WEL COME TO BACK

WEL COME TO BACK

Butt, Asif found guilty of spot-fixing

LONDON: Pakistan cricketers Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif were found guilty Tuesday of fixing parts of a Test against England in a case that has thrown the credibility of the international game into doubt.

Former Test captain Butt, 27, and fast bowler Asif, 28, face jail after a court in London convicted them of deliberately bowling three no-balls during the Lord's Test in August 2010 as part of a "spot-fixing" betting scam.

The verdicts are a scalp from beyond the grave for Britain's News of the World tabloid, which uncovered the conspiracy but was shut down by owner Rupert Murdoch this year amid a scandal over phone-hacking.

Prosecutors alleged Butt and Asif conspired with British agent Mazher Majeed and Pakistan fast bowler Mohammad Aamer to bowl the no-balls as part of a plot that revealed "rampant corruption" at the heart of international cricket.

Butt faces up to seven years in prison jail after the jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted him of conspiracy to obtain or accept corrupt payments, and conspiracy to cheat at gambling.

Asif was found guilty of conspiring to accept corrupt payments in a "spot-fixing" betting scam. The 28-year-old was also found guilty by the jury at Southwark Crown Court on a separate count of conspiring to cheat at gambling. The corrupt payment charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years' imprisonment.

They are expected to be sentenced later this week.

Butt and Asif had pleaded not guilty and they sat in silence in the dock as the jury delivered their verdicts, after spending nearly 17 hours in deliberations over four days.

Majeed, 36, and Aamer, 19, were also charged with the same offences but were not standing trial alongside Butt and Asif.

Mohammad Aamer pleaded guilty to involvement in a spot-fixing betting scam before the trial of his teammates. Aamer pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cheat and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments at a pre-trial hearing on September 16.

In a further twist, Butt's wife gave birth to a baby boy just 30 minutes before the verdict was delivered, his father said by telephone from Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore. Butt already has one daughter.

During the three-week trial the jury heard that vast sums of money could be made by rigging games for betting syndicates, particularly in South Asia, and that the problem was theatening the game of cricket.

Mazher Mahmood, News of the World's former investigations editor, known as the "fake sheikh" for his disguises, told the court he had approached Majeed pretending to be an Indian businessman.

Majeed claimed he had at least six Pakistani players working for him and that it would cost between £50,000 and £80,000 ($78,000 and $125,000) to fix a "bracket", where bets are made on incidents during a given period of play.

But the cost of rigging a whole result was far more, at £400,000 for a Twenty20, £450,000 for a one-day international, and £1 million for Test matches, Majeed allegedly told the reporter.

The agent was secretly filmed accepting £150,000 in cash from the journalist as part of an arrangement to bowl the no-balls, and recorded allegedly making arrangements with Butt for the no balls.

Butt told the court he had ignored his agent's requests to fix games and had no knowledge of the plan to bowl no balls, while admitting that he had failed in his duty to inform cricketing authorities of Majeed's approach.

Asif meanwhile said he had bowled a no ball at the exact time the agent had predicted to the News of the World journalist because Butt had told him to run faster moments before his delivery.

The team's manager during the fateful tour of England when the scam was uncovered, Yawar Saeed, said Pakistan cricket had been badly tarnished by the case.

"I feel very sad because I tried my level best to tell them to keep away from notorious people. They should have understood that and they committed a blunder, and when you commit a blunder, you are punished," Saeed said.

"I'm also sad because the country's name has been dragged into this entire controversy. Pakistan is known for its talented players but this case has stained the country's image badly," he added.

The case is the worst in international cricket since that of South Africa's Hansie Cronje a decade ago.

