Why China and India face a marriage crisis

The Economist

Indian doctor used bicycle pump in sterilization clinic

Read at CNN >>

India en el Siglo XXI

Canada sells historic Macdonald House to Mumbai-based developer

CTV News 

www.ctvnews.ca

OTTAWA -- Canada's top diplomat in the United Kingdom says security concerns were one consideration in the $530-million sale of the historic London mansion that houses part of the Canadian High Commission.

But High Commissioner Gordon Campbell said Canada managed to sell Macdonald House at One Grosvenor Square in London to the highest bidder, an Indian developer.

The Mumbai-based Lodha Group will take over the downtown property in London's posh Mayfair district in December 2014. The deal was announced Thursday after the Harper government declared its intention to sell it earlier this year.

Canada plans to consolidate its diplomatic activity at another historic property, Canada House on Trafalgar Square in the heart of London.

Campbell wouldn't say who else was interested in the Canadian property, but he hinted that the government was sensitive to the good neighbour it was leaving behind on Grosvenor Square -- the U.S. embassy.

London has become a favoured destination of deep-pocketed Russian oligarchs looking for property, which has led some to pejoratively label the city Londongrad. Relations between the U.S. and Russia soured over the last year because of Moscow's decision to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker that Washington wanted to prosecute.

"We had over 106 tours of the actual property by international investors from all over the world," Campbell told The Canadian Press from London.

"We had a whole matrix of decisions we had to go through, including best value, lowest risk, any security risks certainly were all pursued."

In the end, Campbell said, the property was sold to the highest bidder.

"We had lots of very good bidders and this was the highest evaluated bid that we had, and it's a very good bid for Canada."

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canada-sells-london-diplomatic-mansion-for-530m-to-indian-developer-1.1565232#ixzz2m3Xob8cv

India Retail Competition

MercatusCenter

Trade and Poverty in India

MercatusCenter

How to milk savings from a cow: Bad investments do good

The Economist

Simple vinegar cancer test could save tens of thousands of lives

vitals

By Marilynn Marchione, Muneeza Naqvi, The Associated Press

Rafiq Maqbool / AP

Usha Devi, right, who was suffering from cervical cancer, talks with health workers from Tata Memorial Hospital in a slum in Mumbai, India. Devi says a simple vinegar test saved her life.

A simple vinegar test slashed cervical cancer death rates by one-third in a remarkable study of 150,000 women in the slums of India, where the disease is the top cancer killer of women.

Doctors reported the results Sunday at a cancer conference in Chicago. Experts called the outcome "amazing" and said this quick, cheap test could save tens of thousands of lives each year in developing countries by spotting early signs of cancer, allowing treatment before it's too late.

Usha Devi, one of the women in the study, says it saved her life.

"Many women refused to get screened. Some of them died of cancer later," Devi said. "Now I feel everyone should get tested. I got my life back because of these tests."

Pap smears and tests for HPV, a virus that causes most cervical cancers, have slashed cases and deaths in the United States. But poor countries can't afford those screening tools.

This study tried a test that costs very little and can be done by local people with just two weeks of training and no fancy lab equipment. They swab the cervix with diluted vinegar, which can make abnormal cells briefly change color.

This low-tech visual exam cut the cervical cancer death rate by 31 percent, the study found. It could prevent 22,000 deaths in India and 72,600 worldwide each year, researchers estimate.

"That's amazing. That's remarkable. It's a very exciting result," said Dr. Ted Trimble of the National Cancer Institute in the U.S., the main sponsor of the study.

The story of research participant Usha Devi is not an unusual one. Despite having given birth to four children, she had never had a gynecological exam. She had been bleeding heavily for several years, hoping patience and prayers would fix things.

"Everyone said it would go away, and every time I thought about going to the doctor there was either no money or something else would come up," she said, sitting in a tiny room that serves as bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and living room for her entire family.

One day she found a card from health workers trying to convince women to join the study. Devi is in her late 40s and like many poor Indians doesn't know her date of birth. She learned she had advanced cervical cancer. The study paid for surgery to remove her uterus and cervix.

The research effort was led by Dr. Surendra Shastri of Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai. India has nearly one-third of the world's cases of cervical cancer — more than 140,000 each year.

