Four shot dead near scene of US cinema massacre






LOS ANGELES: A gunman killed three people before police shot him dead on Saturday in a shooting at a house in the Colorado town of Aurora, scene of a massacre at a cinema last year, police said.

A statement from the Aurora police department said a woman had escaped from the home and raised the alarm. When officers arrived, the man had barricaded himself inside with the corpses of his three victims.

"The male was given multiple commands to come out of the house both on the phone and from a bullhorn outside. He did not comply," the statement said.

"He was behaving very irrationally throughout the incident and often hanging up on the negotiators," it added, describing how a SWAT team of armed specialist officers had approached the building shielded by an armoured van.

"Upon doing so, the suspect fired multiple rounds striking the vehicle but not injuring any officers. Officers did not return fire. Over the next hour, gas was introduced and more commands were given to the suspect," it said.

"Shortly before 9:00 am, the suspect appeared in a second story window and engaged officers again with gunfire. Officers returned fire, striking the suspect," the statement added.

Entering the property, the team found the shooter dead, along with two other men and a woman. They have not identified the victims and an investigation has been launched.

Aurora made global headlines in July 2012 after a horrific shooting at a movie theatre that left 12 people dead and 58 others wounded during the first midnight screening of the latest Batman film, "The Dark Knight Rises."

The Aurora cinema shooting revived America's perennial gun control debate, a dispute that only intensified last month when a gunman attacked a Connecticut elementary school, killing 20 young children and six staff members.

- AFP/de



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2013 to be lucky for weekend holidayers

NEW DELHI: For those planning weekend getaways, 2013 will prove particularly bountiful. And of all the months, August is the best bet — it has a three-day weekend, a five-day weekend and an extra day off.

In all, the year has five extended weekends. Five gazetted holidays — Eid-un-Nabi, Good Friday, Valmiki Jayanti, Id-ul-Fitr and Ram Navmi — fall on a Friday. If you are lucky, there might be seven more extended weekends in store as Guru Gobind Singh Jayanti, Dusshera, Chhat Puja, Onam, Pongal Bihu and Ganesh Chaturthi, all restricted holidays, fall on either Fridays or Mondays.

There is also the possibility of two five day-weekends if one can manage a day off in the middle of the week. Holi is on March 27 which is a Wednesday while Good Friday is two days later. Bakr-Id falls on October 16, which is a Wednesday, followed by Valmiki Jayanti. In both cases, if one were to take the Thursdays off, it would result in an easy five-day break.

Also, three gazetted holidays fall on Thursdays. If one can take the subsequent Fridays off, it makes for three more four day-weekends.

August to have most extended weekends

For those planning weekend getaways, 2013 will prove a particularly bountiful year. And of all the months, August is the best bet — it has a three-day weekend, a five-day weekend and an extra day off.

There is a flip side, though. Of the 18 gazetted holidays, five fall in weekends. That might take the sheen off Dusshera and Diwali this time around. The list starts with Republic Day, which falls on a Saturday and is followed by Buddha Purnima on May 25. Guru Nanak Jayanti on November 17 is the last of the holidays lost to the weekend.

There is no escaping manic Monday this year either with not a single gazetted holiday falling on the first day of the week.

The entirely relentless working months are February, June, July and September, without a single gazetted holiday. June is without any restricted holiday. May, with its only gazetted holiday Buddha Purnima falling on the 25th, has lost it to the weekend.

However, the extended weekends are spread out equally. In the first half of the year, January, March and April each have extended weekends. In the second half, while August hogs the limelight, October and November also have long weekends.

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City Answers Gang-Rape Cover-Up Allegations












As Steubenville, Ohio, prepares for the high-profile rape trial of two high school football players, officials, battling allegations of a cover-up, announced the creation of a new website today to debunk rumors and create what they said would be a transparent resource for the community.


"This site is not designed to be a forum for how the Juvenile Court ought to rule in this matter," the website, called Steubenville Facts, said.


