[Farmers team up to rescue cattle from exposure to the toxic volcanic ash at a farm in Nupur, Iceland, as the volcano in southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier sends ash into the air Saturday, April 17, 2010. (AP Photo/Brynjar Gauti)] As ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano continued to keep European airspace shut down over the weekend, affecting millions of travelers around the world, some government agencies and airlines clashed over the flight bans. Some restricted airspace is now beginning to open up and some limited flights are being allowed now as airlines are pushing for the ability to judge safety conditions for themselves. The volcano continues to rumble and hurl ash skyward, if at a slightly diminished rate now, as the dispersing ash plume has dropped closer to the ground, and the World Health Organization has issued a health warning to Europeans with respiratory conditions. Collected here are some images from Iceland over the past few days. (35 photos total)

Both progressives and conservatives have sharply criticized Arizona’s new strict immigration law that requires local police to attempt to determine the immigration status of anyone they encounter as part of a “lawful contact” and allows them to arrest undocumented immigrants. The ACLU warns that the law will “exacerbate racial profiling,” and former Republican Arkansas governor has similarly said that “Hispanic Americans have the right to be unhappy about the fact that they might be pulled over.” Even far-right former Colorado Republican congressman Tom Tancredo, who said he supports the Arizona law, has stated, “I do not want people here, there in Arizona, pulled over because you look like [you] should be pulled over.” In the U.S. House and Senate, however, Republicans have been far quieter. AWIP: AZ Truck driver forced to show birth certificate claims racial-profiling -Video.

The low flying U.S Apache helicopter got shot down by Taliban while hovering over the Safid Khak district of Farah province in the late morning hours of the Sunday. The report adds the helicopter caught fire and fell on the desert of Nal in this district, killing at least 13 U.S. soldiers. It is worth saying that one of the U.S. helicopter was shot down near the airfield of Farah province about two months ago which was declared a helicopter crash as a result of a quick landing.

Afghan protesters torched NATO supply vehicles in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, hours after allegations emerged that U.S. and Afghan troops had killed three civilians, including two brothers, in their home. The demonstration occurred in Logar province after a nighttime joint patrol of U.S. Special Operations forces and Afghan soldiers fatally shot three people and arrested two others. NATO officials said falsely claimed the men were insurgents who had displayed "hostile intent." One of those captured was a low-level Taliban commander who planned suicide bombings, they said. But after daybreak, more than 100 people gathered on a main road in Logar to protest the killings and the death in a separate incident of an Islamic scholar, according to Afghan officials. AWIP: Afghanistan: Angry protesters torch 30 logistical vehicles of invaders in Logar.

KANDAHAR, Apr. 27 - A landmine mine planted by Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate during an attack on a U.S military base in Kandahar's Arghandab district, tore through a group of American cowardly soldiers killing 3 Americans besides wounding 5 who, minutes after the attack, approached the site to chase those who had attacked their base, yesterday night (April 26), Mujahideen officials said. According to locals, the blast was so powerful that it threw the mutilated parts of the bodies of the soldiers across the area.

Nigel Inkster, the former assistant head of the British spy service MI6, slammed the United States' handling of its fight on terror, including what he called the "frenzied, alarmist response" to the recently foiled Christmas Day bomber. Writing in an article published in the International Institute for Strategic Studies journal Survival, Inkster and coauthor Alexander Nicoll hammered what they believe is an out of proportion response to attempted terror attacks. They also attacked the United States' policy of imprisoning detainees without trial -- a practice that has continued under President Barack Obama.

The most influential Israeli lobby group in the US has held a fundraising event in an Oregon city as nearby protesters held a mockery-ridden condemnation of the Israeli occupation. The annual meeting, which rallies the contributors to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was held in Portland on Sunday, the International Middle East Media Center reported. Protesters gathered near the venue, putting up maquettes of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, a checkpoint, and the apartheid wall.