"It's just not possible to provide Pap smear screening in developing countries. We don't have that kind of money" or the staff or equipment, so a simpler method had to be found, Shastri said.

Starting in 1998, researchers enrolled 75,360 women to be screened every two years with the vinegar test. Another 76,178 women were chosen for a control, or comparison group that just got cancer education at the start of the study and vouchers for a free Pap test — if they could get to the hospital to have one. Women in either group found to have cancer were offered free treatment at the hospital.

Still, this quick and free cancer screening was a hard sell in a deeply conservative country where women are subservient and need permission from husbands, fathers or others for even routine decisions. Social workers were sent into the slums to win people over.

"We went to every single house in the neighborhood assigned to us introducing ourselves and asking them to come to our health talks. They used to come out of curiosity, listen to the talk but when we asked them to get screened they would totally refuse," said one social worker, Vaishnavi Bhagat. "The women were both scared and shy."

One woman who did agree to testing jumped up from the table when she was examined with a speculum. "She started screaming that we had stolen her kidney," Bhagat said. Another health worker was beaten by people in the neighborhood when women realized they would have to disrobe to be screened.

"There was a sense of shame about taking their clothes off. A lot of them had their babies at home and had never been to a doctor," said one health worker, Urmila Hadkar. "Sometimes just the idea of getting tested for cancer scared them. They would start crying even before being tested."

But screening worked. The quality of screening by health workers was comparable to that of an expert gynecologist, researchers reported. The study was planned for 16 years, but results at 12 years showed lives were saved with the screening. So independent monitors advised offering it to the women in the comparison group.

An ethics controversy developed during the study. The U.S. Office for Human Research Protections faulted researchers for not adequately informing participants in the comparison group about Pap tests for screening. A letter from the agency in March indicated officials seemed to accept many of the remedies study leaders had implemented.

Others defended the study.

"We looked at the ethics very carefully" and felt them to be sound, and visited the project in India, said Trimble of the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Sandra Swain, a cancer specialist at Medstar Washington Hospital Center, also defended the research. She is president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the research results were presented at that group's meeting in Chicago on Sunday.

"There really was no wrongdoing there," she said. "They have no screening anyway," so there is no standard of care now.

Officials in India already are making plans to expand the vinegar testing to a wider population.

Many poor countries can't afford mammograms for breast cancer screening either. The India study also has been testing breast exams by health workers as an alternative. Preliminary results suggest breast cancers are being found at an earlier stage, but it's too soon to know if that will save lives because not enough women have died yet to compare the groups, said Trimble of the National Cancer Institute.

More progress against cervical cancer may come from last month's announcement that two companies will drastically lower prices on HPV vaccines for poor countries. Pilot projects will begin in Asia and Africa; the campaign aims to vaccinate more than 30 million girls in more than 40 countries by 2020.

Girl's organs vanish after vacation death in India

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Passersby ignore dead mother and child after crash in India

ITN

Pakistan test fires nuclear missile capable of striking India

itnnews

Is THIS real reason Obama’s confronting North Korea?

wndI

JERUSALEM – Is the Obama administration’s military build up in the Pacific part of the president’s so-called pivot-toward-Asia strategy, a move that could demonstrate the biggest shift in world power since World War II?

Specifically, is Washington using the North Korean nuclear standoff as an excuse to shift massive military might to Asia just as China and other powers seek to create a new economic order that would rival the Western-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund?

It is difficult for most seasoned observers to explain why Obama is suddenly responding to North Korean aggression when the White House did little in 2008 when North Korea refused to allow United Nations inspectors into its nuclear plants.

The Obama administration also took little action when North Korea in 2009 carried out at least two nuclear tests, one of which is believed to have been the cause of a magnitude 4.7 seismic event.

The White House did not allow the U.S. military any significant response when in 2010 North Korea torpedoed a South Korean navy ship, killing 46 sailors. North Korea then shelled a South Korean island with little U.S. reaction.

Now, purportedly in response to aggressive action by North Korea’s new leader, the White House is sending to Singapore a new class of warship designed to fight in coastal waters.

The Pentagon also announced that it will deploy a missile defense system to the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam to strengthen regional protection against a possible attack. This after the Obama administration largely canceled a similar defense system intended for Europe.

