Bomb at teacher's home investigated

Six North Carolina high school students are suspected of putting a bottle bomb in a teacher's mailbox, police say.

No one was hurt by the device, comprised of Drano and aluminum foil in a plastic bottle, found last week, The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer reported Tuesday.

Bud Cesena, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' police chief, said the teen suspects, at least most of whom are soccer players at Butler High, allegedly had planned to put the bottle bomb at the home of a girlfriend and only placed it in the Butler teacher's mailbox after being scared off. They apparently didn't know a teacher lived at the residence, Cesena said.

"I feel pretty good that they were just stupid," Cesena said.

The chief added that the type of bomb made was not as dangerous as one using gasoline or gunpowder, but has been known to produce shrapnel.

"Depending on the amount of product you use, it can be very, very dangerous," Cesena said.

Ryan McIntyre, 18, and Nicholas Fichman, 16, were both charged with misdemeanor criminal property damage for allegedly damaging the inside of the mailbox. The other students were not identified because they had not been charged.

Police were looking into whether or not a Butler High faculty member had been a part of the scheme, as a parent of a soccer player said the teenagers were talking about the prank after practice and showed their coach the bomb materials.

Zimbabwe diamond torture camp alleged

Zimbabwe's security forces are allegedly operating a torture camp in the country's Marange diamond fields, the BBC's Panorama TV investigative show reported.

Victims told of severe beatings and sexual assault, Panorama said Monday.

The claims come as the European Union is considering a partial lift of a trade ban on Zimbabwe's diamonds dating back to 2009 imposed by the Kimberley Process, the international organization that polices diamonds.

The ban of Zimbabwe diamonds from world markets came after reports of killings and abuses by Zimbabwe's security forces in the diamond fields.

Witnesses described conditions in the alleged torture camp in Zengeni near Marange.

"It is the place of torture where sometimes miners are unable to walk on account of the beatings," a victim who was released from the camp in February told the BBC.

There have been reports of an additional camp located in nearby Muchena, Panorama said.

Civilians recruited by the police and military to illegally dig for diamonds for them are taken to the torture camps if they demand too large a share, the program said.

Civilians found mining for themselves are also tortured in the camps, the report said.

Rioting spreads in London and beyond

Rioting spread Monday to a growing number of neighborhoods in London and to cities beyond in the third night of violence brought on by a police shooting.

The riots erupted Saturday in the North London neighborhood of Tottenham and nearby areas. On Monday, hundreds of young people took to the streets in Croydon, on the capital's southern edge, and in other south London districts, including Battersea and Lewisham, The Guardian reported.

Similar violence was reported in Birmingham and Liverpool.

A fire set by rioters destroyed Reeves, a century-old family-run furniture store in Croydon, The Guardian said. In Battersea, local gangs allegedly declared a night of truce as they attacked stores.

In Birmingham, police cordoned off the Bullring, the city's central shopping and business district. But police said stores were damaged and passersby were beaten elsewhere.

Mike Golden, manager of a store that was broken into, said he had been on vacation and did not know what was going on. Monday night, he got a call from the alarm company.

"They are using what happened in London as an excuse for this behavior," he said.

In Liverpool, police reported "isolated outbreaks of disorder," including cars set on fire.

Enfield, the most northerly London borough and 6 miles north of Tottenham, was one of at least four London neighborhoods targeted Sunday night, police and witnesses said.

Resident Mizu Rahman told The Guardian he had seen a message on Facebook that Enfield would be "next on the hit list."

Conservative Member of Parliament Nick de Bois, whose district includes Enfield, said the disorder was fomented by social-media Web sites.

"There seems to have been a very well-organized campaign over social media to try to engineer trouble here in Enfield. It has almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy," he told LBC Radio.

Saturday night's Tottenham violence started as a small, peaceful march outside a police station to protest the killing of a local man, Mark Duggan, in a police shooting the week before.

Chinese parents decry child-quota laws

China's preference for boys and strict controls on the number of births have combined to create a climate in which children are sometimes seized, observers say.

The practice is especially bad in Longhui County, a poor rural area in Hunan, a southern Chinese province, where at least 16 children were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006, family members told the The New York Times.

Sometimes the children are never seen by their families again, having been placed for adoption or sold on the black market, some parents say.

"They are pirates," said Yuan Xinquan, whose 52-day-old daughter was allegedly snatched by government officials in 2005. Yuan said he hasn't seen or heard from her since.

China's family planning policies are among the strictest in the world, the report said, although it bans the taking of children from parents who exceed the birth quota. Parents in Longhui said local officials treat babies as a source of revenue, imposing fines of $1,000 or more -- about five times as much as the average family makes in a year -- for violating family policies.

Parents in Longhui told the Times local government officials would take their babies if they were unable to pay the fine.

The issue has renewed questions about foreign adoptions of Chinese children who might be falsely described as abandoned or orphaned, the report said.

"The larger issue is that the one-child policy is so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely," said Wang Feng, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directs the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

Seattle bankers indicted over home loans

Four people were indicted in an alleged loan-fraud scheme that federal prosecutors said led to the collapse of a Seattle-area bank.

Two of the defendants were former vice presidents of the now-defunct Pierce Commercial Bank and allegedly helped steer mortgage loans to unqualified buyers who wound up defaulting.

The defendants allegedly fudged the information on about 270 loan applications valued at more than $45 million between 2004 and 2008. About 100 of those loans eventually defaulted, the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle said in a written statement Friday.

Pierce Commercial was closed by federal regulators in November.

"This conspiracy didn't just damage Pierce Commercial Bank," U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan said. "This activity helped pump up the housing bubble that artificially drove up valuations, and now leaves innocent families underwater on their mortgages."

The defendants included Shawn Portman, 39, former senior vice president and loan officer for the bank. He was arrested Friday by federal agents.

Also indicted were former Senior Vice President Sonja Lightfoot, 52, and bank employees Adam Voelker, 38, and Jeanette Salsi, 54.