Designer Watches, Discount Replica Watches Online Shop, Ultimate Model

Hundreds of thousands of police and paramilitaries have been deployed across India to prevent violence following a long-awaited legal decision on the disputed holy site at , in the north of the country, due today.

The judgment will determine whether Hindus or Muslims have the right to worship on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque in the city. In 1992 the mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, was torn down by Hindu extremists, sparking some of India's worst religious violence since independence. The reaction to today's decision is being seen as a crucial test of India's commitment to secularism and the rule of law.

"The way the country handles this, the aftermath, will have a profound impact on the evolution of our country," Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, said this month.

With only three days before the Commonwealth Games open in Delhi, today's decision poses a new security threat to the athletes and dignitaries already in India. More, including Prince Charles, are due to arrive before the opening ceremony this weekend. About 10,000 tourists are also expected, despite recent bad publicity over hygiene, disease and terrorist threats.

The legal dispute over the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodha, 350 miles east of the capital, has run for 60 years. Hindu community representatives in India have argued they should be allowed to build a huge temple to the god Ram where the mosque once stood. Local Muslim bodies want permission to rebuild the demolished 16th-century mosque. Repeated attempts at mediation have failed.

Nearly 2,000 people died in the rioting that followed the demolition of the mosque in 1992. A decade later, Ayodhya was linked to renewed violence in which more than 1,000 people were killed.

Authorities say they are ready to deal with any trouble. Mass text messaging in India has been stopped to prevent organisation of mobs and the circulation of inflammatory rumours. In some states, schools have been shut. Huge numbers of security personnel have been mobilised, co-ordinated by a special cell in the home ministry in Delhi.

In the southern state of Karnataka alone 50,000 police are being deployed. In north-western Rajasthan, more than 20,000 will be assigned to potential troublespots. Others are being kept as an airborne reserve.

Political leaders from all factions have appealed for calm, raising hopes that a repeat of previous violence can be avoided. Sonia Gandhi, president of the centre-left Congress party, which heads the coalition government, yesterday asked Indians to accept the judgment, to be delivered by the Allahabad high court. "I request you keep faith in the Indian judiciary and maintain peace, mutual respect and brotherhood at any cost. Emotional unity is the greatest strength of India," Gandhi said.

Analysts in Indian newspapers have stressed that no political party in India – at either state nor national level – stands to gain from violence.

The original demolition of the mosque and subsequent violence has been blamed on senior politicians from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). However leaders of the BJP, now in opposition, have recently called for the legal process to be respected.

More hardline elements among the Hindu nationalist movement have also pledged to remain within the law. "All Indians should pray for peace. Peace is very necessary for humans," Swami Chakrapani, president of the All India Hindu Mahasabha organisation, said.

Mohan Bhagwat, leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, a Hindu paramilitary organisation, said its members would "be striving to see that there will be a grand Ram temple on that site" but their response would "be within the limits of law and constitution".

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

No comments

The Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ijaz Butt has refused to apologise for his suggestion that England players fixed a match in the one-day series that finished last week. Butt, who arrived in London yesterday, also defended his decision not to suspend the three players accused of spot-fixing during the Test series that preceded the one-day games, claiming it would have sent out the wrong message.

Butt had been threatened with legal action in a letter from the England and Wales Cricket Board and the Professional Cricketers' Association over his accusations against the England team. He told a Pakistani newspaper there was "loud and clear talk in the bookies' circle" that England were paid to lose the third match of the series at The Oval on 17 September.

On the subject of the three players – captain Salman Butt and fast bowlers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamer – accused over the Lord's Test, Butt insisted they had simply been withdrawn, not suspended, from the side due to allegations of spot-fixing in the fourth Test against England. Butt is in London to meet solicitors to discuss the case.

"We didn't take action against them, and let the ICC follow its course of action," Butt said. "We didn't want to send out a message to the world that we believed our players were tainted. The world would have believed that the trio were indeed guilty of spot-fixing."

