In Afghanistan, US breeds white elephants: Our view

Wednesday, 7 August 2013

Kabul, Aug 8 (Newswire): War is expensive, and no one wants to risk American lives by fighting on the cheap. But in Afghanistan, the U.S. government's open checkbook has too often produced the sort of wasteful spending that can undermine public support for the war.

In the nearly 12-year-long fight, American taxpayers have spent nearly $93 billion on "reconstruction," which includes everything from building schools to equipping the Afghan military and securing the government. That's about the same amount the U.S. government is spending this year on domestic highways, airports and other transportation projects.

How much of the Afghan spending has been wasted is unknown, but examples uncovered by John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, suggest that the amounts are substantial.

Some would be comical if they weren't so infuriating:

•The Defense Department built a 64,000-square-foot, $34 million headquarters building in southwestern Afghanistan, even though a Marine commander said he didn't want or need it. The building has never been occupied and will likely be torn down without ever being used.

•The Pentagon is spending more than $770 million to buy 18 Swiss turboprop planes and 30 Russian helicopters for Afghanistan's counternarcotics and counterterrorism air wing, despite a shortage of Afghan pilots capable of flying the aircraft and mechanics who can maintain them.

•The Defense Department spent $11.5 million to build four incinerators for solid waste at a key U.S. military base. Sopko found that the two largest incinerators were not being used; instead, solid waste was being burned in an open pit, worsening the already bad air quality at the base.

•U.S. officials hired an Afghan contractor so inept that the courthouse he built was unusable. The same contractor is bidding to, yes, tear the building down.

Other examples of mismanagement are anything but amusing:

•The Pentagon hired Afghan contractors to install "culvert-denial systems" to stop the Taliban from planting explosive devices inside the culverts underneath roadways where U.S. troops travel. But contract officers rarely bothered to check on the work. The Afghan contractors often installed the grates incorrectly or not at all, contributing to the deaths of least two U.S. soldiers.

•Despite repeated complaints, American contracts and money are going to about 60 Afghan contractors with ties to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, which means U.S. taxpayers could be helping to fund the enemy.

The Pentagon agrees with some of Sopko's findings but disputes others. Officials say the unneeded building, for example, represented $13 million of a $34 million contract. There's a plan to train pilots and mechanics for the helicopters and turboprops. The officials say they take oversight seriously and work hard at it.

If so, there's room for improvement. Afghanistan is unquestionably a tough place to operate — with a harsh security environment and often unreliable allies. But that's no excuse for serial breakdowns in basic planning, oversight and accountability. Who, for example, signed off on that unused building? The Defense Department can't say.

Congress has a role here, too, of course, because the appropriators provide the money in the first place, often in such great gobs that it seems no politician wants to be accused of having lost the war by giving the Pentagon too little.

Americans might think this will all be moot when U.S. troops leave Afghanistan next year, but not so fast: The spending in Afghanistan is set to go on long after the troops come home. If Pentagon officials expect continued backing for such spending, they'll have to do a better job of keeping it from going down a rat hole.

This is the second in an occasional series of editorials on wasteful federal spending and tax policies.

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Fraud fouls up fight against IEDs in Afghanistan

Kabul, Aug 8 (Newswire): A key aspect of the military's effort to protect troops from roadside bombs has been sabotaged from within, according to a report by Pentagon's special inspector general for Afghanistan.

A $32-million effort begun in 2009 to seal off culverts to prevent insurgents from using them as hiding places for improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has been plagued by fraud and may have resulted in several U.S. troops being killed or wounded, the report notes. The inspector general found that Afghan contractors took money to construct the barriers, and in some cases did no work. U.S. contracting officers didn't do enough to ensure the work was done.

Culverts, pipes that run beneath roads for drainage, are common in rural areas in eastern and southern Afghanistan. In some places, they can be found every few hundred feet. They're a natural spot to conceal bombs to attack military vehicles.

Two Afghan contractors billed the U.S. government $1 million to seal 250 culverts and failed to install the devices or did so improperly. An Afghan contractor and subcontractor have been charged with fraud and negligent homicide.

"There is insufficient evidence to show that culvert denial systems paid for with U.S. government funds were ever installed or, if they were, that the systems were installed properly," notes the report, which was released by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.

The inspector general also blasted Pentagon contracting officers for not assuring the work was done properly.

"It is simply not acceptable to spend taxpayer money on a contract when the contracting officer has no way to verify that the contract has been fulfilled," the report notes.

The inspector general recommended better quality control of the work and oversight of contractors.

Sen. Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, said congress should withhold additional funding for Afghanistan until the issue is addressed.

"With billions of taxpayer dollars at stake and American lives hanging in the balance, we owe it to our service members and their families to do everything in our power to protect them while serving in harm's way," he said in a statement.

Afghan farmers often tear up even new road to lay drainage pipes connecting fields. In 2009, a counter-IED unit based in Jalalabad responded to the report of an IED shoved deep inside such a culvert. A small robot with a camera was sent to probe the bomb.

Then an explosive-ordnance solider, who had lost a leg in Iraq dismantling a bomb, donned heavy protective clothing on a 120-degree July day and went into investigate. Eventually, he found about 40 pounds of homemade explosive rigged to explode when a vehicle passed over the culvert.

The U.S. troops, traveling in Mine Resistant Ambush Protected trucks, might have survived such a blast. Their comrades in the Afghan security forces, riding in the back of a Ford Ranger pickup truck, would not.

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CIA closing bases in Afghanistan as it shifts focus amid military drawdown

Kabul, Aug 8 (Newswire): The CIA has begun closing clandestine bases in Afghanistan, marking the start of a drawdown from a region that transformed the agency from an intelligence service struggling to emerge from the Cold War to a counterterrorism force with its own prisons, paramilitary teams and armed Predator drones.

The pullback represents a turning point for the CIA as it shifts resources to other trouble spots. The closures were described by U.S officials as preliminary steps in a plan to reduce the number of CIA installations in Afghanistan from a dozen to as few as six over the next two years — a consolidation to coincide with the withdrawal of most U.S. military forces from the country by the end of 2014.

Senior U.S. intelligence and administration officials said the reductions are overdue in a region where U.S. espionage efforts are now seen as out of proportion to the threat posed by al-Qaeda's diminished core leadership in Pakistan.

The CIA faces an array of new challenges beyond al-Qaeda, such as monitoring developments in the Middle East and delivering weapons to insurgents in Syria. John Brennan, the recently installed CIA director, has also signaled a desire to restore the agency's focus on traditional espionage.

"When we look at post-2014, how does the threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan measure against the threat in North Africa and Yemen?" said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss government deliberations. "Shouldn't our resources reflect that?"

U.S. officials stressed that the CIA is expected to maintain a significant footprint even after the pullback, with a station in Kabul that will remain among the agency's largest in the world, as well as a fleet of armed drones that will continue to patrol Pakistan's tribal belt.

The timing and scope of the CIA's pullout are still being determined and depend to some extent on how many U.S. troops President Obama decides to keep in the country after 2014. The administration is expected to reduce the number from 63,000 now to about 10,000 after next year but recently signaled that it is also considering a "zero option," in part because of mounting frustration with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The CIA may be in a unique position to negotiate with Karzai, who has publicly acknowledged accepting bags of money from the agency for years. The CIA also has provided much of the budget and training for the Afghan intelligence service. The agency wants to maintain the strength of those ties.

