India set for ninth rate hike to cool inflation

AFP - India, which has the highest inflation of any large Asian economy, looked set on Tuesday to hike interest rates for a ninth time as it struggles to clamp down on inflation.

The central bank, which warned Monday of the "risk to growth from sustained high inflation," has raised rates eight times since March 2010, albeit in gradual, quarter-point steps to minimise the impact on economic growth.

But inflation has remained high and some economists expect Reserve Bank of India (RBI) policymakers to move more aggressively when they meet Tuesday.

"A 50-basis-point rate rise wouldn't surprise me -- inflation is proving stubbornly difficult to reduce," Deepak Lalwani, head of London-based India investment consultancy Lalcap, told AFP.

"It's time to step it up," agreed HSBC chief India economist Leif Eskesen.

Others bet the bank will stick to its "slowly, slowly approach" and only hike by a quarter point as it seeks to balance growth and inflation concerns.

The RBI meeting comes after data in April showed inflation had surged to nearly nine percent.

The central bank said in a report on the economy released Monday that it was important for monetary policy "to ensure a low inflation environment as a pre-condition for sustained high growth," stoking expectations of a rate hike.

It also warned that rising global energy and commodity prices may fuel inflationary pressures "and constitute significant medium-term risk."

The Asian Development Bank has said controlling inflation must be the Asian region's top priority as strong growth, turmoil in the Middle East and Japan's nuclear crisis drive up food and oil prices.

Asian economies from South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan to China are all battling inflationary pressures.

But some economists are concerned that India's central bank may push too hard on the brakes.

The benchmark repurchase, or repo rate, at which the bank lends to commercial banks, is 6.75 percent while the reverse repo, paid to banks for deposits, is 5.75 percent.

"The bottom line is the central bank needs to act but it should not go overboard," said CLSA economist Rajeev Malik. "It must avoid a repeat of the mid-1990s outcome of killing inflation by crippling growth."

The government has said it expects the economy to expand by nine percent in the current fiscal year, returning to levels it reached before the global financial crisis.

But there are already fears that Asia's third-largest economy will undershoot the target because of interest rate increases.

Investment house Goldman Sachs has slashed its growth forecast for the year to March 2012 to 7.8 percent from 8.7 percent. Credit Suisse has trimmed its expansion forecast to 7.5 percent.

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Jihadists: bin Laden death will not mute Jihad call

(Reuters) - Members of Jihadist forums said they prayed the news of Osama bin Laden's death was not true, and hinted at retaliation if it was, in some of the first Islamist reaction to the al Qaeda leader's death.

"Oh God, please make this news not true...God curse you Obama," said one message on an Arabic language forum. "Oh Americans ... it is still legal for us to cut your necks."

"Osama may be killed but his message of Jihad will never die. Brothers and sisters, wait and see, his death will be a blessing in disguise," said a poster on another Islamist forum.

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Residents of upscale suburb incredulous wanted terrorist was in their midst

No one in the affluent Bilal Town suburb where Osama bin Laden seemed to suspect his presence here. Nor did they see the possibility that a wanted terrorist, let alone the most hunted man in the world, could live so close to one of its famed military institutions.

A suburb with large, sometimes garish houses, Bilal Town is one of the most upscale neighbourhoods of Abbottabad, a vacation spot set in the Himalayan foothills and a two-hour drive from the capital, Islamabad, Unlike most north-west cities, the population of Abbottabad, which was founded by a British colonial administrator in 1853, are ethnic Hazaras, not Pashtuns.

Osama bin Laden’s last stand was in a large house less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, where the country’s top brass trains, including former president Pervez Musharraf.

On the streets of Abbottabad, there was no visible reaction to events. Shops remained open. Residents went about their usual business. Fareed Alam, a 39-year-old employee of a non-governmental organization, said that if people believed that bin Laden was really dead, “You’d see the fire on the streets.”

Though Bin Laden’s white, roomy three-storey house has an unusually high boundary wall, outside its fences it did not stand out in a neighbourhood of oversized houses built to accommodate extended families that tend to live together in Pakistan.

But there was a little mystery. Neighbours said that two men, ethnic Pashtuns, would emerge from the house but did not mingle with locals. Some suggested that they were brothers and had lived there for five years or more. But they were many other Pashtuns in Abbottabad, so they wouldn’t have stood out.

