Former US President Carter to lead polls observation in Nepal

KATHMANDU, Apr 2: Former US President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, will arrive here to observe the April 10 Constituent Assembly poll in Nepal.

The couple would the lead the Carter Center’s international election observation delegation to Nepal.

Former deputy prime minister of Thailand Dr Surakiart Sathirathai would co-lead the delegation with the Carters, a press statement issued by Carter Center said.

The Carter Center mission would also include more than 60 observers representing more than 20 different nationalities deployed throughout the country.

The leaders are expected to arrive in Kathmandu on April 7 and have a plan to meet the Election Commission officials, political party leaders, representatives of domestic and international election observation delegations, and others.

The team would monitor the polls on election day, the counting process, and handling of challenges.

Nepal is holding CA polls for the first time on April 10 to write a new constitution and decide the future of now suspended monarchy.

The Center also expressed concern over the widespread reports of electoral threats and intimidation, particularly by the CPN-Maoist party.

The Center noted that all parties stand to gain significant domestic and international credibility by conducting a successful election on April 10 and encourages all parties to intensify peaceful campaigning efforts.

"I am encouraged to see that the top leadership of the Nepali congress, CPN-UML, and CPN-Maoist have publicly renewed their commitment to a peaceful election process," associate director of the Carter Center’s Democracy Programme David Pottie said in the statement.

"Now is the time to transform these words into action," he said. (UNI)

US Speaker Pelosi wants int’l monitors in Tibet

WASHINGTON, Apr 2: Pressing China to open dialogue with the Dalai Lama "for a peaceful outcome" to the Tibet issue, influential Democrat Nancy Pelosi has demanded that Beijing immediately allow independent outside monitors to review the situation in the riot-scarred Himalayan region.

"I myself am personally calling once again on the Chinese Government to join, to sustain negotiations with His Holiness for a peaceful outcome to what is happening in Tibet for their autonomy, to immediately have independent outside monitors to review what happened in Tibet," said the Speaker of the House of Representatives who drew Beijing’s ire for meeting the Dalai Lama during a visit to India last month.

Pelosi said the trip was planned before March 10 when the most vicious anti-Chinese demonstrations in two decades erupted in Lhasa.

"We planned to visit His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to pay our respects to him, to join in his ongoing call for negotiations with the Chinese government for autonomy for Tibet," she said.

"Again, as the fate would have it, on March 10, the 49^{th anniversary of the Chinese driving His Holiness the Dalai Lama out of China, the protests there were met by a crackdown of the Chinese Government, so we were there at a time when again, it was our fate to be there, and our fate to help," Pelosi said. (PTI)}

Bush - NATO cannot afford to lose

BUCHAREST, Apr 2: NATO cannot afford to lose its battle against Taliban insurgents and al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan, US President George W Bush said today.

In a keynote speech hours before a summit of the 26-nation alliance in the capital of Romania, Bush said: ''As (French) President (Nicolas) Sarkozy put it in London last week, we cannot afford to lose Afghanistan. Whatever the cost, however difficult, we cannot afford it, we must win. I agree completely.

''If we do not defeat the terrorists in Afghanistan, we will face them on our soil.''

(AGENCIES)

Pakistan nuclear scientist hopes to be freed-paper

ISLAMABAD, Apr 2: Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan termed his detention as "irrational" in a newspaper interview published today, and said he hoped the new Government would free him soon. Khan was put under house arrest by President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad after an investigation was launched in late 2003 and he confessed on television in early 2004 to passing nuclear secrets and materials to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

Lionised by many Pakistanis as the father of the country’s atomic bomb, Khan escaped more severe punishment.

Khan’s admirers want the new coalition Government, which took power after the defeat of pro-Musharraf parties in a February 18 election, to free their hero.

In an interview with the Urdu-language Nawa-i-Waqt, also carried by sister publication The Nation, Khan rejected the impression he was kept under detention for his own security.

