Slave girl kept in cellar awarded $160,000 in UK court

LONDON: A deaf and mute girl smuggled to Britain and kept as a slave for almost a decade must be paid £1,00,000 ($1,60,000) by her captors, a court ruled on Wednesday.

Trafficked from Pakistan as a 10-year-old girl, the victim was repeatedly raped by Ilyas Ashar, 85, who along with his wife Tallat, 69, forced her to work as their servant.

She was discovered in the cellar of their five-bedroom house sleeping on a cot bed by investigators looking into allegations of money laundering.

Now in her 20s, she learned a form of sign language to testify at the trial last year.

"The money will in no way make up for what she went through over a number of years, but it will help her move on with her life and continue her inspiring recovery from these awful events," said Salford Chief Superintendent Mary Doyle.

"I believe today's outcome also gives hope to any victim of trafficking. It reminds us that there are people out there willing to bring people to this country purely to be exploited but, with the correct use of the law, the perpetrators can be brought fully to justice."

The court calculated the Ashars should pay the victim £101,300: what she would have been paid if she had earned the minimum wage working for the couple for 12 hours a day, every day since 2003 except for ten days off.

The two also must also pay back benefits to the state that they wrongfully claimed for the girl.

The victim, who cannot be named, could not read or write but was taught to write her name by the Ashars so that they could claim social benefits on her behalf.

Ilyas Ashar was earlier jailed for 15 years for rape, trafficking and benefit fraud, and his wife Tallat was jailed for five years for trafficking and benefit fraud.

Their daughter Faaiza Ashar, 46, was ordered to do community service after being convicted of benefit fraud.

At their earlier conviction, judge Peter Lakin said the Ashars had shown no remorse and were "deeply unpleasant, highly manipulative and dishonest people" who did not treat the girl as a human being. 

Australia's Richard Flanagan wins Man Booker prize for fiction

LONDON: An Indian lost out on winning the Man Booker prize second time in as many years as Australian author Richard Flanagan took away the literary world's most coveted prize for his book 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North'.

Flanagan's book is the story of his father as a prisoner during war in a Japanese prison and was called a literary masterpiece by the jury.

Flanagan - the Tasmanian-born author is the third Australian to win the coveted prize which, for the first time in its 46-year history, is now expanded to include entries from writers of all nationalities, writing originally in English and published in the UK.

He joins an impressive literary canon of former winners including fellow Australians Thomas Kenneally (Schindler's Ark, 1982) and Peter Carey (Oscar & Lucinda, 1988 and The True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001).

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is the sixth novel from Flanagan which centres upon the experiences of surgeon Dorrigo Evans in a Japanese POW camp on the now infamous Thailand-Burma railway.

Named after a famous Japanese book by the haiku poet Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North was described by the 2014 judges as 'a harrowing account of the cost of war to all who are caught up in it'. Questioning the meaning of heroism, the book explores what motivates acts of extreme cruelty and shows that perpetrators may be as much victims as those they abuse.

Interestingly, the book is the real story of Flanagan's father as a prisoner of war. He was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway. The author took 12 years to write it.

Ironically, Flanagan's father died the day he finished the book

Flanagan was announced as the 2014 winner by AC Grayling, chair of judges, at an awards dinner at London's Guildhall.

He was presented with a trophy from The Duchess of Cornwall and a £50,000 cheque from Emmanuel Roman, Chief Executive of Man Group.

Grayling said "The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism. 'This is the book that Richard Flanagan was born to write".



Nominees for the 2014 Man Booker prize for fiction. (AP photo)


In addition to his £50,000 prize and trophy, Flanagan also receives a designer bound edition of his book, and a further £2,500 for being shortlisted.

On winning the Man Booker prize, an author can expect international recognition, not to mention a dramatic increase in book sales.

Sales of Hilary Mantel's winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have exceeded a million copies in their UK editions. His novels have subsequently been adapted for stage and screen, with the highly acclaimed theatre productions of both novels arriving on Broadway in April 2015.

Granta, publisher of Eleanor Catton's 2013 winner, The Luminaries, has sold 300,000 copies of the book in the UK and almost 500,000 worldwide.

