BRICS

Thousands of people from India's north-eastern states have fled the southern city of Bangalore amid fears that they will be targeted in attacks.

Indian Home Secretary RK Singh blamed the mass exodus on "rumour mongering".

He insisted there was was no threat to anyone from the north-east living anywhere in the country.

Correspondents say the rumours of attacks may be linked to clashes in the north-eastern state of Assam last month.

More than 300,000 people fled after fighting between indigenous Bodo tribes and Muslim settlers in Assam.

Fresh violence between the two sides was reported on Thursday when a mob burnt down a bus and a road bridge, reports say.

Police said local Muslims blocked a highway in protest against an overnight incident in which a group of Bodos set a car on fire near Rangiya, 60km (40 miles) west of Assam's main city of Guwahati.

'All frightened'

The main railway station in Bangalore was flooded with migrant workers from north-eastern states after rumours spread on Wednesday.

The railways ran special trains to the north-east to cope with the rush, officials said.

There are 250,000 people from the north-east living and working in Bangalore, which is often referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

Many of them are students, security guards and workers in the hospitality sector.

Around 4,000 fled on Wednesday, a senior police officer in the city told the BBC.

He said that rumours about possible violence were spread by text messages.

"We will soon catch hold of people who sent out these messages," said the police officer.

Karnataka Chief Minister Jagdish Shettar said that he had reassured Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that there were "no untoward incidents nor any threat to people of north-eastern states [living in Bangalore]."

He added: "I promised that [the] necessary steps would be taken to give protection to these people."

Manoj, a security guard from a north-east state, told the BBC that residents of the region were "all frightened".

"My friend [from the region] was threatened by a knife-wielding man saying that he should leave the city if he cared for his life," he said.

A worker at a city restaurant from the region said there were "rumours that people from the north-east would be attacked".

The rumours came a day after a 22-year-old Tibetan student was allegedly attacked in Mysore city near Bangalore by two people who suspected him of being from the north-east.

Many young people from the restive north-east region have migrated to the cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore in search of better jobs and education.

An 18-year-old orphan girl, Raksha, studying in a local polytechnic in India, committed suicide in her hostel room on Tuesday night. The 18-year-old ended her life after two youth terrorized her by posting obscene and graphic comments about her on a social networking site.

According to Indian media reports, pushed to the wall by this vicious online attack, the girl hanged herself in her room at Mehar Chand Polytechnic hostel. She also left a suicide note blaming the youths Deepak Saini and Lovepreet.

The police arrested both the youths on Wednesday and they will be produced before a court on Thursday.

According to police, the accused Deepak and Lovepreet had graduated from the same polytechnic this year. Police said Raksha and Lovepreet were friends. Relations between the two had become strained sometime before, said ACP, Jalandhar north, Balkar Singh.

When she stopped speaking to him, Lovepreet began bombarding her with threatening SMSs and even threatened to throw acid on her.

It was the last straw for Raksha when the youths posted an obscene message on her social network site profile on Tuesday.

Police said when she did not mark her night attendance other hostellers went to her room at 9 pm to check on her. They found the door bolted from inside. Alarmed at getting no reponse to their knocks, the girls informed the hostel warden and the door was broke open.

But, it was too late as Raksha was already dead.

 

Regional Director of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council for Asia and Africa, Stephen Wong, said on Tuesday his country is looking for ways to develop trade cooperation with Iran.

Summer should be the busy season for Shen Lin's musical instrument workshop in the southwestern city of Kunming. But her monthly sales of traditional wooden flutes are dwindling as China's economy slows, with no sign of a widely anticipated rebound in sight.

"I have less for my workers to do, which means they are paid less. They complain, but I have no choice," said Shen, who runs the company with her husband. "I don't know when things will improve."

China's economic recovery is taking longer than expected. But facing a collapse in export growth and weak consumer spending, Beijing is avoiding an aggressive stimulus and sticking to a gradual strategy of small interest rate cuts and modest spending increases.

A repeat of China's huge stimulus in response to the 2008 crisis, based on a government-led flood of investment, could push up overall growth. But it would set back efforts to nurture a self-sustaining expansion based on domestic consumption, reducing reliance on exports and investment in a shift economists say is needed to keep incomes and living standards rising.

The 2008 stimulus helped China emerge quickly from the global crisis but fueled inflation and a building frenzy that left some communities with underused highways, stadiums and other facilities and debt they might not be able to repay.

