Hostage crisis involving sacked policeman unfolds in Manila (VIDEO)

A Filipino angry at being fired from the police force was holding hostage 15 Hong Kong tourists and their driver on a bus in downtown Manila on Monday.

The gunman, identified as Rolando Mendoza and armed with an automatic rifle, had said, via a handwritten note, that a "big deal" would happen after 3 p.m. (3 a.m. EDT), but the deadline passed without incident. A ninth hostage, a Filipino, has since been released, and negotiations continued as the stand-off stretched to almost eight hours and rain began to fall. [Read the full article here]

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Julian Assange: I was smeared, women stick by molestation charges

The high profile whistleblower behind the controversial website WikiLeaks has spoken out against a group of women who claimed they were raped by him, the Wall Street Journal reports.

It is clearly a smear campaign," Julian Assange told Al-Jazeera yesterday. "The only question is, who was involved?"

One of the two women claim that consensual sex with the internet icon turned abusive, although it was never rape. "The accusations against Assange are not staged by either the Pentagon nor anyone else," the accuser told a Swedish newspaper. "The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl are with a man with a disturbed view of women and problems accepting a no.

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Robber calls Wendy's to complain about how little he was able to steal

As they say: If you don't like what you got, complain. This is perhaps no more true in a case where a robber - who held up an Atlanta Wendy's at gunpoint - was so unhappy with the loot he managed to grab that he called the burger-joint twice to complain.

"Next time," he said in one of the phone calls, "it better be more like $586". According to an Atlanta-based news website:

About 11:15 p.m., a man wearing a ski mask and holding a gun walked up to the drive-through window at the Wendy's at 1940 Piedmont Road, police said. He told an employee to put the cash drawer on the counter.

After grabbing the drawer and running away, the robber discarded the drawer in the bushes at the nearby InTown Suites. Police dusted the drawer for fingerprints. However, the robber was seen wearing yellow gloves at Wendy's.

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