U.S. warplanes, including fighter jets, U-2 spy planes and an A-10 attack jet, were seen flying in South Korea yesterday as part of a massive joint military exercise.

The U.S. says it stands “poised to respond” at the border of North and South Korea, where American troops are on high alert amid possible further Pentagon build-up in the region.

U.S. military ‘rebalance’

Why is the U.S. now responding to North Korea?

Time magazine says the “U.S. pivot toward Asia – and the potential for confrontation with China – became a little more real this week with the arrival of a new class of warship designed to fight in coastal waters.”

That pivot has been declared by the Obama administration itself – a professed strategy of putting a greater focus on the Asia region.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel “made clear the U.S. and the Department of Defense remain committed to the rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said after a meeting between Hagel and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Hagel told Loong that “in the future there will be even more opportunities for closer collaboration between the US and Singapore,” Little said.

‘New economic world order’

The U.S. military shift comes as the so-called BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – seek to create a monetary system to rival and even surpass the West.

While it received little U.S. media attention, last week at its fifth annual summit the BRICS group unveiled what it said was a new development bank aimed at breaking the monopoly held by Western-backed institutions.

The bank would use $50 billion of seed capital shared equally between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa but would clearly be dominated by China.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gave support for the bank while India’s trade minister said BRICS will “have a defining influence on the global order of this century.”

“It’s done,” said Pravin Gordhan, South African Finance Minister, last Tuesday, adding that “we made very good progress” on the formation of a World Bank-analogue development agency

Iran’s Press TV described the deal this way: “The BRICS bank will present an alternative solution to the Western-dominated global banking system comprised of the Bretton Woods institutions – the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“The new bank will provide a collective foreign exchange reserve and a fund for financing developmental projects in order to address the needs of emerging and poor economies.”

Press TV reported, “BRICS members say the current global balance of power is unworkable, with institutions such as the WB, the IMF and the United Nations Security Council irrelevant in addressing matters concerning global economics.”

Under the deal, the two largest economies of the emerging power groups, China and Brazil, agreed to remove nearly half of their trade exchanges out of the U.S. dollar zone – a significant blow to the U.S. dollar.

Some in the U.S. are skeptical the BRICS moves will actually work.

Joseph S. Nye, a professor at Harvard University, wrote in The Australian newspaper: “Tellingly, the meeting in Durban failed to produce any details of the structure of the proposed new development bank, suggesting that little progress had been made in the year since the BRICS’ last meeting in New Delhi, where the plan was announced.”

Continued Nye: “In fact, despite a commitment to launch “formal negotiations” to establish the bank, disagreements about the size and shares of the bank’s capital have not been resolved.”

The New American took the other side, arguing the BRICS bank is a step closer toward a world government.

“Aside from a planetary fiat currency and central bank, the erection of a true world government was at the heart of BRICS regimes’ machinations outlined in their final agreement.”

The publication pointed out the BRICS declaration at the end of last week’s summit included, “We reiterate our strong commitment to the United Nations (UN) as the foremost multilateral forum entrusted with bringing about hope, peace, order and sustainable development to the world.”

See a report on the BRICS summit:

The BRICS statement added, “[W]e reaffirmed our commitment to the promotion of international law, multilateralism and the central role of the United Nations.”

BRICS clearly sees a reshaped economic world in which government-run companies play a significant role.

“We acknowledge the important role that State Owned Companies (SOCs) play in the economy and encourage our SOCs to explore ways of cooperation, exchange of information and best practices,” the declaration states.

“As the global economy is being reshaped, we are committed to exploring new models and approaches towards more equitable development and inclusive global growth.”

With additional research by Joshua Klein.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/is-this-why-obamas-responding-to-north-korea/#0vA1fxswZ4KKlO1p.99

China, India and All That

Why Nations Fail

thecostaricanews.com

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

Let’s take a detour from our discussion of transitioning out of patronage politics and react to a thoughtful review of our book by Arvind Subramanian. Subramanian takes our theory to task for failing to account for what he argues to be the most important two observations, China and India. He first summarizes our theory as: democracy leads to long-run prosperity, and then points out that though most democracies are indeed prosperous, China has become relatively prosperous despite being ruled by an authoritarian regime, and India is much poorer than it should be despite its continuous democratic record since independence.

