Pabaon Sports

Six women found dead at a Cleveland, Ohio, home appeared to have been strangled, and their decomposing bodies could have been lying there for “weeks, if not months or years,” a coroner told CNN on Saturday.

Police discovered the bodies at the home of Anthony Sowell, a 50-year-old convicted rapist, after they tried to serve an arrest and search warrant for him related to a sexual assault investigation.

On Thursday, detectives from the department’s sex-crimes unit and members of its SWAT team went to Sowell’s home to execute the warrant and to arrest the suspect, but he was nowhere to be found, Cleveland Police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho said.

Five female victims were found inside the home, and another female body was discovered outside the home, said Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller III.

Miller’s office had yet to identify the victims, who all died of “homicidal violence,” he said.

“They were mostly strangled, it appears,” he said.

Stacho said a tipster told officers of Sowell’s whereabouts and police arrested him Saturday afternoon as he walked on a street near the 4th District Police Headquarters.

About a month ago, a woman accused Sowell of rape and felonious assault, Stacho said Friday.

“Once we were able to get the cooperation of the victim, we secured an arrest warrant for Mr. Sowell and subsequently a search warrant for his premises,” Stacho said.

Officers serving the warrants Thursday discovered two badly decomposed bodies on the third floor of the house, Stacho said. A subsequent search revealed what appeared to be a freshly dug grave under the stairs in the basement, he said.

On Friday, investigators returned to the house, dug up the grave and found a third body, he said.

A further search of the house and property found two more bodies in a crawl space, and a sixth body was found in a shallow grave outside the home, Stacho said.

Read local coverage on CNN affiliate WJW

Five different burial methods were used on the victims, and the bodies were in varying states of decomposition, Miller said, making it difficult to determine the ages of the victims. He added that the states of the bodies made it hard to tell how long they had lain in the makeshift graves.

“It’s really very difficult to tell,” Miller said. “It’s been some time, I would say probably at least weeks, if not months or years.”

Stacho said Sowell makes his living as a “scrapper.”

“He walks around and picks up scrap metal and takes it to junkyards to make a few pennies.”

Sowell was convicted for a 1989 rape for which he was imprisoned from 1990 to 2005, Stacho said.

Chinese officials say two pandas destined for an Australian zoo will be transported before the end of the year, and the two sides are actively making necessary preparations.

Zhang Shanning, an official from the State Forestry Administration, denied previous reports that the pandas, Wang Wang and Funi, had been due to begin their quarantine period in Adelaide on Oct. 17, but that this had been delayed.

“Construction of the giant panda house in Adelaide Zoo was just finished in September, and our experts who inspected it just returned from Australia on Oct. 28. There is no delay. This is just normal,” said Zhang.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Friday, “During talks with Australian Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Sydney this morning, Vice Premier Li Keqiang promised to transport the two pandas within this year.”

Wangwang and Funi are still in the Wolong-based China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda in southwest China’s Sichuan Province,

The administration is sending the pair to Adelaide as part of a10-year co-study as a goodwill gesture promised by President Hu Jintao during a visit to Australia in September 2007.

Wangwang and Funi had been in isolation quarantine since Sept. 21, said Zhang.

After the May 12 earthquake last year, Wangwang and Funi were taken to Ya’an Panda Breeding Base from the Wolong center, which was seriously damaged.

Training of Australian panda handlers and vets was complete and if necessary, the zoo would send more staff to China for further instruction, Zhang said.

The Adelaide Zoo had experts in bamboo cultivation, panda breeding, transportation and zoo management prepared for the pandas’ arrival, he said.

The male panda, Wangwang, born on Aug. 31, 2005, weighed 119 kilograms, and the female, Funi, born on Aug. 23, 2006, weighed 90kilograms, said Zhang.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) held a disarmament seminar on Thursday on the occasion of “U.N. Disarmament Week (Oct. 24-30).”

The meeting was attended by researchers and scientists from the International Affairs Institute and the Disarmament and Peace Institute of the DPRK.

They discussed a series of issues including how to improve the function and role of the U.N. and the Geneva disarmament conference, and the efficiency and limitations of international treaties and agreements on disarmament.

They believed that the world’s biggest nuclear weapons states should take the lead in materializing nuclear disarmament.

