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.”

Share this:

Santorum largely bypassed Florida and Nevada to blanket the two caucus states with criticism of Romney and lay the groundwork among conservatives who have great sway in the process. RivalNewt Gingrich praised Santorum’s strategy as shrewd even as he signaled he had no interest in exiting the four-way race, which also includes Ron Paul.

“I think that Santorum’s going to have a pretty good day,” Gingrich told reporters on the eve of the caucuses. “He targeted differently than I did. I stayed in Florida to fight it out. … He took the same amount of time and energy and he came to Minnesota and Missouriand Colorado. For him, that was the right decision.”

Missouri’s GOP primary, also scheduled for Tuesday, promised Republicans a chance to show their allegiance to a candidate, but the effort is largely for show. No delegates will be awarded based on the outcome of the primary vote. Instead, Missouri will select delegates through a system of GOP caucuses and conventions that starts with local caucuses in mid-March. Moreover, Gingrich failed to get on the ballot in Missouri, which meant the vote there couldn’t be read as a referendum on the former House speaker’s viability.

Santorum, who for weeks has hammered Romney and Gingrich, seemed optimistic at his final campaign event before the contests got under way.

“This is a big day for us to see whether all the work that we put in in the past few weeks, when not so much attention was paid here as to Florida and Nevada, pays off,” Santorum said at a Denver rally.

Santorum seemed to spare Gingrich after the former House speaker suffered back-to-back losses to Romney in Florida and Nevada. With stepped-up intensity, Santorum castigated Romney as an unfit candidate and warned that Republicans were heading toward defeat if Romney were the nominee.

“A Romney nomination would not be in the best interest of us wining the general election and we need to have a conservative alternative. And my feeling is that Speaker Gingrich sort of had his chance in the arena and came up short in Florida and Nevada,” Santorum told reporters in Golden on Monday. “And now it’s our turn hopefully to get a one-on-one in Missouri.”

Romney sensed a possible threat from Santorum on Monday and went after Santorum’s time in the Senate as “not effective” because of his past support for spending on pork-barrel projects. Santorum flatly countered that Romney was “uniquely unqualified.”

Clearly mindful of the late shift in the race, Santorum has been working aggressively in Minnesota and in conservative areas of Colorado in the past two weeks while Romney campaigned in Florida and Nevada. It was clear Monday that Santorum saw an opportunity to rise in the GOP race.

But he was also facing coordinated criticism from Romney’s headquarters for the first time.

“Any time someone challenges Gov. Romney, Gov. Romney goes out and instead of talking about what he’s for … he just simply goes out and attacks and tries to destroy,” Santorum said.

Share this:

Polls suggest he should triumph easily in the western US state — where he scored 60 percent in 2008 — although there is a tighter race in Minnesota, where last-placed Rick Santorum is hoping to snatch a win.

Romney’s main rival, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, is battling to stay in the race after two heavy losses in a row to the former Massachusetts governor, who won in Florida last week and Nevada over the weekend.

Romney is on a roll in his bid to become the Republican Party’s nominee to take on President Barack Obama in the general election in November, having taken three of the five state polls so far.

His financial and campaigning muscle were on display on the eve of Tuesday’s caucuses, when he held a rally in a packed school sports hall.

“Mitt, Mitt, Mitt!” chanted several thousand supporters packed into the Arapahoe High School hall, with others forced to listen through loudspeakers in a neighboring hall as Romney gave a cheer-buoyed version of his stump address.

By contrast Gingrich spoke to a few hundred supporters in a barely half-full hotel ballroom in Golden, west of Denver, drawing cheers with an attack on a Romney gaffe from last week about poor Americans.

“He said last week that he didn’t really worry very much about the very poor because after all they had a safety net,” Gingrich said, calling Romney’s verbal stumble “backwards” in terms of traditional conservative thinking.

The candidates are battling for the biggest share of the 1,144 delegates at the Republican Party’s convention in Tampa, Florida, in August. With Nevada, Romney has 99, against 33 for Gingrich, 15 for Paul and 11 for Santorum.

Tuesday’s non-binding caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota will be the last contests before Maine’s week-long straw poll begins on February 11 and Michigan Republicans vote in a February 28 primary.

The caucuses begin at 7 pm (0100 GMT in Minnesota and 0200 GMT in Colorado) and results may not immediately be available.