Even so, a full withdrawal of U.S. troops would probably trigger a deeper retrenchment by the CIA, which has relied on U.S. and allied military installations across the country to serve as bases for agency operatives and cover for their spying operations. The CIA's armed drones are flown from a heavily fortified airstrip near the Pakistan border in Jalalabad.

The CIA's presence in the country has already dropped well below the peak levels of several years ago, when more than 1,000 case officers, analysts and other employees had been deployed to support the war effort and hunt al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

The CIA declined to comment on the withdrawal plans.

"Afghanistan fundamentally changed the way the agency conducts business," said Richard Blee, who served as the CIA's senior officer in Afghanistan and Pakistan before he retired in 2007. "We went from a purely espionage organization to more of an offensive weapon, a paramilitary organization where classic spying was less important."

Some of the bases being closed served as important intelligence-gathering nodes during the escalation of the agency's drone campaign, raising the risk that U.S. counterterrorism capabilities could deteriorate and perhaps allow remnants of al-Qaeda to regenerate.

U.S. officials played down that danger. "There's an inherent imbalance," the administration official said. "The effectiveness of our operations has reduced the threat to the point that it's entirely appropriate that we have a smaller counterterrorism footprint."

White House officials have been weighing a shift of some of those resources to other regions, including Yemen and North Africa, where al-Qaeda affiliates are now seen as more dangerous than the network's base. The White House discussions have been part of the overall deliberations over U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan.

The CIA drawdown coincides with Afghanistan-related personnel moves. The agency recently appointed a new station chief in Kabul, a selection that raised eyebrows among some because the veteran officer is known mainly for his tours in Latin America and had not previously served in Afghanistan.

The top military post at CIA headquarters is also changing hands. U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Tony Thomas, who was in charge of special-operations units in Afghanistan, is set to begin serving as associate CIA director for military support in September, replacing an Air Force general with drone expertise.

Current and former U.S. officials familiar with the agency's plans said they call for pulling most agency personnel back to the CIA's main station in Kabul, plus a group of large regional bases — known as the "big five" — in Bagram, Kandahar, Mazar-e Sharif, Jalalabad and Herat.

"The footprint being designed involves six bases and some satellite [locations] out of those," said a former senior CIA officer. The agency may also rely on "mobile stations" in which a small number of operatives move temporarily into remote locations "where they trust the tribal network," the former official said. "Protection issues are going to be critical."

The base closures involve compounds along the Pakistan border, part of a constellation used by CIA operatives and analysts to identify drone targets in Pakistan. The bases, including locations in the provinces of Zabul, Paktika and Khost, have relied heavily on U.S. military and medical evacuation capabilities and were often near larger military outposts.

Among them is Forward Operating Base Chapman, near Khost, where seven CIA employees were killed by a suicide bomber posing as a potential informant in 2009. It is unclear whether the CIA will pull its personnel out of Chapman, which remained active even after that attack.

Administration deliberations over troop levels could also determine where the agency operates its drones. During the early years of the campaign, the aircraft were flown from Shamsi Air Base in Pakistan, but the agency moved most of its fleet to Jalalabad as public opposition to strikes mounted in Pakistan and relations with the government broke down.

The tempo of the CIA's drone campaign has already tapered off. The 17 strikes this year in Pakistan are far off the peak pace of 2010, when there were 117 strikes, according to the Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks drone attacks. Over the past decade, the campaign has killed as many as 3,000 militants and dozens if not hundreds of civilians, according to independent estimates.

U.S. officials said that preferred troop-level options would allow U.S. forces to remain at Jalalabad, in part so that the CIA's flights could continue. But officials said the drones could also be shifted to airstrips at Bagram or Kandahar. The latter has already served as a base for stealth drones used to conduct secret surveillance flights during the bin Laden raid and over Iran.

This year, President Obama approved new counterterrorism guidelines that call for the military to take on a larger role in targeted killing operations, reducing the involvement of the CIA.

But the guidelines included carve-outs that gave the agency wide latitude to continue armed Predator flights across the border and did not ban a controversial practice known as "signature strikes," in which the agency can launch missiles at targets based on patterns of suspicious behavior without knowing the identities of those who would be killed.

The senior Obama administration official said the United States may propose a shift to military drone flights inside Pakistan as part of the discussions with Afghanistan and Islamabad over U.S. troop levels.

The negotiations are seen as the "one shot you have" to raise the issue, the official said, adding that it was doubtful but "not impossible" that Pakistan would consent. Islamabad has never formally acknowledged its cooperation on the drone program and is seen as unlikely to allow a covert — if not exactly secret — CIA operation to give way to an overt campaign involving U.S. military flights.

Despite the pullout of U.S. troops and CIA operatives, officials said the drone campaign in Pakistan and elsewhere is expected to continue for years. Mike Sheehan, the assistant defense secretary for special operations, testified recently that such counterterrorism operations will probably last an additional 10 years or more.

The administration official said others believe the end is closer. The strikes will probably last "some period of years," the official said. "But I don't think you can project out five or 10."

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Couple dies on route to popular rock formation

Salt Lake City, Aug 8 (Newswire): A lottery system for hikers makes it difficult for many to win a permit to visit a rock formation called The Wave — and that may have colored the judgment of a couple who set out in brutal heat and were found dead along the trail.

Ulrich and Patricia Wahli, of Campbell, Calif., had permits to hike the 3 miles across open country in blazing heat and in energy-sapping deep sand. Authorities said they apparently succumbed to temperatures that reached 106 degrees.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management allows only 20 hikers a day to visit The Wave's dramatically flowing sandstone contours at Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Arizona, near the Utah border.

Many hikers enter an online lottery months in advance to their disappointment. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management says the odds of winning a permit to The Wave are as low as 10 percent. Half of the 20 daily permits are doled out on a walk-in basis at a visitor's center in Kanab, Utah, with up to 100 people showing up for one.

More than 48,000 people applied last year for 7,300 available hiking permits, officials said. The Wave is a richly colored geological upheaval, its fiery swirls emblazoned on countless postcards, posters, maps and computer screensavers.

The couple's bodies were found by other hikers. Ulrich Wahli was 70; his wife, 69. They won their permits by showing up for a walk-in lottery, said Rachel Tueller, spokeswoman for the BLM's Arizona Strip.

The lottery system may be the only way to go for a wildly popular backcountry spot, wilderness guides say. But a winning ticket encourages many to grab a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity regardless of the dangers. Guides say they can't help because they are prohibited from running trips inside national parks or monuments.

"The law of averages takes it from there," said Mike Banach of Zion Mountain School in Springdale, Utah. "People go out who aren't suited to the heat, and they don't bring enough water or equipment."

Kane County sheriff's Sgt. Alan Alldredge said The Wave isn't an easy place to reach; no marked trail leads the way. Monument officials say only a few juniper trees provide shade along the open route.

"Add that to the high heat we are experiencing right now, and it makes for a lethal combination," Alldredge said in a statement. "If you must hike, it is best to do it early in the morning, and make sure you have enough water and supplies."

The BLM does its best to educate visitors on safety, said Kevin Wright, manager of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. He said the hiker limit is necessary to protect the rock formations and preserve a sense of wilderness at The Wave.

A lottery system is the only way to govern crowds, he said.

"We don't even know what caused these fatalities, which are obviously a tragedy," Wright said. "We are going to see what the cause was, then review our policies and procedures."

