Polls close in crucial British by-election

LONDON: Polls closed in the southern English town of Eastleigh on Thursday in a by-election for a new member of parliament in a tight contest that threatens serious repercussions for Britain's main parties.

The election pits Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party against its junior coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, while the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) is hoping to capitalise on voter disillusionment. First results are expected around 0200 GMT.

The election was sparked by the resignation of disgraced former energy minister Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat who has pleaded guilty to trying to avoid a speeding fine.

Nick Clegg, the embattled deputy prime minister and Lib Dem leader, has called it a "two-horse race" between his party and the Conservatives, while UKIP leader Nigel Farage predicted a "big" swing to his party.

The Lib Dems have been damaged by an ongoing sex scandal surrounding the party's former chief executive Chris Rennard, and the vote looks set to cause ructions within an already strained coalition, whatever the result.

On the eve of polling, Cameron urged Conservatives to back candidate Maria Hutchings, who vowed to help "get the country back on its feet" if she won.

But senior Conservative David Davis warned that a loss for the party would place serious doubt over Cameron's leadership of the party.

"If we came third it would be a crisis," Davis told BBC television. "And if it's a close second with UKIP on our tail it will also be uncomfortable."

More than 79,000 people were eligible to vote for one of the 14 candidates, and residents have been subjected to incessant campaigning since the election was called after Huhne's resignation on February 5.

Clegg visited Eastleigh on Wednesday to pledge his support for candidate Mike Thornton, saying he was on the "cusp of a great, great victory".

Addressing supporters at Lib Dems headquarters, Clegg called the race the "most exciting and closely contested by-elections" that he could remember.

Farage backed his candidate, Diane James, to "come up on the rails" and cause a major shock.

"If you gave me evens on us gaining more than 20 percent in this by-election I would have a very big bet," he said. "This is the campaign that has got momentum."

John O'Farrell, the candidate for the main opposition Labour party, is fighting not to finish in fourth place, and said he hoped voters would register their dissatisfaction at living standards by voting for his party.

-AFP/ac

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Sariska villagers block tourists’ entry

ALWAR: About 2,500 villagers on Thursday blocked the main entrance of the Sariska Tiger Reserve, protesting their relocation from areas near the sanctuary.

Sariska field director RS Shekhawat said the villagers had locked the entrance and didn't allow tourists to enter the park. "We are trying to sort out the problem on a priority basis," Shekhawat said.

The villagers, who are on an indefinite sit-in, said they would not clear the blockade unless their demands were met. This is the third such protest in the past eight months against the relocation plan.

Tension began in Sariska when about 2,500 people from 50 villages gathered for a mahapanchayat against the alleged "cheating" by the district administration. "We had called off the agitation in May last year when the district administration agreed on some of our demands including lifting ban on the registry of land, construction of a concrete road and earmarking a grazing area. But now they have backtracked on the promise citing the Supreme Court orders," said Jaikishan Gujjar, a villager.

Since 2008, the farmers in the periphery of the reserve have been protesting the state government and wildlife authorities' decision to relocate them. On February 20, villagers thrashed a few senior sanctuary officials when 70 cattle were seized while grazing in the sanctuary area.

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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

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Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

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Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

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Obama Admin to Court: End Calif. Gay Marriage Ban

In a historic argument for gay rights, President Barack Obama on Thursday urged the Supreme Court to overturn California's same-sex marriage ban and turn a skeptical eye on similar prohibitions across the country.

The Obama administration's friend-of-the-court brief marked the first time a U.S. president has urged the high court to expand the right of gays and lesbians to wed. The filing unequivocally calls on the justices to strike down California's Proposition 8 ballot measure, although it stops short of the soaring rhetoric on marriage equality Obama expressed in his inaugural address in January.

California is one of eight states that give gay couples all the benefits of marriage through civil unions or domestic partnership, but don't allow them to wed. The brief argues that in granting same-sex couples those rights, California has already acknowledged that gay relationships bear the same hallmarks as straight ones.

"They establish homes and lives together, support each other financially, share the joys and burdens of raising children, and provide care through illness and comfort at the moment of death," the administration wrote.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The brief marks the president's most expansive view of gay marriage and signals that he is moving away from his previous assertion that states should determine their own marriage laws. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, signed off on the administration's legal argument last week following lengthy discussions with Attorney General Eric Holder and Solicitor General Donald Verrilli.

In a statement following the filing, Holder said "the government seeks to vindicate the defining constitutional ideal of equal treatment under the law."

Obama's position, if adopted by the court, would likely result in gay marriage becoming legal in the seven other states: Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon and Rhode Island.