A timeline of the case, beginning with the alleged gang rape of a 16-year-old girl at a party on Aug. 11-12, 2012, is posted on the site. Summaries of Ohio law relating to the case and facts about the local police force including statistics on how many graduated from Steubenville schools, is included.


The case gained national attention last week when hacking collective Anonymous leaked a video of Steubenville high school athletes mocking the 16-year-old female victim and making crude references to the alleged rape.






Steubenville Herald-Star, Michael D. McElwain/AP Photo







"It's disgusting, and I've had people calling, numerous people call here, upset, they have seen it, one woman, two women were crying, because of what they witnessed," Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said. "It really is disgusting to watch that video."


Anonymous has called for more arrests, however Steubenville Police have said their hands are tied.


"Steubenville Police investigators are caring humans who recoil and are repulsed by many of the things they observe during an investigation," the website said, addressing the video. "Like detectives in every part of America and the world, they are often frustrated when they emotionally want to hold people accountable for certain detestable behavior but realize that there is no statute that allows a criminal charge to be made."


Occupy Steubenville, a grassroots group, estimated 1,300 people attended a rally today outside the Jefferson County Courthouse, where rape victims and their loved ones gathered to share their stories.


The father of a teenage rape victim was met with applause when he shared his outrage.


"I've tried to show my girl that not all men are like this, but only a despicable few," he said. "And their mothers that ignore the truth that they gave birth to a monster."


Authorities investigated the case and charged two Steubenville high school athletes on Aug. 22, 2012.


The teenagers face trial on Feb. 13, 2013 in juvenile court before a visiting judge.


Attorneys for the boys have denied charges in court.



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Congress approves US$9.7b aid for storm Sandy victims






WASHINGTON: The US Congress finally approved emergency disaster aid for victims of Hurricane Sandy on Friday, but only after a delay that sparked East Coast Republican outrage against their own party leadership.

The House voted 354-67 to provide the Federal Emergency Management Agency with US$9.7 billion to pay the flood insurance claims of thousands of victims of the killer October storm that devastated coastal communities.

The legislation, just a wedge of a much larger package sought by the White House, then breezed through the Senate by voice vote, and goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.

"We should not have parades down the street because this bill has passed," said Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who has spearheaded efforts to speed up congressional approval for aid.

"The major work of helping the victims of Sandy is still ahead of us. The bad news is that we had to even go through this dog and pony show in the first place."

The Senate had approved a comprehensive US$60.4 billion Sandy aid package last week, but Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who was stung by fractious negotiations over the deal to avert the fiscal cliff crisis, refused to bring it to the floor.

The delay enraged Democrats and Republicans alike in the New York and New Jersey delegations.

Friday's bill boosts borrowing authority for the depleted National Flood Insurance Program, which is meant to cover the roughly 120,000 Sandy-related claims filed to date.

FEMA has said the program would have run dry next week without additional funds.

Even as Boehner has since vowed to bring the remaining US$51 billion of the package to a vote on January 15, bitter debate is likely to continue, and Schumer expressed worry about the package's future.

"To be a bride and left at the altar once is bad enough. To be left twice would be unconscionable," he said.

Republican congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey told the House that the bill was "the first step of what we need to do to rebuild lives."

"It's been 70 days and many have been living in misery and heartache," he said.

Several lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, pointed to the swift action by Congress to fund relief efforts in the aftermath of deadly Hurricane Katrina.

"We were there within days," Reid said of the 2005 disaster that ravaged the Gulf Coast. "It's too bad that it's taken so long" for Sandy.

Boehner had scrambled to tamp down fury over the delay on aid to victims of the storm, which killed 120 people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes and businesses in New York, New Jersey and neighbouring northeastern states.

Obama had joined New Jersey's outspoken Republican Governor Chris Christie in leading the charge against Boehner's delay, which Christie described as "absolutely disgraceful."

The outrage quickly gained the national spotlight, and Boehner wasted little time announcing the two-part vote.

