the main university phone number and said he had placed bombs all over campus that would go off in 90 minutes. At a press conference held this afternoon, after the campus had been secured by local, state and federal authorities, UT President Bill Powers said the evacuation was ordered because they could not be assured that the threat wasn’t credible. “We got to the point where we thought that the prudent thing to do was to clear our buildings,” he said.

In Fargo, university officials urged all employees and students to leave campus by 10:15 a.m. after they received a bomb threat. Traffic jams were reported as the university evacuated some 20,000 people from the main and downtown campuses. According to a local news site, two other bomb threats were reported in the region, one of which closed access to the Hector International Airport in Fargo. Another was reported at the Grand Forks airport.

Meanwhile Valparaiso University, a private Lutheran school in Valparaiso, Ind., increased security and warned students after a threat in the form of a graffiti message was found on campus. The schools says the message alluded to “dangerous and criminal activity,” but that classes are continuing as planned. The university tweeted that they did not receive a bomb threat and the situation was “substantially different” than what was reported in Texas and North Dakota.—www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: Time News Feed