TOKYO - An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9 struck off Japan's Hokkaido island late on Saturday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported.
The quake hit at a depth of 103 kilometres (64 miles) at 23:17pm (1417 GMT), about 109 kilometres west of Kushiro, Hokkaido, the USGS said.
In an e-mail message, Sheikh told TOI on Saturday that the high court had sustained the objection put up by registrar and had directed him to approach the interior ministry. He had filed a write seeking investigation into the circumstances that led to Chamel's death and action against the guilty.
Chamel Singh was allegedly beaten by the staff of Kot Lakhpat Jail on January 15th after he was objected by them on washing his clothes.
A Pakistan advocate, Tehsin Khan, who was also lodged in the same court, claimed to have witnessed the thrashing of Chamel Singh. He had exposed the deeds of the jail staff to the media after his release on January 18th.
Resident of Jammu, Chamel Singh was arrested on 2010 in Sialkot and was awarded five years of imprisonment on spying charges. He was brought in Central Jail, Kot Lakhpat in June 2012.
NEW YORK (AP) — Add those cute little hedgehogs to the list of pets that can make you sick.
In the last year, 20 people were infected by a rare but dangerous form of salmonella bacteria, and one person died in January. The illnesses were linked to contact with hedgehogs kept as pets, according to a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Health officials on Thursday say such cases seem to be increasing.
The CDC recommends thoroughly washing your hands after handling hedgehogs and cleaning pet cages and other equipment outside.
Other pets that carry the salmonella bug are frogs, toads, turtles, snakes, lizards, chicks and ducklings.
Seven of the hedgehog illnesses were in Washington state, including the death — an elderly man from Spokane County who died in January. The other cases were in Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Oregon.
In years past, only one or two illnesses from this salmonella strain have been reported annually, but the numbers rose to 14 in 2011, 18 last year, and two so far this year.
Children younger than five and the elderly are considered at highest risk for severe illness, CDC officials said.
Hedgehogs are small, insect-eating mammals with a coat of stiff quills. In nature, they sometimes live under hedges and defend themselves by rolling up into a spiky ball.
The critters linked to recent illnesses were purchased from various breeders, many of them licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, CDC officials said. Hedgehogs are native to Western Europe, New Zealand and some other parts of the world, but are bred in the United States.
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Online:
CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr
At least one person was killed in what the State Department called a "terrorist blast" outside the U.S. Embassy in Turkey today.
The explosion, which occurred at a checkpoint to the embassy in Ankara in the early afternoon local time, claimed the life of an embassy guard and wounded a Turkish citizen, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Francis Ricciardione told reporters.
A Turkish provincial governor said the blast was the work of a suicide bomber, according to a report by the BBC.
Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the Chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, referred to the attack as a "suicide bombing" and said it was a "stark reminder of the constant terrorist threat against U.S. facilities, personnel and interests abroad."
Television footage from the scene showed damage to a part of an outer gatehouse, which is adjacent to the main building.
U.S. officials said that Turkish police are investigating the incident.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
ANKARA (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed a Turkish security guard at the U.S. embassy in Ankara on Friday, blowing the door off a side entrance and sending smoke and debris flying into the street.
Ankara Governor Alaaddin Yuksel said the attacker was inside U.S. property when the explosives were detonated. The blast sent masonry spewing out of the wall of the side entrance, but there did not appear to be any more significant structural damage.
The bomber was also killed.
U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone emerged through the main gate of the building, which is surrounded by high walls, shortly after the explosion to address reporters, flanked by a security detail as a Turkish police helicopter hovered overhead.
"We are very sad of course that we lost one of our Turkish guards at the gate," Ricciardone he said, thanking the Turkish authorities for a prompt response.
A Reuters witness saw one wounded person being lifted into an ambulance as police armed with assault rifles cordoned off the area.
"It was a huge explosion. I was sitting in my shop when it happened. I saw what looked like a body part on the ground," said travel agent Kamiyar Barnos whose shop window was shattered around 100 meters away from the blast.
One witness said the blast was audible a mile away.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The British Consulate-General to Turkey said the blast a "suspected terrorist attack".
Islamist radicals, far-left groups, far-right groups and Kurdish separatist militants have all carried out attacks in Turkey in the past.
The main domestic security threat comes from the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), deemed a terrorist group by the United States, European Union and Turkey, but the PKK has focused its campaign largely on domestic targets.
Turkey has led calls for international intervention in neighboring Syria and is hosting hundreds of NATO soldiers from the United States, Germany and the Netherlands who are operating a Patriot missile defense system along its border with Syria, hundreds of kilometers away from the capital.
The U.S. Patriots were expected to go active in the coming days.
The most serious attacks of this kind in Turkey occurred in November 2003, when car bombs shattered two synagogues, killing 30 people and wounding 146. Authorities said the attack bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda.
