Brother charged in torso canal case

The brother of a former EastEnders actress whose headless body was found dumped in a canal is due to appear in court charged with her murder.

Gemma McCluskie's limbless torso was discovered floating close to Hackney's Broadway Market after she attended a high-profile hospital opening ceremony in east London last Thursday.

Her 35-year-old brother Tony was formally charged by police on Saturday night as divers continued their searches for Miss McCluskie's remaining body parts. He will appear in custody at Thames Magistrates' Court, Scotland Yard said.

Miss McCluskie, 29, who played Kerry Skinner in the BBC soap in 2001, disappeared after attending the opening of the new £650 million Royal London Hospital, in Whitechapel, east London. She was reported missing to police two days later.

Friends of Miss McCluskie launched extensive searches across east London in a bid to find her.

Former EastEnders co-stars Natalie Cassidy and Brooke Kinsella both appealed on Twitter for help.

Miss McCluskie's remains were discovered on Tuesday when a member of the public reported a suspicious object in Regent's Canal.

A post-mortem examination has proved inconclusive.

Tony McCluskie, of Pelter Street, Hackney, was arrested on Wednesday. He is accused of killing his sister between February 29 and March 6.

Miss McCluskie's character arrived in Walford as a friend of Zoe Slater and the great-niece of the late Ethel Skinner. She briefly dated Robbie Jackson and got him to propose to her.

No Talks With Syria Opposition, Leader Tells U.N. Envoy

BEIRUT, Lebanon — High-level diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting in Syria yielded mixed results on Saturday as PresidentBashar al-Assad shut the door on any immediate negotiations with the opposition and escalated a new military assault on the city of Idlib.

Mr. Assad told the United Nations envoy Kofi Annan that such talks would be fruitless as long as “terrorist groups” were operating in the country.

“No political dialogue or political activity can succeed while there are armed terrorist groups operating and spreading chaos and instability,” the state news agency, SANA, quoted Mr. Assad as saying.

Mr. Annan, a former United Nations secretary general, was sent to Damascus by the United Nations and the Arab League to try to negotiate a cease-fire. In a statement, he described the talks as “candid and comprehensive,” and said he had also met with opposition leaders and young activists. He was due to meet with Mr. Assad again on Sunday.

In a glimmer of progress, an Arab League meeting in Cairo yielded an agreement with Russia that Arab countries hoped could lead to a new United Nations Security Council resolution on Syria.

The Arab states dropped calls for Mr. Assad to hand over power to his deputy, and endorsed a five-point plan that calls for a halt to the violence on both sides and a dialogue between the Syrian government and its opponents, The Associated Press reported.

The agreement was seen by Arab ministers as a path toward a Security Council resolution that would be acceptable to Russia, Syria’s main international backer.

Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution last month that would have backed an Arab League plan to end the violence.

Russia had initially objected to the proposal because it feared that the measure could open the door to foreign military intervention or force Mr. Assad’s ouster. Even after Arab and Western countries dropped references to Mr. Assad’s ceding power and added language barring outside military intervention, Russia still objected that the resolution did not sufficiently blame the opposition for the violence, and that its demand for the government to withdraw its military forces was unrealistic, given that the opposition now included armed rebels.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in Cairo on Saturday, took heat for that veto. At one point, the Saudi representative bluntly blamed Russia for allowing the killing to continue.

“We must stop issuing hollow resolutions and taking spineless positions,” the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said, according to Reuters. “The position of those countries which thwarted the U.N. Security Council resolution and voted against the resolution of the General Assembly gave the Syrian regime a license to extend its brutal practices against the Syrian people.”

Mr. Lavrov insisted that Russia was “not protecting any regimes.”

“We protect international law,” he said. “The immediate task now is to end violence, irrespective of the source.”

In what appeared to be a jab aimed mainly at Saudi Arabia, he suggested that Russia’s stance would benefit autocratic Arab countries worried about their own restive populations. “We certainly believe that all outside actors must be extremely careful in addressing problems which your countries are facing,” he said, according to The A.P.

Saudi Arabia, despite its own dismal human rights record and the central role it played in repressing a popular uprising in Bahrain, has led the charge to topple Mr. Assad, repeatedly invoking his brutality.

The agreement, however, did nothing to halt the violence in the nearly year-old conflict, whose death toll has risen sharply in recent weeks. Activists and journalists reported clashes between opposition fighters and the army in Idlib, where they said a new government offensive was under way.

A team of A.P. reporters said government tanks that had encircled the town shelled it for several hours on Saturday. The journalists saw wounded opposition fighters being taken to clinics and a number of families fleeing the town.

An activist in Idlib, who reported seeing “heavy smoke,” said that at least three buildings had partly collapsed under the shelling on the western side of town. Another activist in the suburbs said relatives who fled spoke of abandoned neighborhoods.

