3 dead in new Bangladesh war crimes protests: police






CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh: Bangladesh police on Saturday opened fire at Islamists protesting the conviction for war crimes of one of their leaders, killing three people outside the port city of Chittagong.

The deaths brought the total number killed since a war crimes tribunal delivered its first verdict on January 21 to at least 56, according to police figures.

The number includes 40 who have died in the last three days, since Jamaat-e-Islami party vice president Delwar Hossain Sayedee was sentenced to death, police said.

Sayedee was found guilty on Thursday of murder, religious persecution and rape during the 1971 independence war, triggering violent clashes between rampaging Jamaat supporters and police across the country.

The 73-year-old firebrand preacher was the third person to be convicted by the war crimes tribunal, whose verdicts have been met by outrage from Islamists.

The Islamists say the process is more about settling scores than delivering justice.

The latest violence came a day after the United States called for calm in the impoverished South Asian nation.

"While engaging in a peaceful protest is a fundamental democratic right, we believe violence is never the answer," US State Department deputy acting spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters in Washington.

But he stressed the United States believes "it is important to bring justice to those who have committed war crimes and atrocities" while ensuring that the trials be "free, fair, transparent".

In the new clashes, police said they fired live rounds after hundreds of student activists of Jamaat barricaded a key highway and attacked officers with stones and sticks as they tried to clear the road.

"We were forced to open fire. Three people were killed in the clashes," senior Chittagong police official Rabiul Islam told AFP, adding 10 people, including policemen, were wounded.

The war crimes trials of a dozen Jamaat and main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leaders have opened old wounds and divided the nation.

The opposition has accused the government of staging a witchhunt.

The government, which says the war claimed three million lives, rejects the claims and accuses Jamaat leaders of being part of pro-Pakistani militias blamed for much of the carnage during the 1971 independence war.

Independent estimates put the death toll from the war in which Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan at a much lower figure of 300,000 to 500,000.

- AFP/ck



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Rajnath lauds Modi as most popular CM

NEW DELHI: Amid calls for a larger role for him, Narendra Modi on Saturday won singular praise from BJP president Rajnath Singh for being the "most popular" chief minister having registered "never before" three consecutive electoral wins for the party in Gujarat.

The BJP national council meeting began here with Singh exhorting the delegates to give a standing ovation to Modi and garlanding him.

"We have never seen the BJP winning three elections under one leadership," Singh said as Modi stepped forward on the dais to accept plaudits from the delegates.

"It won't be proper to welcome Modi with mere words. He deserves a good round of applause, a standing ovation," Singh said.

The BJP chief also lauded chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh respectively for leading "successful" governments. He also had words of praise for Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar, Bihar deputy chief minister Sushilkumar Modi and leader of the BJP legislature party in Punjab, where the party is sharing power with the Akali Dal.

Singh also defended his predecessor Nitin Gadkari, saying the allegations against the former BJP president were completely false and baseless.

Singh accused the UPA government of failure of various counts including in ensuring security, maintaining diplomatic relations, particularly with neighbouring countries, tackling naxalism and handling of the economy and sought to project the BJP as an alternative.

"We haven't seen a strong leadership in the Congress-led UPA," the BJP president said.

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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident


LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.


In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.


"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."


The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.


On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.


In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.


Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.


In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.


The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.


Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.


For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."


David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.


Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.


Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.


"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.


WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.


Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.


"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.


Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.


"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.


In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."


Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.


Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.


Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.


"I'm enraged," he said.


___


Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.


__


Online:


WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb


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Obama Signs Order to Begin Sequester Cuts












President Obama and congressional leaders today failed to reach a breakthrough to avert a sweeping package of automatic spending cuts, setting into motion $85 billion of across-the-board belt-tightening that neither had wanted to see.


President Obama officially initiated the cuts with an order to agencies Friday evening.


He had met for just over an hour at the White House Friday morning with Republican leaders House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic allies, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Vice President Joe Biden.


But the parties emerged from their first face-to-face meeting of the year resigned to see the cuts take hold at midnight.


"This is not a win for anybody," Obama lamented in a statement to reporters after the meeting. "This is a loss for the American people."


READ MORE: 6 Questions (and Answers) About the Sequester


Officials have said the spending reductions immediately take effect Saturday but that the pain from reduced government services and furloughs of tens of thousands of federal employees would be felt gradually in the weeks ahead.








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Federal agencies, including Homeland Security, the Pentagon, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education, have all prepared to notify employees that they will have to take one unpaid day off per week through the end of the year.


The staffing trims could slow many government services, including airport screenings, air traffic control, and law enforcement investigations and prosecutions. Spending on education programs and health services for low-income families will also get clipped.


"It is absolutely true that this is not going to precipitate the crisis" that would have been caused by the so-called fiscal cliff, Obama said. "But people are going to be hurt. The economy will not grow as quickly as it would have. Unemployment will not go down as quickly as it would have. And there are lives behind that. And it's real."


The sticking point in the debate over the automatic cuts -- known as sequester -- has remained the same between the parties for more than a year since the cuts were first proposed: whether to include more new tax revenue in a broad deficit reduction plan.


