Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating


This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.


After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.


It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.


All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.


For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.


Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."


What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.


"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.


Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.


What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.


A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.


The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.


Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.


Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.


"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.


The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.


A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.


Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.


"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."


___


Online:


Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html


___


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


Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe


Read More..

Obama Signs 'Fiscal Cliff' Bill With Autopen


Jan 3, 2013 12:53am







ap obama fiscal cliff press Conference thg 130101 wblog Obama Signs Fiscal Cliff Bill With Autopen

Charles Dharapak/AP Photo


HONOLULU, Hawaii — President Obama has signed the “fiscal cliff” legislation into law via autopen from Hawaii, where he is vacationing with his family.


The bill to avert the “fiscal cliff” arrived at the White House late this afternoon and it was immediately processed, according to a senior White House official. A copy was delivered to the president in Hawaii for review. He then directed the bill to be signed by autopen back in Washington, D.C.


The Bush administration deemed in 2005 that the use of the autopen is constitutional, although President George W. Bush never used the mechanical device to replicate his signature on a bill.


The office of legal counsel found at the time that Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution allows the president to use the autopen to sign legislation, stating “the President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill to sign it.”


Obama has used the autopen twice in the past to sign legislation, both times while he was overseas.


Use of the autopen has been controversial.  Conservative groups alleged last summer that Obama used an autopen to sign condolence letters to the families of Navy SEALs killed in a Chinook crash in Afghanistan — a charge the White House disputed flatly as false.


In 2004, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was criticized for using an autopen to sign condolence letters to the families of fallen troops.


And in 1992 then-Vice President Dan Quayle even got into some hot water over his use of the autopen on official correspondence during an appearance on “This Week with David Brinkley.”


Obama, who arrived back in Hawaii early Wednesday morning to continue his family vacation, spent the afternoon golfing with friends at the Marine Corps base at Kaneohe Bay.


Obama is slated to remain in Hawaii through Saturday.


ABC News’ Jonathan Karl contributed to this report



SHOWS: Good Morning America This Week World News







Read More..

At least 61 crushed to death in Ivory Coast stampede


ABIDJAN (Reuters) - At least 61 people were crushed to death in a stampede after a New Year's Eve fireworks display at a stadium in Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan early on Tuesday, officials said.


Witnesses said police had tried to control crowds around the Felix Houphouet-Boigny Stadium following the celebrations, triggering a panic in which scores were trampled.


"The estimate we can give right now is 49 people hospitalized ... and 61 people dead," said the chief of staff of Abidjan's fire department Issa Sacko.


Crying women searched for missing family members outside the stadium on Tuesday morning. The area was covered in patches of dried blood and abandoned shoes.


"My two children came here yesterday. I told them not to come but they didn't listen. They came when I was sleeping. What will I do?" said Assetou Toure, a cleaner.


Sanata Zoure, a market vendor injured in the incident, said New Year's revelers going home after watching the fireworks had been stopped by police near the stadium.


"We were walking with our children and we came upon barricades, and people started falling into each other. We were trampled with our children," she said.


Another witness said police arrived to control the crowd after a mob began chasing a pickpocket.


President Alassane Ouattara called the deaths a national tragedy and said an investigation was under way to find out what happened.


"I hope that we can determine what caused this drama so that we can ensure it never happens again," he said after visiting the injured in hospital.


The country, once a stable economic hub for West Africa, is struggling to recover from a 2011 civil war in which more than 3,000 people were killed.


Ivory Coast's security forces once were among the best trained in the region, but a decade of political turmoil and the 2011 war has left them in disarray.


At least 18 people were killed in another stampede during a football match in an Abidjan stadium in 2009.


(Reporting by Loucoumane Coulibaly and Alain Amontchi; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Michael Roddy)



Read More..

Delhi gang-rapists tried to run victim over






NEW DELHI: A gang of rapists who assaulted and murdered a woman on a bus in New Delhi last month tried to run her over with the vehicle after the attack, reports said Wednesday, citing a grisly police account of the incident.

Her boyfriend, who was beaten up and thrown off the bus after the girl had been repeatedly raped, managed to pull her to safety just in time, police are set to allege in a 1,000-page charge sheet to be presented in court on Thursday.