In the longer term, the administration urges the justices to subject laws that discriminate on sexual orientation to more rigorous review than usual, as is the case for claims that laws discriminate on the basis of race, sex and other factors.

The Supreme Court has never given gay Americans the special protection it has afforded women and minorities. If it endorses such an approach in the gay marriage cases, same-sex marriage bans around the country could be imperiled.

Friend-of-the-court briefs are not legally binding. But the government's opinion in particular could carry some weight with the justices when they hear oral arguments in the case on March 26.

Despite the potentially wide-ranging implications of the administration's brief, it still falls short of what gay rights advocates and the attorneys who will argue against Proposition 8 had hoped for. Those parties had pressed the president to urge the Supreme Court to not only overturn California's ban, but also declare all gay marriage bans unconstitutional.

Still, marriage equality advocates publicly welcomed the president's legal positioning.

"President Obama and the solicitor general have taken another historic step forward consistent with the great civil rights battles of our nation's history," said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign and co-founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which brought the legal challenge to Proposition 8.

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Japan's factory output up 1.0% in January

TOKYO: Japan's factory output for January rose a smaller-than-expected 1.0 per cent from the previous month, official data showed on Thursday.

The rise was weaker than a 1.5 per cent expansion expected by the market and a revised 2.4 per cent increase in December.

But the ministry maintained a positive view, saying in a monthly report: "Industrial production has bottomed out and shows some signs of picking up."

- AFP/ck

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CBI seeks more documents, looks at tweaking of specifications

NEW DELHI: The CBI on Wednesday said it had sought more documents related to the AgustaWestland helicopter deal from the defence ministry as it prepares to question suspected beneficiaries about alleged kickbacks received in the Rs 3,600 crore deal.

The agency will also seek all documents related to changes made in the specifications of 12 VVIP choppers by the office of former IAF chief S P Tyagi to allegedly benefit Italian firm Finmeccanica, sources said.

The agency has also sought the reply given by Finmeccanica to the questions raised by the ministry, CBI sources said. They added the agency was focusing on the circumstances in which the requirements were tweaked in the defence ministry to allegedly suit Finmeccanica and its subsidiary AgustaWestland.

They said files related to alterations in the helicopter's specifications will help the agency identify defence ministry officials who could be questioned. A CBI team is in touch with defence ministry officials who have been asked to produce these files at the earliest, they said.

The CBI is also likely to seek documents from the corporate affairs ministry on the shareholding pattern of Aeromatrix and IDS Infotech, allegedly involved in the kickbacks trail.

The agency has registered a preliminary enquiry against 11 people including former IAF chief S P Tyagi, his three cousins, European middlemen and four companies. Two Indian firms allegedly used to route bribe money are among these four companies.

Tyagi has refuted all allegations against him. The agency has also got some documents from Finmeccanica on the basis of which it has started a probe in the matter.

CBI sources said during the preliminary enquiry, the agency's powers in summoning and carrying out searches were limited and it was trying to complete the enquiry as early as possible so that a clear view of alleged corruption could emerge based on which future course of action would be taken.

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Huge study: 5 mental disorders share genetic links

WASHINGTON (AP) — The largest genetic study of mental illnesses to date finds five major disorders may not look much alike but they share some gene-based risks. The surprising discovery comes in the quest to unravel what causes psychiatric disorders and how to better diagnose and treat them.

The disorders — autism, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder or ADHD, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia — are considered distinct problems. But findings published online Wednesday suggest they're related in some way.

"These disorders that we thought of as quite different may not have such sharp boundaries," said Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the lead researchers for the international study appearing in The Lancet.

That has implications for learning how to diagnose mental illnesses with the same precision that physical illnesses are diagnosed, said Dr. Bruce Cuthbert of the National Institute on Mental Health, which funded the research.

Consider: Just because someone has chest pain doesn't mean it's a heart attack; doctors have a variety of tests to find out. But there's no blood test for schizophrenia or other mental illnesses. Instead, doctors rely on symptoms agreed upon by experts. Learning the genetic underpinnings of mental illnesses is part of one day knowing if someone's symptoms really are schizophrenia and not something a bit different.

"If we really want to diagnose and treat people effectively, we have to get to these more fine-grained understandings of what's actually going wrong biologically," Cuthbert explained.

Added Mass General's Smoller: "We are still in the early stages of understanding what are the causes of mental illnesses, so these are clues."

The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, a collaboration of researchers in 19 countries, analyzed the genomes of more than 61,000 people, some with one of the five disorders and some without. They found four regions of the genetic code where variation was linked to all five disorders.

