Oscar Pistorius granted bail in Reeva Steenkamp case

South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who faces murder charges over the fatal shooting of his girlfriend, has been granted bail after a four-day hearing.

Magistrate Desmond Nair said the state had not made a case that he would flee, or that he had a violent character.

The Paralympic champion denies murder, saying he shot Reeva Steenkamp thinking she was an intruder at his home.

The next hearing in the case has been set for 4 June. Bail was set at 1m rand (£74,000; $113,000).

He was ordered to hand over his passport, avoid his home in Pretoria and report to a police station between 07:00 and 13:00 every Monday and Friday.

Mr Nair took almost two hours to deliver his judgement.He criticised the testimony of Detective Hilton Botha for not following up important leads and changing his evidence.

But the magistrate also said he had difficulty understanding why Mr Pistorius had opened fire in the way he did.

However, he said Mr Pistorius had "reached out to meet the state's case" and had given a full version of events at an early stage.

"I come to the conclusion that the accused has made a case to be released on bail," he said.

Mr Pistorius's family and supporters in the court gasped and cheered as the magistrate announced his decision.

His uncle, Arnold Pistorius, said outside court: "We are relieved by the fact that Oscar got bail today, but at the same time, we are in mourning for Reeva Steenkamp and her family."

Conflicting accounts

The hearing began on Tuesday and both prosecution and defence laid out their cases.

Both sides agree that Mr Pistorius shot through the bathroom door four times, hitting and killing Ms Steenkamp.

But prosecutors allege the shooting happened after the couple had an argument at Mr Pistorius's home in the early hours of 14 February.Det Botha told the court that witnesses had heard shouting, screaming and gunfire from about 600m (2,000ft) away.

But later he changed his evidence to suggest the witnesses were much closer.

And on Thursday it emerged that Det Botha faces allegations of attempted murder, and he was removed from the case.

Mr Pistorius says he woke in the middle of the night, and thought there was an intruder in the bathroom.

The prosecutors sought to portray Mr Pistorius as man with a history of violence who was likely to flee the country.

But the defence argued it would be impossible for Mr Pistorius to flee because his prosthetic legs would be noticed wherever he went.

Ms Steenkamp, 29, was a model and law graduate with a burgeoning television career.

Oscar Pistorius, 26, won gold medals at the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens, in Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012.

In London he made history by becoming the first double-amputee to run in the Olympics, making the semi-final of the 400m.

Oscar Pistorius denies Reeva Steenkamp South Africa murder

South African Olympic and Paralympic star Oscar Pistorius has strongly rejected a charge that he murdered his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Ms Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model, was shot dead at Mr Pistorius's home near Pretoria on Thursday.

Appearing in court in Pretoria, Mr Pistorius wept as prosecutors vowed to pursue a charge of premeditated murder.

An application for bail was postponed until next Tuesday and the athlete will remain in police custody.

Dubbed "blade runner", he made history last summer by becoming the first double-amputee track athlete to run in an Olympic Games.

"The alleged murder is disputed in the strongest terms", said a statement released by Mr Pistorius's family and management company "Our thoughts and prayers today should be for Reeva and her family - regardless of the circumstances of this terrible, terrible tragedy," it said.

They were the first words released on behalf of the 26-year-old athlete since Ms Steenkamp was found fatally wounded at his home in the gated Silver Lakes development outside the South African capital.

'Traumatised'

However, he was seen hours earlier, sobbing during his appearance at Pretoria Magistrates Court.

Dozens of reporters witnessed the hearing, where chief magistrate Desmond Nair was presiding.

The BBC's Andrew Harding, who was there, said the defendant cut a lonely figure, holding his head forward and breathing heavily through tears.

Prosecutor Gerrie Nel argued for a "premeditated murder" charge. Mr Pistorius slumped forward at the mention of the words.Media access was discussed at the 40-minute session and the magistrate ruled that there should be no live recording of the bail hearings.

Mr Pistorius's team had argued against such coverage and cited his "extremely traumatised state of mind".

Both prosecution and defence agreed Mr Pistorius could remain in custody at a police station and not in prison.

Members of Mr Pistorius's family, including sister Aimee, brother Carl and father Henke, were in the courtroom.

