Daily Excelsior... World

Pakistani qake survivors
brace for the brutal winter

ISLAMABAD, Jan 7: Three months after South Asia's monster earthquake, hundreds of thousands of survivors chilled by the first blast of the Himalayan winter face a fight for survival until....more

Smoking parents can still
keep kids from starting

NEW YORK, Jan 7: Parents who can't kick the smoking habit themselves can nevertheless convince their children not to start, a new study shows..........more

Raising alcohol prices
unlikely to curb demand

NEW YORK, Jan 7: Increasing the price of beer, wine, and liquor has been proposed as a way to reduce alcohol consumption, and hence problems related to drinking alcohol.........more

Biofeedback cuts urine
leak after prostate surgery

NEW YORK, Jan 7: For men undergoing prostate removal for prostate cancer, biofeedback training before the surgery reduces the duration and severity of urinary incontinence after the procedure, according to a report in The Journal of Urology.................more

Congress arm rejects
Bush eavesdropping
case:Paper

WASHINGTON, Jan 7: A report by a research arm of Congress yesterday concluded the administration's justification for eavesdropping authorised......more

Chinese bloggers take
political satire offline

BEIJING, Jan 7: Forget loners in pyjamas and slippers pouring out their hearts in anonymous solitude. China's bloggers are going offline -- and they're having a blast.............more

China must prevent
population surge: Official

BEIJING, Jan 7: China faces a population surge in the next five years and the Government will enforce ''one-child'' policies to keep the country's numbers at 1.37 billion by 2010, China's top population official said...........more

LTTE attack on Lankan
navy could trigger civil war

COLOMBO, Jan 7: Suspected suicide LTTE attackers blown up an Israeli-built Dvora Fast Attack Craft (FAC) of the Lankan Navy with 15 sailors on board, triggering off fears of the resumption............more

Vitamin D during pregnancy affects kids' bone mass ...........

Indo-American film for unconventional release...........

Google to launch online video store.........

Angioplasty or surgery ups heart failure survival ..........

Pakistani qake survivors brace for the brutal winter

ISLAMABAD, Jan 7: Three months after South Asia's monster earthquake, hundreds of thousands of survivors chilled by the first blast of the Himalayan winter face a fight for survival until spring, huddled in unheated tents and tin shacks erected by the ruins of their homes.

Health workers expect fatalities from cold-related diseases like pneumonia - anecdotal reports suggest dozens of children have already died - but Pakistani officials say enough shelter and supplies are in place to prevent a "second wave" of deaths on top of the 87,000 killed by the Oct 8 temblor.

Senior UN aid officials are more circumspect, saying no one can predict the impact of the weather, but are backing away from dire warnings issued in the early aftermath of the disaster when the world body's humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said tens of thousands more people could die unless there was more funding for aid.

Jan Vandemoortele, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Pakistan, said there was now the capacity - dozens of helicopters, scores of clinics and thousands of tons of food stocks - to keep people alive through the crisis, so long as the weather periodically cleared to allow aid delivery and roving medics to reach the vulnerable. "On that basis, we will be able to prevent a second wave (of deaths)," he said.

A mild December allowed more time than expected to rush in aid for more than 3 million left homeless by the 7.6-magnitude quake across a 30,000-square kilometer swath of mountains, stretching from northwestern Pakistan eastwards into Jammu and Kashmir, where 1,350 people also died in the quake. (AP)

Smoking parents can still keep kids from starting

NEW YORK, Jan 7: Parents who can't kick the smoking habit themselves can nevertheless convince their children not to start, a new study shows.

Researchers found that a programme aimed at helping parents talk with their kids about smoking lowered the likelihood that children would try cigarettes by the 6th grade. All of the parents were smokers themselves.

Past studies have shown that the children of smokers are at high risk of taking up the habit, which makes it ''critical'' to help these parents address the topic with their kids, according to Dr Christine Jackson, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research Chapel Hill Center in North Carolina.

Many parents who smoke, she told Reuters Health, may be reluctant to have such discussions because they feel guilty about their smoking or believe they'd seem ''hypocritical'' to their children.

