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Posted
on 10-Sep-01 10:34 AM
Monday, 10 September, 2001, 08:38 GMT 09:38 UK
Maoists detained in Kathmandu
The Nepalese Government has arrested 14 Maoist activists for what it called suspicious activities.
More than ten others were detained last week.
The government has warned the Maoist rebels to honour their agreement to end violence, made at the first formal peace talks between the two sides last month.
They say the rebels are continuing to practise extortion, intimidation and vandalism across the country.
A second round of peace talks is due to begin this week, although it's not yet known where and when the meeting will take place.
The Home Minister, Khum Bahadur Khadka, warned that any defiance would be dealt with strongly.
Organisations affiliated to the Maoist Communist Party have accused the government of being heavy-handed, saying this could jeopardise the peace process.
A BBC correspondent in Kathmandu says the build up to the talks has caused concern about the prospects for a negotiated settlement to the six-year-old Maoist insurgency.
From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
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Posted
on 10-Sep-01 10:36 AM
Monday, 10 September, 2001, 07:38 GMT 08:38 UK
Bhutanese refugee leader assassinated
A prominent Bhutanese refugee leader has been assassinated in eastern Nepal, which is home to around 100,000 ethnic Nepali refugees who say they have been forced out of Bhutan.
Mr RK Budhathoki, who was the leader of the Bhutan People's Party, was attacked with a knife while attending a meeting of refugees at Damak.
Police afterwards arrested four people in connection with the killing.
The Nepali refugees, who are Hindus, say ethnic discrimination in Bhutan, which is predominantly Bhuddist, forced them to flee their homes ten years ago - a charge Bhutan denies.
Nepal and Bhutan are now negotiating over the repatriation of the refugees.
From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
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Posted
on 10-Sep-01 10:44 AM
Leaders of the late-Saturday ritual by some 6,000 Dalits said they were protesting discrimination by upper caste people and India's failure to raise caste issues at the racism conference in Durban, South Africa that concluded over the weekend.
In Kanpur, 240 miles southeast of India's capital, New Delhi, hundreds of monks in flowing robes arrived from Nepal, Japan and other countries to witness the ceremony, which was presided by a Japanese Buddhist priest.
Participants were distributed posters condemning Hinduism, the religion of India's overwhelming majority.
Several Dalit groups had met in the South African city to press for inclusion of caste-based discrimination in the U.N. World Conference on Racism. They said caste-based discrimination in India was as bad as racial discrimination in other parts of the world.
But Indian officials lobbied, and succeeded, in keeping it off the conference declaration. The New Delhi government said equating the caste system with racism would make India a racist country — a categorization it denies.
''The Government of India misguided all at the Durban meet,'' Dalit leader Ram Prasad Rashik told The Associated Press after the conversion ceremony in Kanpur.
Dalits occupy the lowest rank in India's 3,000-year-old caste system that discriminates against nearly a fourth of the country's billion-plus population.
Though India's Constitution, adopted in 1950, bars discrimination based on caste, the practice still pervades society.
(Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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Posted
on 10-Sep-01 10:57 AM
A tiny genetic change can turn a relatively benign flu virus into a killer, scientists have found.
In its benign form the virus causes only minor respiratory illness, but it can morph into an extremely virulent killer that infects much of the body, including the heart and brain.
We should assume that an outbreak of any new strain or subtype is potentially dangerous to humans
Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka
The discovery helps to explain why a flu outbreak four years ago in Hong Kong killed an unusually high proportion of those that it infected.
Just 18 people were known to have been infected, but six of those died.
Lead researcher Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, said: "We have found that a limited number of very tiny genetic changes in a specific gene, one called PB2, can have a big effect on how potent the influenza virus is.
"Because the influenza virus constantly mutates, and because only a few changes can make a non-pathogenic virus highly pathogenic, we should assume that an outbreak of any new strain or subtype is potentially dangerous to humans."
Natural reservoirs
Wild waterfowl are natural reservoirs for the influenza virus. These birds transmit the virus to pigs or chickens, which then pass it on to people.
The deadly outbreak of influenza virus subtype H5N1 in Hong Kong in 1997 was the first documented case of an influenza virus jumping directly from chickens to people.
Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka made the discovery
Public health authorities responded by ordering the slaughter of more than one million live poultry to prevent further spread of the virus to humans.
Dr Kawaoka and his team obtained samples of the H5N1 viruses that had infected Hong Kong residents. Testing these viruses in laboratory mice, the researchers found that they had the same impact on mice.
Just two particles of the deadly form of the virus isolated from human victims were enough to kill a mouse.
But the less virulent form of the virus, isolated from patients who suffered only mild respiratory systems, also produced only the mildest symptoms in mice.
The researchers divided the H5N1 strains into two groups: one that caused the mice to die, and one that was relatively benign.
Flu potency
They then used gene technology to pinpoint PB2 as the gene that gives the lethal strains their potency.
The key appears to be a tiny change in just one component of the gene.
The function of the PB2 gene is not completely understood, but scientists believe it controls production of chemical that helps the virus to reproduce itself in the cells of its host.
Professor Ron Eccles, director of the Common Cold Centre in Cardiff, told BBC News Online that scientists did not know a great deal about what made a virus virulent.
"This is interesting research because at present we have no real knowledge to help us predict what a virus is going to do. We just have to look at the results."
The research is published in the journal Science.
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