Divers Recover 3 Bodies From Sunken Indian Submarine

NEW DELHI — Naval divers recovered three badly burned bodies on Friday from the Indian submarine that exploded and sank in Mumbai with 18 crew members aboard, according to the Indian Navy, which said it was unlikely that survivors would be found.

The bodies were so disfigured that officials intend to use DNA analysis to identify them, according to a statement from the navy. The state of the bodies, along with conditions within the vessel, which sank early Wednesday, have led to the “firm conclusion that finding any surviving personnel within the submarine is unlikely,” the statement said.

Boiling water within the submarine, the Russian-made INS Sindhurakshak, made it impossible for divers to even enter the vessel until noon on Wednesday, hours after the explosions that sank it, the navy said. Once the divers were inside, oily and muddy water made for zero visibility even with high-powered underwater lamps.

The damage from the explosions resulted in so much twisted metal that only one diver at a time could work in the submarine’s tiny spaces. After 36 hours of continuous effort, the divers finally reached a compartment early Friday where they found the three bodies, the navy’s statement said.

Extremely high temperatures in the forward section of the submarine meant not only that the sailors there were almost certainly dead, but that their bodies were probably incinerated, the navy said. “However, the navy will continue to search every inch of the submerged submarine till all bodies are either located or it can be stated with finality that no bodies remain to be found,” the statement said.

The cause of the explosions on the 16-year-old Sindhurakshak remain a mystery. Mohan Guruswamy, a military analyst with the Observer Research Foundation, said he visited the submarine the day before the explosion and found it to be “in great shape.”

Mr. Guruswamy said the crew was preparing for a departure early Wednesday morning on a routine patrol, and he speculated that munitions were mishandled during the preparations. “The feeling among naval officers is that while loading the missiles, something happened,” said Mr. Guruswamy, who praised the crew as “very smart, very tough guys.”

Mr. Guruswamy said the Sindhurakshak was the navy’s most advanced submarine and had Indian-made sensor equipment that made it more effective than its Russian designers and builders had envisioned. The submarine carried cruise missiles that allowed it to strike targets on land more than 100 miles away.

Officials believe that a small explosion within the submarine triggered two huge blasts from its onboard munitions. Video of the explosions seems to show two separate bursts that threw flames hundreds of feet into the air. The Sindhurakshak’s sister ship, the INS Sindhuratna, was berthed nearby and was damaged by the explosion but was saved by the quick reaction of firefighters.

The Sindhurakshak had 21 sailors on its night watch, but three of the men were stationed on the submarine’s exterior and managed to dive for safety.

Deep Kumar, whose brother, Lt. Cmdr. Alok Kumar, was one of three officers on the submarine when it blew up, said he and his parents had been keeping a vigil in Mumbai waiting for news. He said the family had spoken with his brother the night before the explosion. “He was fine and there was no indication of any danger or wrongdoing,” Mr. Kumar said.

He said the navy had told them there was no chance that his brother was alive, because temperatures in the submarine had risen past 500 degrees Celsius, or about 900 Fahrenheit, after the explosion.

“We are hoping against hope,” he said.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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Divers Recover 3 Bodies From Sunken Indian Submarine

Stocks recover on Wall Street after 2-day plunge

Specialist Joseph Mastrolia, left, and trader George Ettinger work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, June 21, 2013. U.S. stocks rose in morning trading on Friday as traders regrouped following the biggest drop of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Specialist Joseph Mastrolia, left, and trader George Ettinger work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, June 21, 2013. U.S. stocks rose in morning trading on Friday as traders regrouped following the biggest drop of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Trader Vincent Quinones, left, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, June 21, 2013. U.S. stocks rose in morning trading on Friday as traders regrouped following the biggest drop of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Trader Edward McCarthy, left, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, June 21, 2013. U.S. stocks rose in morning trading on Friday as traders regrouped following the biggest drop of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Trader Peter Tuchman, foreground left, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, June 21, 2013. U.S. stocks rose in morning trading on Friday as traders regrouped following the biggest drop of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

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U.S. stocks were mostly higher on Friday, a sharp contrast to the plunge they took earlier this week.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up 26 points at 14,785 as of 1:42 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. That almost seemed like a rally after the Dow’s 560-point tumble over Wednesday and Thursday, which wiped out its gains from May and June. The plunge came just three weeks after the Dow hit a record high of 15,409.