Relatives reached forward to touch Mr Pistorius's shoulder as he stood and left the courtroom at the end of proceedings.

Mr Pistorius had earlier arrived at court in the back of a police vehicle, hiding his face with a jacket and notebook.

Forensic scientists are expected to continue examining the house in the Silver Lakes area on the outskirts of South Africa's administrative capital where Ms Steenkamp, 29, died.

Correspondents say the athlete's arrest has stunned the country where he is considered a national hero.

He is known as "blade runner" because of the carbon fibre prosthetic blades he races in. He was born without a fibula in both legs and had his legs amputated below the knee before his first birthday.

Police were called to his home in the early hours of Thursday morning.

They found paramedics treating a 29-year-old woman with four gunshot wounds to the head and upper body. She died at the scene, and officers recovered a 9mm pistol.

A post-mortem examination is being carried out on Friday but the results will not be made public, police said.

Mr Pistorius and Ms Steenkamp had reportedly been dating since November.

Mr Pistorius dominated in his category at successive Paralympic Games, but in 2008 he won a legal battle over his blades - which critics said gave him an unfair advantage - with the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) for the right to compete in able-bodied competitions.

He reached the 400m semi-finals in the London 2012 Olympics. At the Paralympics he won silver in the T44 200m, gold in the 4x100 relay and gold in the T44 400m, setting a Paralympic record.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of crime in the world and many residents keep weapons to protect themselves against intruders.

But gun ownership is strictly regulated and it is not easy to obtain a licence.after the court hearing.

Pope's resignation a new angle to a tough news beat

For Rome's Vaticanisti -- the name for the Rome-based press corps that follows the pope -- covering the closed world of the Holy See is like attending to a nuclear missile silo; it's largely routine until the balloon goes up.

Opaque, hierarchical and arcane, the Vatican is a tough beat even for seasoned reporters. It involves paying punctilious attention to papal routine -- never missing the often dreary papal audiences on a Wednesday and the uneventful address from the Vatican on Sunday.

Even then, getting blind-sided by stark Vatican announcements that drop without warning is a risk that comes with the round. While many might see shades of Dan Brown in the Vatican's media style, some of it can be attributed to the tradition of humility that comes with holding the Chair of St. Peter.Big on understatement, low on fanfare, first news of Pope Benedict XVI's resignation came in a low key speech read by the pope in Latin at a routine consistory, a type of ecclesiastical council meeting.

"It's important, but it's not one of those events that you underline over and over again in your agenda," French Vatican reporter Charles De Pechpeyrou told the HuffPost Italy. "If you're covering it, you're doing so just as a precautionary measure, to report what happened."Italy's ANSA news agency, whose correspondent Giovanna Chirri understood the Latin, was first to break the news. Other correspondents at the consistory struggled to make sense of the speech.

"At a certain point, for example, I caught the word 'incapability' in the pope's speech," De Pechpeyrou told the HuffPo . "I turned around and spoke with my Mexican colleague. We noticed that Pope Benedict had a sad look on his face, not his usual look. Something wasn't right. Then, when cardinal Sodano mentioned the 'sadness,' we finally understood. Then Father Lombardi confirmed his resignation over the phone."

For the Rome press corps -- laboring under the cycle of constantly falling governments, Mafia stories, and offbeat it-could-only-happen-in-Italy stories -- regime change at the Vatican (arguably one of the biggest news stories in the world) provides a raison d'etre to a sometimes sleepy beat.

Now, Pope Benedict's resignation -- the first in 600 years -- has rewritten the rule book; not just for the Vatican, which now goes through a complex and unprecedented interregnum, but also for the Vatican press corps.

Normally, Vatican-watching requires close attention to the pope's health - a source of low-burning anxiety for the press corps who are charged with the difficult task of taking the pulse of a man who, at best, is often seen at a distance of hundreds of meters and, at worst, whose health is a closely guarded secret.

It was a running joke among Vaticanisti that the pope is always in robust health until he is dead.

Certainly for the small, undermanned U.S. wire agency that I worked for in Rome during the 1990s, keeping on top of Pope John Paul II's health was a full-time job.

