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Jesus Christ was a Hindu Claims RSS founder’s controversial book

Mumbai A Mumbai-based right-wing trust is reissuing a 1946 book by one of the founders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that claims Jesus Christ was born a Tamil Hindu. The book - Christ Parichay - claims Jesus was a Vishwakarma Brahmin by birth and that Christianity is just a sect of Hinduism. The Swatantryaveer Savarkar Rashtriya Smarak (Savarkar National Memorial), a trust that preserves and propagates the Savarkar brothers’ literature and ideology,

will release the Marathi book on February 26.

While it does not specify where Christ was born, it says the present day Palestinian and Arab territories were Hindu land and that Christ traveled to India where he learnt yoga. The author Ganesh Damodar (Babarao) Savarkar is Vinayak Damodhar (Swat-antryaveer) Savarkar’s older brother and is one of the five people who founded the RSS. The book makes several claims - that Jesus Christ was a Tamil Hindu, his real name was

Keshao Krishna, Tamil was his mother tongue, and his complexion was dark. The book claims Christ’s sacred thread ceremony (janeyu) was held when he was 12, as per Brahmin tradition, and that he wore the sacred thread like any other Hindu. It also claims that Christianity was a Hindu cult and doctrine introduced by Christ and was never a separate religion.

Ganesh Savarkar also claims that people from the Essenes cult, which practiced Yoga and spiritual science, saved Christ

after his detractors crucified him.

The book claims his rescuers treated Christ with medicinal herbs and plants to revive him from his deathbed. After this, Christ was taken to Kashmir in India where he prayed to Lord Shiva, the book adds. It claims Christ spent the last phase of his life in the Himalayas. A tomb where his remains are buried, it claims, is known by his name.

According to the book, Arabia was a Hindu land and Jews were Hindus. Savarkar claims Arabic has many Sanskrit and Tamil

words. He further claims that Palestine’s Arabic Language was a version of the Tamil language.

Savarkar says Jesus’ family dressed in a typical Indian way.

The family had Hindu signs on their bodies, he says, adding that the name of Joseph (Christ’s father) was derived from Sheshep, which is further derived from Sheshappa (a common Tamil name). “There is no mala fide intention in reprinting this particular book after 70 years,” Ranjit Savarkar, executive Continued on Page 2

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Masood in custody: Will it pave way for Foreign Secretary-level talks?

New Delhi Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, named by India as the mastermind of the Pathankot attack, has been under “protective custody” since January 14, Pakistan Prime Minister’s Foreign Affairs Advisor Sartaj Aziz has said. He also said it was for India to decide on dates for Foreign Secretary-level talks, postponed after the terror strike. Mr Aziz said a Special Investigation Team from Pakistan may visit Pathankot in the first few days of March to probe the attack and that his country was pursuing the investigation seriously.

He said one of the mobile phone numbers linked to the attackers was traced to the terror group’s headquarters in Pakistan’s Bahawalpur and called the lodging of the FIR in connection with the Pathankot assault as a “logical and positive step” in bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Mr Aziz told Headlines Today that Masood Azhar, along with a few other operatives of the JeM, has been kept under protective custody and that some of the terror outfit’s premises have also been sealed. He

said action will follow against Masood Azhar and others the moment evidence becomes available. This is for the first time a top functionary of the Pakistan government has confirmed that Masood Azhar is in custody.

Mr Aziz said the FIR filed four days back in the Pathankot attack case has created legal basis for a Special Investigation Team of Pakistan to visit India to collect evidence. He said India has agreed to the SIT visit. Asked about Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s comment that the SIT will not be allowed to go inside the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot, Mr Aziz said access to crime scene always helps the investigators. On holding of the Foreign Secretary-level talks between the two countries, Mr Aziz said the “ball is in India’s court”.

“The answer to it lies entirely with India,” he said, adding he hoped prime ministers Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif will meet on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington next month.

Pakistani authorities had lodged an FIR in connection with the Pathankot attack on February 18, without naming Masood Azhar.

Srinagar The 48-hour-long armed standoff outside Jammu and Kashmir’s highway town of Pampore ended on Monday with the killing of all the three militants holed up in a multi-storey building

by Army troops. Officials said the slain men were

the militants fired mortar bombs and rockets on the edifice. The main target of the light artillery fire was the top floor of the main block at J&K Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JK EDI) campus at Sempora, Pampore, about 16-km south of here, where the

Jesus Christ was a Hindu....

Continued from Page 1 president, Swatantryaveer Savarkar National Memorial, told reporters on Monday. “It is one of the books that my grandfather (Ganesh Savarkar) authored. His books are not available and hence we have decided to publish them again for the benefit of readers. I know some people will raise questions. But then what Ganesh Savarkar has written in this book is not new. Many others have researched on the similar lines and drew their own conclusions. Ganesh Savarkar too did his research before writing the book.”

In Ganesh Savarkar’s own words I have presented evidence, references, names of books and portraits, to prove that Christ was a Hindu. He returned to India to study the Vedas, and became an expert in Yoga and then returned to his country to preach the right path or religion. While preaching, he got involved in a political storm and was crucified, but miraculously escaped alive. Later, his stay in Palestine, openly or underground, became dangerous. Therefore, he came to India with a Yogi.

He was a great personality, supposed to be an incarnation. After arriving in India he continued preaching till his death. This is in short the life history of Christ. To remind the Christian world that they have snatched away Christ’s Hinduness and to repay the debt of Christ to us that he gave by hurling the flag of Hinduism beyond India, I have done this work and I

am satisfied with it. Let this literary worship of Christ or Keshao the Krishna reach his divine feet.

(From Christ Parichay) ‘Samadhi’ in Kashmir A passage in the book says Christ - after being crucified - came to Kashmir with a certain Chetan Nath, became healthy, and with Nath’s help, established a ‘math’ (monastery) at the foothills of the Himalayas, probably in Kashmir. He worshipped Lord Shiva there for three years and achieved ‘darshan’ of Shiva. He gathered knowledge and energy and placed the trishoola, a seed of the world. He worshipped Lord Shiva in the form of a Linga.

Sadhus and people arrived from all directions to stay with him and accepted him as Guru, the spiritual

teacher. This way, he carried the work of the cult till he was 49 years old, when he decided to leave his physical body. He sat in a yogic posture and went into deep samadhi (trance) and left the physical body. This way, Ishanath (Isa or Christ), terminated his incarnation. NathaNamawali (Indian scripture) quotes his name as Ishanatha.

Another claim in the book is that the Bible is not Jesus’s preaching.

Claims from the Ganesh Damodar Savarkar, book brother of Veer Savarkar and Jesus Christ’s one of the 5 founders parents were Tamil of the RSS Hindus; His mother tongue was Tamil online under the title ‘Jesus (Arvam=Aram=Aramaic); Christ was a Tamil Hindu’.

‘Jesus’ is derived from Some of the above points are Keshao and ‘Christ’ from from the translated work.)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) fitted with cameras to know the position of militants.

The corpses of the slain militants were later during a combing operation retrieved from the debris by the security forces. Their identity is being ascertained, officials said.

In Delhi, CRPF DG Prakash Mishra said that they appeared to be Lashkar-e-Taiba cadres.

So far, none of the militant group active in Kashmir has owned responsibility.

A police officer involved in the operation said, “Clearly they were exceptionally motivated and highly trained terrorists”. The troops stormed the building around noon on Sunday and then using their highly specialised combat skills

began securing it floor by floor and room by room. The campus is spread over 10,000 sq.ft and the main block where the militants had entrenched themselves has more than fifty classrooms and office cambers besides several halls, storerooms and washrooms. However, in their attempt to overrun the building, two Army captains Pawan Kumar and Tushar Mahajan and corporal Om Prakash laid down their lives. Earlier on Saturday the militants believed to be one local and two foreigners had ambushed a Srinagarbound convoy of CRPF killing two jawans and injuring nine others. In the subsequent shootout, an employee of the JK EDI Abdul Gani Mir, 48, also lost his life. The gunmen

then entrenched themselves in the main block of the campus. They were quickly surrounded by security forces from Army, CRPF and J&K police’s counterinsurgency Special Operations Group (SOG).

The firing which had stopped at nightfall on Sunday resumed with the first light on Monday. Earlier the officials had said that the militants were using

The cover page of the book Christ Parichay

Krishna; Christ was dark complexioned like the Tamil Hindus.

He was Techton=Tachchar (the Tamil word for carpenter) and his family held an honorable title of Assari= Assar= Achar= Acharya. His thread ceremony was performed at the age of 12 in a temple. He wore the sacred thread Yajnopawita like a Tamil Brahmin and later according to his tradition he became a Siddha, achieving the highest rank in the spiritual science. In this way a Tamil Kamalar became a Senar-Siddha, because he was a Vishwakarma Brahmin.

Christianity was a Hindu cult and doctrine introduced

by Jesus the Christ (Keshao the Krishna). It was not a separate religion Christ was firmly believed to be an incarnation of Lord Shiva or Lord Vishnu by the followers residing in Palestine and around.

(Ganesh Savarkar’s Marathi book was translated into English by Dr Padmakar Vishnu Vartak some years ago. The book is available

Army kills all 3 militants, LeT hand suspected

“exceptionally motivated and highly trained terrorists” most probably belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba. The Army in its final assault against

militant trio had been restricted to by Army troops including crack teams from its Para Special Force earlier. Army also used

‘shrewd’ and ‘dodging’ tactics against combat forces and have used their ammunition judiciously.

Officials said a total of 16 security personnel were injured in the incidents.

Explaining the delay in flushing out militants, officials said that they were advantageously positioned in the main concrete multistorey block at the campus.

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Modi Government’s authoritarian drift!

They say the world is watching you. A New York Times editorial this week proves just that. And well, the impression isn’t quite nice. In a stinging editorial, The New York Times has blamed the Modi government for cracking down on JNU students and stifling freedom of expression in India. The “authoritarian drift” of the Modi government has come under sharp criticism by the newspaper which squarely blamed it for “the lynch mob mentality” witnessed in New Delhi in recent days.

An opinion piece on Kanhaiya Kumar, the JNU student who was arrested on charges of sedition, says that this “confrontation raises serious concerns about Mr. Modi’s governance and may further stall any progress in Parliament on economic reforms.” The newspaper carried a separate article on the events in Delhi after the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, JNU student leader, on charges of sedition and said that the message was clear–violence in

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the name of ultra nationalism is acceptable. “Responsibility for this lynchmob mentality lies squarely with Mr. Modi’s government,” it notes. Not just the Prime Minister, NYT also takes a dig at his government and other ministers.

Quoting Home Minister Rajnath Singh “If anyone raises anti-India slogans and tries to raise question on the nation’s unity and integrity, they will not be spared,” the editorial said that “Mr. Singh apparently does not realize that, in a democracy, voicing dissent is a vital right, not a crime.”

In the concluding sentence, NYT asks the Indian Prime Minister to rein in his ministers or risk sabotaging India’s economic progress.

“Mr. Modi must rein in his ministers and his party, and defuse the current crisis, or risk sabotaging both economic progress and India’s democracy,” it notes.

Meanwhile, France’s leading daily ‘Le Monde’ said in an editorial that “the horizon of Indian democracy has been oddly clouded” since the coming to power of Modi. “The arrest of a student of JNU and a former professor in Delhi, accused of ‘sedition’, is the latest illustration of the authoritarian drift of a Hindu nationalist government ...,” said the piece.

Following is an article written by Abhishek Sikhwal on the subject of the “authoritarian drift” of the Modi government in the most recent past. I find this piece quite appropriate given the current political climate in India. Enjoy!

Dictatorial regimes across history have painted dissent as sedition Because I’m terrible at planning holidays, my wife and I spent Christmas 2014 at the Killing Fields of Cambodia. We were on our honeymoon and even the most rudimentary research told us that we were in for an experience that would be anything but romantic. The Cambodians don’t waste time with metaphors; when they promise you a killing field, they literally let you into a field where a lot of killing took place. The Khmer Rouge, led

by Pol Pot, managed to execute over two million people in the area. The targets of this elaborate tyranny were primarily professionals and intellectuals and anyone suspected of having connections with foreign or former governments.

Eventually, this target group was expanded to include Christians, Buddhist monks and ethnic Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese populations.

I mention my Killing Fields experience because something about what is happening in India these days gives me the same lump in the throat. That day, as I listened to a survivor narrate the horrors

of the torture camp on an audio guide, SUNNY BAINS something he said really stuck with me: when the Khmer Rouge wanted to select their targets, they Obedience consists in the fact that a simply arrested people who read books person comes to view themselves as the or wore glasses. Intellectual curiosity and instrument for carrying out another questioning the government was suddenly person’s wishes, and they therefore no tantamount to sedition. As I took in the longer see themselves as responsible for grisly sights and the morbid information, their actions.

I wondered how a country could wage war This ghost in the machine renders humans on its own citizens. Can mass hysteria easy to manipulate. When a mob kills a galvanize people enough to hurt their man for alleged possession of beef or former neighbors, teachers and strips a Tanzanian woman due to racial bias or lynches an alleged rapist because of a rumor ... what we witness is a whole trying to become greater than the sum of its parts. It is reprehensible that a group of lawyers (no less) mete out punishment to those deemed ‘anti-national’ or ‘leftist’ in broad daylight while the police look on with a bovine indifference. Like Milgram’s subjects, BJP supporters are leaving decision making to their elected leaders while seeing themselves as instruments for helping these decisions take root.

Increasingly, we appear to be colleagues? living in a kakistocracy much like the The Milgram experiment was a Cambodia of 1975 (fun fact: the Khmer psychological experiment conducted in empire followed Hinduism which is why 1961 by Stanley Milgram and set out to Angkor Wat is the biggest Hindu temple ascertain whether the Nazis were in the world). Every dictatorial regime culpable for their crimes, or if they were across history came to power by painting simply following orders to the point of dissent as sedition, protestors as antihypnosis. The experiment featured an national and minorities as inferior. A authority figure (‘Experimenter’) who had popular quote by Hermann Goering from the subject (‘Teacher’) administer electric the Nuremberg Trials helps throw some shocks to a fellow volunteer (‘Learner’). light on the mechanics of fascism: Of course, the electric shocks weren’t real “Naturally the common people don’t want and the recipient Learner – who was an war, but it is always a simple matter to actor all along – faked extreme pain while drag the people along, whether it is a complaining that he had a heart condition. democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a However, the alarming takeaway from the parliament, or a communist dictatorship. experiment was how the subject blindly Voice or no voice, the people can always followed the Experimenter’s orders be brought to the bidding of the leaders. despite assuming that the pain he was That is easy. All you have to do is tell them administering was real. Prior to the that they are being attacked, and denounce experiment, each subject was given a the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and sample electric shock of 15 volts in order exposing the country to danger. It works to experience firsthand what the Learner the same in every country”. I hope Arnab would supposedly receive.

Goswami considers this before waxing a Regardless of experiencing that shock lyrical on the martyred soldiers. The themselves, a whopping 65% of the constitutional rights of ordinary Indian subjects disregarded the pleas of the citizens – whether a Bollywood star or Learners and administered up to ‘440 single woman or Dalit or a protesting volts’ simply because the Experimenter student – are being stripped away to make egged them on. Milgram had two theories way for the clinquant patriotism of a violent why the subjects followed orders despite few. To draw parallel to the Milgram their conscience telling them otherwise: experiment, the government has taken the (1) A subject who has neither ability nor role of the authoritative Experimenter and expertise to make decisions, especially is urging the public to teach divisive lessons in a crisis, will leave decision making to to the Learner. However, in this experiment, the hierarchy of the group and (2) the shocks are real.

China research highlights country’s excessive use of antibiotics SHANGHAI Children in China’s eastern Jiangsu province are being widely exposed to antibiotics from tainted food and drinking water, potentially harming long-term health, local media reported on Monday, citing research from Shanghai’s Fudan University. The study, which tested for 21 common antibiotics, including those used for animals, found traces of at least one type in 80 percent of a pool of 505 schoolchildren in Shanghai, China’s modern business hub with a population over 20 million. China suffers from serious overuse of antibiotics, with doctors

prescribing them to half of all outpatients, far above recommended levels, according

to the World Health Organization (WHO). A WHO report in November found that nearly two-thirds of Chinese believed antibiotics should be used to treat colds and flu, while one-third thought antibiotics were effective against headaches. Misuse of antibiotics is becoming a global risk, making the drugs much less effective at treating common infections.

“Beyond the health system, the economic costs of antibiotic resistance are formidable - in China, one prediction estimates the loss of up to a million lives a year by 2050,” the WHO said in the report.

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Human vs AI: Go champ confident in $1m match - for now

We all like to feel we are doing the right thing. We want to be fair, ethical, upright, reasonable. So far, so good. But sometimes, some of us (as you may have noticed) do the wrong thing and then try, through clever argument and explanation, to persuade themselves (and everyone else) that this was the right thing! You, of course, would always resist accidentally succumbing to self-deception.

But you may have to extend a rescue branch to someone who is now up to their neck in that quagmire! !!!

Most big issues begin as little issues. If we could only see them arising and nip them in the bud, we could save trouble later. But, just as a tiny plant and a mighty oak look similar when their first green shoots push above the Earth, the distinction between a minor nuisance and a potential source of major trouble is not always so clear. We must take care, too, that we don’t spend too much time responding to challenges which, if ignored and left alone, might go away of their own accord. Remember all that. !!!

We were not placed on this planet to make ends meet. When we were born, nobody handed our parents an invoice and said, ‘this is how much your child will owe to the cosmos in return for having been granted life.’ However hard existence may at times seem to be - or how expensive - the universe really wants to support us as best it can. It is generous in that process, even if individual human beings are not always quite so kind. The sky offers you the chance to benefit from a gesture of largesse. !!!

People are often a little too cautious with one another.

We don’t want to cause offence, so we avoid saying things that might put another person on the defensive. Or, at least we try to. Some of us, it is true, either deliberately pursue a policy of provocation, or they simply have no idea when they are crossing a line! But you can bring your own sensitivity to bear upon a delicate situation. And, as much through what you don’t say, as from what you do, you can exert a helpful healing influence. !!!

Often, in our personal lives, we have to make delicate decisions about how closely to get involved with situations that are not entirely our business. If we stand too far back, we become accused of a cold, callous attitude. If we dive in too deeply, we may incur the wrath of someone who feels that we have no right to interfere. Experience has taught you that discretion is usually the better part of valor.

Once in a while, though, exceptions are warranted, justified, even essential. Might this be such a time? !!!

We want to please our partners, of course. What else could we ever aspire to? But what if our loved ones aren’t so sure whether they even know what truly pleases them? What if hovering in such a state of uncertainty gives them a perverse pleasure?

What, indeed, if you find yourself dealing with someone who is only really happy when they feel that they have something to be unhappy about?

Understanding another’s needs and motives may be trickier than you expect it to be now - but it is not impossible!

SEOUL The world champion of Go said Monday he would beat a supercomputer by a “landslide” in a $1 million match next month, but acknowledged that Artificial Intelligence would soon overpower the Asian board game’s best human brains.

South Korean Lee SeDol is due to take on the Google-owned AlphaGo in one of the most hotly-anticipated showdowns the ancient game has ever seen.

The 32-year-old is one of the greatest players in modern history, having won 18 international titles. AlphaGo - developed by the AI firm Google Deepmind - stunned the world last month when it was revealed that it had trounced three-time European Go champion Fan Hui 5-0 in a closed-door match last October.

“Based on its level seen in the match (against Fan), I think I will win the game by a near landslide - at least this time,” Lee told reporters. Lee is ranked at

the top of the nine-level scale for professional Go players, far above Fan who is at the second level. “But if Artificial Intelligence keeps advancing at this

chess champion Gary Kasparov. Although its pieces are undifferentiated - just black and white stones - Go is arguably more complex than chess

pace, I’m not sure I’ll be able to win a year or two down the road,” Lee said. In the centuries-old game players take turns placing stones on a grid, trying to surround and capture the opponent’s stones. The person - or computer - who controls the most territory is the winner.

Go is something of a Holy Grail for AI developers, whose first global board games success came in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated then-world

because a player can place his piece anywhere on the 19 x 19 board.

That makes it tough for a regular computer to predict an opponent’s move, because it has to crunch through every possibility. In fact, there are more possible ways to play a game than there are atoms in the universe, Google Deepmind head Demis Hassabis said in a joint video conference call with Lee.

“Even if you have the biggest supercomputer in the world, it will not be enough... to exhaust and research all the possibilities,” he said.

Hassabis says AlphaGo uses two sets of “deep neural networks” which allow the computer to crunch data more intelligently, by discarding moves which a human player would instinctively know were silly.

The computer was programmed with 30 million moves from games played by human experts, and then left to do some self-coaching, he said.

AlphaGo has won almost all the matches it has played so far, but its developers sought out Lee for a real test “against somebody who is on top of the game”, Hassabis said.

The five-game match, to be held in Seoul from March 915, will have a prize purse of $1 million, and will be televised in countries including South Korea, China and Japan as well as streamed online.

Woman performs on trapeze at over 10,000ft to smash world record South Island A paramedic and pilates instructor has set a new record for the highest static trapeze act, while suspended mid-air from underneath a hot air balloon.

Anna Cochrane attempted at an altitude between 10,400 and 11,400 ft and lasted for more than five minutes. The previous highest static trapeze world record to beat was 2,171ft.

Suspended in the sky above Ashburton, on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island, Ms Cochrane dislocated her rib after about a minute, but persevered to complete the routine. There were 11 people on board the balloon during the attempt including Anna, a camera crew, the pilot, two witnesses for the record, a safety rigger and three other skydivers.

To be accepted as a Guinness World Records title, Ms Cochrane had to have a specialist witness and an independent witness on board.

The record evidence has been submitted, but the process can take up to two weeks to be assessed and verified. When she finally

reached the ground, Ms Cochraine said she was sore but the adrenaline was still pumping. ‘I’m really proud of how all the team of experts came together, it’s still unbelievable that it actually happened,’ she

‘My previous training meant I already had the strength and fitness to do trapeze and it was just about creating a routine that I felt I could perform at that height, keeping in mind I would be wearing a harness

the trapeze has been the most challenging to learn.

‘You are essentially bending yourself around a steel bar so I’ve basically been covered in bruises and hands full of rips and calluses for the past year!’

said. ‘A little part of me thought that this was all too big and it couldn’t happen but the whole thing went so smoothly, I am lucky to have had the perfect people involved to help me achieve it.’ Ms Cochrane told Daily Mail Australia she has been training in circus aerials for about seven years, but took up the trapeze specifically for the event about a year ago.

and working around a lanyard that attached me to the trapeze,’ she said.

‘I would try do do something every day that would help me achieve my goal. ‘That could be anything from a session at the gym, a session on the trapeze or a stretch session - I would normally train for around two hours at a time. ‘Compared to other circus aerial apparatuses, I have found

Ms Cochrane had hoped to top off her experience by sky diving from the balloon afterwards, but her injury prevented her.

Her support crew from Sky Diving Kiwis continued with the plan and jumped from the hot air balloon over Ashburton. The attempt has so far raised more than $1700 for Big Brothers Big Sisters, a child mentoring program.

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Cuba deploys army in effort to avoid Zika virus HAVANA Cuban President Raul Castro called on the entire Cuban population to help eradicate the mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus on Monday and ordered 9,000 army troops to help stave off the disease.

Cuba has yet to detect a case of Zika but the outbreak is affecting large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean and is likely to spread to all countries in the Americas except for Canada and Chile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said. “It’s necessary for every single Cuban to take up this battle as a personal matter,” Castro wrote in a national message sounding the alarm over Zika, which is carried by mosquitoes that transmit the virus to humans

and which is suspected of causing birth defects after infecting pregnant women.

“The Revolutionary Armed Forces will assign more than 9,000 troops, among them active duty

Cubans should clean up potential environments for the Aedes genus of mosquitoes, said Castro, who also is general of the armed forces.

officers and reserve officers ... to the anti-vector and cleanup efforts, with the additional support of 200 officers of the National Revolutionary Police,” Castro

Eating less beef key to meeting EU climate targets

STOCKHOLM EU climate targets won’t be met unless greenhouse gas emissions linked to beef and dairy consumption are dramatically reduced, a Swedish study published on Monday said.

“Reductions, by 50 percent or more, in ruminant meat (beef and mutton) consumption are, most likely, unavoidable if the EU targets are to be met,” according to the findings published in the Food Policy journal. But Stefan Wirsenius, one of the authors of the study written by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and the SP Technical Research Institute, said there was no need to give up meat completely. “Poultry and pork cause quite low emissions,” he said. Dairy products are also problematic, according to the study. Producing one kilogram (pound) of protein from dairy results in emissions four times greater than for an equivalent amount of poultry. “EU and US consumption of cheese and other dairy products is among the highest in the world. If we were

to replace some of the dairy products with vegetable products, such as oat milk, we would have a better chance of meeting our climate targets,” said Wirsenius.

The authors also explored how improvements in agricultural techniques could reduce emissions.

“Emissions from manure storage can all but be eliminated if the facilities are covered and waste gases are flared (burned off),” according to lead author David Bryngelsson.

But reducing the amount of food that has been thrown away only cuts emissions from food and agriculture from between five and 10 percent, according to the study. The report, “How Can The EU Climate Targets Be Met? A Combined Analysis of Technological and Demand-Side Changes In Food and Agriculture,” was published in the February issue of Food Policy journal. The European Union would like to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, when compared with levels from 1990.

said.

The ruling Communist Party and the government have adopted an action plan under the direction of the Health Ministry to deal with the Zika that will also help combat the mosquito-borne diseases dengue and chikungunya, Castro said.

One Health Ministry employee, who asked not to be identified as she was not authorized to talk with journalists, said the country’s vast network of neighborhood doctors and clinics were watching for Zika symptoms and suspected cases would be quarantined in hospital wards prepared for an eventual outbreak. “There are no confirmed cases yet but there will be. To date there have been two

suspected cases that turned out negative,” said the employee, who has real-time access to epidemiological data. The government, which has fumigated neighborhoods and homes for decades to contain dengue, put doctors on alert for the virus weeks ago and ramped up mosquito eradication efforts.

Military officers could be seen over the weekend, clip boards instead of rifles in hand, directing fumigation in Havana.

The WHO declared the outbreak an international health emergency on Feb. 1, citing a “strongly suspected” relationship between Zika infection in pregnancy and microcephaly, a condition marked by abnormally small head size. However, much remains unknown about Zika, including whether the virus actually causes microcephaly.

