Cold claims 16 more lives as north India shivers, toll 100

NEW DELHI: North India reeled under icy conditions Saturday with 16 people dying of the intense cold in Uttar Pradesh Friday, officials said Saturday. Over a hundred people have died so far in the bitter cold in India.

Authorities ordered closure of all schools in Lucknow up to Class 8 till Jan 13.

The regional Met Office said the minimum temperature in Lucknow was 2.1 degrees Celsius Saturday, which was five degrees below the season's average.

The minimum temperature in Kanpur settled at 3.7 degrees Celsius, while it was 4.7 degrees in Varanasi and 5.2 degrees Celsius in Gorakhpur.

In New Delhi, fog delayed trains by over six hours, though flights were not affected. Icy winds kept temperatures below average for the past few days.

The Met office has forecast a cold and foggy weekend in Delhi.

Saturday's maximum temperature was 12.6 degrees Celsius, eight notches below average for this time of the season. The minimum was 2.9 degrees, four notches below average, an official of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.

"There is a heavy backlog leading to many delays and rescheduling of trains. A total of 23 trains were delayed and 10 cancelled due to fog," a Northern Railway spokesperson told IANS.

An official at Indira Gandhi International Airport said flight operations were not affected.

"Due to a thick fog in the morning 23 flights operated in Low Visibility Procedure (LVP) and one flight was delayed," an airport official said.

The Met department has forecast similar weather conditions Sunday.

"The maximum and minimum temperatures are likely to be around 13 and 3 degrees Celsius respectively on Sunday," a Met official said.

The national capital is experiencing intense cold conditions this week with Friday being the coldest with the minimum temperature dropping to this season's lowest of 2.7 degrees.

In the northern reaches, Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir recorded minus 5.4 degrees Celsius Friday night, the season's coldest.

The minimum temperature dropped to a bone-chilling minus 16.8 degrees in Leh town of the Ladakh region Saturday. It was minus 9.4 in Gulmarg ski resort and minus 5.4 in Pahalgam.

Parts of Dal Lake in Srinagar are frozen.

The cold wave continued to grip Himachal Pradesh Saturday with the higher reaches experiencing temperatures below freezing point.

Saturday's minimum temperature in Shimla was 0.6 degrees Celsius, two degrees below the average for this time of the year.

The minimum temperature in Manali settled at minus 1.8 degrees Celsius, while it was minus 4.4 degrees in Kalpa in Kinnaur district and minus 7.1 degrees in Keylong in Lahaul and Spiti district.

Dharamsala, the seat of Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, saw a low of 5.2 degrees Celsius.

The minimum temperature in Agra settled at 2.1 degrees Celsius Saturday with a thick fog enveloping the city in the early hours. The regional Met department office in the state capital Lucknow said the temperature could drop to one degree Celsius in the next two days.

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Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

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Debt Limit Negotiating Tactic? No Negotiating

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden walk away from the podium after Obama made a statement regarding the passage of the fiscal cliff bill in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Analysis

New for 2013: In the Washington, D.C. fiscal wars we’ve gone from everything must be on the table to politicians declaring they won’t debate.

The fiscal cliff deal either averted disaster or compounded the problem, depending on who you ask. It certainly created new mini-cliffs in a few months as Congress and the president square off on the debt ceiling, spending cuts and government funding. But it also made sure the vast majority of Americans won’t see as big a tax hike as they might have.

President Obama was pretty clear late on New Year’s night as he reacted to Congress’s passage of a bill to take a turn away from the fiscal cliff. He won’t negotiate with Republicans about the debt ceiling.

“Now, one last point I want to make,” said the president, before wrapping up and hopping on Air Force One for a redeye to Hawaii. “While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed.”

(Read more here about the Fiscal Cliff)

That’s pretty clear. No debt ceiling negotiation. Then he added for emphasis: ”Let me repeat: We can’t not pay bills that we’ve already incurred. If Congress refuses to give the United States government the ability to pay these bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy would be catastrophic — far worse than the impact of a fiscal cliff.”

But in Washington, saying you won’t do something these days has almost become like an opening bid. At least, that’s how Republicans are treating the president’s line in the sand.

“The president may not want to have a fight about government spending over the next few months, but it’s the fight he is going to have because it’s a debate the country needs,” wrote Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, in an op-Ed on Yahoo! News about 36 hours later. “For the sake of our future, the president must show up to this debate early and convince his party to do something that neither he nor they have been willing to do until now.”

