After an inspiring ascension to stardom, the Olympic athlete faces murder charges in a baffling turn of events
Credit: Eddie Mulholland/REX USA
Updated: Friday Feb 15, 2013 | 10:00 AM EST
By: Kiran Hefa
GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations says an outbreak of hepatitis E has killed 111 refugees in camps in South Sudan since July, and has become endemic in the region.
U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards says the influx of people to the camps from neighboring Sudan is believed to be one of the factors in the rapid spread of the contagious, life-threatening inflammatory viral disease of the liver.
Edwards said Friday that the camps have been hit by 6,017 cases of hepatitis E, which is spread through contaminated food and water.
He says the largest number of cases and suspected cases is in the Yusuf Batil camp in Upper Nile state, which houses 37,229 refugees fleeing fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Group of 20 nations declared on Saturday there would be no currency war and deferred plans to set new debt-cutting targets, underlining broad concern about the fragile state of the world economy.
Japan's expansive policies, which have driven down the yen, escaped direct criticism in a statement thrashed out in Moscow by policymakers from the G20, which spans developed and emerging markets and accounts for 90 percent of the world economy.
Analysts said the yen, which has dropped 20 percent as a result of aggressive monetary and fiscal policies to reflate the Japanese economy, may now continue to fall.
"The market will take the G20 statement as an approval for what it has been doing -- selling of the yen," said Neil Mellor, currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon in London. "No censure of Japan means they will be off to the money printing presses."
After late-night talks, finance ministers and central bankers agreed on wording closer than expected to a joint statement issued last Tuesday by the Group of Seven rich nations backing market-determined exchange rates.
A draft communiqué on Friday had steered clear of the G7's call for economic policy not to be targeted at exchange rates. But the final version included a G20 commitment to refrain from competitive devaluations and stated monetary policy would be directed only at price stability and growth.
"The mood quite clearly early on was that we needed desperately to avoid protectionist measures ... that mood permeated quite quickly," Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters, adding that the wording of the G20 statement had been hardened up by the ministers.
As a result, it reflected a substantial, but not complete, endorsement of Tuesday's proclamation by the G7 nations - the United States, Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.
As with the G7 intervention, Tokyo said it gave it a green light to pursue its policies unchecked.
"I have explained that (Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe's administration is doing its utmost to escape from deflation and we have gained a certain understanding," Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters.
"We're confident that if Japan revives its own economy that would certainly affect the world economy as well. We gained understanding on this point."
Flaherty admitted it would be difficult to gauge if domestic policies were aimed at weakening currencies or not.
NO FISCAL TARGETS
The G20 also made a commitment to a credible medium-term fiscal strategy, but stopped short of setting specific goals as most delegations felt any economic recovery was too fragile.
The communiqué said risks to the world economy had receded but growth remained too weak and unemployment too high.
"A sustained effort is required to continue building a stronger economic and monetary union in the euro area and to resolve uncertainties related to the fiscal situation in the United States and Japan, as well as to boost domestic sources of growth in surplus economies," it said.
A debt-cutting pact struck in Toronto in 2010 will expire this year if leaders fail to agree to extend it at a G20 summit of leaders in St Petersburg in September.
The United States says it is on track to meet its Toronto pledge but argues that the pace of future fiscal consolidation must not snuff out demand. Germany and others are pressing for another round of binding debt targets.
"We had a broad consensus in the G20 that we will stick to the commitment to fulfill the Toronto goals," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said. "We do not have any interest in U.S.-bashing ... In St. Petersburg follow-up-goals will be decided."
The G20 put together a huge financial backstop to halt a market meltdown in 2009 but has failed to reach those heights since. At successive meetings, Germany has pressed the United States and others to do more to tackle their debts. Washington in turn has urged Berlin to do more to increase demand.
Backing in the communiqué for the use of domestic monetary policy to support economic recovery reflected the U.S. Federal Reserve's commitment to monetary stimulus through quantitative easing, or QE, to promote recovery and jobs.
QE entails large-scale bond buying -- $85 billion a month in the Fed's case -- that helps economic growth but has also unleashed destabilising capital flows into emerging markets.
A commitment to minimize such "negative spillovers" was an offsetting point in the text that China, fearful of asset bubbles and lost export competitiveness, highlighted.
"Major developed nations (should) pay attention to their monetary policy spillover," Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying in Moscow.
Russia, this year's chair of the G20, admitted the group had failed to reach agreement on medium-term budget deficit levels and expressed concern about ultra-loose policies that it and other emerging economies say could store up trouble for later.