"The government isn't sitting on its hands. It has been acting," said Capital Economics analyst Mark Williams. "People remember what happened in 2008, and obviously compared to that, it seems like a pretty lackluster reaction. But a re-run of that would do more harm than good."

Forecasters initially expected China's falling growth rate to rebound as early as the first quarter of this year. That has been pushed back repeatedly amid a drumbeat of bad news from debt-plagued Europe and a sluggish U.S. recovery.

July export growth fell to just 1 percent from the previous month's 11.3 percent. Consumer spending and factory output also weakened.

Now analysts expect a recovery late this year but say it will be too weak to drive global demand without support from Europe and the United States.

Last month, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for China's growth this year from 8.2 percent to a still-robust 8 percent and warned a hard landing, or abrupt slowdown and a surge in job losses, still was possible.

China still is one of the strongest economies, with growth of 7.6 percent in the three months ending in June. But the abrupt decline from double-digit rates of previous years hurts companies that depend on high growth to drive demand for new factories, apartments and other goods.

The slowdown is due largely to government efforts in 2010-11 to use lending and investment curbs to cool overheating and inflation.

Communist leaders reversed course in late 2011 and promised more bank lending and help to struggling exporters after global demand plunged.

Beijing has cut interest rates twice since early June, approved multibillion-dollar investments by state companies and boosted spending on building airports and other public works. Analysts expect one more rate cut this year.

Local governments have jumped on the bandwagon, announcing trillions of yuan (hundreds of billions of dollars) in planned construction. It is unclear, though, how many of those projects might be built, because they still must win approval from cautious planners in Beijing.

Chinese retailers and manufacturers in some industries such as shipbuilding say sales are down by as much as 50 percent from a year ago. The newspaper China Times said this week 46 shipyards might face bankruptcy if orders fail to improve.

"Most of my friends think the economy will be better in the second half of this year, but I am afraid it could be next year," said Zou Jiahong, the boss of Sichuan Chuanwei Zhiguang Food Co., a food processor with 100 employees in the western province of Sichuan.

Beijing's response is complicated by political wrangling ahead of a once-a-decade handover of power to younger Communist Party leaders that begins in October. It lasts through early next year, when a new premier and other top government officials will be installed.

"We do not expect the outgoing government to jump to remedy slow domestic demand with fiscal stimulus," said Carl Weinberg of High-Frequency Economics in a report this week. "If needed, this task will be left to incoming leaders."

Shen, the musical instrument manufacturer, said that instead of rising as usual during the April-to-September tourist season, monthly sales are down 20 percent.

"I heard from guides there are not many tourists this year," she said. "Business online is even worse. I sold 300 to 400 instruments every month last year during the busy season, but it is down to just dozens lately."

Chinese leaders have avoided giving a forecast for the timing of a rebound. Premier Wen Jiabao, due to step down in March after a decade as China's top economic official, warned last month the economy still faced "relatively large" pressure to slow further.

"There is no rush," said Weinberg. With growth at 7.6 percent, "Beijing can be patient."

A man suspected in a string of grisly rapes and murders that gave a South African community the moniker "village of death" has been arrested, a local newspaper said Wednesday.

Bulelani Mabhayi, 39, was arrested on Sunday after an elderly woman was founded hacked to death the night before in the Eastern Cape village of Tholeni, the Daily Dispatch reported.

He is being charged with a string of unresolved rapes and murders in the village where 19 women have been slain since 2009, police spokesman Jackson Manatha told the paper.

Police took Mabhayi to the village, where he pointed out the homes of his suspected victims, Manatha said.

"The whole village tailed the police as the man pointed out one house after the other," he told the paper.

Mabhayi is related to convicted murderer Mqwalaseli Mabhayi, who this year was sentenced to two life terms over the murders of a 70-year-old and her 12-year-old granddaughter in Tholeni.

Residents said they were relieved but still scared.

"We don't know if he was the only one committing these crimes or not. We will remain cautious until we know he was the only suspect," resident Nowinile Mayekiso told the paper.

South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of rape and murder outside of a war zone. Although the number of murders has steadily declined since the end of white-minority rule in 1994, an average of 43 people are killed every day.

 

A federal judge in Brazil has suspended construction work on a massive dam in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Judge Souza Prudente said that work could only resume on the $11bn, 11,000MW Belo Monte Dam after the indigenous communities living in the area were consulted.

The dam has been condemned by environmentalists and rights activists, who say that it would devastate wildlife and the livelihoods of 40,000 people who live in the area that would be flooded.

The government, however, says the dam will be a source of clean, sustainable energy, and that it will help fuel the country's economy.

The dam would be the world's third largest when completed on the Xingu River that feeds the Amazon.

The court noted that when congress approved the project in 2005, it called for an environmental impact study after the start of the work.

Environmental impact

Native communities had been given the right to air their concerns in parliament on the basis of that environmental-impact study.

This was not done, the court said.

It said that the Norte Energia consortium in charge of the project will be able to appeal the decision to a higher court.

Norte Energia told AFP it was awaiting formal notification of the court ruling before responding.

The court said the consortium was liable for a daily fine of $250,000 should it flout the order.

"It's a historic decision for the country and for the native communities," Antonia Melo, co-ordinator of the Xingu Vivo indigenous movement, said.

"It's a great victory which shows that Belo Monte is not a done deal. We are very happy and satisfied."

Fierce opposition

About 12,000 workers are due to be working on the dam's constructions, 24 hours a day, by the end of the year. Up to 22,000 are scheduled to be at the site by next year.

Work on the dam began a year ago, despite fierce opposition from local people and environmental activists.

Indigenous groups fear the dam will harm their way of life while environmentalists have warned of deforestation, greenhouse-gas emissions and irreparable damage to the ecosystem.

Belo Monte is expected to flood an area of 500sq km along the Xingu and displace 16,000 people, according to the government, although some nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) put the number at 40,000 displaced.

Some 150 indigenous activists recently occupied one of the dam's four construction sites for three weeks to demand that Norte Energia honour commitments made to their communities.

The federal government plans to invest a total $1.2bn to assist the displaced, by the time the dam is completed in 2019.

At least four blasts rocked Indian state of Manipur on Tuesday as the country’s 66th independence day is being observed, reports say.

According to India media, three blasts were heard 2km from parade ground in Imphal, the capital of state while another blast reported in Thoubal district. Two persons were reportedly hurt in the blast.

“No one has been reported to be injured in the blasts,” Times Now reports.

Chinese police in the southwestern city of Chongqing have shot dead a fugitive serial killer and armed robber, after a massive manhunt, officials have said.

Zhou Kehua, 42, who was responsible for nine deaths across several provinces, was finally cornered and shot dead at a Chongqing shoe factory around dawn, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.

The case has gripped the country, and involved the mobilisation of thousands of police to catch one of China's most wanted fugitives.

Zhou had been implicated in robberies and killings in three provinces dating back to 2004, and resurfaced last week to shoot dead a woman outside a Chongqing bank, Xinhua said.

Authorities described Zhou, who targeted people withdrawing money from banks, as "ruthless and extremely dangerous".

"Police ... confirmed that the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau was praised and honoured by China's Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu immediately after the operation," Xinhua said.

Chinese news portals showed a picture, provided by the police, of Zhou sprawled on the ground with blood streaming from his head.

The latest violence had earlier prompted senior Chinese officials, including Public Security Minister Meng and Chongqing Communist Party boss Zhang Dejiang, to issue directives that the suspect be arrested as soon as possible.

Gun crime is rare in China as a result of tight controls over firearms.

The hunt for Zhou has been the most popular topic on China's Twitter-like microblogging site Sina Weibo for the past few days, and has dominated the news.

The murder of a British businessman by the wife of an ousted Chinese politician was supposed to be an open-and-shut case, by the government's account. The victim threatened the life of Gu Kailai's son. Gu poisoned the Briton, was caught and confessed. End of story.

Not so fast. The trial proceedings, and official statements about them, have failed to clarify glaring omissions in the case.

Legal and political scholars say much of the case has been implausible, leaving major questions unanswered, not least of which is whether the victim posed any real threat to Gu's son at all. Also, why would a high official's wife carry out such a murder herself? Where is Bo Xilai, the alleged murderer's husband and man at the center of the messiest scandal in two decades to rock the Chinese leadership?

The government account depicts Gu as a depressed woman on medication who turned willful murderer after Briton Neil Heywood threatened the safety of her son, Bo Guagua. Gu lured the victim to a hotel in Chongqing, got him drunk then poured cyanide into his mouth. It says Gu and her co-defendant "confessed to intentional homicide" and appeared repentant in court last Thursday during a speedy, seven-hour trial.