Queen’s pampered pets London Their behaviour has not always been particularly regal towards footmen or other dogs. But at dinner time the Queen’s beloved corgis and dorgis know their place, sitting obediently around Her Majesty as they are served individual menus that they receive in order of seniority. The carefully tailored menus even include herbal remedies, according to an animal psychologist who worked with the royal pets.

Dr Roger Mugford, who has dealt with doggy discipline problems at Buckingham Palace for more than 20 years, said: ‘At feeding times, each dog had an individually designed menu, including an array of homeopathic and herbal remedies. ‘Their food was served by a butler in an eclectic collection of battered silver and porcelain dishes. ‘As I watched,

the Queen got the corgis to sit in a semi-circle around her, and then fed them one by one, in

and her corgis ‘obeyed her implicitly’ despite the breed being ‘strong-willed’. The Queen was

order of seniority. The others just sat and patiently waited their turn.’ Dr Mugford, 69, also revealed the Queen is ‘a natural when it comes to dog training’

given her first corgi, named Susan, for her 18th birthday.

Numerous dogs were bred from her, and some were mated with dachshunds to create dorgis.

Some victims in terror attack support efforts to hack iPhone Some family members of victims and survivors of the San Bernardino mass shooting will file court papers in support of a judge’s order that Apple Inc. help the FBI hack into a locked iPhone as part of the terrorism investigation, a lawyer and have others said.

A Los Angeles attorney, Stephen Larson, said he represents at least several families of victims and other employees affected by the attack. He said the U.S. Attorney in the case, Eileen Decker, sought his help.

Larson said he will file a brief supporting the Justice Department before March 3.

The victims “have questions that go simply beyond the criminal investigation ... in terms of why this happened, how this happened, why they were

targeted, is there anything about them on the iPhone - things that are more of a personal victim” view, Larson said.

The appeal from victim family members gives the Justice

Department additional support in a case that has sparked a national debate over digital privacy rights and national security interests.

Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym ordered Apple last week to assist investigators by creating specialized software that would let the FBI rapidly test random

passcode combinations to try to unlock the iPhone and view data stored on it.

The county-issued iPhone 5C was used by Syed Farook, who with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people at an office Christmas party in December before they died in a gun battle with police in San Bernardino. The government said they had been at least partly inspired by the Islamic State.

The couple physically destroyed two personal phones so completely that the FBI has been unable to recover information from them.

Robert Velasco, whose 27-yearold daughter Yvette Velasco was killed in the shooting, told The Associated Press that he didn’t have to think long before agreeing to have his name added to the legal filing in support of the FBI.

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23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Mexican woman with Zika gives birth to healthy child MEXICO CITY A woman with a confirmed case of the Zika virus in the southern state of Chiapas gave birth to a ‘clinically healthy’ baby boy, Mexico’s health ministry said. The woman, from the town of Pijijiapan, delivered the six pound (2.8 kilo) boy in a hospital in the city of Tuxtla Gutierrez on Friday. After an evaluation, the hospital’s pediatric center ‘confirmed that the infant is clinically healthy,’ the health ministry said in a statement late Friday.

The woman is one of six known to have contracted Zika while pregnant. Zika, which is spread by mosquitos, has been linked to microcephaly - a birth defect in which the infant is born with an abnormally small head. There is no cure for microcephaly and no vaccine against Zika.

The other five women ‘are

in good health, they are receiving specialized continuous care and are undergoing periodic ultrasound tests,’ the statement read. Two of the women are beyond their 28th week of pregnancy, and several tests show no sign that they are carrying a fetus with microcephaly.

The other three have still not reached the 28 week mark, the statement read. Of the 80 registered Zika cases in Mexico, 45 are in the

southern state of Chiapas, including three of the pregnant women.

On average Mexico, population 122 million, has 600 cases of microcephaly per year. That figure has not change since the Zika virus outbreak in Latin America, officials said. Brazil said this week that it has registered 508 cases of microcephaly since October, a huge increase on the average annual number of 150.

One in three American adults not getting enough sleep

ATLANTA Did you get enough sleep last night? If not, you are not alone.More than one out of three American adults do not get enough sleep, according to a study released Thursday from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

‘That’s a big problem’ says, Dr. Nancy Collop, director of the Emory Sleep Center at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, who is familiar with the study.

‘You don’t function as well, your ability to pay attention is reduced, and it can have serious, long term side effects.

It can change your metabolism for the worse.

‘At least seven hours of sleep is considered healthy for an adults aged 18 to 60, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

CDC analyzed data from a 2014 survey of 444,306 adults and found 65.

2 percent of respondents reported getting that amount of sleep.

‘Lifestyle changes such as going to bed at the same time each night; rising at the same time each morning; and turning off or removing televisions, computers, mobile devices from the bedroom, can help people get the healthy sleep they need,’ said Dr.Wayne Giles, director of the CDC’s Division of Population Health, in a statement.

Getting less than seven hours a night is associated with an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke and frequent mental distress, the study shows.

Conducted by the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the study

is the first of its kind to look at all 50 US states and the District of Columbia.The study found that among those most likely to get great sleep were married or have a job, with 67 percent and 65 percent respectively saying they get enough.Only 56 percent of divorced adults said they get enough sleep, and just over half of jobless adults sleep seven hours a night regularly.Among the best sleepers were college graduates, with 72 percent reporting seven hours or more.The study found geographical differences as well as ethnic disparities.Hawaiian residents get less sleep than those living in South Dakota, the study found.

Non-Hispanic whites sleep better than non-Hispanic black residents, with 67 and 54 percent respectively

Bangladesh’s ‘Tree Man’ undergoes successful surgery DHAKA A Bangladeshi father dubbed ‘Tree Man’ for massive bark-like warts on his hands and feet on Saturday underwent a successful operation to remove some of the growths, a hospital said. A nine-doctor team took three and a half hours to remove the giant warts from Abul Bajandar’s right hand at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital, facility director Samanta Lal Sen told AFP. The 26-year-old was admitted last month for an operation to remove the growths weighing at least five kilogrammes (11 pounds) that first began appearing 10 years ago. ‘It was a successful operation. We removed warts from all five fingers of his right hand. He’s now happy and was laughing,’ Sen said.

‘We’ll now review his condition for the next three weeks before deciding whether to conduct more operations. It’s a big challenge.’ Bajandar, from the southern district of Khulna, was diagnosed with epidermodysplasia

verruciformis, an extremely rare genetic condition dubbed ‘treeman disease’ that causes the skin growths.

after the operation and said he looked ‘relaxed and happy’. Hospital director Sen said there were only three known cases of

He became a celebrity with people travelling to Khulna over the years to see the ‘Tree Man’ and hundreds visiting him in hospital. He was given the all-clear for surgery after tests confirmed the warts were not cancerous. The Bangladesh government agreed to bear the costs of his treatment and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was given an update on his condition, Sen said.

Bajandar’s wife Halima Khatun saw her husband

epidermodysplasia verruciformis in the world and Bajandar’s was the only one in Bangladesh.

Bajandar told AFP last month that he initially thought that the warts were harmless but slowly as the growths covered his hands and feet, he was forced to quit working as a bicycle rickshaw puller. An Indonesian villager with massive warts all over his body underwent a string of operations in 2008 to remove them.

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23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Pluto’s largest moon likely fractured by sub-surface ocean WASHINGTON Images from the New Horizon space probe suggest that Pluto’s moon Charon once had a sub-surface ocean that has since frozen and expanded, causing the surface to stretch and fracture, NASA said Friday. Charon’s surface was photographed by the New Horizons’s Lorri (Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager) camera as the spacecraft flew past the moon in July 2015 at a distance of 48,900 miles (78,700 kilometers). The detailed pictures show a system of ‘pull-apart’ tectonic faults on the moon’s equator.

These faults and fractures run ‘at least 1,100 miles (about 1,800 kilometers) long and in places there are chasms 4.5 miles (7.5 kilometers) deep.

By comparison, the Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 kilometers) long and just over a mile (1.6 kilometers) deep,’ NASA said. The chasms are the longest ever observed in the solar system, NASA said.

Charon’s outer layer today is mainly water ice. But millions of years ago, when Charon was young, scientists believe that

layer was kept warm ‘by heat provided by the decay of radioactive elements, as well as Charon’s own internal heat of formation.’

The moon could have been warm enough to cause the water ice to melt deep down, creating a subsurface ocean.

‘But as Charon cooled over time, this ocean would have frozen and expanded (as happens when water freezes), lifting the outermost layers of the moon and producing the massive chasms we see today,’ NASA said.

Pluto, a dwarf planet in the far reaches of the solar system some 3.6 billion miles (5.8 billion kilometers) away from the sun, has five moons.

Charon, with a diameter about half that of Pluto, is the largest of them. Other moons in the solar system that are closer to the sun still have liquid oceans under their surface.

Experts believe that oceans on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and on two of Saturn’s moons, Ganymede and Enceladus, are the best places in the solar system to look for microbial life forms.

Panic as lions on the loose in Kenyan capital NAIROBI Wildlife rangers on Friday hunted for two lions who escaped from Nairobi’s national park and meandered into ‘highly populated’ areas of the Kenyan capital. Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) issued an appeal, ‘for help to get two lionesses that strayed from the Nairobi National Park.’

Armed rangers, as well as KWS vets with dart guns, scoured bush and agricultural land alongside the Kibera district, one of Africa’s largest slums. ‘Lions are dangerous wild animals. Avoid provoking the lions by confronting them,’ said KWS spokesman Paul Udoto. At least two lionesses are reported to have late Thursday left the park, spread over 117 square kilometres (45 square miles) where buffalo and rhino roam just seven kilometres from the bustling high-rise city centre. Local media reported as many as six lions might be on the loose. It is not the first time lions have prowled into town.

The big cats are under growing pressure as one of Africa’s fastest growing cities creeps onto ancient migration routes and hunting grounds.

Sometimes the lions are killed by livestock farmers protecting their herds, other times they prowl leafy gardens giving residents a fright.‘These are highly populated areas and that is why we are intensifying the

search,’ Udoto said. ‘Anyone with information about them should share it with us immediately.’

Udoto said two lionesses were last sighted around Nairobi’s Langata district. ‘Our teams comprising veterinary officials have been in Langata looking for the animals,’ he said.

Rangers patrolled a narrow corridor of bush on the edge of Kibera. Its tin-roofed shacks house an estimated quarter of a million people, according to an aid agency that carried out a population study there. One fearful Nairobi resident tweeted KWS spokesman Udoto asking whether she ought to ‘lock my kids in’.‘Yes, please do until we report lions have been captured and safely returned to the park.

Perils of born town lions,’ Udoto replied. Lions are estimated to have declined in number by as much as three-quarters since 1980, and to occupy less than a tenth of their historic range

across Africa.

While the park is fenced in on the city side - some bars even have terraces where one can view animals while enjoying a cold drink - the park is opensided elsewhere to allow the annual wildlife migration in search of grazing. But the land is under threat from increasing urbanisation and more intensive agriculture, and the routes used by migrating herds in search of new pastures as well as the carnivores that follow for fresh meat are growing narrower.

Conservationists say wildlife protection is a low priority for city officials struggling with multiple challenges in a grossly unequal capital of some 3.5 million people with overstretched basic services and infrastructure. In Nairobi, lavish villas adjoin squalid slums and cramped high rise apartments.

Image of migrant baby at fence wins World Press Photo AMSTERDAM A haunting black-and-white image of a refugee passing a baby under a barbed wire fence won the prestigious World Press Photo Award on Thursday, highlighting Europe’s worst migrant crisis since World War II. Snapped by Australian freelance photographer Warren Richardson, the picture titled “Hope for a New Life” captures the drama of one border crossing between Serbia and Hungary, as more than a million people made their way to Europe’s shores in 2015 - nearly half of them fleeing Syria’s brutal civil war.

Agence France-Presse scooped up four awards including first prize for Syrian-based Sameer Al-Doumy in the Spot News stories category, for his images taken just after air strikes ravaged the city of Douma near Damascus.

“I am very happy to have won this prize through which I hope I’m able to portray the truth of what’s happening in my country, Syria, to the outside world,” al-Doumy said in reaction to the award.

His AFP Syrian colleague Abd Doumany won second prize in the General News stories category for his harrowing depiction of children killed and wounded in similar strikes over Douma.

Syria’s nearly five-year war has claimed more than 260,000 lives, and al-Doumy added he hoped he would soon not have to take “such painful photos” and that they would help “to

of night without a flash “incredibly powerful visually” and a “haunting image.”

Budapest-based Richardson had camped with a group of migrants for five days on the border near Roszke in

encourage the world to really move towards ending this conflict.” AFP’s veteran lensman Roberto Schmidt won second prize, Spot News stories, for his dramatic shots of the deadly avalanche on Mount Everest triggered by last April’s Nepal earthquake. Turkey-based Bulent Kilic won third prize in the same category for his pictures of Syrian refugees on the Turkish border. Judges in this year’s competition — which drew some 82,951 entries from 5,775 photographers from 128 countries — called Richardson’s grainy picture, taken in the dead

Hungary when he snapped the group as they slipped through the boundary fence. “We played catand-mouse with the police the whole night,” Richardson said in a statement from the World Press Photo Awards. “I was exhausted by the time I took the picture,” he added.

“It was around three o’clock in the morning and you can’t use a flash while police are trying to find these people, because I would just given them away,” he said, adding he shot his picture using just the light of the moon.

AFP photo director Francis Kohn, who chaired this year’s

jury in Amsterdam, said Richardson’s picture “had such power because of its simplicity, especially the symbolism of the barbed wire.” “We thought it had almost everything in there to give a strong visual of what’s happening with the refugees,” Kohn said. Huang Wen, new media development director at Xinhua News Agency, said “it’s a haunting image. You see the anxiousness and the tension in such a mood which is pretty different from those in-your-face images.” The New York Times took three first prizes. Mauricio Lima won in the General News singles category for his picture of a doctor treating a teenage Islamic State fighter in a Kurdish hospital. Sergey Ponomarev won the General News stories category for migrants arriving by

boat at the village of Skala on Greece’s Lesbos island, while Daniel Berehulak won the Daily Life stories category with his account of Chilean, Chinese and Russian research looking for commercial opportunities in Antarctica. Organisers said meanwhile they had introduced a “new code of ethics and a transparent and rigorous verification process”.

This follows a controversy last year when one of the major prizes was withdrawn after a photographer was accused of staging pictures portraying the gritty Belgian industrial town of Charleroi. “This resulted in many more entries being checked, but fewer problems than last year being found,” said Lars Boering, the World Press Photo Foundation’s managing director.

Indian court slaps Hindu god with summons over land grab A court has served a Hindu god with a summons for illegally encroaching on government land in eastern India after a roadside temple was built in his honour, officials said Thursday. Photos in local media showed the summons, addressed to Lord Hanuman, pasted on an idol of the monkey god, worshipped for his courage and strength, at the temple in Bihar state. “The summons was issued after the public works department filed a case against the temple for encroaching on the road,” a court official in Rohtas district, who refused to be named, told AFP. The department petitioned the local magistrate’s court to have the temple removed for obstructing traffic, but local Hindu groups have protested against the legal action.

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23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Facebook helps sister find lost brother in Canada

A Canadian woman found her long-lost brother after posting a message on social media website, Facebook on New Year’s Eve, the media reported on Tuesday.

Matthew Handford, who tracked down his sister, Shylow Wilson, after reading the post on Facebook in which 25-year-old Wilson said she was looking for her biological brother named Matthew who was given up for adoption by their mother after he was born at Calgary’s Grace Hospital in February 1987, Xinhua news agency reported.

“I was a little skeptical, but now that I’ve met him, I know it’s for sure him, and I’m really happy about that,” said Wilson. It was a “good Family Day miracle” right there, she said. Her younger brother Handford also turned to Facebook last December to look for his three siblings. All he had was their names on a piece of

paper his adoptive mother gave him, based on some research she did back in 1996.

Handford contacted a lady named Wanda Levasseur on Facebook, since she had the same last name as his mother, Marilyn Levasseur who died after a battle with alcoholism.

He did not hear back until last Thursday, when Wanda showed him Wilson’s post. Handford reached out to Wilson on Facebook and then by phone, before flying from Toronto in east Canada to Calgary to meet his sister on Saturday.

“I was adopted at four days old, so it’s the only family I know. To find out I’ve got an extended family now, it’s a great feeling,” Handford said.

Handford said he would definitely stay in touch with his sister. “It took this long to get together, so (we’ve) got a lot of time to make up,” he added.

There are “many hundreds or thousands” of Chinese Uighurs from the country’s western Xinjiang province involved with the Islamic State (IS) or other groups to wage jihad in Syria, according to a leading Chinese strategic expert who advises the government on its West Asia policy. The Chinese jihadists, involved “not only with the IS but

As a researcher I have been following the situation closely. I believe there are quite many Chinese citizens fighting in Syria, not just with the IS but also other forces in Syria, where there are all kinds of groups who have people fighting who are from China.” China has recently stepped up its diplomatic engagement with Syria, in recent

with other Syrian forces”, posed “a major threat” to China if they returned home, warned Li Shaoxian, a long-term West Asia expert and the Vice President of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a Beijing think-tank with ties to the Ministry of State Security. “Whether there are Chinese citizens involved in IS, the answer is certainly yes,” he said in an interaction with journalists on Thursday.“I don’t have the specific number but I think there are possibly many hundreds, or thousands, of them.

weeks hosting both the Foreign Minister and top officials of the Syrian National Council representing opposition groups.

Li, who met with representatives from both the Syrian government and the council during their recent Beijing visits, said China was in a “unique” position to play a role in bringing about a political settlement. Referring to the divergent interests of both the United States and Russia, he said China was “the only major country without selfish interests involved” as Beijing “has no specific agenda.” Li did not say

Islamic State behind Jakarta terror attacks, says Indonesian Police SEOUL Thousands of couples took part in a mass wedding Saturday by South Korea’s Unification Church, with the widow of church founder Sun Myung Moon presiding over the event at a giant stadium. Three thousand identically-dressed couples from 62 countries, including 1,000 new couples and 2,000 already-married pairs, participated in the threehour ceremony at Gapyeong which hosts the South Korean headquarters of the church.

Mass weddings, often held in sports stadiums with tens of thousands of couples, have long been a signature feature of the church founded by Moon in 1954. Moon’s widow Han Hak-Ja urged the followers to make the utmost efforts to complete the mission to ‘build heaven on Earth’ by the year 2020. Blake Matthews and his bride Kieva Pace, both 24 and from North Carolina, said they had been together for eight years since they met in high school.

Matthews said he wanted to take back ‘this sense of community with people who don’t even really know each other’.

‘Everyone’s still kind of a

Hundreds, maybe thousands of Chinese Uighurs fighting in Syria

if the issue of Chinese Uighurs an ethnic Turkic Muslim minority in China’s western Xinjiang region - in Syria figured prominently during the recent talks, but described the matter as a serious concern for Beijing.

“I believe this will be a major source or threat because if these people come back to the country of origin they could constitute a considerable threat to the security of the country of origin.”

China says that Uighurs have been travelling to Turkey through Southeast Asia, and Beijing has accused Turkish missions in Southeast Asia of facilitating travel by issuing documents. In July, more than 100 Uighurs were repatriated from Thailand.

The move was criticised by rights groups who say the Uighurs were no terrorists but merely refugees fleeing persecution in China.

While Beijing labelled them all as separatists who wanted to join jihad, rights groups have pointed out there were women and children among the group, which was detained on return to China.Uighur exile groups say the majority of hundreds of travellers who are leaving China for Southeast Asia are doing so to escape what they describe as religious persecution from the authorities.Li, however, pointed to a group of Uighurs who carried out a mass knife attack on a railway station in Kunming in south China in March 2014, stabbing 29 people to death.

family,’ he said. The newly-wed couple said they planned to go on a honeymoon trip to the southern island of Jeju. Moon died in September 2012, aged 92, of complications from pneumonia. Revered by his

1997, 30,000 couples tied the knot in Washington, and two years later around 21,000 filled the Olympic Stadium in Seoul.

Many were personally matched

by Moon, who taught that romantic love led to sexual

followers but denounced by critics as a charlatan who brainwashed church members, Moon was a deeply divisive figure.

His shadowy business dealings saw him jailed in the United States. The church’s mass weddings began in early 1960s.

At first, they involved just a few dozen couples but the numbers mushroomed over the years. In

promiscuity, mismatched couples and dysfunctional societies. Moon’s preference for cross-cultural marriages also meant that couples often shared no common language.

Two thirds of the couples participating in Saturday’s ceremony were married before joining the church and chose to renew their vows as full members.

NEW YORK US biotech company Inovio Pharmaceuticals said Wednesday it has had promising test results on a Zika virus vaccine in mice and plans to launch clinical trials on humans this year. Inovio’s SynCon vaccine technology “shows promise as a preventive and treatment” for Zika viral infections, said Inovio chief executive Joseph Kim. Tests on mice offered promise in developing antibodies and “killer” T cells for countering the Zika virus. “We will next test the vaccine in non-human primates and initiate clinical product manufacturing,” Kim said. “We plan to initiate phase I human testing of our Zika vaccine before the end of 2016.” About 15 pharmaceutical companies are working to develop vaccines for the previously obscure virus that has been linked to microcephaly, a birth defect that results in an abnormally small head and incomplete brain development, and Guillain-Barre syndrome, an immune system disorder.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Zika outbreak an international health

emergency on February 1 and said infections were reported in more than two dozen countries in South and Central America and the Caribbean, with Brazil the hardest hit. Inovio, based in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, said Wednesday it would ask US regulatory authorities to accelerate the process for approving the vaccine with an eye towards marketing the medicine as quickly as possible. Shares of Inovio rose 6.2 percent to $6.98 in latemorning trade.

A senior WHO official, MariePaule Kieny, said on February 12 there were two candidate vaccines that appear most promising: one being developed by the US National Institutes of Health and another by Indiabased Bharat Biotech.

However, large-scale trials of these vaccines are still at least 18 months away, Kieny said.

The Zika virus, which is mainly carried by mosquitos, has spread rapidly through Latin America and the Caribbean, with multiple governments in the most affected areas urging women to avoid getting pregnant for the time being.

US company sees human trials of Zika vaccine

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23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

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Please send your bio-data & recent picture to: mandyusa9@ gmail.com Or Call: 1-414-5527913 ***655*** Jat Sikh parents invite matrimonial alliance for their daughter, 27 yrs. old, 5’-5” tall, Canadian Citizen, working as PSW in a nursing home in Ontaorio, currently in India for a limited time. Looking for a well

educated, well settled and family oriented match. Please email recent picture and bio-data to: msalwan108@gmail.com Or Call : 1-778-386-5994 ***655*** Seeking a Suitable match for a Tonk Kashatri Canadian born, well groomed 28 year old, 5'-8", sardar (non Vegetarian), well educated , currently employed as a screening officer and also with the Correctional service of Canada.

Family all well settled in the Vancouver area. Girl must be well educated, preferably Canadian born, or at least been in Canada for many years be slim with fair complexion and from a sikh backgrouund, well versed in both Canadian and indian culture. Caste no bar. Please send your bio-data & recent picture to:sunshine_bear11 @yahoo.com *** 655*** Lubana Sikh Parents seeking a suitable match for their WellSettled Engineer Son, 30 yrs. old, 6'-1" tall, Athletic built. The girl should be beautiful, tall, well educated, family oriented. Caste No Bar. Please email bio-data & recent picture to: Amar3264@aol.com or call: 1408-781-4086 *** 655*** Jat Sikh Amrit-dhari, USA citizen boy, 5'-9" tall, 28 yrs. old (Aug87), graduate, Electrical Engineer and Management from University of California, working as an Engineer in Federal Gov. The girl should be professionally qualified, Amrit-dhari Jat Sikh, preferred from USA or Canada.

Please send your bio-data & recent picture to:khalsa5756 @gmail.com or call: 1- 916-7086291 or send WhatsApp message. *** 655*** Ramdassia Sikh girl, 42 yrs. old, 5'-5" tall, divorcee, on visitor visa in USA. The boy should be American immigrant or citizen, between 40-45 yrs. of age. Call: 1-925-665-6010 *** 655*** Ramgarhia Sikh parents seek a suitable match for their daughter, 28 yrs. old, 5’-3” tall, B.Sc. Nursing degree holder, registered nurse at present living in India The boy should be Canadian/American Immigrant or Citizen. Please email recent picture and bio-data to: sohalsp@gmail.com Or Call : 647-829-5872 (Leave Message) ***655*** Ramgarhia Sikh parents invite matrimonial alliance for their daughter, 30 yrs. old, 5’ tall, B.Sc. Nursing, Registered Nurse (RN) working in India, beautiful and family oriented. The boy should be Canadian/American Immigrant or Citizen. Please email recent picture and bio data to: sohalsp@gmail.com Or Call: 647-829-5872 (Leave Message) ***655*** Down-to-earth, handsome, intelligent, family-oriented Jat Sikh boy living in US since 1998, Belongs to well-educated,

humble family, 29 yrs. old, June 1986 born, 5'-10" tall, US Citizen, slim and athletic built, graduated from UCLA and working as a Mortgage Loan Officer. The girl should be educated and residing in US/Canada/UK. Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: nirmalranu@yahoo.com *** 655*** Match for Goldsmith girl, 27 yrs. old, 5'-7" tall, MBA, CMA, working as a manager financial analyst in a good company.

Father is well settled business man. whole family Canadian Citizen. The boy should be well educated, well settled, Canadian Citizen, belongs to reputed family. Please send your biodata and recent picture to: sunny_kanda94@hotmail.com or Call: 647-832-8208 *** 655*** Jat Sikh Alwal family seeking matrimonial alliance for their 1984 born son, 6’-3” tall, clean shaven, Canadian immigrant, M.Com degree holder. The girl should be family oriented and educated. Please email recent picture and bio-data to: ratwal07@gmail.com Or Call : 1403-615-4958 ***655*** Jat Sikh parents seek a suitable match for their son, 34 yrs. old, 5’-10” tall, born & raised in Canada, well settled in Job. The Girl should be beautiful, family oriented, born & raised in Canada.

Call : 1-604-671-0002 ***655*** Toronto based Jat Sikh Grewal educated family seeks professional match with Masters/ Bachelor degree (Engineer, Doctor, CGA or Lawyer) from Canada or USA for their Indian born, Canadian citizen, convent educated, Canadian university degree holder, fair complexioned daughter, born in 1977, 5'-3.5" tall, Well versed in both cultures, permanently employed with Federal Govt as a Senior Officer.