The ICC responded to claims over the players' alleged links to illegal betting scams by suspending the accused trio pending appeal. However, Butt maintained the ICC action was taken without gathering substantial evidence. "We have our reservations over the decision to suspend the players without proof," he said. "But we have co-operated with the ICC anti-corruption unit. And as a board we have a responsibility to ensure that no one keeps on making unsubstantiated allegations against our players."

The England batsman Ravi Bopara has signed to play for South African franchise the KwaZulu-Natal Dolphins. Bopara, 25, will play in two first-class matches and South Africa's domestic limited-overs series, which runs from 29 October to 10 December. The right-handed Bopara was left out of England's Ashes squad but will hope to feature in the limited-overs series.

England's players, meanwhile, returned home from their "development camp" in southern Germany yesterday. The five-day camp saw the squad undertake a series of team-building exercises before visiting Dachau, the first of Hitler's concentration camps.

Captain Andrew Strauss said: "This was an opportunity to learn and develop ourselves," he said. England will fly out to Australia next month ahead of the first Test on 25 November.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

No comments

Chinese police are investigating a Beijing firm for holding people in illegal jails that the government says do not exist, state media reported today.

According to China Daily, the company charged local officials to seize and lock up complainants, preventing them from taking their grievances to central authorities. Local authorities are penalised when petitioners from their areas complain to higher officials.

The English language newspaper reported that police had detained Zhang Jun, chairman of Beijing-based Anyuanding Security and Prevention Technical Support Service, and his general manager Zhang Jie, for "illegal detention and unlawful operation", citing the Southern Metropolis Daily. The move follows lengthy articles about the firm by Caijing magazine and Southern Metropolis Daily, both known for their investigative reporting.

Government spokesmen have repeatedly denied the existence of such detention centres, and it is rare to read about them in Chinese media. But last year the official magazine Outlook published a long report about them following an outcry over the rape of a young detainee by a guard, who was later jailed for eight years.

According to media reports, Anyuanding began working for liaison offices that represent local authorities in Beijing two years ago. The company charged local governments for "controlling, forcing and escorting petitioners".

China Daily said the company told petitioners that accommodation was provided for them, then took them to abandoned hotels or rented houses, seized their identity cards and phones, and locked them up until told to send them back to their home towns.

The company's revenues reportedly hit 21m yuan (£2m) in 2008 after it began the detentions.

One petitioner, Zhang Yaochuan, said she was beaten by guards from the Anyuanding company. One told her that the local government would pay 30,000 yuan to have her returned to Guangxi province.

China Daily said the firm's website was shut down yesterday, but the company has denied dealing with petitioners and said its business was still going. "I'm in charge of bodyguard recruitment, and we're still doing business," said an employee surnamed Yu. "I don't know if our company does any business like the media reported."

Phelim Kine, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW), said the police investigation was an encouraging development. HRW last year published a report on illegal jails in which former detainees described physical and psychological abuse by guards.

Kine said: "It suggests that pressure may be building within the Chinese government to address the egregious abuses perpetrated ... against thousands of petitioners each year."

But he warned: "The problem goes far beyond one company. It involves a web of government officials, security forces, huge numbers of plainclothes thugs and dozens of facilities in Beijing alone. Meaningful action ... will require the political will to locate and close all of them."

Kine said the government should acknowledge the existence of illegal jails and stop penalising local officials for petitioners - eradicating the incentive for detentions.

He Weifang, a law professor who once described petitioning as "drinking poison to quench a thirst" because of the treatment complainants received, said it was hard to tell whether authorities were shifting in their attitude towards such jails.

"It is not rare that inside the authorities there are different voices," he said. "It could be that the people who said that [these] jails don't exist are a different group of people. It could be that there have been some careless mistakes on media control, or the people who say [they] don't exist cannot control the media any more. One thing we know is that the resistance from the public is getting stronger – that's why these articles were published."