"I don't like the sound of that cough,'' my then-bureau chief, Charles Ridley, once quipped during the weekly papal audience on Italy's national Catholic television station, Telepace.

It was the kind of remark that tempted fate.

Ridley may have been a press corps veteran of five papal deaths dating back to Pius XII in 1958, but he was not sure he could survive another one.

"A papal death is an unbelievable sweat,'' he recalled at the time. "Six weeks solid, sleeping in the office and filing at all hours. I wouldn't want to go through that again at my age.''

When I asked him how he had felt when John Paul I, after being chosen to succeed Paul VI in August 1978, died 33 days later, he shot me a horrified look, as if I had asked how he had felt after a family tragedy.

"How do you think I felt?'' he shot back. "It was absolutely heartbreaking!''No cough went unremarked, no tremor unnoticed. The health of the Pope took on a life outside its subject and, in the absence of any hard information from the Vatican, was often decided on journalistic consensus.

Whether the Pope "spoke in a clear voice'' or looked "tired" depended entirely on which angle you were coming from -- well for a man who had Parkinson's disease but not very well for a man who used to go skiing on his holidays.

In journalistic terms, a papal death is rolling thunder.

It's not just the death; it's the funeral, the curia, the conclave, electing cardinals, Vatican insiders, pope-makers and pope-breakers, the coronation. Every country in the world with a sizeable Catholic population holds out the hope that its cardinal will get a chance at the top slot. For a wire service, they must all be served.

Adding to the agony is the simple fact that the exact second of any natural death is always an unknown. As John Paul II's health began to falter, networks and agencies, as a measure of their anxiety, had already begun to cut deals with landlords to rent apartments adjacent to the Vatican to get the best possible shots.

While our agency didn't have the firepower of other wire services or networks, it did have history on its side. With a complete set of files on three papal deaths, it was a formidable armory containing detailed background stories -- parts of which could be used again in some form or another -- on the death, the funeral, the conclave, the election, the coronation.

Running through the yellowing subsidiary wire stories on papal deaths of yesteryear was like opening a time capsule. They included such gems as an embalming that had gone wrong, fouling the air for the mourners lined up to see the pope lying in state. Another story detailed how Italians had outraged foreign dignitaries by clapping the coffin at the funeral (a wholly normal custom at Italian funerals).

Like a nuclear missile silo, my agency's Vatican file had its own doomsday file - a hardbound manila folder on which a typewritten sticky label had emblazoned in telex font capitals: WHAT TO DO IN CASE THE POPE DIES. While many of the instructions dated back to 1961 and could be safely ignored, it was still an interesting study in panic.

The first step was to put a call through to the London bureau, the instructions read: "It should take you no longer than three minutes for the operator to get you a line," it hectored.

The next step was to source the news to the Italian wire agency ANSA or Vatican Radio releasing a bulletin that read: VATICAN CITY -- ANSA REPORTING POPE DEAD at a lower wire speed priority. The pope could actually be dead for hours, and the world fully informed of the fact, before the news came officially from the Vatican press office.

Only then could the bulletin: VATICAN CITY -- OFFICIAL POPE DEAD be released at "flash'' priority -- the highest wire speed reserved for papal deaths, presidential assassinations and a few other world beating news stories.

After the "flash" went out, as Ridley recalled at the time, it was a total circus and anyone's race.

"It was hugely and highly secretive, and there were rumors flying around for weeks,'' he told me. "The whole thing was fairly agonizing.''

The secretive conclave, in which electing cardinals are "locked in'' the Vatican until a decision on the next pope is made, is tension personified. The only indication as to whether a decision is made comes from the burning of the ballots at the end of each day. According to Vatican lore, the smoke is black (due to the fact that the ballots were mixed with damp hay) when a decision is still to be reached and white when a new pope has been decided.

In the case of John XXIII, the smoke went from black to white to a sort of grey color and back to white again, Ridley recalled.

"The whole thing was sort of medieval,'' Ridley told me at the time. These days chemicals, rather than hay, are mixed with the ballots to prevent the kind of confusion that occurred with John XXIII.

The most nerve-racking part of the enterprise, however, was backgrounding the more than 100 electing cardinals, all of whom theoretically had a chance at the top job.