The Fed’s easy money policies have been a big driver behind the stock market’s bull run the last four years. It led to low interest rates that encouraged borrowing for everything from factory machinery to commercial airplanes to home renovations. Now investors have to figure out where to put their money now that they have a better idea of how the Fed’s stimulus efforts could end.

Kim Forrest, senior analyst with Fort Pitt Capital Group, a portfolio management firm in Pittsburgh, said the market had the “right reaction” to the news that the Fed would wind down its stimulus if the economy continues to improve, but the move may have been overblown.

“We’re getting news that made the market uncomfortable,” she said. “We shouldn’t be sitting at these highs given the fact that the Fed signaled that someday it’s going to take some liquidity off the table. So the reaction is right, the magnitude is probably a little off.”

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose three points to 1,591. The S&P hit its own record high a month ago. The S&P and Dow were moving between slight gains and losses Friday.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note hit 2.49 percent, up from 2.42 percent late Thursday. It has risen sharply since Wednesday as investors sold bonds in anticipation that the Fed would slow, and eventually end, its bond purchases, if the U.S. recovery continues. The Fed has said it wouldn’t hesitate to step up its bond purchases again if the economy weakens.

The yield, which is a benchmark for interest rates on many kinds of loans including home mortgages, is at its highest level since August 2011. On Tuesday, the day before the Fed’s announcement, it was 2.19 percent. It hit a low for the year of 1.63 percent on May 3.

Technology shares lagged the market after business software maker Oracle reported disappointing earnings late Thursday. Oracle plunged $ 2.71, or 8 percent, to $ 30.50, the biggest drop in the S&P 500 index. Oracle is struggling to adapt as customers shift away from software installed on their own computers toward software that runs remotely.

Oracle’s results are a poor omen for business spending on technology. Technology stocks in the S&P index fell 1.8 percent, the second-biggest decline among the 10 industry groups in the index. The biggest declines were in materials stocks, down 2 percent.

The Nasdaq composite index, which is heavily weighted with technology stocks, fell 14 points, or 0.4 percent, to 3,350. Apple, the biggest stock in the index, fell $ 3.84, or 1 percent, to $ 412.99. Microsoft fell 10 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $ 33.39.

The price of gold recovered after plunging the day before. Gold was up $ 6.30, or 0.5 percent, to $ 1,292.50 an ounce. Crude oil fell $ 1.90, or 2 percent, to $ 93.24 a barrel in New York.

The dollar rose against other currencies as traders anticipated that U.S. interest rates would rise as the Fed winds down its bond purchases.

Among other stocks making big moves:

—Darden Restaurants, which runs Olive Garden and Red Lobster, fell $ 1.97, or 3.8 percent, to $ 49.26 after rising expenses hurt its fourth-quarter earnings.

— Spreadtrum Communications jumped $ 3.98, or 18 percent, after the Chinese smartphone chip maker said its board is considering a buyout offer valued at about $ 1.39 billion from Tsinghua Holdings.

— Facebook rose 36 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $ 24.27 after the company said it would add video to its popular photo-sharing app Instagram, following in the heels of Twitter’s growing video-sharing app, Vine.

A Fed policy statement and comments from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke started the selling in stocks, bonds and commodities Wednesday. Bernanke said the Fed expects to scale back its bond-buying program later this year and end it by mid-2014 if the economy continues to improve. The bank has been buying $ 85 billion a month in Treasury and mortgage bonds, which has made borrowing cheap for consumers and businesses. The program has also encouraged investors to buy stocks instead of bonds.

The S&P 500 is still up 11.6 percent, for the year, not far from its full-year increase of 13.4 percent last year.

Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei index rose 1.7 percent, but other Asian markets fell. European markets slipped. France’s CAC-40 fell 1.1 percent and Germany’s DAX fell 1.8 percent.