Some believe that illegal jails flourished after the abolition of the custody and repatriation system, which was itself allowed many abuses to occur. "Since the custody and repatriation system was abolished, there is no effective or legitimate place to detain people," He said. "But [it was] a terrible system anyway. If the government wants to do something, they surely can find a way to do it - that's why some liaison offices in Beijing have become such [detention] places."

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

No comments

Obsession with economic growth and the greed of financial speculators are destroying efforts to conserve the world's diminishing resources.

British and French speakers from radically different backgrounds, and with sharply contrasting styles, found themselves singing an unlikely political duet at the Lyon environment forum. Big business, they said, must be stopped from "asset stripping" a failing planet.

Andrews Simms, the policy director of the New Economics Foundation, said the "oil-fired" obsession with growth amounted to "treating the biosphere like a business in liquidation".

Eva Joly, a former French investigating magistrate who once specialised in uncovering corruption in big business, accused hedge funds and off-shore financial havens of encouraging "destructive speculation in hard-pressed resources" including oil, water and land.

The flamboyant Mr Simms amused a mostly French audience at the Lyon Sustainable Planet Forum by illustrating his talk with lurid metaphors.

"A hamster doubles in size each week until about six weeks old, then slows," he said. "If it didn't, on its first birthday you would be facing a nine billion tonne hamster that could eat in a day all the corn produced in the world in a year."

So much, he suggested, for the argument that economic growth, consuming ever larger amounts of finite resources, was the "natural" condition of humanity.

He was joined in a debate on how to preserve the world's resources by Ms Joly, who first came to France as a Norwegian au pair. She went on to become a feared judicial investigator and then an MEP. She is regarded as the likely candidate of the French environment movement in the next presidential election in 2012.

Compared to Mr Simms, Ms Joly's style was dry and factual: still more magisterial than political. She said that there was an often neglected new threat to third world resources from the "constant appetite of hedge-funds for new forms of profitable speculation". Now that the bubble in the property market in the developed world had collapsed, she said, speculators were turning to natural resources and concealing parts of their profits in off-shore accounts.

Mr Simms made a broader argument. He said the world could no longer afford to pursue an economic model based entirely on competition and growth. Mankind must break the "vicious cycle" which assumed that greater wealth and consumption always equalled greater happiness. We would have to seek alternative approaches, based on principles of "equilibrium" – such as "cooperation" and "symbiosis – which were as much present in nature as raw competition.

"If lucky, he said, "we have we 75 months, until the end of 2016, before the accumulation and concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make it more rather than less likely that global average surface temperatures will rise 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels – critically this is the level around which climate-driven environmental dominoes fall unpredictably."

And yet, the world was hesitating to save itself, he said. "We have submitted control over our own environmental destiny to a set of economic ideas that parade as if they were unquestionable, natural laws."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

1 Comment

The world's most accurate clock has neatly shown how right Albert Einstein was 100 years ago, when he proposed that time is a relative concept and the higher you live above sea level the faster you should age.

Einstein's theory of relativity states that time and space are not as constant as everyday life would suggest. He suggested that the only true constant, the speed of light, meant that time can run faster or slower depending on how high you are, and how fast you are travelling.

Now scientists have demonstrated the true nature of Einstein's theory for the first time with an incredibly accurate atomic clock that is able to keep time to within one second in about 3.7 billion years – roughly the same length of time that life has existed on Earth.

James Chin-Wen Chou and his colleagues from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, found that when they monitored two such clocks positioned just a foot apart in height above sea level, they found that time really does run more quickly the higher you are – just has Einstein predicted.

"These precise clocks reveal the effects of gravitational pull, so if we position one clock closer to a planet, you also increase the gravitational pull and time actually runs slower than for another, similar clock positioned higher up," Dr Chou said. "No one has seen such effects before with clocks which is why we wanted to see if these effects are there. We would say our results agree with Einstein's theory – we weren't expecting any discrepancies and we didn't find any," he explained.