The 23-year-old female medical student, whose ordeal has brought simmering anger about widespread sex crime in India to the boil, bit three of her attackers as she attempted to fight them off, local newspapers and TV reports said.

These injuries on the suspects, as well as forensic evidence such a blood, semen and hair samples and the testimony of the injured boyfriend, are expected to form the main evidence against the accused, reports and police sources said.

Five men have been arrested and are expected on Thursday to formally face murder and rape charges in a fast-track court set up to try them. A sixth suspect is aged 17 and is expected to be tried in a court for juveniles.

"The woman and her friend were stripped and thrown out of the bus," The Indian Express reported, "Her friend pulled her away when he saw the bus reversing to run her over."

The Times of India newspaper said the charge sheet would likely begin with details on how the driver of the private vehicle, who allegedly took part in the rape, got his group of friends together and set out for a joyride.

One of the charges against the accused relates to the destruction of evidence, the paper said, since the driver had tried to wash the bus and had burned the clothes that were snatched from the victim.

The woman died at the weekend after a 13-day struggle to survive injuries so grievous that her intestines had to be removed. She also underwent three major surgeries and suffered a cardiac arrest before being flown to Singapore.

The brutality and horrific nature of the attack has led to protests in the capital and elsewhere, and has prompted calls for the death penalty for the rapists.

The government, which has faced a wave of public anger over the attack, on Tuesday set up a special 13-member committee to look into safety issues and review the functioning of Delhi police on a regular basis.

A panel to recommend changes to the criminal law dealing with sexual crimes was set up last week.

-AFP/fl



Read More..

Naming anti-rape law after girl will be an honour: Family

BALLIA, UP: A day after Union minister Shashi Tharoor favoured naming the revised anti-rape law after the Delhi gang-rape victim, her family members on Wednesday said they have no objection to it and the move would be an honour to the girl.


The family members of the 23-year-old girl said that "if her name is made public for this purpose, they have no objection to it".


Talking to the father and brother of the girl said that "if the government names the revised anti-rape law after her, they have no objection and it would be an honour to her".


Tharoor had yesterday favoured making public the identity of the gang-rape victim wondering what interest was served by keeping her name under wraps.


Tharoor, the minister of state for human resources development, had also said the revised anti-rape legislation should be named after the victim if her parents do not have any objection.


"Wondering what interest is served by continuing anonymity of #DelhGangRape victim. Why not name&honour her as a real person w/own identity?" he asked on micro-blogging site Twitter.


"Unless her parents object, she should be honoured&the revised anti-rape law named after her. She was a human being w/a name,not just a symbol," Tharoor, who is known for speaking his mind, said.


On reports of Telugu filmmaker Ramana Gaddam planning to make changes in his upcoming film to highlight the brutal gang rape, the girl's brother said before doing so he should meet them and give information about the storyline.


He said the director would have to clarify what he wants to portray in the movie.


Asked about the financial assistance of Rs 20 lakh announced by the Uttar Pradesh government and assistance of Rs 15 lakh and job announced by Delhi government, the brother said though announcements have been made, they are yet to receive the assistance.


However, the girl's father said he was satisfied with the announcements made by the government.


The family members termed as misleading reports in the media that the girl was about to get married.


On a question regarding police chargesheet in the case, the brother said they do not want to comment on the issue and only want justice.

Read More..

Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating


This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.


After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.


It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.


All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.


For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.


Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."


What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.


"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.


Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.


What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.


A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.


The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.


Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.


Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.


"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.


The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.


A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.


Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.


"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."


___


Online:


Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html


___


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


Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe


Read More..

Obama Hails 'Cliff' Deal, Warns of Next Fiscal Fight













Minutes after the House of Representatives approved a bipartisan Senate deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" and preserve Bush-era tax cuts for all Americans making less than $400,000 per year, President Obama praised party leaders and wasted little time turning to the next fiscal fight.


"This is one step in the broader effort to strengthen our economy for everybody," Obama said.


Obama lamented that earlier attempts at a much larger fiscal deal that would have cut spending and dealt with entitlement reforms failed. He said he hoped future debates would be done with "a little less drama, a little less brinksmanship, and not scare folks quite as much."


But Obama drew a line in the sand on the debt ceiling, which is set to be reached by March.


"While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether they should pay the bills for what they've racked up," Obama said. "We can't not pay bills that we've already incurred."