Thoughtful reviews deserve some (hopefully equally thoughtful) responses. Subramanian is certainly right to draw attention to China and India. But perhaps his review is too brief to have done justice to our theory and its implications on these topics — so much so that he actually omits any mention of the extensive discussion of China and extractive growth in the book.

First, our theory isn’t that political institutions directly determine economic prosperity. Rather, we claim that economic institutions determine economic prosperity, and explain why the link is between inclusive economic institutions and sustained economic growth — not necessarily short-run economic growth. We then argue that inclusive economic institutions can only survive in the long run if they are supported by inclusive political institutions. On the way, we provide explanations and examples for why for extended periods of time economic institutions with fairly important inclusive elements can coexist with extractive political institutions. This is all brought together under our discussion of extractive growth under the auspices of extractive political institutions (see Chapter 5). This is either because, as in the Soviet Union or the Caribbean plantation economies, extractive political and economic institutions can reallocate resources in a way that brings economic growth — typically when the elite expects to be the main beneficiary from such growth. Or because as in South Korea or Taiwan, extractive political institutions permit a certain degree of inclusivity to develop. In both cases the logic is clear: the elite, all else equal, would prefer more output, more revenue and more growth. It is the fear of creative destruction that often prevents it from adopting economic arrangements favoring growth or even blocking new technologies. When it feels secure or deems that it doesn’t have any other option, the elite will encourage economic growth.

In this light, as we argue in Chapters 14 and 15, China is not an exception to our theory. First, it is one of several examples of extractive growth — some others are discussed in Chapter 5. Second and very much in consistency with our theory, Chinese growth was spearheaded precisely by a major change in economic institutions, away from the most rigid central planning and collective ownership structure to one that allowed price incentives to encourage agricultural production for the market, at least at the margin. It continued when economic reform and liberalization — though sometimes lopsided still broadly step towards more inclusive economic institutions — spread to the urban sector and industry.

We also noted, in contrast to the standard accounts of Chinese economic reforms, that these didn’t have their origins in some clever planning by Chinese leaders but in political struggles within the Politburo pitting Deng Xiaoping against the Gang of Four. It was once again politics — not clever planning, design or economic advice — driving economics. In fact, the recent thought-provoking book by Victor Nee and Sonja Opper, Capitalism from Below convincingly argues that early reforms were neither instituted by the party nor were they outcomes of experimentation, but resulted from the party catching up with what had been going on on the ground given the political vacuum and crisis wrought by the Cultural Revolution. They point out that before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, privately-led experiments with production for the market and ending collective incentives had started. For example, in Anhui province, peasant households had already dissolved communes and collectives before any reforms, and had started a land-lease system. They suggest it was this sort of development that forced the hand of Deng Xiaoping and Communist Party elites to start loosening of central planning and collectivization. Whether Nee and Opper’s interpretation is correct or not, what seems clear is that there was a radical change in economic institutions in China and most likely this resulted from a variety of political factors — rather than from Deng Xiaoping’s farsighted genius as the hagiographic biography of Deng, Deng Xiaoping, by Ezra Vogel suggests.

It is also in this context that Subramanian’s failure to recognize that the causality doesn’t run directly from political institutions to economic growth but from economic institutions to growth becomes misleading. So when economic institutions take steps towards greater inclusivity — which has happened many times in history and is exactly what happened in China starting in 1978 — this can usher a rapid period of economic growth. Where political institutions come in is that inclusive economic institutions can emerge and encourage growth in the short run but cannot survive in the long run under extractive political institutions. It is for this reason that the rapid growth of China over the last three decades isn’t an exception to our theory. If China manages to continue to grow for several more decades and reach levels of income per capita comparable to those of the United States or Germany while still austerely authoritarian and politically extractive, that would be an exception to our theory. This is exactly what we argue in Chapter 15 as well as pointing out why the transition from extractive to more inclusive political institutions in China will be difficult.

In contrast to China, there is much less in Why Nations Fail about India, mostly because of space limitations. Be that as it may, Subramanian’s summary that our theory suggests India should be prosperous isn’t quite right. 

