Aaron Swartz, internet freedom activist, dies aged 26

Night attack

Police officials say that the latest victim was a 29-year-old woman. She is believed to have been travelling on a bus back to her village on Friday night. The driver and conductor allegedlyrefused to stop at her village, instead taking her to a desolate location not far from the city of Amritsar.

The two men are then believed to have been joined by five others and taken turns raping the woman throughout the night.

The victim was then dropped off near her village, where she was able to tell her relatives about the attack.

Court in Egypt ordersretrial for Mubarak after appeal

A court in Egypt has ordered a retrial for ex-President Hosni Mubarak after accepting an appeal against his life sentence over the deaths of protesters.

Mubarak, 84, was overthrown in 2011 after mass street protests in the capital Cairo and other cities, and jailed in June.

Ex- Interior Minister Habib al-Adly will also be retried on the same charge.

Mubarak, who remains in custody, will also be retried on corruption chargesfor which he was acquitted in June. He led Egypt for almost 30 years, surviving six assassination attempts, before the revolt against his rule.

Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected president in June. (elect smb president)

Judge Ahmed Ali Abdel Rahman announced: " The court has rule d to accept the appeal filed by the defendants... and orders a retrial. "

Mohamed Abdel Razek, one of Mubarak's lawyers, told Reuters news agency the retrial would be based on the same evidence used in the previous trial.

Sunday's ruling was met with cries of "Long live justice!" by Mubarak supporters who held up his picture and hugged each other in the courtroom while dozens more outside shouted "We love you, president!", AFP* news agency reports.

On 2 June, following a 10-month trial, Mubarak and Adly were convicted of conspiring in the killing of protesters. The two men had faced possible death sentences over the killing of 850 protesters.

Families of victims were disappointed that Mubarak had not been convicted of ordering the killings, the BBC's Aleem Maqbool reports from Cairo.

There was also dismay among some that he had not been tried for abuses allegedly committed earlier in his rule. At the same trial in June, Mubarak was acquitted of corruption.

AFP (Agence France-Presse) is a global news agency delivering fast, in-depth coverage of the events shaping our world from wars and conflicts to politics, sports, entertainment and the latest breakthroughs in health, science and technology.

Aaron Swartz, internet freedom activist, dies aged 26

Aaron Swartz, a celebrated internet freedom activist and early developer of the website Reddit, has died at 26.

The activist and programmer took his life in his New York apartment, a relative and the state medical examiner said. His body was found on Friday.

Mr Swartz began computer programming as a child, and at 14 co-authored an early version of the RSS* specification. (* RSS – any of various XML file formats suitable for disseminating real-time information via the Internet on a subscription basis)

Leading internet figures and friends paid tribute to Mr Swartz via t weets or blogs.

After leaving Reddit, Mr Swartz became an advocate of internet freedom, and was facing hacking charges at the time of his death.

He was among the founders of the Demand Progress campaign group, which lobbies against internet censorship.

The hacking charges relate to the downloading of millions of academic papers from online archive JSTOR*, which prosecutors say he intended to distribute for free. (*JSTOR – pronounced JAY -stor;short for Journal Storage) is a digital library founded in 1995.)

He denied charges of computer fraud at an initial hearing last year, but his federal trialwas due to begin next month.

Mr Swartz's lawyer Elliot R. Peters confirmed the news of his client's death in an email to the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) university newspaper The Tech.

"The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true," he wrote.

A spokeswoman for New York's medical examiner later confirmed to Associated Press news agency that Mr Swartz had hanged himself.

In a statement later on Saturday, Mr Swartz's family praised his "brilliance" and " profound" commitment to social justice and also expressed bitterness toward the prosecutor s pursuing the case against him. "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach," the statement said.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee - the British inventor of the world wide web - commemorate d Mr Swartz in a Twitter post: "Aaron dead. World wanderer s, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep. "

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