Brief marriage got annulled.

Divorcees with children please excuse. Serious inquiries only.

Respond with complete qualifications, profession, family details with recent pictures to: matrimonial13 @hotmail.com *** 655*** Required a professional Canadian match for Canada PR Arora girl, 27 yrs. old, 5'-6" tall,B.Pharmacy. Please send your bio-data & recent picture to: aroramail2015@gmail.com or call: 011-91-94174-15590 or 011-91-84270-80900 *** 655*** Jat Sikh parents invite matrimonial alliance for their daughter, 29 yrs. old,raised in Canada, 5’-8" tall, professionally employed, well versed in both cultures. The boy should be well educated, prosefsessionally settled, between 29-35 yrs. of age & from canada. Please send your bio-data & recent picture to: matad5757@gmail. com or call: 1-778-895-7815. *** 655***

Issue - 655 (11)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

‘Hairy panic’ grips Australian town SYDNEY Hairy panic is paralysing parts of an Australian town - but it’s not quite the existential nightmare it sounds, just a fastgrowing tumbleweed.

Homes in Wangaratta are being inundated with the

evocatively named plant pest, with some residents having to spend hours digging out their driveways. Townsfolk are no stranger to the native prickly menace, usually swept in by winds during the hot and dry summer months.But this season has seen an unusual amount of hairy panic known scientifically as Panicum effusum - with hundreds of thousands of the fuzzy, yellowish plants

swamping the entrances of homes, driveways and backyards. “It’s a fairly significant problem,” said Rod Roscholler, an administrator for Wangaratta, 250 kilometres (150 miles) northeast of Melbourne.

“For whatever reason, the climate, the weather, the temperatures, the rains, must have combined for it to be a ‘bumper crop’ this year,” he told AFP on Thursday. Residents spend hours clearing the weeds, piles of which can reach up to the roof.

“It’s physically draining and mentally more draining,” Pam Twitchett told the Seven news network.

Carpenter Jordan Solimo said the “hundreds of

thousands” of tumbleweed, which contains toxins that can be deadly for sheep, were so numerous he was not able to open his backyard door. “They’re covering the front of a couple of people’s (houses),” Solimo told AFP, adding that the phenomenon started around Christmas.

“A lot of people’s backyards get filled up with them. I tried to get out of my back door the other day but I couldn’t, it (the backyard) was just full of tumbleweed.” Solimo said he would wait for winds to temporarily move the thin, wire-like grass or use a leaf-blower to clear them away, “and then it’s all good before the next lot comes”.

sometimes tipped over into acrimony. One school of thought holds that socalled Flores Man descended from the larger Homo erectus and became smaller over hundreds of generations.

The proposed process for this is called “insular

Fossils of Homo floresiensis - dubbed “the hobbits” due to their tiny stature - were discovered on the island of Flores in 2003. Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they are an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease. The new study, based on an analysis of the skull bones, shows once and for all that the pint-sized people were not Homo sapiens, according to the researchers. Until now, academic studies have pointing in one direction or another - and scientific discourse has

dwarfing” - animals, after migrating across land bridges during periods of low sea level, wind up marooned on islands as oceans rise and their size progressively diminishes if the supply of food declines.

An adult hobbit stood a metre (three feet) tall, and weighed about 25 kilos (55 pounds).

Similarly, Flores Island was also home to a miniature race of extinct, elephant-like creatures called Stegodon. But other researchers argue that H. floresiensis was in fact a modern human whose tiny size and small brain - no bigger than a grapefruit -

Iranian state-run media outlets have added $600,000 to a bounty for the killing of British author Salman Rushdie imposed in 1989 over the publishing of his book “The Satanic Verses”.

The leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, that called on Muslims to the kill the author after his book was condemned as blasphemous, forcing him into years of hiding.

Iranian hardliners say Khomeini’s decree is irrevocable and eternal after his death. A wealthy Iranian religious

organisation offered $2.7 million reward to anyone carrying out the fatwa and in 2012 it increased the amount to $3.3 million.

The semi-official Fars news agency published a list of 40 news outlets adding to the pot. Fars itself earmarked $30,000. “These

media outlets have set the $600,000 bounty on the 27th anniversary of the historical fatwa to show it is still alive,” Mansour Amiri, organiser of a digital technology exhibition at which the money was announced this month, told Reuters.

New species of turtle found in Papua New Guinea SYDNEY A new species of freshwater turtle has been discovered in Papua New Guinea, one of a group which would have been present for the full geological formation of its main Pacific island, researchers said.

Mountainous and tropical Papua New Guinea is

Mystery ‘hobbits’ not humans like us PARIS Diminutive humans that died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study published Monday that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.

Iranian media outlets increase bounty for killing Salman Rushdie

was caused by a genetic disorder.One suspect was dwarf cretinism, sometimes brought on by a lack of iodine. Another potential culprit was microcephaly, which shrivels not just the brain and its boney envelope.

Weighing in with a new approach, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, a pair of scientists in France used high-tech tools to reexamine the layers of the “hobbit” skull.

More precise l y, t h e y looked at the remains of Liang Bua 1 (nicknamed LB1), whose cranium is the most intact of nine known specimens. “So f a r, w e h a v e b e e n basing our conclusions on images where you don’t really see very much,” said lead author Antoine Balzeau, a scientist at France’s Natural History Museum. Joining forces with Philippe Charlier, a palaeopathologist at Paris-Descartes University specialised in solving ancient medical mysteries, the researchers secured high-resolution images recently generated in Japan to compute maps of bone thickness variation. “There is a lot of information contained in bone layers of the skull,” Balzeau told AFP.

known for its rich biological diversity, but much of its remote areas are relatively unexplored. The new turtle is one of three distantlyrelated species - Elseya novaeguineae, Elseya schultzei and the new Elseya rhodini - found across New Guinea island, according to a recent study published in international journal Zootaxa.The eastern part of New Guinea island

is PNG while the western side is Indonesia. “The three species evolved from a common ancestor between 17 and 19 million years ago,” lead author Arthur Georges from the University of Canberra said Tuesday. “These ages are quite remarkable and came as a surprise, because it means these turtles have together seen the full geological development of

the island of New Guinea.

“The other species of freshwater turtle appear to have arrived after New Guinea had formed much as we see it today,” he added. The newlydiscovered turtle species is part of the Chelidae family of side-neck turtles which are restricted to South America and Australia, along with PNG, Timor and Rote in Indonesia.

Issue - 655 (12)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

145-year-old letter, delivered by balloon, turns up in Australia SYDNEY A letter from a man to his mother flown out of Paris by hot air balloon during the Prussian siege in 1870 has turned up in Australia’s National Archives, which said Tuesday it was keen to discover the family’s fate.

The Franco-Prussian War saw the Germans completely surround Paris for more than four months that year. Balloon mail was the only way communications from Paris could reach the rest of France, with dozens of flights made, mostly at night, and hundreds of thousands of letters delivered. One of them has been discovered by the National Archives. It was penned in French on December 6, 1870 by a man named Charles Mesnier (or Mesmier) to his mother, care of Monsieur Grussin (or Grossin) at 8 Place de la Ville, Pont-Audemer, in Normandy.

“It’s a intriguing human element to an important piece of history,”

letter was transferred to the archive’s Brisbane office from the

National Archives assistant director-general Louise Doyle told AFP. “We’re not sure how it ended up in Australia, but it would be fascinating to know more. If people see this it would be interesting to have more context in relation to this record.” The

former Queensland Post and Telegraph Museum in 2001, but there is no information about its origin.

It came to light recently as part of a joint project between the National Archives of Australia and the Archives Nationales in France. In the letter, which is full

UK govt intervenes in row over writing laws on animal skin

London Britain’s government intervened Monday to try and save the tradition of printing all laws on vellum made of animal skin, which dates back beyond the Magna Carta but is under threat to cut costs.

The House of Lords decided last week that the centuries-old practice would be scrapped and laws would be printed on paper instead of goatskin or sheepskin in a bid to save £80,000 (103,000 euros, $116,000) per year. That prompted fury among some lawmakers in the House of Commons and a senior lawmaker in Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party, James Gray, was set to organise a debate to try to block it. In a bid to secure the future use of vellum, Cabinet Office Minister Matthew Hancock told the Daily Telegraph that his department would be prepared to cover the cost of recording all laws on animal skins.

“While the world around us constantly changes, we should safeguard some of our great traditions and not let the use of vellum die out,” he said.

Paul Wright, general manager of

William Cowley, Britain’s last remaining vellum makers and suppliers to parliament, welcomed the intervention.

He argued that printing laws on vellum lent them a greater sense of gravity, giving the example of the result of Britain’s looming referendum on whether to leave the European Union. “If we record that on paper, does it not almost lessen it?” Wright told the BBC. But parliamentarians spoke out to make clear it was them, not the government, who would decide whether vellum would continue to be used.

“It’s an important principle that parliament, not government, holds and cares for its archives,” Chris Bryant, the main opposition Labour party’s shadow leader of the House of Commons, wrote on Twitter.

Vellum scrolls with laws on are kept in the Act Room in the Victoria Tower at the Houses of Parliament.

They take up a large amount of space - one, an act dealing with taxation dating back to 1821, is nearly 350 metres long and would take two men a full day to roll up.

of fervour, the man assures his mother he is in good health. “We don’t have meat every day and when we do get some it is not very much, but we can easily get by as things are and no one in our household is complaining,” he wrote. Mesnier added: “The desire to repulse the Prussians is right now the solitary concern of Paris. Any suffering can be borne rather than opening the gates of the capital to them.” He goes on to speak of “some real battles” around the city between November 29 and December 1 in which “our young soldiers have beaten the seasoned Prussian army”.“We have taken their cannon and captured 1,000 prisoners - these days of good fortune have raised the morale of the fearful,” he said.

“We cannot succeed in all our attacks but I have the firm conviction, my good mother, that the ultimate success will be for our just cause.” His hopes were dashed, with the city

surrendering in late January 1871 after sustained bombardment. Mesnier could not have expected a reply from his family. While the prevailing winds sent the balloons over the heads of the Prussian army towards French lines, they could not go the other way. The single-sheet letter is just 207mm x 133 mm (eight by five inches), folded into an envelope with the address on the reverse side and Eure, the department where Pont-Audemer is located, written on the top left along with “par ballon monte” for delivery by hot air balloon.

Doyle said it was sent on December 7 and arrived in Pont-Audemer on the 16th.

“He’s saying to his family not to worry about him and he’s really at the point of saying the city is pushing back against the Prussians,” said Doyle. “It’s one of those quirky and unusual documents and it would be fascinating to learn more.”

Oldest known Jerusalem settlement found JERUSALEM Israeli authorities announced Wednesday they had uncovered findings proving for the first time the existence of an established human settlement in Jerusalem as far back as 7,000 years ago.

A dig in the annexed east Jerusalem neighbourhood Shuafat revealed two homes with parts of walls and floors intact, as well as “pottery vessels, flint tools, and a basalt bowl” characteristic of the Chalcolithic era, the Israel Antiquities Authority said.The discoveries came to light during road work in the area.

Chalcolithic settlements have been found outside of Jerusalem, but prior to the Shuafat finding, only “fragmentary” remnants were unearthed in the city, according to the head of the authority’s prehistory branch, Amnon Barzilai. “Now in the new dig we found remnants of a village, an established village,” he said. In the Chalcolithic period humans were “still using stone tools, but began to create highlevel ceramics and for the first time, copper tools as well,” said Ronit Lupo, director of excavations at the authority.

They were also forming “established settlements with economies,” Lupo said.

Researchers were long puzzled by the lack of hard evidence of Chalcolithic settlements in

Chalcolithic period, considered by some a bridge between antiquity and modern human communal existence.

“Now we can know that even in the periods prior to the First and

Jerusalem, which was a central route connecting the Dead Sea to the coastal area. Chalcolithic settlements were found elsewhere in what is today Israel and Jordan. Barzilai said the focus on Jerusalem’s later historical eras could have led to researchers overlooking the

Second Temples, even in the Chalcolithic period, it was an inhabited area,” he said. To Lupo, the new findings give closure to a long quest for Chalcolithic settlements in Jerusalem. “For years in Jerusalem we had a feeling - we knew it was there somewhere but never found it.

Jermaine slams Trump for ‘botched facts’ about brother Michael Jackson Los Angeles Singer Jermaine Jackson slammed Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump over his recent remarks about his brother, legendary singer Michael Jackson. At CNN’s Republican presidential town hall in Columbia, South Carolina, Trump said he “knew the real story” of the King of Pop. “I knew the real story of

Michael Jackson. He was an unbelievably talented guy. He lost his confidence. And he lost tremendous confidence

because of, honestly, bad, bad, bad surgery... And, you know, believe it or not, when you lose your confidence in something, you can even lose your talent,” Trump said.

Michael Jackson died at age 50 in 2009 from an overdose of the anesthetic propofol, administered by his private doctor, who served two years in jail for involuntary manslaughter.

Issue - 655 (13)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Giant 404-carat diamond worth Icebergs have sound signature $14 million found in Angola

Washington A giant diamond, thought to be one of the biggest ever found, has been discovered in southern Africa.

Miners from an Australian company unearthed the virtually flawless white diamond in a remote part of Lunda Norte province in northeastern Angola.

The gemstone is thought to be 404 carats and valued at around £10million, according to the Lucapa Diamond Company.

Company chairman Miles Kennedy told Australian news outlet ABC the diamond - the largest ever found in Angola is valued at around $14million US dollars.

He told the news channel: “We’re not used to valuing 400-carat diamonds, but if we look at other diamonds slightly less weight than this, you’re looking in the order of $20 million.”

The diamond measures 7cm long smashes the record set by the ‘Angolan Star’, a 217-

carat diamond discovered in 2007. Lupaca believes the huge gem is the 27th biggest diamond ever recorded. The discovery was part of the Lulo Diamond Project, a partnership between Lucapa, private Angolan company Rosas e Pétalas and Angola’s national diamond company, Endiama, the Daily News reported.

Lucapa has been mining in the area since August last year.

London Listening to icebergs could help to assess the extent of glacier melt, scientists report.

Researchers in Poland, the UK and US have found different types of icebergs have their own acoustic signature as they calve away from the ice.Monitoring this could help to determine how much ice is being lost and the effect this could have on global sea level rise. The findings are reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Oskar Glowacki, from the Institute of Geophysics at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said: ‘Using acoustics, we can get very accurate data and we can collect this data continuously. We just place the hydrophones - underwater microphones - in the water and listen to the sounds.’ The researchers used their kit to capture every rumble, groan and snap as ice cleaved away from the Hans Glacier in Svalbard.

Combining this with time-lapse photography, they discovered that the birth of different types of icebergs creates different sounds. The team found three

acoustic signatures from this tidal glacier. This not only allows them to work out how ice is crumbling into the water, but they can use the sounds to determine the stage of the break up, even

this underwater. ‘After this, the ice block detaches from the ice wall and it starts to appear on the surface. And using underwater acoustics, we can identify all stages of this sound.’

when it is taking place underwater.

Dr Glowacki said: ‘It was really, really difficult to study these submarine events. ‘We know now that when a submarine event starts, there is a disintegration below the sea surface, there are many cracks, and cracks are propagating and we can listen to

Currently, glaciers are mainly monitored using satellites, but while they can spot huge ice break-ups, smaller blocks of ice are harder to detect. The researchers say that listening to the ocean could help, allowing them to more accurately monitor how much ice is being lost to the sea as global temperatures rise.

Balloonists make history crossing Pacific ALBUQUERQUE A pair of balloonists trying to fly to North America from Japan passed a major milestone on Friday that could soon be declared a world record for the length of time spent in the air by a gas-filled balloon, a spokeswoman said.The feat came a day after the team of Troy Bradley, an American, and Leonid Tiukhtyaev, a Russian, logged what they also believe to be the distance record for such flights, flying more than 5,260

miles (8,465 km) by Thursday afternoon, according to a tracking website set up for their journey. The existing distance record, set in 1981, also came on a transpacific flight, of 5,209 miles (8,383 km). The existing record for time spent in the air is 137 hours, set in 1978 by a team crossing the Atlantic.

Bradley and Tiukhtyaev, who call their team and balloon Two Eagles, hope to land on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico on Saturday morning, spokeswoman Kim

Vesely said. The pair took off for their trip on Jan. 24. ‘The team is now fully focused on the final and most important task: landing the balloon safely after a successful crossing of the Pacific Ocean,’ she said. Vesely said she did not formally call the team’s feats a record because that designation will be decided by the U.S. National Aeronautic Association and the Fédèration Aéronautique Internationale the international air sports federation.

New UK rape rules: Men must Frequent sex no bar for prove women said ‘yes’ to sex the elderly in Britain

Radical changes to the way sex offences are investigated have been hailed as a “huge step

forward” by campaigners. New guidance to be issued to all police forces and prosecutors will

require rape suspects to convince the authorities that a woman consented to sex.

Police and prosecutors must now put a greater burden of responsibility on rape suspects to demonstrate how the complainant had consented “with full capacity and freedom to do so”, according to the new guidance.

Rape victims should no longer be “blamed” by society if they are too drunk to consent to sex, or if they simply freeze and say nothing, Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, said. “For too long society has blamed rape victims for confusing the issue of consent - by drinking or dressing provocatively for example - but it is not they who are confused, it is society itself and we must challenge that,” Saunders told the the first national crown prosecution service/police conference on rape investigations and prosecutions in London.

London Contrary to popular misconceptions, a significant study has found that older people are continuing to enjoy active sex lives well into their seventies and eighties. According to researchers from the University of Manchester and Britain’s leading independent social research institute NatCen Social Research, more than half (54 percent) of men and almost a third (31 percent) of women over age 70 reported they were still sexually active.“A third of these men and women were having frequent sex - meaning at least twice a month,” revealed the data from the latest wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA).“This is the first nationally-representative study to

include people over age 80 when asking older men and women in England about their sexual health,” said David Lee, an Age UK Research Fellow at the University of Manchester’s school

of social sciences.We hope our findings improve public health by countering stereotypes and misconceptions about late-life sexuality, and offer older people a reference against which they may relate their own experiences and expectations, he noted.

Issue - 655 (14)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Russia prison chief arrested for ‘stealing 50km road’

MOSCOW Russia on Wednesday detained a senior prison service official on suspicion of stealing a 50kilometre (31 mile) stretch of public road, investigators said.

Alexander Protopopov oversaw the dismantling of a concrete highway and sold off the slabs as prison service chief in the far northern Komi region, the Investigative Committee said in a statement. The road, which was made up of over 7,000 reinforced concrete slabs, was ‘dismantled and driven away’ over the period of more than a year, between 2014 and 2015.

The concrete slabs were subsequently used by a commercial company which also sold them on for a profit, investigators said.

Protopopov, now acting deputy chief of the national prison service, faces charges of misappropriating of state property while using his

official position, which could lead to 10 years in jail. While heading Komi region’s prison service from 2010 to 2015, Protopopov won awards, including a medal for creating ‘spiritual unity,’ according to the prison service’s website.

Other prison service officials participated in the scheme, pretending to dispose of waste, with one arrested so far, prosecutors said earlier.

Investigators said the scheme had cost the Russian Federation over six million rubles ($79,000/ 73,000 euros). Road construction is one of the most corrupt sectors in Russia, with costs much higher than on comparable projects in other countries.

The construction of a mountain road for the Sochi Winter Olympic Games cost about $8 billion, with Russian media claiming it would cost the same to slather the 48kilometre stretch with black caviar.

Turkmenistan takes cigarettes off shelves ASHGABAT Turkmenistan’s authorities have forced shops to stop selling cigarettes, traders in Ashgabat said Thursday, after its president urged citizens to kick the habit. State antinarcotics officials ‘came to our shop recently and forced us to remove cigarettes from the shelves, threatening us with huge fines,’ said Bairam Saryev, the 34year-old owner of a small store in the capital.

Saryev’s shop was one of those targeted in a wave of raids in the isolated Central Asian country after President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov slammed the country’s anti-smoking strategy at a televised government meeting on January 5.

Berdymukhamedov threatened to dismiss the chief of the anti-narcotics

agency.’Since then, owners of kiosks and shops have only sold cigarettes under the counter and ‘only to regular customers and friends,’ said one Ashgabat kiosk trader

sweeping move has resulted in already high prices for a pack of cigarettes doubling on the street from around 25 manat to 50 manat (over $14), Vepa said. ‘Because

called Vepa. The ban on cigarette sales has not been officially announced or published by the government. But 24-yearold Vepa said that the fine for violating the ban amounted to ‘10 (average) monthly salaries.’The

of the high price, sales of single cigarettes are growing, for about 2 manat apiece,’ he said.

Berdymukhamedov, who took the helm of the Caspian nation in 2006, has presided over a crackdown on smokers.Turkmenistan is

now the country with the lowest percentage of smokers in the world, according to the World Health Organisation. Only eight percent of the population in Turkmenistan smokes, WHO chief Margaret Chan said last year, calling it ‘the lowest national indicator in the world.’ The country’s previous president Saparmurat Niyazov was a chain smoker who quit in 2000 after heart surgery and subsequently signed an anti-smoking decree.

Gradually stricter measures have been phased in since then, including a hike in excise taxes for tobacco in 2011 and a ban on smoking in public areas in 2013.

These measures had already made cigarettes in Turkmenistan more expensive than in any other country in the ex-Soviet region.

VIENNA Archeologists in Austria said Thursday they had found what they believe to be Europe’s oldest prosthetic implant in the shape of a wooden foot dating from the sixth century.The discovery was made in the grave of a man missing his left foot and ankle at Hemmaberg in southern Austria. Instead at the end of his leg was an iron ring and remnants of a clump of wood and leather. ‘He appears to

have got over the loss of his foot and lived for two more years at least with this implant, and walking pretty well,’ Sabine Ladstaetter from the Austrian Archeological Institute (OeAI) told AFP. The skeleton of what appears to have been a high-ranking Frankish

figure was discovered in 2013, but it is only now that the ‘very, very surprising findings’ about the foot have emerged, she said.‘The infection risk alone would have been extremely high, which shows how good the medical treatment was.

And don’t forget this was

at the edge of the civilised world in the sixth century,’ Ladstaetter said. Until pagan Slavs arrived in the 7th century, Hemmaberg was the most important Christian pilgrimage site north of the Alps containing six churches. It was rediscovered in the early 20th century.

1,500-year-old wooden foot found in Austria

Chinese Internet users prefer Pak to India as neighbour

Beijing An online survey by a government-run newspaper in Beijing has found that more Chinese Internet users prefer Pakistan as a neighbour than India, while Japan ranked as the least popular neighbouring country.The survey of 2 lakh Internet users by the Global Times, a tabloid known for its hard-line nationalistic views, asked Chinese “netizens” to rank their favourite neighbouring countries, as well as to vote on which country they would choose as an ideal neighbour if they could “play God” and redraw global borders.

As many as 13,196 people said they wanted to “move away” Japan, which ranked as the least popular neighbouring country. The other countries they would prefer to not neighbour were Philippines (11,671), Vietnam (11,620), North Korea (11,024), India (10,416), Afghanistan (8,506) and Indonesia (8,167), the newspaper said.Among their favoured neighbours which they would prefer to share borders with, Pakistan ranked the highest (11,831), followed by Kazakhstan, Nepal and Tajikistan. China and Pakistan in fact do not

share borders, with China sharing a border with Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

Sweden was voted as the most ideal neighbour that Chinese Internet users would choose to have if they could redraw the map of the world, with 9,776 votes, followed by New Zealand, Germany, the Maldives, Singapore, Norway and Thailand.

While Chinese scholars told the paper the survey reflected China’s bilateral relations and its territorial disputes, its validity was questioned by independent Chinese media experts.

The 2 lakh internet users cast their vote on the Chinese website of the Global Times, which has a fan following for its hard-line and nationalist views. For this reason, suggested one Beijing media professor, the Party-controlled newspaper’s surveys are usually to be taken “with a few grains of salt” as they “often reflect government views on most issues”.

Issue 655 (15)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Sonam Kapoor delivers her career-best performance in Madhvani’s film Director: Ram Madhvani Cast:Sonam Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Yogendra Tiku, Jim Sarbh Rating: 4 Stars Sonam Kapoor’s adventures as a leading lady have largely revolved around sombre romances and romantic comedies. With Neerja, she tackles a story inspired by true events, a drama where reality bites.

She has been entrusted to essay an inspiring young woman whose bravery outshined her beauty.

ness (serve the passengers, comfort and calm them as well as her colleagues) would win her many posthumous awards including the Ashok Chakra and from United States (bravery) and Pakistan (human kindness). It is a dream role for any actress and Kapoor pulls it off, delivering her careerbest performance as she assuredly plays an abused wife, a beloved daughter and a flight attendant caught in her worst nightmare.

Neerja is as much a biopic

Flight attendant-model Neerja Bhanot was just two days shy of her 23rd birthday when she was killed in a hijack in Karachi.

As the head purser of the flight, her decisions (to hide the passports of the American passengers), actions (inform the pilots who would escape and foil the plans of the Palestinian terrorists) and selfless-

as it is a taut thriller which keeps viewers hooked even as the fate of its protagonist is already known.

Written by Saiwyn Quadras, who also wrote another woman-against-allodds film in Mary Kom, the film respectfully and subtly pays a tribute to the young woman than be a glorifying hagiography. Ad filmmaker Ram Madhvani, who returns

to feature films 14 years after Let’s Talk, is the captain of the proceedings here. A large part why Neerja works is the way Madhvani, cinematographer Mitesh Mirchandani, editor Monisha R Baldawa and production designers Aparna Sud and Anna Ipe collaborate to create an earnest portrait of Neerja as India’s daughter. Her rapport with her parents and two brothers makes her more relatable. Her bedroom feels lived in. And the aircraft where she is confined for more than half the film’s running time credibly conveys the feeling of being trapped.

Neerja is a rising model, a woman wary of embracing another man after an unhappy marriage and an avid fan of Rajesh Khanna. The latter is a running theme in the film which is a source for few initial laughs and credit to Quadras who weaves it beautifully in the film. When four men force their way into the aircraft, Neerja has to overcome her own fears and past to cope with a situation that no amount of training can truly prepare you for.

The film shuttles between Neerja’s difficult past and her more difficult present situation, but the transition is never jarring and enables viewers to better understand her state of mind.

