Australia wins UN Security Council seat

AUSTRALIA has won its bid for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Foreign Minister Bob Carr attended a meeting in New York overnight for a secret ballot of the UN's 193 members.

Rwanda and Argentina have also won seats on the Security Council.

Australia, which needed at least 129 votes and was relying heavily on African, Caribbean and Pacific Island nations for support, received 140 votes.

Australia's Western Europe and Other Group competitors Luxembourg registered 128 and Finland 108.

It is the fifth time Australia will serve on the Security Council, the two-year tenure commencing at the start of 2013.

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Romney son wanted to take a swing at Obama

MITT Romney's eldest son Tagg has told a radio station that the back-and-forth debate sniping between his father and Barack Obama made him want to "take a swing" at the president.

Asked in an interview with North Carolina radio host Bill LuMaye what it was like to sit through Tuesday's super-charged debate and hear Obama "call your dad a liar", Tagg Romney said it made him want to "jump out of your seat and you want to rush down to the debate stage and take a swing at him".

He continued with his description of how the extraordinarily close race is weighing on those close to the protagonists, less than three weeks before Americans head to the polls on November 6.

He followed up his joke about clocking Obama by saying: "But you know you can't do that because, well first because there's a lot of Secret Service between you and him, but also because it's just the nature of the process.

"They're going to try to do everything they can do to try to make my dad into someone he's not," Tagg, the eldest of Romney's five sons, said.

"We signed up for it. We gotta kind of sit there and take our punches, and then send them right back the other way."

There was no malicious tone to his voice, and a campaign aide said that Romney was clearly speaking in jest.

"He was joking about how frustrating this process can be for family," the aide told AFP.

The political slugfest has heated up in recent weeks, and it reached a peak at Tuesday's presidential debate at a New York university, where Obama and Romney often stood just feet apart, talking over each other.

Asked if his father gets nervous before such debates, the younger Romney said: "Absolutely, are you kidding? He's terrified before he gets out there.

"Terrified is too strong a word, but you know, like anybody, he gets butterflies a little bit," Romney added.

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Twitter blocks German neo-Nazi account

MICRO-BLOGGING site Twitter says it has blocked a neo-Nazi group's account at the request of German police in a global first for the company.

In a move pitting censorship concerns against national laws on hate speech, Twitter said it had deployed the tool developed only this year to restrict content in a single country rather than simply delete posted comments.

"We announced the ability to withhold content back in Jan (January)," its chief lawyer Alex Macgillivray said in a tweet on Thursday. "We're using it now for the first time re: a group deemed illegal in Germany."

Twitter's spokesman in Germany, Dirk Hensen, confirmed the decision in an email to AFP.

Lower Saxony's interior minister Uwe Schuenemann welcomed the step to stop distributing Besseres Hannover's "hateful ideology", adding that social media sites including Facebook and YouTube had also complied with the request.

"Right-wing extremists are increasingly using the internet to communicate with and advertise to young people," he said.

Macgillivray posted a link to a letter from the police in the northern German state of Lower Saxony asking Twitter to dismantle the account of Besseres Hannover (Better Hanover), a far-right outfit that was outlawed last month.

The account is still visible on Twitter in Germany with the handle @hannoverticker and calling itself The national information portal from Hanover.

But no message since the date of the ban, September 25, can be seen, and the group's website has also been blocked or deleted.

Prosecutors in Lower Saxony have launched a probe against around 20 members of Besseres Hannover on charges of inciting racial hatred and creating a criminal organisation.

The group is in particular suspected of sending a threatening video by email to the state's social affairs minister, Aygul Ozkan, who is of Turkish origin, and distributing far-right newspapers at schools.

Macgillivray said Twitter aimed to restrict as little as possible on its website while respecting the law.

"Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly & transparently," he said in a separate tweet.

He posted a link to the company's policy on Country-Withheld Content explaining the line it draws between free speech and legal compliance.

"With hundreds of millions of tweets posted every day around the world, our goal is to respect our users' expression, while also taking into consideration applicable local laws," the California-based company said.

It said once it received an official request to withhold content, it would notify users immediately explaining why their posts could pose legal problems for Twitter, and noted that users may challenge the decision.

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Mali Islamists destroy more saints' tombs

ISLAMISTS controlling northern Mali are destroying more Muslim saints' tombs in the ancient city of Timbuktu, witnesses say, in the latest attack on the world heritage sites considered blasphemous by the jihadists.

"Currently, the Islamists are in the process of destroying the tombs of Kabara," a neighbourhood in the south of the city, a witness said on Thursday, adding there were three ancient tombs in the area.

"They are destroying the first tomb with pickaxes and other tools and saying they are going to destroy all the tombs," he said.

Another resident confirmed the report and said the Islamists, some of them armed, had arrived in the area in three vehicles.

In July, Islamists from Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith) - an armed group that controls Timbuktu along with al-Qaeda's North African branch, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb - drew condemnation for smashing seven tombs of ancient Muslim saints as well as the "sacred door" to a 15th-century mosque.

