Australian PM Rudd heads for election wipeout

SYDNEY: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd vowed on Friday to fight to the end despite polls showing him heading for an election wipeout as rival Tony Abbott looked forward to getting straight to work.

A Galaxy survey in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, a day before voters cast their ballots, found Rudd had failed to make any inroads on the conservative opposition leader.

On a two-party basis, the ruling Labor party was trailing 47 to 53 percent, with the newspaper saying Abbot's Liberal/National coalition could pick up as many as 20 to 25 extra seats in the lower House of Representatives.

This would give them more than 90 seats in the 150-seat parliament.

An overwhelming 78 percent of the 1,503 people questioned said Abbott had performed better during the election campaign. Just eight percent said Rudd, with the rest undecided.

But the prime minister, who has struggled for traction after toppling Julia Gillard, Australia's first female leader, just weeks before calling the election, said he was not ready to give up.

"I believe I can win the election," Rudd said Friday evening.

"The people of Australia will ultimately decide but my message... is very simple... if on the day before election day you still have doubts about how Mr Abbott's massive cuts will affect your jobs and job security, your hospitals and schools, then don't vote for him."

The economy has been a key election battleground and the opposition on Thursday pledged Aus$40 billion ($37 billion) of savings if it wins.

Rudd added: "We continue to fight right through till 6:00 pm tomorrow," when polls close, and seized on the coalition announcing then retracting on Thursday night plans for a mandatory Internet porn filter.

He called the policy backflip a "debacle".

"How many other policies do they have in their bottom drawer that they don't want to tell Australians about?" he asked.

Despite his fighting words, Rudd appears to have an insurmountable task with all the nation's main newspapers -- bar The Age in Melbourne -- backing Abbott in election eve editorials.

Yet Abbott, speaking on Network Ten late Friday, said the election was still "anyone's to win" and urged voters to bring in a new government led by him.

"I will be an orthodox prime minister, because I want to lead an adult, grown-up government," he said.

"And that's why I think Australia can't have another three years like the last six, because I don't believe we have always had an adult, grown-up government over the last six years."

Abbott said if he won office, the first thing he would do would be to go for a bike ride "with the guys I've been riding with for years".

"Then into the office to do briefings because you can't muck around with something as important as the future of our country."

But he cautioned that it was too early to start celebrating.

"It's like being in a grand final, five minutes to go, only a goal or two in it, anything could happen," he said.

"If it happens I will be extraordinarily conscious of the heavy burden of responsibilities, of duties, that will have descended on my shoulders.

"Inevitably, anyone who is suddenly given a big job, even if you have been preparing for it for years and you know you are ready for it, when it happens, if it happens, you are conscious of being on a great threshold."

Voting is mandatory in Australia and by Friday afternoon some three million of the 14.7 million enrolled voters had already cast their ballots at pre-polling stations and via postal votes, the electoral commission said.

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Religious sect raided in Germany on abuse fears

BERLIN: Police said they have raided a Christian religious sect in southern Germany and taken 40 children from them on allegations they were being physically abused.

Bavarian police said on Friday that the children of the so-called "Twelve Tribes" sect were taken into protective custody the day before as investigators look into allegations that they were being beaten and otherwise physically punished.

The sect said in a statement on its website that the children were of ages 1 ½ to 17 and that they would remain with foster parents at least until a court hearing next week. They say "there was no direct evidence against any individual provided."

Authorities say 28 of the children were found at one of the sect's locations in the town of Deinigen, and 12 others in Woernitz.

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Hitler's bodyguard Rochus Misch dies at 96

BERLIN: Rochus Misch, who served as Adolf Hitler's devoted bodyguard for most of World War II and was the last remaining witness to the Nazi leader's final hours in his Berlin bunker, has died. He was 96.

Misch died on Thursday in Berlin after a short illness, Burkhard Nachtigall, who helped him write his 2008 memoir, told The Associated Press in an email on Friday.

