WORLD
TORONTO — Doctors say Toronto Mayor Rob Ford will undergo 40 days of chemotherapy to treat a rare and difficult-to-beat cancer that forced him to drop his bid for re-election.
Dr. Zane Cohen, a colorectal surgeon at Mount Sinai hospital, said Wednesday Ford has a malignant liposarcoma. Ford has been hospitalized for a week with a tumor in his abdomen and the news of the cancer comes just days after Ford's dramatic announcement that he was pulling out of a re-election campaign.
Cohen said the cancer is spreading and that they have found “a small nodule in the buttock” near the left hip. He said the mayor will be treated with fairly intensive chemotherapeutic agents within the next two days.
“The plan will be, initially, chemotherapy,” Cohen said. “We think it's fairly an aggressive tumor.”
SYDNEY — Police said they thwarted a plot to carry out beheadings in Australia by supporters of the radical Islamic State group by detaining 15 people and raiding more than a dozen properties across Sydney today.The raids involving 800 federal and state police officers — the largest in the country's history — came in response to intelligence that an Islamic State group leader in the Middle East was calling on Australian supporters to kill, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.Abbott was asked about reports that the detainees were planning to behead a random person in Sydney.“That's the intelligence we received,” he told reporters. “The exhortations — quite direct exhortations — were coming from an Australian who is apparently quite senior in ISIL to networks of support back in Australia to conduct demonstration killings here in this country.”ISIL refers to the al-Qaida splinter group leading Sunni militants in Iraq, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which now calls itself simply Islamic State.“This is not just suspicion, this is intent and that's why the police and security agencies decided to act in the way they have,” Abbott said.
EDINBURGH, Scotland — The fate of the United Kingdom was at stake today as Scotland began voting in a referendum on becoming an independent state, deciding whether to unravel a marriage that helped build an empire but has increasingly been felt by many Scots as stifling and one-sided.The question on the ballot paper is simplicity itself: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” Yet it has divided Scots during months of campaigning — and today the future of the 307-year old union with England hangs in the balance.More than 2,600 polling places opened today. Turnout is expected to be high, with more than 4.2 million people registered to vote — 97 percent of those eligible.Pro-independence forces got a last-minute boost from tennis star Andy Murray, who abandoned neutrality and signaled his support of the Yes campaign in a tweet to his 2.7 million followers early today.By The Associated Press