“We simply cannot increase the nation’s borrowing limit without committing to long overdue reforms to spending programs that are the very cause of our debt,” McConnell said.

The national debt is soon set to reach $16.4 trillion. That’s not a problem that can be solved with one bill or budget. And the two sides will have to figure out some sort of way to talk about entitlement/social safety net reform – meaning things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – in addition to cutting spending and, most importantly, hope for an improving economy, to deal with those deficits.

House Speaker John Boehner, who has several times now failed to reach a big, broad fiscal deal with President Obama, told colleagues, according to The Hill newspaper, that he’s done with secret White House negotiations. He wants to stick with the constitutional way of doing things, with hearings and bills that are debated on Capitol Hill rather than hatched by the vice president and Senate Republicans.

Okay. Obama won’t negotiate on the debt ceiling. McConnell won’t not negotiate on the debt ceiling. Boehner doesn’t to do things by the book.

But McConnell won’t negotiate on taxes any more.

“Predictably,” McConnell had written earlier in his post, “the president is already claiming that his tax hike on the ‘rich’ isn’t enough. I have news for him: the moment that he and virtually every elected Democrat in Washington signed off on the terms of the current arrangement, it was the last word on taxes. That debate is over.”

It’s a new chapter in the ongoing fiscal saga in Washington. Back when the two sides were talking about a grand bargain or a big deal – some sort of all-inclusive reform that would right the listing deficit with one flip of the rudder – the popular trope was that “everything must be on the table.” That’s basically how Obama put it back in the summer of 2011 when he and Boehner failed to reach a grand bargain. He wanted higher taxes – they were calling them revenues back then. More recently, after Obama won the election and when he and Boehner were trying to hammer out another grand bargain to avert the fiscal cliff, Boehner wanted entitlements on the table. That means he wanted to find ways to curb future spending.

Both sides are declaring they won’t debate certain points, but this far – a full two months – before the mini-cliffs start, those are easier declarations to make than they will be when the government is in danger of defaulting or shutting down.

Even though they’re trying to take elements off the table, both men hope that coming negotiations can be a little more cordial and a little less down-to-the wire.

“Over the next two months they need to deliver the same kind of bipartisan resolution to the spending problem we have now achieved on revenue — before the 11th hour,” wrote McConnell.

“The one thing that I think, hopefully, in the New Year we’ll focus on is seeing if we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little less brinksmanship, not scare the heck out of folks quite as much,” said Obama.

That’ll be tough if neither side will talk about what the other side wants to talk about.

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Trio of budget-related measures could affect federal workforce in coming months

The penchant of Congress to govern by brinksmanship continues.

The 113th Congress was sworn in Thursday and there’s little reason to think it will behave any better than the 112th. That’s not good for the nation as a whole and it’s particularly rough on federal agencies and their workers.

Instead of providing wise counsel and establishing priorities as good leaders do, Congress sets an example of operational chaos that it would find totally unacceptable in the government operations the legislators oversee.

The brinksmanship has been on display with threats of government shutdowns and recent events leading to the “fiscal cliff” vote on New Year’s Day, after the deadline for congressional action on tax rates.

That vote was not accompanied by action on sequestration, except to delay the across-the-board budget cuts for two months. That’s just about the time that two other issues also haunting federal agencies and their staffs will come to a head.

It’s a budgetary threesome that leaves everyone unsatisfied.

Debt limit: Congress must deal with the nation’s debt ceiling at the end of February. President Obama has vowed not to negotiate. But before agreeing to raising the limit on how much Uncle Sam can borrow, Republicans want significant budget cuts.

Sequester: This is Sam’s term for $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts, over 10 years, designed by Congress in 2011 to be so onerous that it would be forced to develop a more reasonable deficit reduction package by the end of last year. Instead, legislators gave themselves two more months.

The delay meant Congress needed to come up with money to cover $24 million in savings it would have realized had the sequester been implemented Jan. 1. Half of that, $12 million, will come from spending cuts. How those cuts will affect agencies and workers is to be determined.

Continuing Resolution: A temporary funding measure, CR (in government lingo) expires March 27. At that point, federal employees are scheduled to get a 0.5 percent pay raise, after a freeze on basic pay rates that is 2 years old this week. House Republicans have repeatedly voted for extending the freeze. It’s unlikely that the Democratic-controlled Senate would approve an extension, but the House action is enough to make feds wary.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) called this “a trinity of worse, worse and worser.” Her suggestion to deal with issues affecting employees and the trinity of issues in one package, instead of a series of “cuts, cuts, cuts,” would reduce employee anxiety.