Ulrich and Patricia Wahli were "avid travelers and fairly capable folks," said Tracy Glover, chief deputy of the Kane County Sheriff's Office. The AP was unable to locate any family members or friends of the couple who might have known their intentions.

"I don't know that the lottery is a problem," Glover said. "I'm not going to throw the BLM under a bus."

Patricia Wahli was found under a tree "as though she was trying to find some relief from the heat," Alldredge said.

Ulrich Wahli was found 250 yards away, apparently in the open. The bodies were sent to the Utah State Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy.

Temperatures reached 106 at nearby Page, Ariz., dipping to an overnight low of 80 degrees, the National Weather Service said.

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Anniversary hike ends in tragedy near scenic spot

Salt Lake City, Aug 8 (Newswire): They left their two young children with relatives and set off to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary at one of the most beautiful hiking destinations in the Southwest.

Months earlier, the luck of a draw had brought Anthony and Elisabeth Ann Bervel coveted hiking permits for The Wave, a region of richly colored sandstone patterns near the Utah-Arizona border.

But just hours into the trek, 27-year-old Elisabeth Bervel died of cardiac arrest, becoming the third hiker in a month to succumb to the brutal summer heat and disorienting open country where no marked trail shows the way.

The deaths have prompted officials to reassess the dangers for people who make the hike and perhaps seek an outside investigation of the risks, said Kevin Wright, manager of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.

Only 20 hikers are granted permits each day, a limit defended as necessary to protect the rock formations and preserve a sense of wilderness around the signature rock formation said to be one of the most photographed spots in North America.

Hikers are given plenty of warnings about how to survive. They also get pictures of prominent landmarks and access to eight guides who can lead the way.

"It's not like going to Zion National Park and hiking on an asphalt trail," said Kane County sheriff's Sgt. Alan Alldredge. "Once you hit the slickrock, nothing distinguishes the trail."

"It seems to go well for people going to The Wave," he added. "But for some reasons on the way back, they end up getting lost."

The Bervels, of Mesa, Ariz., lost their way on a three-mile cross-country route back to a trailhead, forcing them to spend extra hours under blazing sun in 90-degree temperatures and humidity, he said.

Officials said Elisabeth Bervel's legs gave out hiking in soft sand, and her husband kept going to find a cellphone signal to call for help.

He appeared to be in no danger from the heat or exertion. But Kane County officials said he was distraught when he sat down to recount the tragedy. A phone listing for Anthony Bervel had been disconnected.

"This event once again demonstrates the inherent risks associated with hiking in southern Utah's desert country," the Kane County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. "Even though the Bervels had tried to make sure they were prepared for this hike, the elements proved to be stronger."

The latest death led to further questions about the lottery system that makes it hard to land a permit for the hike that starts in Utah before reaching The Wave in Arizona. More than 48,000 people applied last year for 7,300 available permits, officials said.

Half of the 20 daily permits are doled out on a walk-in basis at a visitor's center in Kanab, with as many as 100 people showing up to get a permit for the next day.

The rest are awarded through an online lottery, with winners given a specific hiking date months in the future. For many, it's a lifetime opportunity, and the difficulty in getting permits prompts some people to go in the heat of the summer.

On July 3, Ulrich and Patricia Wahli of Campbell, Calif., were found dead in 106-degree heat.

About a year ago, a 30-year-old California man who spent much of a day at The Wave and tried to return after nightfall died after falling into a slot canyon, officials said.

"It does come back to personal discretion, and making choices," said Rachel Tueller, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Strip District of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which controls The Wave. "Anytime you go out on public land, it's a risk. You have to know your own capabilities."

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Boston magazine releases chilling new photos of Tsarnaev

Washington, Aug 8 (Newswire): Rolling Stone's decision to put accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its upcoming cover touched off a firestorm of controversy earlier this week among readers, retailers and purveyors of good taste, who say the magazine is elevating the 19-year-old from terrorist to rock star.

In response, Boston magazine published a series of new, haunting images of Tsarnaev's capture on its website. The images, taken by Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Sean Murphy, ran under the title "The Real Face of Terror."

"As a professional law-enforcement officer of 25 years, I believe that the image that was portrayed by Rolling Stone magazine was an insult to any person who has every worn a uniform of any color or any police organization or military branch, and the family members who have ever lost a loved one serving in the line of duty," Murphy, a tactical photographer with the state police, wrote in an email to Boston magazine. "The truth is that glamorizing the face of terror is not just insulting to the family members of those killed in the line of duty, it also could be an incentive to those who may be unstable to do something to get their face on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine."

Murphy continued:

    I hope that the people who see these images will know that this was real. It was as real as it gets. This may have played out as a television show, but this was not a television show. Officer Dick Donohue almost gave his life. Officer Sean Collier did give his life. These were real people, with real lives, with real families. And to have this cover dropped into Boston was hurtful to their memories and their families. I know from first-hand conversations that this Rolling Stone cover has kept many of them up—again. It's irritated the wounds that will never heal—again. There is nothing glamorous in bringing more pain to a grieving family.

The outrage over the Rolling Stone cover has been widespread, particularly in the city of Boston, where Tsarnaev is accused of planting one of the twin bombs that killed three people and wounded more than 200 others near the race's finish line.

Several retail chains including CVS, Walgreens, Stop & Shop and Tedeschi's announced they would not carry the issue—due on newsstands—in their stores.

Rolling Stone defended its decision to put Tsarnaev on the cover:

    Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts are always with them and their families. The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone's long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day. The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens.

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Facebook blogger goads Zimbabwe's ruling party

Johannesburg, Aug 8 (Newswire): A mysterious Facebook blogger purporting to be a disgruntled "Deep Throat" in President Robert Mugabe's party has become an unlikely election campaign star in Zimbabwe, attracting 275,000 online followers and the fury of the ZANU-PF establishment.

With a daily stream of social tittle-tattle, outrageous personal slurs and explosive - if true - political allegations, "Baba Jukwa" has created an unprecedented stir in the run-up to the July 31 poll.

His popularity reflects the rapid expansion of Internet access and social media since the end in 2008 of a long economic meltdown, and the thirst of Zimbabwe's 13 million people for information beyond the ZANU-PF propaganda that dominates state media.

It also flirts with serious reprisals in a country where sensitive political matters are discussed only behind closed doors for fear of Mugabe's secret police, who can tap phones and intercept Internet traffic in the name of national security.

Although senior figures in Mugabe's ZANU-PF party dismiss his posts as the ramblings of a disaffected lunatic, Baba Jukwa has ruffled enough feathers to merit denunciation in the Herald, Mugabe's state-controlled print mouthpiece.

"Baba Jukwa's thunder is waning as the stories become more and more ridiculous," the paper said in an editorial after Baba Jukwa alleged that police chief Augustine Chihuri had organized the secret printing of extra ballot papers.

"They are not based on any solid grassroots work and is mere gossip, which can never translate into electoral victory," it added, proclaiming ZANU-PF's primacy in the "social network battle" for votes.

In a socially conservative nation where public criticism of elders and political leaders remains taboo - Mugabe, aged 89 and in power for 33 years, qualifies easily on both counts - a mere mention of Baba Jukwa is enough to elicit a furious response.

"Baba Jukwa is a complete waste of time, completely idiotic," said Saviour Kasukuwere, a pugnacious ZANU-PF minister and prime target of Baba Jukwa's often very personal attacks.

"If you take Baba Jukwa seriously, you need your head examined," he said. "He's targeting me at a personal level, but I'm not shaken by that rubbish. We are serious people. It's just meant to discredit individuals."