The real question will be whether the sell-off continues next week, said Frank Fantozzi, CEO of Planned Financial Services. So far, it’s more of an adjustment. “If the flow out of equities starts to increase, this might be the pullback we’ve been waiting for,” he said.

Associated Press

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Business Headlines

Stocks recover on Wall Street after 2-day plunge

Talk therapy helps Congolese victims of sexual violence recover

Group sessions work better than individual counseling

By Nathan Seppa

Web edition: June 6, 2013

African women living in a war zone who have post-traumatic stress disorder from enduring or witnessing sexual violence are more apt to overcome it with group therapy than with private counseling, researchers report in the June 6 New England Journal of Medicine.

The approach, called cognitive processing therapy, encourages people with PTSD to reassess how they think about an event. Victims of sexual violence often place blame on themselves. “They might think, ‘It was my fault,’ or ‘I should have prevented this,’” says Boston University psychologist Patricia Resick.

Cognitive processing therapy provides step-by-step mental techniques to identify such maladaptive thoughts or beliefs, says study coauthor Judith Bass, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Then, she says, the women “can move forward.”

To test the strategy in groups against individual support therapy by lay counselors, researchers enlisted 405 women in 15 villages in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a rural area that has been beset by warfare for nearly two decades. Armed militias and government soldiers continue to roam the region, often attacking civilians. Nearly all the women in the study had been raped.

Psychological assessments of the women showed that most of them had PTSD along with depression or anxiety. Many were also functionally impaired — unable to perform routine tasks. The researchers assigned 248 women in eight villages to get individual support counseling as needed, a standard crisis response; 157 women in the other seven villages were put in groups of six to eight and got up to 12 sessions of cognitive processing therapy.

After four months, the proportion of women with probable PTSD dropped from 60 percent to 8 percent in the cognitive processing therapy group; the proportion of those with depression or anxiety plummeted from 71 to 10 percent. Their functional impairment scores dropped by half. In the women who received individual support counseling, rates of probable PTSD, depression or anxiety declined less, from 83 percent to about 54 percent.

Resick, who devised the 12-session cognitive processing strategy, has used it to treat PTSD in rape victims, battered women and combat veterans. She says testing the therapy in war-torn Congo is a real accomplishment, in part since many of the women were illiterate. The therapeutic strategy normally involves giving clients notebooks to record and recognize problem thoughts and to write down coping techniques. “I was very impressed, actually amazed,” she says, “that they were able to pull off a randomized, controlled trial under those kinds of circumstances.”

The approach should translate to other war-weary areas, Bass says. “We’ve shown we can do it in low-literacy, conflict areas. These are the hardest parts of the world.”

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Suggested Reading

A. Arieff. Sexual violence in African conflicts: CRS report for Congress prepared for members and committees of Congress. Nov. 30, 2010. [Go to]

Sexual violence in conflict: Report of the Secretary-General. United Nations, March 14, 2013. [Go to]

C. Watts, M. Hossain and C. Zimmerman. War and sexual violence – mental health care for survivors. New England Journal of Medicine. Volume 368, June 6, 2013, p. 2152. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp1304712. [Go to]

K. Johnson et al. Association of sexual violence and human right violations with physical and mental health in territories of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. JAMA, Volume 304, Aug. 4, 2012, p. 553. [Go to]

Science News

Talk therapy helps Congolese victims of sexual violence recover

Why the US economy is taking so long to recover

WASHINGTON (AP) — The American economy and job market are moving in the right direction, just not very quickly.

The news Friday that U.S. employers added a solid 165,000 jobs in April and unemployment fell to a four-year low of 7.5 percent came as a relief.

The Dow Jones industrial average surged 142 points, or 1 percent, on the news to close at a record 14,973. The better-than-expected April numbers erased worries that the U.S. economy was stalling for the fourth year in a row — a fear that had emerged after a disappointing jobs report for March. Friday’s report also showed job growth in March and February was stronger than first estimated.

Nearly four years after a devastating recession, the U.S. economy and job market are far from a full recovery, but they have made steady progress. Here is an overview of America’s economic health:

—HIRING: PICKING UP BUT FACING A LONG SLOG

The U.S. economy has been adding 196,000 jobs a month this year, up from a monthly average of 179,000 in 2011 and 2012. Given how far it needs to go, the job market is recovering more slowly than people had hoped. The U.S. still has 2.6 million fewer jobs than it had when the Great Recession began in December 2007. At the current pace of hiring, total U.S. jobs won’t reach the pre-recession level of 138 million for more than another year.

Account for population growth, and the jobs ditch is even deeper: Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, says the economy needs to add 8.6 million jobs, not 2.6 million, to keep up with a rising population.

—UNEMPLOYMENT: FALLING — BUT STILL HIGH

Unemployment has improved dramatically since peaking at 10 percent in October 2009. But by any normal standard, April’s 7.5 percent unemployment was still a recession-level figure — higher, for example, than it ever got in the short recession of 2001. The Federal Reserve doesn’t expect the unemployment rate to reach a healthy level — 6 percent or lower — any sooner than 2015.

At least unemployment fell last month from 7.6 percent in March for the right reasons: More Americans reported having jobs and fewer reported being unemployed.

A big part of the drop in unemployment the past 3 ½ years has come because people have given up looking for work. Only 63.3 percent of working-age Americans were working or looking for work last month and in March. That is the lowest “labor force participation rate” since May 1979. People without a job who stop looking for one are no longer counted as unemployed. If the participation rate were at the pre-recession level of 66 percent, the unemployment rate could have reached 11.3 percent last month.

—THE ECONOMY: GROWING SLOWLY

The economic recovery from the Great Recession is the slowest since World War II. Growth has been hobbled by lingering damage from a housing bust and financial crisis. The economy expanded just 2.4 percent in 2010, 1.8 percent in 2011 and 2.2 percent in 2012. It grew at an annual pace of 2.5 percent in the January-March quarter this year.

If the economy were healthy, 2.5 percent growth would be fine. But generating enough jobs to bring unemployment down quickly requires faster growth.

Economists had originally hoped the economy would expand at a brisker pace this year — 3 percent or 4 percent. But across-the-board government spending cuts, which began taking effect March 1, are forcing federal agencies to furlough workers, reducing spending on public projects and making businesses nervous about investing and hiring.

Growth is expected to slow to 2 percent in the April-June quarter.

Budget cuts have already been a drag on the economy. Government spending at the local, state and federal levels fell at an annual rate of 4.1 percent from January through March and 7 percent the last three months of 2012. Normally, government spending contributes to economic recoveries.

The damage from government austerity has been offset in part by the Federal Reserve, which has kept short-term interest rates near zero since the end of 2008 and has been pumping $ 85 billion a month into the economy by buying bonds.

—CONSUMERS, HOUSING AND THE STOCK MARKET: LOOKING UP

Some of the U.S. economy’s fundamentals are looking healthier.

Consumers have shrugged off an increase in their Social Security taxes this year and the budget shenanigans in Washington: From January through March, they spent at the strongest pace in two years. That’s good news because consumers account for 70 percent of U.S. economic activity.

Fueled by near-record low mortgage rates, the housing market has been bouncing back. New-home sales in March were up 18.5 percent from a year earlier. Sales of previously occupied homes were up 10.3 percent. For the first time in five years, homebuilders started work on more than 1 million homes in March at a seasonally adjusted annual rate.

Investors have celebrated rising corporate profits and other good news. The Dow Jones industrial average is up 1,870 points, or more than 14 percent, so far this year, including Friday’s gain.

Rising stock and home prices help feed consumer spending by making people feel wealthier and more willing to spend.

—EUROPE: MAKING THE U.S. ECONOMY LOOK GOOD

The American economy and job market look a lot better when you compare them with Europe’s. Across the Atlantic, governments have been cutting spending and raising taxes even more aggressively. The 17 European Union countries that use the euro currency slid back into recession in the fall of 2011 and have been stuck there since.

Eurozone unemployment hit a record 12.1 percent in March, reaching 27.2 percent in Greece and 26.7 percent in Spain.

Economy News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Why the US economy is taking so long to recover