"And they always chose someone you'd never heard of. I remember John XXIII was just the papal nuncio in Paris -- no one considered him for a moment," Ridley told me. "And all the time, if the other (agencies) were ahead by five minutes, you were lost.

Anonymous hacker group: Two jailed for cyber attacks

Two men who carried out cyber attacks for the Anonymous hacking group have been jailed.

Christopher Weatherhead, 22, of Northampton, and Ashley Rhodes, 28, of Camberwell, London, were jailed for 18 months and seven months respectively.

The two men carried out distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks which paralyse computer systems by flooding them with online requests.

The ones they attacked included payment site PayPal, costing it £3.5m.

Co-defendant Peter Gibson, of Hartlepool, was given a six-month sentence, suspended for two years.

Another defendant, Jake Birchall, 18, from Chester, will be sentenced on 1 February.

'You're being stung'

The sentences were handed down at Southwark Crown Court and are thought to be the first convictions for DDoS in the UK.

Weatherhead and Rhodes were found guilty of conspiring to impair the operation of computers between 1 August 2010 and 22 January 2011.

Gibson was deemed to have played a lesser role in the conspiracy and admitted his part, as did Birchall.

The websites targeted by the cyber attacks were chosen by Anonymous, as part of what it called Operation Payback, because the hackers did not agree with their views.Other companies hit by the attacks included Mastercard and Visa.

Southwark Crown Court had previously heard that PayPal was attacked after it decided not to process payments on behalf of the Wau Holland Foundation, an organisation involved in raising funds for the Wikileaks website.

Visitors to the affected websites in this case would be directed to a page displaying the message: "You've tried to bite the Anonymous hand. You angered the hive and now you are being stung."

Handing down his sentences, Judge Peter Testar said: "It is intolerable that when an individual or a group disagrees with a particular entity's activities, they should be free to curtail that activity by means of attacks such as those which took place in this case."

Prosecutor Joel Smith said theirs was a "persistent campaign" designed to "cause damage, financial losses and press exposure".

'Ideological twizzle'

The judge said the DDoS attacks had not been particularly sophisticated.

"What was sophisticated was the lengths taken to protect the identities of those involved," he said.

"The investigators are really to be commended for breaking down the wall of anonymity that was put up in order to prevent the activity of these conspirators being interrupted."

The Ministry of Sound estimated the cost of the attack on its sites as £9,000, while the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's costs were more than £20,000 and the British Phonographic Industry's more than £4,000.

The financial impact on MasterCard and Visa were not revealed to the court, although Weatherhead once boasted online at having caused £1m worth of damage to MasterCard.

Gibson suggested attacking the website of singer Lily Allen, now known by her married name of Lily Cooper, as a possible target to Rhodes at one point. He agreed with the idea but the attack never went ahead.

Judge Testar told the court: "They got themselves into a bit of an ideological twizzle.

"On one hand, they wanted to attack her because she had taken a stand against breach of copyright. But on the other hand, they didn't like the idea of attacking artists."

Snow covers Britain with big freeze

snow in UK

Snow is expected to blanket the UK for the next week, with no end to the freezing conditions in sight.

The forecast of prolonged cold weather is likely to bring further delays and cancellations to travel plans after two days of snow disrupted airports and transport networks.

On Saturday, Heathrow invoked new weather planning operations for the first time and cancelled 20% of flights ahead of snowfall.

In 2010, heavy snow brought chaos to the UK's primary air hub but after a L36m investment in cold weather equipment the airport said it was coping with this week's wintry conditions. It pointed out that a reduction in its capacity was primarily due to low visibility rather than snow clogging up the runways.

Large parts of the UK will experience further snowfall on Sunday, with up to 4cm falling in the north and west, and 6cm in the east Midlands, East Anglia and the south-east, including London.

Up to 10cm could fall in local areas, and 15cm on higher ground, weather experts said.

The Met Office has issued yellow warnings for ice for much of the country and advised people to take extra care as snow turns to ice in the sub-zero conditions.

In the Scottish Highlands, four climbers were swept to their deaths in an avalanche, while in Humberside seven people were taken to hospital after a doubledecker bus collided with two cars and ploughed into a garden, fire and rescue services said.

