Britons guilty of child sex abuse

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London man convicted in Indian paedophilia case

Five boys came forward with sex assault allegations against Grant and Waters

India's Supreme Court has convicted two Britons of sexually abusing boys at a children's shelter in Mumbai.

Duncan Grant, of Hampstead, north London, and Allan Waters, of Hampshire, had been acquitted by the High Court in Mumbai in 2008 for lack of evidence.

But the Supreme Court overturned that decision and upheld guilty verdicts from the trial court in 2006 which sentenced the men to six years.

Charity Childline India Foundation said the case was a "real watershed moment".

Campaign group Fair Trials Abroad, which represented the Britons in court, is yet to comment on the case.

'Culture of silence'

Grant, a charity worker, had set up Anchorage shelter in Colaba, Mumbai, in 1995. Waters, of Porchester, was a visitor to the home, Indian police said.

The pair were charged in 2001 with sexual assault after five boys complained to the police about repeated sexual and physical abuse by the men.

William D'souza, an Indian citizen who managed the shelter, was convicted of aiding and abetting the men and sentenced to three years. He had also earlier been cleared by the High Court, in 2006.

Childline India Foundation had appealed against the High Court's decision to acquit the men.

Kajal Mennon, executive director of the charity, said: "This was a real watershed moment in child sexual abuse convictions (in India)... as laws are extremely opaque, plus there is a culture of silence."

She added the case would go towards ensuring that people do not take advantage of India's "laxity of laws" and the convictions highlighted the need of special legislation for child sexual offences in the country.

More on This Story Related Stories Cleared sex case Britons released 30 JULY 2008, SOUTH ASIA Related Internet links Fair Trials Abroad Childline India Foundation The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites Read more at www.bbc.co.uk

 

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Fukushima - disaster or distraction?

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Japan nuclear plant power 'close'

By Richard Black

The government's swift imposition of a protection zone may have kept any health impact down

As it was almost bound to do at some point, Japan's nuclear safety agency has uprated its assessment of the Fukushima power station incident from a level four to a level five.

These are categories on the International Nuclear and Radiological Events Scale (INES), which runs from zero (nothing happened, essentially) to seven, a "major accident".

So far, Chernobyl is the only seven-rated incident in nuclear history.

Level five is defined as an "accident with wider consequences".

So what is the worst-case scenario for those "wider consequences" at Fukushima?

What clues are there either from that level five rating, or from the situation on the ground, as to how things might transpire - whether it will in the end prove to have been a disaster or a distraction from the serious and widespread impact of the tsunami?

"The worst-case scenario would be where you have the fission products in stored canisters or in the reactors being released," said Professor Malcolm Sperrin, director of medical physics and clinical engineering at Royal Berkshire Hospital, UK.

"Radiation levels would then be very high around the plant, which is not to say they'd reach the general public.

"And we're definitely not in the situation where we're going to see another Chernobyl - that possibility has long gone."

Distant advice

The level five rating applies specifically to the nuclear reactors in buildings 2 and 3 at Fukushima, rather than to the spent fuel cooling ponds that have lost water and where the stored fuel is heating up.

That implies that the regulators believe the main source of radioactivity coming from the plant has been the reactors.

Certainly, one of the the spikes in readings earlier in the week appeared to co-incide with damage to reactor number 2, believed to be a crack in the containment system - the symptoms being a sharp release of steam and an abrupt drop in pressure.

On Thursday and Friday, radiation levels around the plant appeared much more stable.

And although elevated readings have been noted in some locations 30km from Fukushima, there has been nothing outside the 30km protection zone that has appeared to pose a danger to health.

Despite this, a number of governments have advised their citizens to stay much further away - or in the case of the UK, to consider doing so.

However, when the UK's chief scientific adviser explained the reasoning to BBC News on Thursday, he was still painting a worst-case scenario that appeared some way short of apocalyptic.

"The worst-case scenario would see the ponds starting to emit serious amounts of radiation, with some of the reactors going into a meltdown phase," he said.

"We put that together with [a possible scenario of] extremely unfavourable weather conditions - wind in the direction of Tokyo, for example.

"Even in that situation, the radiation that we believe could come into the Tokyo area is such that you could mitigate it with relatively straightforward measures, for example staying indoors and keeping the windows closed."

Local issue

Fukushima now becomes the third level five incident in half a century of nuclear power.

The Windscale fire could have been far worse if filters had not been installed at the tops of the chimneys

The first was the Windscale reactor fire in the UK in 1957 - the second, the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979.

Richard Wakeford from the Dalton Nuclear Institute, a visiting professor in epidemiology at the University of Manchester, recently re-assessed the effect of radiation released at Windscale.