Full results for Nevada published on Monday gave Romney 50 percent of the vote, more than twice his nearest rival Gingrich, with 21 percent. Paul came in third with 19 followed by Santorum with 10.

In Colorado Romney’s win might not be that crushing, but should still be comfortable: a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey on Sunday put Romney at 40 percent, Santorum at 26, Gingrich at 18 and Paul at 12.

While the Colorado result is barely in doubt, Romney could see his momentum slowed by a narrow victory — or even a loss — in the heartland state of Minnesota.

He was in a statistical tie with conservative darling Santorum, who is hoping to carry Minnesota’s caucuses on Tuesday with the help of the state’s large base of evangelical Christian and ultraconservative Tea Party voters.

Santorum, who has seen his campaign flag after scoring an early victory in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus, is hoping for another upset in Minnesota’s non-binding caucus, where turnout is expected to be low.

Romney — who carried Minnesota in 2008 with 41 percent of the vote — has not returned to the midwestern state since last week, relying instead on former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to press his cause.

“The only candidate in the race who hasn’t spent the bulk of his adult life either in Washington, DC or in a parasitic relationship with Washington, DC is Mitt Romney,” Pawlenty told a group of around 40 supporters gathered at Romney’s suburban Minnesota headquarters.

While the Republicans slug it out on the ground, Obama saw his approval rating soar Monday to the 50-percent mark, with a solid lead over Romney, seen as his likely Republican opponent in November.

Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans, and a narrower 51 to 45 percent among registered voters, according to a poll by the Washington Post and ABC television.

Share this:

“We are very concerned that people seem to be starting to think that all politicians behave like Wulff, and that would be fatal,” Christian Humborg, TI Germany’s managing director told The Local.

“I think the Wulff affair is a wonderful opportunity for German politicians to react to the cynical attitude that this is normal, and improve things,” he said.

He said the fact that the authorities were investigating whether Wulff and his aide had committed crimes showed that Germany already had the laws necessary to tackle his case.

But for Wulff, the problem was one of the credibility invested in his constitutional office.

“The president doesn’t have power in Germany; the only power he has is his word. And the power of the word is a function of his integrity. He doesn’t fulfil the level of integrity necessary for his position.

“Let’s not forget that a lot of people want to see him resign – less than half of the population want him to stay. And we’ve heard from many of those that they only want him to stay because they are convinced that any other candidate would have similar allegations thrown at them. We need a poll to ask why people think he should stay in office. I wouldn’t assume that the people who want him to stay approve of his behaviour.”

The question of whether Wulff should resign was one for him to answer personally, and although opposition politicians were increasing pressure on the president, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s continued support for him was questionable, said Humborg.

“We have to ask ourselves why the chancellor is still publicly supporting his behaviour and allowing the public image of politicians to be tainted further. She has some responsibility to safeguard our democracy so that people do not lose trust in the system as a result of politicians’ questionable practices.”

Most of the allegations against Wulff date back to his state premiership of Lower Saxony between 2003 and 2010.

Asked whether the dense web of overlapping personal, business and political relationships that Wulff seemed to have spun during this time were normal for a man in his position, Humborg said, “We don’t have enough empirical data to say to what degree politicians have such relationships in general, but I would be surprised if that was a widespread phenomenon.”

Humborg said he recognized that state politicians must promote their regional economy, but that high moral standards could still be expected of them.

“I don’t think it is so difficult to have a close interaction with people and businesses while still respecting a responsible distance when it comes to personal advantage,” he said.

While Humborg acknowledged that the laws concerning Wulff’s case were sufficient, he called for four major changes to increase transparency elsewhere in Germany’s political life.

He pointed out that there was currently no regulation to force transparency in sponsoring political parties, that Germany has not signed up to the United Nations convention against corruption, and that the law against bribing politicians was too weak.

And he said there needed to be more public information on how federal MPs earn money outside their parliamentary remuneration.

The final additional measure would be to govern what is known as revolving door employment – where ministers and deputy parliamentary ministers who have had contact with businesses in their public positions then go to work for them.

Other countries impose a quarantine period after politicians leave office, during which they cannot work for a firm with which they have had dealings.

Overall, Humborg said Germany had a high levels of integrity, but that there was a need for greater transparency.