Part of the HSBC Bank headquarters was destroyed and the British consulate was damaged in two more explosions that killed a further 32 people a week later.
(Writing by Nick Tattersall and Daren Butler; Editing by Jon Hemming)
LONDON: Force India unveiled their new car for the forthcoming Formula One season at Silverstone on Friday, but they are still to confirm the identity of British driver Paul di Resta's teammate.
The vacancy next to Di Resta is one of only three across the grid for the 2013 season, which begins with the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on March 17.
French driver Jules Bianchi, the team's third driver in 2012, was expected to be announced as Di Resta's teammate.
However, he was present at the launch of Ferrari's new F1 car on Friday as he is a member of the Italian team's academy.
Former driver Adrian Sutil and ex-Sauber man Kamui Kobayashi have also been linked with the role.
Force India team principal Robert Fearnley refused to be drawn on the identity of the new driver at the launch, telling reporters: "We do not want to confuse the two stories."
The VJM06 is the third of four cars unveiled so far for the 2013 season that have jettisoned the stepped nose design that featured widely in last year's world championship.
The Indian team finished seventh in last season's constructor championship, but saw German driver Nico Hulkenburg leave to join rivals Sauber at the end of the year.
- AFP/de
BANGALORE: One more BJP MLA DN Suresh resigned his assembly on Friday to join rebel camp Karnataka Janata Party ( KJP) headed by former chief minister BS Yeddyurappa. Suresh, representing Tarikere assembly segment, joins the list of 12 MLAs who resigned on Tuesday to join Yeddyurappa camp.
On finding that Speaker KG Bopaiah was not in Bangalore, Suresh reached out to the Speaker in Kodagu, 250km from the City, and put in his papers.
While state BJP KS Eshwarappa said no more MLAs would resign, former minister CM Udasi, one of the chief campaigner for Yeddyurappa, on Friday said there were more than 70 MLAs waiting to resign their assembly membership and quit also BJP.
Fact or fiction? Sex burns a lot of calories. Snacking or skipping breakfast is bad. School gym classes make a big difference in kids' weight.
All are myths or at least presumptions that may not be true, say researchers who reviewed the science behind some widely held obesity beliefs and found it lacking.
Their report in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine says dogma and fallacies are detracting from real solutions to the nation's weight problems.
"The evidence is what matters," and many feel-good ideas repeated by well-meaning health experts just don't have it, said the lead author, David Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Independent researchers say the authors have some valid points. But many of the report's authors also have deep financial ties to food, beverage and weight-loss product makers — the disclosures take up half a page of fine print in the journal.
"It raises questions about what the purpose of this paper is" and whether it's aimed at promoting drugs, meal replacement products and bariatric surgery as solutions, said Marion Nestle, a New York University professor of nutrition and food studies.
"The big issues in weight loss are how you change the food environment in order for people to make healthy choices," such as limits on soda sizes and marketing junk food to children, she said. Some of the myths they cite are "straw men" issues, she said.
But some are pretty interesting.
Sex, for instance. Not that people do it to try to lose weight, but claims that it burns 100 to 300 calories are common, Allison said. Yet the only study that scientifically measured the energy output found that sex lasted six minutes on average — "disappointing, isn't it?" — and burned a mere 21 calories, about as much as walking, he said.
That's for a man. The study was done in 1984 and didn't measure the women's experience.
Among the other myths or assumptions the authors cite, based on their review of the most rigorous studies on each topic:
—Small changes in diet or exercise lead to large, long-term weight changes. Fact: The body adapts to changes, so small steps to cut calories don't have the same effect over time, studies suggest. At least one outside expert agrees with the authors that the "small changes" concept is based on an "oversimplified" 3,500-calorie rule, that adding or cutting that many calories alters weight by one pound.
—School gym classes have a big impact on kids' weight. Fact: Classes typically are not long, often or intense enough to make much difference.
—Losing a lot of weight quickly is worse than losing a little slowly over the long term. Fact: Although many dieters regain weight, those who lose a lot to start with often end up at a lower weight than people who drop more modest amounts.
—Snacking leads to weight gain. Fact: No high quality studies support that, the authors say.
—Regularly eating breakfast helps prevent obesity. Fact: Two studies found no effect on weight and one suggested that the effect depended on whether people were used to skipping breakfast or not.
—Setting overly ambitious goals leads to frustration and less weight loss. Fact: Some studies suggest people do better with high goals.
Some things may not have the strongest evidence for preventing obesity but are good for other reasons, such as breastfeeding and eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, the authors write. And exercise helps prevent a host of health problems regardless of whether it helps a person shed weight.
"I agree with most of the points" except the authors' conclusions that meal replacement products and diet drugs work for battling obesity, said Dr. David Ludwig, a prominent obesity research with Boston Children's Hospital who has no industry ties. Most weight-loss drugs sold over the last century had to be recalled because of serious side effects, so "there's much more evidence of failure than success," he said.
