W O R L D

Santorum gives ‘conservative’ blow to front-runner Romney 
Washington, March 14
Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum today secured two crucial victories in Alabama and Mississippi primaries dealing a blow to front-runner Mitt Romney’s hopes of making a mark in southern America’s conservative bastions.

Republican US presidential candidate Rick Santorum gives the thumbs-up to supporters after speaking at his primary election night rally in Louisiana. — Reuters 

After 244 years, print edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica to be history
New York, March 14
Encyclopaedia Britannica, a reference book in homes and libraries worldwide, will stop publishing the print edition for the first time in 244 years and shift focus to digital versions.

Small tsunami hits Japan after quake
Tokyo, March 14
Small tsunami waves hit Japan’s northeastern coastline today, officials said, after a strong earthquake rocked the region a year on from the country’s worst post-war natural disaster.

Santorum gives ‘conservative’ blow to front-runner Romney 

Washington, March 14
Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum today secured two crucial victories in Alabama and Mississippi primaries dealing a blow to front-runner Mitt Romney’s hopes of making a mark in southern America’s conservative bastions.

“We did it again,” the 53-year-old former Pennsylvania senator Santorum said, addressing jubilant supporters in Louisiana, which holds its Republican primary on March 24.

“The time is now for conservatives to pull together,” Santorum said after the win in Alabama and Mississippi, the two southern states that are among the most conservative in the US.

The victory has boosted Santorum’s claim to being the conservative alternative to 64-year-old former Massachusetts governor Romney in the race for the party’s nomination to challenge Obama in the November 6 presidential poll.

In Alabama, Santorum won 35 per cent of the vote. Former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and Romney both had 29 per cent, although Gingrich was about 2,000 votes ahead with 99 per cent of the vote counted, and Ron Paul, the lawmaker from Texas, had just 5 per cent.

With 99 per cent of the vote counted in Mississippi, Santorum had 33 per cent. Gingrich was at 31 per cent, Romney at 30 per cent and Paul at 4 per cent. Romney claimed victory in the caucuses of American Samoa, local officials said, while caucus results in Hawaii had yet to come in.

“A week after Super Tuesday cemented the status of Romney and Santorum as the leading Republican candidates, the outcome of the Alabama and Mississippi primaries strengthened Santorum’s argument that he should emerge as the final competitor to Romney,” The New York Times commented on Santorum’s victory.

The defeat was a blow to Romney and showed that he was still struggling to win over the conservatives, despite being much better funded and having superior campaign organisation. — AFP

After 244 years, print edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica to be history

New York, March 14
Encyclopaedia Britannica, a reference book in homes and libraries worldwide, will stop publishing the print edition for the first time in 244 years and shift focus to digital versions.

The book-form of the encyclopaedia first hit the print in Scotland in 1768 and will stop being available after the current stocks run out, the Chicago-based company announced. The last edition of the 32-volume encyclopedia will be the 2010 one and the company said it will keep selling print editions until the current stock of around 4000 sets runs out.

“The announcement that we will no longer print the 32-volume encyclopedia is of great significance, not for what it says about our past, but for what it projects about our vibrant present and future as a digital provider of general knowledge and instructional services,” the company’s president Jorge Cauz said in a blog post titled ‘Looking Ahead’.

But whatever be the fate of printed Encyclopedia Britannica, it has already made history with thousands of contributors, including Nobel laureates and world leaders like President Bill Clinton.

The end of the printed version was foreseen and the printers said they were seeking to keep its relevance in a digital market place that is increasingly dominated by e-books and tablets.

For Encyclopaedia Britannica, the sales worldwide climaxed in 1990 when over 120,000 sets were sold, but sales fell to just 40,000 six years later. The final hardcover version on the shelf is priced at $1395.

Admitting that the sales had plunged, Cauz said, “We knew this was coming, so we shifted to exploring digital publishing by the 90’s.” Though competition from online search engines like Google and Wikipedia was seen as a big factor for the company to shed its over 200-year tradition, the company’s President Jorge Cauz said, “this has nothing to do with Wikipedia or Google. We want Britannica to sell our digital products.” He said for some the end of the Britannica print set may be perceived as an “unwelcomed goodbye” to a reliable source but it will live on in bigger, more numerous and vibrant digital forms.

By concentrating the company’s efforts on e-learning solutions and digital properties, “we can continuously update our content and further expand the number of topics and the depth with which they are treated without the space constraints of the print set.”

In explaining its decision, the company said its digital database is much larger than what it can fit in the print set and the information can be updated and revised several times in a day, something which was not possible with the print editions.

“In spite of our long history with print, I would like to point out that no single medium, neither books nor bits, is at the core of our mission. That mission is to be a reliable, up-to-date, and scholarly source of knowledge and learning for the general public,” Cauz added.

Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopaedias and educational curriculum for schools. Through its digital format, it will be able to provide expanded coverage as the “space constraints of print no longer limit the amount of coverage we can offer electronically.

“The new format will also help the company revise and update data on a continuous basis as well as provide links to external sites on the Internet. — PTI

Small tsunami hits Japan after quake 

Tokyo, March 14
Small tsunami waves hit Japan’s northeastern coastline today, officials said, after a strong earthquake rocked the region a year on from the country’s worst post-war natural disaster.

The 6.9-magtinude quake struck 26.6 km below the seabed off the northern island of Hokkaido in the Pacific, the US Geological Survey said.

Earlier, Japan’s meteorological agency rated its magnitude at 6.8. The 20 cm wave, confirmed by the Japanese agency, prompted local authorities to issue an evacuation warning for coastal residents before it hit land.

The waves hit several locations in Hokkaido and Aomori prefecture, which was one of the areas in Japan’s northeast devastated by last year’s disaster.

The agency had initially said a tsunami could be as high as 50 cm, but US monitors said there was no Pacific-wide tsunami threat.

The tsunami warning, which was lifted at 1040 GMT, comes after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered a monster wave on March 11 last year that killed more than 19,000 people and crippled Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant.

The tsunami swamped cooling systems at the Fukushima site and sent three reactors into meltdown, spewing radiation into the environment and sparking the world’s worst atomic accident in a generation.

There were no immediate reports of damage at nuclear facilities in the area affected by Wednesday’s quake.

A spokesman for Tohoku Electric Power, which operates two nuclear power plants in the country’s northeast, said the facilities were unaffected. — AFP

B’desh ferry mishap toll climbs to 112

Dhaka, March 14
Rescuers and naval divers today recovered more bodies from an ill-fated ferry which capsized in Meghna river in southwest Bangladesh, taking the death toll to 112 in the worst boat tragedies in the country in recent times.

The ferry ‘MV Shariatpur-1’ had collided head-on with a cargo vessel and capsized at 3 am local time yesterday, trapping most of the estimated 300 passengers on board.

The sunken double-decker vessel was retrieved from under 70 feet waters, 37 hours after it capsized in the Meghna river in Munshiganj area, and towed to the river bank, officials said.

The death toll rose to 112 after rescuers recovered more bodies today, they said, adding the salvage operation was being wrapped up. — PTI