Misch remained proud to the end about his years with Hitler, whom he affectionately called "boss." In a 2005 interview with The Associated Press, Misch recalled Hitler as "a very normal man" and gave a riveting account of the German dictator's last days before he and his wife Eva Braun killed themselves as the Soviet Red Army closed in around their bunker in Berlin.

"He was no brute. He was no monster. He was no superman," Misch said.

Born July 29, 1917, in the tiny Silesian town of Alt Schalkowitz, in what today is Poland, Misch was orphaned at an early age. At age 20, he decided to join the SS - an organization that he saw as a counterweight to a rising threat from the left. He signed up for the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, a unit that was founded to serve as Hitler's personal protection.

"It was anti-communist, against Stalin - to protect Europe," Misch said. "I signed up in the war against Bolshevism, not for Adolf Hitler."

But when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Misch found himself in the vanguard, as his SS division was attached to a regular army unit for the blitzkrieg attack.

Misch was shot and nearly killed while trying to negotiate the surrender of a fortress near Warsaw, and he was sent to Germany to recover. There, he was chosen in May 1940 as one of two SS men who would serve as Hitler's bodyguards and general assistants, doing everything from answering the telephones to greeting dignitaries.

Misch and comrade Johannes Hentschel accompanied Hitler almost everywhere he went - including his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden and his forward "Wolf's Lair" headquarters.

He lived between the Fuehrer's apartments in the New Reich Chancellery and the home in a working-class Berlin neighborhood that he kept until his death.

"He was a wonderful boss," Misch said. "I lived with him for five years. We were the closest people who worked with him ... we were always there. Hitler was never without us day and night."

In the last days of Hitler's life, Misch followed him to live underground, protected by the so-called Fuehrerbunker's heavily reinforced concrete ceilings and walls.

"Hentschel ran the lights, air and water and I did the telephones - there was nobody else," he said. "When someone would come downstairs we couldn't even offer them a place to sit. It was far too small."

After the Soviet assault began, Misch remembered generals and Nazi brass coming and going as they tried desperately to cobble together a defense of the capital with the ragtag remains of the German military.

He recalled that on April 22, two days before two Soviet armies completed their encirclement of the city, Hitler said: "That's it. The war is lost. Everybody can go."

"Everyone except those who still had jobs to do like us - we had to stay," Misch said. "The lights, water, telephone ... those had to be kept going but everybody else was allowed to go and almost all were gone immediately."

However, Hitler clung to a report - false, as it turned out - that the Western Allies had called upon Germany to hold Berlin for two more weeks against the Soviets so that they could battle communism together.

"He still believed in a union between West and East," Misch said. "Hitler liked England - except for (then-Prime Minister Winston) Churchill - and didn't think that a people like the English would bind themselves with the communists to crush Germany."

On April 28, Misch saw Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Hitler confidant Martin Bormann enter the bunker with a man he had never seen before.

"I asked who it was and they said that's the civil magistrate who has come to perform Hitler's marriage," Misch said. That night, Hitler and longtime mistress Eva Braun were married in a short ceremony.

Two days later, Misch saw Goebbels and Bormann talking with Hitler and his adjutant, SS Maj. Otto Guensche, in the bunker's corridor.

"I saw him go into his room ... and someone, Guensche, said that he shouldn't be disturbed," Misch said. "We all knew that it was happening. He said he wasn't going to leave Berlin, he would stay here."

"We heard no shot, we heard nothing, but one of those who was in the hallway, I don't remember if it was Guensche or Bormann, said, 'Linge, Linge, I think it's done,'" Misch said, referring to Hitler's valet Heinz Linge.

"Then everything was really quiet ... who opened the door I don't remember, Guensche or Linge. They opened the door, and I naturally looked, and then there was a short pause and the second door was opened... and I saw Hitler lying on the table like so," Misch said, putting his head down on his hands on his living-room table.