"It is nothing but a lame excuse," Khan was quoted as saying in an interview carried out on his birthday. Khan turned 72 on Monday.

"It is simply irrational. I was roaming around the world freely at times when in 1979 numerous fake cases had been registered against me in Holland and I faced no security threat."

Khan is said to have stolen European plans for centrifuges needed to produce enriched uranium, a key ingredient in nuclear arms, while working in the 1970s at the Dutch partner in URENCO.

He was convicted of nuclear espionage by a Dutch court in 1983 and sentenced to four years in jail, although the decision was later overturned on a technicality.

The Pakistan People’s Party of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is leading the new government, and the party of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister Musharraf deposed, is its main coalition partner.

Old rivals Pakistan and India both conducted nuclear tests in 1998 to become nuclear weapons states. Pakistan is the first Muslim country known to have built an atomic bomb.

Sharif, as prime minister at the time, garnered prestige from the nuclear tests. Campaigning for the February election, Sharif said Khan should be freed.

A source close to the government told Reuters, however, that he doubted Khan would be released any time soon, and the matter hadn’t been seriously raised during policy discussions.

Khan had surgery for prostrate cancer in September 2006. A month later, he was also diagnosed as suffering from deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot, usually in a vein in the lower leg.

Musharraf, a close ally of the United States in its war on terror, has described Khan’s confession as one of the most embarrassing events of his presidency.

While Pakistan says it has shared information gleaned from Khan to the International Atomic Energy Agency, it has refused to give US investigators direct access to him. (AGENCIES)

Algae may be answer to rising fuel prices

WASHINGTON, Apr 2: The world may soon find an answer to the ever soaring fuel prices in the form of algae as an alternative.

Researchers at US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are working hard to chemically manipulate algae for production of hydrogen gas, the next generation of renewable fuel.

Some varieties of algae, a kind of unicellular plant, contain an enzyme called hydrogenase that can create small amounts of hydrogen gas and it is believed that Nature uses the plant as a way to get rid of excess reducing equivalents that are produced under high light conditions, senior researcher David Tiede said in a statement.

Dr Tiede and his team are trying to find a way to take the part of the enzyme that creates the gas and introduce it into the photosynthesis process.

"We believe there is a fundamental advantage in looking at the production of hydrogen by photosynthesis as a renewable fuel," he said.

Right now, ethanol is being produced from corn, but generating ethanol from corn is a thermodynamically much more inefficient process, he added.

Algae has several benefits over corn in fuel production. It can be grown in a closed system almost anywhere including deserts or even rooftops, and there is no competition for food or fertile soil. Algae is also easier to harvest because it has no roots or fruit and grows dispersed in water.

Although, the research is in its initial stages, Dr Tiede is confident that the result would be a large amount of hydrogen gas, possibly on par with the amount of oxygen created.

"Biology can do it, but it’s making it do it at 5-10 per cent yield that’s the problem," Dr Tiede said. (UNI)

New therapy to fight phantom noises of Tinnitus

NEW YORK, Apr 2: Modern life with the jolting buzz of alarm clocks, blaring sirens, droning televisions and ringing phones can be an everyday routine for people.

But for millions who suffer from severe tinnitus, the phantom tones inside their head are louder than anything else, researchers say.

Tinnitus, often caused by prolonged or sudden exposure to loud noises is an increasing complaint among soldiers returning from combat, users of portable music players and aging baby boomers reared on rock 'n' roll.

Researchers suggest new treatment in helping patients manage the ringing, pinging and hissing that otherwise drives them to distraction.

The most promising therapies were based on discoveries about the brain activity of people with tinnitus.

With brain-scanning equipment like functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have discovered that the brain areas responsible for interpreting sound and producing fearful emotions were exceptionally active in people who complain of tinnitus.

''We've discovered that tinnitus is not so much ringing in the ears as ringing in the brain,'' New York Times quoted Thomas J Brozoski, a tinnitus researcher at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine as saying.

