Irish president signs abortions into law

ABORTION has become legal in Ireland in limited cases where the mother's life is at risk, after President Michael D. Higgins signed a law that has exposed deep divisions in the Catholic-majority nation.

Irish MPs had overwhelmingly voted through the abortion bill earlier this month, prompted by an outcry over the death last year of an Indian woman who had been refused an abortion in an Irish hospital.

"President Higgins has today signed the bill into law," a statement from the president's office confirmed on Tuesday.

The law permits the termination of a pregnancy if doctors certify there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother.

The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act ends years of uncertainty over the legal status of terminations in Ireland.

It follows a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in 2010 that found Ireland had failed to properly implement the constitutional right to abortion where a woman's life is at risk.

Under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling, women in Ireland are also legally entitled to an abortion if it is needed to save a mother's life - but six successive governments had failed to introduce legislation to reflect this.

The death of 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar in a Galway hospital last October placed Ireland's restrictive abortion laws under global scrutiny and forced the current government to act.

Halappanavar, who was from India, had sought a termination when told she was miscarrying, but the request was refused as her life was not at risk at the time. She died of blood poisoning days later.

In a sign of the rifts that remain on abortion in predominantly Catholic Ireland, tens of thousands of people protested both in favour and against a change in the law following Halappanavar's death.

The lower house of the Irish parliament passed the legislation with 127 votes in favour and 31 against earlier this month. It passed through the upper house last week.

But seven MPs including a junior minister were expelled from Prime Minister Enda Kenny's Fine Gael party for voting against the legislation.

Lucinda Creighton, junior minister with responsibility for European affairs, quit her cabinet post after voting against the bill over her concerns that a woman deemed suicidal will be allowed a termination.

The new act permits a termination when one obstetrician and two psychiatrists unanimously agree that an expectant mother is a suicide risk, in a clause that deeply divided opinion.

Pro-life groups are widely expected to challenge aspects of the new law through the courts.

Almost 4000 Irish women had abortions in England or Wales last year, according to the British health ministry.

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UBS reports firm profits for Q2

SWISS bank UBS has reported strong results for the second quarter in its drive to refocus activities and turn the page on the financial crisis.

The bank, which is slimming down after turmoil during the crisis, reported pre-tax operating profit of 775 million Swiss francs ($A910.39 million).

This was 21.0 per cent less than the outcome in the first quarter, but it showed a big switch from a loss of 130 million francs for the second quarter of last year.

Last week, the bank had already signalled its results, reporting a net profit for the second quarter of 690 million francs, marking an increase of 62.5 per cent from the figure in the same period of last year.

Those figures were announced when the bank said it was settling a dispute in the United States over subprime instruments by paying a fine of $US885 million.

On Tuesday, it said that operating profit in the second quarter rose by 15.0 per cent on a 12-month comparison to 7.3 billion francs.

The activities of managing private wealth turned in a pre-tax operating profit of 557 million Swiss francs from a profit of 502 million francs last time, and from 664 million francs in the first quarter of this year.

It explained the figure had fallen between the first and second quarters because it had had to pay 104 million francs under a tax agreement between Switzerland and Britain.

Excluding this charge, the pre-tax outcome had risen, it said.

Wealth management activities in the Americas, presented separately, raised pre-tax operating profit by four per cent from the first-quarter figure to 243 million francs.

Managing director Sergio Ermotti said in a statement that he was highly satisfied with the results for the quarter.

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Signal-jumping focus of Swiss train probe

GRANGES-PRES-MARNAND, Switzerland, July 30 AFP - Swiss investigators have pointed to signal-jumping as the likely cause of a head-on train collision in the west of the country that killed a driver and injured 26 other people.

"The investigation focuses on the likelihood that the train travelling from Payerne failed to respect a signal," Jean-Christophe Sauterel, police spokesman for Switzerland's Vaud region, told reporters.

Monday's crash between two local trains occurred just outside the station in Granges-pres-Mornand, a village between the Geneva and Neuchatel lakes in Switzerland's French-speaking region.

One train had been travelling from the town of Payerne to the lakeside city of Lausanne, 38km to the south, while the other one, a faster regional service, was travelling north from Lausanne.