The same policies that have been debated for two years, on federal pay, retirement benefits and workforce size, will continue to be in play as the trio of deadlines are considered on Capitol Hill. Jessica Klement, legislative director of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, said the debt limit, the sequester and the CR “represent a perfect storm that many may not be expecting since we have avoided going over the fiscal cliff.”

One was avoided, temporarily, yet three other cliffs remain a short distance away.

Don’t be surprised if House Republicans again advance legislation calling on federal employees to give up more in the name of deficit reduction. The workforce already is effectively losing $103 billion over 10 years because of hits to compensation.

“The federal employees have paid too much of a price,” said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (Va.), one of just two Republicans (the other was Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia) who voted against a bill this week to extend the freeze through 2013. “We need to protect the federal employees, because the person working on cancer research at [the National Institutes of Health] is a federal employee.”

The forces that the cancer researcher will need protection from are other Republicans, says Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).

For everybody “who cares about a strong federal workforce, this is a time to be on maximum alert,” he said. Republicans always try “to use federal employees as the piggy bank to solve budget issues.” He expects that to continue. “That’s been the case in every one of their proposals.”

Rep. James P. Moran (Va.) wouldn’t dispute that, but he also holds his fellow Democrats responsible.

“Only bad things can happen,” he said. “I see no prospect for anything good coming from the deal that was voted on New Year’s Day.” That deal, negotiated with the Obama administration and congressional leadership, “was disastrous for federal employees particularly,” Moran said, because Democrats “gave up all of the leverage that we could have used to protect federal programs, employees.”

“Now, the only questions asked will be which programs do we cut and how deeply,” said Moran, who voted against the agreement. “I’m beside myself. I’m so upset about it.”

Twitter: @JoeDavidsonWP

Previous columns by Joe Davidson are available at wapo.st/JoeDavidson.

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France seeks to grill Swiss shooter over Britons' murders in Alps

GENEVA: French police investigating the murder of a British-Iraqi family in the Alps have asked to question a Swiss gunman who killed three women in his home village, police in Switzerland said Friday.

The police in the neighbouring French region of Haute-Savoie made the request to their colleagues in the Swiss canton of Valais, where on Thursday the gunman went on a shooting spree, a spokesman told AFP.

Saad al-Hilli, his wife Iqbal and her mother Suhaila al-Allaf, were all found dead inside their estate car near Lake Annecy in Haute-Savoie on September 5, along with a French cyclist who police believe was an innocent bystander.

On Thursday, a gunman with psychiatric and drug problems killed three women and wounded two men in a shooting spree in the tiny Swiss village where he lived.

-AFP/fl

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Over 700,000 children in Himachal to get polio drops

SHIMLA: Over 700,000 children will be administered polio drops in a two-round campaign beginning this month in Himachal Pradesh, an official said here Friday.

More than 5,850 booths, each catering to a population of 125, would be set up for the pulse polio immunization campaign to be carried out Jan 20 and Feb 24, Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare, Ali R. Rizvi said in a statement.

He said residents of even snow-bound areas would be covered.

Special booths would be set up in forest and remote areas too for the children of Gaddi and Gujjar tribes, Rizvi added.

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Chelsea Clinton Raises Profile During Mom's Illness

While Hillary Clinton was in the hospital it was daughter Chelsea -- not the secretary of state or the former president Bill Clinton -- who spoke for the family.

She, along with the State Department, doled out what little information the family wanted to share in a series of tweets and when her mother was released from the hospital, it was Chelsea who delivered the thanks on behalf of her parents, tweeting her gratitude to the doctors as well as those who kept her mother in their thoughts while she recovered from a blood clot.

When Hillary Clinton leaves office, possibly at the end of this month, it will be the first time since 1982 that a Clinton will not be holding a public office.

The watch will be on whether Hillary Clinton makes another run for the White House in 2016, but almost inevitably people will also be watching to see if Chelsea Clinton decides to run for office, too.

"Americans always look for dynasties: Bush, Kennedy, Cuomo, Clinton … it's some kind of continuity. There will always be pressure on her to run for public office," said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political strategist in New York.

"She's learning from the two best politicians in recent American history and she understands when to hold them and when to fold them," Sheinkopf said.