The White House insists there must be higher tax revenue, through elimination of tax loopholes and deductions that benefit wealthier Americans and corporations. Republicans seek an approach of spending cuts only, with an emphasis on entitlement programs. It's a deep divide that both sides have proven unable to bridge.


"This discussion about revenue, in my view, is over," Boehner told reporters after the meeting. "It's about taking on the spending problem here in Washington."


Boehner: No New Taxes to Avert Sequester


Boehner says any elimination of tax loopholes or deductions should be part of a broader tax code overhaul aimed at lowering rates overall, not to offset spending cuts in the sequester.


Obama countered today that he's willing to "take on the problem where it exists, on entitlements, and do some things that my own party doesn't like."


But he says Republicans must be willing to eliminate some tax loopholes as part of a deal.


"They refuse to budge on closing a single wasteful loophole to help reduce the deficit," Obama said. "We can and must replace these cuts with a more balanced approach that asks something from everybody."


Can anything more be done by either side to reach a middle ground?


The president today claimed he's done all he can. "I am not a dictator, I'm the president," Obama said.






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Bertelsmann buys out KKR in music rights business BMG






FRANKFURT: German media giant Bertelsmann said Friday it has agreed to buy out the US investment fund KKR in their jointly-owned music rights management company BMG for an undisclosed sum.

Bertelsmann said in a statement it will acquire the 51-percent stake that KKR has held in BMG since 2009, finally bringing the unit back under full ownership.

BMG was originally set up in 2008 and KKR acquired its 51-percent stake in 2009.

According to the Financial Times last week, the estimated cost of the deal is around 500 million euros ($654 million).

The deal is still subject to regulatory approval, but is scheduled to close "during the first half of this year," the statement said.

Bertelsmann said BMG manages the rights to more than one million songs, including works by such artists as Bruno Mars, Duran Duran, Gossip, Johnny Cash, and Will.i.am.

It also represents the master rights -- composition and recording -- of artists such as Brian Ferry, Nena and Anastacia.

"This is a great day for Bertelsmann. We are bringing the music home to our group. We are happy to have BMG as our own company again," said Bertelsmann chief executive Thomas Rabe.

Rabe said KKR had been a good partner, but taking full ownership of BMG was "an important step in putting Bertelsmann's growth strategy into practice," Rabe said.

-AFP/sb



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Home minister Shinde 'deeply shocked' at Bhandara rapes

NEW DELHI: Expressing shock at the kidnapping, gang-rape and killing of three minor sisters in Maharashtra last month, home minister Sushilkumar Shinde on Friday said police in the state was making every effort to nab the perpetrators.

"I am deeply shocked that three minor girls from same family were brutally murdered after being sexually abused and their bodies thrown in a well in a village in Maharashtra's Bhandara district," Shinde told Rajya Sabha in a statement.

Shinde said the girls went missing on February 14 and their bodies were found three days later.

"The in-charge of the police station was suspended for not seriously taking the report of missing girls. Several teams have been formed to pursue different line of investigation," he said.

Shinde said efforts were on to nab the perpetrators.

The three sisters, aged between 11 and six, went missing on February 14, Valentine's Day, after attending school. Two days later, their brutalized bodies were found in a well.

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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident


LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.


In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.


"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."


The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.


On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.


In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.


Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.


In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.


The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.


Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.


For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."


David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.


Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.


Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.


"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.


WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.


Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.


"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.


Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.


"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.


In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."


Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.


Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.


Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.


"I'm enraged," he said.


___


Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.


__


Online:


WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb


Read More..

Sequestration: Surrender is in the Air












The budget ax is about to fall, and there's little lawmakers in Washington are doing to stop it.


Despite a parade of dire warnings from the White House, an $85 billion package of deep automatic spending cuts appears poised to take effect at the stroke of midnight on Friday.


The cuts – known in Washington-speak as the sequester – will hit every federal budget, from defense to education, and even the president's own staff.


On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats and Republicans each staged votes Thursday aimed at substituting the indiscriminate across-the-board cuts with more sensible ones. Democrats also called for including new tax revenue in the mix. Both measures failed.


Lleaders on both sides publicly conceded that the effort was largely for show, with little chance the opposing chamber would embrace the other's plan. They will discuss their differences with President Obama at the White House on Friday.


"It isn't a plan at all, it's a gimmick," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said today of the Democrats' legislation.


"Republicans call the plan flexibility" in how the cuts are made, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "Let's call it what it is. It is a punt."


The budget crisis is the product of a longstanding failure of Congress and the White House to compromise on plans for deficit reduction. The sequester itself, enacted in late 2011, was intended to be so unpalatable as to help force a deal.








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Republicans and Democrats, however, remain gridlocked over the issue of taxes.


Obama has mandated that any steps to offset the automatic cuts must include new tax revenue through the elimination of loopholes and deductions. House Speaker John Boehner and the GOP insist the approach should be spending cuts-only, modifying the package to make it more reasonable.