"It sounds like a story from a fairy tale. The details of the case have very little credibility," Peking University law professor He Weifang said of the narrative via state media and official comments.

Much of the speculation outside the courtroom has centered on whether the slaying was the result of corrupt business dealings gone awry, or if Heywood was somehow involved in moving money overseas for Gu.

The official line on the motive — Gu protecting her son — serves to deflect any attention to potential corruption within what was one of China's top political families. It also serves up a punishable offense but with a mitigating circumstance that avoids the death penalty — thus, eliminating a punishment that might crystalize Gu's position as a scapegoat and draw an outcry among the public.

Steve Tsang, director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham in Britain, said the motive helps, firstly, to "avoid reference to Bo Xilai and therefore the issue of corruption and abuse of power." Secondly, it shows that Gu "did it because she thought her son was in mortal danger."

"Therefore it was 'intentional homicide' that could be understood, and everything is playing out to script."

Gu's arrest and the ouster of her husband Bo, the Communist Party boss of Chongqing until March, sparked the biggest political turbulence in China since the putdown of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Her tightly orchestrated trial has been a step toward resolving the scandal before the party's once-a-decade leadership transition this fall. Before his fall, Bo was a contender for a top job.

The official Xinhua news agency said Gu accepted the indictment during the trial in the eastern city of Hefei, and is ready to accept her punishment. A verdict is to be handed down later.

But He, the law professor, said too many important questions remain, such as the nature of the threat Heywood allegedly posed to Gu's son. Xinhua said prosecutors presented emails exchanged between Heywood and Bo Guagua, and a man who attended the hearing said Heywood wrote that he would "destroy" the son.

But "in order to prove that there was an actual threat of death, or that her son was in a situation in which he faced immediate danger, there needs to be concrete evidence," He said. "The evidence is too ambiguous."

He also expressed skepticism that Heywood would willingly travel to Chongqing and have drinks with a woman after threatening her son. The legal expert also said it was "inconceivable" that Gu would personally carry out the deed.

Many other questions have been raised, including over the claim in Xinhua reports that Gu and Heywood became acquainted in 2005, which contradicts Western media reports that the two had known each other since the late 1990s when Bo Guagua, then 12, had just started going to a prestigious boarding school in Britain, apparently with Heywood's help.

No specific time line has been provided for the events leading up to the slaying. When exactly was Bo Guagua allegedly threatened by Heywood? By November last year, Bo Guagua was a Harvard Kennedy School graduate student living thousands of kilometers (miles) away from Britain. Why did Gu feel like Heywood posed a serious threat to her son?

The most conspicuous omission in official accounts of the crime so far is that of Gu's husband, Bo Xilai, given that his political downfall was precipitated by the exposure of the crime, allegedly committed by his wife in the city that he ruled with a firm grip. A man who attended the trial told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that the court heard evidence that Chongqing police chief and Bo's close aide, Wang Lijun, was informed by Gu of her plan to kill Heywood and even participated in planning it for a time.

"If Wang Lijun was in on the conspiracy from the very beginning, could he have decided on something like this, either to be involved, or then to be out of it, without telling Bo Xilai?" asked Tsang. "It is hard to believe that Bo Xilai would not have been informed and indeed his permission requested."

In an odd and unexplained twist, Wang later became the person who exposed the crime, the court heard, according to the court attendee.

Another seeming irregularity is that the younger Bo did not have to testify in person in court despite being depicted as key to the murder motive, Tsang said.

Tsang said he believes that the party leadership has drawn three political parameters around the case: first, that murder by a senior leader's wife must be punished, though short of execution; second, that Bo Xilai's case is unlikely to be resolved before the political transition; and third, that Bo Guagua is not to be implicated out of concern that other party leaders' overseas children might someday be dragged into political affairs back home.

"If you accept that these are the basic political parameters first and the script was subsequently written to make it work, then you see how the script becomes eventually what it looks like and how it can't actually really be a consistent narrative," he said.

Still, trying the wife of a senior political leader already has served a purpose domestically, sending a message that all people are equal before the law, said Nicholas Howson, a Chinese law expert at University of Michigan.

The trial itself is "quite significant to the Chinese audience," Howson said. "To the extent that people know about it, I think that they wouldn't be that concerned about the obvious silliness in some of the evidence offered or some substantive aspects of the confession itself."

A senior aide to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has flown to China for talks on the crisis, officials say.

The Chinese foreign ministry said Bouthaina Shaaban would meet Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi later.