On currencies, the G20 text reiterated its commitment last November, "to move more rapidly toward mores market-determined exchange rate systems and exchange rate flexibility to reflect underlying fundamentals, and avoid persistent exchange rate misalignments".
It said disorderly exchange rate movements and excess volatility in financial flows could harm economic and financial stability.
(Additional reporting by Gernot Heller, Lesley Wroughton, Maya Dyakina, Tetsushi Kajimoto, Jan Strupczewski, Lidia Kelly, Katya Golubkova, Jason Bush, Anirban Nag and Michael Martina. Writing by Douglas Busvine. Editing by Timothy Heritage/Mike Peacock)
Pavel Rahman/Associated Press
Mourners in Bangladesh on Saturday carried the coffin containing the body of Rajib Haider, an organizer who was killed.
NEW DELHI — Tens of thousands of people resumed mass demonstrations in Bangladesh’s capital on Saturday, intensifying their demands for more severe punishment for war criminals from the country’s 1971 liberation war, while also demanding justice for the slaying of a blogger who had been a leading organizer of the protests.
The coffin bearing the body of Rajib Haider, an architect and blogger, was carried through the crowd in a public funeral at Shahbagh, a major intersection in Dhaka, the national capital. Bangladeshi television showed thousands of people kneeling in prayer, chanting slogans or waving banners bearing Mr. Haider’s image. The crowd were estimated at more than 100,000 people.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina visited Mr. Haider’s family on Saturday to express her condolences. Mr. Haider’s body was discovered Friday night near his home, after he had been savagely stabbed. His family has told the Bangladeshi news media that they believed that he was killed for his role in the protests and his outspoken criticism of the fundamentalist Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami.
“Haider’s killing occurred at a time when the youngsters have awakened and united the whole nation,” the prime minister told Bangladeshi reporters during her visit to the family’s home. “Let me promise that we will not spare the killers.”
Saturday was the 12th consecutive day in which crowds of protesters have poured into the Shahbagh site for demonstrations. The movement began Feb. 5, when a coalition of bloggers called for protests against a verdict by the special tribunal prosecuting people accused of committing atrocities during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
The tribunal had handed down a life sentence to Abdul Quader Mollah, a Jamaat leader, after convicting him of murder, rape and torture. Protesters, however, demanded that he be sentenced to death, given the severity of his crimes. Many suspected that some sort of political deal had been reached to spare Mr. Mollah’s life.
The bloody legacy of the 1971 war continues to cast a shadow over Bangladesh: an estimated three million people were killed and many of those suspected of committing atrocities have never been prosecuted. Besides the protests in Dhaka, demonstrations have spread to other major cities and towns across the country.
By the weekend, protest organizers had agreed to reduce their round-the-clock demonstrations to only seven hours a day. But they reversed that decision after the killing of Mr. Haider, and the crowds quickly swelled with college students, workers and other citizens.
Meanwhile, followers of Jamaat-e-Islami have staged often violent protests against the government, which the party has accused of manipulating the tribunal as a way to go after political rivals.
The presiding justice of the tribunal has resigned over irregularities that arose over its proceedings.
The Bachelor
Tierra LiCausi and Sean Lowe
Rick Rowell/ABC
"She's sincere," Chris Harrison told PEOPLE Thursday. "People will think [the way she acts is] fake or it's made up. It's not. This is how she goes about finding a man. Once you shine a light on it and put a camera on it, it's not attractive, but that's how she does it."
And apparently she's found one! (Just not Bachelor Sean Lowe.)
"I can't wait to talk to her next week at the Women Tell All," Harrison said of LiCausi's engagement while attending the Club SI Swimsuit party at Vegas's 1 OAK. "It's not to back the bus over her. I kind of want to know what she sees."
Harrison is well aware of the public perception of LiCausi, but he can't rank her in terms of "all time Bachelor villains".
"She was her own character so I don't think I can rank them," he said. "I think it's the way she went out put the cherry on top when she said, 'No one's gonna take my sparkle away'. You just can't top that."
BOSTON (AP) — What happens to fish that swim in waters tainted by traces of drugs that people take? When it's an anti-anxiety drug, they become hyper, anti-social and aggressive, a study found. They even get the munchies.
It may sound funny, but it could threaten the fish population and upset the delicate dynamics of the marine environment, scientists say.
The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that minuscule amounts of medicines in rivers and streams can alter the biology and behavior of fish and other marine animals.
"I think people are starting to understand that pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants," said Dana Kolpin, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who is familiar with the study.
