While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, April 14 edition

ISIS, Boko Haram use rape, sex slavery as tactic of war: United Nations

Extremist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram are increasingly resorting to rape and sexual violence as a tactic of war, according to an annual UN report released Monday.

2014 "was marked by harrowing accounts of rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage being used by extremist groups, including as a tactic of terror", Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in the report.

The review found that sexual attacks in Iraq, Syria and Nigeria were not incidental, but "integrally linked to strategic objectives, ideology and funding of extremist groups".

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Florida Senator Marco Rubio becomes fourth person to announce White House run

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, 43, has confirmed that he will running to be president for the United States, joining an increasingly crowded field of Republicans vying for the White House in 2016.

Mr Rubio, who became senator in 2011, reportedly announced his intentions in a conference call to donors ahead of a planned big bang announcement before supporters later in the day.

The Cuban-American is due to make his speech in front of Freedom Tower in Miami, a deeply symbolic choice given the place used to be where the government processed Cuban refugees fleeing from the regime of Fidel Castro.

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Driving instructor killed in Walt Disney World Speedway 'exotic' car experience

A passenger killed in a crash at a Walt Disney World Speedway race-car attraction has been identified as an instructor who was riding in a Lamborghini that hit a guardrail after the driver lost control, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

The instructor was 36 year-old Gary Terry of Davenport, a senior operations manager at Exotic Driving Experience, the highway patrol said. Terry died at the scene.

The driver, Tavon Watson, 24, of Kissimmee, was taken to a hospital with minor injuries.

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Rare notebook owned by WWII codebreaker Alan Turing sells for US$1million in New York

A long-lost notebook owned by British mathematician and World War II code breaker Alan Turing sold at auction in New York on Monday for US$1 million (S$1.37 million), Bonhams auction house said.

The sale of the recently discovered notebook comes at a time of enormous interest in Turing's life and work generated by Oscar-winning movie The Imitation Game.

The manuscript, which sold for US$1.025 million in two minutes of bidding, dates back to the mid-1940s when Turing was working to break the Nazi Enigma code at Britain's Bletchley Park.

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NASA's Curiosity rover data boosts hope for liquid water on Mars

Research from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has strengthened hopes that liquid water may exist near the surface of Mars, astrophysicists said on Monday.

The clue comes from the presence in the soil of calcium perchlorate, they said.

This is a type of salt that is highly absorbent and lowers the freezing point of water so that it remains liquid.

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