We go to pains in the book to emphasize that electoral democracy isn’t the same as inclusive political institutions. This becomes particularly binding when it comes to India. India has been democratic since its independence, but in the same way that regular elections since 1929 don’t make Mexico under PRI control an inclusive society, Congress-dominated democratic politics of India doesn’t make India inclusive. Perhaps it’s then no surprise that major economic reforms in India started when the Congress Party faced serious political competition. In fact, the quality of democracy in India remains very low. Politics has not only been  dominated by the Congress party but continues to be highly patrimonial, and as we have been discussing recently, this sort of patrimonialism militates against the provision of public goods. Recent research by Toke Aidt, Miriam Golden and Devesh Tiwari (“Incumbents and Criminals in the Indian National Legislature”) shows there are other very problematic aspects of the Indian democratic system: a quarter of the members of the Lok Sabha, the Indian legislature, have faced criminal charges, but alarmingly, such politicians are more likely to be re-elected than those without criminal charges, reflecting the fact that Indian democracy is far from being an inclusive ideal.

What’s more, blaming India’s poverty on its democratic recent past, as Subramanian seems to do, is probably more than a little unfair. After all, India has been growing since independence even if the growth rate was disappointing for the first three decades, and it seems to have largely stagnated during British colonialism as Tirthankar Roy shows in The Economic History of India, 1857-1947.

All of this is not to say that the extractive-inclusive distinction captures the richness of politics and economics in China and India. In both cases, as in most other instances, more detailed analyses of political dynamics and economic origins of growth need to be conducted to gain a more satisfactory picture. But nor is it the case that India’s relative poverty and China’s recent economic surge disprove or even challenge our theory.

India and China: An unresolved squabble

EconomistMagazine

Fifty years on from China's invasion of north-east India, our correspondent visits Tawang, a remote Himalayan border town still claimed by both countries.

India's drug-patent rules: Potential implications for health care

EconomistMagazine

India test-fires ’China killer’ missile capable of reaching Beijing, Europe

By Alastair Jamieson and msnbc.com news services/

Updated at 3:45 a.m. ET: India test-fired a nuclear-capable, long-range missile capable of reaching deep inside China and Europe Thursday, television stations showed, putting the emerging Asian power into an elite club of nations with intercontinental nuclear defense capabilities.

A scientist at the launch site said the launch was successful, minutes after television images showed the rocket blasting through clouds from an island off India's east coast.

Footage showed the rocket, with a range of more than 3,100 miles, blasting through clouds from an island off India's east coast. The defense minister said the test was "immaculate."

"Today's launch represents another milestone in our quest for our security, preparedness and to explore the frontiers of science," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a congratulatory message to the scientists who developed the rocket. 

The Agni-V missile is expected to become fully operational as early as 2014 after several more tests, The Times of India reported. It has a range of more than 3,100 miles, according to a BBC report.  More >>

New Delhi's Israeli Embassy Car Bombing: Is Iran Behind the Blast?

Sajjad Hussain / AFP / Getty Images

Investigators inspect the scene of the car bombing near the Israeli embassy in New Delhi on Feb. 13, 2012.

 Global Spin/
“We would be talking in a different tone if it had happened 20 minutes later and her kids were in the car,” a senior Israeli intelligence official told TIME on Monday, commenting on the bomb attack in New Delhi that injured an Israeli diplomat. An eyewitness claimed to have seen a man aboard a motorbike pull up alongside the car carrying Tali Koren Yeshova, 42, and attach an explosive device whose detonation injured Yeshova, her driver, and two bystanders. Yeshova, who had been en route to pick up her children in the Indian capital, has been hospitalized with spinal and liver injuries and is reported to be in “critical but stable” condition. Soon after the blast, which took place around 3 p.m., Israel blamed Iran for the attack, as well as a foiled attempt on the same day to attach a hand-grenade to an Israeli embassy vehicle in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

(PHOTOS: A bomb explodes near New Delhi’s Israeli embassy.)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters in Jerusalem that “Iran stands behind the bombers.” Israeli embassies around the world has been on high alert Sunday, the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Imad Mugniyah, former military commander of the Iran-backed Lebanese Shi’ite Hizballah organization.

Iranian officials denied the allegation, while India’s Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna condemned the attack vowed to investigate.