But parents who speak from the experience of becoming addicted to nicotine may in fact have more credibility, Jackson pointed out. ''They absolutely hate the fact that they smoke,'' she said. ''They can be incredibly persuasive.''

However, keeping kids from smoking may take much more than simply telling them not to do it -- the tactic many parents rely on.

The new study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, looked at the effects of a programme that helped smoking parents learn ''anti-smoking socialization.''

The researchers randomly assigned 776 families to one of two groups: a programme group where parents periodically received written materials to help them discuss smoking with their children; or a comparison group where parents received only short fact sheets on smoking.

Parents in the program used the materials to help them talk with their children about their own history with smoking and what it means to be addicted, among other topics.

They were also encouraged to take small, everyday measures to dispel the image that smoking is normal -- like not leaving dirty ashtrays in the house and not asking their kids to bring them their pack of cigarettes.

Three years later, the study found, 12 per cent of children in the programme group said they had tried smoking, versus 19 percent in the comparison group.

The findings show that, with the right tools, parents who smoke can discourage their kids from doing the same, according to the researchers. Yet, Jackson said, the role of these parents in smoking prevention efforts has until now been largely ignored.

''But parents who smoke are critical,'' she said, ''because it's their children who are most likely to smoke.'' (AGENCIES)

Raising alcohol prices unlikely to curb demand

NEW YORK, Jan 7: Increasing the price of beer, wine, and liquor has been proposed as a way to reduce alcohol consumption, and hence problems related to drinking alcohol.

But research published this month suggests that ''across-the-board'' price increases may not reduce alcohol sales, and might even increase them.

In general, there is evidence to suggest that as taxes on alcohol go up and alcoholic beverages become more expensive, people do tend to lower their alcohol intake. But it may not be that simple, according to Dr Paul J Gruenewald from the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, California and colleagues.

They gauged the effect of cost on alcohol consumption by analyzing Swedish price and sales data over a 10-year period. The data suggest that, when faced with a price hike in their favourite spirit, consumers respond not only by altering their total consumption but also by varying their brand choices.

Rather than simply drinking less alcohol in response to price hikes, people may switch to lower-cost brands in order to keep drinking the same amount of alcohol.

''These quantity/quality tradeoffs appear to be substantial both within a beverage type (i.E., moving from a higher-quality wine brand to a lower-cost wine in the face of a price hike) and between beverages (i.E., switching from wine to spirits),'' the authors report in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

In some situations, raising the alcohol prices may backfire, Gruenewald's team warns. A price hike on the most expensive brands, they explain, may simply lead consumers of these brands to switch to cheaper alternatives -- and with the money saved, they buy more alcohol and end up drinking more.

The researchers suggest that it might be more effective to increase prices on low-cost alcoholic beverages as opposed to raising prices equally across all beverages. This would afford drinkers the least opportunity to respond to a price change by cutting quality rather than quantity.

''If younger or heavier drinkers tend disproportionately to consume low-quality brands, price increases focusing on these low-cost beverages might be particularly useful for preventing alcohol problems among these groups,'' Gruenewald and colleagues point out. (AGENCIES)

Biofeedback cuts urine leak after prostate surgery

Behavioral training has been shown to decrease incontinence that persists following prostate surgery, the authors explain, suggesting that training before surgery might also be effective.

Dr Kathryn L Burgio and colleagues from the University of Alabama at Birmingham evaluated the effectiveness of pre-op biofeedback to hasten the recovery of urinary control, decrease the severity of incontinence, and improve the quality of life in the 6 months following prostate removal.

The intervention consisted of one session of biofeedback-assisted behavioral training, in which men learned bladder muscle control and received instructions for muscle exercises. A rectal balloon probe measured and provided immediate visual feedback of rectal pressure and bladder muscle control.

Of the 51 men in the biofeedback group, 70 percent reported that they were still doing the exercises they learned preoperatively at the 6-month follow-up.

The time taken to achieve continence in the biofeedback-training group hovered around 3.5 months, the investigators report. On the other hand, fewer than half of the 51 men in the comparison group achieved continence by the 6-month follow-up.