Shot in handheld, the occasionally jerky footage

creates the sense of urgency and dread. The casting of the innumerable frantic passengers stranded on the flight is well done. So are the four terrorists including Jim Sarbh as the angry and uncontrollable one. Azmi as Neerja’s mother is the

Bryan Cranston’s film script is exact and precise Directed by Jay Roach Starring: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Michael Stuhlbarg, Louis C K, John Goodman, Dean O’Gorman Rating: 4 Stars Dalton Trumbo was one of the Hollywood 10 targeted and jailed for being “Communists”, at a time soon after World War II and heading into Korean War, when that was a very bad, very unpatriotic term in America. With Bernie Sanders, a self-declared “democratic socialist” his rivals insist that’s just a more acceptable term for Communist knocking at the door of the US Presi-

dency, this then is as good a time as there ever will be to have a film like Trumbo.

Cranston, nominated for Best Actor Oscar for the role, plays the hit as well as critically acclaimed screenwriter with some verve and a lot of feeling.

Hauled before Congressional hearings and attacked by the ‘Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals’, he lays out clearly what is at stake here, at one point denouncing the attempt to “indict opinion to criminalise thought”. The script by John McNamara, based on a book by Bruce Cook, spends too much time perhaps on Trumbo’s family life

(including a woefully underused Lane). However, at every instant that he fights external demons, the film is exact and precise.

That “vaguer” the enemy, the longer the war; that “traitor” is the easiest charge to level against a critic; that “the Congress has every right to go after who it chooses” is a dangerous line to let a government cross; that fighting the system from within is as difficult as battling it from without; and that the bravest men can be bent to a government’s will. At the same time, Trumbo is a fascinating account of how show business works, where success ultimately

subverts everything else.

While on “the black list”, Trumbo wrote scripts under pseudonym and won Oscars for Roman Holiday and The Brave One, paving the way for that taint to collapse under its own contradictions. He found jobs with Blist producers, churned out scrips sometimes the same day, set up a small business of sorts with other blacklisted screenwriters, and upended Hollywood from right under it.

The charge from the other side is led by former actress and gossip writer Hedda Hopper, played by a positively poisonous and rapaciously bitter Helen Mirren.

commanding supporting character. The scene in which she has to wake up her daughter for the flight is a poignant one. There are many more well-crafted scenes including one in which Kapoor in near silence demonstrates exhaustion, sadness, joy and

resolve. Bollywood has been short on films which can be billed as one-woman army and in Neerja we have finally one. This is a heartbreaking watch, but never a mawkish one. As the end credits roll, audiences will fall for Neerja Bhanot’s valour and also her charm.

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Here’s what Swara Bhaskar wrote in her open letter to Umar Khalid Prem Ratan Dhan Payo actor Swara Bhaskar, a JNU alumni, has written an open letter to varsity’s student Umar Khalid, who is being searched in connection with a sedition case.

Khalid is among the students, who are being looked out by police in connection with an event at JNU against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised.

In the letter to Khalid, Swara who studied sociology at JNU, has also questioned him for hiding from police saying, that is being taken as the most incriminating evidence of his guilt of being a terror sympathiser.

“No, you are not a terrorist Umar Khalid, you are a radical and an idiot with poor judgement of what to say where, but you do NOT deserve to be jailed, tortured or killed for that,” she said in the letter.

“I am a JNU alumnus. I spent two years doing my Masters in JNU at CSSS and am now a Bollywood actress.

I was never a member of any student political party in JNU though I voted Left. I scoffed and chatted with friends about how silly Democratic Students Union (with which Khalid was formerly associated)

still was,” wrote Bhaskar.

“That was until Kanhaiya was arrested and you and six or seven others went underground, everyone got slapped with sedition charges and the public discourse in this country erupted into the most emotive and also most polemical discussion about patriotism and sedition,” she added.

Swara said she was not even thinking about Khalid as she was focused on freeing Kanhaiya by “waging my little Facebook-Twitter war” with so called patriots but she started worrying when TV news started linking him to a terrorist organisation.

“This discomfiture expanded steadily in the coming days as I began to see your name flashing everywhere as the runaway TERRORIST. Your family, I’m sorry to tell you, is being harassed. Your parents and sisters are being threatened in diverse ways....”

The Tanu Weds Manu actor wrote, “Why did you go into hiding and not surrender to the police? You know that is being taken as the most incriminating evidence of your guilt of being a terror sympathiser, if not a terrorist, right?,” she added. Swara also participated in a solidarity march for JNU students at Jantar Mantar last week.

Salman Khan reveals why awards don’t matter much to him

Superstar Salman Khan, who won accolades for his performance in films like “Bajrangi Bhaijaan” and “Prem Ratan Dhan Payo”, and even got nominated at various award functions this year, feels that the “young generation should be given a chance to win awards” as “awards don’t matter much in my life”.

The actor was present at the red carpet of Zee Cine Awards 2016, held here on Saturday night.

Stating that he loves attending award functions and performing, he said: “I feel very happy when others get awards but they don’t matter much in my life. I like award functions as the whole industry

comes together,” “We all keep busy so, at award functions, we get to meet our friends and it feels nice,” he added.

He further said that he should be kept out of the competition so that the younger generation can get a chance and move forward. “Delete me from the competition. We are here since long, we have been nominated... I can come and perform, attend the award shows but I think now young generation should be given a chance to win awards,” the “Sultan” actor, who got the Best Actor (Viewers’ Choice) for “Bajrangi Bhaijaan” at Zee Cine Awards, said.

Except Priyanka, not many have managed to break out into West says Sonakshi Sinha

Priyanka ChoPra to shoot for BaywatCh after osCars 2016 Priyanka Chopra, who has been roped for a negative role in Hollywood film Baywatch, will be joining the cast and crew after Oscars 2016. The 33-year-old actor is currently shooting for the next season of Quantico in Montreal, Canada.

Priyanka Chopra has to juggle between Hollywood and Bollywood projects after she signed up for Dwayne The Rock Johnson starrerBaywatch. She has to promote her muchawaited film, Jai Gangaajal which is set to release on March, 4 2016.

Before Prakash Jha directorial Jai Gangaajal releases in India, Priyanka will have to attend Oscars as she has been invited as one of presenters this year. In an

interview with NDTV, the Bajirao Mastani actor said, “As soon as the Oscars wrap up on February 28 night, I leave for Miami. I begin shooting for Baywatch the very next day, even though the unit starts earlier. I will be juggling Baywatch and Quantico until April. So, it will be a lot of travel between Miami and Montreal. Makers of both have allowed me to do the balancing act. It is going to be crazy. I have a nightmare schedule ahead. I shoot for Quantico from Monday to Friday.” And if this tight schedule is not enough to keep Priyanka busy, she has her new production house, Purple Pebble Pictures (PPP) to take care which was launched last year.

Actress Sonakshi Sinha says besides Priyanka Chopra, not many actors from the Indian film industry have managed to “break out into the West”.

“So far, except Priyanka not many people have managed to break out into the West in a big way.

Because I feel they don’t have great roles for Indian actors. But, Priyanka has done in that way. She has broken all the barriers. I think she is doing fantastic,” Sonakshi said at the

Zee Cine Awards 2016 here on Saturday night.

While an international break is always touted as a big deal in Bollywood, the “Dabangg” actress said she is happy working in Bollywood. Sonakshi, who released her debut single “Aaj mood ishqholic hai”, also said that she will work on another single as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Sonakshi is now waiting for the release of “Akira” and “Force 2”.

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Kristen Stewart slams celebs for ‘selling’ their lives

Khloe Kardashian lost her virginity at the age of 15

Actress Kristen Stewart says she hates it when people sell their lives to the media in other to get publicity.

When asked about the matter, Stewart said that she strongly disagrees with celebrities who did the action to bring them to fame and raise money, reports aceshowbiz.com.

“People who are interested in selling a life as if it’s a comic book story?

It’s just money, money, money, money,” Stewart was quoted as saying

by AnOther magazine.

“It’s just bulls**t distraction, and a lot of people make a lot of

money on that, because we wanna get distracted,” she added. The “Twilight” star went on to say that at one point in her life she also needs some distraction, but she hardly finds a place for it. She says that she wants to go to a place where she can dance

like nobody is watching.

“I danced the other night, and it felt so f**king good. And it’s so not like

Julianne Hough quits ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Actress-dancer Julianne Hough won’t return as a judge on the upcoming 22nd season of dancing reality show ‘Dancing with the Stars’.

The 27-year-old, who won the coveted Mirrorball Trophy twice as a professional on the show, announced she is taking a break from the glitz and glamour of the dancing competition, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

“I promise it’s not the last you’ll see of me in the ballroom.

I will miss being on the panel for season 22, but have a lot of exciting stuff coming that I look forward to sharing,” Hough said.

However, there is some good news for fans as head judge Len Goodman will be back alongside Bruno Tonioli after sitting

out the last series to spend time with his family. Hough’s departure may not be permanent as

show bosses are keen to see the star “back in the ballroom” in the future.

Producer Rob Wade said: “Julianne will always be a part of the ‘Dancing with the Stars’ family and we hope to see her back in the ballroom in the future.”

Reality TV personality Khloe Kardashian told her sister Kourtney that she lost her virginity at the age of 15.

While playing the game of “Know Thy Sister” for her website kourtneykardashian.com, Khloe confessed about her sexual life.

Kourtney said: “We are going to play a game called Know Thy Sister, a question is going to pop up and we have to see if we know the answer.”

She then asked Khloe when her first sexual encounter was, and she wrote down on a white board the number 15, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

me. I envy people like that so much. I’m pretty physical, but I really need to let myself go.

Honestly, I just wish I could f**king dance more. That’s all,” she said.

Harry Porter star Emma Watson is taking a year’s hiatus from acting to read more on gender equality and feminism.

The UN goodwill ambassador, known for her HeForShe initiative, says she wants to read books and study about feminism, a topic that she has been vocal about, reports aceshowbiz.com.

“I’m taking a year away from acting to focus on two things, really. My own personal development is one,” Watson was quoted as saying

by Paper magazine.

“My own personal task is to read one book a week, and also to read a book a month as part of my book club. I’m doing a huge amount of reading and study just on my own,” she added.

The 25-year-old said she wants to “listen to as

many different women in the world as I can”.

“That’s something that I’ve been doing on my own, through the UN, the HeForShe campaign, and my work generally,” she said.

Emma along with the Hollywood actor Benedict Cumberbatch has been appointed as one of Oxford University’s visiting fellows, among nine others members. Being a visiting a fellow means she has to engage with students at the university from time to time.

The actor will next be seen in Beauty And The Beast which is scheduled to release in 2017.

A few days back it was revealed that Emma is dating 35-year-old tech wizard William Mack Knight. The two recently spent their holidays in Big Sur.

And Khloe, 31, added: “I think it was 15?”

Elsewhere in the game, Kourtney was asked when her first lip-locking session was and she said it was “a late first kiss”.

The mother-of-three was shocked when Khloe asked her if it was in fifth grade she had it.

She responded: “What?

Who do you think I am?”

However, Kourtney clarified and teased that while she was late to kissing she did other stuff with boys, which “made up for it.” “I remember it being a late first kiss. But I made up for it by doing more than just kissing,” she said.

Emma Watson takes one year hiatus from acting to study feminism

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Google’s Sundar Pichai backs Apple over cracking shooter’s phone Washington Google’s Indian-American chief executive Sundar Pichai sided with rival Apple in its battle over a court order to help the FBI access information on the encrypted iPhone used by

gunned down 14 people at a social services agency Dec 2 in San Bernardino, California, before being killed in a shootout with police.

FBI Director James Comey said last week that inves-

a Pakistani-American shooter in San Bernardino.

Pichai Wedenesday directed followers to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook’s open letter Tuesday night arguing that helping the FBI try to get into the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook would sabotage the security of “tens of millions of American citizens.”

Farook and his Pakistani origin wife, Tashfeen Malik,

tigators still haven’t been able to get at the information on Farook’s iPhone 5c. A Riverside, California court Tuesday directed Apple to help FBI crack the phone by developing software to hack into one of its own devices.

In a series of tweets Wednesday evening, Pichai argued that even that would essentially put tech companies in the position of hacking their own cus-

tomers: 1/5 Important post by @tim_cook. Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy.

2/5 We know that law enforcement and intelligence agencies face significant challenges in protecting the public against crime and terrorism 3/5 We build secure products to keep your information safe and we give law enforcement access to data based on valid legal orders 4/5 But that’s wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices & data.

Could be a troubling precedent 5/5 Looking forward to a thoughtful and open discussion on this important issue The government, Cook contends, is asking Apple to create a ‘backdoor’ to its own security systems.

“Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them,” Cook wrote in a letter published on the company’s website.

Hindu priest killed in attack in Bangladesh’s Panchagarh New Delhi A Hindu priest was hacked to death and two members of the minority community were injured in an attack by unidentified people outside a temple in northern Bangladesh early on Sunday.

Police said the attack occurred at Deviganj Upazila of Panchagarh district at 6.30 am when priest Jogeshwar Roy of Sri Sri Shantu Santo Gaurio monastery emerged from the temple on the banks of Karatoa river.

At least three unidentified men attacked and killed the 50-year-old priest with sharp weapons. Local police chief Gias Uddin said the attackers also opened fire and exploded several homemade bombs, injuring Gopal Chandra Roy and Nitai Pada Das, who had come to the temple

to pray. Uddin said police have no clues about who was behind the attack and why.

No group claimed responsibility for the attack.

threatened in Bangladesh. A Christian pastor survived an attack, also in northern Bangladesh, last October. Last year, an Italian

Local residents told police the attackers were unknown to them and came to the temple on a motorcycle. Some of them said they saw three men on the motorcycle flee the area but they did not chase them as they could not understand what had happened. In recent months, several Christian and Hindu priests have been

and a Japanese national were killed in similar but separate attacks while four secular bloggers and a publisher were killed, allegedly by radical groups.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for some attacks but the government rejected the claim and pointed to local radical groups.

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Will Brexit trigger another referendum in Scotland?

London If the vote in the EU referendum on June 23 is for Britain to leave the European Union, it will trigger demands for an-

ments in Scotland.

Pro-Brexit Iain Duncan Smith, a cabinet minister in the David Cameron government, claimed that remaining in the

other referendum on Scotland’s independence, first minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Sunday, reflecting its major implications for the country’s unity and future.

Scotland narrowly voted to remain in the United Kingdom during the September 2014 referendum. Sturgeon said Scotland wanted to remain in the European Union, but a Brexit will be a strong reason to hold another referendum, given strong pro-EU senti-

EU would make Britain more vulnerable to Paris-style attacks, putting forth another reason for leaving the EU. Campaigning began in right earnest after Cameron on Saturday announced the deal he had secured in Brussels, with critics calling it minor concessions that would not alter the status quo on the issue of Britain needing to follow EU laws or on the emotive issue migration.

In a major boost to the Brexit

camp, the popular Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson decided “after a huge amount of heartache” to campaign for Britain to leave the EU. Widely tipped as the next Conservative leader, Johnson said the EU was eroding British sovereignty. Cameron’s deal would not bring about fundamental change of its membership, he added.

However, he said he would not enter into any public debate with Cameron during the campaigning. Besides John son, the Brexit camp has already enlisted as many as six ministers, including Justice secretary Michael Gove and minister of state for Employment Priti Patel.

The EU referendum has brought rivals on the same side of the campaign: Cameron, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Sturgeon support Britain remaining in the EU. Top Tories such as Gove, Chris Gayling are on the same side as Nigel Farage of UK Independence Party.

Prince William’s palace staff may go on strike protesting pay cuts London Prince William and wife Kate’s Kensington Palace staff may go on strike in protest against a 3,000 pound pay cut.

The staff, who deal with members of the public visiting the palace in central London, have been asked to accept

tecting the exhibits and helping visitors, as well as working in the ticket office.

The staff at Kensington Palace are threatening to go on strike after rejecting plans forcing them to accept a 3,000 pounds pay cut, the report said.

reduced working hours, which will hit their annual earnings hard, ‘The Sunday Times’ reported.

The UK’s Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) is to hold talks on a compromise deal on Monday but a source close to the negotiations told the newspaper that a ballot to strike was likely to follow.

All the workers involved are uniformed wardens who are employed in the parts of the palace open to the public, pro-

One staff member was quoted as saying: “It’s in the contract that they can cut the London living allowance and they’re also cutting the starting times in the morning and the finishing times. I’ll miss it if I have to go but I just couldn’t carry on working here if it goes ahead.”

It follows a similar dispute at Windsor Castle last year, thought to be the first in the history of the monarchy, which saw staff threatening to

strike over additional duties that they were being asked to take on without a pay rise.

The palace, which is the London residence of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte, underwent a 12 million pound refurbishment which completed in 2012.

Improvements to the private apartments now used by William and Kate were completed in 2014 and cost a further 4.5 million pounds.

The public part of the building is run

by Historic Royal Palaces charity and attracts about 400,000 visitors a year to its exhibitions, restaurant and functions.

The charity said: “The changes to working hours affect a small number of colleagues in the front-of-house team at Kensington Palace.

We have given a year’s notice of the planned changes and are currently in discussions with the PCS union.”

“We value our staff very highly and hope to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement,” the charity said.

Uber driver arrested over killing six in U.S. shooting rampage Chicago A man arrested early today on suspicion of shooting dead six people in the northern US state of Michigan was an Uber driver who may have been picking up fares just before the killing spree began.

Uber confirmed that the suspect, 45-year-old Jason Brian Dalton, was a driver for the ride-sharing company, adding he had passed a background check and had no criminal record.

“We have reached out to the police to help with their investigation in any way that we can,” Uber’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, said in a statement.

Dalton was apprehended at 12:40 AM today. He is believed to be the gunman who opened fire at three different locations in the city of Kalamazoo, killing six people and seriously wounding two others, police said.

A woman was seriously wounded outside an apartment complex, two people were killed at a car dealership, and four more were shot to death and a teenage girl seriously wounded at a chain restaurant.

Kalamazoo County prosecutor Jeff Getting said Dalton, who surrendered without incident during a traffic stop, will face murder charges in court tomorrow.

There is “no reason to believe” more than one person was involved in the crime, Getting added.

Local resident Matt Mellen said he was Dalton’s passenger just a couple of hours before the rampage began, and was taken on a hair-raising ride.

“We were driving through medians, driving through the lawn, speeding

along and when we came to a stop, I jumped out the car and ran away,” Mellen told WWMT, a CBS affiliate.

“He wouldn’t stop. He just kind of kept looking at me like -- ‘Don’t you want to get to your friend’s house’ and I’m like, I want to get there alive.”

Mellen said he jumped out of the car at 4:30 PM, and called 911,

the phone number for emergencies. He told his fiancee what had happened and she posted Dalton’s picture on Facebook as a warning to others. “We’re looking into his connection to Uber and whether or not he was picking up fares in between the shootings,” Kalamazoo Public Safety Chief Jeff Hadley said, according to CNN. The shootings began at 6:00 PM. “What it looks like is we have somebody driving around, finding people and shooting them dead in their tracks,” Kalamazoo County Undersheriff Paul Matyas told local media. “This is your worst nightmare, when you have somebody just driving around randomly killing people,” he added. The gunman’s first victim was a woman who was with her three children outside an apartment complex when she was shot, he said.

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Umar Khalid who is facing sedition charges, was associated with the Democratic Students’ Union.

$I]DO $I]DO $I]DO 6KRZ 6KRZ 6KRZ Maharashtra Police Inspector claims arrested DU academic Professor Saibaba recruited four JNU students for underground Maoist cadre

By SIDDHARTHA RAI The Maharashtra Police’s startling allegations may bring further infamy to the already-embattled Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

The Inspector General of Police (IGP) of Nagpur Range, Ravindra Kadam, has claimed to Mail Today that a few students of the university had joined the underground Maoist cadre at the behest of arrested Delhi University (DU) professor GN Saibaba, currently lodged in Nagpur jail.

The Maharashtra Police have also said those students who joined the Maoists in their anti-State struggle were members of the Democratic Students’ Union (DSU). This is the same students’ body Umar Khalid, whom the Delhi police want to question in relation to the Afzal Guru show case, was associated with.

Khalid was one of the organisers of the event to commemorate Parliament attack convict Guru and is also one of the five accused in the sedition case pertaining to the February 9 show on the JNU campus.

At that event, hanged terrorist Guru was lauded as a “martyr” while antiIndia and pro-Pakistan slogans were allegedly raised.

Kadam claimed that Professor Saibaba had been active with Left-leaning students of both JNU and DU, and had been indoctrinating and recruiting them for the Maoist movement.

Gadchiroli Police had arrested Saibaba in 2014 for his alleged links with Maoists.

“While Professor Saibaba was working in DU, he was also associated with students’ activities in JNU and DU, especially the DSU. Saibaba used to guide students from these universities. In course of time, Saibaba had prepared and recruited four students as Maoist cadre,” Kadam said.

DU professor GN Saibaba was arrested in 2013 for his alleged links with Maoists.

Members of the JNUTA do not want the accused to surrender.

Incidentally, the professor’s name had cropped up during the interrogation of another JNU student, Hem Mishra, who was arrested by the Maharashtra Police from Gadchiroli district. Mishra too was a member of DSU. The IGP also claimed that one of Saibaba’s recruits was Ritupan Goswami, a JNU scholar.

“One of them is Ritupan Goswami, a scholar who completed his PhD from JNU. He has already joined the underground cadre of CPI (M-L). He is not just a cardholder of the underground party, but also a functionary; he is the general secretary. All this has been corroborated in our investigation,” Kadam said.

The police, however, refused to divulge the

names of the other three.

“We do not know who the three others are yet, but they also seem to be from DSU. Probably, all four are from JNU, but so far we are sure of Goswami having been a student of JNU,” the top officer said.

Meanwhile, Saibaba’s wife denied that her husband had anything to do with recruiting or indoctrinating students on behalf of any organisation. “My husband did not indoctrinate or recruit students for any organisation. He was extremely popular among students across the country, students from both JNU and DU used to visit him. But, there was no recruitments for the Maoist movement,” Saibaba’s wife Vasantha Kumari told Mail Today.

According to the Maharashtra police, a parallel investigation has also been undertaken by the special cell of the Delhi

police to look into the Saibaba case, but when Mail Today tried to get details, Special CP (Special Cell) Arvind Deep said he was not familiar with the case. Additional CP (Special Cell) did not respond despite multiple calls and messages. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Monday asked the Maharashtra government to look for an alternate arrangement to house the wheelchair-bound Saibaba at Gadchiroli. He is currently lodged in Nagpur jail. The SC also directed the state to provide sufficient medical facilities to him. The bench fixed the matter for further hearing on February 29. By then the state government has to inform the SC about the facilities to be provided to Saibaba. During the hearing, the counsel for the state government said it would conclude the trial in a period of two months and asserted that he had not been kept in solitary confinement.

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Sedition suspects Ashutosh Kumar (clockwise from left) and Anirban Bhattacharya were seen on the JNU campus late, Two of the accused in the JNU sedition controversy, JNUSU general secretary Ram Naga and Anant Prakash .

Teachers throw weight behind the five accused The Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association (JNUTA) on Monday came out in support of the prime accused in the sedition row, Umar Khalid and four others.

The JNUTA held a meeting with the university vicechancellor M Jagadesh Kumar in which they demanded the reconstitution of the inquiry committee of the case.

Also, they sought the removal of registrar Bhupinder Zutshi, whom they accused of being an ‘RSS man’ and want the charges against the students to be dropped.

According to sources, in the teachers’ view there is no question of surrender as the video evidence against the students is ‘fake’. “We have been meeting the V-C repeatedly hoping that he would come out with a positive solution. Around 300 teachers met him on Monday to discuss demands and suggestions. We had already submitted a letter and resolution to him on Saturday. Right now, we have zero faith and want the administration to take up a transparent process,� Bikramaditya Choudhary, secretary, JNUTA said. The teachers have submitted four major demands to the V-C. “We have asked the administration to drop charges of sedition on the JNU students. The officiating registrar should be immediately removed, as he has been one of the main accused in tarnishing the image of the university,� added Choudhary.

On Monday, Khalid and four others - Anirban Bhattacharya, JNUSU general secretary Rama Naga, Ashutosh Kumar and Anant Prakash - were present at the administrative block of JNU, where hundreds of students and private security men kept vigil.

The students also agreed that the existing inquiry committee should be stopped. “This committee has to be replaced. Whatever they are enquiring doesn’t seem to be correct and everything seems to be fabricated. If the administration has taken a decision, then there is no need of any inquiry,� said Sucheta De, AISA national president and former JNUSU president.

Moreover, teachers have also demanded the denial of blanket access to Delhi Police inside the campus. The V-C is yet to decide on the demand. “The V-C heard all our demands and has asked for some time to think. On the Delhi Police issue, he said he has not given any permission to them. We are waiting for his decision,� Prof Ajay Patnaik, president of JNUTA told Mail Today.

With the return of Khalid and the other four students, a rift was apparent among students and teachers. Some of them said the five students must surrender and cooperate with the police investigation. “What is the need for such drama? If they are innocent, why don’t they just surrender? They are trying to divert the attention towards them. The issue has always been about Rohith Vemula,� one of the students from JNU told Mail Today.

Large numbers of students from JNU are gearing up for another protest march on Tuesday from Ambedkar Bhawan to Jantar Mantar.

Interestingly, students who have been protesting about the removal of sedition charges from the students in the last protest march are now back to demanding justice for Rohith Vemula.

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Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi met Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung and briefed him about the prevailing situation on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus. Following the resurfacing of the prime accused on the university campus late on Monday, the Delhi Police chose to avoid confrontation with the varsity administration and urged the students to join the probe. On a day brimming with speculation, the police decided not to arrest the five prime accused in the sedition row. However, police said it was necessary to question them.

The police are already under fire for the arrest of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar over sedition charges. The accused have refused to surrender, though they said they were ready to face arrest.

Meanwhile, Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi urged the accused to join the investigation and prove

their innocence. The students had been absconding since February 12 after the arrest of Kanhaiya. “I would say, if the police are looking for them, they should join the probe. If they are innocent, they should present evidence of their innocence,� Bassi said.

Police teams were rushed to the university on Monday following information that the accused were spotted on the premises. However, the police waited for the V-C to give his go-ahead for action. Meanwhile, Bassi briefed Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung about the issue.

