In October, an Italian appeals court overturned the young Seattle woman’s murder conviction in the 2007 death of her British roommate in Perugia. But the same court upheld Knox’s conviction for slander — for falsely accusing bar owner Diya “Patrick” Lumumba of involvement in the slaying.

Lumumba was freed after two weeks in prison for lack of evidence.

Knox later said she was “manipulated” during her lengthy police interrogation.

An appeal of the slander conviction was filed Monday, Knox family spokesman Dave Marriott confirmed. He doesn’t know when the Italian court might consider it.

Knox returned to Seattle after her murder conviction was overturned. The former exchange student had been in custody since 2007.

In its ruling last fall, the Italian appeals court also acquitted Knox’s then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, in the murder of Meredith Kercher.

A third defendant, Ivory Coast-born drifter Rudy Guede, was convicted in a separate trial of sexually assaulting and stabbing Kercher. His 16-year prison sentence — reduced on appeal from an initial 30 years — was upheld by Italy’s highest court in 2010.

In a lengthy court document explaining the ruling that cleared Knox and Sollecito, presiding appeals court Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann wrote that Knox implicated Lumumba after hours of intense police questioning because “she was convinced that was what the police wanted her to do; to name a guilty person.”

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The NS and ProRail assumed on Thursday of last week that there would be three to five centimetres of snow. When the forecast was increased on Friday morning to between 10 and 15 centimetres, it was too late to change the timetables automatically, Schultz van Haegen told parliament.

Drivers and conductors had to be told about the changes individually which cost time and delayed the availability of information to passengers, she said.

Once the new schedule was up and running, it did provide ‘a predictable and reliable service’ from Sunday onwards, the Volkskrant quotes the minister as saying.

Schultz van Haegen says she will be consulting ‘experts’ from countries with experience of extreme weather conditions to find solutions to the chaos on the railways whenever it snows.

But she also says the railways will remain ‘vulnerable’ because of the ‘intensive use of the trains and track’.

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“The pensions scheme isn’t based on magic. It is a welfare ambition based on large-scale re-distribution and citizens’ own work. If people think that we can live longer and shorten our work life, then pensions will get lower,” Reinfeldt said in interview with daily Dagens Nyheter (DN).

According to Reinfeldt, the expectation to retire at 65 is a problem in Sweden today.

He thinks that Swedes may have to stretch their working life to 75 years of age in order to keep the same living standard. Not many would be willing to sacrifice the way they live, he said to the paper.

“Are people on a large scale willing to give this up? I think not,” he said.

To keep going that long, Reinfeldt isn’t ruling out that Swedes would need to have more than one career during their working life.

“It is a very challenging view. Our entire life is characterized by the idea that once we have spoken to the student career counselor, we think we are going to do the same thing our entire life,” said Reinfeldt.

But instead, Swedes need to be able to change their career at a later stage in life, said the prime minister

He also said that student loans for the over 55s wasn’t out of the question.

“Maybe it is worth looking into that,” he told DN.

Reinfeldt also said that those who are 55+ would immediately become more attractive with employers if they were expected to work for another 20 years instead of ramping down after 5-6 years.

“But it is important to understand that a 30-year-old wouldn’t do the same work as a 70-year-old,” said Reinfeldt.

The prime minister is scheduled to host a meeting in Sweden on Wednesday with the leaders of the Nordic nations, as well as with British PM David Cameron, to discuss among other things the implications of an aging population.

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The leaders are caught between their increasingly frustrated partners in the European Union for failing to pass the reforms quickly and workers who went on strike on Tuesday to protest against the austerity measures.

European Union (EU) officials say the full package must be agreed with Greece and approved by the euro zone, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund before February 15 to allow time for complex legal procedures involved in the bond swap to be completed in time for a March 20 bond redemption.

In some euro zone countries, including Germany and Finland, parliamentary approval is required to raise the bailout money.

In Paris, German Chancellor Angel Merkel on Monday expressed the exasperation among euro zone leaders at seemingly endless arguing in Athens that has yet to produce a definitive acceptance of the austerity and reform demanded by the lenders.