Mugabe does not read the site, he added.

Ever since the blog emerged in March this year, Zimbabweans of all political persuasions have sliced and diced Baba Jukwa's posts for clues to his identity.

The blogger describes himself as "Concerned father, fighting nepotism and directly linking community with their Leaders, Government, MPs and Ministers" and says more than 70 percent of his online supporters are in Zimbabwe.

His varied style, erratic use of grammar and prolific output - barely a day goes by without a torrent of invective against "my evil party" - suggest more than one author at work, but beyond that his identity or identities remain unclear.

Even the origins of his name are murky: Jukwa means nothing in any of Zimbabwe's major languages and appears to come from the word for 'podium' in Swahili, the lingua franca of Kenya and Tanzania.

Many of his allegations are impossible to verify and numerous calls in Johannesburg to mobile telephone numbers posted on the site and said to belong to senior officials including Chihuri, the police chief, went unanswered.

The nature of the allegations, which include purported accounts from meetings of the ZANU-PF Politburo, the party's top 50 or so officials, suggests he is either a senior member of ZANU-PF or has access to senior members.

The Herald for its part denies that the Politburo has a mole. "Baba Jukwa claims that he is a member of Mugabe's inner circle," it said this month. "He is not."

Baba Jukwa's page was among the first outlets to report problems with early voting last week for 60,000 civil servants and police, long before they were officially confirmed. This suggests the site could play an important role in collating any irregularities or violence on polling day.

Whatever his identity or sources, Baba Jukwa's emergence has given ZANU-PF a glimpse of the future as technology erodes its dominance of information and political discourse inside Zimbabwe's borders since independence from Britain in 1980.

"It reflects a desperation and a hunger for information and understanding of what's going on," said International Crisis Group researcher Piers Pigou in Johannesburg. "And it's the first time they've ever had to deal with what you might say is their own medicine."

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Wrongful death suit in Quebec train crash filed in U.S.

New York, Aug 8 (Newswire): The guardian of a girl whose Canadian father died in the tragic Quebec train crash this month filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Illinois against a number of railway and fuel services companies connected with the disaster.

The lawsuit is believed to be the first filed in the United States related to the train derailment in the early hours of July 6 that sent 72 tankers of crude oil crashing into the village of Lac-Megantic in Quebec, where they exploded in a ball of fire, killing almost 50 people.

Annick Roy, the guardian of Fanny Roy Veilleux, whose father Jean-Guy Veilleux, a Lac-Megantic resident, allegedly burned to death as a result of the train crash, filed the lawsuit in Cook County. Court documents did not provide the age of Fanny Roy Veilleux, but described her as a minor daughter.

The defendants include railroad operator Montreal Maine and Atlantic Railway Inc, its parent company Rail World Inc, MMA Chairman Edward Burkhardt, and fuel services company World Fuel Services Corp.

Roy alleges in the suit that the companies largely failed to keep the train's oil tankers, known as DOT-111s, up to reasonable government safety standards and are therefore negligent in the death of Veilleux.

"For more than 20 years, problems with DOT-111 tankers rupturing upon derailment have been well documented by government safety regulators and media outlets," Roy said in the lawsuit. "The railroad and petroleum industries have long acknowledged the design flaws in the DOT-111, but have consistently ignored the (National Transportation Safety Board's) calls to address the dangers associated with rupture of the tankers."

Roy said in the lawsuit that the tanker cars that spilled in Lac-Megantic were the same type that ruptured in a 2009 derailment in Cherry Valley, Illinois, that resulted in a spillage of 324,000 gallons of ethanol. The Lac-Megantic tankers lacked safety improvements recommended by the NTSB, the lawsuit said.

Other defendants named in the lawsuit are Western Petroleum Company, Petroleum Transport Solutions, Dakota Plains Transloading LLC, Dakota Petroleum Transport Solutions, Dakota Plaints Marketing and DPTS Marketing.

Montreal, Maine and Atlantic, Rail World, Edward Burkhardt, World Fuel Services Corp and other defendants were approached for comment on the suit but did not immediately respond. Nor did the lawyer representing Roy, Peter Flowers of Chicago-based Meyers & Flowers.

About a week after the crash, Canadian and U.S. lawyers filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two Lac-Megantic residents, Guy Ouellet and Yannick Gagne, in Quebec Superior Court to seek compensation from the accident. Defendants included the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic and Burkhardt, among others.

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Ninety-four illegal immigrants held in Mexico, including 19 Asians

Mexico City, Aug 8 (Newswire): Mexico detained 94 illegal immigrants, including 19 from the Indian subcontinent, packed into a truck bound for the U.S. border, authorities said.

Among the people found near the southern city of Tuxtla Gutierrez, capital of Chiapas state, were 10 Nepalese and nine Bangladeshis trying to reach the United States, officials said.

Apprehensions of Asians immigrating illegally to the United States have increased sharply in recent years, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Authorities said the migrants were traveling in inhumane conditions. The driver of the vehicle, who was from central Mexico, was arrested on human trafficking charges.

The truck set out from Huehuetenango, Guatemala, and police detected the migrants with an x-ray at a checkpoint outside Tuxtla Gutierrez after midnight. The migrants were on their way to the United States, state prosecutors said.

Several of the migrants were treated for hand and leg injuries, and some struggled to breathe due to the "overcrowded conditions" on the truck, Mexico's National Migration Institute said.

"It's a long journey and they intended to travel to the United States like that, literally hidden," said Hector Flores, a spokesman for the Chiapas state prosecutor's office. "Obviously, those are not optimal conditions for human beings."

The non-Asian migrants were from the Central American nations of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

The entire group, which included seven minors, is likely to face deportation proceedings.

Between 2007 and 2011, the most recent year for which statistics were available, the number of Indian nationals apprehended by U.S. authorities jumped from less than 1,000 annually to nearly 4,000. The numbers of Bangladeshi, Nepalese and Sri Lankan migrants detained have also increased.

The Central Americans were charged between $4,000 and $5,000 for the journey, while the Asian migrants had to pay between $6,000 and $8,000, according to the National Migration Institute.

An Indian national was among a group of 165 migrants rescued by Mexican troops in June, after being kidnapped near the U.S. border and held in the state of Tamaulipas.

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WellPoint beats second-quarter estimates, raises 2013 outlook

New York, July 8 (Newswire): WellPoint Inc (WLP) reported a much higher-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by lower than forecast medical costs in its employer-based insurance business and improvements in Medicaid operations after the purchase of Amerigroup in December.

The second-largest U.S. insurer also raised its full-year earnings forecast to at least $8 per share, up from the $7.75 it had affirmed in June.

This was the first full quarter under new Chief Executive Officer Joseph Swedish. He took over the top spot at the company from Angela Braly, who left after coming under investor pressure one year ago over disappointing financial results.

WellPoint, which operates the Blue Cross Blue Shield license in 14 states, said second-quarter net income rose to $800.1 million, or $2.64 per share, from $643.6 million, or $1.94 per share, a year earlier.

Excluding investment gains and acquisition-related costs, WellPoint said earnings were $2.60 per share. That compares with analysts' expectations of $2.11.

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Analysis: Cabela's building on gun sale gains by leveraging data

New York, Aug 8 (Newswire): Few companies have benefited more from the record number of gun sales in the U.S. than hunting, fishing and outdoor products retailer Cabela's (CAB).