Share this:

Despite accusations in both countries of interference, Merkel used a visit to Paris for a joint Franco-German cabinet session to make clear her support for Sarkozy, who has increasingly cited Germany as a model for France.

“We belong to the same political family. He supported me and it is natural that I support him in his campaign,” Merkel said during a joint television interview with Sarkozy to be broadcast later on French and German television.

Saying the two had worked together in a “friendly atmosphere” on the eurozone debt crisis, Merkel said they had a strong personal relationship.

Sarkozy said he was pleased to have won her support.

“The French people will decide themselves, like Germans decide, freely,” he said in the interview, but added: “When someone for whom you have affection and whom you admire says ‘I support your actions’, that pleases me.”

At a press conference after the cabinet session, Merkel dismissed criticism of her support for Sarkozy, saying: “It is normal that we support parties that are friends.”

Merkel recalled that Sarkozy had supported her in 2009 during her own election campaign, and said the French leader’s Socialist opponent François Hollande had recently come to Germany to address the opposition SPD.

Sarkozy thanked Merkel for her “friendship and trust” and — without citing him by name — slammed Hollande’s plan to renegotiate a eurozone fiscal compact seen by Berlin and Paris as a solution to the eurozone debt crisis.

He also denounced critics, in particular from the left, who have slammed Sarkozy for taking inspiration from the German model in efforts to reform France’s faltering economy.

“We are not jealous of them (Germany), we want to draw inspiration from them,” Sarkozy said, warning his opponents against “playing with feelings that remind us of periods that we do not want to see again.”

France and Germany were once seen as the twin motors of the European Union, but Paris is now clearly the junior partner, its economy lagging behind by any measure, and Sarkozy has turned to Berlin for ideas.

Sarkozy trails Hollande in opinion polls and Merkel fears that a new left-wing French administration will diverge from her austerity plans.

Speaking to reporters in Dijon, Hollande said “it says a lot about (Sarkozy’s) situation” that he was seeking Merkel’s support.

“For me the only test is the French people…. I don’t need the support of anyone but the votes of the French people,” he said, adding that Merkel would face a “tough task” in winning support for Sarkozy.

Sarkozy, still smarting from France’s loss of its AAA debt rating, cites Germany’s success almost daily to justify his own policies, drawing inspiration from both Merkel and her centre-left predecessor Gerhard Schroeder.

In Berlin, Merkel’s spokesman Georg Streiter said her active support for Sarkozy’s re-election campaign was a “personal” engagement as leader of Germany’s centre-right CDU party and not as the nation’s chancellor.

According to CDU general secretary Hermann Groehe, Merkel plans to support Sarkozy at campaign rallies ahead of France’s two-round presidential election, with a first round on April 22nd and a run-off on May 6th.

Sabine von Oppeln, a Berlin-based expert on Franco-German relations, said Merkel’s backing of Sarkozy was motivated by her efforts to reform Europe.

“With the euro crisis, she found in Sarkozy a partner who has largely supported her or at least not worked against her,” she said.

“There were numerous tensions between Merkel and Sarkozy in the past but today she is making a tactical calculation based on the fact that the two governments need Europe.”

German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung meanwhile wrote that Sarkozy had “latched his destiny to that of ‘dear Angela’ and the ‘German model’.”

“The time is long gone when he would, in private, call the chancellor ‘fatso’ and the Germans ‘the Boche’,” it wrote.

Share this:

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.

Share this:

Guéant, who is also responsible for immigration and is known as a hardliner, provoked a storm of controversy with the comments on Saturday.

“Contrary to what the left’s relativist ideology says, for us all civilisations are not of equal value,” Guéant told a gathering of right-wing students.

“Those which defend humanity seem to us to be more advanced than those that do not,” he said.

“Those which defend liberty, equality and fraternity, seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred,” he said in his speech, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.

He also stressed the need to “protect our civilisation”.

“I do not regret (the comments),” Guéant said on Sunday, though he accused critics of taking them “out of context”.

The left denounced his speech as an attempt by President Nicolas Sarkozy to woo supporters of the the far-right National Front (FN) ahead of a two-round presidential election in April and May.

Harlem Desir, the number two in the French Socialist Party, slammed “the pitiful provocation from a minister reduced to a mouthpiece for the FN”.

Bernard Cazeneuve, a spokesman for Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande, denounced the remarks as “divisive and degrading” while former Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal called them “dangerous.”