Calling their results alarming, the Swedish researchers who did the study suspect the little drugged fish could become easier targets for bigger fish because they are more likely to venture alone into unfamiliar places.
"We know that in a predator-prey relation, increased boldness and activity combined with decreased sociality ... means you're going to be somebody's lunch quite soon," said Gregory Moller, a toxicologist at the University of Idaho and Washington State University. "It removes the natural balance."
Researchers around the world have been taking a close look at the effects of pharmaceuticals in extremely low concentrations, measured in parts per billion. Such drugs have turned up in waterways in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere over the past decade.
They come mostly from humans and farm animals; the drugs pass through their bodies in unmetabolized form. These drug traces are then piped to water treatment plants, which are not designed to remove them from the cleaned water that flows back into streams and rivers.
The Associated Press first reported in 2008 that the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans carries low concentrations of many common drugs. The findings were based on questionnaires sent to water utilities, which reported the presence of antibiotics, sedatives, sex hormones and other drugs.
The news reports led to congressional hearings and legislation, more water testing and more public disclosure. To this day, though, there are no mandatory U.S. limits on pharmaceuticals in waterways.
The research team at Sweden's Umea University used minute concentrations of 2 parts per billion of the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam, similar to concentrations found in real waters. The drug belongs to a widely used class of medicines known as benzodiazepines that includes Valium and Librium.
The team put young wild European perch into an aquarium, exposed them to these highly diluted drugs and then carefully measured feeding, schooling, movement and hiding behavior. They found that drug-exposed fish moved more, fed more aggressively, hid less and tended to school less than unexposed fish. On average, the drugged fish were more than twice as active as the others, researcher Micael Jonsson said. The effects were more pronounced at higher drug concentrations.
"Our first thought is, this is like a person diagnosed with ADHD," said Jonsson, referring to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. "They become asocial and more active than they should be."
Tomas Brodin, another member of the research team, called the drug's environmental impact a global problem. "We find these concentrations or close to them all over the world, and it's quite possible or even probable that these behavioral effects are taking place as we speak," he said Thursday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Most previous research on trace drugs and marine life has focused on biological changes, such as male fish that take on female characteristics. However, a 2009 study found that tiny concentrations of antidepressants made fathead minnows more vulnerable to predators.
It is not clear exactly how long-term drug exposure, beyond the seven days in this study, would affect real fish in real rivers and streams. The Swedish researchers argue that the drug-induced changes could jeopardize populations of this sport and commercial fish, which lives in both fresh and brackish water.
Water toxins specialist Anne McElroy of Stony Brook University in New York agreed: "These lower chronic exposures that may alter things like animals' mating behavior or its ability to catch food or its ability to avoid being eaten — over time, that could really affect a population."
Another possibility, the researchers said, is that more aggressive feeding by the perch on zooplankton could reduce the numbers of these tiny creatures. Since zooplankton feed on algae, a drop in their numbers could allow algae to grow unchecked. That, in turn, could choke other marine life.
The Swedish team said it is highly unlikely people would be harmed by eating such drug-exposed fish. Jonsson said a person would have to eat 4 tons of perch to consume the equivalent of a single pill.
Researchers said more work is needed to develop better ways of removing drugs from water at treatment plants. They also said unused drugs should be brought to take-back programs where they exist, instead of being flushed down the toilet. And they called on pharmaceutical companies to work on "greener" drugs that degrade more easily.
Sandoz, one of three companies approved to sell oxazepam in the U.S., "shares society's desire to protect the environment and takes steps to minimize the environmental impact of its products over their life cycle," spokeswoman Julie Masow said in an emailed statement. She provided no details.
___
Online:
Overview of the drug: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682050.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 dipped in a late decline on Friday as Wal-Mart dropped following a report of a weak start to February sales, though the index just barely extended its streak of weekly gains to seven.
Equities were little changed for much of the session, with investors finding few reasons to make big bets following an extended rally on Wall Street, but stocks turned lower in afternoon action.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc
"When a retailer of this size comes out with this kind of lousy news, the whole market can fall off, especially on a Friday afternoon," said Mike Shea, trader at Direct Access Partners in New York. "However, I'm not worried that this is indicative of any larger macro issue with retail."
Equities have struggled for direction recently, with major indexes moving only slightly in the past several sessions. The S&P didn't end a session with a move greater than 0.2 percent at all this week.
The benchmark index, up 6.6 percent so far this year, is facing strong technical resistance near the 1,525 level. But investors, expecting the index to advance further in the quarter, have held back from locking in profits.