Responding to questions on whether the police will enter JNU to arrest the accused, Bassi said DCP (South) Prem Nath, who is heading the probe, will take a decision. “Delhi Police is a law-abiding body and we do not indulge in any injustice against anybody. One should also remember that the police come first in the ladder of justice,� the commissioner added.

Hoping to win over Dalits, Varanasi saw a beeline of political visitors at the Guru Ravidas Temple at Seer Goverdhanpur in Varanasi. Leading the pack was Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, the two states where polls are due next year, have a sizeable Dalit population which can make or break electoral prospects of any party. Forming 31 per cent of the population, Punjab has the highest percentage of Dalits in the country.

In Uttar Pradesh, dalits are considered to be voters of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) but the Congress, the BJP, the SP and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) are working hard to bolster their presence among the community.

Sant Ravidas, born in Kashi (now Varanasi) in 1377 CE, has a huge following among the Dalits across north India. Kejriwal, who had contested against Modi in Varanasi, also attended the birth anniversary celebration. While Modi visited the Sant Ravidas Temple during early hours, Kejriwal also visited the same temple later in the day.

Taking a dig at other political parties, BSP supremo Mayawati, who is defending her turf, said apart from paying obeisance, leaders should also try to adopt the saint’s ideology. “Besides paying obeisance at the Ravidas temple, the leaders should also try to adopt his ideology, only then the poor and downtrodden can benefit,� Mayawati said.

Attacking the ruling Samajwadi Party government in the state, Mayawati said it did not have a moral right to celebrate Ravidas Jayanti as immediately after coming to power, it had changed name of district Ravidas Nagar to Bhadohi. “The SP has no right to celebrate Ravidas Jayanti as it did not respect him and had changed the district’s name to Bhadohi again after coming to power,� she added. The PM and AAP chief’s visits to the city is seen as an attempt to woo the saint’s followers know as Ravidasia Sikhs, which mostly include Sikhs from several parts of the country, ahead of the Punjab Assembly polls next year.

Leaders’ visit are significant as thousands of Dalit Ramdasia Sikhs from Punjab were in Varanasi on Monday to offer prayer at the Ravidas Temple.

The BJP is trying to send out a positive message to the dalit community as it had organised a special debate in both the Houses of Parliament on November 26 last year as ‘Constitution Day’ as a mark of respect to Dr BR Ambedkar.

Issue 655 (22)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

What if we all looked like this, asks Iraqi artist in mock bomb suit The man in the bulky bomb disposal suit waved at a gaggle of awed children as he walked down a Baghdad street and sat outside a small cafe to drink tea.

the most.”

Adil, a wispy 20-year-old with a wild head of tight curly hair, is one of an evergrowing number of Iraqi artists looking for new ways for tackling the violence

sion moments later. After searching for them for hours, he found one of his friends with a head injury in hospital and was told that Shahbander had been killed.

But there was no bomb to defuse on Rasheed Street that day, and no armour inside the black suit to protect him from explosives.

Iraqi artist Hussein Adil designed the mock bomb suit -- complete with huge helmet and visor -- himself for this performance.

“We had to make this one because there aren’t many bomb suits in Iraq,” he said. “We have to be one of the countries in the world that needs them

they grew up with.

The inspiration for his “bomb suit happening” was the death last year in a suicide car bombing of his close friend Ammar al Shahbander, a much-loved journalist.

Adil, Shahbander and two other friends were heading to a cafe to drink tea in Baghdad’s Karrada district when an important call came in on his mobile phone. “I told them to go ahead, that I would follow them in five minutes,” Adil said. He heard an explo-

Two weeks later, he dreamt that a bomb would go off near a square in central Baghdad and, after waking up, immediately called his friends and his father to tell them.

An explosion rocked the exact spot later that day.

“My friends called me to ask me how I knew, it was a very strange thing,” he said, adding that it was then that he started looking for ways to express his angst through art.

When Pak authorities stopped Sharmila Tagore from crossing at Wagah border Veteran actress Sharmila Tagore on Monday crossed the Wagah Border into India, a day after Pakistan’s immigration authorities stopped her for not having a ‘police report’ of her stay here.

When Sharmila reached Wagah Border on Sunday night the immigration officials told her that ‘police report’ was missing from her travel documents.

71-year-old actress was then stopped by the Federal Investigation Agency Immigration at Wagah Border.

A protocol official accompanying Sharmila contacted the police station concerned and arranged the report in about two hours through fax. By the time the police report matter was resolved she changed her mind to cross the border and decided to leave for India on Monday (today).

Tagore, who had come here on a four-day visit to participate in the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF), was escorted by police to get to Wagah Border.

The Punjab government had given her ‘official pro-

tocol’ after her meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

However, when she reached Wagah Border the immigration officials told her that ‘police report’ was missing from her travel documents. On her inquiry

Mall Road,” the official said.

Perhaps, missing her flight Amritsar-Mumbai was the reason to extend her stay in Lahore for one more day, he said.

During her stay in Lahore, Tagore called on Prime

that “can’t I go with this document”, the immigration official said ‘No’.

An FIA official told PTI that a protocol official accompanying Tagore contacted the police station concerned and arranged the report in about two hours through fax. “By the time the police report matter was resolved Tagore, who was waiting at the guest room, changed her mind to cross the border. She decided to leave for India on Monday and returned to hotel on the

Minister Sharif yesterday at his palatial Jati Umra residence in Raiwind and had a dinner with him and his family members.

She was warmly received by the family members of Sharif especially his daughter Maryum Nawaz.

Sharif, an admirer of Tagore, also inquired her about the health of iconic actor Dilip Kumar.

The Prime Minister told Tagore that Pakistan wanted cordial relations with India.

Issue 655 (23)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

China third largest weapons exporter, Pakistan main recipient China has become the world’s third largest weapons exporters with Pakistan emerging as the top recipient of its arms, according to a report from a leading think tank on Monday.

Communist China, which has the world’s largest armed forces, nearly doubled its arms exports in the past 10 years, said the report on global arms trade by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Beijing is now capable of producing advanced weapons and is less dependent on imports.

With its 5.9% share of the global arms market, China is still dwarfed by the US and Russia but Beijing’s clout is clearly increasing and Islamabad is making the most of it.

“Pakistan was the main recipient of Chinese exports, accounting for 35%, followed by Bangladesh and Myanmar, accounting for 20% and 16% respectively (all three states are neighbours of India, the leading importer of arms in the region),” the report said.

China is scheduled to transfer eight submarines to Pakistan and two more to Bangladesh, the report said.

Beijing and Islamabad are key allies who describe themselves as “all-weather friends”, and the SIPRI report indicates a further strengthening of their military ties. China, reports say, has aided Pakistan to

set up its nuclear and ballistic missiles programmes, besides supplying conventional arms.

The report further said India continued to be the largest importer of major arms in 2011-15, accounting for 14% of the global total. “In 2011-15 India’s imports were three times greater than those of ei-

‘Rat fur being used to make luxury ‘cashmere’ clothing as world faces shortage in goats’ wool’ Rat fur is reportedly being used to make expensive scarves or jumpers advertised as 100 per cent cashmere.

Cheap materials - including at least one case of rat fur - are being woven into garments, claim campaigners including former TV presenter Selina Scott.

Supporters of cashmere goat farmers in China and Mongolia say their industry is being undermined by factories practising fraud and mislabelling.

Scott, who is about to launch her own ethical cashmere collection, believes the problem is widespread.

She told the Sunday Times: “It’s an absolute scam. It is a wellrecognised fact in the industry that parts of the cashmere trade have been corrupted.”

She said the cheap trade

undermined the livelihoods of goat herders in Mongolia, because of a fall in demand for high-quality cashmere.

Global cashmere production is about 7.5million kilograms, however sales of products carrying the

name are much higher.

Malcolm Campbell, managing director of the Cloth of Kings in Fife, has worked for more than four decades in the textile industry.

He said: “There are not

enough cashmere goats in the world to produce the amount of cashmere that is on sale.”

According to Mr Campbell, the “basic cheaters” will use acrylic or polyester mixed with the cashmere. Others will contain modified sheep or yak wool. In some cases even rat fur has been found.

It was reported two years ago that 1m items of cashmere clothing seized from Chinese-run firms in Rome were found to be a mixture of acrylic, viscose and fur from rats and other animals.

Karl Spilhaus, president of the Cashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute (CCMI), which represents cashmere producers and conducts worldwide said that mislabelling was a problem on British high streets.

ther of its regional rivals: China and Pakistan,” it said.

Unlike India, which has failed to produce “competitive indigenously designed weapons”, China has become increasingly capable of producing advanced hardware, the report said. China imported 25% less arms between 2006-10 and 2011-15.

“While in the early2000s China was by far the largest importer, it dropped to third place in 201115,” the report said.

It added: “However, China remains partly dependent on imports for some key weapons and components, including large transport aircraft and helicopters, and engines for aircraft, vehicles and ships.” In 2015, China signed orders for air defence systems and 24 combat jets from Russia, indicating that it is “not yet self-sufficient in those categories”. China’s largest supplier was Russia, which accounted for 59% of the imports, followed by France with 15% and Ukraine with 14%.

Bill Cosby’s wife to depose in defamation case, court blocks halt plea A plea by comedian Bill Cosby’s wife to halt her upcoming deposition in a defamation case was put down by a federal judge in Massachusetts on Sunday night. The case was brought by seven women against the disgraced entertainer.

Camille Cosby’s lawyers late on Saturday filed an emergency motion to delay her deposition, which is scheduled for Monday, pending an appeal of a judge’s Friday ruling not to stay the proceeding. They argued the deposition would create a “media circus” and threaten her personal safety.

US district judge Mark Mastroianni ruled late on Sunday night that the deposition would go ahead on Monday morning. He also ordered the attorneys to court for a brief status conference ahead of the meeting.

Lawyers for the seven women fired back at the Camille Cosby’s motion on Sunday, saying the claims were without merit.

“The Cosbys’ last-minute filing is the latest in a series of increasingly brazen attempts to interfere with the deposition of Mrs. Cosby,” the attorneys said in a filing. “The Cosbys should not be allowed to indefinitely delay Mrs Cosby’s deposition by repeatedly filing what is in substance the same motion, over and over again.”

Mastroianni earlier this month ruled that Camille Cosby would have to talk to lawyers bringing the defamation suit against the

LA hospital pays $17,000 as ransom for medical records A Los Angeles hospital has paid $17,000 in bitcoins to hackers after its computer systems were taken offline by ransomware.

Systems at the hospital Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center had been affected for more than a week and their staff was forced to carry out some tasks on paper.

However, the hospital’s chief executive Allen Stefanek, said the incident

had not affected the quality of patient care.

Previously, sources had reported that the hackers were demanding a ransom payment of $3.4m but Mr Stefanek denied this. “The amount of ransom requested was 40 bitcoins, equivalent to $17,000,” he wrote. “The quickest and most efficient way to restore our systems and administra-

In coming years, China’s dependence on imported arms is expected to further decrease as it leaders invest billions of dollars to develop the homegrown weapons industry.

China’s military budget in 2015 was more than 886 billion Yuan ($141.45 billion), 10% more than the year before.

The report said the ?ve biggest weapons exporters in 2011-15 were the US, Russia, China, France and Germany, accounting for 74% of total exports.

Combined, the US and Russia supplied 58% of all exports.

“They’ve biggest importers in 2011-15 were India, Saudi Arabia, China, the UAE and Australia. Together, they received 34% of all arms imports,” the report added.

tive functions was to pay the ransom and obtain the decryption key.” All systems currently in use had been cleared of malware and thoroughly tested, he added.

Ransomware is a form of malware which infects a victim’s computer, locking it, and demanding that a ransom often in bitcoins be paid in order to restore access.

comedian, although she could not be compelled to reveal private conversations with her husband.

More than 50 women have publicly accused Cosby best known for his role as the father in the 1980s television hit “The Cosby Show” - of raping them, often after plying them with alcohol or drugs in incidents dating back decades. Most of the alleged assaults date too far back to be criminally prosecuted, but Pennsylvania officials late last year charged the 78-year-old entertainer with sexually assaulting a woman in 2005, with the charges coming just days before the statute of limitations was to expire. Cosby has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, but a Pennsylvania judge early this month rejected Cosby’s request to dismiss the charges.

The Massachusetts lawsuit was filed in December 2014 by Tamara Green and later joined by six other women who contend Cosby sexually assaulted or abused and defamed them by calling them liars.

Issue 655 (24)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Relax and enjoy sensual pleasures on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as the Taurus Moon enhances the fun of the occasion. A focus on your career zone keeps you busy and eager to make a start with plans and projects. Don’t be tempted to bite off more than you can chew on Thursday, though. Try to pace yourself.

You’ll enjoy New Year’s Eve and the start of 2015 with the Moon in your sign to nurture your gourmet palate and love of all good things in life. The action speeds up as the week progresses. On Thursday you’ll be eager to put ideas into action that you’ve been mulling over in the holiday week. Come the weekend, career opportunities may coincide with enhanced networking.

You’ll make use of the holidays to get your bearings and relax, but once January 1 rolls around you’ll be ready to explore the potential that 2015 has in store for you. Money matters still count for a lot, and you’ll be eager to organize things so you don’t have to contend with any unnecessary worry.

Venus and Mercury hike into your travel and adventure sector over the weekend.

Although your social life still sparkles and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day bring plenty of fun your way, you’re ready to enter a new phase. Saturn in your lifestyle sector may act as a catalyst, encouraging you to consider taking up a healthier lifestyle and looking for work that reflects your mission and purpose in life.

Perhaps your New Year ’s resolution is to lose weight, get fit, and feel fabulous. If so, the planets are in the right place to help you with your goal. This is a good time to plan a new diet or fitness routine and start as you mean to carry on. With Saturn in your zone of leisure and pleasure, you may want get involved in a competitive sport.

The focus on your pleasure and leisure sector continues, so you could decide to take an extended vacation this week.

Whether or not you’re at work, take any opportunities to have fun and enjoy yourself. You’ll benefit in more ways than one. A Mars/Jupiter link encourages you to consider meditating regularly in order to release stress and develop inner peace.

New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day could be busy times for you, as you’ll be entertaining and making sure everybody has a good time. The presence of Mars in Aquarius is still calling to you to get involved in the things you love best.

Indulge yourself in a favorite hobby or engage your senses by enjoying a massage or spa treatment.

You’ll enjoy mixing and mingling with old and new friends on New Year’s Eve and January 1. Use this chance to rebuild connections that may have been in danger of disappearing. You’ll also enjoy entertaining people at your place, playing host and watching pals cut loose and be completely themselves.

You may feel a subtle inner pressure to get things done now that Saturn is in your sign. Use this opportunity at the start of the year to review priorities. Meditate and make use of periods of introspection to discover the goals and plans that are most meaningful to you. Later this week your zone of communication livens up as Venus and Mercury move in.

You’re in your element this week! You’ll enjoy New Year’s Eve and January 1. If you’re planning ahead, take into account any goals that enhance self-expression.

If you have an artistic skill or other ability, factor it into your daily schedule so you can develop and use it. Personal finances seem to be important to you this week.

Although you’re still in a phase in which it helps to relax and recharge, there is a lot to do. Continue to pace yourself this week.

Enjoy spending New Year’s Eve at home with pals and family - it could be a night to remember. As Saturn edges into your social sector, you may get choosier about the people with whom you associate.

You’re going to have a great time this week, especially over New Year’s Eve and January 1. The party isn’t over yet, and you seem to be taking full advantage of the chance to hang out with friends and loved ones. You’ll also want to achieve a key ambition as Saturn moves to your career sector. Start now to research your options, get the knowledge you need, and make a plan.

Issue 655 (25)

23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Technology Facebook’s policy on nudity - All you need to know!

The question is at the forefront again after a French court ruled Friday that a French art teacher can sue the social media service after it suspended his Facebook account. Although Facebook hasn’t given a reason, the account suspension came after he posted an image of a classical painting featuring a female nude.

Facebook’s rules on nudity have evolved over time. The latest community-standards policy, from March 2015, says Facebook restricts photos of genitals or fully exposed buttocks, as well as some images of breasts if they include the nipple. But Facebook says it allows photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring.

“We restrict the display of nudity because some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content particularly because of their cultural background or age,” the policy states.

Here’s what that means in practice: Breastfeeding Breastfeeding pictures were the subject of controversy for years.

Breastfeeding moms protested when images were pulled. In 2009, 11,000 people staged a virtual

“nurse-in,” replacing their profile photos with nursing ones. It’s not clear when Facebook’s policy changed internally, but about two years ago the policy wording changed to

specifically allow photos of nursing mothers.

Mastectomy photos In 2013, more than 20,000 people signed an online petition, led by photographer David Jay and breastcancer survivor Ann Marie Giannino-Otis, urging Facebook not to ban mastectomy images.

Facebook responded with an official policy that permits the vast majority of mastectomy photos.

Giannino-Otis said Friday that while the policy change helped, many mastectomy photos are still flagged by other users and removed by Facebook. Facebook didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday.

Photos of children

page. Her 2-year-old daughter’s buttocks were partially visible, an homage to the famous Coppertone image of a dog tugging at a child’s swimsuit. White says her account was suspended twice, and she was warned it would be banned permanently if she didn’t take the photo down. She replaced it with the same image with an emoji covered the offending part. But after friends got away with posting the original photo, she started doing it, too so far without problems.

White says she still doesn’t understand Facebook’s rules or how they are enforced.

Birth photography In 2011, Facebook apolo-

Social media giant Facebook has announced plans to open up its Instant Articles programme to all publishers globally to give

April 12. “To date, we have been working with a few hundred publishers around the world to build an incredibly fast and immersive reading

users a better and faster reading experience whether it is news, views or opinion pieces. The announcement is expected to come during Facebook’s “F8 Conference” in San Francisco on

experience for people on Facebook,” Josh Roberts, product manager (Facebook) said in a statement. Facebook is making improvements according to the feedback it is getting and

is building the tools to open up Instant Articles more broadly, he added. Instant Articles was built to solve a specific problem -- slow loading times on the mobile web created a problematic experience for people reading news on their phones.

With Instant Articles, publishers the world over can have full control over the look of their stories as well as data and ads. They will have the ability to bring their own direct-sold ads and keep 100 percent of the revenue, and track data on the ads served through their existing ad measurement systems or they can monetise their content through the Facebook Audience Network.

In July 2014, North Carolina photographer Jill White’s Facebook account was suspended after she posted a photograph of her daughter and a friend on Coppertone’s Facebook

Google balloon to provide fast Internet in remote areas

gized for disabling the account of an Iowa photographer who posted shots of a friend and her newborn moments after birth; the images partially showed her friend’s breasts, but not her nipples. Laura Eckert’s photography business, New Creation Photography & Design, specializes in pictures of pregnant women and the first moments of a baby’s life. Facebook emailed Eckert to apologize and say that disabling the account had been in error.

Artwork Facebook’s policy allows “photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures.” Yet many users have run into trouble after posting art containing nudity. Frederic DurandBaissas, the teacher whose account was suspended, had posted Gustave Courbet’s 1866 nude painting “The Origin of the World.” Artist Jerry Saltz said in a column for New York magazine’s Vulture blog that he lost his account after posting graphic images from medieval art.

And in January a Facebook account for the Christopher Stout gallery in New York was suspended after posting an image of an artist sitting topless on a toilet.

Google’s ambitious project to deliver internet to remote parts of the world using high-flying balloons has survived a brutal development phase and will enter the testing mode later this year, media reported on Tuesday.

With “Project Loon”, the internet giant struggled to find the right balloon design that could be both inexpensive and durable not only to float but navigate to predictably travel through the stratosphere, tech website Re/Code reported.

“We busted a lot of balloons,” Astro Teller, head of Alphabet’s X unit (formerly Google X), was quoted as saying while showing off some of the designs at the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, which kicked off in Vancouver, Canada, on Monday.

“So we are going to keep going,” Teller said, adding

that last year the balloon travelled around the world 19 times over 187 days.

He also noted that the connection has advanced to deliver about 15 megabitper-second internet access.

The company will test this technology in Indonesia and Sri Lanka to see how it works delivering real internet service to consumers.

“Alphabet is in talks with carriers around the world.

The prospect is very real that a further five billion people will have Internet access within five to 10 years. It will change the world in ways we cannot possibly imagine,” Teller was quoted as saying.

TED is a global set of conferences run to discuss technology, design and include talk sessions on many scientific, cultural and academic topics.

Indonesian officials have banned the microblogging platform Tumblr over pornographic content, the media

pany, says the BBC report.

“After an exhaustive study, the ministry has decided to ban Tumblr since it con-

reported on Thursday.

An official in Indonesia’s Information Ministry said the site was shut down without consultation with the Yahoo-owned com-

tains many videos and pornographic images,” said the communication ministry’s e-business director, Azhar Hasyim.

The ministry has also de-

cided to ban 477 other online sites for the same reason.

According to Azhar, blocking access to these sites will take two to three days.

The ban was announced a week after the Indonesian government demanded the removal of emoticons representing homosexuality in messaging apps, following an internet campaign against Line, another popular messaging application, for the same reason.

Tumblr, which has about 280 million blogs, was set up in 2007 by David Karp and acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 for $1.1 billion.

Indonesia govt bans Facebook to open Instant Articles feature to all publishers Tumblr over pornography

Issue - 619 (27)

15 June.-21 June. 2015

150,000 penguins killed by iceberg

SYDNEY Some 150,000 penguins died after a massive iceberg grounded near their colony in Antarctica, forcing them to make a lengthy trek to find food, scientists say in a newly-published study.

The B09B iceberg, measuring some 100 square kilometres (38.6 square miles), grounded in Commonwealth Bay in East Antarctica in December 2010, the researchers from Australia and New Zealand wrote in the Antarctic Science journal.

The Adelie penguin population at the bay's Cape Denison was measured to be about 160,000 in February 2011 but by December 2013 it had plunged to an estimated 10,000, they said. The iceberg's grounding meant the penguins had to walk more than 60 kilometres (37

miles) to find food, impeding their breeding attempts, said the researchers from the University of New South Wales' (UNSW) Climate Change Research Centre and New Zealand's West Coast Penguin Trust.

‘The Cape Denison population could be extirpated within 20 years unless B09B relocates or the now perennial fast ice within the bay breaks out,’ they wrote in the research published in February. Fast ice is sea ice which forms and stays fast along the coast.

During their census in December 2013, the researchers said ‘hundreds of abandoned eggs were noted, and the ground was littered with the freeze-dried carcasses of previous season's chicks’.

‘It's eerily silent now,’ UNSW's

Chinese scientists achieve temp 3 times hotter than sun Beijing A nuclear reactor in China has created plasma at a temperature of 50 million Kelvins (49.999 million degrees Celsius or 90 million Fahrenheit) for 102 seconds. The temperature is

thought to be three times hotter than the core of the sun or ‘roughly the same as a midsized thermo-nuclear explosion,’ according to the South China Morning Post. The experiment was done in a machine called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST).It happened last week at the Institute of Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangsu province.

The research team had aimed to maintain a plasma of 100 million Kelvins for over 1,000 seconds, nearly 17 minutes. However, the length of time that the plasma was sustained and controlled remains significant, as this is one of the main obstacles to implementing nuclear fusion more widely.Despite the extreme temperatures reached during the

experiment, there have been other plasmas produced which have been much higher in different types of machines.

However, other super-hot plasmas have not been maintained for as long, largely due to their volatile temperatures and the consequent safety considerations.

The plasma being created is a super-hot gas formed from heating atoms in the magnetic EAST device. While the technology - in which the atoms fuse at extremely high temperatures to release large amounts of energy - is many decades from being perfected, its proponents believe that it could eventually replace fossil fuels and conventional nuclear fission reactors. Nuclear fission is different from nuclear fusion in that is the splitting of atoms rather than joining them together.

There is an on-going scientific effort worldwide to increase knowledge of nuclear fusion. The EAST experiment follows the successful testing of the German Wendelstein 7-X stellarator fusion reactor earlier this month.

The machine successfully created plasma through nuclear fusion, but only for under a second.In France, construction is underway to build an international research reactor known as ITER.

Chris Turney, who led the 2013 expedition, told the Sydney Morning Herald Friday.

‘The ones that we saw at Cape Denison were incredibly docile, lethargic, almost unaware of your existence. ‘The ones that are surviving are clearly struggling.

They can barely survive themselves, let alone hatch the next generation. We saw lots of dead birds on the ground... it's just heartbreaking to see.’

In contrast, penguins living on the eastern fringe of the bay just eight kilometres from the fast ice edge were thriving, the scientists said. The researchers said the study had ‘important implications’ for the wider East Antarctic if the current trend of increasing sea ice continued.

Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing, in contrast to the Arctic where global warming is causing ice to melt and glaciers to shrink. Scientists believe the growth in Antarctic sea ice is largely driven by changes in wind and local conditions.

Whistling sound? Nasa releases strange outer-space music heard in 1969

London Nasa released a strange “music” recording that astronauts reportedly heard in 1969 while on the far side of the Moon, out of radio contact with the Earth.

The story behind these unusual whistling noises was showcased on Sunday night in a show on Discovery channel, as part of a series called “NASA’s Unexplained Files”.

The noises reportedly were heard in May 1969 by the Apollo 10 astronauts as they circled the Moon, months before the first astronauts stepped foot on the lunar surface on July 21 that same year. The three astronauts on board were Thomas Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan.

The sounds, which lasted about an hour, were recorded and transmitted to mission control in Houston. A transcript of the text was released in 2008, but the actual audio has only just been made public.

“You hear that? That whistling sound?” asks Cernan, describing it as “outer-space-type music.”

The trio felt the sounds were so strange that they debated whether or not to tell the chiefs at Nasa, for fear they wouldn’t be taken seriously and could be dropped from future space missions, according to the Discovery show.

Nasa says the sounds could not have been alien music.

An engineer from the US space agency said the noises likely came from interference caused by radios that were close to each other in the lunar module and the command module.

Astronaut Al Worden, who flew on Apollo 15, disputed that explanation, saying “logic tells me that if there was something recorded on there, then there’s something there,” according to the Discovery show.

But Michael Collins, the pilot of Apollo 11, who became the first person to fly around the far side of the Moon by himself while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were walking on the surface, said he too heard “an eerie woo-woo sound” but accepted the explanation of radio interference.

Drought may affect 49m in Africa HARARE As many as 49 million people in southern Africa could be affected by a drought that has been worsened by the most severe and longest El Nino weather pattern in 35 years, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Monday.