Sarkozy’s allies were quick to defend the minister, however.

Defence Minister Gerard Longuet said it was simply “common sense” to suggest that civilisations could be ranked according to values such as “respecting personal rights, rejecting violence or abolishing the death penalty”.

Finance Minister François Baroin accused the left of “exploiting the statements for electoral gain”.

Foreign Minister Alain Juppé suggested that his colleague had meant to say that “all ideas, all political systems are not equal”.

Speaking on BFM television, Juppé said however one should avoid talking of a shock of civilisations, suggesting the term was “inadequate”.

Guéant has repeatedly linked immigration with crime in France and last month said the delinquency rate among immigrants was “two to three times higher” than the national average.

In April, he declared that an increase in the number of Muslim faithful in France posed a “problem”.

He has also said that he wants to reduce the number of legal immigrants entering France, including those coming to work legally or to join their families.

His latest comments came as the FN’s presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is credited with about 20 percent support in opinion polls.

Share this:

That the pair were to chair their 14th joint Franco-German cabinet session was not unusual, but the joint television interview that they were to give afterwards was billed as an unprecedented cross-border endorsement.

France and Germany were once seen as the twin motor of the European Union, but Paris is now clearly the junior partner, its economy lagging behind by any measure, and Sarkozy has turned to his fellow conservative for ideas.

Sarkozy trails Socialist challenger Francois Hollande in the opinion polls, less than 80 days before the French election, and Merkel fears that a new left-wing French administration will diverge from her austerity plans.

Specifically, Hollande has said he will seek to re-negotiate the hard-won eurozone “fiscal compact” that Merkel sees as essential to binding the single currency bloc together behind her deficit-cutting agenda.

Sarkozy, still smarting from France’s loss of its AAA debt rating, now cites Germany’s success almost daily to justify his own policies, drawing inspiration from both Merkel and her centre-left predecessor Gerhard Schröder.

The leader of Merkel’s CDU party, Hermann Gröhe, has confirmed that Merkel will support Sarkozy “at campaign events in the spring.”

The French and German leaders will therefore give a joint interview to their respective public television networks from Paris, after a meeting of their top ministerial teams in Sarkozy’s cabinet room at the Elysee Palace.

Despite the humiliation of the loss of France’s AAA, the governments believe the fiscal compact and the creation of a eurozone financial safety net in the form of a permanent bail-out fund have contained the debt crisis.

Now, they plan to turn to measures to prevent future crises and restart growth – while keeping a close eye on Greece and other weaker Mediterranean countries in case any backsliding on austerity measures spooks the markets.

Monday’s talks will concentrate on ways of harmonising corporate tax rates across the Rhine and on plans for a new financial transaction tax.

Both support the idea of such a tax – mocked as “madness” by their British colleague Prime Minister David Cameron, who fears it would drive finance houses out of Europe – but differences remain.

Sarkozy is so determined to burnish his credentials as a reformer in the twilight of his first term that he vowed France will go it alone with a 0.1 percent tax by August. Merkel still hopes for a joint European measure.

The French leader also claims German parentage for his plan to boost sales tax in order to fund a reduction in employer social security contributions, a reform he hopes will boost job creation in a stagnant economy.

Many in France have mocked Sarkozy’s new determination to celebrate the “German model” at every turn, but his supporters are convinced his relations with Merkel will pay off in the long run.

“By tying himself to other world leaders, Nicolas Sarkozy reinforces in French minds his image as a statesman… and reduces the Socialist candidate to nothing more than a mere opposition figure,” said a ruling party source.

In an interview with French television last Sunday, Sarkozy repeatedly referred to Germany’s economic success, noting that it had managed to save industrial jobs by keeping corporate payroll charges down.

Sarkozy supported Merkel in 2009 when she successfully ran for re-election, but some in his own camp are worried by the closeness between the pair.

“We must be careful not to appear to be following Germany’s lead,” said Lionnel Luca, a UMP lawmaker, warning against the “whiff of Germanophobia exuded by the Socialist Party for political reasons.”

Hollande has taken a strong lead ahead of the presidential vote, with polls showing him taking 28 to 30 percent of votes in the first round, ahead of 23 to 24 percent for Sarkozy. The first round of the election will take place on April 22 followed by a run-off on May 6.

