India Ink: Calls Grow Louder for Politician Accused of Rape to Resign

KOCHI— Demands for a fresh investigation of an Indian politician accused of raping a teenager in 1996 gained momentum after the young woman’s mother urged the Congress Party’s leader to dismiss the lawmaker.

As a teenager, a woman from a small town called Suryanelli in Kerala was allegedly abducted and raped by 42 men over a period of 40 days in January and February of 1996. Among the suspects the girl identified was P.J. Kurien, then a member of Parliament and now the deputy chairman of the upper house of Parliament.

In an emotionally charged letter to Sonia Gandhi, the president of Congress Party, the woman’s mother called for Mr. Kurien, a Congress member, to be dismissed from his position in the Rajya Sabha.

“We believe that Mr. P.J. Kurien has exerted undue influence over the investigating officials in order to escape from the clutches of law, and he had succeeded in that,” she said in the letter, dated Thursday.

She also asked Mrs. Gandhi how Mr. Kurien could be allowed to preside over the legislative debate on criminal law amendments for tougher rape laws.

In a country outraged by the gang-rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in Delhi and by the authorities’ failure to prevent and punish crimes against women, this latest rape case is being seen as yet another example of India’s slow justice system, where cases languish in courts for years. It has also focused attention on official corruption, which allows the wealthy and politically connected to influence police investigations.

For the last 17 years, the Kerala rape case has been winding its way through India’s judicial system. On Jan. 31, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial, overturning the acquittal of a majority of the 42 suspects in 2005 by the Kerala High Court, which said that the girl had not tried to escape.

The girl alleged that Mr. Kurien had raped her at a government guest house in the southern town of Kumily. But police failed to include him on the list of men she had accused, so she filed a private complaint before a magistrate in 1999, said Sureshbabu Thomas, a special prosecutor for the case against the rest of the men.

Mr. Kurien filed a petition to dismiss the case in the lower court, which rejected his request. He then filed his appeal with the Kerala High Court, which said there was insufficient evidence against Mr. Kurien. The state government of Kerala appealed to the Supreme Court, which sided with Mr. Kurien.

“All the others who were named by the victim had to appear in the court, but P.J. Kurien did not,” K.V. Bhadra Kumari, a women’s rights activist and a lawyer, said in a phone interview. “Let him also be tried and let the law take its course.”

The Kerala government has refused to investigate Mr. Kurien, saying that his case has been cleared by the Supreme Court, but that has only enraged those who want Mr. Kurien to stand trial.

Opposition leaders in Kerala, Mr. Kurien’s home state, disrupted state legislative assembly proceedings Friday, demanding that Mr. Kurien resign. Angry protests were also held in Kerala’s capital city of Thiruvananthapuram.

Mr. Kurien has refused to step down. “I have already offered myself for judicial scrutiny in 1990s. Why should I do so again?” Mr. Kurien told an Indian television channel NDTV. “Then the High Court and Supreme Court had exonerated me. A fresh investigation will be contempt of court.”

Kerala, one of the few states in India where women outnumber men, is considered one of India’s most progressive states because of its high literacy rates: 93.91 percent overall, and a female literacy rate of 91.98 percent. It also has a much higher rate of reported rapes than the national average and has one of the highest rates of reported crimes against women among India’s 26 states.

K. Ajitha, a former member of the Naxal movement who now serves as a director of Anweshi, a woman’s organization that fights gender-based violence, said that one of the crucial problems is that there is a well-connected criminal network in the state, which protects political leaders and influential people when they are accused of rape.

“The organized mafia traps young adolescent girls by spreading its tentacles to all fields — the political leadership, the police, the judiciary,” she said. “So a rape victim rarely receives justice.”

Two of Kerala’s most publicized cases of sexual assault, known in the media as the “Suryanelli” and the “Vithura” after the hometowns of the victims, have been pending for years.

The trial of the 45 men accused in the Vithura case, where a girl was allegedly gang raped in 1995, is still under way 18 years after the crime was first reported. The victim, now in her early 30s, has requested the courts to discontinue the trial, saying it was traumatic to relive the incidents over and over again. The Kerala High Court, however, has rejected the request.

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Meet Gisele Bündchen's Daughter Vivian

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/08/2013 at 09:00 AM ET

Courtesy Gisele Bündchen

Meet Vivian Lake Brady!

Gisele Bündchen introduces her and Tom Brady‘s 9-week-old daughter in a Facebook post Friday, sharing a photo as the family vacations in Hawaii.

“Love is everything!!!” the model, 32, writes. “Happy Friday, much love to all.”

Born at home in Boston on Dec. 5, Vivian joins big brothers Benjamin, 3, and John, 5.

“We feel so lucky to have been able to experience the miracle of birth once again and are forever grateful for the opportunity to be the parents of another little angel,” Bündchen and her New England Patriots quarterback husband, 35, wrote at the time.

RELATED: Tom Brady Thrilled His Sons Have a Sister

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Southern diet, fried foods, may raise stroke risk

Deep-fried foods may be causing trouble in the Deep South. People whose diets are heavy on them and sugary drinks like sweet tea and soda were more likely to suffer a stroke, a new study finds.

It's the first big look at diet and strokes, and researchers say it might help explain why blacks in the Southeast — the nation's "stroke belt" — suffer more of them.

Blacks were five times more likely than whites to have the Southern dietary pattern linked with the highest stroke risk. And blacks and whites who live in the South were more likely to eat this way than people in other parts of the country were. Diet might explain as much as two-thirds of the excess stroke risk seen in blacks versus whites, researchers concluded.

"We're talking about fried foods, french fries, hamburgers, processed meats, hot dogs," bacon, ham, liver, gizzards and sugary drinks, said the study's leader, Suzanne Judd of the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

People who ate about six meals a week featuring these sorts of foods had a 41 percent higher stroke risk than people who ate that way about once a month, researchers found.

In contrast, people whose diets were high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish had a 29 percent lower stroke risk.

"It's a very big difference," Judd said. "The message for people in the middle is there's a graded risk" — the likelihood of suffering a stroke rises in proportion to each Southern meal in a week.

Results were reported Thursday at an American Stroke Association conference in Honolulu.

The federally funded study was launched in 2002 to explore regional variations in stroke risks and reasons for them. More than 20,000 people 45 or older — half of them black — from all 48 mainland states filled out food surveys and were sorted into one of five diet styles:

—Southern: Fried foods, processed meats (lunchmeat, jerky), red meat, eggs, sweet drinks and whole milk.

—Convenience: Mexican and Chinese food, pizza, pasta.

—Plant-based: Fruits, vegetables, juice, cereal, fish, poultry, yogurt, nuts and whole-grain bread.

—Sweets: Added fats, breads, chocolate, desserts, sweet breakfast foods.

—Alcohol: Beer, wine, liquor, green leafy vegetables, salad dressings, nuts and seeds, coffee.

"They're not mutually exclusive" — for example, hamburgers fall into both convenience and Southern diets, Judd said. Each person got a score for each diet, depending on how many meals leaned that way.

Over more than five years of follow-up, nearly 500 strokes occurred. Researchers saw clear patterns with the Southern and plant-based diets; the other three didn't seem to affect stroke risk.

There were 138 strokes among the 4,977 who ate the most Southern food, compared to 109 strokes among the 5,156 people eating the least of it.

There were 122 strokes among the 5,076 who ate the most plant-based meals, compared to 135 strokes among the 5,056 people who seldom ate that way.

The trends held up after researchers took into account other factors such as age, income, smoking, education, exercise and total calories consumed.

Fried foods tend to be eaten with lots of salt, which raises blood pressure — a known stroke risk factor, Judd said. And sweet drinks can contribute to diabetes, the disease that celebrity chef Paula Deen — the queen of Southern cuisine — revealed she had a year ago.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, drugmaker Amgen Inc. and General Mills Inc. funded the study.

"This study does strongly suggest that food does have an influence and people should be trying to avoid these kinds of fatty foods and high sugar content," said an independent expert, Dr. Brian Silver, a Brown University neurologist and stroke center director at Rhode Island Hospital.

"I don't mean to sound like an ogre. I know when I'm in New Orleans I certainly enjoy the food there. But you don't have to make a regular habit of eating all this stuff."

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Wall Street opens modestly higher after data

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks opened slightly higher on Friday after a trio of positive economic data points, and further gains were expected to be modest with the benchmark S&P index near five-year highs.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 18.97 points, or 0.14 percent, at 13,963.02. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 3.05 points, or 0.20 percent, at 1,512.44. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 13.59 points, or 0.43 percent, at 3,178.72.

(Reporting by Ryan Vlastelica; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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Court Urged to Reverse a Ruling on Terror

The Obama administration on Wednesday urged a federal appeals court to overturn a sweeping ruling by a district judge that blocked the government from enforcing a statute related to the indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects.

Appearing before a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, Robert M. Loeb, a Justice Department lawyer, said a lawsuit challenging the statute should be dismissed because those who brought it — including a former reporter for The New York Times, Christopher Hedges, who interacts with terrorist groups for his reporting, and several supporters of the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks — had no real-world risk of being detained.

“The plaintiffs’ claims all fail at the outset,” Mr. Loeb said, asserting that the plaintiffs had failed to show an “objectively reasonable fear of being placed in long-term detention.”

But lawyers for the plaintiffs, Carl J. Mayer and Bruce Afran, insisted that their clients had legal standing to challenge the statute — a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 — because it interfered with their right to free speech by creating a basis to fear that they might be placed in military detention on the basis of their activities.

The provision authorizes the detention of people who are part of or “substantially supported” Al Qaeda or “associated forces.” When Congress enacted it, lawmakers said the statute merely reaffirmed, and did not expand, the existing detention powers granted a decade earlier in the authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But lawmakers did not specify whether Americans could be detained without trial and were vague about what kind of conduct was off limits. In September, Judge Katherine B. Forrest of Federal District Court ruled that Congress had expanded the government’s detention powers, saying the 2001 version did not cover mere supporters. A portion of her ruling suggested that the government could be held in contempt if it detained anyone under that theory.

The Obama administration appealed, arguing that her ruling was wrong and put a cloud over its existing detention authority for prisoners picked up in the Afghanistan war zone.

On Wednesday, Judge Raymond J. Lohier, an appellate court judge, pressed Mr. Loeb about whether there had been any authority before the 2011 statute that allowed the government to detain people based upon “substantial support” of a terrorist group.

“To my knowledge it has never been applied that way,” Mr. Loeb replied.

Another judge on the panel, Lewis Kaplan, questioned whether there could be any guarantee that the current policy limits on powers would always be in place.

“The executive branch has been known occasionally to change its mind, isn’t that true?” he asked.

David Rivkin, a lawyer representing three lawmakers, including Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, argued that the statute should be upheld because Congress, presidents of both parties and other judges had agreed that the government has, and should have, indefinite detention powers in the war against Al Qaeda.

“The political branches are speaking in unison,” Mr. Rivkin said.

Charlie Savage contributed reporting from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 7, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the fiscal year of the National Defense Authorization Act whose indefinite detention provision is being challenged. It is 2012.

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Scott Neeson Left Hollywood to Save Kids in Cambodia's Slums

Scott Neeson's life in Hollywood was dreamy – he had the million-dollar salary, the yacht, the A-list contacts and a packed social calendar.

But after he stepped into a nightmare in Cambodia's Steung Meanchey garbage dump in December 2003, he walked away from all his wealth to help some of the poorest children in the world.

At the dump in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh he saw a girl, dressed in rags, picking through syringes and broken glass. Her name, Neeson learned through an interpreter, was Srey Nich. She was 9 and lived in the dump with her mother and younger sister; there they collected scraps, which they sold for money to buy food.

"How could anyone survive here?" Neeson recalls thinking. "I couldn't look away."

So, Neeson, 53, gave up his Hollywood life and never looked back. Once president of 20th Century Fox International, overseeing films from Titanic to X-Men, the Scottish-born executive drove a Porsche and lived in ritzy Brentwood.

Today, he lives in a two-story home that doubles as office space for his nonprofit Cambodian Children's Fund. Since 2004, Neeson's charity has helped house, educate and provide health care for more than 1,450 children in the country's most desperate slums.

"Scott is a remarkable human being who put his life on the line to help children in Cambodia who had no hope," says Dr. Jay Winsten, associate dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. "Now they have a future."

Neeson says that his life is better now because of his decision.

"I miss a lot of things about Hollywood." he says, "but I wouldn't change this for the world."

Poverty To Riches

Neeson never imagined much of a future for himself. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Elizabeth, Australia, where his father worked for the Department of Defense and his mother as a cleaning lady, he was a frail kid, unhappy both at home and in school.

"A lot of teachers said I'd be unemployed, spend my life on welfare," he says.

He dropped out of high school and found work delivering movie posters to theaters, working his way up to projectionist and then assistant to the director of movie programming, eventually landing the position of managing director at an Australian film distributor that later merged with Sony. By 1993 he was vice president of international marketing for Fox and moved to America, ultimately being promoted to president in 2003.

"Scott was a major driving force," says former Fox colleague Gina Kilberg, now senior vice president of international media at Sony. "He was very motivated to be successful."

Scott Neeson at a fundraiser for his organization in 2012

Joe Scarnici / Getty

And along with success came lavish perks. "Cindy Crawford lived two doors down from me," he says, laughing. "For someone who'd been told over and over he'd never amount to anything, to earn a million dollars and have this great lifestyle was something I'd never dreamed of."

Life-Changing Trip

The excesses of that life came into sharp focus on his second trip to Phnom Penh just a few months after his first. He had returned to the dump and was trying to help three sick children when he got a call on his cell phone. It was an agent whose star client was having a meltdown before boarding his private jet because it wasn't properly stocked with his favorite amenities.

"The actor said, 'My life wasn't meant to be this difficult.' The kids I was with were very sick and here's this movie star yelling," says Neeson. "If I needed a sign, that was it."

These days Neeson (who's lived in Cambodia for the past 10 years) is as driven as he ever was, only about different things. He starts work at dawn with a cup of coffee from his espresso machine – his one luxury – and leaves the country only for fund-raising trips. He uses his formidable negotiating skills to persuade desperate and starving parents to enroll their kids in his school or bring a sick baby to his clinic.

"I guess I identify with [the kids] never believing they could do anything with their lives," he says. "They've been through so much, but they're so hugely energetic and joyful. I've got more love in my life than I ever thought existed. My fear is what would have happened to me if I was still living a life all about me."

For the road he did take, Neeson only need thank Srey Nich, that first little girl from the dump. Using his own money, Neeson got Srey Nich and her family out of the now-closed dump and into a house. She then became one of the original students at Neeson's CCF school. Today, 18 years old and planning for college next year, she says Neeson changed everything for her.

"The dump was a very bad, dirty place," she says. "Now my life has changed. I can speak English with you, I have the opportunity to go to school. Everything is different."

How He's Helping

• More than 1,450 students attend the school, which supplements public education – and nearly all stay on.

• After learning cooking and customer-service skills, about 100 students have landed jobs in restaurants and hotels.

• Three full-time doctors and seven nurses treat more than 3,000 patients a month at the free medical clinic.

Know a hero? Send suggestions to heroesamongus@peoplemag.com. For more inspiring stories, read the latest issue of PEOPLE magazine

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New whooping cough strain in US raises questions

NEW YORK (AP) — Researchers have discovered the first U.S. cases of whooping cough caused by a germ that may be resistant to the vaccine.

Health officials are looking into whether cases like the dozen found in Philadelphia might be one reason the nation just had its worst year for whooping cough in six decades. The new bug was previously reported in Japan, France and Finland.

"It's quite intriguing. It's the first time we've seen this here," said Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. cases are detailed in a brief report from the CDC and other researchers in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Whooping cough is a highly contagious disease that can strike people of any age but is most dangerous to children. It was once common, but cases in the U.S. dropped after a vaccine was introduced in the 1940s.

An increase in illnesses in recent years has been partially blamed on a version of the vaccine used since the 1990s, which doesn't last as long. Last year, the CDC received reports of 41,880 cases, according to a preliminary count. That included 18 deaths.

The new study suggests that the new whooping cough strain may be why more people have been getting sick. Experts don't think it's more deadly, but the shots may not work as well against it.

In a small, soon-to-be published study, French researchers found the vaccine seemed to lower the risk of severe disease from the new strain in infants. But it didn't prevent illness completely, said Nicole Guiso of the Pasteur Institute, one of the researchers.

The new germ was first identified in France, where more extensive testing is routinely done for whooping cough. The strain now accounts for 14 percent of cases there, Guiso said.

In the United States, doctors usually rely on a rapid test to help make a diagnosis. The extra lab work isn't done often enough to give health officials a good idea how common the new type is here, experts said.

"We definitely need some more information about this before we can draw any conclusions," the CDC's Clark said.

The U.S. cases were found in the past two years in patients at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. One of the study's researchers works for a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, which makes a version of the old whooping cough vaccine that is sold in other countries.

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JournaL: http://www.nejm.org

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Wall Street opens flat after claims, sales data

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks opened flat on Thursday after a trend gauge in weekly jobless claims signaled modest economic improvement and retailers posted mixed monthly sales.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was down 11.06 points, or 0.08 percent, at 13,975.46. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was down 0.67 point, or 0.04 percent, at 1,511.45. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 1.68 points, or 0.05 percent, at 3,166.80.

(Reporting by Ryan Vlastelica; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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IHT Rendezvous: Turkey Hints at a Breakup With Europe

LONDON — A half century after taking the first steps toward becoming an integral part of Europe, Turkey may be ready to give up.

After heavy hints that Ankara is looking eastwards to a closer alliance with Asia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, said this week that membership in the European Union was not a must for Turkey.

“It is not the Apocalypse if they do not let us in the E.U.,” Mr. Erdogan told reporters during a visit to Budapest on Wednesday, as he launched his latest broadside against the Union’s alleged delaying tactics to keep his country out.

His remarks followed a news conference earlier this week in Prague, where Mr. Erdogan described the delay in granting membership to Turkey as “unforgivable.”

These and similar expressions of frustration have come as Turkey approaches the 50th anniversary of an agreement with what was then the European Economic Community, which was to have led to eventual full membership in the bloc.

Mr. Erdogan set the tone in a television interview last month in which he accused the E.U. of dragging its feet because Turkey was an Islamic nation.

As my colleague Andrew Finkel wrote from Istanbul, the prime minister also “threw the diplomatic equivalent of a cream pie” into the debate by suggesting Turkey join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization instead.

Membership of the S.C.O., which groups Russia, China and central Asian states, is not widely viewed as a viable alternative to joining Europe. Andrew wrote that Mr. Erdogan’s proposal prompted Turkish columnists to ask whether he might be bluffing in an attempt to put pressure on the Europeans.

The same question was posed this week by Pravda.ru, a Russian news Web site: “The first thought about the purpose of such statements is the fact that Turkey is trying to express its disappointment with the stalled negotiations on accession to the E.U.”

But it did not rule out the possibility that Mr. Erdogan might be seeking power “wherever his country’s economic strength is consistent with its geopolitical needs as a global player,” in contrast to a weak Europe that was preoccupied with its internal problems.

Washington has suggested that Turkish membership in the S.C.O., a security organization viewed as an anti-American bulwark in Central Asia, might be problematic in view of the Turkish role in N.A.T.O.

“Obviously it would be interesting, given the fact that Turkey is also a N.A.T.O. member,” Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, said last week.

Hugh Pope, the International Crisis Group’s project director in Turkey, suggested that Mr. Erdogan was courting popularity by bashing the Union.

Turks are frustrated not only by delays in the membership process, he told Rendezvous, but also by the draconian visa regulations they face when traveling to Europe. Potshots aimed at Turkey by European critics were also deeply offensive to Turks, he said.

“But joining the E.U. is not rocket science,” he added, emphasizing that Turkey had to meet the requirements of the club if it wanted to join. This would include making domestic reforms and changing its policy on Cyprus, an E.U. state that it refuses to recognize.

Mr. Erdogan’s recent remarks on Europe might not indicate that Turkey is quite ready to break off the world’s longest engagement.

Murat Yetkin, of the Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet, commented on Wednesday: “It is…clear that Turkey-E.U. relations cannot go on like this any longer; another chapter this year, a pointless agreement the next.”

However, he wrote, “it seems that neither Turkey nor the E.U. wants to be the first to declare divorce. Perhaps because both sides know that it would be a strategically wrong move.”

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Snoop Dogg Gets the Party Started with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lawrence

Caught in the Act

02/06/2013 at 06:00 AM EST

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lawrence, inset: Snoop Lion (Dogg)

Valerie Goodloe/PictureGroup; Frederick M. Brown/Getty

Guess the "O" in "O.G." stands for Oscar.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lawrence both attended the Hollywood Reporter's Nominees' Night 2013 at Spago in Beverly Hills on Monday.

It was a low-key affair at first, with Affleck holding court in a central area of the soiree, where he was animated while chatting with people and seemed excited and genuinely happy.

The Argo star and director, looking handsome in a suit, also obliged guests who approached him for photos.

Lawrence was spotted embracing her Silver Linings Playbook costar Julia Stiles. "You're so stunning!" Stiles told Lawrence just before taking a snapshot together.

As the evening continued, it was clear that Lawrence was the darling of event. Fellow guests were going up and telling her she is beautiful and they're so proud of her and Lawrence was ever the gracious guest, chatting with anyone who approached her.

But it wasn't until Snoop Lion (Dogg) arrived, who went by the deejay name Snoopadelic, that the party really went into full gear. After a lengthy intro that included a clip-filled video, Snoop emerged, gave an intro of his own – he praised Argo and shouted for Affleck to come take a photo with him before the night's end – and began playing an eclectic mix of songs, which included everything from Pat Benatar to 2 Chainz.

– Dahvi Shira

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