Israeli officials believe the latest attacks are related to a series of as many as ten failed attempts, including one in Thailand and one in Azerbaijan in recent weeks. And they suspect Hizballah, perhaps operating through local proxies, as being the perpetrators.

If Monday’s attacks were related to the Mughniyeh anniversary, Israeli sources said, they highlight just how difficult it has been for Hizballah to replace a mastermind whose resume allegedly included spectacular track bombings of U.S. and French embassies in Beirut in 1983, attacks on the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center in Argentina in 1994 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, which together claimed hundreds of lives. By comparison, Monday’s attacks appear to have been relatively unimpressive, even amateurish in the case of the Georgian attempt.

Earlier in the evening, Indian television channels showed a burning car around 300 meters away from the Israel embassy in Delhi, which is in a high security zone in the country’s capital, with the Indian Prime Minister’s residence only 500 meters away. Later in the evening, however, the scene at the Israeli Embassy on the six-lane, tree-lined Aurangzeb Road was calm. Three or four security personnel stood around making sure the rush hour traffic moved quickly. The gates to the embassy were closed but not barricaded and floodlights lit up the compound from the inside. The windows facing the street were lit, a sign of the alarm of the embassy officials inside.

David Goldfarb, the spokesman for Israel’s Delhi embassy, said Yeshova’s car was close to the building on Aurangzeb Road when the explosion went off. Syed Akbaruddin, spokesperson of India’s Ministry of External Affairs told TIME that Indian officials are working closely with the Israelis. Officials of the central forensic laboratory were seen collecting evidence at the blast site on Monday evening.

India now finds itself caught in the geo-political mire between Israel and Iran, two countries that both share friendly relations with New Delhi. The coming few weeks will be a test for Indian diplomacy as well as its security establishment. It’s unclear whether Hizballah is gaining a foothold in the country, which has suffered no terrorist attack since a blast at Delhi’s High Court last September. In the grisly 2008 assault on buildings in ritzy south Mumbai, conducted by Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, a prominent Jewish center was targeted. This is the first prominent attack on a foreign government property in India since the January 2002 attack on the American Center in Kolkata. Monday’s blast has brought the spotlight back on the vulnerability of diplomatic missions in the country. India is not taking any chances and has strengthened its security apparatus across the country to prevent a repeat of Monday’s incident.

—with reporting by Elliot Hannon/New Delhi

Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2012/02/13/is-iran-behind-a-new-delhi-attack-on-an-israeli-diplomat/#ixzz1mICcbWx0

'Totally drug-resistant' TB strain reported

Rafiq Maqbool  /  AP

Mohammed Shamim Sheikh, who suffers from multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, is seen through an X-ray of his chest as he listens to a social worker at his home in a slum in Mumbai on Monday.

Indian doctors have reported the country's first cases of "totally drug-resistant tuberculosis," a long-feared and virtually untreatable form of the killer lung disease.

It's not the first time highly resistant cases like this have been seen. Since 2003, patients have been documented in Italy and Iran. It has mostly been limited to impoverished areas, and has not spread widely. But experts believe there could be many undocumented cases.
No one expects the Indian TB strains to rapidly spread elsewhere. The airborne disease is mainly transmitted through close personal contact and isn't nearly as contagious as the flu. Indeed, most of the cases of this kind of TB were not from person-to-person infection but were mutations that occurred in poorly treated patients.
What's more, there's a debate within the public health community about whether to even label TB infections as totally drug resistant. The World Health Organization hasn't accepted the term and still considers the cases to be what's now called extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR. However, Dr. Paul Nunn, a coordinator at the WHO's Stop TB Department in Geneva, said there is ample proof that these virtually untreatable cases do exist.
Student's virulent TB prompts testing of 150 classmates
The Indian hospital that saw the initial cases tested a dozen medicines and none of them worked, a pretty comprehensive assessment. A TB expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they do appear to be totally resistant to available drugs.
"It is concerning," said Dr. Kenneth Castro, director of the CDC's Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. "Anytime we see something like this, we better get on top of it before it becomes a more widespread problem." More >>

"Untouchables": Indian outcast millionaire mulls caste, riches

AP reports:

As far back as he can remember, people told Hari Kishan Pippal that he was unclean, with a filthiness that had tainted his family for centuries. Teachers forced him to sit apart from other students. Employers sometimes didn't bother to pay him.
Pippal is a dalit, a member of the outcast community once known as untouchables. Born at the bottom of Hinduism's complex social ladder, that meant he could not eat with people from higher castes or drink from their wells. He was not supposed to aspire to a life beyond that of his father, an illiterate cobbler. Years later, he still won't repeat the slurs that people called him.
Now, though, people call him something else.
They call him rich.