The atomic clocks used in the study are based on the tiny vibrations of aluminium atoms trapped in an electric field. These vibrations are in the same frequency range of ultraviolet light, detected by lasers, which effectively means that the atomic timepieces are optical clocks, accurate enough to measure billionths of a second and to keep time accurately over millions of years.

It means that the clocks were able to perceive the dilation of time with height above ground that was first predicted by Einstein. For every foot above ground, for instance, the clocks showed that someone would age about 90 billionths of a second faster over a 79-year lifetime, Dr Chou said.

The time dilation experiment, published in the journal Science, is vivid proof of how time is not what we think it is. The researchers also demonstrated that when the atomic clocks were altered in a way that mimics the effect of travelling through space, time began to slow down, as the theory of relativity says it should.

This is a practical demonstration of the "twin paradox", a thought experiment of Einstein's special theory of relativity which states that an identical twin sibling who travels through space in a rocket will actually age more slowly than the other twin living on terra firma.

Marcus Chown, author of the best-selling We Need to Talk about Kelvin, which is shortlisted for this year's Science Book Prize, said that the results of the atomic clock experiments were a remarkable demonstration of Einstein's theories.

"What's really remarkable is that these studies show these incredibly small effects of relativity over such short distances," he said. "They have demonstrated graphically that although we think of relativity as an esoteric theory of no relevance to everyday life, we can in fact show that it is really true that you will grow old marginally faster if you stand just one step higher on a staircase.

"It's a very small effect, but it brings these esoteric effects into the everyday world. It shows that if you want to live longer, buy a bungalow," he added.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

No comments

One of the lost and reputedly haunted stations of the London Underground reopens briefly today to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Blitz.

Aldwych station was one of the first to be used as an air raid shelter during the Second World War, when it helped protect many thousands of people from bombs dropped by the German Luftwaffe. Its tunnels also provided protection for some of the country's irreplaceable art.

It closed to the public in 1994, when essential lift renovations were deemed too expensive, but will reopen today and over the weekend for guided tours to help provide a glimpse of what it was like to hide from the bombs in a tube station 70 years ago. From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941, 50,000 bombs and millions of incendiaries were dropped onto the city.

The station has been decorated to replicate how it would have looked when the bombs were falling, and actors dressed in early 1940s attire will lead visitors deep into the station to add to the realism.

The tours, arranged in partnership with the Mayor of London, the London Transport Museum and Transport for London, have already sold out. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, wanted the station reopened for the historic anniversary. "We must never forget the bravery and dogged determination of the men and women who battled to keep London moving in the face of a terrifying and unremitting bombardment which sought to destroy our great city during the Blitz," he said.

Aldwych tube station, originally and briefly called Strand station, was first opened in 1907 on the site of the Royal Strand Theatre and is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of an actress trying to return for a final curtain call.

Since its closure in 1994 the station has often been used as a film set and featured in the Lara Croft computer game Tomb Raider.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

No comments

The protest group Greenpeace claims it could occupy a deepwater drilling ship off Shetland for up to a month after two activists attached a "survival pod"  to the vessel's anchor.

In the latest stage of its campaign against deep sea drilling, Greenpeace has targeted a 228m long ship owned by the US oil giant Chevron which had been preparing to set sail to drill in about 500m of water some 150km north of Shetland.

The campaigners, based on the Greenpeace protest ship Esperanza, attached the pod to one of the Stena Carron's anchors while it was moored in Bressay Sound after spending last night in a tent suspended by ropes.

Earlier today they handed up enough fresh food and water to supply the two activists for a month, before sealing the two metre-long pod shut.

One of the two activists involved, a Finnish climber called Timo Puohiniemi, was amongst the four Greenpeace protesters who briefly occupied a British drilling rig owned by Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy in the Arctic last month.

