Dutch sailor girl Laura Dekker to stay with father

A Dutch court has ruled that 14-year-old Laura Dekker can remain with her father, despite his support for her plan to sail solo round the world.

The court in Utrecht met on Wednesday to consider whether the girl should go into foster care.
Miss Dekker returned from the Dutch Caribbean island of St Maarten on Tuesday. By going there she violated a court order blocking her sailing trip.
Her lawyer has now said that she went there to buy a boat to start her trip.
She appeared in court with her parents, who separated when she was six.
The Dutch child welfare agency had asked for Miss Dekker to be taken into care.
Secret flight
She was discovered on St Maarten after disappearing last week. It is still unclear how she managed to make the journey unaccompanied.
Miss Dekker has been under state supervision since October, when the Utrecht court blocked her bid to become the youngest person to sail the globe solo.
The order remains valid until the end of her school year in July 2010.
A seasoned sailor, Miss Dekker was born on a yacht off the coast of New Zealand during a seven-year world trip. She had her own yacht by the age of six and began sailing solo when she was 10.
While her father, Dick Dekker, supports her attempt at the record, her mother has expressed some concerns.
Miss Dekker had planned to spend about two years aboard her 8m (26ft) boat, Guppy, to break the record set in August by a 17-year-old British boy.

Lithuania hosted secret CIA prisons

The CIA used at least two secret detention centres in Lithuania after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks on the US, a Lithuanian inquiry has found.

The report by a Lithuanian parliamentary committee says that in 2005 and 2006 CIA chartered planes were allowed to land in Lithuania.

It says that no Lithuanian officials were allowed near the aircraft, nor were they told who was on board.

Poland and Romania hosted similar CIA "black sites", media reports say.

In Lithuania, at least eight terror suspects were held at one centre on the outskirts of the capital Vilnius, the investigation found.

It was formerly a riding school and the suspects were reportedly held there between 2004 and 2005.

In August this year, US media reports claimed that Lithuania, Poland and Romania all hosted secret CIA interrogation centres.

But the parliamentary report appears to absolve Lithuania's political leaders of responsibility for any human rights violations that may have been committed by the CIA, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Moscow.

It says even the president was unaware of exactly what the US intelligence service was doing.

Secret flights

The practice of "extraordinary rendition" and the long-suspected network of secret US detention facilities became among the most controversial aspects of the Bush administration's response to the 11 September attacks.

"Extraordinary rendition" is the tactic of capturing militant suspects in one country and transporting them to another without judicial oversight.

The BBC's defence and security correspondent Nick Childs says critics of the Bush administration saw it as a way of avoiding legal constraints and, in some cases, as they put it, "contracting out" torture - although American officials repeatedly denied the allegations.

The issue caused considerable strains between Washington and some of its key allies during President Bush's administration.

Many governments - not least the British - have been under pressure to disclose what they knew, Nick Childs says, and the tactics the Americans did or did not use, and how extensively, remain murky.

US officials have hinted at perhaps dozens of prisoners having been held in secret detention centres. A controversial European Parliament report, however, spoke of hundreds of so-called "rendition" flights.

So far, only one case has actually gone to trial. Recently an Italian court convicted more than 20 American agents in their absence of being involved in the abduction of a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003.

US President Barack Obama announced early on that he was closing the foreign detention centre network.