Saurabh Das / AP

Hari Kishan Pippal speaks in his office in Agra, India.

Saurabh Das / AP

Hari Kishan Pippal inspects shoes at his shoe factory in Agra.

Saurabh Das / AP

Hari Kishan Pippal poses for a photograph inside his
Heritage Hospital, one of the largest private medical
facilities in the north Indian city of Agra.

Saurabh Das / AP

Hari Kishan Pippal sits for a photograph with his family at
his home in Agra, India.

Saurabh Das / AP

Hari Kishan Pippal sits with his granddaughter at his home
in Agra, India.

Saurabh Das / AP

Hari Kishan Pippal talks on his mobile phone as his wife
watches television in their bedroom at their home in Agra,
India.

Full story here >>

The Nixon Administration and the Indian Nuclear Program, 1972-1974

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., December 5, 2011 – India's "peaceful nuclear explosion" on 18 May 1974 caught the United States by surprise in part because the intelligence community had not been looking for signs that a test was in the works. According to a recently declassified Intelligence Community Staff post-mortem posted today by the National Security Archive and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, Nixon administration policymakers had given a relatively low priority to the Indian program and there was "no sense of urgency" to determine whether New Delhi was preparing to test a nuclear device. Intelligence "production" (analysis and reporting) on the topic "fell off" during the 20 months before the test, the analysis concluded.^[i]

In early 1972, however—two years before the test—the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had predicted that India could make preparations for an underground test without detection by U.S. intelligence. Published for the first time today, the INR report warned that the U.S. government had given a "relatively modest priority to … relevant intelligence collection activities" which meant that a "concerted effort by India to conceal such preparations … may well succeed."

The post-mortem [see document 21], the INR report [see document 2] and other new materials illustrate how intelligence priorities generally reflect the interests and priorities of top policymakers. The Nixon White House was focused on the Vietnam War and grand strategy toward Beijing and Moscow; intelligence on nuclear proliferation was a low priority. Compare, for example, the India case with that of Iraq during 2002-2003, when White House concerns encouraged—some say even compelled—intelligence producers to cherry pick raw information to demonstrate the development of WMD by the Saddam Hussein regime.

INR prepared its India report at a time when secret sources were telling U.S. intelligence that New Delhi was about to test a nuclear device. The "small spate" of reports about a test had such "congruity, apparent reliability, and seeming credibility" that they prompted a review of India's nuclear intentions by INR and other government offices. In the end, government officials could not decide whether India had made a decision to test although a subsequent lead suggested otherwise.

According to the intelligence community's post-mortem, obtained through a mandatory review appeal to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), one of the problems was that intelligence producers were not communicating with each other, so the "other guy" assumed that someone else was "primarily responsible for producing hard evidence of Indian intentions." The analysis was especially critical of an August 1972 Special National Intelligence Estimate for its "waffling judgments" on Indian nuclear intentions.

Other declassified documents reproduced here from 1972 through 1974 illustrate the range of thinking on this sensitive topic: More >>

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Trombay, the site of India's first atomic reactor (Aspara), the CIRUS reactor provided by Canada, and a plutonium reprocessing facility, as photographed by a KH-7/GAMBIT satellite during February 1966. Provided under lax safeguards, the CIRUS reactor produced the spent fuel that India converted into plutonium for the May 1974 test (the heavy water needed to run the reactor was provided by the United States, also under weak safeguards).

Raja Rammana, director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center at Trombay, played a key role in the production, development, and testing of the May 1974 Indian "peaceful nuclear explosion." In the Spring of 1973, John Pinajian, the Atomic Energy Commission’s representative in India, became suspicious that India was preparing for a nuclear test in part because Rammana rebuffed his requests for access to BARC so he could conduct an experiment which had been approved by the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (see document 17A)