"And Eva lay like so on the sofa with knees up, her head to him."

Misch ran up to the chancellery to tell his superior the news and then back downstairs, where Hitler's corpse had been put on the floor with a blanket over it.

"Then they bundled Hitler up and said 'What do we do now?'" Misch said. "As they took Hitler out ... they walked by me about three or four meters away. I saw his shoes sticking outside the sack."

An SS guard ran down the stairs and tried to get Misch to watch as the two were covered in gasoline and set alight.

"He said, 'The boss is being burned. Come on out,'" Misch recalled. But instead Misch hastily retreated deeper into the bunker to talk with comrade Hentschel.

"I said 'I saw the Gestapo upstairs in the ... chancellery, and it could be that they'll want to kill us as witnesses,'" Misch said.

But Misch stuck to his post in the bunker - which he described as "a coffin of concrete" - taking and directing telephone calls with Goebbels as his new boss until May 2, when he was given permission to flee.

Goebbels, he said, "came down and said: 'You have a chance to live. You don't have to stay here and die.'"

Misch grabbed the rucksack he had packed and fled with a few others into the rubble of Berlin.

Working his way through cellars and subways, Misch decided to surface after hearing German being spoken above through an air ventilation shaft. But the voices came from about 300 soldiers who had been taken prisoner, and the Soviet guards grabbed him as well.

Following the German surrender May 7, Misch was taken to the Soviet Union, where he spent the next nine years in prisoner of war camps before being allowed to return to Berlin in 1954.

He reunited with his wife Gerda, whom he had married in 1942 and who died in 1997, and opened up a shop.

At age 87, when he talked with the AP, Misch still cut the image of an SS man, with a rigid posture, broad shoulders and neatly combed white hair.

He stayed away from questions of guilt or responsibility for the Holocaust, saying he knew nothing of the murder of 6 million Jews and that Hitler never brought up the Final Solution in his presence.

"That was never a topic," he said emphatically. "Never."

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Karzai: Hindus, Sikhs get Afghan parliament seat

KABUL, Afghanistan: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has issued a legislative decree that gives minority Hindus and Sikhs a seat in the country's next parliamentarian election.

A statement on Wednesday from the presidency said the seat would be in the parliament's lower house. The addition would make the parliament now have 250 seats.

Karzai's decision comes after lawmakers declined to require a special seat for Hindus and Sikhs in the law. Under Afghan law, the president has the power to issue legislative decrees when the parliament is on vacation.

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Russia not to extradite Snowden to US, says Putin

MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will not extradite former US intelligence employee Edward Snowden back to the US as the two countries do not have an agreement on mutual extradition of criminals.

"The problem is not that we defended Snowden. We are not defending him in any way," Putin said in an interview with Channel 1 TV and the Associated Press ahead of a G20 summit in St. Petersburg, which was available on the Kremlin website Wednesday, Xinhua reported.

"The problem is that we and the United States do not have an agreement on mutual extradition of criminals," said the Russian president.

He asserted that Moscow had invited Washington on numerous occasions to conclude such an agreement "but have been denied".

"We cannot judge whether Snowden committed some crime in the United States or not... But we, as a sovereign country having no such agreements with the United States, cannot do anything but provide him with the opportunity to stay here," Putin said.

He added that Russia had not received and did not wish to obtain any secret information from Snowden.

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Jailed Ohio rapist found hanged in 'apparent suicide'

WASHINGTON: The former US bus driver jailed for life for kidnapping and raping three young women he held as sex slaves for a decade was found hanged in "an apparent case of suicide" in his closely monitored cell, authorities said.

The death of Ariel Castro, who was required to be checked on every 30 minutes, brought an abrupt and dramatic ending to a sordid case that shocked America and the world with its revelations of systematic depravity and brutality.

JoEllen Smith, spokeswoman for the Ohio prisons department, said that Castro was found hanging in a cell in which he was alone last night in a prison in the town of Orient.