The Neuromonics device which looks like an MP3 player and delivers sound spanning the full auditory spectrum, digitally embedded in soothing music was 90 per cent successful at reducing tinnitus, said Anne Howell, audiologist at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Other treatments include surgically implanted electrodes and noninvasive magnetic stimulation, both intended to disrupt and possibly reset the faulty brain signals responsible for tinnitus. (UNI)

Intel rolls out Atom chips at Shanghai tech forum

SAN FRANCISCO, Apr 2: Intel Corp <INTC.O> is rolling out five new Atom microprocessors and a collection of chips designed for portable gadgets that access the Internet and for other uses, as the world’s largest chipmaker uses its marketing muscle to help create a new market.

The low-power, tiny Atom chips will come in speeds of up to 1.86 gigahertz and Intel says that speed, plus other technologies designed into the chip, make it the fastest processor that consumes 3 watts of electricity or less.

The recently named Atom family of processors is part of Intel’s effort to have chips designed with Intel Architecture—the fundamental blueprint of its semiconductors—in myriad computing devices—from what it calls mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, all the way up to high-performance computers.

Intel is making the announcements at its Intel Developer Forum conference on Wednesday in Shanghai, the company said.

"Global Internet growth continues unabated," said Anand Chandrasekher, who runs Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group. "The best Internet experience is still on the PC, but users want to carry that experience with them."

That is where the Atom and Centrino Atom, come in. The Centrino Atom also includes a single-chip with integrated graphics called Intel System Controller Hub that allows for PC-like capabilities and long battery life for devices that fit in a user’s pocket.

"Intel is really pumping this category," said Roger Kay, an analyst with market research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates. "That said, mobile Internet is here. For them this is really a great potential business."

Intel said that the features of the Atom processor—the "brains" of an electronic device—and its system controller hub would help device makers create a range of MIDs with differing functions and designs.

Chandrasekher said major device makers are already planning to adopt Atom, with more than 20 manufacturers coming out with products using the processor. As far as MIDs, those will start shipping in May, he said.

He said Intel expects about 30 percent of those MIDs to have both WiFi—short range high-speed wireless Internet access—and WiMax—longer-range high-speed access designed into them.

MID device makers include Asus, Fujitsu, Lenovo, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp and Toshiba, among others, and prices will probably average about $500, with some priced higher than that or lower, depending on the functions, Chandrasekher said in a telephone briefing ahead of his keynote speech at the IDF in Shanghai.

The small size of the Atom processor—the die of the chip is less than 25 square millimeters, or about a 10th ^{of the low- cost Celeron desktop and notebook PC chip—also lets Intel target the embedded market.}

^{Embedded chips are used in devices such as portable cash registers, robotics for industrial manufacturing, kiosks, patient monitoring and car "infotainment" systems.}

^{The economics of the diminutive chip are appealing, Kay said, noting Intel gets nearly 2,700 Atom processors from a single dinner-plate-size silicon wafer.}

^{He estimates Intel could yield about $30,000 per wafer with a gross margin of around 50 percent, not far off the gross margin of its mainstream PC chips. He put Intel’s approximate cost-per-chip for Atom at about $11.}

^{"If you start looking at that number, then the profitability of one of these things sold at $45, or even $160, they’re fantastically profitable," Kay said.}

^{Still, do not expect the MID and this new market to take off right out of the gate.}

^{"The world often divides half way between the reality on the ground and where Intel would like it to go," Kay added. "It’ll likely go a little more slowly than Intel would like."}

^(AGENCIES)

They grumble, they gripe, they're angry journalists

WASHINGTON, Apr 2: sThey're angry at their demanding editors. They're angry about the mushrooming workload in shrinking newsrooms. They're even angry about other angry journalists.

But these angry journalists are happy they can now vent their frustrations to the rest of the world, courtesy of angryjournalist.Com, a sort of online complaint board allowing ink-stained wretches to gripe anonymously.

Ironically, their anger is partly fueled by the Internet, which has forced newspapers and television networks to reinvent themselves with painful consequences for their staffs.