The WFP, which has already said 14 million people face hunger in the region, said the El Nino conditions had caused the lowest recorded rainfall between October and December since 1981. The forecast for January to March indicated a high probability of below-normal rainfall in southern

Africa, which would result in one of the worst droughts on record, it added.

“It is estimated that 40 million rural people and 9 million poor urban people who live in droughtaffected areas could be exposed,” the WFP said in its latest report.

The drought has hit much of the region, including the maize belt in South Africa, the continent’s most advanced economy and the top producer of the staple grain.In Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, planting delayed by two months or more has severely impacted maize yields. Malawi is experiencing its first maize deficit in a decade,

pushing the price 73 percent higher than the December 2015 average.

In Mozambique, prices were 50 percent higher than last year.

The WFP said food production in Zimbabwe had fallen by half compared to last year and maize was 53 percent more expensive. Zimbabwe last week said it needed nearly $1.6 billion in aid to help pay for grain and other food after the drought.

El Nino events typically bring drier conditions to southern Africa and wetter ones to East Africa. The dry, hot conditions are expected to persist until the start of the southern hemisphere autumn in April or May.

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Zika virus may hide in organs protected from immune system CHICAGO The Zika virus may be particularly adept at entrenching itself in parts of the body that are shielded from the immune system, making it harder to fight off and possibly lengthening the timeframe in which it can be

transmitted, top US experts said on Friday.Researchers reported that Zika virus can be detected in semen for 62 days after a person is infected, adding to evidence of the virus's presence in fetal brain tissue, placenta and amniotic fluid.

Their work is part of an international race to understand the risks associated with Zika, a rapidly spreading mosquitoborne virus thought to be linked to thousands of cases of birth defects in Brazil. ‘Right now, we know it's in the blood for a very limited period of time, measured in a week to at most 10 days.

We know now, as we accumulate experience, it can be seen in the seminal fluid.

We're not exactly sure after the infection clears, where else it would be,’ Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said.‘These are all things that need to be carefully examined in natural history and case-control studies,’ he said.

Fauci said that Zika's persistence in the body recalled findings during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the worst on record.

In individual patients, the highly deadly virus remained in semen and eye fluid for months.

Zika causes only mild symptoms, and in most cases may not result in illness at all.

Its suspected link to the birth defect microcephaly and to neurological disorder GuillainBarre syndrome has generated alarm among public health officials, though an association has not been proven. The World

Health Organization on Feb. 1 declared Zika a global health emergency.Several organs in the body, including the testes, the eyes, the placenta and the brain, are ‘immune privileged’ protected from attacks launched by the immune

system to neutralize foreign invaders.These sites are safeguarded from antibodies to prevent the immune system from attacking vital tissues. But if a virus enters these protected sites, it is much harder to fight them off.‘The virus can continue to persist and or multiply,’ said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. ‘The virus is in a bubble of sorts.’ Fauci said it is not entirely surprising that Zika persists in semen. There have already been at least two reports in which the virus was likely transmitted. What has not been clear is for how long.

British researchers offered some clues on Friday. In a letter to the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, scientists reported the case of a 68-yearold man who was infected with Zika in 2014. They detected Zika virus 62 days after the initial infection, but they were not able to confirm whether it could still infect another person.

Earlier this week, researchers in Slovenia published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine describing a severely brain damaged fetus from a mother who was infected with Zika in Brazil and later terminated the pregnancy.

In an autopsy, the authors found high levels of Zika in the brain and some evidence that the virus had been replicating. They suggested that Zika may persist in the fetal brain because it is an immunologically privileged site. That is true of many other

Alzheimer's preventative drug hope Scientists have detected a number of drugs which could help protect against Alzheimer's disease, acting like statins for the brain. In experiments on worms, University of Cambridge researchers identified drugs which prevented the very first step towards brain cell death. They now want to match up drugs with

specific stages of the disease.

Experts said it was important to find out if these drugs could work safely in humans. Statins are taken by people to reduce the risk of developing heart disease and the Cambridge research team says its work may have unearthed a potential ‘neurostatin’ to ward off Alzheimer's disease.

viruses, such as toxoplasmosis, rubella, cytomegalovirus or herpes, which can also cross the placenta and cause microcephaly, a birth defect marked by small head size and underdeveloped brains. Doctors commonly screen pregnant women for these infections, said Dr. Ian Lipkin of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University in New York. Lipkin said the key concern about Zika harboring in immune protected sites is that it could be transmitted through semen. So far, there is little to suggest transmission is common, said Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, ‘but it will bear looking at so that we can counsel individuals about the risk that they pose to others.’

US health officials advise that men who come to the country from Zika outbreak areas should consider using condoms even with nonpregnant partners because the virus may persist in semen even after it clears the bloodstream. ‘They don't say for how long,’ Schaffner said.

Donald Trump vows to bring back jobs from countries like China, India

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has vowed to bring back jobs for Americans.

He has alleged that countries like India and China are taking away jobs from the US. These remarks were made by him while predicting that he will earn a “tremendous amount” of support from African-Americans.

“You are seeing the stories when African-American leaders are saying, ‘my people really like Trump’ because I am going to bring jobs back from China, from Mexico, Japan and Vietnam and India... and all these places that are taking our jobs and I am going to bring back jobs,” he told CNN. “I’m going to do great with the African-Americans. AfricanAmerican youth is 58 per cent

unemployed. African-Americans in their prime are substantially worse off than the whites in their prime, and it’s a very sad situation,” the 69-year-old said.

His remarks came after his victory in the South Carolina primary. The victory gave him two wins and one second-place finish in the first three primaries and consolidated his front-runner billing.

He also predicted the presidential contest will be between him and Hillary Clinton.

Trump had last month said India is “doing great” but no one talks about it.

Laying out his roadmap to US Election 2016, Trump said, “I’ll win states that aren’t in play. I’ll win states that Republicans don’t even think of.”

oblivion, aside from passing interest from a few scholars.

In 2005, however, Adrian Sudhalter, an art historian and curator at MOMA, noticed a series of numerical markings on various pieces while

put (Dadaglobe) back together again.’

Tzara, who died in 1963, commissioned pieces from the leading lights of Dadaism, many of whom sought to poke fun or mock outright a world

participating in a Dada retrospective at the Beaubourg Museum in Paris. ‘When we inspected the art work I started to see these numbers at the back of the works and asked myself, 'what are these numbers',’ she told AFP. Her curiosity piqued, Sudhalter headed to the archives of the Jacques Doucet library in Paris, which has a significant collection of Dada and surrealist material. There she discovered a list which corresponded to the numbers and sequences she found on the pieces at the retrospective. Baffled at first, she little by little realised the list was a complete inventory of Tzara's intended Dadaglobe.

She would be able to assemble ‘the pieces of the puzzle’.

‘It was really artistic detective work,’ Sudhalter told AFP. ‘Because of this list and because of these numbers I realised it would be possible to

thrust into upheaval by World War I. The ‘Reconstructed’ exhibit features work by German painter and sculptor Max Ernst, who fought in WWI and was reportedly traumatised by the experience, producing art that was partly concerned with the subject of mental illness. Also featured are Hans Arp and Sophie Taeubeur, who were married and worked together in Zurich, turning out what were then groundbreaking multi-media projects. Taeubeur, born in Davos, is pictured on Switzerland's 50-franc note.

Sudhalter told AFP that in her research for the project she consulted with Michel Sanouillet, one of France's most renowned experts of Dadaism, who spoke with Tzara a few years before his death.

‘Tzara told (Sanouillet) that Dadaglobe was one of his biggest regrets,’ Sudhalter said.

Zurich museum recreates lost work ZURICH A century after Dadaism was founded in Zurich, a prestigious museum in the city is hosting an exhibit that aims to recreate one of the rebellious artistic movement's great but unfinished projects.

Dadaism was born in 1916 at the famous Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich's old town, where artists produced work partly inspired by the devastation of World War I that sought to challenge preexisting notions of what constituted art. One of its founders, Romanian-born Tristan Tzara, tried in 1921 to release a collection with some 200 contributions from some of Dadaism's main contributors a project named ‘Dadaglobe’, which ultimately faltered due to financing problems.

Thanks to artistic sleuthing, much of the collection has been reassembled and put on display Zurich's Kunsthaus museum. Entitled ‘Dadaglobe Reconstructed’, it includes some 160 works by 40 artists from across the world, including noted figures like Max Ernst, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeubeur. All had sent contributions to Tzara for the project. The exhibit opened this month and will be on display in Zurich until May 1, before it shifts to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.

Tzara's Dadaglobe project was conceived as an anthology of the movement, which ran through the mid-1920s and used humour, wit and irony to highlight what some artists described as the social and cultural decay in Europe.

Dadaglobe gradually fell into

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DNA rice breakthrough raises ‘green revolution’ hopes LOS BANOS Rice-growing techniques learned through thousands of years of trial and error are about to be turbocharged with DNA technology in a breakthrough hailed by scientists as a potential second “green revolution”. Over the next few years farmers are expected to have new genome sequencing technology at their disposal, helping to offset a myriad of problems that threaten to curtail production of the grain that feeds half of humanity.

Drawing on a massive bank of varieties stored in the Philippines and state-of-the-art Chinese technology, scientists recently completed the DNA sequencing of more than 3,000 of the world’s most significant types of rice.

With the huge pool of data unlocked, rice breeders will soon be able to produce higheryielding varieties much more quickly and under increasingly stressful conditions, scientists involved with the project told AFP. Other potential new varieties being dreamt about are ones that are resistant to certain pests and diseases, or types that pack more nutrients and vitamins.

“This will be a big help to strengthen food security for rice eaters,” said Kenneth McNally, an American biochemist at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

Since rice was first domesticated thousands of years ago, farmers have improved yields through various planting techniques. For the past century breeders have isolated traits, such as high

yields and disease resistance, then developed them through cross breeding. However, they did not know which genes controlled which traits, leaving much of the effort to lengthy guesswork.The latest breakthroughs in molecular genetics promise to fast-track the process, eliminating much of the mystery, scientists involved in the project told AFP.Better rice varieties can now be expected to be developed and passed on to farmers’ hands in less than three years, compared with 12 without the guidance of DNA sequencing.

Genome sequencing involves decoding DNA, the hereditary material of all living cells and organisms. The process roughly compares with solving a giant jigsaw puzzle made up of billions of microscopic pieces.

A multinational team undertook the four-year project with the DNA decoding primarily in China by BGI, the world’s biggest genome sequencing firm.

Leaf tissue from the samples, drawn mostly from IRRI’s gene bank of 127,000 varieties were ground by McNally’s team at its laboratory in Los Banos, near Manila’s southern outskirts, before being shipped for sequencing.

A non-profit research outfit founded in 1960, IRRI works with governments to develop advanced varieties of the grain.

Farmers and breeders will need the new DNA tools, which scientists take pains to say is not genetic modification,

Russian scientists ‘to shoot down meteorites’ thru nuclear missiles Moscow Russian scientists want to upgrade their nuclear missiles in order to prevent meteorites

threatening to hit earth by smashing them while they are still in space.While it may sound similar to the plot of scifi disaster films Armageddon and Deep Impact, Russian scientists are planning to tweak their intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, to target meteorites.

Russian news agency TASS reports the missiles would have the power to destroy meteorites measuring from 20m and up to 50m in size.

Senior rocket researcher Sabit Saitgaraye, from the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau, said they plan to test their missiles on the asteroid 99942 Apophis, which he believes will pass ‘dangerously close’ to Earth in 2036.

However, NASA has ‘effectively ruled out the possibility’ of an impact.

Discovered in 2004, the asteroid, which is the size of three-and-a-half football fields, gathered the immediate attention of space scientists and the media when initial calculations of its orbit indicated a 2.7% possibility of an Earth impact, but the possibility was later ruled out.

Mr Saitgarayev said: ‘Most rockets work on boiling fuel.

Their fueling begins 10 days before the launch and, therefore, they are unfit for destroying meteorites similar to the Chelyabinsk meteorite in diameter, which are detected several hours before coming close to the Earth.‘For this purpose, intercontinental ballistic missiles can be used, which requires their upgrade.’

As a result, modifying solidfueled ICBMs will require millions of pounds and permission from the authorities, and as such it is unclear whether the project will ever get the green light.

It is not the first time Mr Saitgarayev has put forward plans to destroy meteorites.

In 2013 he said a Soviet-era ballistic missile system dubbed ‘Satan’ should be put back into use defending the earth from asteroids.

because of the increasingly stressful conditions for rice growing expected in the 21st Century. While there will be many more millions to feed, there is expected to be less land

combat all those problems.

“Essentially, you will be able to design what properties you want in rice, in terms of the drought resistance, resistance to diseases, high yields, and

available for planting as farms are converted for urban development, destroyed by rising sea levels or converted to other crops.

Rice-paddy destroying floods, drought and storms are also expected to worsen with climate change. Meanwhile, pests and diseases that evolve to resist herbicides and pesticides will be more difficult to kill.

And fresh water, vital for growing rice, is expected to become an increasingly scarce commodity in many parts of the world.

As scientists develop the tools necessary to harness the full advantages of the rice genome database, the hope is that new varieties can be developed to

others,” said Russian bioanalytics expert and IRRI team member Nickolai Alexandrov.

Scientists behind the project hope it will lead to a second “green revolution”.

The first began in the 1960s as the development of higheryielding varieties of wheat and rice was credited with preventing massive global food shortages around the world.

That giant leap to producing more food involved the cross-breeding of unrelated varieties to produce new ones that grew faster and produced higher yields, mainly by being able to respond better to fertiliser.

But the massive gains of the earlier efforts, which earnt US geneticist Norman Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, have since reached a plateau.

Although the DNA breakthrough has generated much optimism, IRRI scientists caution it is not a magic bullet for all rice-growing problems, and believe that genetically modifying is also necessary.

They also warn that governments will still need to implement the right policies, such as in regards to land and water use.

One of the key priorities of IRRI is to pack more nutrients into rice, transforming it into a tool to fight ailments linked to inadequate diets in poor countries as well as lifestyle diseases in wealthier countries.

“We’re interested to understand the nutritional value.... we’re looking into the enrichment of micronutrients,” Nese Sreenivasulu, the Indian head of the IRRI’s grain quality and nutrition centre told AFP. Nese believes Type-2 diabetes, which afflicts hundreds of million of people, can be checked by breeding for particular varieties of rice which when cooked will release sugar into the bloodstream more slowly.

IRRI scientists are also hoping to breed rice varieties with a higher component of zinc, which prevents stunting and deaths from diarohea in rice-eating Southeast Asia.

Dutch open first ‘poop bank’ to treat gut diseases THE HAGUE After blood and sperm banks, Dutch researchers have now opened the country’s first “poop bank” in a rare and cutting-edge branch of medicine to treat people with chronic gut infections.

“Our poop bank will help give doctors and hospitals access to transplants of fecal matter,” Ed Kuijper, professor of microbiology at Leiden University, told AFP. The Netherlands Donor Feces Bank (NDFB) will collect, store and distribute the stools necessary to help with such transplants. Often this is the “only solution for people suffering from chronic intestinal infections, and in particular ‘Clostridium difficile (CD)’,” a bacteria which can develop in patients particularly after lengthy and heavy courses of antibiotics, Kuijper said.“Certain antibiotics destroy intestinal flora which allows bacteria to develop and spread,” he explained.

“Transplants of fecal matter allow healthy bacteria to be put back into the body, which then spread in the intestines and recreate healthy flora in the gut.”There are about 3,000 people diagnosed with CD annually in the Netherlands, and about five percent of cases

become chronic. About three to four transplants of fecal material are carried out in the country every month.

Leiden and then transformed into a product which can be transplanted either through a nasal endoscopy or implanted

In some cases, such infections can be fatal after triggering severe diarrhoea, inflammation of the colon and even intestinal perforations.Donors must be “in good health, neither too overweight or too skinny and must have good intestinal flora,” said Kuijper. Unlike in the United States, where the first two poop banks were opened last year, donors are not paid. Donations are collected at home, and the donor remains anonymous.

The donated stools are taken to the bank in western city of

directly via a colonoscopy.

It is hoped the “poop bank” will also aid research into other illnesses and may be adapted for other conditions such as the debilitating Crohn’s disease.

“Stool donations are not as accepted yet as blood donations,” Kuipjer acknowledged. “But I think it’s a question of what people are used to, and donors are offering the possibility of a safe treatment to patients suffering from what is a difficult illness.”

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12 dead in caste riots in north India

ROHTAK Twelve people have died in caste protests which triggered widespread arson and looting in a north Indian state, police said Sunday, as New Delhi faced a water crisis after mobs shut down a key supply.

Thousands of troops with shooton-sight orders were deployed on Saturday in Haryana state, a day after week-long protests turned violent with rioters setting fire to homes and railway stations and blocking highways.

Twelve people have been killed and about 150 injured in the state since Friday when officers fired on rioters, Haryana police chief Yash Pal Singal told a press conference, updating earlier estimates of five dead.

The Jat caste is leading the protests, demanding quotas for government jobs and university places, saying they are struggling to find employment and education opportunities despite India's strong economic growth. India reserves places for

lower castes in measures intended to bring victims of the country's worst discrimination into the mainstream. But the policy causes resentment among Jats, a rural caste which owns farms, and among other communities, who say it freezes them out.

Protesters again took to the streets overnight despite the stepped-up security, torching shops in Haryana's Rohtak district which is the epicentre of the violence, a local police officer told AFP. "There were clashes during the night across the district. Over a dozen buildings were set on fire by protesters, with incidents of looting of shops and ATMs at two places," the officer said on condition of anonymity.

A local police officer in Jhajjar, whose district borders that of Rohtak, earlier told AFP that five people were killed on Saturday "when the army opened fire on a mob". As the crisis escalates, the Indian capital's water

supplies have been hit after mobs forced the shutting of sluice gates at a canal in Haryana which takes water to the capital's treatment plants.

After holding emergency meetings, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced water rationing throughout the city, and said schools would be closed on Monday to conserve supplies.

"Water to be equally rationed amongst all. Pl save water.

Schools closed tomo," Kejriwal said on Twitter. Talks aimed at ending the violence were set to be held later Sunday in Delhi between Jat leaders, including those involved in the protests, and national Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

"We are working on immediately ending the violence," national Jat leader Yashpal Malik, who will take part in the talks, told AFP. Protesters maintained blockades of roads into Haryana despite the impending talks, television footage showed.

Hundreds armed with sticks

halted vehicles along one key route which was also blocked with fallen trees, an AFP photographer reported.

The photographer saw at least a dozen gutted buildings including a school in the town of Sampla five kilometres from Rohtak city.

One of India's largest carmakers, Maruti Suzuki, suspended operations at its two Haryana plants after the protests disrupted supplies of components, a spokesman said.

Hundreds of trains in the state have also been cancelled or

diverted since Friday, an official said. "Ten small and big railway stations have been burnt. The mobs set fire to rail engines and bogies," railways spokesman Neeraj Sharma told AFP. A senior local police officer warned the situation was tense in Jhajjar as Jat protesters kept up their agitation."We are not in control. The situation is very tense as thousands of protesters are on roads encircling the main administrative area in the town," Jhajjar police chief Rajiv Kumar told AFP.

Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar was taken into “protective custody” after the assault on Pathankot airbase and one of the mobile phone numbers linked to the attackers was traced to the terror group’s headquarters, Pakistan’s foreign policy chief Sartaj Aziz has said.

Azhar was placed in custody “a few days after” the attack, said

Aziz, the adviser on foreign affairs to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. He rejected India’s charge that Pakistan had taken no action over the January 2 attack that killed seven people.

On Friday, Pakistani authorities registered a First Information Report in connection with the Pathankot attack, which India has blamed on the JeM and its

chief. The FIR, however, made no mention of the JeM or Azhar, who allegedly masterminded the strike.

The FIR mentions five Pakistani mobile phone numbers that were called by the attackers from the Indian side.

Aziz said during an interview with India Today channel that one of the mobile numbers provided by India was active and had been traced to the JeM’s headquarters in Bahawalpur.

“The FIR is only a first stage report and subsequent FIRs will definitely carry names,” he said.

Pakistani authorities took time to file the FIR because “whenever a crime happens across the border in another country, it’s much more difficult to pursue the legal requirements because you don’t have all the location or evidence”, he said.

“The special investigation team

Pathankot. The team is likely to visit Pathankot by the end of February or in March.

“Even the identity of those attackers who died in Pathankot has not been established. So this is the first step of the investigation and as additional evidence is provided, once the investigation team visits India, then obviously names will happen and whosoever is responsible will be

had to investigate the telephone numbers or whatever links were available and find out who could be (behind the attack),” he added.

Aziz said India has agreed in principle to allow Pakistan’s special investigation team to visit

acted against...,” he said.

Rubbishing Pakistani- American Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Coleman Headley’s deposition to a Mumbai court, Aziz described him as a drug peddler whose statements cannot be taken seriously.

“Pakistan is not worried by Headley’s deposition. He has no credibility. He is a double agent and a drug peddler,” Aziz said.

Aziz further said there is no evidence to suggest LeT founder Hafiz Saeed was involved in the Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people. He even praised the “humanitarian” work being carried out by Saeed’s Jamaat-udDawah, which the UN Security Council has declared a front for the LeT. Pakistan, he said, will propose to India the joint withdrawal of troops from the Siachen glacier when talks between the two countries resume. He stopped short of saying that Pakistan could agree to signing a map showing actual positions held by troops from both sides.

India and Pakistan should work together to strengthen SAARC and New Delhi should shun its obsession with terrorism, Aziz said. “India is obsessed with terror, but India and Pakistan must cooperate to tackle adverse US trade pacts and build up SAARC,” he said.

Aziz was critical of the Indian media and said it should present a balanced view while reporting on bilateral ties.

JeM chief Masood Azhar in ‘protective custody’, assures Pakistan

India tops list of largest weapons importing countries in the world

India has once again topped the list of the largest weapons importing countries in the world, accounting for 14% of global imports, a prominent Stockholmbased think-tank said on Monday.

China and Pakistan rank second and fourth with their imports accounting for 4.7% and 3.3% of the global figure during 201115, according to the latest report of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). To get rid of the tag of the world’s biggest importer, India is betting on its Make in India plan in the defence sector. India’s imports have in-

creased by 90% between 2006-10 and 2011-15, the report said.

“A major reason for the high level of imports is that India’s arms industry has so far largely failed to produce competitive indigenously-designed weapons,” the report said. Russia was the top supplier to India during the five-year period accounting for 70% of the country’s imports. The SIPRI said China had shown significant capability to produce its own advanced weapons and cut its dependence on arms imports, which decreased by 25% between 2006–10

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Queen sells her Jaguar for £15,000 London One unsuspecting petrol head can rest easy knowing their used Jaguar had one very careful lady owner previously The Queen herself.

Someone unwittingly bought a slice of royalty.'

The Queen was pictured driving the V6 Sovereign model around Windsor last year but decided to part with the vehicle, which has

The monarch's X-type - which comes complete with heated seats, parking sensors and a dog grille to stop the corgis distracting the driver - sold for £15,000 after being offered online. London-based car firm Fletchdale Ltd was involved in the sale and said the new owner did not realise they were buying from Her Majesty herself.

A spokesman for the company told The Sun: 'It went to a buyer unaware of its former owner.

heated seats, parking sensors and a dog grille to stop her corgis distracting her. The three-litre automatic vehicle had just 7,600 miles on the clock at the time of the sale despite being seven years old and the sale was described as being the next-best thing to buying a top-of-the-range X-type.Her jaunt in the Jaguar in Windsor last year turned dramatic at one point when she had to swerve off a road to avoid a family out for a stroll. Oblivious

Russian DiCaprio look-alike wants Leo to win Oscar

Moscow Leonardo DiCaprio's fat Russian doppelganger has become a star in his own right. Roman Burtsev, the Revenant star look-a-like, has posted images to his Instagram of himself dressed at the three-time Golden Globe winning actor.

He even appears to be starring on the set of a Russian show called 'The Kitchen'. Many of his latest Instagram posts show Roman reenacting scenes from the Revenant, posing as Leo with beautiful women and talking about the Oscars.Roman, the Leo-like Russian policeman, rose to fame on Twitter after being spotted by a Russian news website. Though he may be a bit more portly, the Russian guardsman clearly shares some similar features to the modelloving star. He has the same blue eyes and Leo's trademark disheveled demeanor. His eyebrows are also remarkably similar.Roman gives a casually disinterested look to the camera, as if he knows he was meant to be a star.Even his stature is similar to Leo's. His shoulders are rounded and he slouches as

he stands. Many Twitter users were quick to express their amazement at the similarities.

'Leo should do a movie with this guy!' exclaimed one user. 'For fun give him a makeover & tell him to lose weight. He's certainly a lookalike [sic],' said another.

'OMG WOT! Thats crazy!!! [sic]' said one man.

Others encouraged Leo himself to weigh in. 'Leo take a look,' said one man. 'People seem to appreciate your old lost twin brother from Russia.'

'Draw me like one of your Chechen girls' said someone, putting a spin the line Kate Winslet's Rose said to Leo's character Jack in Titanic. 'The wolf-down of Wall Street,' said another user.However, the Russian officer may have some competition in the Leo-lookalike department. Just this summer, a 21-year-old Swedish model named Konrad Annerud also rose to fame after the internet discovered his similarity to the actor when he was young.

That said, Leo has revealed in the past that he is half Russian, perhaps this man truly is a distant cousin.

that they were being approached by the monarch on the Long Walk in Windsor Great Park, Scarlett Vincent and Toby Core, out with 11-monthold son Teddy, were left stunned when they realised the identity of the passing driver.

Miss Vincent, 23, a housewife from Buckinghamshire, said that she and Mr Core, 30, a company director, were left in fits of laughter when they realised they had been overtaken by the monarch.

Despite her advancing years, the Queen remains a keen motorist, having spent time as a driver and mechanic in the Women’s Auxillary Territorial Service during the Second World War.As well as regularly taking to the lanes of her Sandringham estate in a trusted Range Rover, she is often seen at the wheel on Sundays as she travels to the church near the Royal Lodge on the Windsor estate. The monarch is the only person in the UK who is permitted to drive without a licence and is the only person allowed to drive down the 2.6mile Long Walk apart from park rangers.

I bleach my eyebrows every day says Gaga New York Lady Gaga bleaches her eyebrows 'every day'. The Til It Happens To You hitmaker has revealed the strict beauty routine she sticks to, which keeps her brows looking fabulous.

She told Vogue magazine: 'I bleach my eyebrows every day I like to keep them light. They're more versatile for a beauty look.