The four men were arrested by Greenlandic police after their occupation was cut short by severe weather. They were each fined about 2200 euros (£1880), immediately deported by the Danish authorities, and banned from entering any Danish territory for a year.

The second activist in the pod was named by Greenpeace as Leila Deen - a campaigner who previously threw custard over Peter Mandelson - was also on board the Esperanza in Greenland.

In a statement issued by Greenpeace, Deen said: "An oil spill here would be a disaster and just as difficult to plug as the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico, but the Government has so far refused to stop issuing permits for ships like this to drill."

So far, Greenpeace has not been challenged or impeded by the police, Royal Navy or coastguard during its latest action, and has promised to keep a rescue boat very close to the survival pod. Chevron, which owns the Texaco petrol station chain and is involved in 10 oil and gas fields in British water, confirmed it was not aware of any direct intervention by the authorities.

A Chevron spokesman said: "This kind of action is foolhardy and demonstrates that Greenpeace is willing to put its volunteers at risk to carry out such reckless publicity stunts and we are concerned for the safety of those involved."

"We fully acknowledge and respect the right of Greenpeace or anyone else to express their views by peaceful and lawful action but deplore activities that could put people at risk.

"Chevron's first priority is always safety; we are confident our operations are safe and we can drill deep water wells in the Atlantic Margin safely and without environmental harm."

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

No comments

An auction of government bonds in Ireland this morning will provide a crucial test of investors' appetite for Irish debt amid growing fears of a default.

The National Treasury Management Agency in Dublin is expected to raise up to €1.5bn (£1.2bn), a day after 10-year government bonds hit a a new record high amid fresh worries over Ireland's economic recovery. The Irish central bank warned on Monday that even tougher action on public spending may be required to win back investor confidence and cut interest payments on national debt.

The agency is offering between €1bn and €1.5bn of four and eight-year bonds. The auction results will be announced after 10am.

Markets are expecting solid demand as bond yields are high. Investors are demanding high premiums to buy Irish debt due to growing concerns about the escalating cost of the government's bailout of Ireland's stricken banking sector.

The cost of rescuing the nationalised Anglo Irish Bank, which recently reported the biggest corporate loss in Irish history, is set to push Ireland's budget deficit to 25% of GDP this year. The government insists it can slash this to 3%, as required under EU rules, by 2014.

The premium paid for Irish 10-year debt over the German bund equivalent rose to a record yesterday, with the spread exceeding 400 basis points. Irish finance minister Brian Lenihan said he was "concerned" about the jump.

The yield on 10-year bonds hit 6.5% at one stage yesterday before falling back to 6.48%. The rate moved up again this morning, to 6.6%.

Contracts insuring against an Irish debt default rose to a record 450 basis points yesterday from 421.

drive from www.guaridan.co.uk

No comments

A US woman who gained sympathy worldwide after she claimed a random attacker threw acid in her face has admitted carrying out the attack herself.

Bethany Storro admitted under questioning to fabricating a story about the attack, in which she suffered severe burns, police said.

Vancouver police chief Clifford Cook said he did not know a motive for Storro's actions, but added she was "very remorseful."

He said Storro was still being interviewed by detectives.

The police chief said that "during the course of the investigation, several discrepancies began to emerge regarding the alleged attack," leading police to search her home earlier yesterday and interview her.

"During the interview, Ms. Storro admitted the injuries were self-inflicted," Cook said.

Police had been seeking a black woman with a ponytail after Storro described the August 30 attack.

She had said the woman asked her, "Hey, pretty girl, want something to drink?" then threw acid in her face.

After the incident, Storro made several media appearances, but a planned interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show was cancelled.

She said she had received correspondence from people around the world concerned for her well being.

Vancouver police Commander Marla Schuman said detectives were working on a way to return any money donated to Storro.

Cook said any decision to charge Storro with a crime would be left to prosecutors.