An hour after his remarks, Obama boarded Air Force One to return to his planned Hawaiian holiday vacation, reuniting with his family, who have been vacationing there since just before Christmas.






AP Photo/Charles Dharapak















'Fiscal Cliff' Negotiations: Congress Reaches Agreement Watch Video





House Republicans agreed to the up-or-down vote Tuesday evening, despite earlier talk of trying to amend the Senate bill with more spending cuts before taking a vote. The bill delays for two months tough decisions about automatic spending cuts that were set to kick in Wednesday.


A majority of the Republicans in the GOP-majority House voted against the fiscal cliff deal. About twice as many Democrats voted in favor of the deal compared to Republicans. One hundred fifty-one Republicans joined 16 Democrats to vote against the deal, while 172 Democrats carried the vote along with 85 Republicans.


The Senate passed the same bill by an 89-8 vote in the wee hours of New Year's Day. If House Republicans had tweaked the legislation, there would have been no clear path for its return to the Senate before a new Congress is sworn in Thursday.


The vote split Republican leaders in the House. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, voted yes, and so did the GOP's 2012 vice presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.


But House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., the No. 2 Republican in the House, voted no. It was his opposition that had made passage of the bill seem unlikely earlier in the day.


The deal does little to address the nation's long-term debt woes and does not entirely solve the problem of the "fiscal cliff."


Indeed, the last-minute compromise -- far short from a so-called grand bargain on deficit reduction -- sets up a new showdown on the same spending cuts in two months amplified by a brewing fight on how to raise the debt ceiling beyond $16.4 trillion. That new fiscal battle has the potential to eclipse the "fiscal cliff" in short order.


"Now the focus turns to spending," said Boehner in a statement after the vote. "The American people re-elected a Republican majority in the House, and we will use it in 2013 to hold the president accountable for the 'balanced' approach he promised, meaning significant spending cuts and reforms to the entitlement programs that are driving our country deeper and deeper into debt."


Republicans hope that allowing the fiscal cliff compromise, which raised taxes without an equal amount of spending cuts, will settle the issue of tax rates for the coming debates on spending.






Read More..

North Korean leader, in rare address, seeks end to confrontation with South


SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for an end to confrontation between the two Koreas, technically still at war in the absence of a peace treaty to end their 1950-53 conflict, in a surprise New Year speech broadcast on state media.


The address by Kim, who took over power in the reclusive state after his father, Kim Jong-il, died in 2011, appeared to take the place of the policy-setting New Year editorial published in leading state newspapers.


But North Korea has offered olive branches before and Kim's speech does not necessarily signify a change in tack from a country which vilifies the United States and U.S. ally South Korea at every chance it gets.


Impoverished North Korea raised tensions in the region by launching a long-range rocket in December that it said was aimed at putting a scientific satellite in orbit, drawing international condemnation.


North Korea, which considers North and South as one country, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is banned from testing missile or nuclear technology under U.N. sanctions imposed after its 2006 and 2009 nuclear weapons tests.


"An important issue in putting an end to the division of the country and achieving its reunification is to remove confrontation between the north and the south," Kim said in the address that appeared to be pre-recorded and was made at an undisclosed location.


"The past records of inter-Korean relations show that confrontation between fellow countrymen leads to nothing but war."


The New Year address was the first in 19 years by a North Korean leader after the death of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un's grandfather. Kim Jong-il rarely spoke in public and disclosed his national policy agenda in editorials in state newspapers.


"(Kim's statement) apparently contains a message that he has an intention to dispel the current face-off (between the two Koreas), which could eventually be linked with the North's call for aid (from the South)," said Kim Tae-woo, a North Korea expert at the state-funded Korea Institute for National Unification.


"But such a move does not necessarily mean any substantive change in the North Korean regime's policy towards the South."


The two Koreas have seen tensions rise to the highest level in decades after the North bombed a Southern island in 2010 killing two civilians and two soldiers.


The sinking of a South Korean navy ship earlier that year was blamed on the North but Pyongyang has denied it and accused Seoul of waging a smear campaign against its leadership.


Last month, South Korea elected as president Park Geun-hye, a conservative daughter of assassinated military ruler Park Chung-hee whom Kim Il-sung had tried to kill at the height of their Cold War confrontation.


