Two Internet sweepstakes cafes robbed in Fayetteville

Fayetteville police are investigating the robbery of two Internet sweepstakes cafes on Friday.
Police said the first robbery happened at Little Vegas Sweepstakes,108 Grove St., shortly after midnight.  Within an hour, the Little Vegas at 3319 Raeford Road was robbed.
watch now









In both incidents, the robber walked into the business, pointed a gun at an employee and demanded money. After receiving an undisclosed amount of cash each time, the robber left the building.

Read More

India maharaja's tiger hunting Rolls may fetch $1 million

Auction house Bonhams will put under the hammer a rare Rolls Royce Phantom modified for tiger hunting by an Indian maharaja during the days of the British Raj, featuring a mounted machine gun and a cannon, that may fetch up to $1 million.

The custom-made 1925 Rolls Royce was originally commissioned by Umed Singh II, the maharaja of Kotah in the 1920s at a time when tiger hunting was hugely popular in India.

The flaming red vehicle, with a convertible canvas roof and bespoke hunting features including a double-barreled shotgun, spotlights for night hunting and a mountable Lantaka cannon, is expected to fetch up to $1 million when it goes on the block in mid-August in Carmel, California.

"It was quite common, most of the maharajahs had specialized customized cars manufactured in the US and they even had gilted frames and all sorts of things," said Pran Nevile, a writer and expert on India's colonial era known as the British Raj.

The car's 8.0-liter, 6-cylinder engine with a low gearing ratio allowed "it to creep powerfully through the roughshod jungles of Rajasthan," wrote Bonhams.

For centuries, big game hunting of tigers, leopards and Asiatic lions in India's forests was a favored pastime of India's rulers from the Mughal emperors to the British elite.

While much tiger hunting was carried out on elephant-back, some Indian maharajahs, or "great kings" of princely states across India including arid Rajasthan, took things to the extreme.

"It was more for a show but everything would be ready and then they would then go and take this Rolls Royce up to a point or the hills and from there shoot the tiger that was already captured by their servants," Nevile told Reuters.

Indiscriminate hunting, however, decimated India's Bengal tiger population from an estimated 40,000 a century ago to about 1,700 today. Tigers are now a protected keystone species throughout Asia from Indonesia's Sumatra to Indochina and India.

Indian maharajas were known for their high living and extravagant spending on all manner of trappings including ornate palaces, vintage cars and Louis Vuitton bags.

The nawab, or ruler, of southern Hyderabad state used the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond, once the largest known gemstone in the world, as a paperweight, while the nawab of tiny western Junagadh state was renowned for spending lavishly on his dog's wedding.

"They wanted to live in ostentatious style. Being a princely lot they had their own grand style and it was even copied by the British," said Nevile.

Read More

Teenagers swam for their lives in Norway carnage

Norwegian teenagers at a lakeside summer camp fled screaming in panic, many leaping into the water to save themselves, when an attacker dressed as a policeman began spraying them with gunfire.

Police said at least 10 of the youngsters, attending a camp run by the governing Labour Party, were killed in Friday's attack, shortly after a blast in the capital Oslo killed seven people in Western Europe's worst bombing since 2005.

"I just saw people jumping into the water, about 50 people swimming toward the shore. People were crying, shaking, they were terrified," said Anita Lien, 42, who lives by Tyrifjord lake, a few hundred meters (yards) from Utoeya island, northwest of Oslo.

"They were so young, between 14 and 19 years old," she said.

Utoeya is an island about 500 meters long, clad with pine trees. Lien said the shooting sounded like automatic gunfire.

A camp guard, Simen Braenden Mortensen, said that the gunman had tricked his way onto the island by posing as a policeman driving a silver grey car.
id,
"He gets out of the car and shows ID, says he's sent there to check security, that that is purely routine in connection with the terror attack (in Oslo)," Mortensen told the daily Verdens Gang.

"It all looks fine, and a boat is called and it carries him over to Utoeya. A few minutes passed, then we heard shots," he said.

A teenaged boy who witnessed the attack from the mainland told Britain's Sky Television: "We heard people screaming, it was horrible...Some were waving at us from the island."