Its shares are up more than 67 percent over the last year, in large part because of what the company called "extraordinary" demand for firearms and ammunition in the wake of mass shootings in Colorado and Connecticut. FBI background checks of gun purchasers - considered the best proxy for retail gun sales - are up nearly 29 percent over the last year ending in June, for a total of 11.4 million.

But amid the fervor over gun sales, which have jumped by an estimated 20 percent at Cabela's over the last 12 months, analysts and fund managers cite another reason for the company's success: its use of customer data. And they say this should allow the shares to rise further when the overall growth in firearm sales slips.

Leveraging data to increase revenue is common in retailing. But experts say Cabela's, a $4.7 billion market-cap company whose roots trace back to the direct mail business selling fishing flies that Dick and Mary Cabela started at their kitchen table in 1961, has one of the most sophisticated customer-tracking and analytics programs in the industry.

As a result, Cabela's sales at its 44 stores average $370 per square foot, while the typical big-box sporting goods store averages closer to $200 per square foot, according to Reed Anderson, director of equity research at Northland Capital Markets. Five smaller, so-called "next generation" Cabela's stores - which range between 80,000 and 100,000 square feet - topped $500 per square foot in sales in 2012, he said.

"They have one of the best flows of information on someone who is involved in camping or hunting," Anderson said. "They may live in remote Wyoming, but Cabela's knows precisely how much they spend on an annualized basis. Their data gives them the precision to locate stores like no one in the industry."

While data alone won't insulate the company from any downturns, of course, analysts say that Cabela's is beating its competition by tying together the strength of its data program with a high quality service model similar to upper-end retailers like Nordstrom (JWN). When it reports earnings, Cabela's is expected to show earnings per share growth of 32 percent from the same time last year, compared with a median 13.4 percent among specialty retailers.

While Amazon.com (AMZN) may have mastered the art of so-called suggested selling online, Cabela's has decades of customer data at its fingers that allow it to open a 200,000 square foot store in a lightly-populated area and know which mix of the approximately 225,000 products it carries will make it profitable. Many of these items - ranging from rifles to kayaks - are tough to impossible to buy online, limiting the competition from Amazon.

Data collection begins as customers, whether in-store, online or from one of the more than 100 catalogs the company publishes each year, are lured into joining Cabela's Club Rewards loyalty program or sign up for its Club Rewards Visa card. Customers are prompted to use accumulated points at checkout, creating a positive feedback loop.

All told, 29 percent of sales at the company are made using its Cabela's credit card, which is issued by a company-owned bank called The World's Foremost Bank and accounts for 10 percent of revenues. Competitors like Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS) and Target (TGT), by comparison, do not own their own banks.

"This is by far the easiest and best loyalty rewards program that I've ever seen," Anderson said, noting that customers do not need rebates or face other restrictions on purchases.

In 2007, Cabela's launched a new data analytics program, built by Teradata Corp (TDC), that integrated figures from across all of its retail channels. The system allows someone in the marketing department, say, to access a single day's sales data by the next morning, and launch an email marketing campaign to boost sales. Previously, that process would have taken several days.

Few retailers streamline their data to the same degree, says Jeff Tanner, a professor of marketing at Baylor University who has studied retailers' use of data.

"The problem, of which Wal-Mart is an exemplar, is that they treat the various channels as separate businesses, which makes data integration incredibly difficult," Tanner said. One anonymous retailer Tanner studied described meetings between executives in which each had different figures on market penetration, leading to a range of conflicting conclusions. Target Corp has the most similar emphasis on data collection and modeling, though it is not at the same level as Cabela's, he said.

Online, meanwhile, Cabela's has examined how the order in which customers place items in their basket influences the probability of purchase, Tanner said. A customer that begins a basket with a hunting call that attracts predators like coyote, for instance, suggests a specific kind of hunt. The customer will then be prompted to buy lightweight camouflage that can be worn year-round (as opposed to camouflage for deer hunting, which is only done in the winter) or a spotlight with a red filter that helps hunters spot coyotes at night.

Cabela's ability to seemingly know what its customers want at all times has helped the company become "central to their lifestyle," said Mark Mulholland, manager of the $630 million Matthew 25 fund. Mulholland began buying shares at around $6 per share in late 2008 - giving him an approximately 1,000 percent return since - and has added to his position in the last 30 days, in anticipation that the company's share price will continue to see percentage growth in the mid-teens for the next several years. The company makes up the second-largest position in his fund, behind Apple Inc.

Anderson, the Northland Capital Markets analyst, has a target price of $80 for the shares, more than a 20 percent jump above the market close at $65.80 on June 23 and almost 10 percent higher than Wall Street's average price target of $73.50.

Overall, eight analysts who cover the company rate it a buy or strong buy, compared with five who have hold ratings on the company.

Customer loyalty should bolster shares over the long run, said Matt Nemer, an analyst at Wells Fargo (WFC) who has an outperform rating for the stock.

"The stock is definitely sensitive to firearms data in the short-term," Nemer said. The overall rate of gun sales "will slow down, but everybody knows that, and some of its baked into the stock. Guns aren't going to jump by 30 percent forever."

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Apple wobbles in China as rivals offer more, for less

San Francisco, Aug 8 (Newswire): A sharp drop in Apple Inc's China revenue in April-June underscores the challenges it faces in its second-largest market as the technology gap with cheaper local rivals narrows and as Samsung Electronics keeps up a steady stream of new models across all price ranges.

While investors marked up Apple shares as the company sold more of its iPhones than expected, the stock rally may prove short-lived as demand for its products fades in China. Analysts predict Apple will lose market share in the world's leading smartphone sector.

"There's some cannibalization of Apple's market share from competitive mid-tier models that cost a lot less and perform as well, from vendors such as Xiaomi and Vivo," said Huang Leping, an analyst at Nomura in Hong Kong, referring to rival Chinese models.

Salespeople at several electronics shops in Hong Kong said South Korea's Samsung was a bigger hit with consumers as it offers more products. Some display counters didn't carry any Apple devices.

"Samsung products have enjoyed greater sales than Apple as many mainland (Chinese) tourists tend to buy Samsung due to a greater variety of models with a wider price range," said a saleswoman at a Hong Kong computer centre. "That's why we stock more Samsung products."

In the first quarter of this year, Apple ranked top in Hong Kong with 46 percent market share in smartphones, though that was down from 54 percent in the last quarter of 2012, according to market research firm Canalys.

Even without releasing a new product, Apple sold 31.2 million iPhones in its fiscal third quarter, around a fifth more than analysts had predicted. But revenue from all Apple products in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, slumped 43 percent from the previous quarter and was down 14 percent from a year earlier - worrying in a region where smartphone penetration is still low.

Greater China accounted for 13 percent of Apple's sales, or $5 billion, in April-June - down from nearly 19 percent in the previous quarter. Hong Kong was a particularly weak spot. "It's not totally clear exactly why that occurred," CEO Tim Cook said on a conference call with analysts.

"In the past three months, the number of mainland Chinese consumers of Apple products dropped about 50 percent," said Sunny Tang, a salesperson at another Hong Kong electronics store that sells Apple products. "Android (Google's operating system in many Samsung phones) is much better than Apple, and in that period Samsung released at least five phones and tablets."

Nicole Peng Luping at Canalys said: "China is a very diverse market so you need to have very diverse products to serve different levels of customers - and that's the weakness for Apple."

