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China poultry unit goes up in flames; 119 killed
10 children among 20 die in Afghanistan suicide attack
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PM denies 'Turkish Spring' amid fresh clashes
Sharif makes reconciliatory start in Balochistan
Artificial livers: Scientists achieve breakthrough
India, Pak, China expanded N-arsenal in 2012: Report India ‘lags behind China’ in tackling climate change
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China poultry unit goes up in flames; 119 killed
Beijing, June 3 The fire broke out at around 6:06 am (local time) at a slaughterhouse owned by the Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry Company in Mishazi township of Dehui city, Jilin province, according to firefighters. Officials put the death toll at 119 that is expected to rise further. Over 300 workers were in the pre-fabricated structure when the accident happened, survivors were quoted by state-run Xinhua news agency as saying. The cause of the fire has not yet been ascertained, but state broadcaster CCTV said eyewitnesses had heard a blast and suspected a leak of liquid ammonia. CCTV also said on its Weibo account that the fire could have started due to an electric spark in the plant. Six hours after the fire broke out around 6:00 am it had largely been brought under control, CCTV said. The survivors said that
a sudden bang was heard and then they witnessed dark smoke. About 100 workers managed to escape from the plant whose gate was locked when the fire occurred, survivors
said. — PTI
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10 children among 20 die in Afghanistan suicide attack
Kabul, June 3 Gen Zelmia Oryakhail, provincial police chief of Paktia province, said the bomber was on a motorcycle and detonated his explosives at midday outside the market in Samkani district as American forces passed. He said a local school had just let pupils out for lunch. Also today, a landmine killed seven Afghan civilians in the eastern province of Laghman. A statement from the provincial government said a group of four women and two children had gone with a male driver into the hills to collect firewood. On their way back, their vehicle hit the mine and all inside were killed.
— AP
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PM denies 'Turkish Spring' amid fresh clashes
Istanbul, June 3 Erdogan defied protesters who accuse him of seeking to impose conservative Islamic reforms on secular Turkey, stressing that he was democratically elected. "Was there a multi-party system in the Arab Spring countries?" he said in televised comments. AFP photographers in Ankara later saw police fire tear gas and use water cannon to disperse stone-throwing demonstrators on the fourth day of violent protests that have swept scores of Turkish cities. Rights groups say hundreds have been wounded in clashes nationwide that have pitted stone-throwing protesters against riot police firing tear gas and water cannons since Friday. Erdogan's ally President Abdullah Gul today urged calm and promised protesters that their voice had been heard. "The messages delivered with good intentions have been received," he was quoted as saying quoted by the Anatolia news agency. Erdogan struck a harder tone, vowing: "We will stand firm" against the protests and promising his supporters: "We'll overcome this." With Turkey's allies
calling for restraint and international human rights groups denouncing the police crackdown, Gul acknowledged the demonstrators' right to protest but called for an end to
the clashes. "Democracy does not only mean elections," he said, adding: "I am calling on all my citizens to abide by the rules and state their objections and views in a peaceful way, as they have already done." Erdogan had earlier denounced demonstrators as "vandals". He also lashed out at the social messaging service Twitter, used by many of the protesters.
— AFP
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Sharif makes reconciliatory start in Balochistan
Dr Abdul Malik Baloch, the nominated Chief Minister for the restive Balochistan province, has said that he would strive to bring the dissident Baloch people and nationalists to the negotiating table.
PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif had on Sunday announced the nomination of National Party (NP) president and nationalist leader Abdul Malik Baloch for the post of Chief Minister. The choice was made after consultations with Baloch and Pashtun nationalist leaders at a meeting in Murree. Baloch will be the first commoner outside the tribal Sardars of Balochistan to be Chief Minister of the province. Sharif bypassed two PML-N contenders Sanaullah Zehri and Sardar Chengez Marri. This is in an apparent bid to boost reconciliation
in the troubled southwestern province. The PML-N has tied up with the National Party, which draws its support from the Baloch, and the Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, which is backed by ethnic Pashtuns, to form a coalition government
in Balochistan. Despite being the single largest party with 17 lawmakers in the 62-member Assembly, the PML-N decided to give the post of Chief Minister to the National Party, which has only 10 members in the Provincial Assembly. As a further sign of the PML-N's desire to boost reconciliation, Sharif announced that the next Governor of Balochistan would be from the Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, which has 14 members in the
Assembly. (With PTI inputs)
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Artificial livers: Scientists achieve breakthrough
Washington, June 3 Mature liver cells, known as
hepatocytes, quickly lose their normal function when removed from the body. According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Sangeeta
Bhatia, the liver can indeed regenerate itself if part of it is removed. "It's a paradox because we know liver cells are capable of growing, but somehow we can't get them to grow" outside the body, said
Bhatia. Bhatia and her colleagues have identified a dozen chemical compounds that can help liver cells not only maintain their normal function while grown in a lab dish, but also multiply to produce new tissue. Cells grown this way could help researchers develop engineered tissue to treat many of the 500 million people suffering from chronic liver diseases such as hepatitis C, according to the
researchers. Bhatia and colleagues have also recently made progress toward solving another challenge of engineering liver tissue, which is getting the recipient's body to grow blood vessels to supply the new tissue with oxygen and nutrients.