Of particular interest are disruptions in two specific genes that regulate the flow of calcium in brain cells, key to how neurons signal each other. That suggests that this change in a basic brain function could be one early pathway that leaves someone vulnerable to developing these disorders, depending on what else goes wrong.

For patients and their families, the research offers no immediate benefit. These disorders are thought to be caused by a complex mix of numerous genes and other risk factors that range from exposures in the womb to the experiences of daily life.

"There may be many paths to each of these illnesses," Smoller cautioned.

But the study offers a lead in the hunt for psychiatric treatments, said NIMH's Cuthbert. Drugs that affect calcium channels in other parts of the body are used for such conditions as high blood pressure, and scientists could explore whether they'd be useful for psychiatric disorders as well.

The findings make sense, as there is some overlap in the symptoms of the different disorders, he said. People with schizophrenia can have some of the same social withdrawal that's so characteristic of autism, for example. Nor is it uncommon for people to be affected by more than one psychiatric disorder.

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Online:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)60223-8/abstract

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Holder Says Sequester Makes America Less Safe

The looming budget sequestration will make Americans less safe, Eric Holder says—and anyone who says otherwise isn't telling the truth.

"This is something that is going to have an impact on the safety of this country," the U.S. attorney general told ABC's Pierre Thomas on Wednesday in a wide-ranging, exclusive interview.

"And anybody that says otherwise is either lying or saying something that runs contrary to the facts," Holder said.

In his interview with ABC News, Holder reiterated warnings that if automatic spending cuts are triggered on Friday, the Justice Department will be handicapped in some of its most vital missions to prevent terrorist attacks and crime.

"The Justice Department is going to lose nine percent of its budget between now and September 30th. We're going to lose $1.6 billion. There are not going to be as many FBI agents, ATF agents, DEA agents, prosecutors who are going to be able to do their jobs," Holder said. "They're going to be furloughed. They're going to spend time out of their offices, not doing their jobs."

Portions of the interview will air Wednesday, February 27 on "ABC World News"

Patrick Semansky/AP Photo

Eric Holder Says Homegrown Terror Threat Equals International: Exclusive Watch Video

Eric Holder Remembers Newtown, His Worst Day on the Job: Exclusive Watch Video

President Obama's Cabinet members have been warning for weeks that budget sequestration, which will begin Friday unless Obama and Republicans reach a deficit-reduction deal to avoid it, will leave their agencies shorthanded and could bring about disastrous consequences. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood have both appeared at the White House press briefing room to warn that furloughs for border-patrol agents, TSA agents and air-traffic controllers will mean weakened border and port security, longer waits in airport security lines, and logjammed air travel.

Holder, for his part, warned in a Feb. 1 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee that cuts to the FBI, the ATF, the U.S. Marshals Service, and U.S. Attorneys would limit the department's capacity to investigate crimes. Cuts at the Bureau of Prisons, Holder wrote, would mean lockdowns and potential violence, with fewer staff members on hand. In a separate letter, FBI Director Robert Mueller warned that counterterrorism operations would be affected, with the possible elimination of some joint terrorism task forces with state and local police. Limited surveillance and slower response times would mean unwatched targets and the possibility that individuals on terrorism watch lists could gain entry to the U.S.

"FBI's ability to proactively penetrate and disrupt terrorist plans and groups prior to an attack would be impacted," Mueller wrote.

To Holder, the problem is simple.

"If you don't have prosecutors and agents doing what we expect them to do, and we won't if this thing actually takes place, we are going to be a nation that is going to be less safe. And that is simple fact," Holder said.

Some Republicans have claimed the Obama administration is exaggerating the sequester's purported consequences as a ploy to campaign for tax hikes. On "Fox News Sunday" this week, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., posited that federal agencies enjoy enough flexibility to avoid the worst consequences of the cuts.

On Wednesday, Holder acknowledged that the Justice Department will do what it can to avoid compromised security, while maintaining that furloughs can't be avoided.

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Iran upbeat on nuclear talks, West still wary

ALMATY (Reuters) - Iran was upbeat on Wednesday after talks with world powers about its nuclear work ended with an agreement to meet again, but Western officials said it had yet to take concrete steps to ease their fears about its atomic ambitions.

Rapid progress was unlikely with Iran's presidential election, due in June, raising domestic political tensions, diplomats and analysts had said ahead of the February 26-27 meeting in the Kazakh city of Almaty, the first in eight months.

The United States, China, France, Russia, Britain and Germany offered modest sanctions relief in return for Iran curbing its most sensitive nuclear work but made clear that they expected no immediate breakthrough.

In an attempt to make their proposals more palatable to Iran, the six powers appeared to have softened previous demands somewhat, for example regarding their requirement that the Islamic state ship out its stockpile of higher-grade uranium.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili said the powers had tried to "get closer to our viewpoint", which he said was positive.