“We’re expecting something like Baba Amr,” the activist said, referring to the neighborhood in the city of Homs that was the site of a monthlong siege by government troops trying to rout opposition fighters from a stronghold.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

Japan Marks Quake And Tsunami Anniversary

Japan is remembering the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck the nation one year ago, killing just over 19,000 people and unleashing the world's worst nuclear crisis in a quarter of a century.

Along the tsunami-battered northeastern coast memorial ceremonies mark the precise moment the magnitude-9.0 earthquake hit - 2.46pm on March 11, 2011.

The main ceremony will be held in Tokyo at the National Theatre, attended by Japan's Emperor Akihito and Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.

A minute's silence will be observed at the exact moment the quake hit (5.46am GMT).

The quake was the strongest recorded in Japan's history, and set off a tsunami that towered more than 65ft in some spots along the coast, destroying thousands of homes and wreaking widespread destruction.Some 325,000 people left homeless in the disaster still remain in temporary housing.

While much of the debris has been gathered into massive piles, very little rebuilding has begun.

"I wish I could go back to my old house and get back our normal life again," said Hyakuaiko Konno, a 64-year-old woman from the Ishinomaki coast who has been living in temporary housing for the past seven months.

The government says thedamaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where three reactor cores melted down after the tsunami knocked out their vital cooling systems, is stable and that radiation coming from the plant has subsided significantly.

But the plant's chief acknowledged to journalists visiting the complex recently that it remains in a fragile state, and makeshift equipment - some mended with tape - could be seen keeping crucial systems running.

An anti-nuclear protest is also planned in downtown Tokyo amid growing public opposition to atomic power in the wake of the disaster, the worst since Chernobyl in 1986.

Only two of Japan's 54 reactors are now running while those shut down for regular inspections undergo special tests to check their ability to withstand similar disasters.

They could all go offline by the end of April if none are restarted before then.

The Japanese government has pledged to reduce reliance on nuclear power, which supplied about 30% of the nation's energy needs before the disaster.

However, it says some nuclear plants must be restarted to meet Japan's energy needs during the transition period.

Mr Noda has acknowledged failures in the government's response to the disaster, being too slow in relaying key information and believing too much in "a myth of safety" about nuclear power.

"We can no longer make the excuse that what was unpredictable and outside our imagination has happened," he said.

"Crisis management requires us to imagine what may be outside our imagination."

Enormous risks and challenges lie ahead at the Fukushima plant, including removal of the melted nuclear fuel from the core and the disposal of spent fuel rods. Completely decommissioning the plant could take 40 years.

Meanwhile, some 100,000 residents who lived around the plant are in temporary shelters or with relatives, unsure of when they will be able to return to their homes.

A 12-mile zone around the complex and an adjacent area remains off limits.

Efforts to make radiation-contaminated land around the plant inhabitable again have begun, using everything from shovels and high-powered water guns to chemicals that absorb radiation.

But it is a monumental, costly project fraught with uncertainty, and experts cannot guarantee it will be successful.

The environment ministry expects it will generate at least 100 million cubic meters of soil, enough to fill 80 domed baseball stadiums.

Solar storm shakes Earth's magnetic field

WASHINGTON: A solar storm shook the Earth's magnetic field early on Friday, but scientists said they had no reports of any problems with electrical systems. 

After reports Thursday of the storm fizzling out, a surge of activity prompted space weather forecasters to issue alerts about changes in the magnetic field. 

``We really haven't had any reports from power system operators yet,'' Rob Steenburgh, a space weather forecaster at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, said early Friday. ``But sometimes they don't come in until after the storm.'' 

He said the storm reached a moderate level late Thursday, before going to a strong level early Friday. For most of Thursday, it was rated as minor. Scientists say such storms don't pose a threat to people, just technology. 

The space weather center's website says a storm rated as strong could force corrections to voltage systems and trigger false alarms on some protection devices, as well as increase drag on satellites and affect their orientation. 

The forecasters weren't aware of any significant impact to electrical or technological systems, but said there was a two-hour blackout of high frequency radio communications, affecting mainly ham radio operations, stretching from eastern Africa to eastern Australia. 

Steenburgh also said that there was another solar flare late Thursday, similar to the one a few days ago that set off the current storm. ``Right now we're still analyzing when it will arrive'' and how strong it could be, he said. 

The space weather center had reports of Northern Lights across Canada and dipping into the northern tier of US states, Steenburgh said. While some experts thought the threat from the solar storm passed by earlier Thursday, the space weather center maintained the storm's effects could continue through Friday morning. 

The current storm, which started with a solar flare Tuesday evening, caused a stir Wednesday because forecasts were for a strong storm with the potential to knock electrical grids offline, mess with GPS and harm satellites. It even forced airlines to reroute a few flights on Thursday. 

It was never seen as a threat to people, just technology, and teased skywatchers with the prospect of colorful Northern Lights dipping further south. But when the storm finally arrived around 6 a.m. EST Thursday, after traveling at 2.7 million mph (4.4 million kph), it was more a magnetic breeze than a gale. The power stayed on. So did GPS and satellites. And the promise of auroras seemed to be more of a mirage. 

