News Headlines - 11 February 2014

▽BBC News - China and Taiwan in first government talks

China and Taiwan have held their first high-level talks since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
Wang Yu-chi and Zhang Zhijun, the top cross-strait officials from each side, attended the four-day talks in Nanjing.
No official agenda was released for the talks, which are widely seen as a confidence-building exercise.

▽Japanese Composer Says His Hearing Loss Is Partly Faked - NYTimes.com

Making his first public statement since admitting last week that a ghostwriter had written his best-known compositions, the man once hailed as Japan’s deaf musical genius said Wednesday that he had also at least partly faked his own hearing loss.

▽Getty Images: David Cameron Visits Flood Victims In The South West

British Prime Minister David Cameron (c) looks at a map showing the extent of the flooding on the Somerset Levels as he attends a meeting of Gold Command at Taunton Command Centre in Taunton on February 11, 2014 in Somerset, England.

▽Turin Shroud may date from time of Jesus - Telegraph

An earthquake in Jerusalem in AD 33 may have caused an atomic reaction which created the Turin Shroud and skewed radiocarbon dating results, scientists believe

▽Police break transatlantic network of US and Italian crime families | theguardian.com

Police in Italy and the US have carried out a series of arrests in a joint operation aimed at smashing a new trafficking route for drugs and weapons that officials said had brought together the Gambino crime family of New York and the Calabrian mafia, or 'Ndrangheta.
Raffaele Grassi, an Italian police spokesman, said that 24 people had been arrested in the raids, with two more still being sought. Seventeen of them had been detained in Italy, he said, and seven in New York by the FBI.