You can draw [your eyebrows] any way you want when they're bleached.' And whilst Lady Gaga has a wealth of beauty tips, she previously insisted she would never release her own clothing collection because she has too much 'respect' for fashion designers. Gaga said: 'The thing is, at the end of the day, I have a real respect for fashion designers. And it's the reason I don't have my own line and the reason I never will.

'If I ever do anything in fashion, it will always just be as a muse or as an aesthetic, creative. I like to be a part of helping artists find themselves and feel good about who they are. I would never for a second claim to be proficient in fashion design [just] because I know good looks. '[One of the things] I've really learned from Brandon is that he's able to see in me this extremely

kind of girlish, feminine side of myself that I don't naturally see because I'm more of an imaginative person, and I don't really identify one way or another with my fashion.' The Applause Singer has been having an incredible 2016 on top of her Golden Globe win for FX's AHS:

imaginative and necessary filmmaking"."It's a daring hybrid of captured footage and deliberate storytelling that allows us to consider what documentary can do," she said. "It demands its place in front of our eyes and compels our engagement and action." The Golden Bear for "Fire at Sea" comes after the Cannes film festival last May awarded its Palme d'Or to "Dheepan", a drama about Sri Lankan refugees living on the violent outskirts of Paris.Rosi, who captured the Venice film festival's 2013 Golden Lion for his film "Sacro GRA", said when his film premiered that Europe's refugee crisis marked one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes since the Holocaust.He told reporters after the awards ceremony late Saturday that he would aim to show the film to the people of Lampedusa in an open-air screening in the spring.

The festival, now in its 66th year,

Angela Merkel with his wife Amal "to talk about how best we can help".In other prizes, France's Mia Hansen-Love won the Silver Bear for best director for her drama "Things to Come" starring Isabelle Huppert as a philosophy teacher whose marriage falls apart just as her elderly mother dies.Tunisia's Majd Mastoura won the Silver Bear for best actor for his role in "Hedi", a love story set in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, which also won best debut feature."I give this gift to the great Tunisian people, all the martyrs of the revolution, everyone who contributed to the revolution," he said. "I hope we will continue on being free, being happy, producing good art."

The Silver Bear for best actress went to Denmark's Trine Dyrholm for her role as a wronged wife in Thomas Vinterberg's "The Commune", a semiautobiographical take on his 1970s childhood.Oscar-winning

had placed a special spotlight on the refugee issue, after Germany let in more than 1.1 million asylum seekers last year.

Donations boxes to support charities helping torture survivors were placed at cinema venues, and festival internships and free tickets were reserved for migrants.George Clooney, whose "Hail, Caesar!" opened the event, even met with German Chancellor

Bosnian director Danis Tanovic took the runner-up Grand Jury Prize among 18 contenders for "Death in Sarajevo" about the corrosive legacy of the 1990s Balkan wars.A more than eighthour-long historical epic by Filipino director Lav Diaz, "A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery", claimed the Alfred Bauer Prize for a feature film that opens new perspectives in cinema.

Hotel, and engagement to fiancé Taylor Kinney. Lady Gaga also modelled on the Marc Jacobs catwalk this week, following her David Bowie tribute at the Grammys, and belting the StarSpangled Banner at Superbowl 50. The heavily-tattooed millennial - along with Diane Warren - will next compete at the Academy Awards for Best Original Song (rape documentary The Hunting Ground).

Fire at Sea wins Berlin fest top prize BERLIN The Berlin film festival wraps up Sunday after "Fire at Sea", a harrowing documentary about Europe's refugee crisis, clinched its Golden Bear top prize from a jury led by Meryl Streep.

As Europe grapples with its biggest migrant influx since World War II, the picture by Italian director Gianfranco Rosi offers an unflinching look at life on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where thousands of asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East have arrived trying to reach the European Union over the last two decades.

Thousands more have perished on the dangerous journey in rickety, overcrowded boats.

The Eritrean-born Rosi, who spent several months on Italy's Lampedusa making the film, dedicated the prize to its residents "who open their hearts to other peoples". "I hope to bring awareness," he said as he accepted the trophy from Streep.

"It is not acceptable that people die crossing the sea trying to escape from tragedies." The picture is told through the eyes of a 12-year-old local boy, Samuele Pucillo, and a doctor, Pietro Bartolo, who has been tending to the dehydrated, malnourished and traumatised new arrivals for a quarter-century.

In chilling footage, Rosi accompanied coastguard rescue missions answering the terrified SOS calls of people on boats, most of them arriving from Libya.

Many of the vessels are packed with corpses of people who suffocated from diesel fumes.

Three-time Oscar-winner Streep said her seven-member jury was "swept away" by "Fire at Sea", which she called "urgent,

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15 June.-21 June. 2015

3,000 condoms, 4,000 beedis: BJP MLA calls JNU hub for sex and drugs

Amidst the ongoing unrest in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) over anti-national slogans, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA on Monday defamed the varsity and its students.

According to BJP MLA from Ramgarh in Rajasthan’s Alwar district Gyandev Ahuja, those studying in JNU are involved in activities including sex and drugs among others.

Listing out the statistics over the illicit activities been conducted at JNU, Ahuja said, “More than 10,000 butts of cigarettes and 4,000 pieces of beedis are found.

50,000 big and small pieces of bones are found. 2,000 wrappers of chips and namkeen are found, and so are 3,000 used condoms the misdeeds they commit with our sisters and daughters there.

And 500 used contraceptive injections are also found.” ”Students are mostly found taking drugs after 8 p.m. inside the campus. Those studying in JNU

are not children, but parents of two children. They indulge in peace protests in the mornings and during the nights, they perform obscene dance, he added.

On Monday, senior BJP leader Subramanian Swamy demanded that JNU be “purified” by shutting it down for four months to weed out “communists, jihadists and LTTE people”.

“There is only one way to purify JNU. Shut down the university for four months, question every student, especially those pursuing courses in political science and sociology who are extending their stay by several years while insulting the nation,” he said at a public function.

The BJP leader’s remarks came amid the raging row over an event on the campus to protest the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. Anti-national slogans were alleged to have been raised at the function and Guru hailed as a martyr.

Scalia’s death tips scale towards Indian American judge in US Supreme Court sweepstakes In June 2012, President Obama nominated Chandigarh-born legal luminary Srikanth (“Sri”) Srinivasan to the Federal Court of Appeals, the highest-ever judicial appointment of an IndianAmerican, in what was then seen as putting him on track for an eventual elevation to the US Supreme Court. That unprecedented prospect has bubbled to the surface sooner than expected following the sudden death in Texas on Saturday of Justice Antonin Scalia, 79, reportedly of natural causes.

While it may appear indecorous to discuss a replacement even as Scalia’s body returns to the capital, US political and legal circles are agog with the implications of his death. It evens a nine-member Supreme Court bench that typically bent 5-4 in favor of conservatives, with Scalia leaning heavily to the right. It provides Obama with an opportunity to reverse the rightist orientation of the bench, and the President was quick to seize the moment, saying he will “fulfill my constitutional responsibility” to nominate a successor to Scalia.

That may be easier said than done. Appointing a U.S Supreme Court judge can be one of the most important legacies of a President given the bench’s power to shape the country’s socio-economic-cultural landscape, with decisions on issues

Indian-origin man jailed for beating Filipino maid A 52-year-old Indian-origin man in Singapore has been sentenced to 14 weeks in jail for beating up his Filipino maid, a month after his wife was imprisoned for abusing the same

domestic helper.

Janardana Jayasankarr, who worked as a security guard, grabbed 31-year-old Miezel Cagas Limbaga’s T-shirt, dragged her into a bedroom and took turns to hit the helper with his wife on January 20 last year.

Jayasankarr slapped her face and punched her stomach and chest. As Limbaga lay on the ground in pain, unable to get up after the assault, he stamped on her back, The

Straits Times reported on Saturday.

His wife, Vidya Jayasankarr, 32, slapped the maid and grabbed her neck with both hands. She was sentenced to

a week in jail last month.

Jayasankarr pleaded guilty to three charges of causing hurt, which was taken into consideration during sentencing.

Limbaga had started working for the couple in October 2014.

She earned 400 Singapore dollars a month and did not have any days off.

Her duties included doing housework, cooking and taking care of the couple’s two children, aged four and five.

The maid’s case was reported

after another Filipino maid within the housing estate saw bruises on the victim’s face, arms and chest on January 22 last year.

Limbaga confided she had been beaten up by her employers and confirmed the assault to the police.

A hospital doctor recorded bruises on her scalp, cheeks, upper chest, back and left hip.

Jayasankarr’s lawyer Rajan Nair said in mitigation the maid turned out to be a poor helper.

“She neglected her duties, had poor hygiene and could not get used to the family’s lifestyle,” said the lawyer defending Jayasankarr.

The lawyer also claimed that Limbaga had punished the couple’s two children by beating them with a broom on a few occasions, and had threatened to punish them further if they told their parents about it.

The maximum penalty for voluntarily causing hurt is two years’ jail and a 5 , 0 0 0 Singapore dollars’ fine.

The maximum punishment for the offence, if committed against a domestic maid by her employer, or a member of the household, is three years’ jail term and a Singapore dollar 7,500 fine.

ranging from gay rights to gun control to healthcare. Both parties jealously guard executive and legislative prerogative in this matter, and often a conservative or liberal judge may wait for an ideologically- aligned President and Senate majority before retiring, to enable a political status quo.

But the timing of death is not a

matter of choice, and Scalia’s sudden demise gives Obama a windfall to bend the apex bench in a liberal direction. Because US Supreme Court judges have lifetime tenure, they are typically replaced when they pass on (less than 50 per cent retire voluntarily). Some Presidents, notably Jimmy Carter, didn’t get to nominate even a single SC Justice.

Given such political and ideological implications, Republicans immediately signaled they would block any Obama nomination, saying it should come from the next elected President. “Justice Scalia was an American hero.

We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement,” tweeted Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who as Texas’ solicitor general argued several cases before Scalia.

But Obama, who has already nominated two liberal replacements to the Supreme Court bench (Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, both women), is cer-

tain to force the issue, adding spice to an already fraught electoral season.

Heading almost every short-list in US circles is Sri Srinivasan, particularly since he is one of the few Obama nominees to be have been approved by the Senate when he was elevated to the Federal Appeals Court (he won a unanimous 97-0 vote from the Senate). “Even in the malignant political atmosphere of the contemporary Senate, that margin might make him a safe pick for the Supreme Court.

Would Obama nominate a man to replace Ginsburg, and reduce the number of women on the Court to two?

Making history with the first Indian-American Justice might tempt him,” legal eagle Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the NewYorker in 2014, amid expectation that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who at 83 is the oldest of the current justices, would bet he one to make way for him.

While Srinivasan, 49, appears to be the odds-on favorite for the nomination, an Indian-AfricanAmerican outsider who makes the shortlist is Kamala Harris, California’s Attorney General who is otherwise tipped to enter the Senate replacing Democrat Barbara Boxer. Other names being discussed in the capital’s legal and political circles include former Attorney General Eric Holder, incumbent Loretta Lynch, and California SC Judge Goodwin Liu. If Obama fails to clinch the nomination for his candidate, there is also the distant but intriguing prospect of Obama himself being nominated by the next Democratic President, although Obama has demurred about his interest in the job. But for now, all eyes are on Sri Srinivasan.

Jealous of newborn, US dad tries to shoot wife A man tried to shoot his wife while she breastfed their 4month-old, because he was jealous of how much time she spent with the baby, she told police.

Nicholas George Lehmeier, 28, was charged with second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon for the attempted shooting in Minnesota.

His wife said he physically and verbally abused her for 10 years, before pointing a shotgun at her while she nursed their 4-month-old in July, reports CBS Minnesota.

She said she remembers him cocking the gun and pulling the trigger about three to four feet from her - but it didn’t go off.

He was allegedly upset she was spending more time with the child than him.

After the attempted shooting, he went to get a handgun with one

round, saying “one bullet is all I need to end this”.

His wife said she thought he was going to shoot her, but he allegedly went downstairs and shot

the gun out of a window because he didn’t want to shoot her.

She said told police she didn’t report the alleged abuse because she was too afraid and he had threatened to kill her or the children if she told anyone.

Lehmer had previously been convicted for assaulting their 7-yearold child, which led to the removal of five children from the home.

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15 June.-21 June. 2015

Chinese teen chops off hand to cure Internet addiction

In a grisly incident, a 19-yearold boy in China chopped off his left hand with a cleaver in order to cure his Internet addiction.

Xiao Wang (pseudonym), a high school senior, in Nantong, Jiangsu Province is recovering after doctors were able to successfully reattach his hand.

He performed the amputation on a stone bench next to a bus stop on Sunday with a cleaver taken from his kitchen.He then hailed a cab and headed for the Affiliated Hospital of Nantong University, where doctors conducted 10 hours of emergency surgery to reattach Xiao’s severed hand, the Global Times reported.Doctors have said it would take a week to know whether the hand would be saved.The severity of Xiao’s heavy-handed deed became known when the taxi driver called police, who then informed his parents and teachers.“He chopped off his hand to show his determination to end his Internet addiction,” one of his teachers was quoted as saying.Pressed by his parents, Xiao finally told police the location of his left hand.Reportedly China has an estimated 24 million “web junkies” who are addicted to going online. Several militarystyle boot camps have been

set up in a bid to combat what is believed to be a growing problem. “We cannot accept what has happened. It was completely out of the blue. He was a smart boy,” his mother, who declined to be identified, told reporters.The woman said she had gone to her son’s bedroom only to find that he had disappeared. She found a handwritten note on the bed in which he should have been sleeping.“Mum, I have gone to hospital for a while. Don’t worry. I will definitely come back this evening,” it read.

Drunk Air India passenger urinates in aisle, fined $1400 A drunk passenger on an Air India flight from India to Birmingham was slapped with a hefty 1,000 pound penalty for urinating in the aisle, shocking the crew and sparking angry protests from other passengers.

Jinu Abraham, 39, who was travelling with his 10-year-old son, was handcuffed and restrained with seat belts and arrested when the flight landed in Birmingham on January 19 and later fined £300 by the Birmingham Crown Court.

A resident of Hollow Croft, Northfield, Abraham was also directed to fork out £500 as compensation, and £185 in costs besides a victim surcharge of £30. During the flight he had become aggressive after drinking alcohol, declining crew’s request to get back to his seat.

The airline was not available for comments on the incident.

“About 40 minutes prior to landing he removed his trousers and stood in the aisle. He pulled down his boxer shorts, exposing his buttocks and then began urinating on the floor and seat of

the aircraft,” John Cardiff, the prosecuting lawyer, told the court.

“He was restrained by crew with plastic handcuffs and seat belts for the rest of the flight and was

years, worked for the National Health Service. His wife is a theatre nurse.

He said Abraham had been on medication after one of his children died at birth and that his

arrested on landing.”

When questioned, Abraham later said he had drunk two whiskies, that he was on anti-depressants and he could not remember anything about his actions, the Birmingham Mail reported.

Alan Newport, Abraham’s lawyer, said the defendant and his wife, who had been married for 11

wife had returned from India on a separate flight with their 15month-old child.

“Unfortunately because of a mix up at the airport in India his medication had been placed in the hold. He was without medication and nervous about flying and was concerned about his wife’s welfare,” Newport said.

Indian restaurant owner banned for employing illegal workers A 40-year-old Indian-origin restaurant owner in the UK who employed four illegal immigrants at his eatery has been disqualified for six years from being director of a limited company. Harcharan Singh Sekhon, owner of the Bombay Blues restaurant in Glasgow, gave an undertaking to UK Insolvency Service not to manage or control a company for six years from tomorrow until 2022, an insolvency service statement said. “The Insolvency Service rigorously pursues directors who break employment and immigration laws. Taking on staff illegally means they do not enjoy basic employment rights, a clear breach of a director’s duties,”

said Robert Clarke, Group Leader, Insolvent Investigations North. “The public has a right to expect that those who break the law will face the consequences. Running a limited company brings with it statutory obligations as well as pro-

tections, and this should serve as a warning to other directors tempted to take on illegal staff,” he said.

An investigation by the Insolvency Service found that Sekhon’s failed as a director of Kirkcrest Limited to ensure

that the company complied with its statutory obligations under immigration law (specifically, to make sure that relevant immigration checks were completed and copy documents retained), resulting in the employment of four illegal workers. Following a visit from the UK Home Office Immigration officers in January last year, during which the illegal workers were discovered, the company was issued with a 25,000-pound penalty notice, which remained outstanding at the date of liquidation.

All the illegal workers were also found to be paid less than the national minimum wage, contrary to the National Minimum Wage Act 1998.

been dragging up bones and artifacts from that long-vanished world.Once thought to be uninhabited, it is now suspected that Doggerland was settled by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, probably in great numbers.

As the BBC reported, “by around 10,000 years ago, the area

would still have been one of the richest areas for hunting, fishing and fowling in Europe.”

Watson and her partner Rob Spray are now in the process of surveying the ancient forest, which has evolved into a kind of natural reef, and is home to all kinds of marine life.

Woman goes scuba diving, stumbles upon 10,000-year-old underwater jungle in UK

Lucky find: Woman goes scuba diving, stumbles upon 10,000-year-old underwater jungle in UK A scuba diver in the United Kingdom claims to have

discovered an ancient forest that has remained submerged underwater for 10,000 years.

Dawn Watson, who was diving in the North Sea off the Norfolk coast in the UK, made the

discovery when she veered off her normal course.

As she continued swimming she emerged in the midst of what she described as large oak trees, some with branches measuring eight-metres-long, lying on the sea floor. “To start with I actually thought it was a piece of wreck,” ScienceAlert quoted Watson as telling the BBC. “It just looked like a piece of hull. It wasn’t until I had a really close look that I realised it was actually solid wood.” The forest is believed to be part of an ancient land mass known as Doggerland, which once linked Great Britain to the rest of Europe, and disappeared under rising sea levels about 6,000 years ago.For decades, fisherman in the North Sea have

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15 June.-21 June. 2015

Why the Results of South Carolina’s Republican Primary Should Worry Democrats President Trump. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but after his victory last night in South Carolina, a prospect that would have been dismissed as a joke only a few months ago is now a very real possibility. In a normal year it would be hard to dispute Nate Silver’s argument that Trump’s current support of about 35 percent of Republican voters also represents his candidacy’s ceiling. Meaning that if the GOP ever managed to get its act together over an opposition candidate, Trump is eminently stoppable. And if they don’t, Trump’s firm grip on just 35 percent of half the electorate makes him a soft target for the Democratic nominee in November.In my view both of those claims are mistaken-and Democrats who take any comfort in the second scenario are not only deluded but dangerous. South Carolina Republican politics is a cage fight-no rules, no refs, and plenty of gouging, biting, and low blows. This is the state where push pollers suggested in 2000 that John McCain had fathered a black child, and where Mitt Romney’s campaign played a tape of Rick Santorum’s 2008 endorsement of Romney against Santorum in 2012. It’s where the

young Lee Atwater used a third candidate as a cut-out to make sure voters knew his client’s opponent, Greenville Mayor Max Heller, was a Jew-in the process honing the skills that he would later use to deploy Willie Horton to stoke racist fears against Michael Dukakis. If you want to know just how dirty any coming election might get, South Carolina is always worth a visit.This time around Ted Cruz’s people circulated a photoshopped image of Marco Rubio shaking hands with Obama to attack the Florida senator’s “moderate” record on immigration. Trump, perhaps not finding Cruz a big enough target for his hostility, decided to take on the pope! Yet, when the votes were counted, Trump held on to his lead, winning 32.5 percent of the vote-and all 44 of the state’s delegates.

The bigger news of the night was Marco Rubio’s not only sliding into second place just ahead of Cruz with 22.5 percent of the vote to Cruz’s 22.3, but also decisively claiming the so-called “establishment lane” for himself, now that Jeb Bush has dropped out of the race. Kasich will hang on-essentially as life insurance, should any of the various rumors (which you’ll have to Google

I am not a terrorist JNU’s Umar Khalid NEW DELHI The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus came alive on Sunday night when five students accused of raising anti-national slogans, returned to the university.“The spotlight was on Umar Khalid, one of the two names that had came up prominently in the controversy.

The other one being JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who is in Tihar jail now,” Hindustan

Times reported.A large number of students had gathered outside the administrative block and shouted slogans in support of Umar Khalid, Anant Prakash Narayan, Ashutosh Kumar, Rama Naga and Anirban Bhattacharya.

“In the last seven years in campus I never felt I was a Muslim and in last 10 days I was made to feel, I was a Muslim. I am Umar Khalid and I’m not a terrorist,” said Khalid, who fled the campus after the incident. He also condemned the media trial that branded him a terrorist.“The attack (on the university) is not because of the programme which was organised on February 9, but because the government needs an excuse to attack us,” Khalid said, addressing students in front of the

admin block at the campus.Slogans of “Kanhaiya Kumar ko reha karo”, “sedition charges wapas karo”, “long live JNU” resonated in the campus.

“The media, all this while, presented a lot of things about me. The media trial, this propaganda... I know what my family is going through,” Khalid said.He also refuted claims that he made 800 calls to ‘Gulf or Kashmir’ a few days before the programme was organised.

“We are glad that our friends are back,” said Shehla Rashid Shora, JNUSU vice-president. She said that if the police come to the campus, the “activist students” will surrender. “We want the media persons to record whatever event unfolds here and request them to not doctor the tapes,” said Rashid, referring to allegations that the tapes on the basis of which FIR in the matter was registered had been doctored.Though police was not seen on the campus, students claimed they were “moving about in plain clothes”.

Meanwhile, Jamia Millia Islamia University PhD scholar Kamran was detained and questioned for over six hours at the Vasant Vihar police station after police asked him to join investigation on Sunday, police sources said. Police suspect Kamran was present at JNU during the event as well.Sadiq Naqvi, a reporter with a news portal, who was detained from Bijnor on Friday and questioned on Saturday, was questioned again on Sunday.

yourself) about Rubio’s finances or private life prove true. So will Carson, who despite claiming otherwise clearly prefers running for president to learning to play the organ.But this is now a threeperson race, with the only candidate the Democrats can count on beating, Ted Cruz, also the most likely to be the next casualty. South Carolina is a Tea Party state, and though the telegenic governor, Nikki Haley, seems determined to leverage herself away from extremism, and perhaps into the VP slot, there are enough unreconstructed (rarely has that word been more appropriate) Republican right-wingers to make this as much Cruz country as any state apart from Texas. Yet the primary results reflect the same shift I saw at the Tea Party Convention at Myrtle Beach in last month:

They clapped for Cruz, but swooned over Trump.

Rubio’s strong finish was also predicted then, by Charleston County GOP chair Larry Kobrovsky, who told me the Floridian was a “generational phenomenon,” right-wing enough to satisfy the party base, but with a unique ability to excite young Republicans. Rubio’s devastating attack on Bush as the tool of his handlers back in October opened the slow bleed that finally brought him down last night, while Rubio’s comeback from his own debate fail showed the kind of nimble-footed resilience he’ll need to survive until the convention.Will that be enough to overcome the power of Donald Trump’s celebrity? Or the Cloak of Inevitability that seems to allow the New York billionaire to offend constituencies the GOP was

supposed to embrace this time around-Hello, Hispanics!seemingly without paying any political price?

We are about to find out. But Democrats can take little comfort from South Carolina’s result.

Marco Rubio may be a fraud with a résumé thinner than Ted Cruz’s smile, but when he’s standing next to either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, the first things most voters will notice are his youth and energy. As for Trump, perhaps the laws of political gravity are merely in temporary suspension, and policy will soon matter more than celebrity once again. I’m not holding my breath, though.

And if you believe the celebrity slugfest of Clinton versus Trump would be fought on ground in any way favorable to the Democrat, you really haven’t been paying attention.

LAHORE Samjhota Express and Dosti Bus Service could not leave for India yesterday due to suspension of their operation

by Indian authorities.

Railways spokesman said that 72 passengers went back to their towns after the New Delhi bound train was not allowed to leave Lahore Railways Station.

“Around 12 Indian passengers and 60 Pakistanis travelled back to their cities. There is no passenger of Samjhota Express now at Lahore Railways Station,” spokesman told The Nation.

Sources said some two dozen passengers were due to leave for India on Dosti Bus Service.

Indian authorities had suspended the train and bus service due to violent riots in its side. New Delhi had earlier suspended the train service between the two countries on October last year in similar situation.

Official sources said that Pakistan extended the visas of Indian citizens after they were not allowed to travel to their homeland on Monday.

“Pakistan and Indian authorities have extended the visas of the passengers

travelling through the LahoreDelhi Dosti Bus Service and Samjhota Express on both sides of the border following cast violence in the northern Indian state of Haryana,” a local television reported.

come to Pakistan using this service. The service has been suspended in the past as well due to unstable relations between Pakistan and India.

Samjhota Express makes two journeys between Lahore and

The TV quoting the Indian High Commission reported the visas of those passengers travelling to India, and whose travel documents are going to expire shortly have been extended until the Dosti Bus and Samjohota Express services were restored.

Dosti Bus service travels between Lahore and Delhi via Wagha border three times a week. It was started in 1999.

India’s former Prime Minister A ta l B i h a r i Va j pa y e e h a d

Delhi in a week that is on Monday and Thursday. The train was started on 22 July 1976 following the Shimla Agreement.

Railways spokesman said the exact time frame for the train departure could not be given so far.“We cannot give exact time frame for train’s departure to India.

Indians say they cannot accept the train due to riots in Haryana. We are waiting for Indian reply,” he said.

Samjhota Express, Dosti Bus service remain suspended

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23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Devastated boyfriend tells of his final kiss goodbye Australian police find meth The devastated boyfriend of a young nurse killed following a tragic accident in Australia has posted a heartbreaking tribute on Facebook telling of their final kiss goodbye.

Darcy-Jaine Hopwood, originally from Oldham, was struck by a car as she left her friend’s wedding in Borneo, south of Melbourne, on Saturday night. It’s understood the 22-yearold’s friends tried desperately to save her but attempts at CPR failed. Her boyfriend Scott Riley paid tribute to her, revealing they had been planning a move to Europe later this month and that he’d been getting ready to propose.

He encouraged his followers to spread his heartbreaking message, and ‘appreciate the love’ around them.So far it has been shared almost 40,000 times.

Scott wrote, “Please read this, share this. do it. Everyone, treat your significant other like the king or queen they are too you today. Do it for me. Be-

cause for me, I can’t.