In the first quarter, Apple ranked 5th in China with 9.7 percent market share, well behind leader Samsung with 17.7 percent, and lagging, among others, Lenovo Group Ltd and Huawei Technologies, which said it was on track to hit 10 percent revenue growth this year.

Nomura's Huang expects Apple's China market share to slip 1-2 percentage points in the coming quarters as the novelty of the iPhone 5 fades and as new buyers opt for cheaper smartphones.

The global battle for mobile supremacy is not just between Apple and Samsung. Huawei and ZTE Corp are growing across their Chinese home base, and South Korea's LG Electronics said it sold a record 12.1 million smartphones in April-June, more than double its year-ago sales.

As high-end smartphone sales hit a plateau, the $2 trillion industry - telecom carriers, handset makers and content providers - is buckling up for a bumpier ride as growth shifts to emerging markets, primarily in Asia.

Even excluding China, Apple's revenue in Asia Pacific fell 35 percent quarter-on-quarter.

CEO Cook, who has seen Apple stock fall by more than a fifth so far this year, blamed China's slowing economic growth, but said he remained bullish on that market. The "economy clearly doesn't help us, nor others," he told analysts.

He said, however, that the revenue numbers don't tell the whole story. Apple books revenue when it sells to resellers, who then sell the products to consumers. Sales to consumers - or sell-through - slipped just 4 percent in Greater China from a year ago. By that same measure, mainland Chinese sell-through sales actually rose 5 percent year-on-year, though that was a deceleration in growth, Cook said.

Beyond the Asia weakness, Apple's sales of its iPad - the device that catapulted tablet computing into the mainstream - underperformed. Apple shipped 14.6 million tablets in April-June, some way below rough estimates.

Some investors argue that Apple's hold on a market it created is likely to slip as rival smartphone makers as well as Google and Amazon.com Inc pile in, but Cook noted that usage data shows the iPad still commands a dominant share of Web traffic.

"iPad accounts for 84 percent of the Web traffic from tablets," he said. "So if there are lots of other tablets selling, I don't know what they are being used for."

Given the pressures and increasing competition, Apple's stock rally should not be seen as proof that concerns over its outlook have abated, some analysts said. "It's nice to see a bit of a beat for a change," said Hudson Square Research analyst Daniel Ernst. But "earnings are still down year over year."

"It's going to take a new product introduction before we see earnings turn positive."

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Lilly beats forecast, helped by drugs soon to face generics

New York, Aug 8 (Newswire): Eli Lilly and Co reported higher-than-expected quarterly earnings, helped by cost cuts and strong sales growth of depression and impotence treatments that will soon lose patent protection, and the drugmaker raised its full-year profit forecast.

Lilly said it earned $1.21 billion, or $1.11 per share in the second quarter. That compared with $924 million, or 83 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding special items, Lilly earned $1.16 per share. Analysts on average had forecast $1.00 per share.

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Dell shareholders convene again to vote on founder's buyout offer

Round Rock, Aug 8 (Newswire): Dell Inc shareholders converge on Texas to vote on CEO Michael Dell's $24.4 billion buyout offer for the company after a previous meeting was pushed back a week in the hope of convincing dubious investors to accept the deal.

A meeting called last week at Dell's headquarters on the outskirts of Austin was adjourned within minutes after the company founder and his private equity partner, Silver Lake, failed to secure enough votes to take the No.3 PC maker private.

Unless it is postponed again, the vote could decide the fate of the struggling company. Founder Michael Dell wants to take it private, arguing that a painful restructuring can best be performed away from Wall Street's scrutiny.

In the week leading up to the meeting, Michael Dell, his advisers and proxy solicitors reached out to investors big and small to secure whatever votes they could get, according to investors who have knowledge of the meetings and calls.

A crucial player was T.Rowe Price - a major shareholder with some 71 million shares according to latest public filings - which remained opposed, even as other institutional investors such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard switched sides at the last minute.

One Dell shareholder said many investors feel the current offer of $13.65 a share is inadequate, but are leery of waiting for another buyer given the company's rapidly deteriorating prospects, or of letting the stock tank if the deal falls through.

It is "the best of all evils," the source said on condition of anonymity.

Investors remain divided over Dell's prospects. Some are ready to cash out of a company increasingly vulnerable to a crumbling PC market. The company created by Dell in his dorm room in 1984, and which rapidly grew into a global market leader renowned for innovation, is a now shadow of its former self.

Others, led by billionaire Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management, are convinced the company can transform itself into a dominant provider of business computing services.

In a last-ditch attempt to torpedo Michael Dell, Icahn and Southeastern called a special board committee that was set up to consider the his buyout offer "unconscionable," saying it would cut off shareholders from the company's future. Icahn also accused the company of resorting to "scare tactics" by disclosing bad news and dismal forecasts. Dell reported a 79 percent drop in profit in its latest quarterly report.

However, one source close to the buyout group warned that Dell shares would tank if the deal falls through.

"The longer there is uncertainty, the worse it is for shareholders," said the source, who ask not to be named because he was not authorized to speak with the media.

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Strong iPhone sales buoy Apple's third quarter, shares climb

San Francisco, Aug 8 (Newswire): Sales of Apple Inc's iPhone trumped Wall Street estimates after U.S. shipments soared 51 percent in the third quarter, lifting its stock 5 percent even as profit fell.

The world's largest technology company said that profit fell 22 percent as gross margins slid below 37 percent from more than 42 percent in the year-ago quarter.

The iPhone's solid showing eased concerns that growing competition is hurting demand for Apple's top-selling product as the global smartphone market matures. Rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which overtook Apple to become the world's largest smartphone maker in 2012, fueled those fears when it issued a disappointing earnings forecast earlier this month.

Apple's stock, which has fallen 20 percent since January, rose 5 percent to $437.94 in after-hours trade. It closed at $418.99 on Nasdaq.

"The iPhone number should provide some comfort to investors who were worried about smartphone demand. That's one of the reasons the stock is up. Expectations were not strong for this quarter," said Shannon Cross of Cross Research.

The company sold 31.2 million iPhones last quarter - far more than the estimated 26 million - and 14.6 million iPads.

Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said in an interview that iPhone sales rose 51 percent in the United States from a year earlier, and 66 percent in Japan.

But revenue from greater China - an increasingly crucial market for the Silicon Valley giant as it strives for growth - dived 43 percent from the second quarter and 14 percent from the year-ago period.

Executives blamed China's slowing economy for the revenue decline but did not elaborate.

"China is a huge opportunity for Apple," Chief Executive Tim Cook said on a conference call. "I don't get discouraged over a 90-day kind of cycle."

Apple earned $6.9 billion, or $7.47 a share, on revenue of $35.3 billion. That compared with a profit of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 a share, on revenue of about $35 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Wall Street's average forecast was for revenue of $35.02 billion and earnings per share of $7.32.

The company has $146.6 billion in cash and short term securities.

Investors' biggest long-term concern about Apple is whether the company has lost its innovative edge after re-imagining at least three major consumer electronics markets, with iTunes and the iPod, the iPhone and then the iPad.

Since launching the iPad mini last fall, the company has yet to update its major devices.

Cook told analysts to expect new products in coming months, with some "in new categories," but as usual he played his cards close to the vest.

"We are on track to have a very busy fall," CFO Oppenheimer said earlier during the call without going into details.

Apple forecast revenue of $34 billion to $37 billion this quarter, slightly below Wall Street's average projection of $37.04 billion.