Police said they had found undetonated explosives on the island. They said the gunman, whom they described as ethnic Norwegian, may also have been involved in planting the bomb in Oslo.

Early on Saturday, an ambulance left the lake area, with a body lying on a stretcher inside. Cars with distraught relatives were heading to a nearby hotel hoping to meet loved ones evacuated from the island.

Police and dogs were still searching the island and lake overnight from boats and helicopters, with ambulances on standby. Searchlights slowly swept the water in the dark.

People living by the lake got into boats to try to evacuate people from the water. "I used my boat to ferry a lot of people from the island, I saw many wounded people," said a local man who said he lived in a white house by the lake.

Read More

US in talks with Taliban: Afghan president

 The United States is holding talks with the Taliban, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said, in the first official confirmation of such contacts after nearly 10 years of war.

---

Although diplomats and officials say talks are at a very early stage, Karzai's remarks highlight the increasing focus on finding a political solution in Afghanistan as foreign combat troops prepare to pull out by 2014.

"Talks with the Taliban have started... the talks are going on well," Karzai said, addressing a conference in Kabul.

"Also foreign forces, especially the United States, are carrying out the talks themselves."

But the problems surrounding any reconciliation bid were thrown into sharp focus shortly afterwards when nine people died as three Taliban attackers armed with suicide vests and machine guns stormed a Kabul police station.

A British soldier was shot dead in an insurgent attack, the defence ministry said, while France confirmed one of its troops was also fatally wounded by militant gunfire.

The militants have consistently rejected any efforts to talk peace in public statements.

"We have already said this and have repeated it many times. We have no negotiation with the United States and we deny any report as such," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told AFP.

A US State Department spokeswoman in Washington had "no comment" on Karzai's statement.

"However, we have consistently supported an Afghan-led process of reconciliation," spokeswoman Megan Mattson told AFP.

"Currently, we have a broad range of contacts across Afghanistan and the region, and at many levels, to support that effort."

The US embassy in Kabul did not respond to a request for comment on the latest remarks from Karzai, who is known for dropping unscripted, headline-grabbing remarks into speeches.

Western officials acknowledge on condition of anonymity that attempts to set up contacts with the Taliban are at a very early stage, while efforts to open up a communication channel with Taliban leaders are still being made.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this year called on Taliban members to split from Al-Qaeda, renounce violence and accept the constitution so they can be re-integrated into society.

Drone strikes and covert operations have weakened Afghanistan's Al-Qaeda network and could justify a White House decision to withdraw troops quicker than planned.

20 of Al-Qaeda's 30 prominent leaders in the region had been killed in the past year.

And US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on a visit to Kabul this month that there could be talks with the Taliban by the end of the year if foreign troops make sufficient gains.

A report last month in Der Spiegel magazine claimed Germany was helping to mediate secret, direct talks between the US and the Taliban on German soil while the New Yorker magazine reported in February that the US had begun direct discussions with senior Taliban figures.

Karzai's comments came the day after the United Nations Security Council agreed to split the international sanctions regime for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

The move sends "a clear message to the Taliban that there is a future for those who separate from Al-Qaeda, renounce violence and abide by the Afghan constitution," said Susan Rice, UN envoy for the United States, which led the campaign for the division.

Afghan attempts to pursue talks with the Taliban have been public for months -- Karzai last year set up a High Council for Peace to look at the issue.

But efforts to negotiate hit an embarrassing set-back when reports in November said a Pakistani shopkeeper posing as a senior Taliban leader had been brought to Kabul for talks with the president before being exposed as a fake.

US President Barack Obama is expected to announce soon how many troops from his country will pull out from July as the process of handing control from foreign to Afghan forces starts.

It is due to conclude in 2014, when all foreign forces are scheduled to leave Afghanistan.

Obama is facing mounting pressure to announce a significant drawdown after last month's killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and amid domestic economic woes and a mounting US death toll.

The Taliban's harbouring of bin Laden was the reason for the US-led invasion in 2001 following the September 11 attacks.

Read More