(CNN) -- History in the making was how many international newspapers viewed Barack Obama's emergence as Democratic presidential candidate, with the focus on his status as the first ever African-American to win the ticket.

Newspapers described Obama as a "political giant slayer."

Even before Hillary Clinton admitted defeat in the hard-fought contest, some publications were already dissecting her failed campaign, analyzing where it went wrong and what the future has in store for her political dynasty.

Tuesday's win "confirms Obama's reputation as a political giant-slayer, who after less than four years in the U.S. Senate brought down the couple credited with creating the Democrats' most powerful political machine," the Guardian newspaper wrote.

The Chinese Xinhua news agency marveled at how "one year ago, it was very hard to imagine that Obama, a young politician without a strong political base and little known to the public can defeat Hillary Clinton, the heir-apparent of the Democratic Party."

The Times of London saw Obama's victory as evidence that "the United States remains a land of opportunity."

"This moment's significance is its resounding proof of the truism about America as a land of opportunity: Mr Obama's opportunity to graduate from Harvard and take Washington by storm," it wrote.

It said his victory also demonstrates "the opportunity that the world's most responsive democratic system gives its voters to be inspired by an unknown; the opportunity that outsiders now have to reassess the superpower that too many of them love to hate.

"Win or lose in November, he will have gone farther than anyone in history to bury the toxic enmity that fueled America's civil war and has haunted it ever since."

The Financial Times opened a post-mortem on Clinton's campaign, indicating that her defeat was not about her shortcomings but about Obama's political potency.

"Analysts will spend years poring over the reasons for Mrs Clinton's failed bid and probably never reach consensus," it wrote.

"But almost everyone, including some members of her own staff, would agree that the former first lady's campaign looked old-fashioned next to that of Barack Obama."

The Independent newspaper, however, placed the blame on "loyal husband" Bill Clinton who "more than anyone sabotaged his wife's chances by airing too many outspoken opinions on the way."

But the paper hinted the Clintons may still have another shot at the White House -- although it could be a few years away.

"Hillary has been beaten. Bill has dishonored himself. And Chelsea? Chelsea need have no regrets. She may be the candidate that brings the family back to the campaign trail again. But that drama is for another decade." The French newspaper Le Monde also examined Bill Clinton's role in Hillary's failure. The former president was both her greatest asset and her worst, the paper said, delivering a blunt assessment of her campaign with an emphatic: "C'est fini."

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Residents in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, braced for further flooding after a high tide of over 2 metres resulted in flooding in parts of the city on Wednesday.

Authorities in the capital, home to more than 10 million people, had prepared for the unusually high tides with sand bags and wire netting filled with stones following a warning by the World Bank.

Tide waters swamped areas near the coast for a few hours overnight, leaving hundreds of people stranded in their homes. But the main highway leading to the airport, which has suffered from flooding on previous occasions, was not affected.

The water has receded, but officials say they expect the waters to rise again tonight.

The flooding was the result of a high tide cycle that occurs once every 18 years or so, when the sun and moon are in direct alignment and are closest to the earth.

A Jakarta Public Works Agency official said they expect a 2.06-metre to 2.09-metre water rise later on Wednesday adding that the high tide is expected to last until June 7.

By Maggie Shiels BBC News, Silicon Valley

Google says that its privacy policy is easy to find

Privacy groups are accusing Google of violating California law in its reluctance to provide a direct link to its privacy policy on its homepage.

The search engine giant is being asked to write the word "privacy" alongside other information links.

"It's a short, seven-letter word and in the world of privacy it's a very important word," said Beth Givens of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Google says its policy is easy to find and it gives "accessible information".

'Not rocket science'

The issue has been building momentum following a series of blogs in the New York Times questioning Google's compliance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003.

The law requires any commercial website that collects personal information about its users to "conspicuously post its privacy policy on its website".

Quarks are considered to be the tiniest elementary particles that form the building blocks for protons and neutrons, which in turn form atoms. While protons and neutrons are thought to be made of three quarks each, a short-lived particle called a pion is made up of just two quarks and eventually decays into photons, electrons and neutrinos.

The body of 62-year-old Richard Emery was discovered near his home in Dorset on Saturday.

Thirty-four-year-old Richard Ormond and Samantha Faulder, who's 46, are accused of killing him.

Obama poised to claim victory

Tue Jun 3, 2008 9:54 PM BST

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By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Barack Obama was on the brink of winning the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday, as the support of a steady parade of uncommitted delegates pushed rival Hillary Clinton to the verge of defeat.

At least 20 superdelegates -- party officials free to back any candidate at the August nominating convention -- and 10 delegates pledged to former rival John Edwards announced their support for Obama, who would be the first black presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party.