It estimated a margin of 36 to 37 percent. Gross margins came in at 36.9 percent in the third quarter, sharply below 42.8 percent a year ago, as Apple sold more cheaper older model iPhones along with the new iPhone 5 model.

"It's pretty remarkable that they are selling as many phones as they are, given that it's not a new product," said Michael Yoshikami, chief executive of Destination Wealth, which owns Apple shares. "That's really the key for them; they've got to come up with a new product."

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Pamposh Colony faces water shortage

Srinagar, Aug 8 (Newswire): Residents of Pamposh Colony, Nati Pora complained that there was acute scarcity of drinking water in the area.

 The residents said since the advent of Ramazan, the water supply to the area has become irregular.

"It is only just for a few hours from Sehri that the taps run in the area daily. During these hours also, the pressure is quite low," a delegation from the area told Greater Kashmir.
 "The scarcity of water during Ramazan has added to our woes. It is quite disgusting that despite repeated requests to the authorities, they have not addressed our problem," they said.

 "At the time of Sehri instead of taking the pre-dawn meals, we first ensure to collect some water for the day," they complained.
 "Ahead of Ramazan government functionaries are asked to ensure smooth water supply to every area. But it is quite surprising that since the advent of the holy month we are facing acute water shortage," they said.

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Nowshera protests nocturnal raids, arrests

Srinagar, Aug 8 (Newswire): Occupant police used force to disperse scores of people in Nowshera area of Soura who were protesting against the arrest of more than a dozen youth by the cops during nocturnal raids.

The area observed a complete shutdown against the "terror unleashed by police and demanded immediate release of the youth."

The residents of various localities including Khawaja Pora, Mukdam Pora and Kagazgari Mohalla in Nowshera said the forces burst tear smoke shells last night and arrested several youth. The locals said their areas were cordoned off and subsequently youth were arrested.

They said that three brothers identified as Jan Muhammad Khan, Ashiq Hussain Khan and Raja Khan sons of late Assadullah Khan were also arrested by police in the nocturnal raids.

The protesting people alleged that police ransacked their houses during the raids. "Arresting innocents has become a routine for police. Some days back police called a tailor Bashir Ahmad Mir to police station and detained him for no reasons," the people said.

A police official admitted the raids in Nowshera but said that they arrested only five people. He said all of them are involved in stone pelting adding that police has evidence.

Meanwhile Mufti Azam designate, Mufti Nasir Ul Islam has condemned the "brute use of force against innocent civilians" in Soura area.

"Instead of feeling ashamed and taking action against the culprits behind the Gool bloodbath the state government has unleashed a reign of terror on the victimized and innocent people of held Kashmir particularly the youth," Mufti Nasir said.

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IHK rulers breach ban on re-employment

Srinagar, July Aug 8 (Newswire): In blatant violation of the ban on re-employment of government officers after their retirement, service of Shankar Kotwal Singh a senior law officer Jammu Development Authority has been extended raising questions on seriousness of the government to implement its own orders.

 "It is hereby ordered that no administrative department will initiate any proposal for re-employment of any government servant. Besides GAD shall not entertain any proposal of re-employment from now onwards," the Government vide order number 719 GAD of 2013 on March 7 2013. The order was issued as per the Cabinet decision number 116/12-2013.

However, office of the Vice Chairman JDA issued an order, dated 224-JDA of 2013, July 3, 2013 which reads: "Sanction is hereby accorded to the extension in services of Shankar Singh Kotwal, senior law officer, JDA beyond his date of superannuation on 30-06-2013 for the period of three months."

 The order, a copy of which is available with Greater Kashmir, reads: "this issues with the approval of Hon'ble Minister for Urban Development and Urban Local Bodies/Hon'ble Chairman, JDA."
 Sources in the administration said there are lot of loopholes in appointing and re-appointing people in the Civil Secretariat.

"There are many orders that are full of mystery. What remains to be seen is how far government can follow the order on ban on re-employment of officers after retirement, given the fact that corruption is rampant in the State," said a source.

 Earlier, the re-employment of Rashim Kashyap as a consultant for coordinating work related to the 14th Fnance Commission, the re-employment of Ajay Khajuria as Director Agriculture Jammu, Dr Muneer Masoodi (Retd) Prof former HoD GMC Srinagar, as Medical Superintendent G B Pant Hospital, Srinagar have raised various questions on the ban on re-employment.

When contacted, vice-chairman JDA Satish Nehru said, "under rules we can reemploy any of our employees until he or she attains age of 60 years."

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Magnetic particles used to accelerate process of heart healing

Islamabad, Aug 8 (Newswire): Interventional cardiologists used magnetic particles to accelerate the process of healing after the placement of a stent.

To do this, they extract cells from the interior of a patient's blood vessels, cultivate them, and insert iron-based paramagnetic particles into the cells.

When the cells are reintroduced to the blood, this attracts them to the magnetic coating on the stent, creating a film of living cells that promotes tissue healing and ultimately reduces the risk of blood clot formation.

A common heart problem may now have a magnetic solution. Researchers are using the laws of attraction to make heart stents that unclog blood vessels more safely.

A puppy named Cash is the newest member of Bob Stortron's family. At 68, Stortron says it's not too hard keeping up with him.

A few years ago, it may have been more difficult. Stortron's heart was fading, and he had to have a stent put in. Stents reinforce blood vessel walls to keep vessels open and blood flowing.

"When you're talking about numbers of patients in the millions, 1 percent can add up to pretty large numbers," Gurpreet Sandhu, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said of those who need heart stents.

Normally, it takes weeks for endothelial cells to coat stents and blood vessels to heal. Now, interventional cardiologists are testing magnetic stents that attract those cells faster. First, cells are taken from the blood and tagged with iron microspheres.

Then, a magnetic stent is threaded through the blood vessel. At last, tagged cells are sent through the blood vessels to see if they are attracted to the stent.

"This will hopefully mean fewer repeat procedures on patients and better quality of life for our patients," Dr. Sandhu said.

Dr. Sandhu says the technology speeds up healing to just days, requires fewer blood thinners and lowers the risk of blood clots.

Stortron says he couldn't ask for a better life, and he's content spending the rest of it enjoying his family.

"I hope I'm around for a long time, but I don't have control over that button," Stortron said.

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Topiramate effective therapeutic medication for drinking

Islamabad, Aug 8 (Newswire): Neuropharmacologists ran clinical trials to find that a drug called topiramate is an effective therapeutic medication for decreasing heavy drinking and diminishing the physical and psychosocial harm caused by alcohol dependence.

The drug works by blocking the right amount of the feel good effects of alcohol (brought on by increased levels of dopamine), making drinking less enjoyable and thus reducing cravings and helping to stop heavy drinking.

Topiramate was also found to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels which may lead to a decrease in heart disease in alcohol dependent patients.

Alcoholism affects over 17 million people. Without proper treatment, it's a devastating disease that can ruin lives and relationships. A new therapy that comes in a pill is bringing new hope to alcoholics.

There was a time in Christine Flemming's life when alcohol came before her kids.

"I can't remember when my daughter was very little, because I was drinking so much," said Flemming. "That affected me a lot."

Flemming needed help, but traditional treatment methods didn't work. Now she's on a new kind of therapy in the form of a pill called topiramate. It has changed her life. "I can tell you that it cuts my cravings, and I don't feel like I have to drink," Flemming said. "I don't feel like that's something I need in my life and I have to do."