"This is not a handout, this is not something we're looking for as a favour," Republican congressman Peter King of New York, who had lashed out at Boehner when he learned of the delay, told the House.

"What we're asking for is to be treated the same as victims (from) other natural disaster victims have been treated."

Some Republicans including Senator Marco Rubio from Florida, a hurricane-prone state which has received billions in federal disaster aid, voted against the Sandy bill in the Senate, claiming it was stuffed with "pork" -- funding for projects or elements unrelated to Sandy relief.

Darrell Issa, the powerful Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, continued in that vein Friday, saying "we need to get the pork out" and pointing to funding in the Senate bill that went to programs in Alaska, clear across the country from the Sandy disaster zone.

Issa expressed hope the new legislation would be a "clean bill" focused exclusively on Sandy relief.

- AFP/jc



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Till legislation, guidelines must to end Khap terror against matrimonial alliance: Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday said it intended to lay down guidelines to curb khap panchayat-dictated violence against couples marrying inter-caste or in same gotra till the government enacted a suitable legislation to deal with the menace.

Dealing with a PIL detailing the violence in various states, mainly in northern India, directed at the behest of khap panchayats, a bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Ranjana P Desai said till the government enacted a legislation, a draft of which has been submitted by the Law Commission, a guidelines on the foot steps of Vishaka judgment would fill the legal void.

"On the lines of Vishaka judgment, till such time legislation is enacted, we will issue whatever direction which is legal and proper," the bench said and suggested that the guidelines could be implemented as a pilot project in few of the worst affected districts where khap dictated violence against matrimonial alliances had been recurring.

For this purpose, petitioner Shakti Vahini's counsel Ravi Kant suggested Haryana districts of Jind and Rohtak and Baghpat in western Uttar Pradesh. The bench summoned the Additional Director General of Police (law and order), Haryana and Inspector General of Police, Meerut Zone, along with the Superintendents of Police of the three districts to the court on January 14 to discuss framing of guidelines and their implementation.

The Vishaka judgment, delivered on August 13, 1997, by a bench of then CJI J S Verma and Justices Sujata V Manohar and B N Kirpal, laid down guidelines for government and private employers to stop sexual harassment of women at work places. The guidelines still hold good as the law of the land as no legislation had been enacted on this issue even after 15 years.

Additional solicitor general Indira Jaising supported laying down of guidelines by the court till a legislation was enacted but stressed that NGOs and social activists, who were instrumental in successful implementation of Vishaka guidelines, needed to be involved in monitoring the police action to prevent crimes against couples marrying against the wish of their parents or against the dictates of khaps.

Jaising said the government had received representation from various khap panchayats demanding amendments to the Hindu Marriage Act to ban 'sagotra' marriages, but the Centre had rejected their demand.

When amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran suggested a moderate approach, the bench said, "We do not want to delay the matter any longer." However, it said in a judicial proceeding it was imperative that the views of the khap panchayats were heard.

"We are getting the views on khap panchayats from those who are adverse to them. We may share the views but we must hear from them about their views on this issue. We may at the end of the day reject their views as unconstitutional. But it will be more satisfying in a judicial proceedings if the khaps were heard more so because all the parties before the court are hostile to them," the bench said.

Petitioner's counsel Ravi Kant said he had been researching in the three worst affected districts and would be able to send the message to two prominent khaps - Meham Chaubisi and Sarv Khap Panchayat - that the court intended to hear their views.

dhananjay.mahapatra@timesgroup.com

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Scientists Seek Foolproof Signal to Predict Earthquakes


Twenty-three hundred years ago, hordes of mice, snakes, and insects fled the Greek city of Helike on the Gulf of Corinth (map). "After these creatures departed, an earthquake occurred in the night," wrote the ancient Roman writer Claudius Aelianus. "The city subsided; an immense wave flooded and Helike disappeared."

Since then, generations of scientists and folklorists have used a dizzying array of methods to attempt to predict earthquakes. Animal behavior, changes in the weather, and seismograms have all fallen short. (Watch: home video footage and the science of earthquakes.)