"It does appear to be an apparent case of suicide," Smith told AFP early on Wednesday, declining to give further details.

But Cleveland TV station WOIO said he had not been on suicide watch. It said he had been at the Orient prison for only about 30 days. He was sentenced in August.

Officials tried in vain to resuscitate the 53-year-old, according to an earlier statement from the Ohio department of corrections.

"He was housed in protective custody which means he was in a cell by himself and rounds are required every 30 minutes at staggered intervals. Upon finding inmate Castro, prison medical staff began performing life-saving measures," the statement by Smith said.

Castro, it said, was pronounced dead at 10.52pm after he had been found hanging in his cell at 9.20pm at the correctional reception center in Orient.

"A thorough review of this incident is underway," the statement said.

Blogs posted in the main Cleveland newspaper, Plain Dealer, were merciless.

"Adios diablo, may you burn for 1,000 years, just like you were sentenced," one said, alluding to his jail term of life plus 1,000 years.

"Why no picture of him hanging? Now THAT would be justice," asked another.

"Must have used his clothing?" mused yet another. Castro's crimes — keeping the three young women in what came to be known as a house of horrors and raping and otherwise brutalizing them for around a decade — disgusted the country and led to an outpouring of national pity for the three victims. They were abducted separately between 2002 and 2004.

Their names are Amanda Berry, now 27; Gina DeJesus, 23; and Michelle Knight, 32.

A cousin of Castro, Maria Castro Montes, told CNN that perhaps there was some good to come from the death of Castro. Maybe now, she said, the victims can truly can get on with their lives and not deal with periodic new details leaking about their respective nightmares.

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11 Muslim Brotherhood members sentenced to life

CAIRO: Fifty-six members of Muslim Brotherhood were today sentenced, including 11 to life imprisonment, by an Egyptian military court on charges of acts of "aggression" against the army in Suez city last month.

In the first such sentencing since the ouster of former president Mohammed Morsi on July 3, the Suez military court sentenced 11 Islamists to 25 years in jail, while 45 others were given five years. Eight others were acquitted.

The Islamists were accused of assaulting army troops, burning military vehicles, throwing Molotov cocktails and attacking churches in Suez governorate following the August 14 military crackdown on pro-Morsi sit-ins in Cairo and Giza.

The court started the trial of 64 Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters of ousted president Morsi today, state media reported.

The military trial was held at Agroud, on the Suez-Cairo highway.

The military prosecutor accused defendants of incitement, aiding and abetting the killing of citizens, burning down three churches in Suez and setting ablaze Third Field Army armoured vehicles, as well as attacking public facilities and spreading chaos.

Clashes were reported in Suez between supporters and opponents of Morsi after the military carried out a deadly crackdown on August 14 in the Cairo's Rabaa al-Adawiya and Nahda squares, killing hundreds. It was the deadliest such crackdown in Egypt's recent history.

Since then Egyptian authorities have carried out a relentless crackdown against Islamists in which more than 1,000 people have been killed and some 2,000 members of the Brotherhood arrested.

Brotherhood's supreme guide Mohamed Badie has also been arrested, while Morsi has been in custody since his ouster.

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Japan to fund ice wall to stop leak

TOKYO: The Japanese government announced on Tuesday that it will spend $470 million on a subterranean ice wall and other steps in a desperate bid to stop leaks of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear station after repeated failures by the plant's operator.

The decision is widely seen as an attempt to show that the nuclear accident won't be a safety concern just days before the International Olympic Committee chooses between Tokyo, Istanbul and Madrid as the host of the 2020 Olympics.

The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has been leaking hundreds of tons of contaminated underground water into the sea since shortly after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami damaged the complex. Several leaks from tanks storing tainted water in recent weeks have heightened the sense of crisis that the plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., isn't able to contain the problem.

"Instead of leaving this up to TEPCO, the government will step forward and take charge," said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said after adopting the outline. "The world is watching if we can properly handle the contaminated water but also the entire decommissioning of the plant."