There's the veterans complaining about newsrooms stretched thin by executives requiring reporters to produce stories for old and new media.

"I'm angry because my company, just like the rest of the industry, wants me to do more with less. They've said, 'To hell with quality. Let's just fill the website with as much (expletive) as possible,'" gripes Angry Journalist #241.

There's also the young guns frustrated by the culture clash.

"I hate the fact that print and online can't work together! Come on, online is the future, so please have some respect for the webeditors!" says Angry Journalist #700.

The website contains gripes ranging from existential musings about one's career to expletive-laced diatribes that trigger heated exchanges. (AGENCIES)

Walkable towns curb obesity, pollution, expert says

NEW YORK, Apr 2: Designing walkable communities is a cost-effective way to address the growing epidemic of obesity in the United States and cut down on harmful car emissions and pollution, a researcher told the American College of Sports Medicine's 12th annual Health and Fitness Summit in Long Beach, California.

The problem, said Jim Sallis from San Diego State University, is that local zoning laws essentially prevent the development of walkable communities. ''Zoning laws today,'' he told Reuters Health, ''really enforce the separation of uses; they are designed to move cars as quickly as possible -- which is dangerous to pedestrians.''

Sallis recently took a tour with urban planners in a new development in San Diego designed to be walkable. ''The developers told me they had to get 25 waivers from zoning laws to put in the development. All that kind of paperwork costs the developer time and money so it discourages them from building walkable neighborhoods,'' Sallis said.

He encourages people to ''be a voice for walkable neighborhoods and parks in your area and help change local zoning laws.''

Sallis would also like to dispel the misconception that walkable communities are more expensive to build. They aren't, he said, noting that money spent on building, maintaining and expanding roadways could be re-allocated to building sidewalks and trails.

Walkable cities ''have worked for thousands of years,'' Sallis points out. The most walkable cities are on the east coast of the US because they are older. ''Any city built in the 1800s is likely to be walkable because everyone who lived there walked. Cities like Boston, Manhattan, Washington DC, inner Baltimore, Savannah, Charleston, are all very walkable,'' he noted.

In the west there are fewer walkable cities, except for Portland, which has made a concerted effort to make the city pedestrian-friendly, Sallis said. ''Many years ago, Portland set up policies for transportation planning that make pedestrians a first priority, cyclists second, public transit riders third, and car drivers last. It's now one of the most activity-friendly cities in the country.''

''The suburbs have really been designed to take away the option of walking to places; there are no sidewalks, everything is spread out, and there is really only one way to get around and that is by car,'' according to Sallis.

The good news, he said, is that more and more communities are embracing the idea of becoming more activity-friendly by adopting ''mixed-use'' area laws.

(AGENCIES)

Your baby is a statistician

LONDON, Apr 2: You might have a deep fear of mathematics, but your baby is a born statistician, according to scientists.

A study of eight-month-olds showed how they are able to work out the likelihood of an event occurring, based on their knowledge of what has come before, showing they have a working knowledge of probability and statistics years before they even go to school.

The study by Prof Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia did six experiments in which coloured ping pong balls were drawn from a box.

They found that the babies can intuitively predict the colour of ping-pong balls pulled out of a box, based on what they have seen before.

The team measured this by studying how long the babies looked at the red and white ping-pong balls as they were taken out of the box.

It found if the box contained mostly red ping-pong balls, the infants looked longer if a mixture of mostly white ping-pong balls were pulled out compared to a mixture of mostly red ping-pong balls.

Conversely, if the infants were shown a mixture of mostly red ping-pong balls being pulled out, they expected to see the big box containing mostly red ping-pong balls, it found.

The psychologists concluded that ''infants possess a powerful mechanism for inductive learning, either using heuristics or basic principles of probability.''

(UNI)

Anemia increases risk of breast cancer recurrence

NEW YORK, Apr 2: Women with breast cancer who developed anemia during chemotherapy had nearly three times the risk of local recurrence as those who did not develop anemia, according to a study published this week.