That sense of dynasty could also present a significant hurdle.

James Devaney/Getty Images

Secretary of State Clinton: Mystery Health Issues Watch Video

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Undergoing Blood-Thinning Therapy Watch Video

"She's got to A, demonstrate that she has the charisma of her father, or B, demonstrate that she has the policy chops of her mother. And I think like most people she is somewhere in between," a former Hillary Clinton aide from her 2008 campaign said. "People are judging her through each of her parents and it's an impossible standard."

Chelsea Clinton, 32, has inched towards a possible political career in recent statements and has become more politically active.

In an interview with Vogue published in August she was more open to it than she has been in the past, telling the magazine, "Before my mom's (presidential) campaign I would have said no," but "now I don't know."

"I believe that engaging in the political process is part of being a good person. And I certainly believe that part of helping to build a better world is ensuring that we have political leaders who are committed to that premise. So if there were to be a point where it was something I felt called to do and I didn't think there was someone who was sufficiently committed to building a healthier, more just, more equitable, more productive world? Then that would be a question I'd have to ask and answer."

Clinton also spoke of a change in her private to public life:

"Historically I deliberately tried to lead a private life in the public eye," she told the magazine. "And now I am trying to lead a purposefully public life."

Besides her work as a special correspondent with NBC, Chelsea Clinton has taken on high profile roles with her father's Clinton Global Initiative. She sits on several corporate boards and has both moderated and sat on panels discussing both women in politics and childhood obesity, among other issues.

She has also worked toward making same-sex marriage legal in New York last year, as well as gay marriage referendums in Maine, Maryland, Wisconsin and Washington state, all of which were successful in November. She has also been active in superstorm Sandy recovery, most notably delivering aid to the devastated Rockaways with her father.

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Federal agencies bracing for cuts after ‘fiscal cliff’ deal

The fiscal pact Congress reached hours into the new year will delay $109 billion in automatic across-the-board spending cuts for two months. But it will make a down payment on those reductions that will affect federal operations this year and next.

The eleventh-hour agreement to avoid a “fiscal cliff” of higher taxes put off the major cuts known as a sequester until March 1, when another showdown is expected over the federal debt limit and how much to reduce the size of government.

Congress and the White House agreed to find $24 billion to pay for the delay, divided between spending cuts and a tax change that allows Americans holding traditional retirement plans to convert more of them to Roth IRAs, a process that requires tax payments up front.

The remaining $12 billion in cuts to domestic and defense agencies will not take effect until at least March 27, when the stopgap budget funding the government expires. The first $4 billion in cuts must come by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, and the remaining $8 billion in fiscal 2014, which will start Oct. 1.

The cuts will be rolled into budget deliberations on Capitol Hill, and no one knows what agencies and programs they will affect. Out of a discretionary spending budget of $1.04 trillion, $12 billion is relatively small. But it’s not a rounding error.

“There will be a few select cuts that will be painful,” said Patrick Lester, fiscal policy director at the Center for Effective Philanthropy (formerly OMB Watch). “We won’t know for months what those cuts are, which makes them easy to do.”

William R. Dougan, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, said $12 billion “spread across the government doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it depends on how it’s spread out.”

Even if each agency took a hit, some “will still be looking at furloughs and even [reductions in force] as a possible solution,” he said. Those are some of the near-certain actions many agencies have said they would take if they had to make the across-the-board cuts Congress imposed in 2011 to force itself to reckon with the federal deficit.

On Wednesday, government and union leaders said that threat, just two months away, is making them nervous.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Congress has “prevented the worst possible outcome by delaying sequestration for two months.”

But he warned that the “the specter of sequestration” threatens national security.

“We need to have stability in our future budgets,” Panetta said in a statement. “We need to have the resources to effectively execute our strategy, defend the nation, and meet our commitments to troops and their families after more than a decade of war.”

Several officials said they are still sorting out what the two-month delay means.

“We are working hard with [the Office of Management and Budget] to understand the impact, but we’re just not there yet,” said Army Lt. Col. Elizabeth Robbins, a Defense Department spokeswoman.

Defense consultant Jim McAleese said the deal to raise taxes on families with income above $450,000 and individuals earning more than $400,000 will bring in so much less revenue than the $250,000 threshold President Obama proposed that steep defense cuts are inevitable.