The government plans to spend an estimated 47 billion yen ($470 million) through the end of March 2015 on two projects - 32 billion yen ($320 million) on the ice wall and 15 billion yen ($150 million) on upgraded water treatment units that is supposed to remove all radioactive elements but water-soluble tritium - according to energy agency official Tatsuya Shinkawa.

The government, however, is not paying for urgently needed water tanks and other equipment that TEPCO is using to stop leaks. Shinkawa said the funding is limited to "technologically challenging projects" but the government will open to additional help when needed.

The ice wall would freeze the ground to a depth of up to 30 meters (100 feet) through an electrical system of thin pipes carrying a coolant as cold as minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 Fahrenheit). That would block contaminated water from escaping the facility's immediate surroundings, as well as keep underground water from entering the reactor and turbine buildings, where much of the radioactive water has collected.

The project, which TEPCO and the government proposed in May, is being tested for feasibility by a Japanese construction giant Kajima Corp. and set for completion by March 2015.

Similar methods have been used to block water from parts of tunnels and subways, but building a 1.4 kilometer (2-mile) wall that surrounds four reactor buildings and their related facilities is unprecedented.

An underground ice wall has been used to isolate radioactive waste at the U.S. Department of Energy's former site of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that produced plutonium, but only for six years, according to the MIT Technology Review magazine.

Some experts are still skeptical about the technology and say the running costs would be a huge burden.

Atsunao Marui, an underground water expert at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, said a frozen wall could be water-tight but is normally intended for use for a couple of years and is not proven for long-term use as planned in the outline. The decommissioning process is expected to take about 40 years.

"We still need a few layers of safety backups in case it fails," Marui told the Associated Press. "Plus the frozen wall won't be ready for another two years, which means contaminated water would continue to leak out."

Marui said additional measures should be taken to stop contaminated water from keep traveling under the seabed during that time and leak further out in the sea.

TEPCO has been pumping water into the wrecked reactors to keep cool nuclear fuel that melted when the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami knocked out the plant's power and cooling system. The utility has built more than 1,000 tanks holding 335,000 tons of contaminated water at the plant, and the amount grows by 400 tons daily. Some tanks have sprung leaks, spilling contaminated water onto the ground.

After spending on the ice wall, the remainder of the public funding - 15 billion yen until March 2015 - will go to the development and production of a water treatment unit that can treat the contaminated water more thoroughly and by a larger volume than an existing machine, which is under repair after corrosion was found during a test run.

Nuclear Regulation Authority Chairman Shunichi Tanaka has repeatedly said that the contaminated water cannot be stored in tanks forever and eventually has to be released into the sea after fully processed and diluted, but only with local consent.

Other measures include replacing rubber-seamed storage tanks with more durable welded tanks as quickly as possible, and pumping out untainted underground water further inland for release into the sea to reduce the total amount flowing into the plant site. About 1,000 tons of underground water runs into the complex every day.

TEPCO is also constructing an offshore wall of steel panels along the coast to keep contaminants from spreading further into the sea. The utility says radioactive elements have mostly remained near the embankment inside the bay, but experts have reported offshore "hot spots" of sediments contaminated with high levels of cesium.

The leaks came at a worst time as Tokyo headed into the final days of the contest to host the 2020 Summer Olympics. With anti-government demonstrations plaguing Istanbul, Turkey's bid and a recession and high Spanish unemployment hanging over Madrid's candidacy, Tokyo is pushing its bid as the safe choice in uncertain times.

The IOC will select the 2020 host on Sept. 7 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Germany recommends Auschwitz guard charges

LUDWIGSBURG, Germany: The special prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi war crimes said on Tuesday it is recommending charges against dozens of alleged former Auschwitz guards, opening the possibility of a new wave of trials almost 70 years after the end of World War II.