A surgeon who operated on Storro said the substance thrown on her face was an acid as strong as hydrochloric or sulphuric acid.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

No comments

Uganda has joined Zimbabwe  in banning the use of untrained teachers in primary schools. It's a cruel blow to primary education, particularly in rural areas where a severe lack of funding and qualified staff means many schools rely on unqualifed teachers to remain open and provide the only learning opportunity for thousands of children.

In Zimbabwe unqualified teachers provide up to 60% of staffing needs, forming the bulk of staff in rural areas, so the immediate result of the ban is a reduced curriculum and teacherless classes. The cutbacks, which in Zimbabwe affect both primary and secondary sectors, are already causing major disruption to schools, with qualified teachers complaining that they are being forced to teach subjects they have not had training for, and that there is no extra money for an increased workload. Some schools are reported to have no teachers at all and the move has been pilloried as "a complete disaster" by the Progressive Teacher Union of Zimbabwe.

In Uganda, the government's directive hit home last week as children found themselves in even larger classes than before. For instance, in Katine sub-county, Soroti district, where the Guardian and the African Medical Research Foundation (Amref) are supporting a community development project, a third of schools will lose teachers and in most cases that includes, at a day's notice, both heads and deputies.

"I cannot believe it," said Michael Emiru, deputy head of Kadinya community school for the past six years. Gaunt and worn, he was sitting in the shade of a tree leafing through the P5 teachers' handbook from which he had been working only that afternoon. "I was telephoned this morning [Thursday] and told to report to my old school on Monday."

The first any Katine school knew of the edict, which came in a government circular issued back in May, was when they attended a training session, initiated by Amref, for teachers and parents involved in school management on the Wednesday before term began.

For some years the district education office in Soroti has been supporting the large number of non-government community schools in the district by providing them with teachers, often at a senior level, from government schools. It was recognition that universal primary education could only be a paper promise unless parents themselves set up schools. There was simply not enough space for all the primary-age children to go to government schools, nor funds to build new ones.

In Katine, five of its 15 schools are paid for by the community. And aross Soroti district, according to assistant director of education Charles Okiror, about a fifth of all primaries are community-funded.

In an area as poor as Katine, it is often a real sacrifice to send children to school at all. All parents have to find thousands of shillings each year for uniforms, exam fees and exercise books. At community schools they have to find as much again to pay fees that in turn pay the teachers. That can be another Ushs 6,000 a term. Most families have three or more children in school at any one time.

Without community schools the Ugandan government could not boast so proudly (http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/-/688324/848940/-/c6yaj0/-/index.html) of its successful introduction of universal primary education (UPE) in 1997. Yet it does nothing to support them and even bars their staff from government-funded training sessions. They have the same relationship to government schools as private schools do in the UK – except it is nothing to do with class or ambition. Without community schools, millions of children would have no schools to go to.

Many parents in Katine find it hard to understand why, if they lived a few miles away, they could send their children to a government school and yet get no support to send them to a school they can feasibly reach. It seems like an entirely arbitrary penalty on a community that has traditionally viewed education with suspicion.

It comes as an additional blow when Katine's five community schools are struggling to hang on until they are recognised – or coded, in the official language – by the government. Last year's application was messed up by the district, Charles Okiror now admits. "We submitted the applications late and without enough information."

And his protestations that he is confident that all five will be recognised by next July are immediately undermined by his admission that the government will never code more than one school in a parish.

Three of Katine's five community schools are in one parish, Olwelai, where the only government school, with more than a thousand pupils, is already grossly overcrowded.

Okiror talks of turning the community schools into satellites of the nearest government school, a good idea but not one likely to be accomplished overnight.

The abrupt removal of key teaching staff will be a disastrous blow to morale for parents who struggle so hard to send their children to school, and for the children who will find themselves in larger classes in a school without a leader. And for some families, it will be one more reason not to bother with the expense of it all, and revert instead to traditional ways.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

No comments