Alcohol increases levels of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that makes us feel good. The drug works by blocking the right amount of the feel-good effects from alcohol to reduce cravings and help stop heavy drinking.

During clinical trials, neuropharmacologists were surprised to learn it also lowers blood pressure and cholesterol levels, which may lead to a decrease in heart disease in alcohol dependent patients.

"Most of the morbidity due to alcoholism is caused by secondary effects of all these other systems, so to have a drug that begins to correct all those other physical abnormalities is extremely helpful," said Bankhole Johnson, Ph.D., a Neuropharmacologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va.

The drug helped improve Fleming's health and end her dependence on alcohol. She cut her drinking from 15 beers a day to just three, so time with her kids is now a priority.

"It's made a big difference," Flemming said. "It's made a really big difference, and I feel like I'm actually there for my family."

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Autonomous molecular robot made out of DNA

Islamabad, Aug 8 (Newswire): A team of scientists from Columbia University, Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have programmed an autonomous molecular "robot" made out of DNA to start, move, turn, and stop while following a DNA track.

The development could ultimately lead to molecular systems that might one day be used for medical therapeutic devices and molecular-scale reconfigurable robots -- robots made of many simple units that can reposition or even rebuild themselves to accomplish different tasks.

A paper describing the work appears in the current issue of the journal Nature.

The traditional view of a robot is that it is "a machine that senses its environment, makes a decision, and then does something -- it acts," says Erik Winfree, associate professor of computer science, computation and neural systems, and bioengineering at Caltech.

Milan N. Stojanovic, a faculty member in the Division of Experimental Therapeutics at Columbia University, led the project and teamed up with Winfree and Hao Yan, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Arizona State University and an expert in DNA nanotechnology, and with Nils G. Walter, professor of chemistry and director of the Single Molecule Analysis in Real-Time (SMART) Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, for what became a modern-day self-assembly of like-minded scientists with the complementary areas of expertise needed to tackle a tough problem.

Shrinking robots down to the molecular scale would provide, for molecular processes, the same kinds of benefits that classical robotics and automation provide at the macroscopic scale. Molecular robots, in theory, could be programmed to sense their environment (say, the presence of disease markers on a cell), make a decision (that the cell is cancerous and needs to be neutralized), and act on that decision (deliver a cargo of cancer-killing drugs).

Or, like the robots in a modern-day factory, they could be programmed to assemble complex molecular products. The power of robotics lies in the fact that once programmed, the robots can carry out their tasks autonomously, without further human intervention.

With that promise, however, comes a practical problem: how do you program a molecule to perform complex behaviors?

"In normal robotics, the robot itself contains the knowledge about the commands, but with individual molecules, you can't store that amount of information, so the idea instead is to store information on the commands on the outside," says Walter. And you do that, says Stojanovic, "by imbuing the molecule's environment with informational cues."

"We were able to create such a programmed or 'prescribed' environment using DNA origami," explains Yan. DNA origami, an invention by Caltech Senior Research Associate Paul W. K. Rothemund, is a type of self-assembled structure made from DNA that can be programmed to form nearly limitless shapes and patterns (such as smiley faces or maps of the Western Hemisphere or even electrical diagrams). Exploiting the sequence-recognition properties of DNA base pairing, DNA origami are created from a long single strand of DNA and a mixture of different short synthetic DNA strands that bind to and "staple" the long DNA into the desired shape. The origami used in the Nature study was a rectangle that was 2 nanometers (nm) thick and roughly 100 nm on each side.

The researchers constructed a trail of molecular "bread crumbs" on the DNA origami track by stringing additional single-stranded DNA molecules, or oligonucleotides, off the ends of the staples. These represent the cues that tell the molecular robots what to do -- start, walk, turn left, turn right, or stop, for example -- akin to the commands given to traditional robots.

The molecular robot the researchers chose to use -- dubbed a "spider" -- was invented by Stojanovic several years ago, at which time it was shown to be capable of extended, but undirected, random walks on two-dimensional surfaces, eating through a field of bread crumbs.

To build the 4-nm-diameter molecular robot, the researchers started with a common protein called streptavidin, which has four symmetrically placed binding pockets for a chemical moiety called biotin. Each robot leg is a short biotin-labeled strand of DNA, "so this way we can bind up to four legs to the body of our robot," Walter says.

"It's a four-legged spider," quips Stojanovic. Three of the legs are made of enzymatic DNA, which is DNA that binds to and cuts a particular sequence of DNA. The spider also is outfitted with a "start strand" -- the fourth leg -- that tethers the spider to the start site (one particular oligonucleotide on the DNA origami track).

"After the robot is released from its start site by a trigger strand, it follows the track by binding to and then cutting the DNA strands extending off of the staple strands on the molecular track," Stojanovic explains.

"Once it cleaves," adds Yan, "the product will dissociate, and the leg will start searching for the next substrate." In this way, the spider is guided down the path laid out by the researchers. Finally, explains Yan, "the robot stops when it encounters a patch of DNA that it can bind to but that it cannot cut," which acts as a sort of flypaper.

Although other DNA walkers have been developed before, they've never ventured farther than about three steps. "This one," says Yan, "can walk up to about 100 nanometers. That's roughly 50 steps."

"This in itself wasn't a surprise," adds Winfree, "since Milan's original work suggested that spiders can take hundreds if not thousands of processive steps. What's exciting here is that not only can we directly confirm the spiders' multistep movement, but we can direct the spiders to follow a specific path, and they do it all by themselves -- autonomously."

In fact, using atomic force microscopy and single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, the researchers were able to watch directly spiders crawling over the origami, showing that they were able to guide their molecular robots to follow four different paths.

"Monitoring this at a single molecule level is very challenging," says Walter. "This is why we have an interdisciplinary, multi-institute operation. We have people constructing the spider, characterizing the basic spider. We have the capability to assemble the track, and analyze the system with single-molecule imaging. That's the technical challenge." The scientific challenges for the future, Yan says, "are how to make the spider walk faster and how to make it more programmable, so it can follow many commands on the track and make more decisions, implementing logical behaviour."

"In the current system," says Stojanovic, "interactions are restricted to the walker and the environment. Our next step is to add a second walker, so the walkers can communicate with each other directly and via the environment. The spiders will work together to accomplish a goal." Adds Winfree, "The key is how to learn to program higher-level behaviors through lower-level interactions."

Such collaboration ultimately could be the basis for developing molecular-scale reconfigurable robots -- complicated machines that are made of many simple units that can reorganize themselves into any shape -- to accomplish different tasks, or fix themselves if they break. For example, it may be possible to use the robots for medical applications. "The idea is to have molecular robots build a structure or repair damaged tissues," says Stojanovic.

"You could imagine the spider carrying a drug and bonding to a two-dimensional surface like a cell membrane, finding the receptors and, depending on the local environment," adds Yan, "triggering the activation of this drug."

Such applications, while intriguing, are decades or more away. "This may be 100 years in the future," Stojanovic says. "We're so far from that right now."

"But," Walter adds, "just as researchers self-assemble today to solve a tough problem, molecular nanorobots may do so in the future."

The other coauthors on the paper, "Molecular robots guided by prescriptive landscapes," are Kyle Lund and Jeanette Nangreave from Arizona State University; Anthony J. Manzo, Alexander Johnson-Buck, and Nicole Michelotti from the University of Michigan; Nadine Dabby from Caltech; and Steven Taylor and Renjun Pei from Columbia University. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the Searle Foundation, the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.

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