“I honestly can’t understand how additional days will help. Time is of the essence. A lot is at stake for the entire euro zone,” she told a news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

But leaders of the three parties in the coalition government appeared to need at least one additional day.

The office of Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, a former central banker who heads a government of politicians, said that a meeting of leaders from the conservative, socialist and far-right parties due on Monday had been postponed to Tuesday.

No reason was given for the delay. Papademos held further talks with the “troika” of lenders – the European Commission, ECB and IMF – on Monday.

The party leaders, positioning themselves for a likely general election in April, have balked at accepting another package of deeply unpopular wage and pension reductions, job cuts and tougher tax enforcement measures.

Alarmed by the prospect of yet more budget cuts, Greece’s two main trade unions said they would hold a 24-hour strike on Tuesday in protest against policies they say have only driven the economy into a downward spiral.

Demonstrations are planned in central Athens.

PATIENCE WEARING THIN

Greeks watched the political drama with the same exasperation they have shown throughout the nation’s nearly three-year crisis, mixed with fear of the consequences of leaving the euro.

“We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We are lost either way but political leaders have to agree,” said Kosmas Georgiou, a 31-year old company inspector. “Going back to the drachma is not an option, it’s disaster.”

“They are delaying this just to look like heroes.”

Merkel made clear that her patience was wearing thin on a deal that affects not only Greece but the wider currency bloc, which fears that a default would hit much larger economies such as Spain and Italy.

One government official said the entire Greek side had to agree terms of the rescue, which would be the second for Athens since 2010, with international lenders before the next meeting of the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers.

No date has been set for the Eurogroup meeting, and a European Commission spokesman said it would be held only when Greece had made a commitment to the deal.

Papademos said after five hours of talks on Sunday that party chiefs had agreed measures including wage cuts and other reforms as part of spending cuts worth 1.5 percent of gross domestic product.

But leaders of the PASOK socialist party, the conservative New Democracy and the far-right LAOS party still have to reach agreement on several unresolved issues.

These include labour market reform and shoring up domestic banks. Greece needs the bailout money by mid-March to meet big debt repayments but tempers are rising in the EU over what it sees as Greek dithering on implementing reforms.

Greeks have been worn down by a deep recession, now in its fifth year, and wave after wave of austerity measures imposed under the first bailout.

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The diminutive singer told her more than one million followers on the site that she adored her supporters, but one among them was not her ‘lover’ — her nickname for her fans.

“I love 1,033,861 of you LOVERS, but 1 is not a lover, just a deluded weirdo making threat #andthatdoesnotmakeyouspecial So..police alerted,” she tweeted Tuesday.

The announcement prompted a groundswell of support for the 43-year-old on the social networking site, with fans vowing to protect her and offering support.

“I hope whoever’s threatening @kylieminogue knows there’s more than 1,000,000 of us ready to jump to her defence,” wrote one.

Former television soap star Minogue this year celebrates 25 years in the music business since her hit debut single “Locomotion” was released in 1987.

The singer, who has successfully battled breast cancer, has attracted unwanted attention in the past, reportedly receiving hundreds of threatening letters at her British home and office in 2003.

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard said eight military helicopters would help in search, evacuation and resupply missions in the eastern state, where days of heavy rainfall have prompted hundreds of evacuations and dozens of rescues.

“The helicopters will be available to assist in rescue operations as required until the immediate crisis has passed,” Gillard said in a statement.

In the inland Queensland town of Charleville authorities are on alert amid fears a temporary levee will collapse as the Warrego River continues to rise, flooding the whole town.

The weather bureau’s Paul Birch told the ABC the situation was “touch and go” as the water will be “rushing in quick over the levee”.

“If it does that you find it tends to erode out part of the levee fairly quickly. So then it will just open up the river into town — it’s quite catastrophic,” Birch said.

Mayor Mark O’Brien said hundreds of people had been evacuated from their homes but so far Charleville itself was “high and dry”.

“We’ve just got an enormous body of water going down the river, but if this thing passes quickly people can just go straight back to the way they were before,” he told the ABC.