Nor would they guess the duo could be connected to Mr. bin Laden. “This is such a sensitive place, with the military academy just across the road. Also the (intelligence) agencies are all over here,” said Azhar Khan, 32, who works for a non-governmental organization.

Mr. Khan said that he believed that bin Laden was “created by America” and he was probably actually killed long ago.

Other residents were angry that a burial at sea – bin Laden’s body was reportedly dumped in the ocean – was not in accordance with an Islamic burial; others demanded proof that the dead man was the al-Qaeda leader.

The bin Laden house did not look damaged from the outside. A cloth screen had been put up on one side of the compound Monday morning by the military, obscuring the view where the helicopter was said to be destroyed.

Pakistani soldiers and police stood guard around the area and stopped anyone from approaching the house.

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America's Most Wanted: Osama Bin Laden Killed After 13-Year Hunt

The United States had been trying to kill Osama bin Laden for 13 years, since the administration of President Bill Clinton.

"Bin Laden has been our national enemy self declared for far longer than any one person in our history," said Richard Clarke, an ABC News contributor who served as a counterterrorism advisor to Clinton and both presidents Bush.

For years the trail had gone cold, some thought he had left the region and Pakistani officials even claimed bin Laden must be dead. In the end he was found in a house where he may have been living for as many as six years, almost next door to Pakistani military installations and less than 100 miles from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

The son of a prominent and wealthy Saudi family, bin Laden first went to Afghanistan to fight the Russians but then turned on the United States.

On his orders thousands died, in the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, in the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and the 9/11 attacks of which he seemed so proud. Bin Laden boasted on tape that "We calculated in advance the number of casualties."

The discovery of bin Laden's hiding place in a million-dollar mansion in Pakistan was the result of a masterful CIA intelligence operation that focused on the courier who was his connection to the outside world.

"We had to piece it together," explained John Brennan, counterterrorism advisor to President Obama, "get [the courier's] nom de guerre, associate it with a real name and track it until we got to the compound."

Every video or audio message recorded by bin Laden went by courier, so each new message became an opportunity for the CIA to find him.

"That was his Achilles heel," said John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. "We were able to use the information provided by tracking his couriers to hunt him down and bring him to justice."

U.S. officials say detainees held at Guantanamo helped lead them to the courier.

In one early clue, according to a secret Pentagon cable made public by Wikileaks, senior Al Qaeda commander Abu al Libi told interrogators he became "the official messenger" for bin Laden and for a year in 2003 "moved his family to Abbottabad, Pakistan" -- the city near Islamabad where bin Laden was killed Sunday.

By August of last year, the CIA had a sharp focus on a newly built compound in the Abbottabad, suspicious of its large size and extensive security features, including a seven-foot wall on the terrace so the very tall bin Laden could be outside without being seen.

A family of the same size as bin Laden's was seen here, although bin Laden himself was never actually spotted.

But since August he had sent out, at least two new taped messages. One of them, remarkably, last October, focused on the severe flooding that had just occurred in the Abbottabad region.

Bin Laden had long been said to be in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan, Pakistan border, hiding in a cave as the U.S. sought to kill him with drone strikes from above. Instead, he was in a house with many peculiar features that brought it to the attention of U.S. authorities.

After locating the Al Qaeda courier in 2009 and then tracking him to the structure in 2010, the CIA noted that the house, built in 2005, had high exterior walls topped with barbed wire, high windows and few points of access. Residents burned their trash instead of putting it out. U.S. officials wondered if the extra seven-foot-high wall on a third-floor terrace was built to shield a man as tall as bin Laden, whose height was estimated at between 6'4" and 6'6".

The CIA began to believe that a high-value target was in the house. A CIA "red team" assigned to assess the house decided that it could well be sheltering bin Laden, even though he'd never been seen in the compound.

The CIA was responsible for "finding" and "fixing" the target, said a U.S. official, and the military "finished" the job.

According to U.S. officials, the Navy's SEAL Team Six practiced the assault in a replica of the compound built inside the United States.

Late Sunday night local time, two U.S. helicopters from Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and carrying Team Six SEALs flew in low from Afghanistan and swept into the compound. As CIA director Leon Panetta listened in, the Navy SEALs stormed the compound and engaged bin Laden and his men in a firefight, killing bin Laden and all those with him.