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Online:
Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org
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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Jan 31, 2013 6:00am
(Image Credit: John Gurzinski/Getty Images)
President Obama has apparently had enough of leading from behind.
During the health-care push, Obama left Congress to its own devices. On immigration, he’s doing just the opposite, attempting to prod Republican legislators to the middle by demanding a vote on his own plan.
Obama Confident Immigration Overhaul Passes This Year
The president insisted Tuesday that Congress vote on his plan as soon as possible, barring agreement on something else.
“It’s important for us to recognize that the foundation for bipartisan action is already in place,” Obama said, referring to a bipartisan Senate bill offered up by the so-called Gang of Eight senators, which looks much more palatable to Republicans than Obama’s own plan. “And if Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away.”
In doing so, Obama dared Congress to say “no” to something specific.
A Glossary for Immigration Overhaul
It’s the same strategy Obama used in the “fiscal-cliff” talks. With a year-end deadline approaching, he pushed Congress to vote on his own plan: to let higher income tax hikes go into effect if lawmakers couldn’t cut a deal themselves. Obama asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to call “an up-or-down vote” on that plan, the president announced in a Dec. 28 appearance before cameras at the White House.
“If members of the House or the Senate want to vote ‘no,’ they can, but we should let everybody vote,” Obama said then.
Republicans hate such a negotiation tactic. Throughout Obama’s White House tenure, GOP aides have griped that the president and congressional Democrats have sought political gain while refusing to negotiate in good faith. On immigration, it’s the same.
The Obama plan includes a faster path to citizenship and nothing to trigger border-security enforcement. It would also clear an easier path for same-sex couples.
Before Obama rolled out his immigration plan in Nevada Tuesday, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida raised concerns that the president would launch a “bidding war.”
In a radio interview with Rush Limbaugh, Rubio dismissed the notion of an up-or-down vote: “It’s going to have to go through committees and people are going to have their input. There’s going to be public hearings. I don’t want to be part of a process that comes up with some bill in secret and brings it to the floor and gives people a take it or leave it.
“I want this place to work the way it’s supposed to work, with every senator having input and the public having input,” Rubio said.
A Senate Republican aide jabbed, “The president’s been gone from the Senate a long time and perhaps he has forgotten that it’s a lot easier to pass legislation if he works with Congress.”
Obama has presented Republicans with a plan they will like much less than what’s been crafted by the bipartisan Senate group. The group plan includes triggers to enforce border-security measures, more unmanned drones and no provisions making it easier for same-sex couples seeking to immigrate or naturalize.
Unless other Republicans come up with a plan of their own, the president has given Republicans a choice between the left and the middle. It’s not hard to tell which they’d prefer.
AMMAN (Reuters) - The revolt against President Bashar al-Assad first flared in Deraa, but the southern border city now epitomizes the bloody stalemate gripping Syria after 22 months of violence and 60,000 dead.
Jordan next door has little sympathy with Assad, but is wary of spillover from the upheaval in its bigger neighbor. It has tightened control of its 370-km (230-mile) border with Syria, partly to stop Islamist fighters or weapons from crossing.
That makes things tough for Assad's enemies in the Hawran plain, traditionally one of Syria's most heavily militarized regions, where the army has long been deployed to defend the southern approaches to Damascus from any Israeli threat.
The mostly Sunni Muslim rebels, loosely grouped in tribal and local "brigades", are united by a hatred of Assad and range from secular-minded fighters to al Qaeda-aligned Islamists.
"Nothing comes from Jordan," complained Moaz al-Zubi, an officer in the rebel Free Syrian Army, contacted via Skype from the Jordanian capital Amman. "If every village had weapons, we would not be afraid, but the lack of them is sapping morale."
Insurgents in Syria say weapons occasionally do seep through from Jordan but that they rely more on arsenals they seize from Assad's troops and arms that reach them from distant Turkey.
This month a Syrian pro-government television channel showed footage of what it said was an intercepted shipment of anti-tank weapons in Deraa, without specifying where it had come from.
Assad's troops man dozens of checkpoints in Deraa, a Sunni city that was home to 180,000 people before the uprising there in March 2011. They have imposed a stranglehold which insurgents rarely penetrate, apart from sporadic suicide bombings by Islamist militants, say residents and dissidents.
Rebel activity is minimal west of Deraa, where military bases proliferate near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Insurgents have captured some towns and villages in a 25-km (17-mile) wedge of territory east of Deraa, but intensifying army shelling and air strikes have reduced many of these to ruin, forcing their residents to join a rapidly expanding refugee exodus to Jordan, which now hosts 320,000 Syrians.