Oldham nurse killed after being hit by a car as she left friend’s wedding in Australia. In the early hours of this morning while I was planning my

valentine’s day ahead for the love of my life I received a phone call telling me I’d never be seeing my amazing girl ever again. Ever. As she’d been taken away from me and is now with God. I never saw this coming.”

“We were meant to be moving to Europe in 10 days, and I was going to ask her to marry me! We had planned a life together

full of incredible things but now I’ll be spending my valentine’s day alone, one side of my bed empty tonight wishing I could hold my girl just for one more night and tell her she’s

safe in my arms. Appreciate the love you have around you, embrace and enjoy it. Please do it for me.”

“Yesterday morning when I left I kissed her sweet lips goodbye but I never thought it would be the last time. I love you Darcy.”

Scott said he feels ‘irrelevant’ without DarcyJaine, and that he’s glad

his post has been shared so many times.

He added: “I’m glad that post reached the world.

I’ve got thousands of messages of people telling me how well they’re going to treat their partner from seeing my post.

And that was the aim. To appreciate your loved ones every damn day.” Her sister, Jaide, described her as ‘an amazing loving person’ who had her whole life ahead of her.

She explained DarcyJaine moved to Australia with her mum and siblings in 2007 when she was 14 and had been a pupil at Mosley Hollins High School in Tameside.

Her dad, Phillip Hopwood, and his wife, Alison, still live in Chadderton and have flown to the country after hearing the news, reports Manchester Evening News.

Jaide said her sister had recently qualified as a nurse working with people who had suffered brain injuries and only picked up her certificate on Friday. She added, “We’re going to miss her so much.”

worth $1bn in bra inserts

Australian police have seized more than AUD 1 billion (Rs 48 thousand crore) in crystal methamphetamine, or ice, some concealed in gel bra inserts in one of the country’s biggest drug busts, authorities said yesterday.

Three Hong Kong nationals and a Chinese national were arrested during the operation which Justice Minister Michael Keenan described as the largest seizure of liquid methamphetamine in Australian history. “This has resulted in 3.6 million individual hits of ice being taken off our streets with a street value of AUD 1.26 billion,” he said. Australian Federal

Police Commander Chris Sheehan said the joint operation with Chinese authorities began in December 2015 when the Australian Border Force examined a shipping container out of Hong Kong in Sydney. It originated in Mainland China. “That shipping container was found to contain gel bra inserts and hidden inside those gel bra inserts was 190 litres of liquid methamphetamine,” he said.

The seizure was referred to the Australian Federal Police who began an investigation which traced an additional 530 litres of liquid meth to five storage units in Sydney where they were found inside art supplies.

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23 Feb. - 29 Feb. 2016

Parthiv Patel to join Team India as Dhoni’s back-up

India ODI and T20I captain MS Dhoni suffered a muscle spasm in the back during a training session on Monday in Dhaka. The selection committee has named Parthiv Patel as the back-up wicketkeeper for the upcoming Asia Cup. According to BCCI release, Patel will join the team in Dhaka at the earliest as India take on Bangladesh in the tournament-opener on February 24. With the ICC World Twenty20 three weeks away, the tourney in Bangladesh allows the Indian team one last shot at zeroing in on their best combination as well as testing out the bench

strength.

Patel has played 20 Tests, 38 one-day internationals (ODI) and just two Twenty20 internationals, last representing India in an ODI against Sri Lanka four years ago at Brisbane.

Dhoni’s fitness is crucial for the team as the Asia Cup will be followed by the all-important World Twenty20, to be played across seven Indian cities from March 15 to April 3.

Dhoni’s injury comes as the latest setback for Team India after fast bowler Mohammed Shami was ruled out of the Asia Cup last week since he failed to recover from a hamstring strain.

India needs to continue winning as it’s a habit, says Ravi Shastri

Indian cricket team Director Ravi Shastri wants a positive start from his wards in the Asia Cup, and said “winning is habit” which they want to keep rolling in the Asia Cup, which kick starts on Wednesday. India will face hosts Bangladesh in the tournament opener and Shastri feels every game from here on is “important” for his side in the run up to the ICC World Twenty20, starting next month. “Winning is a habit so when you are playing good cricket it

is important to keep that habit going. Focus on your strengths, focus on your work ethics and make sure that you are not complacent, neither are you overconfident,” Shastri told reporters today. India are currently on a roll in Twenty20 cricket having routed Australia 3-0 and then registering a come-from-behind 21 win over Sri Lanka at home. “We don’t want to always come from behind, sometimes we want to start well also.

Dhawan finds the balance, looks to form deadly partnership with Rohit As bold as the claim might seem, Shikhar Dhawan has no qualms in believing that with Rohit Sharma he can be as good a pair as Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly.

Dhawan feels they could be even more successful than what is still considered the best opening pair ever for India. “Surely, we can have that between us,” said Dhawan.

“The way Sachin and Sourav had a long career in opening, we can have that in time.

You never know, maybe we can break more records. I’m always positive. It sure is going to benefit the both of us, and more than that it will benefit our country,” he said.

Whether they eventually do it is another question.

But there is potential, no doubt. Though between the two Rohit is the more accomplished batsman in ODIs and T20s, with a more varied repertoire of shots and a greater con-

version record. But that small statement gave an insight into how the pair approaches every match.

has also seen rough days when he was dismissed to poor shots after wasting a lot of deliveries. The

the fact that he never curbs his natural instinct.

It showed in his debut Test in Mohali, where he

“Rohit and I have been opening for a long time.

We understand each other very well. We know each other’s nature very well. I know what he likes to do in the middle. We are quite comfortable. We both have a lot of strokemaking abilities, so it becomes easy. If he plays fast I can play the role of rotating the strike,” explained Dhawan.

Dhawan too has enjoyed good form of late. But he

ability to keep himself together, Dhawan feels, has come from experience.

“It’s a journey. I am getting more experienced and matured with time. I am getting to know my game better. But in bad patches, I tried to stick to basics. I learn in both the good and bad times. It’s a part of life. I believe in my abilities,” said Dhawan. The confidence shows in his wide grin. To Dhawan, it stems from

raced to 187 from 174 deliveries, as it did in the 25-ball 51 in Ranchi about a week back. “I was enjoying the flow (in Mohali) and I thought it is of no use to control myself as my natural instinct had taken over my mindset. I just wanted to let go. It worked for me. I feel it’s a balance of both. How you make it better with time, that’s the key. I try to do that when I go in the middle,” he said.

Cricket is a career option now, says Kapil Dev Former captain Kapil Dev on Monday doffed his hat at the rise of cricket as a career option for youngsters, saying that parents now encourage their children to take up the game to earn a living.

“Now a cricketer can earn Rs 10 crore for playing 40 days only (in the IPL). It is just fantastic. Cricket is a career option now,” Kapil said during his address at the 7th Global Sports Summit organised by Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in New Delhi.

“Times have changed and the thought process has changed. Now parents say to their children ‘if you do not want to study you can at least play cricket and become a Sachin Tendulkar or a Rahul Dravid’,” the 1983 cricket World Cup-winning captain

said. Kapil asked the government to provide the required sports infrastructure, including play fields, and reduce tax on sports goods and equipments.

“The corporate has done their part by way of sponsorship and media have done their part by making sports, especially cricket, big. I think the government will have to do its part by

giving sports infrastructure if India wants to produce champions,” he said.

“The government will have to provide the sports infrastructure. Reduce the tax on sports goods and equipments. I heard that shooters have issues on importing their equipment and ammunition. The government will have to make it easy to bring in sports

goods and equipments by reducing taxes on these,” he said in the presence of Sports Secretary Rajiv Yadav. He also said that every school in the country should have enough play fields. “Schools are the places from where talent will come and if there are not enough play fields, how will the country produce world champions. 40 per cent of the premises of all schools should be play fields,” said Kapil. Responding to Kapil’s plea, Yadav said that because of the limited budgetary allocation for sports, it’s difficult for his ministry to provide all the facilities and it needs help from the corporate sector to build infrastructure. “The budget allocation for 2015-16 is just Rs 835 crore, whereas it should be at the range of Rs 6000 crore.

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US airstrikes destroy over $500 million ISIS cash reserves US airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria have reportedly destroyed more than $500 million cash reserves and 20 kilogrammes of gold stored by the terror group.

The estimate comes amid reports that the terror group is facing cash shortage in its so-called caliphate, slashing the perks and salaries of its fighters across the region.

Recent reports have stated that the extremist group has started accepting only dollars for “tax” payments, water and electric bills.

The US believes that airstrikes in Iraq and Syria have destroyed more than $500 million in cash that ISIS used to pay its fighters and fund its terror and military operations, ABC News reported.

That is probably a low es-

timate, a US official was quoted as saying. The official said the figure is in “the high hundreds of millions of dollars.”

An additional 20 kilogrammes of gold is

also believed to have been destroyed by the airstrikes, the report said.

As part of the effort to weaken ISIS, the US military has struck at the terror group’s finances, particularly its lucrative oil smuggling enterprise in Syria that provides revenue for its operations.

The US also began targeting ISIS “cash distribution centres” in Syria where it stored hard cash used for its operations.

Ten strikes have been conducted since then with the

most high profile being two airstrikes in Mosul, in northern Iraq, targeting facilities that American officials characterised as ISIS banks.

As proof of their successful targeting the US-led coalition released video of one of the Mosul airstrikes that showed what ap-

peared to be large amounts of bills fluttering in the air after the airstrike.

American officials believe the strikes have had an impact on ISIS operations often citing anecdotal reports that ISIS fighters are now being paid half what they had been receiving prior to the airstrikes.

“It’s a significant amount of cash that we believe was in those various collection points before we struck them,” Colonel Steve Warren, the US military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters this week at a Pentagon briefing.

According to Warren, the US now estimates that “hundreds of millions of dollars” in cash has been destroyed by airstrikes targeting ISIS financial centers.

Mumbai teacher sentenced in Pakistan for ‘spying’ Hamid Nehal Ansari, a teacher at a Mumbai management college, who went missing after illegally entering Pakistan over three years ago to meet his Pakistani girlfriend, has been jailed for three years for espionage.

A military court passed the sentence over the weekend in Kohat city in KhyberPakhtunkhwa province. He has been shifted to the Peshawar Central Prison and has a right to appeal.

The convict (31) reportedly confessed to illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan for espionage.

The Dawn newspaper quoted unnamed officials as saying that Ansari had seven Facebook accounts as well as around 30 email IDs. He was reportedly found to be in possession of “sensitive documents”.

Last month, the Pakistan

defence ministry informed the Peshawar High Court that Ansari was in army custody and would face

court martial.

After that, a two-member bench on January 13 disposed of a habeas corpus petition filed by Fauzia Ansari, the Indian’s mother, against his alleged illegal detention.

Ansari was arrested in Kohat in November 2012.

Until last month, his whereabouts remained unknown.

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Health Go ‘desi’; use ghee to get rid of hair problems!

Tired of trying to control those unmanageable and unruly hair? Good healthy hair in these times of air pollution is hard to come by and with global warming doing its stuff, the scorching heat doesn’t exactly help matters.

Be it girls or boys, that mane sure is a thing of pride. But, people put their hair through so much – styling, curling, straightening, colouring, etc. - it’s evident that this will take its toll.

Even with all the pampering and caring you do for your hair, don’t forget that many hair products are home to chemicals, which can have adverse effects in

the long run.

This may have put you in a dilemma, but, were you aware that your kitchen has that one ingredient that can help you get rid of half of your hair problems?

That magic secret ingredient is Ghee! No, this is not about eating it, in fact, this is about applying it on your hair. You may not have seen or heard many people use this method, but it’s super effective!

Want to know how it will help your hair? Read on!

1. Conditioning: Desi ghee is the perfect conditioner for your unmanageable mane. Not only does it make your hair shiny, but it also

makes them softer and luscious. Simply mix two tablespoons of ghee and one tablespoon of olive oil.

Apply it directly on the hair and leave it on for 20 minutes. Rinse it off with a mild shampoo.

2. Removes split ends: Do your split ends frustrate you no end? If you’ve tried everything from trimming to texturizing to oiling and nothing in the world seems to work, then ghee can be your saviour. Ghee has the power to not only remove your split ends, but also prevent them! All you have to do is take three tablespoons of ghee and apply it evenly on the split ends. Let it stay for

15 minutes and then comb the hair gently.

Later, wash your hair with a mild shampoo and lukewarm water.

3. Hair growth: Is this the answer to your prayers or what? Yes, you read this right! Ghee does promote hair growth, albeit with a little help from other kitchen ingredients. Once you apply ghee on the hair,

you’ll need to wash it off with either amla or onion juice. Wash your hair normally the next day. This method is ideal to be used at night before bed. Do this at least twice a month.

4. Dandruff woes: If you have dry hair and dry scalp, then you probably suffer from dandruff issues too. Although, this is something that most

people complain about during winter season, ghee is your best friend during these times. All you have to do is massage your scalp with a mixture of lukewarm ghee and almond oil. Leave it on for 15 minutes and wash your hair with rose water to remove the oil from the tresses. Try this twice a month to get rid of dandruff.

Why you should avoid eating leftover food! These are the best weight loss apps!

No wonder most of us end up eating leftovers – thanks to our hectic daily lifestyle! While they may

why you should avoid eating leftover food: Food poisoning – Usually, we don’t refrigerate our

look healthier than most pre-packaged foods, often eating food stored in your refrigerator can be dangerous.

Here are three reasons

food immediately after cooking. This habbit encourages the growth of bacteria in leftover foods, resulting in food poisoning and other digestive prob-

lems. It is believed that bacteria can grow in foods that are not refrigerated within two hours of cooking.

Cross contamination – Bacteria-loaded leftovers can contaminate other foods stored in your refrigerator, thereby degrading the food quality while increasing the risk of your family falling ill.

Acidity – Since harmful bacteria continues to grow even after the foods are refrigerated, leftovers get fermented, making them even more acidic in nature. And consuming frequent this food can cause acidity.

Sugar found in leafy greenS good for your gut health!

Whether we like it or not, leafy greens are filled with nutritional powerhouses filled with vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients.

And that’s the reason why our parents always encourage us to eat vegetables.

Now, scientists have found that these leafy greens are beneficial for our stomachs too. They discovered an unusual sugar molecule found in leafy green vegetables such as cabbage, spinach and other leafy

greens feeds the ‘good’ stomach bacteria, thus improving gut health.

The finding suggests that leafy greens are essential for feeding good gut bacteria, limiting the ability of bad bacteria to colonise the gut by shutting them out of the prime ‘real estate’.

Researchers identified a previously unknown enzyme used by bacteria, fungi and other organisms to feed on the unusual but abundant sugar sulfoquinovose, SQ for short, found in green vegetables.

A new study suggests that there are only 11 weight loss apps that can actually help you monitor your calorie intake and physical activity. Experts from the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre have found considerable inaccuracy and poor scientific basis in many apps.

After examining 800 apps, they ranked the best apps for weight loss on the basis of their accuracy and scientific basis.

Researchers selected 28 apps that were weight management-specific and allowed for logging food intake.

Lead author Juliana Chen said that although they’re clearly not perfect for managing weight loss, apps are

becoming increasingly popular for both consumers and clinicians.

Chen noted “Check to see if the information provided in the app matches up with reliable sources on healthy eating, such as the Australian Dietary Guidelines.

Lastly, choose an app that’s easy to use and easy to log your food. This includes using an app with an Australian database of foods.”

The top apps are: 1. Noom Weight Loss Coach by Noom Inc 2. Calorie Counter PRO by MyNetDiary Inc 2. ControlMyWeight by CalorieKing Wellness Solutions 4. Food Diary and Calorie Tracker by MyNetDiary Inc

5. Easy Diet Diary by Xyris Software 6. Calorie Counter by SparkPeople 7. Jillian Michaels SlimDown: Weight Loss, Diet & Exercise Solution 8. MyPlate Calorie Tracker LITE by Demand Media Inc 9. Calorie Counter by MyFitnessPal Inc 9. Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by Calorie Count 9. My Diet Coach Pro by InspiredApps (A.L) Ltd. It is said that he study is the first in Australia to comprehensively test the quality and evidence base of dietary weight loss apps, and the first in the world to test kilojoule measures reported in the app against the reference standard for Australia.

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Walk your way to better health!

We have heard over and over again that walking is important for maintaining a good health. Walking is simple, yet powerful. It can help you stay slim, improve your overall health.

Know the benefits!

Walking has been considered as one of the easiest, simplest and most convenient exercises. Daily walking can be hugely beneficial to your health.

Benefits of walking include: • Walking 1-2 kilometres can help one lose up to 100 calories.

• Daily walking will help in control weight, better blood

circulation, increase mobility and flexibility in the joints, better absorption of blood sugar, increase lung capacity & stamina and in the longer term even prevention of critical ailments such as cancer.

• Getting up and walking for two minutes every one hour could help reverse the negative health effects.

• It is also a best stress buster.

But, then why doesn’t everyone walk?

With the health benefits being well understood and tangibly visible, what are the reasons this form of

exercise is not as common as it could be? A common theme which cuts across all major cities is lack of time, says Dr Sudha Reddy, Medical Advisory Team, Max Bupa.

So, where do I start?

Dr Sudha Reddy provides some tips on how to incorporate walking into your daily life. It doesn’t need to be a specially planned walk to begin with.

• Walk to the store for your groceries.

• Walk to your work place if possible.

• Avoid usage of motorized transportation for short dis-

tances.

Small steps and changes such as these can set one up for the big goal.

Walking is the most preferred and economical

Five reasons why you should start using facial oils today!

The idea of applying oils on your face may sound abit crazy to some, but it actually is a worth try. The Egyptian queen Cleopatra used it to enhance her beauty in harsh desert conditions. Makeup artists have been using it for years.

Facial oils provide end-

less benefits- from helping remove makeup to being a natural looking highlighter. In fact oilbased facial products can actually work wonders on all skin types.

Here are five amazing benefits of facial oils: Good for dry skin Essential oils are the

Exposure to air pollution may increase obesity, diabetes risk

Exposure to polluted air may increase the risk of obesity and lead to high cholesterol and more insulin resistance, a precursor of Type 2 diabetes, a new study has warned. Researchers from Duke University in US found that laboratory rats who breathed Beijing’s highly polluted air gained weight and experienced cardiorespiratory and metabolic dysfunctions. The pollution-breathing pregnant rats had heavier lungs and

livers and increased tissue inflammation, researchers said.

For the study, they placed pregnant rats and their offspring in two chambers, one exposed to outdoor Beijing air and the other containing an air filter that removed most of the air pollution particles. After only 19 days, the lungs and livers of pregnant rats exposed to the polluted air were heavier and showed increased tissue inflammation.

ideal remedy to dry, flaky skin and can give effective results at moisturising than your over-the-counter lotions and creams.

Reduce wrinkles Most facial oils are packed with antioxidants and vitamins, which prevent firther ageing. Since,

oils are absorbed quickly, they soften the appearance of fine lines.

Good for rashes Facial oils can calm down rashes as most of them contain anti-inflammatory properties, helping to subdue irritated skin.

Good as face cleansers They work best for you as any facial oil will gently remove long wear foundations, waterproof mascara, long wearing eye shadow and lipstick in just a few trouble free swipes.

Give you radiant complexion Most essential and botanical oils can address a wide variety of skin concerns and work well on all skin types. They have anti-ageing, skin-smoothing properties to give a glowing and healthy skin complexion.

exercise option in our country versus other more strenuous options.

Walk for Health!

‘Walk for Health’ is one such step Max Bupa has

taken and the organisation hopes this will motivate several people to start walking regularly to improve their health.

Six ways to lose weight without dieting!

Lose weight without dieting – sounds easy, yet unreliable right? But, it actually can, perhaps, all you need to do in order to achieve this goal is making small changes to your everyday life.

Try these small steps to drop those excess kilos without giving up your favourite foodsGo for smaller dishes: Most people eat more when served larger portions, so pick smaller dishes while eating meals.

Drink up: Drink plenty of water – at least 8-10 glasses a day. This will not only help you stay hydrated, but will help you feel full. Studies

suggest that drinking water before meals can make you feel fuller, which can help shed pounds, as well.

Eat slow: Study shows that people can reduce their calorie consumption by eating more slowly, giving their brain time to think how full they feel. Eat mindfully and savour each bite that you take without distracting your mind.

Healthy and better breakfast: Studies have shown that people who eat a healthy breakfast typically consume about 100 fewer calories during the course of the day and weigh less than those who skip breakfast.

Improve your stamina, BP with daily dose of beet juice Beetroot’s deep, overpoweringly red juice has now earned it the reputation of a big endurance-boosting and blood pressure-improving sensation.

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found that a daily dose of beetroot juice significantly improved exercise endurance and blood pressure in elderly patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFPEF). Exercise intolerance, shortness of breath and fatigue with normal amounts of exertion, is the primary symptom of HFPEF and is due partly to non-cardiac factors that reduce oxygen delivery to active skeletal muscles.

Emerging evidence suggests that dietary inorganic nitrate supplementation has beneficial effects on blood pressure control, vascular health, exercise capacity and oxygen metabolism.

The team found that the daily dosing of beetroot juice improved aerobic endurance by 24 percent after one week, as compared

to the single dose which produced no improvement.

Aerobic endurance was measured as cycling time to exhaustion at a fixed workload lower than their maximum.

Another finding was that consumption of the juice significantly reduced resting systolic blood pressure in both the single and daily dose groups by 5 to 10

mmHg. Although, larger trials need to be conducted, these initial findings suggest that one week of daily beetroot juice could be a potential therapeutic option to improve aerobic endurance in patients with HFPEF, which has implications for improving everyday activities and quality of life, said senior author Dalane Kitzman.

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Mexican Baked Fish Ingredients: 1 1/2 pounds cod 1 cup salsa 1 cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese 1/2 cup coarsely crushed corn chips 1 avocado - peeled, pitted and sliced 1/4 cup sour cream Directions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Lightly grease one 8x12 inch baking dish.

Rinse fish fillets under cold water, and pat dry with paper towels. Lay fillets side by side in the prepared baking dish. Pour the salsa over the top, and sprinkle evenly with the shredded cheese. Top with the crushed corn

Pasta Pomodoro

chips.

Bake, uncovered, in the preheated oven for 15 minutes, or until fish is opaque and flakes with a fork. Serve topped with sliced avocado and sour cream.

and chicken broth; simmer for about 8 minutes.

Stir in red pepper, black pepper, basil and cooked pasta, tossing thoroughly with sauce. Simmer for about 5 more minutes and serve topped with grated cheese.

Basil Shrimp

Penne PaSta with SPinach and Bacon Ingredients: 1 (12 ounce) package penne pasta 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided 6 slices bacon, chopped 2 tablespoons minced garlic 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes 1 bunch fresh spinach, rinsed and torn into bite-size pieces Directions: Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add the penne pasta, and cook until tender, 8 to 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Place bacon in the skillet, and cook until browned and crisp. Add garlic, and cook for about 1 minute. Stir in the

Ingredients: 1 (16 ounce) package angel hair pasta 1/4 cup olive oil 1/2 onion, chopped 4 cloves garlic, minced 2 cups roma (plum) tomatoes, diced 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar 1 (10.75 ounce) can low-sodium chicken broth crushed red pepper to taste freshly ground black pepper to taste 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese Directions: Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook for 8 minutes or until al dente; drain.

Pour olive oil in a large deep skillet over high-heat. Saute onions and garlic until lightly browned. Reduce heat to medium-high and add tomatoes, vinegar

tomatoes, and cook until heated through.

Place the spinach into a colander, and drain the hot pasta over it so it is wilted.

Transfer to a large serving bowl, and toss with the remaining olive oil, and the bacon and tomato mixture.

shrimp from marinade, and thread onto skewers. Discard marinade.

Lightly oil grill grate, and arrange skewers on preheated grill. Cook for 4 minutes, turning once, or until opaque.

Turkey Pot Pie

Breaded chicken fingerS Ingredients: 6 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - cut into 1/2 inch strips 1 egg, beaten 1 cup buttermilk 1 1/2 teaspoons garlic powder 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup seasoned bread crumbs 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 quart oil for frying Directions: Place chicken strips into a large, resealable plastic bag. In a small bowl, mix the egg, buttermilk and garlic powder. Pour mixture into bag with chicken. Seal, and refrigerate 2 to 4 hours.

In another large, resealable plastic bag, mix together the flour, bread crumbs, salt and

Ingredients: 2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil 1/4 cup butter, melted 1 1/2 lemons, juiced 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard (such as Grey Poupon Country Mustard™) 1/2 cup minced fresh basil leaves 3 cloves garlic, minced salt to taste white pepper 3 pounds fresh shrimp, peeled and deveined skewers Directions: In a shallow, non-porous dish or bowl, mix together olive oil and melted butter. Stir in lemon juice, mustard, basil, and garlic, and season with salt and white pepper. Add shrimp, and toss to coat. Cover, and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Preheat grill to high heat. Remove

baking powder. Remove chicken from refrigerator, and drain, discarding buttermilk mixture. Place chicken in flour mixture bag. Seal, and shake to coat.

Heat oil in a large, heavy skillet to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C).

Carefully place coated chicken in hot oil. Fry until golden brown and juices run clear. Drain on paper towels.

Ingredients: 1 recipe pastry for a (10 inch) double crust pie, 4 tablespoons butter, divided 1 small onion, minced 2 stalks celery, chopped 2 carrots, diced, 3 tablespoons dried parsley, 1 teaspoon dried oregano salt and pepper to taste 2 cubes chicken bouillon 2 cups water, 3 potatoes, peeled and cubed, 1 1/2 cups cubed cooked turkey, 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour 1/2 cup milk Directions: Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Roll out bottom pie crust, press into a 10 inch pie pan, and set aside. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a large skillet over medium heat; add the onion, celery, carrots, parsley, oregano, and salt and pepper. Cook and stir until

the vegetables are soft. Stir in the bouillon and water. Bring mixture to a boil. Stir in the potatoes, and cook until tender but still firm. In a medium saucepan, melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter. Stir in the turkey and flour. Add the milk, and heat through. Stir the turkey mixture into the vegetable mixture, and cook until thickened. Cool slightly, then pour mixture into the unbaked pie shell. Roll out the top crust, and place on top of filling. Flute edges, and make 4 slits in the top crust to let out steam. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C), and continue baking for 20 minutes, or until crust is golden brown.

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