The dream is to be able to forecast earthquakes like we now predict the weather. Even a few minutes' warning would be enough for people to move away from walls or ceilings that might collapse or for nuclear plants and other critical facilities to be shut down safely in advance of the temblor. And if accurate predictions could be made a few days in advance, any necessary evacuations could be planned, much as is done today for hurricanes.

Scientists first turned to seismology as a predictive tool, hoping to find patterns of foreshocks that might indicate that a fault is about to slip. But nobody has been able to reliably distinguish between the waves of energy that herald a great earthquake and harmless rumblings.

Seismologists just can't give a simple yes or no answer to the question of whether we're about to have a large earthquake, said Thomas Jordan, director of the University of Southern California's Southern California Earthquake Center at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco in December.

So some scientist have turned their attention to other signals, including electricity, that might be related to activity occurring below ground as a fault prepares to slip. (How to build earthquake-ready homes—cheaply.)

Like Underground Lightning

One theory is that when an earthquake looms, the rock "goes through a strange change," producing intense electrical currents, says Tom Bleier, a satellite engineer with QuakeFinder, a project funded by his parent company, Stellar Solutions, of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"These currents are huge," Bleier said at the AGU meeting. "They're on the order of 100,000 amperes for a magnitude 6 earthquake and a million amperes for a magnitude 7. It's almost like lightning, underground."

To measure those currents, Bleier's team has spent millions of dollars putting out magnetometers along fault lines in California, Peru, Taiwan, and Greece. The instruments are sensitive enough to detect magnetic pulses from electrical discharges up to 10 miles (16 kilometers) away.

"In a typical day along the San Andreas fault [in California], you might see ten pulses per day," he told National Geographic News. "The fault is always moving, grinding, snapping, and crackling."

Before a large earthquake, that background level of static-electricity discharges should rise sharply, Bleier said.

And that is indeed what he claims he's seen prior to the half dozen magnitude 5 and 6 earthquakes whose precursors he's been able to monitor.

"It goes up to maybe 150 or 200 pulses a day," he said.

The number of pulses, he added, seems to surge about two weeks before the earthquake then drop back to background level until shortly before the fault slips. "That's the pattern we're looking for," he said.

False Alarms

But magnetic pulses could be caused by a lot of other things, ranging from random events within the Earth to lightning, solar flares, and electrical interference from highway equipment, lawn mowers, or even a nearby farmers' tractor engine. And that's not the only thing that can interfere with sensitive electrical equipment. "Spiders got inside of our instruments once, so we had to put screens in front of it," Bleier remembers.

Bleier also saw that charged particles called ions produced from currents deep within the Earth eventually migrate to the surface. "So we added a negative ion sensor and a positive ion sensor," he said.

And because rainy weather can also produce spikes in ion concentrations, his team also added humidity sensors to help rule out this possible cause of false alarms.

Finally, he noticed that when the ions reach the air, the positive and negative charges neutralize. This produces a burst of infrared radiation that can fool weather satellites into thinking the ground near the fault is warming up, even when ground-based weather stations say it isn't. This is easily visible by GOES weather satellites, he says.

"If all of these things happen, then we think there's going to be an earthquake greater than magnitude 5 about two days after," he said.

His team hasn't yet monitored enough large earthquakes for him to be sure that what he's found is valid for all quakes. "But the patterns look really interesting," he said.

But he does feel they have enough good clues to move ahead. Starting in January, his team will try to start making forecasts. "Instead of looking backwards in time, we're going to start looking forwards," he said.

Other scientists are contributing laboratory analysis to support the magnetic field theory. Robert Dahlgren, an electrical engineer at the SETI Institute, has spent 16 months working with other scientists to squeeze rocks under high pressures to see if they produce electrical currents.

He confirmed that dry rocks indeed produce pressure-dependent current and voltage signals. But he found no discharges from rocks soaked in the type of brine found at earthquake epicenter depths, presumably because the salty brine short circuits the current.