In the town of Roma to the east, police were continuing their search for a woman missing since Friday after her vehicle was swept off the side of a road.

“A boy was rescued from the car and a woman got out of the vehicle but rescuers could not keep hold of her,” police said in a statement. “The woman was swept away in fast flowing flood waters.”

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who just over a year ago was dealing with epic floods that swamped the state, sweeping away entire hamlets and flooding thousands of homes, has warned the community faced dangerous new territory.

In New South Wales, the State Emergency Service said 16,550 people were stranded with the worst affected areas around Moree in the state’s far north where floodwaters are expected to remain at their peak for one or two days.

“At this height the properties on the north side of the Mehi River in Moree will remain isolated with many properties surrounded by floodwater and some, possibly in excess of three hundred, inundated,” the service said.

SES assistant commissioner Andrew Edwards said while the rain was easing, the amount of flooding in the region and to the north meant that “we can expect these floods to be going on for months” in some pockets.

Australia suffered epic floods late 2010 and in the January 2011 which swamped a huge area of Queensland, inundating thousands of homes and businesses, sweeping away small villages and leaving more than 30 people dead.

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The 238 known survivors arrived by five vessels at the city of Lae. Many were undergoing medical tests, according to Capt. Nurur Rahman, rescue coordinator with the country’s National Maritime Safety Authority.

About 350 people were aboard the MV Rabaul Queen when it sank Thursday, said Rahman.

The MV Rabaul Queen went down about 16 kilometers (10 miles) off Cape Fortification in the Vitiaz Strait after getting into trouble early Thursday, officials said.

The ferry is about 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) below the surface, Rahman said.

After an alert was sent out, boats and helicopters rushed to the scene to try to save scores of people left adrift at sea by the sinking. They had to deal with high winds and ocean swells.

Joanne Meehan of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority told CNN two of that country’s aircraft were assisting in the search.

Australia is Papua New Guinea’s closest neighbor minus Indonesia, with which it shares a border.

“I’m pleased that a large number of people have been rescued,” said Kevin Rudd, the Australian foreign minister. “We’re deeply concerned about those who are still missing.”

Rudd said he didn’t have any information on the nationalities of the passengers aboard the ship.

“This is a difficult operating environment,” he said. “We are doing everything within our power.”

The Rabaul Queen was ferrying passengers from the town of Kimbe on New Britain Island to Lae when it got into difficulty.

“Taking ferries is the most economic method of transport for people traveling between the islands and the mainland,” Rahman told CNN. “What I understand from local media is that a lot of students and their parents were traveling to schools that recently reopened on the mainland.”

Jurgen Ruh, the chief executive of Manolos Aviation Ltd. in Lae, was in one of the helicopters that helped with the rescue effort.

“I could see the survivors on the debris,” he said, noting that the passenger ship had sunk completely by the time he reached the scene.

There were about 10 life rafts visible, each with roughly 10 people on them, the first time his helicopter flew overhead, he said. However, when the helicopter returned to the area after refueling, no more survivors were spotted.

The weather was likely to be a contributing factor in the ferry’s sinking, Ruh said, as there were high winds at the time in what is a notorious area.

Papua New Guinea had a population of 6.7 million in 2010, the U.S. State Department says, with about 190,000 people living in Lae. Most of the population is scattered in small settlements across the state’s many islands.

The largely Christian country is part of the Commonwealth and has Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. The bulk of the estimated 2,000 American residents in Papua New Guinea, are missionaries and their families, the State Department says.

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“Yes, it’s true. I am in love with captain (Francesco) Schettino,” Domnica Cemortan, who has joint Moldovan and Romanian citizenship, was quoted by La Stampa daily as saying to investigators looking into the January 13 tragedy.

The 52-year-old captain is married and has a daughter. Cemortan in earlier interviews had dismissed gossip that she was Schettino’s lover saying he was a faithful family man because he had shown her pictures of his daughter.

The woman was also quoted as saying that she was on the bridge when the luxury liner hit rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio on January 13, which caused it to keel over with a loss of 32 lives out of 4,229 people on board.