At 6 months, men in the biofeedback group reported an average of 73 days with no leakage, compared with 54 days reported by men in the comparison group.

Severe or continual leakage was still present in nearly 20 per cent of comparison subjects at the 6-month mark, the researchers note, compared to 6 per cent of those in the biofeedback group.

''The training effect might have been greater had we used more intensive preoperative training or resumed intervention after surgery with a more regular program of postoperative visits to further optimize outcomes,'' the team suggests. (AGENCIES)

Congress arm rejects Bush eavesdropping case:Paper

WASHINGTON, Jan 7: A report by a research arm of Congress yesterday concluded the administration's justification for eavesdropping authorised by President George W Bush conflicts with existing law, the Washington Post reported today.

The Congressional Research Services report, the first nonpartisan findings on the programme to date, rejects key assertions made by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R Gonzales about the President's authority to order the eavesdropping into telephone calls and e-mails, the paper wrote.

The 44-page CRS report said that Bush likely cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of phone calls made by U S citizens since the fall of 2001.

A 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, forbids domestic spying on U S citizens without the approval of a special court. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to intercept communications without court approval.

Critics of the administration warn that civil liberties could be jeopardised by Government eavesdropping practices that avoid judicial oversight.

(AGENCIES)

Chinese bloggers take political satire offline

BEIJING, Jan 7: Forget loners in pyjamas and slippers pouring out their hearts in anonymous solitude.

China's bloggers are going offline -- and they're having a blast.

Among the best known is ''Dai San Ge Biao'', literally meaning 'wears three watches' but also a play on former leader Jiang Zemin's Three Represents, or ''San Ge Dai Biao'', political theory.

A bespectacled journalist by day whose real name is Wang Xiaofeng, he's not only busy writing diary-like posts on the Internet that run the gamut from ruminations on the state of China's media to a defence of some of Beijing's cruder slang, he's also made a movie.

Only ''A Hard Day's Night'', isn't really a movie, he insists.

''So what is it then? It's a bunch of bloggers who are so free their balls ache,'' he wrote.

Despite an army of cyber police who monitor for politically sensitive posts and regulations that aim to extend controls to personal blogs, his friends and supporters remain undeterred.

A recent screening before friends and supporters -- most of whom work in the media and themselves have blogs -- had the jubilant atmosphere of a bunch of kids skipping school.

The 50-minute film, made in a day with no budget and with basic equipment, tells the story of a man picked up by police and mistaken first for a bank robber and then for one of China's best known film stars, while he tries unsuccessfully to convince them he's only a blogger.

''There's no point, really, it was all just for fun,'' said one of the actors, who has a day job as a think-tank researcher.

ALL IN FUN

The emphasis on fun contrasts starkly to the situation in China's liberal media circles, which is still reeling from the news last week of the sacking of a top editor at the Beijing News, one of the country's most independent dailies.

It is also a change from the tone of some of Dai San Ge Biao's recent blog postings, which offer reflective year-end ruminations on the state of Chinese media.

''In China, most people in the media have to foster a perverse mentality, otherwise they will have to live feeling very depressed,'' he writes in one posting.

''Moreover, when you realise you have no way to change this reality, you will feel an indescribable sorrow.''

And if he insists the movie is only for fun, it's a brand of fun that's in the best tradition of political satire.

The police are portrayed in turn as bumbling or brutal, and the Communist Party's slogans are skewered along the way.

In one scene, a character takes on the leadership's repeated exhortations to build a 'harmonious society', declaring that the only harmonious society to be found in China is on the 7 o'clock state news.

''He's hilarious -- and very sharp,'' said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley and a follower of Dai San Ge Biao's blog, which goes by the title ''Massage Milk''.

He's also part of something new, Xiao says, in blogging not only as an individual, but as part of a community that is starting to make the leap from the virtual world to real life.

''He's blogging with a group of friends,'' he said. ''Blogging gives them this tool to communicate to the public. It's a very effective organising tool.''

It also gives Dai San Ge Biao and his friends a way to get together and let off steam and perhaps to overcome some of the sorrow he describes in his blog.