Share this:

The first demonstration demands fair elections at the March 4 presidential polls, at which Putin is expected to secure a third term in the Kremlin. It also calls on Russians “not to give a single vote” to Putin.

The opposition rally is widely seen by analysts as a litmus test of protesters’ ability to maintain momentum after two earlier protests against alleged vote fraud in favor of Putin’s United Russia party at December’s parliamentary polls.

“We are prepared for a long tough struggle,” protest organizer and opposition figure Boris Nemtsov on the eve of the rally. “One peaceful march will not change the country.”

Around 30,000 have signed up on social networks to attend the demonstration. The protests are to include a march through downtown Moscow and a rally across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. The two previous rallies drew an estimated combined total of 100,000 people.

Protesters were set to gather by the downtown Oktyabrskaya station starting 12 p.m. local time, when temperature in Moscow stood at minus 22 degrees Celsius.

President Dmitry Medvedev, widely seen as Putin’s junior partner in Russia’s ruling tandem, proposed a host of political reforms after the initial vote protests, including the return of direct elections for regional governors and easier registration for political parties and presidential candidates. His proposals were dismissed by protest leaders on Friday as “imitation reforms.”

Putin has also ordered the installation of video cameras at polling stations and has encouraged independent monitors to oversee the presidential vote.

The organization of Saturday’s march has seen the involvement of the Voters League, a freshly-minted public group that claims no involvement in politics and is led by popular figures such as novelist Boris Akunin, TV journalist Leonid Parfyonov and rock musician Yury Shevchuk.

A separate rally, expected to draw some 15,000 people, will urge protesters to resist what organizers say are attempts to instigate an Orange Revolution in Russia. So-called Color uprisings took place in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia in the early 2000s after contested presidential elections.

Putin thanked late on Friday those people who planned to attend the rally in his support.

“I share their views,” he said.

There have been numerous reports in the Russian media of state employees being coerced to attend the Anti-Orange rally, but the authorities have said these are untrue or the actions of over-zealous, low-level officials.

Both demonstrations have been authorized by City Hall. Moscow police say they will deploy 9,000 officers to maintain order at the rallies.

Rallies by both the opposition and Putin’s supporters took place in cities across Siberia and the Far East, most of them gathering several hundreds of protesters. An opposition rally in Novosibirsk was attended by an 1,500 to 2,000 people, according to police estimates, while a pro-Putin indoors rally in far eastern Birobidzhan had 600 participants, organizers said.

Police said some 11,000 gathered for the opposition rally at Moscow’s Kaluzhskaya Ploshchad as of 12:30 a.m. Saturday, though video feed from the site indicated the figure was considerably higher.

About 35,000 were in attendance for the rally in support of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Poklonnaya Gora an hour before its scheduled start at 1 p.m., Moscow police said. No video feed from the site was available at the time.

“People keep on arriving, the situation is changing constantly,” police said in a statement.

Police estimates of attendance during two previous opposition rallies in December were considerably lower than those by organizers and independent observers.

Share this:

The Liberal Democrat MP has been charged with perverting the course of justice after an investigation into the 2003 incident by Essex Police.

His former wife, the economist Vicky Pryce is also facing charges of perverting the course of justice. They are due to appear before Westminster Magistrates’ Court on February 16. The maximum sentence for perverting the course of justice is life in prison, the CPS and the Sentencing Council said.

Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer said a criminal complaint was made to Essex Police in May 2011, alleging Ms Pryce had accepted responsibility for a speeding offence committed by Mr Huhne in 2003.

“That complaint was investigated by Essex Police and a file was passed to the CPS in late July 2011. The CPS advised that further investigations should be made, including obtaining certain material from a national newspaper,” he said.

“Those further investigations were made and, in October 2011, an order was made for the newspaper to produce material to the police. The newspaper appealed that order, as it was entitled to do, but subsequently consented to producing the material in question just before the appeal was due to be heard, on 20 January this year.

“All the available evidence, including the new material, has now been carefully considered by the CPS and we have concluded that there is sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against Mr Huhne and Ms Pryce for perverting the course of justice.

“The essence of the charges is that between March and May 2003, Mr Huhne, having allegedly committed a speeding offence, falsely informed the investigating authorities that Ms Pryce had been the driver of the vehicle in question, and she falsely accepted that she was the driver.”

Share this: