India will import food to make up for shortages caused by a drought thought to be affecting 700 million people, the finance minister has said.

The minister, Pranab Mukherjee, did not specify what would be imported and when, saying he wanted to avoid speculation on prices.

The drought is affecting almost half of India's districts.

Food prices have risen by 10% after poor monsoon rains hit sowing. Monsoon rains are critical to India's farmers.

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The summer rains are crucial to crops such as rice, soybean, sugarcane and cotton.

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Up to 70% of Indians are dependent on farm incomes, and about 60% of India's farms depend on rains.

Read more @ BBC News

Israel is to lodge an official complaint with Sweden over claims in a newspaper that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians to sell their organs.

The article was published in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet this week.

The Swedish ambassador to Israel condemned the newspaper article as "shocking and appalling".

The government in Stockholm has not issued a similar condemnation, and Israeli foreign ministry officials have reacted furiously.

"It is regrettable that the Swedish foreign ministry does not intervene when it comes to a blood libel against Jews," Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said.

"[This] reminds one of Sweden's conduct during World War II, when it also did not intervene."

In a blog post on Thursday evening, Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt wrote that he would not condemn the article, and that freedom of expression is part of the Swedish constitution.

Read more @ BBC News

A 25-year-old Somali pirate has told the BBC's Mohamed Olad Hassan by telephone from the notorious den of Harardhere in central Somalia why he became a sea bandit. Dahir Mohamed Hayeysi says he and his big-spending accomplices are seen by many as heroes.

"I used to be a fisherman with a poor family that depended only on fishing.

The first day joining the pirates came into my mind was in 2006.

A group of our villagers, mainly fishermen I knew, were arming themselves.

One of them told me that they wanted to hijack ships, which he said were looting our sea resources...

Read more @ BBC News

These days, their footage is all over the Pakistani news channels. Lawyers, dressed in black suits and ties, on the attack.

Every few days seem to bring a new incident; the beating of a policeman; a scuffle with members of the press outside the high court in Lahore.

The newspapers scream that lawyers have become a public menace. The police are incensed.

"Lawyers used to be a very gentle people," says superintendent Sohail Sukhera of Lahore police force. "They were polite and educated. But the last couple of years have converted them into an absolutely different commodity."

He says that, in the last month, there have been 18 cases of assaults carried out by lawyers in Lahore alone.

"In one case, lawyers broke the leg of a police inspector. Others have had their skulls exposed when lawyers have hit them on the head with stones or chair legs. It's really uncalled for."

Visibly upset

Too embarrassed to talk to us at the police station at which he works, we go to meet one of the victims elsewhere.

He is a 52-year-old officer, Fakir Muhammed.

A cameraman filmed the moment he was punched and slapped and harassed by lawyers at the high court.

"I had just testified against a man accused of kidnapping a woman," he says. "As I was leaving the court, I was surrounded by 10 or 11 lawyers."

Mr Muhammed is visibly upset as he recounts how one snatched and broke his glasses before a few of the others tore his uniform and beat him.

"They really hurt me and it was so sudden," he says.

"I tried to reason with them but they didn't listen and I still have no idea what it was about. I feel so insulted. My whole department looks at me as the guy that got beaten up. It's humiliating."

read more @ BBC News

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.

The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another.

Read more @ New York Times

An Afghan bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has been published in the official gazette and become law.

The original bill caused outrage earlier this year, forcing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to withdraw it.

But critics say the amended version of the law remains highly repressive.

They accuse Mr Karzai of selling out Afghan women for the sake of conservative Shia support at next week's presidential election.

The law governs family life for Afghanistan's Shia minority.

Sexual demands

The original version obliged Shia women to have sex with their husbands every four days at a minimum, and it effectively condoned rape by removing the need for consent to sex within marriage.

Western leaders and Afghan women's groups were united in condemning an apparent reversal of key freedoms won by women after the fall of the Taliban.

Now an amended version of the same bill has passed quietly into law with the apparent approval of President Karzai...

Read more @ BBC News

Why isn’t the trial of a man charged with preparing for terror attacks using tennis-ball bombs being reported? He’s not a bearded Muslim

Imagine, for a moment, that Neil Lewington, who is on trial at the Old Bailey for preparing for a “campaign of terrorism” using tennis-ball bombs, was a British Muslim. The story would be splashed across the front page of every newspaper in Britain, and Sky News would be rolling a loop of images of his scowling, bearded, dark face.

The reality, however, is that you’ve probably never heard of Lewington (who denies all eight charges of terrorism) because he is not Muslim, or black, or of Asian origin. He is white. And our gloriously impartial, truth-seeking, “colour-blind” media don’t seem to care. The coverage of the Lewington trial has been negligible – a few short stories buried deep inside a handful of newspapers, but, as I write, no rolling coverage on Sky News, and not a peep on the main BBC news bulletins or on Newsnight.

One veteran home affairs correspondent told me he had asked his editors why the Lewington trial wasn’t being covered. “They didn’t want to hear about it,” he said. “They just weren’t interested. It’s outrageous.”

Lewington is only the latest in a long line of white terror suspects who have “disappeared” from the mainstream media. Have you heard of Robert Cottage? He is the former British National Party candidate jailed in July 2007 for possessing explosive chemicals in his home – described by police at the time of his arrest as the largest amount of chemical explosive of its type ever found in this country. The national coverage of Cottage’s arrest in October 2006 amounted to exactly 56 words in a single “news in brief” item in the Sunday Times.

There is, too, the case of Martyn Gilleard, the Nazi sympathiser jailed in June 2008 after police found nail bombs, bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat, as well as a note in which he had written, “I am so sick and tired of hearing nationalists talk of killing Muslims, of blowing up mosques, of fighting back. Only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear. The time has come to stop the talk and start to act.” What about Nathan Worrell? This neo-Nazi, described by police as a “dangerous individual”, hoarded bomb-making materials in his home, and was found guilty in December 2008 of possessing material for terrorist purposes and for racially aggravated harassment. His trial attracted two passing references in the popular national press, in the Daily Star and the Sun.

Read more @ New Statesman

Time to start running around like headless chicken, people.

(I assume that chicken are immune?)