''The laughter and the joy the two hours brought to everybody are something you cannot find in any other corner of China,'' he wrote of the screening.

(AGENCIES)

China must prevent population surge: Official

''In the next five years, China will face its fourth upsurge of births, and we must stabilise and improve the current family planning policies and hold to a stable, low birth-rate,'' Zhang Weiqing, the minister in charge of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, told a meeting in Beijing yesterday.

China's official population at the start of 2005 was 1.3 billion. China experienced several birth peaks from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Zhang said China's three decades-old restrictions on family size, which generally restrict most urban couples to one child and rural couples to two, are under challenge by new forces.

''The public's fertility preferences and behaviour are increasingly diverse, and the children of one-child families are entering their marriage and child-rearing phase,'' Zhang said in his speech that appeared in the state-run press today.

But Zhang dismissed recent discussion among Chinese experts and even officials about easing some of the country's restrictions on family size, especially in cities.

''The media have made a fuss of this and it's had an unhealthy effect,'' Zhang said of the discussion. ''This state of affairs must be resolutely corrected.''

In recent years, demographers and some local Governments across China have proposed trial adjustments to China's national family planning policies, often in response to the growing number of affluent urban Chinese who choose not to have any children.

Zhang said that any family-planning policy changes must first receive the approval of China's State Council -- China's cabinet.

He said family-planning officials must not fall prey to ''blind optimism and lax complacency'' about China's population levels.

''Get rid of any dangers of a rebound in birth-rates,'' he said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, China progressively introduced restrictions on the number of children couples are allowed.

While nearly all urban couples abide abide by the ''one-child'' restriction, in the countryside many couples have more then two children, despite the threat of heavy fines and forced abortions.

But Zhang also said China is troubled by a ''prematurely ageing'' urban population and a major imbalance in numbers of boys and girls born to rural couples -- problems that are at least partly an outcome of its birth restrictions.

More than 10 per cent of the 1.3 billion people in the world's most populous country were 60 or above, Chinese officials said in October.

China has warned that the already strained social security and pension systems must be reformed before the elderly population is expected to peak by the end of the 2020s.

Official statistics indicate that 119 boys are born for every 100 girls, because some tradition-minded rural families abort female foetuses to ensure they can have at least one boy.

''About 40 million men may live as frustrated bachelors by 2020,'' the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported today. (AGENCIES)

LTTE attack on Lankan navy could trigger civil war

Senior defence analyst, Iqbal Athas told UNI that the attack on the naval vessel has the "potential danger" of plunging the country back into the bloody ethnic war.

"The two sides are inching towards war. The LTTE suicide attack just outside the Trincomalee naval base has the potential danger of both parties getting back to a full-scale war," he said, adding that the Government, especially the defence top brass, was giving mixed and wrong signals to the other side.

The FAC with two officers and 13 sailors was on a routine patrol when it came under the suicidal attack of the Sea Tigers near Foul Point off Trincomalee naval base.

The navy divers undertaking search operations have rescued two sailors from the sea military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said.

He said the rescued sailors have been admitted to the naval hospital while the search operation was on to locate the remaining sailors.

According to the military spokesman, there were two Dvora FACs on a routine patrol off Trincomalee at the time of the attack (around 0100 hrs (local time) and the main control room lost communication with the one of the craft immediately after the huge explosion was heard.

This is the first major attack on the sea after the Norwegian-brokered truce agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tiger rebels came into operation in February 2002.

The Sea Tigers during the war carried out several suicide attacks on the naval patrols in the deep seas by ramming their explosive-laden boats with the naval crafts.

Although the shaky truce agreement is in operation for the past four years, there is no written agreement with regard to the sea movement, and LTTE claims to be in control of certain coastal areas both in the North and the East.

In April 1995 the then short-lived ceasefire came to an end with the LTTE attacked two naval Dvora gunboats anchored in the Trincomalee naval base.

The Sri Lankan navy has its main naval base in Trincomalee harbour, with an attack boat squadron deployed there.

The attack has taken place amidst an uneasy situation in Trincomalee district following the killing of five Tamil students on Monday.