Travellers at regional airports including Leeds Bradford, Humberside and Newcastle were also frustrated by delays and disruption caused by the wintry weather.

The road and rail networks were also braced for further bad weather. The M48 Severn Bridge was closed in both directions between junctions 1 and 2, and was not expected to reopen until midday on Sunday.

Among rail services, Eurostar warned that all trains will be delayed on Sunday, with a number of services to and from Paris and Brussels cancelled.

Thousands of passengers were stranded at Heathrow for a second day on Saturday after planes were grounded. British Airways cancelled at least 100 flights, leaving people stuck for hours on planes or stranded at the airport.

On Saturday, passengers branded BA's treatment of them as "appalling" and said staff were not keeping them informed as to what was happening. BA and the airport insisted they were doing everything they could in difficult circumstances.

A spokeswoman for Heathrow said that until Sunday airlines had been making their own decisions to cancel flights.

"A lot of what has been happening at Heathrow before today … is related to airlines making their own individual decisions about where their aircraft are placed throughout the world and how they are best going to recover those aircraft as and when the snow falls, and whether they can even get them out of the other airports," she said.

The spokeswoman said it was "a myth" that other airports did not experience disruption due to the snow, adding that Munich, Geneva and Frankfurt were all experiencing significant disruption and that 40% of flights out of Paris were already cancelled on Sunday.

"What Heathrow is experiencing is absolutely in proportion to what other airports affected by snow are experiencing."

The airport said it had invoked its Heathrow demand and capacity balancing group procedure for the first time and cancelled more than 200 flights to help ease congestion within the terminals and give travellers advance notice.

Heathrow said it would normally have aircraft arriving or departing every 45 seconds, but due to the low visibility it had to increase the space between aircraft. "At the moment that spacing is doubled and that's why we are running at a reduced capacity," it said.

The airport said that while it couldn't "clear up the sky" to improve visibility, its snow-clearing operations were running according to plan.

"At 11am we'll do a sweep of the runways. So we close one while we clean the runway, and then we swap them over … so again that is going to reduce capacity."

Southern trains will run an amended timetable on Monday because of forecast snow.

Freezing conditions have also prompted motoring organisations to issue warnings. Darron Burness, the AA's head of special operations, said: "With the snow compacting down and turning icy, we're likely to see treacherous driving conditions throughout the weekend. Any fresh snow on top will just add to the problems."

Sally Webb, a forecaster with MeteoGroup, said: "We expect it to remain cold and there to be snow or sleet for the next week in most areas.

"It will also be icy everywhere, especially with the snow melt, and temperatures are going to be no more than 1C, dropping below zero overnight."

Is this last season for Frank Lampard in Chelsea

The uncertainty surrounding Frank Lampard's future at Chelsea appears to be over after the player's agent said that the midfielder would "in no circumstances" be offered a fresh contract to stay beyond this season.

Steve Kutner's assertion comes after reports emerged following Chelsea's 5-1 FA Cup victory over Southampton on Saturday, during which Lampard scored to become the club's joint-second all-time record scorer with Kerry Dixon on 193 goals, that the Stamford Bridge hierarchy had changed their long-held stance and decided to try to keep the 34-year-old for another year at least, possibly by agreeing a deal that would see the player take a reduction in his L150,000-a-week-salary. But that, according to Kutner, is definitely not the case.

"Chelsea executives told Frank in Japan during the Club World Cup, then again reconfirmed with me after the Everton victory [both in December], that in no circumstances will he be offered a new contract to stay at the club after the end of this season," said Kutner. "Nothing since has changed in any respect. Frank has had to accept that and just wants to carry on playing football for Chelsea so as to finish the season as successfully as possible for the club that he loves."

Kutner's revelation, which comes days after he denied telling the Italian website Cittaceleste.it that Lampard would definitely be leaving Chelsea, will come as a blow to the club's supporters who have made clear their desire to see the midfielder remain in west London.

Lampard has also made no secret of his desire to stay at Chelsea, whom he joined from West Ham for L11m in 2001 and has helped win three Premier League titles and the Champions League. He remains free, however, to speak to other clubs about a summer transfer, with LA Galaxy among those linked with a move for the England international.