In an interview with AFP earlier, however, she said that she had been dining with friends when the accident happened. Schettino had told investigators that there was no-one apart from authorised staff on the bridge at the time.

Italian newspapers say that the testimony of the mysterious Moldovan — a former employee of cruise ship operator Costa Crociere — has become a key part of the investigation that is trying to work out who was where when.

Cemortan in earlier interviews in the Moldovan capital Chisinau said Schettino was “a hero” whose actions after the impact saved thousands of lives and she dismissed the accusations against him as “absurd”.

The captain, who is under house arrest at his home on the Amalfi coast, and first officer Ciro Ambrosio are accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers were evacuated.

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Experts said the incident, which follows smaller leaks last weekend, is not a big setback to getting the plant under control but the timing is awkward for the government as it strives to win public acceptance for the restart of reactors elsewhere to avoid a summer power crunch.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant, on the coast 240 km northeast of Tokyo, was wrecked by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering reactor meltdowns and radiation leaks that caused mass evacuations and widespread contamination.

The leak discovered late on Tuesday was from a pipe at the plant’s No.4 reactor that may have burst after freezing due to cold weather, said a spokesman for the utility, known as Tepco. He said leaking water would go into a drain leading to a storage facility.

It contained only a tiny amount of radiation compared with the huge amount of water used to cool the reactors in the aftermath of the March disaster, much of which is still being treated at the plant to lower its radiation level, he said.

The No.4 reactor was shut for maintenance when the tsunami struck, and no fuel rods are inside thereactor vessel.

“I wouldn’t say this is a positive development. But it isn’t something that would further stoke safety concerns over other nuclear plants,” said Kenji Sumita, honorary professor at Osaka University.

“If it hadn’t been for the Fukushima disaster, an incident like this could have gone unreported.”

Shattered trust in the safety of nuclear energy has prevented the restart of reactors shut for routine maintenance, straining power supply and threatening blackouts. Only three of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors are now operating. Without approval for restarts, all of them could be shut by the end of April, boosting the use of fossil fuels and adding over $30 billion a year to the nation’s energy costs, a government estimate said.

U.N. nuclear experts gave their backing on Tuesday to stress tests aimed at showing Japan’s nuclear plants can withstand the sort of disasters that devastated Fukushima Daiichi.

The government announced on December 16 that reactors at the plant had reached a state of cold shutdown, a milestone in cleanup efforts and a pre-condition for allowing about 80,000 residents evacuated from a 20-km (12 miles) radius of the Daiichi plant to return home.

Resource-poor Japan had aimed to increase the share of nuclear power to more than half of its electricity supply by 2030 before the disaster, but now looks to reduce its reliance on nuclear power and raise the role renewable sources such as wind and solar power.

Tepco initially estimated the size of this week’s leak at six litres but later revised it to 8.5 cubic metres, and is looking into how it can prevent similar incidents.

It follows the discovery and plugging of smaller leaks at the same reactor last weekend.

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An airplane from Australia, three helicopters and six ships were scouring the search area after the MV Rabaul Queen went down while traveling from Kimbe on the island of New Britain to coastal town of Lae on the main island, Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in a statement.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard called the incident a “major tragedy” and said her country was providing assistance to its near neighbor.

“Given the likely very high loss of life here, I think when this news comes to the attention of Australians around the country they will be thinking about the people of PNG as they respond to this tragedy,” she added.

The Australian maritime agency initially detected the ferry’s distress beacon and alerted the PNG Maritime Rescue Coordination Center, which is coordinating the rescue effort. The Australian statement said “approximately 50 people have been rescued so far.”

It said 350 people were believed to be on board, but Papua New Guinea’s National Maritime Safety Authority (NMSA) rescue co-ordinator Captain Nurur Rahman said the true figure was likely lower.

“I cannot confirm or deny the 350 missing number. It is hearsay,” Rahman said. “I have not seen the manifest as yet, but it is likely around 300.”

Rahman said he was being fed information from an NMSA agent on board one of the ships.

“The dynamics of this thing are changing all the time, minute by minute,” he said.

Ship operator Star Ships could not be immediately contacted for comment.

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