Cronje was banned for life in 2000 after it was revealed he accepted money from bookmakers in a bid to influence the course of games as well as trying to corrupt his team-mates. He died in a plane crash in 2002. (AFP)

Over 2,000 found buried in Kashmir's unmarked graves - Report

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - More than 2,000 corpses have been found buried in several unmarked graves in Kashmir, believed to be victims of the divided region's separatist revolt, a government human rights commission said in a report. The graves were found in dozens of villages near the Line of Control, the military line dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan. "At 38 places visited in north Kashmir, there were 2,156 unidentified dead bodies buried in unmarked graves," the inquiry report by the Indian government's Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (J&KSHRC) said. The report, released on Saturday, comes after a three-year inquiry by an 11-member team led by a senior police official. Nearly 50,000 people have been killed in mainly Muslim Kashmir since a revolt against New Delhi's rule began in 1989. On Saturday, Indian soldier shot dead 12 separatist militants trying to cross from Pakistan into the disputed region. Indian security forces in Kashmir have been accused of murdering innocent civilians in staged gun battles and passing them off as separatist militants to earn rewards and promotions. Indian authorities have consistently denied systematic human rights violations in Kashmir and say they probe all such reports and punish the guilty. The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), which estimates around 10,000 people went missing during nearly two decades of separatist revolt, says many missing people may have ended up in these unmarked graves. "We appeal to International human rights groups and Indian authorities to identify the people buried," said Parveena Ahanger, founder and chairperson of the APDP. International human rights groups have also repeatedly asked the Indian authorities to investigate the unmarked graves. (Reporting by Sheikh Mushtaq; Editing by Rajesh Kumar Singh and Miral Fahmy)

IBM produces first 'brain chips

IBM has developed a microprocessor which it claims comes closer than ever to replicating the human brain.

The system is capable of "rewiring" its connections as it encounters new information, similar to the way biological synapses work.

Researchers believe that that by replicating that feature, the technology could start to learn.

Cognitive computers may eventually be used for understanding human behaviour as well as environmental monitoring.

Dharmendra Modha, IBM's project leader, explained that they were trying to recreate aspects of the mind such as emotion, perception, sensation and cognition by "reverse engineering the brain."

The SyNAPSE system uses two prototype "neurosynaptic computing chips". Both have 256 computational cores, which the scientists described as the electronic equivalent of neurons.

One chip has 262,144 programmable synapses, while the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.

Man machine

In humans and animals, synaptic connections between brain cells physically connect themselves depending on our experience of the world. The process of learning is essentially the forming and strengthening of connections.

A machine cannot solder and de-solder its electrical tracks. However, it can simulate such a system by "turning up the volume" on important input signals, and paying less attention to others.

IBM has not released exact details of how its SyNAPSE processor works, but Dr Richard Cooper, a reader in cognitive science at Birkbeck, University of London said that it likely replicated physical connections using a "virtual machine".

Instead of stronger and weaker links, such a system would simply remember how much "attention" to pay to each signal and alter that depending on new experiences.

"Part of the trick is the learning algorithm - how should you turn those volumes up and down," said Dr Cooper.

"There's a a whole bunch of tasks that can be done just with a relatively simple system like that such as associative memory. When we see a cat we might think of a mouse."

Some future-gazers in the cognitive computing world have speculated that the technology will reach a tipping point where machine consciousness is possible.

IBM's work on the SyNAPSE project continues and the company, along with its academic partners, has just been awarded $21m (£12.7m) by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

US charges 72 over 'nightmare' child porn network

WASHINGTON  : US officials Wednesday unveiled charges against 72 people in their largest global probe into Internet child pornography which smashed a "nightmare" online bulletin board catering to pedophiles.

The investigation launched in 2009 has led to arrests in the US and 13 other countries of participants in Dreamboard, which had a "VIP" ranking system for members trading in graphic images and videos of adults molesting children age 12 and under, often violently, the Justice Department said.

"Dreamboard's creators and members lived all over the world -- but they allegedly were united by a disturbing belief that the sexual abuse of children is proper conduct that should not be criminalized," Attorney General Eric Holder said.

"The members of this criminal network shared a demented dream to create the preeminent online community for the promotion of child sexual exploitation, but for the children they victimized, this was nothing short of a nightmare."

The ongoing probe has led to the arrest of 52 people in the US and 13 other countries -- Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hungary, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Qatar, Serbia, Sweden and Switzerland. more