Using data and computer models, his scientific paper concluded that the release could have caused about 240 cases of cancer, half of them fatal.

However, inquiries into Three Mile Island concluded it probably caused no deaths.

That raises the question of why both are in the same INES category, given that Three Mile Island did not, in the end, have more than a local impact.

"The reason why Three Mile Island was rated a five is that there was major damage to the reactor core and there was potential for a widespread release of radioactive material - it didn't happen, but that potential is built into the event scale," said Professor Wakeford.

In terms of material released, he said: "Fukushima is somewhere between the two - clearly there have been releases, and you have a possible breach of the containment system - no-one really knows."

Slow down

As time passes, the reactors should in principle become less dangerous.

The rate at which they pump out heat decreases quickly, and by now the rate should be down to about one-thousandth of what it was a week ago, just before the Tohoku earthquake triggered a shutdown.

Prospects of exposure to perhaps the most dangerous radioactive substance, iodine-131, also diminish rapidly.

It decays quickly through radioactivity - after eight days, half the atoms present initially will already have decayed away.

There should be very little left in fuel rods that have been in storage ponds since November.

In addition, the continuing efforts to keep seawater flowing into reactors 1, 2 and 3 appear to have been relatively successful on Thursday and Friday.

If the reactors have been cooled, fuel rods will have been degrading at a slower rate, again curbing the release of radioactive substances.

On Friday afternoon, radioactivity readings had reportedly declined to less than 500 microsieverts per hour on site - below the level at which operators have to sound the alarm.

Some governments have advised their nationals to keep well away

Nevertheless, computer simulations by the French Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) indicate that harmful levels of radioactivity could have been experienced close to Fukushima but outside the 30km protection zone - though not further afield.

Greenpeace, with a long history of opposition to nuclear power, is not convinced that the time has come to declare that the risk of a major accident has subsided.

The group's nuclear campaigner Jan Beranek outlined a scenario where radioactive material was dispersed through fires or gas explosions of the type we saw earlier in the week.

"The mechanism could be destruction of the cladding around the fuel rods and fire - leading not only to the relase of radioactive iodine and caesium, but also opening fuel rods to the air," he told BBC News.

"With the fuel ponds, there is no barrier to further release.

"With the reactors, you could have a steam or hydrogen explosion if they try to pour water too quickly, and another explosion could give the final blow to the containment."

Hooking up

The cure for the plant's immediate problems could be the restoration of electrical power.

A grid connection was hooked up on Friday, although technicians were clearly struggling to power up systems around the site given that some of the plant's internal circuitry had been damaged by the tsunami or the gas explosions.

The nuclear safety authority outlined a timescale that would see power restored in reactor buildings 1-4 by Sunday.

If this all works, the prospects of the Greenpeace scenario should recede.

Then it will be time to take stock. And it may turn out, said Richard Wakeford, that no deaths at all will be attributable to the Fukushima incident.

"If you take one of the workers who's been exposed to 100 milliSieverts (mSv), that's not going to have any serious short-term effects," he said - "certainly nothing like the situation facing the Chernobyl emergency workers that killed 28 of them.

"The risk of a serious cancer arising from that kind of dose would be less than 1% in a lifetime - and you have to consider that the normal chance of dying from cancer is 20-25% anyway.

"As for people outside the plant - I can't see any chance of picking out the effect of the Fukushima releases against the general background of cancers."

Continue reading the main story World's worst nuclear incidents Level 7: Chernobyl, Ukraine, 1986 - explosion and fire in operational reactor, fallout over thousands of square kilometres, possible 4,000 cancer cases Level 6: Kyshtym, Russia, 1957 - explosion in waste tank leading to hundreds of cancer cases, contamination over hundreds of square kilometres Level 5: Windscale, UK, 1957 - fire in operating reactor, release of contamination in local area, possible 240 cancer cases Level 5: Three Mile Island, US, 1986 - instrument fault leading to large-scale meltdown, severe damage to reactor core Level 5: Fukushima, 2011 - tsunami and possibly earthquake damage from seismic activity beyond plant design, leading to...? Timeline: nuclear accidents

Japan Earthquake Latest News Japan quake Live Q&A: Fukushima alert In pictures: A week on 'Fukushima 50' admired Foreign evacuations mount In pictures: Japan's week Yen hits record In pictures: Survivors' misery Foreign firms evacuate staff Safety concerns: Your views Nuclear Fears Q&A: Health effects Fake text spreads confusion Meltdown fear over rod exposure What went wrong at plant? Background and Analysis Teams help rescue efforts Country at the mercy of nature Video Reports Aerial footage of devastation Watch New footage of tsunami path Watch

Related Internet links Tepco IAEA Update on Japan Earthquake IRSN simulations Fukushima - Greenpeace International Read more at www.bbc.co.uk

 

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Japan Electric Co. Chief Weeps

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Japan Electric Co. Chief Weeps In Least Reassuring Press Conference Ever

Adrian Chen — If you had any doubt about just how out-of-control Japan's nuclear situation is, take a look at Tokyo Electric Power Company Managing Director Akio Komori, who broke down after a press conference about the stricken Fukushima power plant.