The driver of the northbound train, a 24-year-old French citizen who lived in the region, was killed in the collision. His body was pulled from the wreckage early Tuesday after a frantic rescue operation.

Daniel Antonez, a resident of nearby Moudon, said he had heard the impact.

"It's one I often take. I'm sure I know some people who were on the train," he said.

Flanked by cornfields, the two mangled trains were still on the track on Tuesday, both engines locked into each other and lifted slightly off the ground as workers used beams to prepare to remove them.

Forty-six people were believed to have been travelling on the two trains. Police did not rule out the possibility of finding another victim in the wreckage.

"Two adults and a child are still in hospital out of the 23 recorded injured, but their lives are not in danger," said Jocelyn Corniche, the emergency services' chief physician.

The relatively slow speed of the southbound train, 40km/h, appeared to be one explanation why more people had not died. The speed of the northbound train has yet to be confirmed.

Accident investigators were still trying to understand why the southbound train, operating a slower service between a string of communities, failed to wait for the passage of the faster northbound service, which does not stop at Granges-pres-Marnand.

Sauterel stressed that the issue of criminal responsiblity for the crash was not under discussion for the moment.

Swiss federal railway company CFF offered its condolences to the dead driver's family.

"The management and employees of the CFF are shocked by the death of their colleague," the company said in a statement.

Rescuers had worked into the night under arc lamps, using special equipment to cut through the wreckage and reach the missing driver. They retrieved his body but it was not clear whether he had died on impact.

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US consumer confidence dips in July

Pink dazzles Sydney fans

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Miller 'desperate to get help'

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Single parents forced to move states

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Meet the real Squizzy Taylor

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Breivik applies to study political science

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Hird denies fresh claims on drugs saga

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Miller 'desperate to get help'

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Pokies habit hits seven-year low

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Fear over violent parolee

JUST days before a parolee slew his former partner, a social worker asked that he be kept in a psychiatric ward, an inquest heard yesterday.

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Eight killed in Iraq violence

VIOLENCE in Iraq has killed eight people, among them seven police as an al-Qaeda front group claimed a wave of attacks that killed dozens the day before.

The country is witnessing its worst violence since 2008, when it was emerging from a bloody sectarian conflict.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that Iraq is "on the brink," and the interior ministry warned of civil war.

On Tuesday, gunmen killed three police and wounded two in an attack on a checkpoint south of Baghdad, while bombings in Kirkuk province, north of the capital, killed a policeman and a civilian, and wounded four people.

And gunmen killed three more policemen in the northern city of Mosul.

Security forces are frequently targeted by militants opposed to the government.

The attacks came as al-Qaeda front group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed a wave of attacks that killed some 60 people the day before.

"Security and military detachments of the state of Baghdad and the south on Monday ... simultaneously hit targets that were surveyed and chosen specifically," a statement posted on jihadist forums said.

The statement said the violence, which struck the capital and areas to its south, was the beginning of a new campaign dubbed "Harvesting the Soldiers".

The al-Qaeda front group said last week that brazen assaults on two Iraqi prisons marked the end of its previous campaign, called "Breaking the Walls".

At least 53 people were killed in the attacks, and more than 500 inmates, among them senior al-Qaeda members, managed to escape.

"Iraq is at another crossroads," UN chief Ban was quoted as saying in a statement released by a spokesman.

"Its political leaders have a clear responsibility to bring the country back from the brink, and to leave no space to those who seek to exploit the political stalemate through violence and terror."

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European stocks close higher

EUROPEAN stock markets have closed slightly higher, with London's FTSE 100 index of leading shares adding 0.16 per cent to 6570.95 points.

Frankfurt's DAX 30 rose 0.15 per cent to 8271.02 points on Tuesday, while the CAC 40 in Paris inched upwards 0.45 per cent to 3986.61 points.

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Russia blocks bid for Antarctic sanctuary

RUSSIA has blocked attempts by Western countries to create the world's largest ocean sanctuary off Antarctica, green groups say.

The Russian representative questioned the legal right of a meeting in Bremerhaven, northern Germany, to declare such a haven, according to organisations at the talks.