"There's no news that suggests the strong underpinning for stocks isn't appropriate. We may have gotten ahead of ourselves, but there's also an absence of bad news," said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.
Many investors are starting to look ahead to a debate in Washington over sequestration, automatic across-the-board spending cuts put in place as part of a larger congressional budget fight. The cuts are due to kick in March 1 unless lawmakers agree to an alternative.
"This had been far enough out to not yet become an impediment for stocks, but it will start to move into the forefront and cause people to take a bit of a jaundiced eye towards the market," said Luschini, who helps oversee about $54 billion in assets.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 11.27 points, or 0.08 percent, at 13,984.66. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 0.32 points, or 0.02 percent, at 1,521.70. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 1.51 points, or 0.05 percent, at 3,200.17.
For the week, both the Dow and Nasdaq fell 0.1 percent while the S&P rose 0.1 percent in its seventh straight week of gains, a period during which the index rose 8.4 percent. The last such seven-week run was between December 2010 and January 2011.
The New York Federal Reserve said manufacturing in New York state expanded for the first time in seven months, while Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's preliminary reading of consumer sentiment rose from the prior month and beat expectations.
But U.S. manufacturing fell in January after a rise in the prior month.
Wall Street's gain thus far in 2013 has largely been driven by strong corporate earnings, while data indicated some weakening in economic conditions.
A surge in merger and acquisition activity, with more than $158 billion in deals announced so far in 2013, has given further support to the equity market as it points to healthy valuations and bets on the economic outlook.
Herbalife
MeadWestvaco Corp
Burger King Worldwide
Oil service stocks declined, weighed by a 5.1 percent drop in shares of Transocean
Slightly more stocks fell than rose on the New York Stock Exchange while about 50 percent of Nasdaq shares ended lower. About 6.69 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, above the daily average so far this year of about 6.48 billion shares.
(Editing by Nick Zieminski)
Video posted on YouTube on Friday appeared to catch an explosion caused by a meteor streaking over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.
Last Updated, 4:31 p.m. As our colleagues Ellen Barry and Andrew Kramer report, Russians recorded video of bright objects, apparently debris from a meteor, “streaking through the sky in western Siberia early on Friday, accompanied by a boom that damaged buildings across a vast area of territory.” Hundreds of injuries were reported, mainly from breaking glass.
Video recorded from the dashboard camera of a car in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Friday.
Video said to have been recorded on Friday in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk as a meteor passed low overhead. An explosion can be heard clearly at the seven-minute mark of the video.
The video clips, many recorded from cars on the dashboard cameras that are popular in Russia, quickly spread from social networks to Russian news sites. While it was not possible to confirm the authenticity of all of the clips posted online, several tracked closely with witness accounts and each other.
Dashboard-camera footage appeared to record a meteor plunging to Earth on Friday in Russia.
Video uploaded to YouTube on Friday was said to have been recorded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk (although the camera’s time stamp displays an earlier date).
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported, “The Russian fireball is the largest reported since 1908, when a fireball hit Tunguska, Siberia.”
The fireball entered the atmosphere at about 40,000 mph (18 kilometers per second). The impact time was 7:20:26 p.m. PST, or 10:20:26 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (3:20:26 UTC on Feb. 15), and the energy released by the impact was in the hundreds of kilotons.
Based on the duration of the event, it was a very shallow entry. It was larger than the fireball over Indonesia on Oct. 8, 2009. Measurements are still coming in, and a more precise measure of the energy may be available later. The size of the object before hitting the atmosphere was about 49 feet (15 meters) and had a mass of about 7,000 tons.
Later in the day, NASA released more information about the meteor.
Our colleague Henry Fountain reminds us of the vastly greater impact of what’s known as The Tunguska Event on 1908.
Several clips showed a flaming object streaking through the sky and a burst of blinding light followed by a smoke trail. One, shot by a driver named Alexander Mezentsev, showed a bright light over a city street in Chelyabinsk, a city of 1 million about 900 miles east of Moscow.
One clip, recorded on a street in Chelyabinsk, appeared to capture the chaotic aftermath of the event, as glass shattered after the shock wave and people shouted and tried to make sense of what was happening.
Video said to have been recorded in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Friday after a meteor passed overhead.
A very loud explosion could be heard about 25 seconds into another video, apparently recorded on a phone in the same city by a blogger named Sergey Hametov.
Video said to have been recorded on Friday in Chelyabinsk appeared to capture a loud explosion.