Kolkata boy Neel Mukherjee was among the six short listed authors for his book Mukherjee's latest novel The Lives of Others.

In 2013, Indian writer Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland lost out to Eleanor Catton who became the youngest writer to ever win a Man Booker prize.

The 28-year-old New Zealander's book The Luminaries - an 832-page murder mystery based on the gold rush in the 19th-century is also the longest novel to ever win the coveted literary prize.

"There is a very powerful cohort of contemporary American writers, but neither the longlist nor the shortlist was overwhelmed by them," he said.BANGALORE: Oracle India looks to be in the middle of yet another bribery issue, and multiple sources told TOI that Sandeep Mathur's sudden exit as managing director of the company is linked to this.

Mathur quit soon after returning from an Oracle conference in San Francisco earlier this month. Shailender Kumar, group VP-key accounts for Oracle India, has taken over as interim MD.

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British police seize over $400,000 suspected funds for IS

London: British police have confiscated 250,000 pounds (about 401,713 dollars) of suspected funds for the Islamic State (IS), the anti-terror authorities said Monday.

 Most of the money was seized from travellers departing from Manchester Airport to Turkey, who were suspected of supplying cash for militia fighters in Syria and Iraq.

"Terrorists need money to fight. At the Turkish border with Syria there are shops where you can buy guns, boots, rations and if you are going out there to fight you need money and you want equipment," Xinhua quoted Tony Mole, detective chief superintendent of the Greater Manchester Police (GMP), as saying.

"We take that cash away from people, not only stopping them from buying weapons and funding terror organisations which are a threat to the UK and an international threat but we also disrupt that person," added Mole, who is also head of the North West Counter Terrorism Unit (NWCTU).

Some of the confiscated cash was spotted in the travellers' luggage or hidden under their clothes.

The confiscated cash was seized between April 2013 and April this year, while details for the rest of Britain were not available yet.

Why beer tastes good to us

London: The importance of yeast in beer brewing has long been underestimated but researchers from University of Leuven in Belgium now report that beer yeasts produce chemicals that mimic the aroma of fruits in order to attract flies that can transport the yeast cells to new places.

Interestingly, yeasts are essential for the flavour of beverages such as beer and wine.

“In fact, yeasts may even be responsible for much of the 'terroir', the connection between a particular growing area and wine flavour which previously often was attributed to differences in the soil,” said Kevin Verstrepen from University of Leuven, also known as KU Leuven.

The new collaborative study from VIB, a life sciences research institute, and KU Leuven shows that the fruity volatiles produced by yeast cells are highly appealing to fruit flies.

This attraction allows some yeast cells to hitch a ride with the insects who carry the otherwise immobile microbes to new food sources.

Flies are strongly attracted to normal yeast cells when compared to mutant yeasts that do not produce esters.

“Knowing that esters make beer taste good, it seems that the same flavours that allow us to enjoy our beer probably evolved to attract flies and to help yeast disperse into broader ecosystems,” explained neuroscientist Emre Yaksi from Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), an academic research initiative.

The team believes that their findings have far-reaching implications.

“We all know that flowers attract insects by producing aromas. But there is also a lot of microbes living inside flowers and the chemicals they produce may also play an important role,” added Joaquin Christiaens from VIB who performed the experiments with yeast cells.

New app enables smartphones to understand gestures

London: Scientists have developed a new app enabling users to operate their smartphone with gestures.

The app developed by Professor Otmar Hilliges and his staff at ETH expands the range of potential interactions with such devices and the gesture control significantly expands the range of smartphone functionality.

The app lets the smartphone understand gestures such as movement of your index finger to the left, or right or spreading out of your fingers, or imitate a pair of pliers or the firing of a pistol.

This gesturing wizardry is made possible by a new type of algorithm that uses the smartphone's built-in camera to register its environment and then executes the gesture command associated with the gesture it observes.

The program also recognizes the hand's distance from the camera and warns the user when the hand is either too close or too far away and currently recognizes six different gestures and executes their corresponding commands.

The researchers are convinced that this new way of operating smartphones greatly increases the range of interactivity. The researcher's objective is to keep the gestures as simple as possible, so that users can operate their smartphone effortlessly.