Many pundits are probably poised to consider Barack Obama the 2009 person of the year. And who can blame them? Obama, who made history in 2008 by becoming the first black president of the United States, had quite a successful first six months in office. In fact, it seemed that the 44th president of the United States had managed in that short period to repair the damage done to the country's international image by his predecessor's policies, as evinced by the soaring popularity of the United States across the globe at the beginning of the year.World leaders lined up in every international forum to shower praises on Obama and what they perceived as his commitment to multilateralism. People gave him a hero's welcome in almost every city he visited. ...

Saint Louis, Missouri - A gunman stormed a power company's office on Thursday, shooting at least three people and killing one.
Police officers were dispatched after reports of a shooting spree at a busy factory near the centre of the city, and an interstate highway was shut down amid a hunt for a suspect vehicle.
"We have reports of at least three people shot," a police spokeswoman said, adding that the shooter was still at large.
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Miami - A Florida airline passenger who witnesses say proclaimed "I want to kill all the Jews" before police forced him off a Detroit-bound plane has been arrested.

Miami-Dade police said in a statement on Thursday that 43-year-old Mansor Mohammad Asad of Toledo, Ohio, faces several charges including disorderly conduct.
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Washington - The police were searching on Thursday for two adolescent girls suspected of robbing a bank in the north-eastern state of Ohio.

The girls, one believed to be between the ages of 14 and 16 and the other a couple of years younger, pulled off the unarmed heist on Tuesday at a bank in a suburb of Cincinnati.

The police said the juvenile suspects, wearing hooded sweatshirts that partly concealed their faces, had passed a note to a teller demanding money and had left with an unspecified amount of cash, in a robbery recorded by the bank's video camera.
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JOHANNESBURG –Being infected with HIV will no longer be an “ineligibility” when foreign citizens apply for visas to travel to the US, the US embassy in South Africa said yesterday.
Foreign citizens would also no longer be required to take an HIV test during medical examinations for visa purposes and HIV positive applicants would no longer require waiver processing by the US depa ...