"Do we want to close loopholes? We sure do. But if we are going to do tax reform, it should focus on creating jobs, not funding more government," House Speaker John Boehner said, explaining his opposition to Obama's plan.


Boehner, McConnell, Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will huddle with Obama at the White House on Friday for the first face-to-face meeting of the group this year.


"There are no preconditions to a meeting like this," White House spokesman Jay Carney said today. "The immediate purpose of the meeting is to discuss the imminent sequester deadline and to avert it."


Even if the leaders reach a deal, there's almost no chance a compromise could be enacted before the deadline. Lawmakers are expected to recess later today for a long weekend in their districts.


What will be the short-term impact of the automatic cuts?


Officials say it will be a gradual, "rolling impact" with limited visible impact across the country in the first few weeks that the cuts are allowed to stand.


Over the long term, however, the Congressional Budget Office and independent economic analysts have warned sequester could lead to economic contraction and possibly a recession.


"This is going to be a big hit on the economy," Obama said Wednesday night.


"It means that you have fewer customers with money in their pockets ready to buy your goods and services. It means that the global economy will be weaker," he said. "And the worst part of it is, it's entirely unnecessary."


Both sides say that if the cuts take effect, the next best chance for a resolution could come next month when the parties need to enact a new federal budget. Government funding runs out on March 27, raising the specter of a federal shutdown if they still can't reach a deal.


"As we anticipate an across-the-board budget cuts across our land, we still expect to see your goodness prevail, O God, " Senate Chaplain Barry Black prayed on the Senate floor this morning, "and save us from ourselves."



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Sony sells Tokyo office building for US$1.2b






TOKYO: Sony said on Thursday it has sold one of its main buildings in Tokyo for US$1.2 billion as the embattled Japanese electronics giant offloads assets to help repair its tattered balance sheet.

The news comes after the company in January announced the sale of its US headquarters in Manhattan for more than US$1.0 billion while this month it also sold part of its online medical services unit.

Sony said its had sold the 25-storey central Tokyo building, which houses its television unit, to Nippon Building Fund and an unnamed Japanese institutional investor for 111 billion yen (US$1.2 billion) and would earn it a profit of 41 billion yen.

"Sony is transforming its business portfolio and reorganising its assets in an effort to strengthen its corporate structure," the company said in a statement. "This sale was conducted as a part of this reorganisation."

Sony said it would remain in the central Tokyo building for five years under a leasing agreement.

Earlier this month, the firm said it would book a US$1.2-billion gain from selling part of an online medical services unit, as it eyes a full-year profit after four years in the red.

Sony has announced a massive corporate overhaul that includes thousands of job cuts, the sale of a chemical division and an investment in Olympus to tap the camera and medical equipment maker's strong foothold in the global market for endoscopes.

The maker of Bravia televisions and PlayStation games consoles lost 456.66 billion yen in the last fiscal year, but says it is on track for a 20-billion-yen net profit in the year to March.

Last week, Sony announced it would launch its PlayStation 4 system as it faces increasing competition from cheap -- or sometimes free -- downloadable video games for smartphones and tablets.

The company's hard times saw its stock value tumble below 1,000 yen a share last year, for the first time since the era of the Walkman.

The stock has since come back, with Sony shares up 3.56 per cent at 1,338 yen on Thursday in Tokyo.

Japan's electronics sector has suffered a myriad of problems, including a strong yen, slowing demand in key export markets, fierce competition especially in the struggling TV division and strategic mistakes.

The industry has been awash in huge losses and credit rating downgrades, with rival Sharp saying last year it would put up real estate as collateral for bank loans -- including its Osaka headquarters -- to stay afloat.

- AFP/xq



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Landslide victory for Left in Tripura, Cong to retain power in Meghalaya

AGARTALA: Tripura's ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) led Left Front was Thursday heading for a landslide victory and set to retain power for a fifth straight term.

In a virtual status quo, the ruling formations were ahead and appeared to be romping back to power in the assembly elections in Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya where counting of votes was taken up on Thursday.
TRIPURA

PARTY LEADS WINS
CONGRESS 5 5
CPM 13 35
CPI 1 1

MEGHALAYA

PARTY LEADS WINS
CONGRESS 26 2
UDP 4 2
NCP 2 0
National People's Party 2 0
Hill state People's
Democratic party
4
0
Others 11 0

NAGALAND

PARTY LEADS WINS
CONGRESS 3 1
Janata Dal(United) 1 0
NPF 10 20
NCP 2 2
Rashtriya Janata Dal 1 0
Others 5 3

The Left Front government is set to come back to power for the fifth consecutive term in Tripura with leader of the coalition CPM leading in 32 of the 60 seats while its ally CPI was ahead in one.

Congress was a poor second leading only in four seats and others in one in the trends available so far.

In Meghalaya, the ruling Congress-UDP coalition is ahead in 14 of the 60 seats. Congress was ahead in 9 and its alliance partner UDP in 5.

Nagaland also continued with the same trend of favouring the ruling combination.

The Naga Peoples Front (NPF) was ahead in 15 seats while the Congress was ahead in 4, JD(U) 1 and others 2 in the 60-member assembly.

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