This comes as the government raised the severity from 4 to 5 on the international nuclear crisis scale and admitted it was overwhelmed by the disaster. And, still, none of the increasingly-desperate measures taken to cool the reactors seem to be making much of an impact. Grim. [Daily Mail via Boing Boing] Read more at gawker.com

 

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Catholic School Sex Scandal

Tabloid Trying Desperately to Make This Decade-Old Teacher Sex Scandal Work

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Tabloid Trying Desperately to Make This Decade-Old Teacher Sex Scandal Work

Hamilton Nolan — The New York Post has five(!) total bylines on today's story about the very latest Hot Sexxxy Teacher Sexxx Scandal here in New York. What salacious details has all that reporting power turned up?

1. Joseph Appel, a 33 year old teacher at Xavieran HS in Brooklyn (pictured), "has been fired for alleged 'inappropriate' conduct" with a male student.

2. Ten years ago. Yeah. It happened ten years ago, this incident.

3. The hot sexxxy rumors making the rounds at school? "'They told us he did something inappropriate with a student 10 years ago,' said a student."

4. Last year the school's baseball coach was fined for "promoting gambling."

Five fucking bylines, for this? Where are the quotes from the janitor who walked in on the two in the throes of passion? Where is the Facebook group gleefully recounting totally unverified versions of the hot sexxx? Where is the supposedly innocent explanation that makes the whole thing sound even sexxxier? Where are all the other staff members engaged in sexual harassment of their own?

Hot sexxxy teacher scandals really aren't what they used to be.

[NYP. Photo via] Read more at gawker.com

 

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Qaddafi Threatens to ‘Get Crazy’

Jeff Neumann — As the United Nations voted last night to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, a totally sane Muammar Qaddafi sat down with a Portuguese TV news channel. He had some interesting things to say:

"If the world gets crazy with us, we will get crazy too. We will respond. We will make their lives hell because they are making our lives hell. They will never have peace."

He also said that he's prepared to shoot down passenger planes and sink ships in the Mediterranean. Then he warned "traitors" in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi that he's coming for them in their closets. Watch out — Qaddafi's about to suddenly become crazy!

[Image via AP] Read more at gawker.com

 

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Japan Considers Burying Nuclear Plant

Jeff Neumann — The effort to cool Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant by dropping seawater from helicopters and repairing water pumps is not going well, and engineers suggested today that the entire site might need to be buried under sand and concrete, as was done at Chernobyl 25 years ago. A plant official told reporters today, "It is not impossible to encase the reactors in concrete. But our priority right now is to try and cool them down first."

[Reuters; Image via AP] Read more at gawker.com

 

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New Bible Translation to Include Women

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New Translation of Bible to Include Women

Max Read — A new translation of the Bible has removed all instances of the word "booty." But that's not all! Several passages are retranslated using gender-neutral language. Some Christians, surprisingly, are not pleased.

The Bible, the most successful Da Vinci Code prequel of all time, has been translated about a million times before, even into made-up languages like Esperanto and Finnish. But when you've got a book with this much incest, there's always room for improvement! And the Biblical scholars behind the widely-used New International Version Bible think they've found one such improvement, and have translated the Bible using a feminine pronoun to describe God.

Ha, totally kidding. God is a dude, everyone knows that! No, really they're just try to make references to "unspecified" people gender-neutral, so that Robert Langdon now says "If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar" (emphasis ours, and God's), instead of "If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar."

And yet, as charmingly hippie-dippie as this sounds, a delightful group known as "the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood" has objected. Why? Because the new translation changes "the theological direction and meaning of the text," or, in other words, treats women as members of the default religious community. Which is likely problematic for "an organization that believes women should submit to their husbands in the home and only men can hold some leadership roles in the church"! Hopefully they're at least happy there's no booty in the Bible anymore?

[AP; image via AP] Read more at gawker.com

 

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30+ Bahrain protesters collapse on the spot after toxic nerve gas fired ...

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Some Banks Charging Check Cashing Fees - Video - WGAL The Susquehanna Valley

Some Banks Charging Check Cashing Fees - Video - WGAL The Susquehanna Valley