In Paris, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry commented that the talks had been "useful" and that a serious engagement by Iran could lead to a comprehensive deal in a decade-old dispute that has threatened to trigger a new Middle East war.

Iran's foreign minister said in Vienna he was "very confident" an agreement could be reached and Jalili, the chief negotiator, said he believed the Almaty meeting could be a "turning point".

However, one diplomat said Iranian officials at the negotiations appeared to be suggesting that they were opening new avenues, but it was not clear if this was really the case.

Iran expert Dina Esfandiary of the International Institute for Strategic Studies said: "Everyone is saying Iran was more positive and portrayed the talks as a win."

"I reckon the reason for that is that they are saving face internally while buying time with the West until after the elections," she said.

The two sides agreed to hold expert-level talks in Istanbul on March 18 to discuss the powers' proposals, and return to Almaty for political discussions on April 5-6, when Western diplomats made clear they wanted to see a substantive response from Iran.

"Iran knows what it needs to do, the president has made clear his determination to implement his policy that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon," Kerry said.

A senior U.S. official in Almaty said, "What we care about at the end is concrete results."

ISRAELI WARNING

Israel, assumed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power, was watching the talks closely. It has strongly hinted it might attack Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to ensure that it cannot build a nuclear weapon. Iran denies any such aim.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said economic sanctions were failing and urged the international community to threaten Iran with military action.

Western officials said the offer presented by the six powers included an easing of a ban on trade in gold and other precious metals, and a relaxation of an import embargo on Iranian petrochemical products. They gave no further details.

In exchange, a senior U.S. official said, Iran would among other things have to suspend uranium enrichment to a fissile concentration of 20 percent at its Fordow underground facility and "constrain the ability to quickly resume operations there".

The official did not describe what was being asked of Iran as a "shutdown" of the plant as Western diplomats had said in previous meetings with Iran last year.

Iran says it has a sovereign right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and wants to fuel nuclear power plants so that it can export more oil.

But 20-percent purity is far higher than that needed for nuclear power, and rings alarm bells abroad because it is only a short technical step away from weapons-grade uranium. Iran says it produces higher-grade uranium to fuel a research reactor.

Iran's growing stockpile of 20-percent-enriched uranium is already more than half-way to a "red line" that Israel has made clear it would consider sufficient for a bomb.

In Vienna on Wednesday, a senior U.N. nuclear agency official told diplomats in a closed-door briefing that Iran was technically ready to sharply increase this higher-grade enrichment, two Western diplomats said.

"Iran can triple 20 percent production in the blink of an eye," one of the diplomats said.

The U.S. official in Almaty said the powers' latest proposal would "significantly restrict the accumulation of near-20-percent enriched uranium in Iran, while enabling the Iranians to produce sufficient fuel" for their Tehran medical reactor.

This appeared to be a softening of a previous demand that Iran ship out its stockpile of higher-grade enriched uranium, which it says it needs to produce medical isotopes.

Iran has often indicated that 20-percent enrichment could be up for negotiation if it received the fuel from abroad instead.

Jalili suggested Iran could discuss the issue, although he appeared to rule out shutting down Fordow. He said the powers had not made that specific demand.

The Iranian rial, which has lost more than half its foreign exchange value in the last year as sanctions bite, rose some 2 percent on Wednesday, currency tracking websites reported.

(Additional reporting by Fredrik Dahl and Yeganeh Torbati in Almaty, Georgina Prodhan in Vienna, Zahra Hosseinian in Zurich, Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow, Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Marcus George in Dubai; Writing by Timothy Heritage and Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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Batman to lose son Robin

NEW YORK: Batman may be able to save the world, but he'll lose his sidekick Robin -- who in his current incarnation as his son -- in the upcoming Batman Incorporated comic book series.

DC Comics said the caped crusader's acrobatic young assistant, Batman alter ego Bruce Wayne's son Damian, will die in Wednesday's issue number eight.

"This master theme of damaged and ruined families was nowhere more in evidence than in the creation of Damian, the first 'Son of Batman' to be acknowledged in the canon," series writer Grant Morrison said in a statement.

"In many ways this has been Damian's story as much as it has been the story of Bruce Wayne and it's a story that had its end planned a long time ago -- for what son could ever hope to replace a father like Batman, who never dies?"

The good news for those who might miss Robin is that this is the comics universe and characters who are killed can easily return. Even a previous incarnation of Robin was killed and resurrected before.

"You can never say never in a comic book," Morrison told the New York Post. "Batman will ultimately always have a partner."

-AFP/gn

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