''We speculate that there may be an interaction between chemotherapy/radiotherapy and anemia,'' study chief Dr. Peter Dubsky, from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, said in a statement.

''Both treatment modalities have been shown to be less effective in anemia patients. Since we do not see the effect in terms of relapse-free survival, the interaction with local adjuvant treatment may play a more important role,'' Dubsky added.

The results are based on a study of 424 premenopausal women with early-stage disease who were treated with cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, and 5-fluorouracil (CMF) after surgery, as part of the Austrian Breast and Colorectal Cancer Study Group Trial 5. All of the women who had breast-conserving surgery received radiation, whereas radiation was optional in women who had radical mastectomy.

The findings, appearing in the April 1st issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research, indicate that 19.6 per cent of women who developed anemia experienced a relapse during 5 years of follow-up compared with just 8.9 per cent of women without anemia. This translates into nearly a three-fold increased risk of relapse in anemic patients.

Women without anemia experienced a significantly longer local relapse-free survival than women with anemia, according to the study.

Overall relapse-free survival, however, was not significantly affected by anemia status. ''The effect was limited to local recurrences. Any explanation of the limit is pure speculation,'' Dubsky said.

No difference in overall survival was noted either, although Dubsky believes this may simply be a function of relatively small patient numbers and length of follow-up. (AGENCIES)

Mom's fish intake may boost child's brain power

NEW YORK, Apr 2: Preschoolers whose mothers regularly ate low-mercury fish during pregnancy may have sharper minds than their peers, a study suggests.

Researchers found that among 341 3-year-olds, those whose mothers ate more than two servings of fish per week during pregnancy generally performed better on tests of verbal, visual and motor development.

On the other hand, tests scores were lower among preschoolers whose mothers had relatively high mercury levels in their blood during pregnancy.

And mothers who regularly ate fish during pregnancy were more likely to have such mercury levels than non-fish-eaters were, the researchers report in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The findings add to evidence that fish can be brain-food, but underscore the importance of choosing lower-mercury fish during pregnancy.

''Recommendations for fish consumption during pregnancy should take into account the nutritional benefits of fish as well as the potential harms from mercury exposure,'' write the researchers, led by Dr. Emily Oken of Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Oily fish such as tuna, salmon and sardines contain omega-3 fatty acids, which are important in fetal and child brain development. The problem is that fatty fish are more likely to be contaminated with mercury, a metal that is toxic to brain cells, particularly in fetuses and young children.

Because of this, pregnant women are advised to avoid certain fish altogether: shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish. These fish are particularly high in mercury because they eat other fish and are long-lived, over time accumulating mercury in their fat tissue.

Less clear is how the benefits of other omega-3-containing fish stack up against the potential risks. Currently, US health officials recommend that pregnant women eat no more than 12 ounces, or roughly two servings, of fish per week.

For the current study, Oken's team collected blood samples from 341 women during their second trimester and asked them how often they ate various foods, including fish. When their children were 3 years old, they took standard tests of vocabulary, visual-spatial skills and fine-motor coordination of the hands and fingers.

Overall, the researchers found, children whose mothers ate fish more than twice a week had higher test scores.

However, children whose mothers had mercury levels in the top 10 percent of the study scored more poorly than those whose mothers had lower mercury levels.

Only 2 per cent of mothers who never ate fish during pregnancy had blood mercury levels that high, versus 23 per cent of those who ate fish more than twice weekly.

According to Oken's team, the bottom line is that eating fish lower in mercury could ''allow for stronger benefits of fish intake.''

Fish that are high in omega-3 but relatively lower in mercury include canned light tuna, which has less mercury than albacore tuna, and smaller oily fish like salmon. White-meat fish such as cod and haddock tend to be low in mercury, but have less omega-3 than fattier fish.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and Harvard. Some of Oken's co-researchers have received funding from the food and supplement industry.

(AGENCIES)