Instead of the $10 billion in cuts a year over 10 years that the Defense Department could have expected to see under Obama’s most recent deficit reduction plan, McAleese said the reductions could be more in the range of $15 billion to $20 billion a year over 10 years.

“People were talking before about defense cuts of $10 billion per year, but the sheer size of the disagreement is going to bring about an immediate, aggressive reaction that will impact the final outcome of the spending cuts,” he said.

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said of the $12 billion in cuts, “I would hope agencies could find these savings without impacts on front-line employees and without impacts on services to the public. We have more questions than answers right now.”

Steve Vogel contributed to this report.

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141 journalists killed in 2012: media watchdog

GENEVA: Last year was one of the deadliest on record for journalists, with 141 killed in 29 different countries and Syria the most dangerous place on earth for reporters, a media watchdog said Thursday.

The Swiss-based Press Emblem Campaign (PEC), which fights for the protection of journalists, said the figure was up by 31 percent on 2011.

At least 37 journalists, among them 13 working for foreign media, were killed in Syria, it said in a statement.

Four journalists are reported missing or detained: Ukrainian Anhar Kochneva, Jordanian-Palestinian Bashar Fahmi, freelance US reporter Austin Tice and another American reporter James Foley, who has contributed video to Agence France-Presse.

The situation in Somalia has deteriorated dramatically, where 19 were killed, said the PEC.

Three Latin American countries followed among the most dangerous places: Mexico with 11 journalists killed, Brazil also with 11 dead, and Honduras, where six journalists were killed.

The Philippines ranked number seven with six killed, followed by Bangladesh and India with four each, said the PEC.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists for its part said last month that 67 reporters were killed in 2012, up 42 percent from the previous year, due in large part to the Syria conflict, shootings in Somalia, violence in Pakistan and killings of reporters in Brazil.

The Paris-based press rights group Reporters without Borders (RSF) meanwhile put the number of those killed at 88 last year.

-AFP/fl

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PM unveils new science policy

KOLKATA: India today unveiled a new science policy that lays greater thrust on innovation, establishing research institutes and encourage women scientists with an aim to position itself among the top five scientific powers in the world by 2020.

The Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy, 2013 also speaks of modifying the intellectual property regime to provide for marching rights for social good when supported by public funds and co-sharing of patents generated in the public private partnership mode.

Unveiling the STI policy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said it aspires to position India among the top five global scientific powers by 2020.

"It is an ambitious goal," he said, adding the policy also aims at producing and nurturing talent in science, to stimulate research in universities, to develop young leaders in the field of science and to reward performance.

It also seeks to create a policy environment for greater private sector participation in research and innovation and to forge international alliances and collaborations to meet the national agenda, he said.

The policy also talks of raising gross expenditure in R&D to two per cent of GDP from the current one per cent in this decade by encouraging enhanced private sector contribution.

"The policy is truly aspirational and seeks to accelerate the pace of discovery and delivery of science-led solutions for faster, sustainable and inclusive growth," Science and Technology Minister S Jaipal Reddy said.

He dubbed the policy as a "rare and resounding expression of collective will and wisdom of the Indian scientific community that is at once a product of and a clarion call of the scientific community".

The document is a revision of the 2003 policy which sought to bring science and technology together and emphasised on the need for higher investment into R&D to address national problems.

The (STI) policy also seeks to trigger an ecosystem for innovative abilities to flourish by leveraging partnerships among diverse stakeholders and by encouraging and facilitating enterprises to invest in innovations.

The aim of the policy is to accelerate the pace of discovery, diffusion and delivery of science-led solutions for serving the aspirational goals of India for faster, sustainable and inclusive growth.

The key features of the STI Policy 2013 include making careers in science, research and innovation attractive, establishing world-class infrastructure for R&D for gaining global leadership in some select frontier areas of science.

The policy also includes linking contributions of science, research and innovation system with the inclusive economic growth agenda and combining priorities of excellence and relevance.

It also stresses on creating an environment for enhanced private sector participation in R&D, enabling conversion of R&D outputs into societal and commercial applications by replicating successful models as well as establishing of new public-private partnership structures.

India first unveiled its Scientific Policy Resolution in 1958 which resolved to "foster, promote and sustain" the cultivation of science and scientific research in all its aspects.

The Technology Policy Statement of 1983 focused on the need to attain technological competence and self reliance.

Officials said in today's world, innovation was no longer a mere appendage to S&T but has assumed centre stage in its own right in the development of countries around the world.

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