That put Obama fewer than 15 delegates from the 2,118 he needs to face Republican John McCain in November and put him within reach of clinching the honour after polls close in the final two contests in Montana and South Dakota. Those states have 31 delegates at stake.

Facing defeat, Clinton told a conference call with New York members of Congress that she would be open to becoming Obama's vice presidential running mate.

But her campaign said she did not plan to concede to Obama at a rally in New York later on Tuesday.

ROME (Reuters) - A U.N. global food crisis summit will draw up an emergency plan on Wednesday to mobilise aid, reduce trade barriers and invest in farming in poor countries to stop the spread of hunger threatening nearly one billion people.

"We commit to eliminating hunger and to securing food for all, today and tomorrow," read a draft declaration from the three-day Rome summit, whose opening session on Tuesday was attended by leaders of about 44 nations.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation called the emergency meeting amid soaring commodity prices that threaten to add as many as 100 million more people to the 850 million already going hungry and destabilise governments.

The cost of major food commodities has doubled over the last couple of years, with rice, corn and wheat at record highs. The OECD sees prices retreating from their current peaks but still up to 50 percent higher in the coming decade.

After lofty speeches from leaders on Tuesday, many of whom blamed trade barriers and biofuels, championed by Brazil and the United States, for driving up prices, delegates will hold talks on Wednesday to prepare a declaration for release on Thursday.

The Mysterious Ring Of A Soft Gamma Repeater - Magnetar SGR 1900+14

"The universe is a big place, and weird things can happen. I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that's when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we'd never seen before, "said Stephanie Wachter of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology about a mysterious infrared ring a dead star that displays a magnetic field trillions of times more intense than Earth's.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope detected the ring around magnetar SGR 1900+14 at two narrow infrared frequencies in 2005 and 2007. The ringed magnetar is of a type called a soft gamma repeater (SGR) because it repeatedly emits bursts of gamma rays.

This image shows a ghostly ring extending seven light-years across around the corpse of a massive star. Magnetar SGR 1900 14, is located at the exact center of this image. The magnetar itself is not visible in this image, as it has not been detected at infrared wavelengths (it has been seen in X-ray light). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Wachter enlisted Vikram Dwarkadas, a Senior Research Associate in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, to help determine how the ring formed. Wachter, Dwarkadas and five other co-authors present the results of their investigation in the May 29 issue of the journal Nature.

Magnetars interest astrophysicists because of their mysterious and unusual characteristics. When massive stars collapse, they usually form compact objects called neutron stars or black holes. "We have no idea why some neutron stars are magnetars and some are not," Dwarkadas said.

SGR 1900+14 seems to belong to a nearby cluster of massive stars that resides along the plane of the Milky Way. Since the most massive stars live the shortest lives, the object hints that perhaps only the most massive stars become magnetars.

When Wachter's team began pondering the origin of the ring, "We thought initially of all the standard explanations," Dwarkadas said. But the team considered and eliminated several possibilities before concluding that a powerful flare that burst from the magnetar formed the ring, which measures seven light-years across.

"It's as if the magnetar became a huge flaming torch and obliterated the dust around it, creating a massive cavity," said co-author Chryssa Kouveliotou, senior astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. "Then the stars nearby lit up a ring of fire around the dead star, marking it for eternity."

A theoretical astrophysicist supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA, Dwarkadas specializes in various phenomena related to supernova remnants and stellar winds. He helped Wachter's team systematically eliminate several potential causes for the ring.

Was the ring an infrared echo, a mass of dust lit up by a flare moving out from the magnetar" The 2007 Spitzer image showed no discernable change in the ring after two years. "If it hasn't moved, it hasn't changed, it can't be an infrared echo," Dwarkadas said. "It's a stationary ring."

Could the ring be a bubble blown by solar winds emitted from the star before it exploded" Shock waves of a supernova travel at approximately 10,000 miles a second. If the ring was a wind-blown bubble, the supernova shock wave would overtake it somewhere between a few decades to a century or two, at most.

"It would mean that the supernova should have actually gone through and destroyed the ring unless it was very, very recent," Dwarkadas said. If the ring was a wind-blown bubble that somehow survived the supernova shock wave, "then you'd need a massive bubble," he said. "We did some calculations and we ran some simulations, and it just didn't work."

Wachter's team next considered whether the ring could be related to the supernova. That possibility also failed to pan out. "If there is a supernova, there would be shocks. You would see X-ray, radio and optical emission. We looked at archival data, and there was no emission at any wavelength except in the Spitzer images," Dwarkadas said.

The paper's other co-authors are Jonathan Granot of the University of Hertfordshire, England; Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of the University of California, Santa Cruz; Sandy Patel of the Optical Sciences Corporation, Huntsville, Ala.; and Don Figer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Five children died when a mortar shell they were playing with exploded in the southeastern city of Quetta, while a landmine killed four people in Pakistan's Kurram tribal region on Tuesday, officials said.