They underlined the need to make the “hostile forces roll back their policies of antagonizing the DPRK” as well as pressurize the U.S. forces to pull back from South Korea and its vicinity, and stop all forms of war exercises there.

It was also important to hold in check U.S. moves for building a missile shield as it might trigger a new arms race, they added.

“I think whoever is going to send more troops to Afghanistan will put up some conditions,” said Gade, whose country has 690 soldiers in Afghanistan.

“They need to see the new Afghan president and say: ‘If we send more troops to your country, you have to deal with this, this and this.’ We have to make sure the new government in Afghanistan are committed to their job before we send any more troops to Afghanistan.”

Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung of Germany said he also doesn’t expect his country to increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan when the soldiers’ mandate from the German parliament comes up for renewal in December. The existing mandate allows the deployment of a maximum 4,500 soldiers, and Germany currently has just over 4,200 troops in Afghanistan.

Other officials, however, expressed doubts about sending more forces amid widespread concerns of corruption tainting Afghanistan’s government and its president, Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan will hold a runoff of its presidential election on Nov. 7 to settle allegations of fraud that marred an August balloting between Karzai and his chief rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

Dutch Defense Minister Eimert Van Middelkoop said his country, with 2,160 troops in Afghanistan, is awaiting the final election results “because the legitimacy of the Afghan government is key,” as well as a decision by the Obama administration.

Danish Defense Minister Soeren Gade said allies won’t increase troop levels until they’re assured the new government in Kabul is committed to the NATO goals.

“I have registered broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach, but without discussing resource implications of these recommendations,” Rasmussen said.

The top U.N. official in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, also signaled that more NATO troops would soon be on the move. “I do believe that additional international troops will be needed in the future,” he said.

Gates spoke before heading into a lunch meeting with officials from nations that have sent troops to Afghanistan. McChrystal also was at the meeting to brief the officials on his on-the-ground assessment of the war zone.

An estimated 104,000 U.S. and NATO troops will be in Afghanistan by the end of the year — two-thirds of which are American.

He said President Barack Obama would consider specific plans for moving forward over the next two to three weeks.

Speaking minutes earlier, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the defense ministers did not discuss precisely how many more troops might be sent. The U.S. and NATO military commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has asked Obama for as many as 80,000 additional American troops to continue the current mission of countering the escalating Taliban insurgency and protecting the local population.

Rasmussen said McChrystal’s request was being reviewed by NATO leaders, many of whom are reluctant to endorse large troop increases before Obama decides on a strategy.

“There were a number of allies who indicated they were thinking about, or were moving toward, increasing either their military or their civilian contributions, or both,” Gates said at a news conference. “And I found that very heartening.”

He praised NATO nations for already doubling the number of troops they have sent to Afghanistan over the last 15 months. “People really have been stepping up to this,” Gates said.

Gates also sought to assure allies that the United States also will remain in the fight, despite the Obama administration’s ongoing indecision over a war strategy.

“We’re not pulling out,” He said. “I think that any reduction is very unlikely.”

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that NATO allies are moving toward sending more troops and civilian aid to Afghanistan.

Gates said he was “heartened” by allies’ commitment to the 8-year-old war even as the Obama administration mulls whether to order tens of thousands more U.S. troops to the fight.

The Pentagon chief cited a long-term commitment by NATO partners to remain in Afghanistan until the conflict is successfully resolved.

At a meeting of 28 NATO defense ministers in Bratislava, Gates said he did not seek specific promises of military assistance, and none was given. He described, however, “a renewed determination to see this through.”

A different market

Kingfisher said B&Q’s fast expansion put a strain on management and quality control.

Ian Cheshire, the chief executive of Kingfisher, said the business had become too reliant on apartment design and installations and was not developing other services or product lines.

Cheshire, who led B&Q through one of its greatest periods of growth in the 1990s, said that the dramatic slowdown in the housing market hit sales hard as well.

According to the China Building Decoration Association’s (CBDA) latest statistics, sales in the home improvement and decoration market dropped 30 percent from 2007 to 2008.

Cheshire also said that the reliance on local suppliers to provide staff led to a drop in the quality of customer service and stocking.