Kurt Schrimm, the head of the federal prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg, said an investigation of 49 suspects turned up enough evidence to recommend that state prosecutors pursue charges of accessory to murder against 30 of them in Germany.

Another seven suspects who live outside the country are still being investigated, two could not be found, and one further case has already gone to prosecutors, he said. Those living abroad are in Austria, Brazil, Croatia, the U.S., Poland and even one in Israel, Schrimm said without giving further details.

The names and hometowns of the suspects were not released. Schrimm said the oldest suspect was born in 1916 and the youngest in 1926.

The cases are being sent to the responsible state prosecutors' offices in 11 of Germany's 16 states. It will be up to them to determine whether the elderly suspects - primarily men but also some women - are fit to stand trial and whether to bring official charges.

"The biggest enemy is time," Schrimm told reporters.

Accessory to murder charges can be filed under the same legal theory that Munich prosecutors used to try former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died in a Bavarian nursing home last year while appealing his 2011 conviction on charges he served as a Sobibor death camp guard, Schrimm said.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was the first person convicted in Germany solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing. Under the new legal argument, anyone who was involved in the operation of a death camp was an accessory to murder. Demjanjuk steadfastly maintained that he had been mistaken for someone else and never served as a camp guard.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said the decision could mean even more cases will be opened against guards at the other five main death camps established by the Nazis.

"We commend the (prosecutors) for seeking to apply the precedent as widely as possible and hope that they will be able to find as many perpetrators as possible," he said in a telephone interview.

"It's only a shame that this kind of legal reasoning was not applied previously, because it would have led to many, many more cases of people who definitely deserved to be brought to justice."

Schrimm said that even guards who worked in a death camp's kitchens played a role in the facility's function as a site that existed for the purpose of mass murder.

He cautioned that the health of the suspects - and of possible witnesses - would make bringing them to trial difficult.

"I don't want to raise excessive expectations," he said.

The Nazis built six main death camps, all in occupied Poland: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

About 1.5 million people, primarily Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz camp complex alone between 1940 and 1945.

Schrimm's office is now focusing on the other death camps, starting with investigating all former personnel at Majdanek. He said expects to announce results of the Majdanek probe within six months.

He said he did not see extending the Demjanjuk precedent, however, to the Nazis' network of hundreds of concentration camps - places like Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald - where many tens of thousands died but whose purpose was not solely extermination.

In cases of guards from those camps, prosecutors still need evidence of a specific crime in order to bring charges, he said.

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Top US judge to officiate at gay wedding

WASHINGTON: US supreme court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg will officiate at a same-sex wedding this weekend in what is believed to be a first for a member of America's highest court.

Ginsburg will officiate Saturday at the marriage of Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser and John Roberts, a government economist.

"Michael Kaiser is a friend and someone I much admire," Ginsburg said in a written statement Friday. "That is why I am officiating at his wedding."

The private ceremony will take place at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a national memorial to John F Kennedy. The 80-year-old Ginsburg, an opera lover, is a frequent guest at the center.

Same-sex marriage is legal in the district of Columbia and 13 US states.

"I think it will be one more statement that people who love each other and want to live together should be able to enjoy the blessings and the strife in the marriage relationship," Ginsburg told Washington Post in an interview.

Kaiser told Associated Press that he asked Ginsburg to officiate because she is a longtime friend.

"It's very meaningful mostly to have a friend officiate, and then for someone of her stature, it's a very big honor," Kaiser said. "I think that everything that's going on that makes same-sex marriage possible and visible helps to encourage others and to make the issue seem less of an issue, to make it just more part of life."

Justices generally avoid taking stands on political issues. The wedding, though, comes after the court's landmark ruling in June to expand federal recognition of same-sex marriages, striking down part of an anti-gay marriage law.

While hearing arguments in the case in March, Ginsburg argued for treating marriages equally. The rights associated with marriage are pervasive, she said, and the law had created two classes of marriage.

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