Pat McQuaid, the president of world cycling's governing body the UCI, has hit back at claims by disgraced rider Lance Armstrong that the sport cannot change its doping image while the Irishman remains in charge.

Armstrong claimed McQuaid - currently facing a re-election challenge from British Cycling's Brian Cookson - must go if the sport is to clean up.

"Things just cannot change as long as McQuaid stays in power," Armstrong said. "The UCI refuses to establish a truth and reconciliation commission because the testimony that everyone would want to hear would bring McQuaid, [his predecessor] Hein Verbruggen and the whole institution down."

McQuaid yesterday released a statement of his own, which read: "It is very sad that Lance Armstrong has decided to make this statement on the eve of the Tour de France. However, I can tell him categorically that he is wrong. His comments do absolutely nothing to help cycling. Armstrong's views and opinions are shaped by his own behaviour and time in the peloton. Cycling has now moved on."

State Railway of Thailand governor Prapas Jongsanguan said the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai skidded off the tracks in Phrae province and seven of the 10 carriages flipped on to their sides.

Railway authorities believe the accident was caused by old tracks due for repair.

Mr Prapas said one passenger was seriously injured and the rest had minor injuries and were given free transport to their destinations.

A man who pleaded guilty in January of this year to raping his niece has been allowed to change his plea after the complainant admitted she had been lying.

The girl, who is now aged 18, told gardaí that her mother made her file a complaint to gardaí and social services when she was about ten years old claiming her uncle had abused her.

The 41-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had maintained his innocence until the trial but pleaded guilty on the day because he said he was "completely terrified" of going to prison. He believed a guilty plea offered the best chance of avoiding a jail sentence.

He had pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to rape and serious sexual assault, including penetrating the girl's anus with his penis, at a house in Galway city on a date between September 1, 2004 and February 28, 2005.

A sign posted outside a south suburban church is generating a powerful debate over race in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict.

The marquee outside the First Baptist Church of University Park earlier this week read: "It Is Safe To Kill Black People In Amerikkka."

On Saturday, a jury of six women in Florida acquitted Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Several comments on the church's Facebook page took issue with the reference to the Ku Klux Klan in the word Amerikkka, with many saying the church's sign is hateful and divisive and implies that all white Americans are racist.

At least 20 children have died and many others are sick after eating a free school lunch which was tainted by a heavy dose of insecticide, Indian officials said.

It was not immediately clear how chemicals ended up in the food in the school in the eastern state of Bihar, though one official said the food may not have been properly washed before it was cooked.

The children, aged between eight and 11, fell ill soon after eating their school lunch in Masrakh, a village 50 miles north of the state capital of Patna.

School authorities immediately stopped serving the meal of rice, lentils, soya and potatoes as the children started vomiting. The lunch, part of a popular country-wide campaign to give at least one hot meal to children from poor families, was cooked in the school kitchen.

The children were quickly rushed to a local hospital and later to Patna for treatment, said state official Abhijit Sinha. In addition to the 20 children who died, another 27 children as well as the school cook were admitted to hospital, he said. Ten of them were in a serious condition.

A nun, 28, was abducted and raped for a week. One of her cousins is among the attackers. For the archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneshwar, "The perpetrators must be brought to justice [. . .]. What happened is a disgrace".
Bhubaneshwar - A 28-year-old nun was kidnapped and raped for a week by a group of men in Bamunigam, Kandhamal District (Orissa). She was held between 5 and 11 July, but the case was made public only today. "The perpetrators must be brought to justice without delay and the law must take its course. What happened is a disgrace," said Mgr John Barwa SVD, archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneshwar, who condemned the attack.

The nun, a Kandhamal native, lives in Chennai (Tamil Nadu), where she is studying in college. According to her testimony to police, she received a phone call from a woman about two weeks ago, who reported that her mother was very sick.

On 5 July, she took a train to Bamunigam, where two cousins ​​and some friends were waiting to take her home. However, rather than take her to the village of Minapanka, the men led her to a still unidentified place. Here the sister was gang raped for a week.

Toronto police Chief Bill Blair says an officer has been disciplined for posing as a stranded passenger on a waterlogged commuter train during major flooding last week.

Blair told radio station Newstalk 1010 the officer was "shameful" to pretend he was one of the 1,400 riders on the GO train when it became trapped by flood waters during the evening rush hour.

CBC said the officer was Const. Nickolas Dorazio. The network said he was working to help rescue the passengers, but told their TV crew he was stuck on the stranded train and even draped an orange towel around his shoulders for effect.

Blair says the force has disciplined the officer for his "stupid behaviour" that Monday night.

The police chief says the officer's conduct was an "eyebrow raiser" that undermined public confidence in the force.

Police and firefighters used small inflatable boats to ferry the trapped passengers a short distance to higher ground, with the evacuation taking some seven hours.

San Francisco police are continuing to investigate a case involving numerous poisonous meatballs found on city streets recently.

Police warned dog owners in the city's Twin Peaks and Diamond Heights neighborhoods about the meatballs last week, and now say hundreds have been recovered.

The meatballs, which investigators said contained rodent poison, had been deliberately placed in spots where dogs defecate in the area of Crestline, Burnett and Parkridge drives, according to police.

One dog gobbled up a meatball last Wednesday evening while being walked by its owner, then became sick and had to be taken to a veterinarian, police said.

Anyone who sees anything resembling the meatballs should call the Police Department's non-emergency number at (415) 553-0123. Anyone who witnesses suspicious activity is asked to call 911.

Police also advised residents in those neighborhoods who have been involved in disputes over pets to call the Park Station investigations team at (415) 242-3000 and ask to speak with Lt. Pengel or Inspector Nannery.

A juror in the George Zimmerman trial said Monday that the actions of the neighborhood watch volunteer and Trayvon Martin both led to the teenager's fatal shooting last year, but that Zimmerman didn't actually break the law.

She also revealed that during initial deliberations, half of the jurors wanted to convict Zimmerman.

The woman known as Juror B37 told CNN's Anderson Cooper that Zimmerman made some poor decisions leading up to the shooting, but that Martin wasn't innocent either.

"I think both were responsible for the situation they had gotten themselves into," said the juror, who is planning to write a book about the trial. "I think they both could have walked away."

Recently published historical research says hungry aboriginal children and adults were once used as unwitting subjects in nutritional experiments by Canadian government bureaucrats.

"This was the hardest thing I've ever written," said Ian Mosby, who has revealed new details about one of the least-known but perhaps most disturbing aspects of government policy toward aboriginals immediately after the Second World War.

Mosby - whose work at the University of Guelph focuses on the history of food in Canada - was researching the development of health policy when he ran across something strange.

"I started to find vague references to studies conducted on 'Indians' that piqued my interest and seemed potentially problematic, to say the least," he said. "I went on a search to find out what was going on."

Government documents eventually revealed a long-standing, government-run experiment that came to span the entire country and involved at least 1,300 aboriginals, most of them children.

It began with a 1942 visit by government researchers to a number of remote reserve communities in northern Manitoba, including places such as The Pas and Norway House.

They found people who were hungry, beggared by a combination of the collapsing fur trade and declining government support. They also found a demoralized population marked by, in the words of the researchers, "shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia."

The researchers suggested those problems - "so long regarded as inherent or hereditary traits in the Indian race" - were in fact the results of malnutrition.