However, despite more than a month of fighting, Assad's forces have failed to winkle rebels out of strongholds in the rugged volcanic terrain that stretches from Busra al-Harir, 37 km (23 miles) northeast of Deraa, to the outskirts of Damascus.
Further east lies Sweida, home to minority Druze who have mostly sat out the Sunni-led revolt against security forces dominated by Assad's minority, Shi'ite-rooted Alawite sect.
"KEY TO DAMASCUS"
As long as Assad's forces control southwestern Syria, with its fertile, rain-fed Hawran plain, his foes will find it hard to make a concerted assault on Damascus, the capital and seat of his power, from suburbs where they already have footholds.
"If this area is liberated, the supply routes from the south to Damascus would be cut," said Abu Hamza, a commander in the rebel Ababeel Hawran Brigade. "Deraa is the key to the capital."
Fighters in the north, where Turkey provides a rear base and at least some supply lines, have fared somewhat better than their counterparts in the south, grabbing control of swathes of territory and seizing half of Aleppo, Syria's biggest city.
They have also captured some towns in the east, across the border from Iraq's Sunni heartland of Anbar province, and in central Syria near the mostly Sunni cities of Homs and Hama.
But even where they gain ground, Assad's mostly Russian-supplied army and air force can still pound rebels from afar, prompting a Saudi prince to call for outsiders to "level the playing field" by providing anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.
"What is needed are sophisticated, high-level weapons that can bring down planes, can take out tanks at a distance," Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former intelligence chief and brother of the Saudi foreign minister, said last week at a meeting in Davos.
Saudi Arabia and its fellow Gulf state Qatar have long backed Assad's opponents and advocate arming them, but for now the rebels are still far outgunned by the Syrian military.
"They are not heavily armed, properly trained or equipped," said Ali Shukri, a retired Jordanian general, who argued also that rebels would need extensive training to use Western anti-tank or anti-aircraft weapons effectively even if they had them.
He said two powerful armored divisions were among Syrian forces in the south, where the rebels are "not that strong".
It is easier for insurgents elsewhere in Syria to get support via Turkey or Lebanon than in the south where the only borders are with Israel and Jordan, Shukri said.
Jordan, which has urged Assad to go, but seeks a political solution to the crisis, is unlikely to ramp up support for the rebels, even if its cautious policy risks irritating Saudi Arabia and Qatar, financial donors to the cash-strapped kingdom.
ISLAMIST STRENGTH
"I'm confident the opposition would like to be sourcing arms regularly from the Jordanian border, not least because I guess it would be easier for the Saudis to get stuff up there on the scale you'd be talking about," said a Western diplomat in Amman.
A scarcity of arms and ammunition is the main complaint of the armed opposition, a disparate array of local factions in which Islamist militants, especially the al Qaeda-endorsed Nusra Front, have come to play an increasing role in recent months.
The Nusra Front, better armed than many groups, emerged months after the anti-Assad revolt began in Deraa with peaceful protests that drew a violent response from the security forces.
It has flourished as the conflict has turned ever more bitterly sectarian, pitting majority Sunnis against Alawites.
Since October, the Front, deemed a terrorist group by the United States, has carried out at least three high-profile suicide bombings in Deraa, attacking the officers' club, the governor's residence and an army checkpoint in the city centre.
Such exploits have won prestige for the Islamist group, which has gained a reputation for military prowess, piety and respect for local communities, in contrast to some other rebel outfits tainted by looting and other unpopular behavior.
"So far no misdeeds have come from the Nusra Front to make us fear them," said Daya al-Deen al-Hawrani, a fighter from the rebel al-Omari Brigade. "Their goal and our goal is one."
Abu Ibrahim, a non-Islamist rebel commander operating near Deraa, said the Nusra Front fought better and behaved better than units active under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.
"Their influence has grown," he acknowledged, describing them as dedicated and disciplined. Nor were their fighters imposing their austere Islamic ideology on others, at least for now. "I sit with them and smoke and they don't mind," he said.
The Nusra Front may be trying to avoid the mistakes made by a kindred group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, which fought U.S. troops and the rise of Shi'ite factions empowered by the 2003 invasion.
The Iraqi group's suicide attacks on civilians, hostage beheadings and attempts to enforce a harsh version of Islamic law eventually alienated fellow Sunni tribesmen who switched sides and joined U.S. forces in combating the militants.
Despite the Nusra Front's growing prominence and its occasional spectacular suicide bombings in Deraa, there are few signs that its fighters or other rebels are on the verge of dislodging the Syrian military from its southern bastions.
Abu Hamza, the commander in the Ababeel Hawran Brigade, was among many rebels and opposition figures to lament the toughness of the task facing Assad's enemies in the south: "What is killing us is that all of Hawran is a military area," he said.
"And every village has five army compounds around it."
(Writing by Alistair Lyon; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
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