What does this say for earthquake prediction? He has no idea. "I'm the instrument guy," he says. But he notes that the signals he measured in the laboratory could indeed generate magnetic fields under the right conditions.

It's a very painstaking type of research. "It takes a year to prepare the brine-saturated rock samples," he said. "It's like breeding elephants. It takes a long time to get results."

Nor is earthquake prediction a field rife with successes.

Sorting the Wheat From the Chaff

A few years ago, some scientists thought earthquakes might be predictable by changes in the Earth's ionosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere a couple hundred miles (300 kilometers) above the Earth's surface. The theory was that ions produced by the soon-to-slip fault could disturb the ionosphere.

But an analysis of five ionosphere disturbances recorded before earthquakes found that each could have been caused by something else—usually the sun. That's "a space-physics signal, not an earthquake signal," says Jeremy Thomas, a space plasma physicist at Northwest Research Associates and the Digipen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. Thomas also presented his findings at the AGU meeting.

It's particularly telling, Thomas says, that the same disturbances in the ionosphere could be found far away from the earthquake epicenter. "If it's related to the earthquake, you wouldn't have the signal thousands of kilometers away," he said.

This lack of success doesn't mean that earthquake prediction is quackery.

"It is a field that is very much alive," says Michael Blanpied, executive director of the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, whose scientists assess the believability of proposed earthquake prediction methods and report findings to the U.S. Geological Survey.

"There are a lot of people attacking the problem from a lot of angles and trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff—to find out if there is some wheat in there, which is still not clear," he said.

"The heart of the issue is that the field contains people who are working at a very highly professional level, people who come from other professional fields, and people who don't have a scientific background but think they have something to contribute."

And sorting that out, he added, is what earthquake prediction science is all about.


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Pharmacy Blames Cleaners in Meningitis Outbreak


Jan 4, 2013 11:41am







ap meningitis door vial nt 130104 wblog Meningitis Outbreak: NECC Blames Cleaners

Credit: Minnesota Department of Health/AP Photo


The pharmacy at the heart of the fungal meningitis outbreak says a cleaning company it hired should share the blame for the tainted steroid injections that caused more than 600 illnesses in 19 states, killing 39 people.


Click here to read about the road to recovery for fungal meningitis victims.


The New England Compounding Pharmacy, which made the fungus-tainted drugs, sent a letter to UniFirst Corp., which provided once-a month cleaning services to the Framingham, Mass., lab, “demanding” it indemnify NECC for the meningitis outbreak, according to a UniFirst filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.


“Based on its preliminary review of this matter, the company believes that NECC’s claims are without merit,” UniFirst wrote in its quarterly filing.


The New England Compounding Center recalled 17,000 vials of tainted steroid injections on Sept. 26 before recalling all drugs and shutting down on Oct. 6.


The Food and Drug Administration investigated NECC’s lab and found that a quarter of the steroid injections in one bin contained “greenish black foreign matter,” according to the report.  The FDA also identified several cleanrooms that had bacterial or mold overgrowths.


UniFirst’s UniClean business cleaned portions of the NECC cleanrooms to NECC’s specifications and using NECC’s cleansing solutions, UniFirst spokesman Adam Soreoff said in a statement. It provided two technicians once a month for about an hour and a half.


“UniClean was not in any way responsible for NECC’s day-to-day operations, its overall facility cleanliness, or the integrity of the products they produced,” Soreoff said. “Therefore, based on what we know, we believe any NECC claims against UniFirst or UniClean are unfounded and without merit. ”


Click here for our fungal meningitis outbreak timeline, “Anatomy of an Outbreak.”


NECC was not immediately available for comment.


The House of Representatives subpoenaed Barry Cadden, who owns NECC,  to a hearing in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 14. He declined to testify when members of Congress pressed him on his role in ensuring that the drugs his company produced were safe and sterile.


“On advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer on the basis of my constitutional rights and privileges including the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States,” he said at the hearing.


