■UNITED STATES
Sensitive computers missing
Eighty computers have been lost, stolen or gone “missing” at a major US nuclear weapons lab, the nonprofit watchdog group Project On Government Oversight said on Friday. The group posted online a copy of what they say is an internal letter outlining what appear to be worrisome losses at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The letter said that 13 lab computers were lost or stolen during the past year, three of the machines taken from an employee’s home in January. Another 67 computers are deemed “missing.” “The magnitude of exposure and risk to the laboratory is at best unclear as little data on these losses has been collected or pursued,” it said.
■UNITED STATES
Behavioral problems costly
Mental illness, substance abuse and behavioral problems among children and young adults cost the country US$247 billion a year in treatment and lost productivity alone, an expert panel said on Friday. The panel, set up by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, which advise policymakers, urged the White House to set prevention goals and coordinate government action. The panel looked at the financial toll from mental illnesses including depression, anxiety disorders and schizophrenia, as well as drug and alcohol abuse and behavioral problems by people up to age 24.
■INDIA
Train crash claims 16 lives
Rescuers searched through the wreckage of smashed carriages yesterday after a train derailed in the east, leaving 16 people dead and almost 200 injured, rail officials said. The high-speed Coromandel Express, connecting the eastern metropolis of Kolkata and the southern city of Chennai, derailed on Friday night while changing tracks at Jajpur. Witnesses said 12 carriages had jumped the tracks while traveling at high speed. “The train had acquired speed and minutes later it crossed the station and just toppled,” said Hemant Bhalotia, whose 70-year-old father died. The accident came on a day when Federal Railways Minister Lalu Yadav took credit for turning round the giant state-run transport network, which was once headed for bankruptcy. The Press Trust of India news agency reported that Yadav has ordered an inquiry into the accident as well as compensation for families of the dead and those injured.
■INDIA
‘Stone man’ killer sought
Police are searching for a killer — dubbed the “stone man” for his choice of weapon — who has struck for the sixth time in less than two months. The murderer’s latest victim was a young man whose badly battered body was recovered on Friday from outside a Hindu temple in Guwahati, the main city in the northeastern state of Assam. Police said the modus operandi was almost the same in the five other murders in Guwahati, whose victims were all men. The attacker targets the victim before dawn, bludgeoning him around the head with a stone-like object. The killer appears to be targeting beggars and homeless people, police said. The killings come as The Stoneman Murders, a film based on the unsolved serial murders of pavement dwellers in Mumbai in 1983, hit movie theaters across the country this week.
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