Once considered one of Africa's most stable democracies, Mali has descended into chaos since a March coup that overthrew the government of president Amadou Toumani Toure.

A number of Islamist groups including al-Qaeda's north African branch capitalised on the power vacuum to seize the country's vast desert north, an area larger than France.

For more than six months, the Islamists have been imposing their strict version of sharia on areas under their control, arresting unveiled women, stoning an unmarried couple to death, publicly flogging smokers and amputating suspected thieves' limbs, according to residents and rights groups.

Islamists also destroyed tombs in the northern towns of Goundam and Gao in September.

Ansar Dine began their campaign of destruction after UN cultural organisation UNESCO put Timbuktu on its list of endangered world heritage sites.

They have also threatened to destroy the city's three ancient mosques, one of which dates back to 1327.

The latest destruction came after the UN Security Council last week passed a resolution asking West African nations to speed up preparations for an international military intervention to reclaim northern Mali, giving them 45 days to lay out detailed plans.

The Economic Community of West African States has said it has 3000 troops on standby for an intervention in the north.

Politicians from northern Mali called on Thursday for urgent Western military intervention to remove the Islamists.

"There must be an urgent intervention of Western forces," Elhadj Baba Haidara, the head of a group representing elected officials in the north, told journalists in Paris, warning that delays were giving the Islamists time to consolidate their hold on the region.

"They have ways of indoctrinating the population, with fear, with conviction, with force or with money," said Haidara, the elected deputy for Timbuktu.

But plans for an intervention remain divisive in Mali, which is deeply fractured since the coup.

Some 2000 people took to the streets in the Malian capital Bamako on Thursday to protest plans for a foreign intervention.

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Bloomberg to spend millions on candidates

MAYOR Michael Bloomberg is reaching into his very, very deep pockets to spend millions in the election home stretch on candidates - Republican and Democrat, alike - he feels will do the US good.

Bloomberg, whose personal wealth is estimated at $US25 billion ($A24 billion), said he will pony up at least $US10 million on candidates in tight election races and to promote his views in referendums on three subjects he holds dear: stricter gun control laws, same-sex marriage and improved education.

"Over the next three weeks, the mayor will be making an eight figure independent spending campaign that will support moderates on both sides of the aisle as well as independents who have shown a willingness to work in a bi-partisan fashion," said the statement on his website.

The New York City mayor said it was important for Americans to elect officials in Washington, in his state's capital, Albany, and around the country "who are willing to work across party lines to achieve real results".

Bloomberg, 70, now a political independent, was a Democrat before running for mayor as a Republican in 2001. He left the Republican party in 2007 and was re-elected for his third term as an independent.

Bloomberg founded the financial news agency that bears his name and is the 10th-richest person in the United States. He is scheduled to leave office next year.

The mayor does not shy from controversial moves, such as his recent decision to fight obesity by limiting the size of individual soft drink portions sold in restaurants.

And the man does not mince his words. He has been highly critical of the tone of the current US presidential campaign.

On Wednesday he described as "gibberish" President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney's responses, at their second debate earlier this week, to a question on banning assault weapons.

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Australia wins bid for UN seat

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UK starts secret agent apprenticeships

HOW'S this for a job title - secret agent's apprentice?

The British government is recruiting teenage apprentice spies and codebreakers without university degrees in a bid to deepen the talent pool of its intelligence services for the era of cyberterorrism and cyberwarfare.

Foreign Secretary William Hague announced the program on Thursday in a speech at Bletchley Park, Britain's World War II code-breaking headquarters.

"Young people are the key to our country's future success, just as they were during the war," Hague said.

"It will be the young innovators of this generation who will help keep our country safe in years to come against threats which are every bit as serious as some of those confronted in the Second World War."

The Foreign Office said the apprenticeship program aims to find up to 100 new recruits for GCHQ - Britain's electronic surveillance agency - and the MI5 and MI6 and intelligence services. The idea is to expand recruitment of spies beyond the traditional method of a discreet "tap on the shoulder" at university.

The program will be open to bright 18-year-olds with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and even computer gaming. They will undergo a two-year course of university classes, technical training and work placements before starting full-time jobs.

High-school students will also be invited to take part in a "national cipher challenge" competition intended to inspire pupils to consider careers in mathematics and cybersecurity.

The Foreign Office said the goal was to "harness the expertise of its young people, who have grown up with a world of social media, global connectivity and interactive gaming, to make sure we can tackle the threats and challenges of the 21st century."

Hague also said the government was donating STG480,000 ($A751,760) toward restoration of Bletchley Park, a complex of buildings and wooden huts northwest of London where hundreds of mathematicians, cryptologists, crossword puzzle experts and computer pioneers worked to crack Nazi Germany's secret codes. Historians say their work shortened World War II by as much as two years.

Bletchley Park's guardians are fundraising to restore the site and turn it into a museum.

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