Members of Congress also questioned whether the FDA could have prevented the outbreak.


Compounding pharmacies, which are intended to tailor drugs to individuals with a single prescription from a single doctor, are typically overseen by state pharmacy boards rather than the FDA because they are so small. However, in 2006, the FDA issued a warning letter to NECC, accusing it of mass-producing a topical anesthetic cream, and jeopardizing another drug’s sterility by repackaging it.




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Federal agencies bracing for cuts after ‘fiscal cliff’ deal



The eleventh-hour agreement to avoid a “fiscal cliff” of higher taxes put off the major cuts known as a sequester until March 1, when another showdown is expected over the federal debt limit and how much to reduce the size of government.


Congress and the White House agreed to find $24 billion to pay for the delay, divided between spending cuts and a tax change that allows Americans holding traditional retirement plans to convert more of them to Roth IRAs, a process that requires tax payments up front.

The remaining $12 billion in cuts to domestic and defense agencies will not take effect until at least March 27, when the stopgap budget funding the government expires. The first $4 billion in cuts must come by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, and the remaining $8 billion in fiscal 2014, which will start Oct. 1.

The cuts will be rolled into budget deliberations on Capitol Hill, and no one knows what agencies and programs they will affect. Out of a discretionary spending budget of $1.04 trillion, $12 billion is relatively small. But it’s not a rounding error.

“There will be a few select cuts that will be painful,” said Patrick Lester, fiscal policy director at the Center for Effective Philanthropy (formerly OMB Watch). “We won’t know for months what those cuts are, which makes them easy to do.”

William R. Dougan, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, said $12 billion “spread across the government doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it depends on how it’s spread out.”

Even if each agency took a hit, some “will still be looking at furloughs and even [reductions in force] as a possible solution,” he said. Those are some of the near-certain actions many agencies have said they would take if they had to make the across-the-board cuts Congress imposed in 2011 to force itself to reckon with the federal deficit.

On Wednesday, government and union leaders said that threat, just two months away, is making them nervous.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Congress has “prevented the worst possible outcome by delaying sequestration for two months.”

But he warned that the “the specter of sequestration” threatens national security.

“We need to have stability in our future budgets,” Panetta said in a statement. “We need to have the resources to effectively execute our strategy, defend the nation, and meet our commitments to troops and their families after more than a decade of war.”

Several officials said they are still sorting out what the two-month delay means.

“We are working hard with [the Office of Management and Budget] to understand the impact, but we’re just not there yet,” said Army Lt. Col. Elizabeth Robbins, a Defense Department spokeswoman.

Defense consultant Jim McAleese said the deal to raise taxes on families with income above $450,000 and individuals earning more than $400,000 will bring in so much less revenue than the $250,000 threshold President Obama proposed that steep defense cuts are inevitable.

Instead of the $10 billion in cuts a year over 10 years that the Defense Department could have expected to see under Obama’s most recent deficit reduction plan, McAleese said the reductions could be more in the range of $15 billion to $20 billion a year over 10 years.

“People were talking before about defense cuts of $10 billion per year, but the sheer size of the disagreement is going to bring about an immediate, aggressive reaction that will impact the final outcome of the spending cuts,” he said.

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said of the $12 billion in cuts, “I would hope agencies could find these savings without impacts on front-line employees and without impacts on services to the public. We have more questions than answers right now.”

Steve Vogel contributed to this report.

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Pakistani warlord's death a 'major development': US






WASHINGTON: The Pentagon welcomed reports Thursday that a prominent Pakistani warlord was killed in a drone strike, saying his death would represent a "major development."

Local officials in Pakistan said Mullah Nazir, the main militant commander in South Waziristan, was taken out when an unmanned US aircraft fired two missiles at his vehicle.

But a Pentagon spokesman could not confirm the account.

"If the reports are true, then this would be a significant blow, and would be very helpful not just to the United States but also to our Pakistani partners," spokesman George Little told reporters.