Two Bin Laden couriers were killed, as was Osama Bin Laden's son Khalid and a woman. Two women were injured. Children were present in the compound but were not harmed. U.S. officials said that bin Laden was asked to surrender but did not. He was shot in the head and then shot again to make sure he was dead.

The raid began on the smaller of two buildings in the compound, where the couriers were believed to live. The raid then moved to the larger three-story building. The couriers were killed downstairs, while bin Laden was upstairs.

After the raid, blood covered the floor of one room to the right inside the sprawling larger structure. In another room to the left that held a small kitchenette, broken computers could be seen, minus their hard drives. The SEALs also recovered papers, CDs, laptops, which were taken away for analysis.

One of the U.S. Blackhawk helicopters was damaged but not destroyed during the operation, and U.S. forces elected to destroy it themselves with explosives. At least a dozen individuals who were present in the compound were left flex cuffed by the side of the road by the SEALs when they departed, according to a senior administration official.

The Americans took bin Laden's body into custody after the firefight, taking it back to Afghanistan by helicopter, and confirmed his identity. His DNA matched DNA taken from multiple bin Laden relatives with almost 100 percent certainty, and his body was found to be more than 6'4". He was also identified by two women at the compound after he was killed, and via facial recognition analysis from photos sent back to CIA headquarters.

A U.S. official said bin Laden was later buried at sea in accordance with Islamic practice at 2 a.m. Washington time. Bin Laden's body was taken to the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, a U.S. aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Sea, according to officials. His body was washed and wrapped in the prescribed way. A military officer read religious remarks that were translated by a native Arabic speaker before bin Laden's remains were sent into the deep.

Remarkably, bin Laden was hiding almost under the nose of the Pakistani military, which has a major garrison in Abbottabad and the Pakistani version of West Point. A senior U.S. official says the U.S. government believes that bin Laden may have been living in the house ever since it was built in 2005.

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Panel proposes ‘principles and objects' for Lokpal Bill

New Delhi, May 2:  Civil society members on the Lokpal Bill joint drafting committee have submitted two documents outlining “principles and objects” for the proposed law.

“The civil society members submitted a document with respect to the objects of the Bill as well as one that enunciated the general principles underlying the Bill,” the Human Resource Development Minister, Mr Kapil Sibal, told newspersons after the second meeting here on Monday.

Both sides agreed to reflect on the documents.

Mr Sibal said it was decided to fast-track the drafting process ahead of the June 30 deadline and the committee had agreed to meet again on May 7, 23 and 30. The committee may even meet daily in June to keep with the deadline and help the Government introduce the Bill in the Monsoon session, a panel member said.

“The meeting was very good, very cooperative. There was no difference of opinion,” Mr Sibal said.

Mr Prashant Bhushan, civil society member and lawyer, said: “The discussion was on essential features, objects and reasons of the Bill which has been prepared according to the main provisions of the UN Convention against Corruption.”

He said all signatories of the UN Convention against Corruption have to pass this kind of a law.

India signed the UN convention in 2005, but is yet to ratify it.

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Back to 9/11, with forgiveness & fear Indian families sigh, don’t celebrate

May 2: For the Yambem family of Imphal, the news of Osama bin Laden’s death brought a sense of calm satisfaction. In faraway Hyderabad, the relatives of Deepika Kumar Sattaluri expressed similar sentiments.

The families of some of the NRIs who died in 9/11 were largely restrained in their reactions to the killing of the attack’s mastermind, their relief tempered by fears of reprisals.

“This is the greatest day for the family and all those against terrorism. Now that the symbol of terrorism is dead, my brother Jupiter’s soul can rest in peace,” Laba Yambem, Jupiter’s elder brother, said in Imphal.

Jupiter, then 41, was supervising breakfast at the Windows on the World, a restaurant in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, when the building was attacked. Jupiter, the manager of the eatery, died, leaving behind his American wife Nancy McCardle Yambem and their five-year-old son Shanti.

Manipur’s capital had long power cuts this morning, which meant the Yambems had not caught the news on TV. It was around 10am that a cellphone message from a friend in Delhi beeped on Laba’s cellphone.