“There was panic. People had no idea what was happening,” Mr. Hametov told The Associated Press. “We saw a big burst of light, then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud, thundering sound.”
The blast, and breaking glass, was also captured about 70 seconds into another clip, which showed very clear images of the smoke trail after the meteor passed by.
Video posted on YouTube on Friday showed a smoke trail and a loud explosion after a meteor passed over Siberia.
Another video, shot from the window of a building, seemed to capture the long trail of smoke after the object passed through the sky.
Video posted on YouTube Friday appeared to show the trail of a meteor fragment in the sky.
Several clips also showed what bloggers said was the damage caused by the sonic boom.
Damage to a school in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, said to have been caused by the sonic boom from a meteor.
Video of what was described as damage caused by the sonic boom after a meteor passed over Russia on Friday.
As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports, a blinding flash of light was captured by traffic cameras on top of buildings in Nizhny Tagil, around 220 miles north of Chelyabinsk.
A blinding flash of light was captured by Web cameras in Nizhny Tagil, north of Chelyabinsk
Another view of the meteor streaking across the sky in Nizhniy Tagil was captured on a driver’s dashboard camera.
Video of a meteor from a dashboard camera in the Russian town of Nizhniy Tagil.
Our colleague William Broad from The Times Science desk will be explaining what likely caused today’s spectacular event and answering questions on The Lede later today.
Almost immediately after the spectacular images appeared online, Russian bloggers started making comic alterations, adding aliens and President Vladimir V. Putin to the pictures.
Some of the numerous videos that quickly emerged of the incident highlighted a distinctly Russian phenomenon: the viral dashboard-cam clip. As the blogger Marina Galperina explained last year, they are commonplace in Russia partly because of the dangerous driving conditions that lead to so many accidents, and with an unreliable police force such cameras can provide valuable evidence after a crash.
The conditions of Russian roads are perilous, with insane gridlock in cities and gigantic ditches, endless swamps and severe wintry emptiness on the back roads and highways. Then there are large, lawless areas you don’t just ride into, the police with a penchant for extortion and deeply frustrated drivers who want to smash your face.
Psychopaths are abundant on Russian roads. You best not cut anyone off or undertake some other type of maneuver that might inconvenience the 200-pound, six-foot-five brawling children you see on YouTube hopping out of their SUVs with their dukes up. They will go ballistic in a snap, drive in front of you, brake suddenly, block you off, jump out and run towards your vehicle. Next thing you start getting punches in your face because your didn’t roll up your windows, or getting pulled out of the car and beaten because you didn’t lock the doors.
These fights happen all the time and you can’t really press charges. Point to your broken nose or smashed windows all you want. The Russian courts don’t like verbal claims. They do, however, like to send people to jail for battery and property destruction if there’s definite video proof.
One popular video posted on YouTube last year appeared to show just such a fight being prevented by a man facing down another driver clutching a baseball bat by pointing out that any attack on him would be recorded on his dashboard-cam.
Video of a confrontation between two Russian drivers recorded last year on a dashboard-cam.
Just last month, video recorded by a Russian driver on a dashboard-cam showed a tank suddenly cutting across a highway.
Last month, a Russian driver recorded video of a tank cutting across a highway.
The meteor that streaked across the Russian skies came from almost the opposite direction as 2012 DA14, the larger asteroid that missed Earth on Friday. That both showed up on the same day was just cosmic coincidence.
“There is no relation there,” said Paul Chodas, a scientist at NASA’s Near-Earth Object program office.
At the Grammys he made our screens go sepia tone, and now, in his new, black-and-white, David Fincher-directed music video for the much hyped comeback single “Suit & Tie,” Justin Timberlake continues to try and prove that he’s a classy neo-Rat Pack star. That is, he’s a classy neo-Rat Pack star with a nearly naked women writhing around him and lot of “cool” modern conveniences like his iPad. See, JT gets rolled, via bed, into a soundstage-type area reading such a device:
RELATED: David Fincher Is Directing the Ridiculous Justin Timberlake Music Video
Before he starts performing the song at a venue that appears to be Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl, JT and Jay-Z are just kind of chilling, because remember these are two improbably famous bros with a lot of fancy amenities:
RELATED: The 2012 Gossip Stories We Loved
There are references to Singin’ in the Rain-type films:
RELATED: Dr. Dre and the Lucrative Business of Not Rapping
And then, later on, hot girls in puddles on a stage because such is the life of Justin Timberlake, apparently:
Watch the entire video here, and remember it was directed by Fincher, so they all probably did a million takes of every shot:
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