A general shut down was observed in the Trincomalee town yesterday in protest of the killings of the students.

There has been no immediate reaction from the LTTE on the attack. (UNI)

Vitamin D during pregnancy affects kids' bone mass

NEW YORK, Jan 7: The children of mothers who had low levels of vitamin D during their pregnancy have reduced bone mineral content during childhood, potentially increasing their risk of osteoporosis in later life, British investigators report.

Vitamin D is required for skeletal growth during infancy and childhood, the team notes, and recent findings raise concerns that low levels of vitamin D during pregnancy may have a deleterious effect.

Dr Cyrus Cooper, from the University of Southampton, and his colleagues measured levels of vitamin D in blood samples obtained from women during late pregnancy. Their offspring had the mineral content of their bone measured at age 9. The study, reported in the Lancet medical journal, included 160 mother-child pairs.

Mothers with low vitamin D had offspring whose whole-body bone mineral content at 9 years of age was significantly lower than in those born to women with higher levels.

Children born during the summer -- whose mothers were therefore exposed to more sunshine, which triggers vitamin D production -- and children whose mothers took vitamin D supplements had significantly higher bone mineral content.

Cooper's group suggest that giving vitamin D supplements to moms-to-be with low vitamin D levels "especially when the last trimester of pregnancy occurs during the winter months, could lead to an enhanced peak bone-mineral accrual and a reduced risk of fragility fracture in offspring during later life." (AGENCIES)

Indo-American film for unconventional release

NEW YORK, Jan 7: An Indo-American film starring Shabhana Azmi will be one of the first movies to have an unconventional 'release' as its makers are reaching out to the viewers through a new technology developed by Google Inc in which it could be viewed by downloading from its website.

Directed by Ben Rekhi, son of Silicon Valley pioneer Kanwal Rekhi, 'Waterborne' will not have a commerical release in cinema houses and those who want to watch it would have to download it from the Google website after paying USD 4.99.

The film will be available on the Google Video Store under the new "download-to-own" distribution model.

"The producers had earlier turned down an USD 125,000 offer for release of movie to opt for latest technology offered by Google," Anisa Qureshi, spokesperson for the producers, told PTI.

The new technology offers no barriers of time or boundaries as anyone in the world could download the movie at anytime, Qureshi said.

"The movie should be available for download sometime next week and its resolution would be as high as movies played through DVD," she added. Google Video Store has launched this state-of-the-art technology yesterday only.

Rekhi said a little "out-of-the-box" thinking led them to the "unconventional" mode of release of the film. "When we set out to make Waterborne, we aimed to think outside the box of conventional filmmaking. Now in releasing it, we want to continue this forward-thinking mentality by embracing new methods of film distribution," he said.

The movie, which stars Ajay Naidu besides Azmi, is a fictional story of a terrorist bio-attack in Los Angeles' water supply system and effect it has on residents.

'Waterborne' got rave reviews and won an Audience Award at the prestigious SXSW Film Festival as well as the Best Feature Film Award at the Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival.

In addition to streaming the film for free for the first week of release, a digital file of the film can be downloaded. Currently, the copyright-protected downloads of Video limit how the viewer can watch the content. But Waterborne will be different.

Once the viewers have downloaded the di gital copy, they may do anything they want with their purchased product -- view it not just on their computer but on any monitor, burn it to a DVD, or even transfer it to a Video iPod, Qureshi said.

"We're excited that independent filmmakers like Rekhi are using Google Video to distribute their work and discover new audiences around the world" said Jennifer Feikin, Director of Google Video.

The producer Smriti Mundhra, daughter of filmmaker Jagmohan Mundhra said, "in the traditional distribution framework, a film of this size would be lucky to get released in a handful of theaters, reaching a few thousand viewers at best."

"But by utilizing Google Video's radical new model, Waterborne will get an audience of millions. For those of us working outside the studio system, this kind of exposure is tremendous."

Rekhi said a lot of people thought "we are crazy" for turning down a six-figure advance to dive into the unknown perils of online distribution.