He let out a sigh of suppressed happiness as he read the SMS: the man responsible for the death of his brother and thousands of others was finally dead.

“My first reaction was that Allah had been merciful to my brother’s soul. We can only wonder what heights Jupiter would have scaled if he were alive today,” Laba said.

Jupiter left India after he was selected as a co-ordinator at Camp America, a youth exchange programme, in 1981. He stayed back in America and married Nancy, a music therapist, and they settled in New York.

“I have mixed feelings,” Nancy said over the phone from the US this evening. “It’s a great end to a chapter, a justice that everybody in the US had been waiting for a long, long time.”

She added: “The families weren’t sure if they would ever hear this. But at the same time, it brings back memories and a lot of negativity. I just visited my son in school to see if he was feeling fine.”

So is it time for celebration for the Yambems in Imphal and New York?

“I am not very comfortable with the idea of celebrating this. My husband was murdered and killed. I know what it feels like. Although Osama needed to be brought to justice, and death was probably the only way to do it, I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of celebrating a killing,” said Nancy, who comes to Manipur every two years.

“I would not be able to live in my shoes had I not been able to forgive Osama.”

The show of emotion was restrained in Hyderabad too. Deepika’s cousin Malleshwari Deverakonda recalled her agony during the months it had taken to receive final confirmation that the 28-year-old IT professional had died in the attack while at work in her office at the World Trade Center.

“A complete list was never given and we came to know about her death only after months,” she said.

Malleshwari’s brother Gopalakrishna wasn’t sure if this was the end of terror. “I don’t know whether I should be celebrating the news of Osama’s death. Can we hope there won’t be retaliation?” Gopalakrishna, who works for an international airline, said over the phone from his home in Chicago.

Among the 41 Indians said to have died in the attack, around seven to eight traced their roots to Andhra Pradesh. Most of the state’s residents in the US are doctors and engineers.

“I am relieved at a world without Osama,” said J.A. Chowdhary, convener of the IT committee of business chamber CII’s Andhra chapter. Chowdhary said he knew “at least a dozen-odd” IT professionals working in the US at the time of 9/11.

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EC stepped up security in East Midnapore after CPI(M) complaint

Ahead of the fourth phase of Assembly election in West Bengal on May 3, the Election Commission today further strengthened the security arrangement following complaints of threat and terror by the ruling Left Front.

“Security arrangement has been revamped further in East Midnapore district following complaint by the LF. There will not be any problem for any voter to exercise franchise in the presence of a huge contingent of central force and State security personnel in the districts going to poll on May 3”, West Bengal CEO Sunil Kumar Gupta said here today.

Mr. Gupta said a LF delegation led by CPI(M) leaders, Rabin Deb and Sukhendu Panigrahi, today called on him and submitted a letter, alleging “their supporters are under threat of terror by the Trinamool Congress and are not allowed to enter several areas under East Midnapore district.”

Demanding measures from the EC for the protection of the Front supporters and workers, CPI(M) leader Rabin Deb said that “without any concrete step by the EC against growing evidences of the campaign of terror and violence in East Midnapore, it is very difficult for our supporters to exercise franchise in the areas under Nandigram, Khejuri, Patashpur, Bhagabanpur, Chandipur, Contai and Moyna.”

Responding to the complaint, the CEO said that he had already ordered the district administration to act immediately to ensure safety and security of all voters irrespective of the political parties they belonged to.

“Strong security arrangement has been made in all these areas with the central force engaged in area domination, route march and flag march on the basis of vulnerability mapping”, Mr. Gupta said.

Mr. Gupta said 1.26 crore electorate will decide the fate of 366 candidates, comprising 327 male and 39 female contestants, for 63 seats under Howrah, Hooghly, East Midnapore and part of Burdwan districts during the fourth phase.

20,000 EVMs will be used in 15,711 polling stations, he said.

While maximum number of 13 candidates were at Bally in Howrah district in this phase, lowest number of three contestants were in six seats at Singur, Pursurah, Arambagh, Goghat, Khanakul and Bhagabanpur, the CEO said.

Chinsurah Assembly seat under Hooghly district had 327 polling stations, the largest in this phase, with the highest number of electorate at 2.63 lakh, while Bally seat in Howrah district had the lowest number of electorate at 1.42 lakh, Mr. Gupta said.

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