Nazir sent insurgents to Afghanistan to wage war on NATO-led troops and operated out of the tribal zone where militants linked to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda have bases on the Afghan border.

Pakistani officials said the drone strike on Wednesday killed Nazir and five of his loyalists, including two senior deputies.

Nazir, one of the highest-profile drone victims in recent years, had a complicated relationship with the Pakistani government, having agreed to a peace deal with Islamabad in 2007. Pakistani officials had hoped he could counter Pakistani Taliban insurgents.

He was understood to be close to the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, a faction of the Afghan Taliban blamed for some of the most high-profile attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan in recent years.

"This is someone who has a great deal of blood on his hands," Little said. "This would be a major development."

Washington has long urged Islamabad to crack down on the Haqqani network without success.

Drone bombing raids in Pakistan are run by the CIA and not by the Pentagon. Although an open secret, the CIA does not publicly discuss the drone air war, which officials believe has severely weakened Al-Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan.

According to figures compiled by a Washington think tank, US drone strikes against Islamist militants decreased in Pakistan's tribal regions for the second year in a row but intensified in Yemen.

In Pakistan, 46 strikes were carried out in 2012, compared to 72 in 2011 and 122 in 2010, the New America Foundation said, based on its compilation of reports in international media.

But Yemen saw an equally dramatic spike in the covert bombing runs, with strikes against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants rising from 18 in 2011 to 53 in 2012.

- AFP/jc



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Amendment to anti-rape law to top agenda in MHA meet today

NEW DELHI: Timeline to fill police vacancies, rationalization of VIP security, modernization of forces including networking of police stations across the country and imparting special training to cops for handling cases relating to sexual offences against women will dominate the agenda of the meeting of chief secretaries and top cops of states here on Friday.

Convened in the backdrop of the Delhi gang-rape incident, the day-long meeting will also deliberate on possible amendments which can be brought in to make the existing laws much more stringent against rapists and also against offenders of crime against Schedules Castes and Schedule Tribes.

"Though the final decision about amending the law will be taken after submission of the Justice (retired) J S Verma Committee report, we will seek the opinions of director generals of police and chief secretaries of states," said an official, privy to the agenda of the meeting.

He said the suggestions emerged in the meeting would be passed on to the Verma panel.

The much-awaited Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System (CCTNS) project to create an integrated database for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of policing and sharing data among 14,000 police stations and over 6,000 higher offices across the country will formally be launched by the home minister Sushilkumar Shinde on the occasion.

The project includes creation of a nationwide networking infrastructure for the IT-enabled state-of-the-art tracking system that will revolve around investigation of crime and detection of criminals.

Issues relating to crime against women and atrocities on SCs\STs will be discussed in two different sessions where senior officials from the home ministry — led by home secretary R K Singh — would chalk out strategies to prevent such offences across the country.

"Discussion on amendments in the SCs and STs (prevention of atrocities) Act is also part of the agenda. Focus will be on building consensus around strengthening institutional mechanism and creating standard operating procedures to prevent crime against women and weaker sections of the society," said the official.

State would also be asked to focus on imparting 'special' training to cops for handing cases relating to sexual assault against women and emphasize on setting up of fast-track courts in consultation with respective High Courts for trying pending rape cases.

States have been asked to come with data on police vacancies as most of them failed to recruit cops despite being requested by the Centre in every high-level meet on security at the time when over one-fifth of the country's sanctioned police force remains just on paper.

Latest figures show that all states and Union Territories (UTs) had collectively reported police vacancy to the tune of nearly 4.20 lakh during 2011. The actual strength of the police force in the country as on December, 2011, was 16.60 lakh as against the sanctioned strength of 20.86 lakh, with Uttar Pradesh leading the pack in reporting police vacancies. The other states which report huge vacancy include Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Haryana and West Bengal.

"Since the shortage of cops for actual policing is compounded by excessive deployment of police personnel for VIP security, the states will be asked to rationalize the system in such a manner that only those get State security who actually need it," said the official.

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