The three-day talks gathered 24 nations plus the European Union (EU) in the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), a 31-year-old treaty tasked with overseeing conservation and sustainable exploitation of the Southern Ocean.

One proposal, floated by the United States and New Zealand, covered 1.6 million square kilometres of the Ross Sea, the deep bay on Antarctica's Pacific side.

The other, backed by Australia, France and the EU, would protect 1.9 million square kilometres of coastal seas off East Antarctica, on the frozen continent's Indian Ocean side.

Protecting those areas - which biologists say are rich in unique species - would more than double the amount of ocean sanctuary in the world.

Andrea Kavanagh, in charge of the Southern Ocean Sanctuaries campaign at the US green group Pew Environment, said Russia had refused to negotiate, saying simply that it questioned the legal status of CCAMLR to declare such zones.

"The actions of the Russian delegation have put international cooperation and goodwill at risk, the two key ingredients needed for global marine conservation," she said on Tuesday.

"After two years of preparation, including this meeting, which Russia requested to settle the scientific case for the Ross Sea and East Antarctic proposals, we leave with nothing," said Steve Campbell, director of the Antarctic Ocean Alliance (AOA) of green groups.

"All members, except Russia, came to this meeting to negotiate in good faith," he said in a press statement.

The parties met in Hobart, Australia, last October, but failed to reach a deal because of opposition by China and Russia, supported by Ukraine, which said restrictions on fishing were too onerous.

As a result, they agreed to an exceptional meeting this July. It was only the second time that the CCAMLR has met outside its annual gathering.

The fate of the proposed marine sanctuaries now lies in the next annual meeting of CCAMLR in Hobart, running from October 23 to November 1, the sources said.

Kavanagh said many delegates had been stunned and dismayed at the setback, given the effort in time and money to attend a meeting that had been requested by Russia itself, ostensibly to address questions of science.

"The proponent countries were unwilling to negotiate when it appeared that Russia was here in bad faith. They weren't willing to lay their cards on the table," she said.

The waters around the Antarctica are home to some 16,000 known species, including whales, seals, albatrosses and penguins, as well as unique species of fish, sponges and worms that are bioluminescent or produce their own natural anti-freeze to survive in the region's chilly waters.

They are also rich in nutrients, whose influence spreads far beyond Antarctica thanks to the powerful current that swirls around the continent.

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Man shot in neck in Sydney's south

A YOUNG man has been shot in the neck in a street in Sydney's south.

Police say a man in his 20s was on Princes Street, Bexley, when he suffered a gunshot wound to the neck about 8.35pm (AEST) on Tuesday.

He was rushed to hospital in serious but stable condition.

A police spokesman said the man's injuries were not considered to be life-threatening.

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Attacked Queen portrait returns to Abbey

A PORTRAIT of the Queen defaced as it hung in Westminster Abbey has gone back on display four weeks after being sprayed with paint.

Artist Ralph Heimans who created the artwork said he was "thrilled" it was now on public view again.

The oil painting, entitled The Coronation Theatre, Westminster Abbey: A Portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, had been on display in the Chapter House for just a few weeks before it was vandalised last month.

The incident came a few weeks before another attack on Abbey artwork when a statue was sprayed with paint.

"I am thrilled that the painting has been restored in good time and that it can be returned to public display as intended," Heimans said.

"Westminster Abbey feels like the natural home for my portrait and I'm glad to see it back where it belongs in this remarkable setting."

The Australian-born painter worked with the Abbey's conservation team to remove the paint from the artwork which went on display yesterday.

A spokeswoman for the artist said: "There was a team to restore and clean the painting and Ralph Heimans had to come in and do some touching up."

The painting depicts the monarch in the Sacrarium of Westminster Abbey, also known as the Coronation Theatre.

It was shown publicly for the first time in September by the Australian Governor-General Quentin Bryce at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

Heimans, who is based in London, had a sitting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace on March 21 last year, but the scene is an imagined one, set at night in Westminster Abbey.

Tim Haries, 41, from Doncaster in South Yorkshire, appeared at Southwark Crown Court in London last month charged with criminal damage to Mr Heimans' canvas.

He was bailed to appear at the court again in September.

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