— PTI indian link
MIT researchers, including an Indian-origin scientist Sangeeta
Bhatia, have identified a dozen chemical compounds that can help liver cells not only maintain their normal function while grown in a lab dish, but also multiply to produce new tissue
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India, Pak, China expanded N-arsenal in 2012: Report
The study said India and Pakistan are also expanding their missile delivery capabilities. In view of tensions between India and Pakistan, China and Japan, South Korea and North Korea and others, SIPRI finds the arms race all the more disturbing in view of what it called a “fragile” peace in Asia. “While states have avoided direct conflict with each other and have stopped supporting insurgent movements on each other’s territory, decades-old suspicions linger and economic integration has not been followed up with political integration,” SIPRI said. While the progress towards a global ban on cluster munitions stalled in 2012, it noted the decrease is due to Russia and the US further reducing their inventories of strategic nuclear weapons. The two old superpowers have cut their warheads, Russia reducing its number from 10,000 to 8,500, and the United States scaling back from 8,000 to 7,700. The warheads controlled by France stayed at 300, while Britain’s remained at 225, and Israel’s at 80. SIPRI, however, said the figures were to a large extent estimates, as the nuclear powers aren’t equally transparent, China being totally opaque, and Russia gradually becoming less open. It does not count North Korea and Iran as nuclear powers yet, as their respective programmes are still considered in their early stages. All five legally recognised nuclear weapon states - China, France, Russia, the UK and the US - are either deploying new nuclear weapon delivery systems or have announced programmes to do so, and appear determined to retain their nuclear arsenals indefinitely, the report said. Of the five, only China seems to be expanding its nuclear arsenal and SIPRI noted that China had overtaken Britain as the world’s fifth largest arms exporter after the US, Russia, Germany and France. At the start of 2013, eight states - the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel - possessed approximately 4,400 operational nuclear weapons. Nearly 2,000 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert. SIPRI noted that these states together possess a total of approximately 17,265 nuclear weapons, as compared with 19,000 at the beginning of 2012 though it did not translate the trend into a significantly diminished nuclear threat. “Once again there was little to inspire hope that the nuclear weapon-possessing states are genuinely willing to give up their nuclear arsenals,” said SIPRI senior researcher Shannon Kile. “The long-term modernisation programmes underway in these states suggest that nuclear weapons are still a marker of international status and power.” As a long-time advocate of abolishing weapons of mass destruction, SIPRI said efforts to reduce arsenals of chemical and biological weapons have also been slow. — PTI
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India ‘lags behind China’ in tackling climate change
Johannesburg, June 3 “A lot of the initiatives that the Indian government has taken look great on paper, but in reality there has not been an improvement in the market, which is the difference between India and China,” said Dilip Limaye of the Energy Services Company (ESCO) while presenting the paper at the inaugural International ESCO Finance Conference. Based in the US, India-born Limaye singled out the South Asian country's temperament in implementing strategy as the reason for this situation. “The capacity to implement from the private sector, which outdoes China anytime, is there, but the bureaucracy from government and the regulation is still not enough.” On the contrary, China has fared much better than India in its efforts to implement alternative energies to deal with global warming. “China is the biggest polluter in the world; more even than the US, but at least they are making an effort. When they set five-year term targets, they meet them,” he said. However, in India, Limaye said, “The strategy is there, the plans are there, the funding is there, but the problem is that they are not deploying the funds. “In India we’ve created something called the Clean Energy Fund, based on a tax of Rs 50 per tonne of coal. They are collecting three to four thousand crores per year. They are sitting on six to eight thousand crores right now, but they have not deployed it,” he added. Limaye, who helped write India's Energy Conservation Act in 2001 and started India's first ESCO company in 1995, proposed the development of what he calls a Super ESCO to speed up implementation of clean energy programmes. — PTI
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London, June 3