Aside from the five children killed, five others were wounded. They all belonged to an Afghan family living in Quetta. Police said they found three more mortar rounds in the children's home.

"We're investigating where they got them from," senior police officer Rematullah Niazi said.

Children were also killed when a passenger van hit a landmine on a road about 60 km (37 miles) east of Parachinar, Kurram's main town.

"We have a confirmed report of four dead, including two children," Ahsanullah Khan, a government officer in Parachinar, told Reuters.

Islamist militants, some linked to the Taliban and al Qaeda, operate in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal lands.

WUFU, China (Reuters) - Top Chinese officials considered on Tuesday a plan to rebuild earthquake-ravaged parts of the country's southwest while protests by grieving parents and dangerous quake lakes cast a shadow over relief efforts.

The earthquake centred in Sichuan province has killed 69,107 people and displaced more than 15 million, according to official figures on Tuesday. The death toll is likely to rise with 18,230 still listed as missing.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has nonetheless vowed to move quickly to rebuild towns and villages devastated by the May 12 quake. He and other officials met to discuss a reconstruction plan for the region, state television reported.

"As quickly as possibly restore agricultural production in the disaster area," the officials urged, also calling for rapid road repairs and reviving trade and services.

But protests by parents who lost children in schools destroyed during the quake also flared, underscoring the tensions that could erupt as grieving gives way to anger.

Many schools collapsed in the quake, killing more than 9,000 students and teachers according to figures compiled by Reuters.

Many parents blame shoddy buildings for the deaths, pointing to apartments and government offices that survived while nearby schools fell.   Continued...

A 15-year-old schoolgirl was stabbed to death yesterday in the lift of a block of Central London flats in a frenzied knife attack after returning home from class.

The teenager, who was discovered by an eight-year-old girl and her mother, suffered at least ten stab wounds to her front, neck and back. The attack was so ferocious that the handle of the knife broke off and the blade was left in her body.

Neighbours said that the girl was thought to have known her attacker. A local man in his thirties was arrested on suspicion of murder and was being questioned by police last night.

The girl is the sixteenth teenager — but the first female — to have been killed violently in London since January and the thirty-first in Britain.

Clubs and managers were jockeying for position last night as football's managerial merry-go-round gathered pace. No sooner had Sven-Göran Eriksson walked away with another handsome pay-off after finally being dismissed as Manchester City manager yesterday than the Barclays Premier League club were pressing ahead with plans to appoint Mark Hughes as the Swede's successor.

Despite reluctantly granting City permission to talk to Hughes, Blackburn Rovers will not allow their manager and his trusted backroom staff of Mark Bowen, Eddie Niedzwiecki and Kevin Hitchcock - all of whom have two years remaining on their contracts - to leave on the cheap and are expected to demand at least £5million in compensation for the quartet.

City will open talks with Hughes today or tomorrow - Garry Cook, who was ratified as City's executive chairman yesterday, will lead the negotiations - but with the Blackburn manager also in contention for the vacancy at Stamford Bridge, Hughes is unlikely to commit his future to City until Chelsea's intentions become clearer.

Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea owner, Peter Kenyon, the chief executive, and other figures from the club's hierarchy were meeting last night as the search for a first-team coach to replace Avram Grant, who was sacked ten days ago, intensifies. Although City appear to be in pole position to land Hughes, Chelsea could yet hijack any attempted deal and leave Thaksin Shinawatra, the City owner, to pursue other targets.

Intriguingly, many of the names on the Stamford Bridge shortlist also feature on that of Thaksin, although given Chelsea's loftier status and greater spending power, West London remains the more attractive venue. City have all but conceded defeat in their efforts to lure Luiz Felipe Scolari, the Portugal coach, who, along with Carlo Ancelotti, of AC Milan, and Hughes is in the running to succeed Grant.

Roberto Mancini, who was replaced by José Mourinho, the former Chelsea manager, at Inter Milan yesterday, has his admirers at Stamford Bridge and City. His 17-year-old son, Filippo, joined City's youth academy on loan from Inter in January and Mancini Sr enjoys a cordial relationship with Alistair Mackintosh, the City chief executive.

Although Eriksson was known to be dismayed by his treatment at the hands of Thaksin, the former England head coach may well have reasoned that his protracted departure was worth it. Eriksson, who had two years remaining on his contract, was given a settlement of £1.25million - the equivalent of six months' salary - and will receive another bumper pay-day if, as expected, he is confirmed as the Mexico coach, possibly as early as today.

Blackburn have not given up hope of keeping Hughes, but Sam Allardyce, the former Bolton Wanderers and Newcastle United manager, is known to be keen to take over at Ewood Park.