The leaders of Russia and Norway said Tuesday they had agreed on a compromise Arctic border in the resource-rich Barents Sea, bringing an end to a 40-year dispute. "This solution is about more than a border line under the ocean. It is about developing good neighbour relations," Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told a joint press conference in Oslo with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. "It will unite much more than divide, and it will become a bridge to cooperation," he added. Since 1970 Norway has been in dispute with first the Soviet Union then Russia over a 176,000-square-kilometre (67,950-square-mile) maritime area straddling their economic zones in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean. The surprise compromise reached during Medvedev's state visit plans for the contested zone to be divided almost equally between the two countries.

A Twin Falls woman convicted of forcing a 13-year-old boy to touch her breasts was sentenced Monday to life in prison. Michelle Lyn Taylor, 34, was convicted of lewdness with a minor under 14 in November after a week-long trial in Elko County, Nev., District Judge Mike Memeo’s courtroom. With the conviction, Taylor faced a mandatory life sentence, and Memeo set parole eligibility after 10 years, the minimum sentence. If released on parole she must register as a sex offender and will be under lifetime supervision. The district attorney’s office did not offer a plea agreement in the case, said public defender Alina Kilpatrick, who argued the sentence is unconstitutional and doesn’t fit the crime.

[Editor's Comment:] The sentence does certainly not fit the crime; we're not even sure this should be considered a 'crime' at all. 'Offense' or 'misdemeanor' would probably make more sense. -This prudishness is typical of fascist regimes. Under such regimes, the authoritarian mindset is not just dominant but prevalent. This mindset is characterized by "high levels of aggression in the name of [the] authorities". The authoritarians are very aggressive and simply love to punish people. Their virue is not genuine though, but is a false front of prudery passed off as virtue. The Nazi saying over the gates of Auschwitz comes to mind ("Arbeit Macht Frei"), where cruelty and "virtue" went hand in hand. The US now seems to be headed in the same general direction.

According to an anonymous source, the investigation into the causes of the Polish presidential plane crash may be subjected to political pressure which could hinder the ongoing investigation. This, claims the source, is due to the political aspect of the accident: the tragic death of the president on the territory of a foreign country. The Polish presidential jet was not insured, which could mean that the party at fault in the tragedy may be subject to a multimillion dollar civil litigation suit by families of the victims.

This situation additionally complicates the fact that the Polish president was headed to Russia to commemorate a mass murder of Polish officers during World War II by the Soviets in Katyn, "a cursed place" as the former President of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski has described it. Some even compare the Polish presidential jet crash, in which Poland lost its President and dozens of political, military and religious leaders, to Katyn No 2. AWIP: Kaczynski twin to run for president.

Iranian doctors have carried out an in situ transplant of bio-artificial trachea in humans for the first time in the world. A team of tissue-engineering scientists at the Lung and Tuberculosis Center at Tehran's Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences and Health Services carried out the transplant on a 29-year-old woman who had lost her trachea in a car accident two years ago. The researchers used bio artificial materials instead of stem cells and injected them directly into the trachea to make a good architecture of the organ.

Dozens of World War I photographs, including some from Australia's Gallipoli campaign, have been saved by a quick-thinking removalist in Canada. Max Madden, an Australian who operates a removalist business in Vancouver, was helping relocate Canadian man Trevor Pilley to a retirement home when he came across the historic black and white photos. They were contained inside an album marked, "Dardanelles - Landing of Australians and New Zealanders at Anzac", which was in a pile of belongings to be sent to a consignment store for auction. "I said, 'Look, these are pretty important, you probably shouldn't send them off to a consignment store and auction because your father may want to keep them," Mr Madden said. "'And if not, as Australians, it's pretty important to us.'" The photos were taken by Trevor Pilley's father, Charles, who was a machine gunner in a biplane during World War 1.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin brother of Poland's former president, who was killed in a plane crash in Russia earlier this month, has said he will run in presidential elections called for June. The elections were called early after Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria and 94 others were killed on April 10 in Smolensk, Russia, en route to a memorial service for a second world war massacre. Kaczynski, the leader of Poland's main opposition, the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, said on Monday that he would be standing in the contest in order to continue his brother's policies.

The United States has extradited former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega to France, where he faces money-laundering charges. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed Noriega's extradition order on Monday before he was put on a plane to France. Noriega was convicted in absentia in France in 1999 for 'laundering more than three million dollars in drug proceeds.' He faces up to 10 years in prison in France over the charges.

Thailand's pro-establishment Yellow Shirt activists are now threatening to take to the streets to shut down the anti-government Red Shirt rallies paralysing Bangkok. Thailand's pro-monarchist Yellow Shirts say they will take action to protect the country if the government does not put an end to the Red Shirts' protests. The Yellow Shirts are a pro-establishment group who shut down Bangkok's airports in 2008 before a court verdict removed the government and the current administration was installed. They are fiercely opposed to exiled prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his poor rural allies, the Red Shirts.

Crews were using a robot submarine to try to stop an oil leak nearly 2km below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, but officials said it would take at least another day before they knew whether the job was completed. It could take hours or it could take months to stop the 15,900-litre-a-day oil leak at the site of a wrecked drilling platform. Whether the environmental threat grows many times bigger depends on whether the oil company can turn off the well completely. Crews are using robot submarines to activate valves at the well head in hopes of cutting off the leak, which threatens the Gulf Coast's fragile ecosystem of shrimp, fish, birds and coral. If the effort fails, they'll have to start drilling again. The submarine work will take 24 to 36 hours, Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP Exploration and Production, said yesterday. "I should emphasise this is a highly complex operation being performed at 1520m below the surface and it may not be successful."

The Taliban has denied responsibility for gas attacks over the weekend that caused more than 50 schoolgirls in northern Afghanistan to lose consciousness or fall ill. "We strongly condemn such an act that targeted innocent schoolgirls by poisonous gas," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, according news reports. In three separate incidents at schools in the city of Kunduz on Saturday and Sunday, teenagers reported being overcome by fumes.

The agreement was sealed last month during a visit to Tehran by a close aide to Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president who last weekend celebrated 30 years in power, The Sunday Telegraph has learned. In return for supplying oil, which Zimbabwe desperately needs to keep its faltering economy moving, Iran has been promised access to potentially huge deposits of uranium ore – which [in principle] can be converted into the basic fuel for nuclear power or enriched to make a nuclear bomb.

Scottish scientists have made cancer tumours vanish within 10 days by sending DNA to seek and destroy the cells. The system, developed at Strathclyde and Glasgow universities, is being hailed as a breakthrough because it appears to eradicate tumours without causing harmful side-effects. A leading medical journal has described the results so far as remarkable, while Cancer Research UK said they were encouraging.

[In the Orion Nebula, dense clumps of material are detected by Planck (left) that go completely unnoticed by telescopes operating at visible wavelengths (right)] The gaseous and dusty fabric of our galaxy is illuminated in new images captured by Europe's Planck telescope. The pictures reveal features of the Milky Way that are unseen by most other space observatories, say scientists. Remarkably, these images are just byproducts for Planck, which must filter out much of the light it detects to get at its primary target. That target is a relic radiation emitted in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang [The "Big Bang" theory is unproven and unprovable. Therefore it is just another religious tenet, masquerading as science.]. This so-called Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fills the entire sky and retains fundamental information about the age, contents and structure of the cosmos. On one level, therefore, Monday's release represents "rejected" data - although Planck scientists stress there will be many researchers for whom this information will still hold high value. "For the primary CMB, we want to remove all the galactic emission - but it's an important part of the science case for Planck that you can also learn a lot about the galaxy from that data," Planck team-member Professor George Efstathiou told BBC News.