Park has vowed to pursue engagement with the North and called for dialogue to build confidence but has demanded that Pyongyang abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions, something it is unlikely to do.


Conspicuously absent from Kim's speech was any mention of the nuclear arms program.


(Additional reporting by Sung-Won Shim; Editing by Nick Macfie)



Read More..

Slew of new measures to take effect on Jan 1






SINGAPORE: A slew of new measures kick in on Tuesday. Among them - parents getting better support in raising a child, and employers abiding by a weekly day-off policy for foreign maids. Car buyers and taxi users too will benefit from new regulations.

With the new year, comes new policies.

One of the new policies is the Child Development Account (CDA) under the Baby Bonus scheme, which is aimed at helping families with the costs of raising children.

It is a savings account where parents' deposits are matched dollar-for-dollar by the government, up to a cap ranging from S$6,000 to S$18,000, depending on the birth order of the child.

From January, parents can continue to dip into the savings account until their children are 12 years old, instead of six. This includes paying for healthcare and childcare fees.

Associate Professor Paulin Straughan, a sociologist with the National university of Singapore (NUS), said the move is pertinent, given the demands of raising a child.

She added: "A big concern for parents now is childcare. And childcare for school-going primary kids, primary school kids are not cheap. For example, after school care. So if they are allowed to dip into the CDA for this, it will certainly help working dual-income families significantly."

The new year also marks the start of mandatory weekly rest-days for foreign domestic workers. This will apply to those whose work permits are issued or renewed from January 1, 2013. All maids will be covered by the new legislation by 2015.

Employers and workers should agree on which day of the week the rest day falls, and if there's no day-off, employers must give monetary compensation.

Employment agencies are also expected to play a larger role.

President of the Association of Employment Agencies, K Jayaprema, said: "The employers are going to need the employment agencies to be part of this, because we are supposed to negotiate the off-days, we are supposed to witness the paperwork, when the domestic worker actually agrees not to take her day off and to be compensated.

"So I will strongly encourage employers to ensure that when they are going through this process of off-days with the employees, they should work with the employment agencies involved."

Separately, those eyeing a new car can stand to benefit from the new Carbon Emissions-Based Vehicle Scheme. Owners of cars which are more fuel-efficient and emit less carbon will enjoy rebates of up to S$20,000. This will be given as an offset against the vehicle's Additional Registration Fee.

To make an informed choice, buyers are advised to look out for the mandatory Fuel Economy Labelling Scheme (FELS) at showrooms.

The Land Transport Authority said only cars that are approved by LTA under FELS can be registered for use from January 1.

Those who do not own a car may also now find it easier to get a cab. That is because operators must ensure that 70 per cent of their fleet are on the road during peak hours and clock an average daily mileage of 250 kilometres. This translates to around eight to nine hours on the road per day, five days a week.

Observers believe the move may burden smaller operators and cause them to merge, in order to meet the standards.

Associate Professor Lee Der-Horng of the Department of Civil Engineering at NUS said: "With this quality of service measurement, this may become a burden to the smaller operators. Because given their size and given their corporate resources, it may be even more difficult for them to satisfy (the requirements).

"Perhaps we may see a merger between the smaller operators but from the passengers side, this may be good news as well. After the merger, they may better cooperate resources and they may be able to provide better service to passengers."

Taxis will be also allowed to pick up and drop off passengers along roads within the Central Business District, except for roads with bus lanes during the operating hours of the lanes.

-CNA/ac



Read More..

Curfew lifted from Pulwama town in J&K

SRINAGAR: Authorities today lifted four-day curfew from Pulwama town in south Kashmir following improvement in law and order situation in the area, officials said.

"Curfew has been lifted from the affected areas this morning," the officials said.

They said senior officials of the district administration and police are monitoring the situation in the area.

Curfew was imposed in Pulwama town on Friday following massive protests against firing by security forces that resulted in injuries to seven civilians.

The security forces had opened fire at Pulwama chowk, 32 km from here, to make way for vehicles carrying four persons including two Army officers who were injured in a gunbattle with two Lashkar-e-Taiba militants in a nearby village.

Both the Army and police are claiming that their personnel did not fire at the people.

The state government has ordered a magisterial probe into the incident.

Read More..