The ministry said it was part of its effort to implement the UN's six-point peace plan. China has twice vetoed UN resolutions against the Assad regime.

Meanwhile, UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos is due to arrive in Syria to assess the flow of emergency aid.

She is expected to ask for more visas for foreign aid workers as the Syrian Arab Red Crescent struggles to distribute food.

The UN says an estimated two million Syrian civilians have now been affected by the crisis and more than one million have fled their homes.

Tens of thousands of people have fled across Syria's borders into Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq amid continuing violence across the country.

In another development, foreign ministers of the Islamic Co-operation Organisation (OIC) have called for Syria to be suspended from the 57-nation bloc at an emergency two-day summit in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which starts on Tuesday.

Only ministers from Algeria and Iran, which is regarded as Syria's closest ally, were against the recommendation, reports say.

"We certainly do not agree with the suspension of any OIC member," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said after a preliminary meeting in the city of Jeddah on Monday.

"We have to look for other ways, means and mechanisms for resolving conflicts and crises," he said.

Downed jet

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement that China had always "actively balanced its work between the Syrian government and the opposition".

He repeated China's call for the "practical implementation" of former UN envoy Kofi Annan's peace plan - now widely considered defunct - and for "an immediate ceasefire".

"Receiving Shaaban in China is part of the above-mentioned work by the Chinese side," Mr Qin said, adding: "China is also considering inviting Syrian opposition groups in the near term to China."

China, along with fellow UN Security Council permanent member Russia, has vetoed UN resolutions condemning the violent crackdown by Mr Assad's government.

Correspondents say it wants to deflect criticism and show it is trying to develop a political solution to the Syrian crisis.

In Syria, rebels clashed with government forces in the northern city of Aleppo and the capital Damascus on Monday, opposition groups said.

Activist group the Local Co-ordination Committees said at least 64 people had been killed in Damascus and its suburbs.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government forces had begun a new advance against rebels in Aleppo, which has seen fierce clashes in recent weeks.

Syrian rebels also produced footage of a man they claim was the captured pilot of a fighter jet shot down in the east of the country.

The Free Syrian Army (FSA) said it had shot the aircraft down near the Iraqi border.

However, state media say the plane crashed because of "technical problems" and a search is under way to find the pilot.

Indian police on Monday arrested famed TV yoga guru and anti-corruption campaigner Baba Ramdev as he attempted to lead a procession of thousands of supporters to parliament.

Ramdev, an eccentric saffron-robed holy man with a yoga empire that spans the globe, began a protest in New Delhi last Thursday demanding the government do more to repatriate illicit money stashed by Indians in foreign accounts.

Police parked buses and erected barricades across the route taken by Ramdev and his supporters, many of whom had come from his home town of Haridwar in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Ramdev "offered to be arrested and we are making other preventative arrests as well", area police commander Taj Hassan told AFP.

Ramdev and activist Anna Hazare have made joint efforts to mobilise Indians to fight corruption, following a string of major scandals that have tarnished the Congress-led government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"Oust Congress -- save the country," Ramdev declared at the rally.

Hazare, a former army driver who models his appearance on independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, led a huge protest movement in 2011 but his popularity and ability to tap into public anger have since waned.

Ramdev, whose current protest has been ignored by the government -- unlike in 2011 when senior ministers held meetings with him -- said he had wanted to march to parliament to have the voice of his supporters heard by lawmakers.

Police said Ramdev and other arrested protesters were transported to a stadium in the centre of New Delhi as supporters jammed the streets, making it difficult for the bus carrying the guru to move.

Initially police had planned to hold Ramdev in a stadium on the outskirts of the Indian capital. But shifting him there proved impossible "due to the traffic jam and monsoon showers", police spokesman Rajan Bhagat told AFP.

Police said they were detaining the guru temporarily and he would probably be released without charge.

Thousands of his supporters shouting "hail mother India" followed the guru to the stadium barely a kilometre from the arrest site, creating a monster traffic gridlock in one of New Delhi's busiest office districts.

India's ruling Congress party, meanwhile, charged that Ramdev was being used by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the country's main opposition.

"The country has seen today that the masks have fallen and the real faces have been revealed," Congress spokesman Janardhan Dwivedi said after BJP president Nitin Gadkari delivered a speech of support at Ramdev's rally.

"The BJP president has gone there and they (Ramdev's supporters) say they have no relationship with political parties. I am saying the masks are off," he said.