"But it is time that someone put their money where their mouth is. No one ever got ahead by playing things safe." (PTI)

Google to launch online video store

LAS VEGAS, Jan 7: Google Inc said on Friday the company is expanding into two new fields with an online video store and a computer maintenance service, moves that mark stepped-up challenges to its biggest computer and media rivals, including Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo Inc.

Google Co-founder Larry Page said the video marketplace would offer free programming, low-cost rentals and outright purchases of premium entertainment and sports shows.

The second plan outlined by Page at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a free offer to personal computer users of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP software to install and maintain the basic software, security and services on new and existing machines.

With the product, called Google Pack, the company is promising to help most users set up and maintain their machines in a matter of minutes rather than the hours that many computer users require to get going on a new PC.

"Google Pack is quite exciting," said Page during his keynote address at the show, "It's as easy as going to the Google home page."

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates used his own keynote speech here earlier this week to take the covers off many new consumer features of the next upgrade of the Windows desktop, known as Vista, due out later this year.

"This is a direct action to challenge Microsoft: Google is saying we can manage the browser and other elements of the computer desktop experience better than what you get now," said Forrester media and Internet analyst Josh Bernoff.

Specifically, Google said it will rent and sell television programs from CBS Corp and the National Basketball Association. CBS plans to offer three current programs, including "Crime Scene Investigation," for rental a day after they originally air, priced at $1.99. Another 300 "classic" CBS shows will be offered for download and outright ownership for the same $1.99 fee.

Executives said the company would not announce plans to enter the computer business, denying rumors that Google would launch at the show a machine costing as little as $100.

In its most overt slap at Microsoft, Google has named a set of preferred software, security and Web service providers that will be part of its recommended PC set-up.

Preferred software vendors include Symantec Corp, Adobe Systems Inc. And RealNeworks Inc .

Reviving a decade-old battle that pitted Microsoft vs Web browser pioneer Netscape Communications, Google plans to automatically install for customers who accept its offer the Mozilla/Firefox browser, in a challenge to Microsoft's far more widely used Internet Explorer browser.

The most basic measure of the Google-Microsoft competition is the growing percentage of time computer users spend on Google products rather than Microsoft, Bernoff said.

Initially, Google offered only Web search. That has expanded to include desktop search, communications, video and an ever broader array of software offerings, he said.

A version of new Google video store for Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac line of computers is coming, Page said.

"We have a version of video for Mac that is not downloadable yet," Page said. "Hopefully that will come out soon."

Roughly four-fifths of US households in a survey of consumer Internet trends released this week by brokerage SG Cowen use Microsoft Windows XP as their operating system software.

(AGENCIES)

Angioplasty or surgery ups heart failure survival

NEW YORK, Jan 7: In a study of people with severe heart failure, those treated early with angioplasty or coronary bypass surgery to improve blood flow to the heart had significantly better survival than those treated with drug therapy.

"It surprised us that the patients who had open-heart surgery or (angioplasty) did so much better," Dr Michael S Lauer, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, said in a statement. "Right now the standard care for patients with ... Heart failure is medicine."

The pros and cons of surgery or angioplasty in people with heart failure have been unclear, according to the report in the medical journal Circulation. These treatments can potentially reverse heart dysfunction, but whether this outweighs the risks of surgery and actually improves long-term outcomes is unknown.

Still, there has been evidence that a test that assesses blood flow to the heart can identify patients who would benefit from bypass surgery or angioplasty.

Lauer said the current study is the largest to date to look at whether angioplasty or surgery can improve the survival of patients with severe heart failure. The investigators compared the survival of 153 patients treated with angioplasty or surgery with that of 153 similar patients who received only medical therapy.

During a follow-up period of around 3 years, 84 patients died, the authors report. The 3-year death rate in the angioplasty/surgery group was 15 percent, less than half the 35 percent rate seen in the medical group.

In a related editorial, Dr Raymond J Gibbons and colleagues, from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, commented that although early treatment with angioplasty or surgery "may benefit such patients, their overall outcomes remain relatively poor."

As such, a major focus should be on preventive efforts, such as counseling patients on healthy lifestyle behaviors and using certain medications, designed to avoid progression to severe heart failure, they add. (AGENCIES)