Scientists initially figured the storm would be the worst since 2006, but now seems only as bad as ones a few months ago, said Joe Kunches, a scientist at the NOAA center. The strongest storm in recorded history was probably in 1859, he said. ``It's not a terribly strong event. It's a very interesting event,'' Kunches said.  

Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus gets price in India, up for pre-order

At almost Rs. 17,000, the successor to the popular Galaxy Ace smartphone might seem a bit costly, especially since it competes with the likes of the Sony Xperia Neo V and Ray

The Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus, unveiled just a few weeks ago, is already making its way to Indian shores and should be hitting retail shelves within two weeks. Online retailerFlipkart has put the handset up for pre-order at a price of Rs. 16,750, with deliveries starting from March 21.

The Galaxy Ace Plus is a slight improvement on the original Galaxy Ace, which has proven to be a very popular handset in India. Running on Google Android v2.3 Gingerbread, the Galaxy Ace Plus features a 3.65-inch capacitive touchscreen and a 1GHz processor, packaged in a rounded body. Along with 3GB of onboard storage (expandable via microSD), users get a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS and a 1300 mAh battery.

At its current price, the Galaxy Ace Plus directly competes with the Sony Xperia Neo V, Sony Xperia Ray, LG Optimus Sol and the Motorola Defy+. We wonder if the Galaxy Ace Plus can outscore the Sony handsets, which have become our standard recommendations for anyone looking for phones in that price range.

Samsung has previously also announced another model, the Galaxy Ace 2, which promises to bring dual-core processors for a lower price to the masses.

The guys at GSMArena also got some hands-on time with the device and posted a short video of its user interface:

Apple looks to capture more of tablet market with the new iPad

NEW DELHI: As with any new Apple product launch, rumours and sightings of an upcoming device fuelled many online debates, spawned several websites and filled many inboxes. This time, however, most of the predictions about the third-generation iPad were spot-on.

The four major upgrades to the iPad are a super high-resolution screen (higher than even a full HD TV), a better camera for stills and full HD video, a faster processor with upgraded graphics capabilities and support for even faster 4G/LTE wireless networks. 

Also Check: Special Coverage on Apple's new iPad

The only unexpected change is that it's not called the iPad 3 or iPad HD, just the new iPad. But the name is not what the competition has to fear. After selling 55 million units in just 20 months and capturing over 73% of the tablet market, the iPad is now all set for its next innings.

These are some things unique to the new iPad: 

Make beautiful music 

The GarageBand app lets four users connect theiriPads together for a quick jam session. You can quickly record a song, add different tracks with various instruments, edit and export or upload it once done -- all on the device itself.

A complete video studio in your hand 

The new camera and upgraded processor gives the new iPad the ability to record 1080p (full HD) video. With the iMovie app, you can edit, package together professional transitions/effects and upload finished movies without external devices.

Numerous connectivity options 

The new iPad includes support for 4G/LTE networks. If you're lucky enough to have a 4G/LTE network around, you can stream HD videos without buffering, upload 1080p videos effortlessly and share/stream large amounts of data to the cloud with ease. 

Apple's new iPad making waves in video game market

New York: Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) faster and sharper-looking new iPad is drawing the notice of the traditional video game industry, as developers are envisioning games for it that have more in common with the visceral 3D shooter "Call of Duty" than "FarmVille." 

The company is also setting itself up to take on Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Sony (6758.T) on their home turf of console games. 

From Electronic Arts to "Crysis" developers Crytek, industry executives are figuring out ways to migrate graphics-intensive so-called hardcore games to the iPad. Epic Games and Namco Bandai (7832.T) took the stage at Apple's iPad unveiling this week to show off what they can do with an iPad that has a faster quad core processor. 

With more than 55 million iPads sold to date, including 15.43 million last quarter, the tablet is quickly catching up to the number of consoles on the market: the PlayStation 3 has sold 62 million units and Xbox 360 has moved more than 65 million units. That growing user base is drawing developers who want to see their games played on as many devices as possible. 

"Apple is definitely building their devices as if they care a lot about 'triple-A' games," said Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, the studio behind "Gears of War" for consoles and "Infinity Blade" for the iPad. 

The "triple-A" moniker is bequeathed to only the highest-quality video games -- those with the best graphics and that cost in the tens of millions of dollars to produce. So far, not many "triple-A" titles appear on mobile devices. 

Capps, who has appeared on stage at all three of Apple's iPad launches, said he is trying to push the console manufacturers, Sony and Microsoft, to come out with more powerful devices so they do not get left behind. On Wednesday, he told the crowd in San Francisco the new iPad has better screen resolution and more memory than Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation. 

While gamers today might still prefer to play shooter games at home on big screen TVs with a handheld controller, that could soon change, Capps said, especially if a bluetooth controller is developed for the iPad. 

"It is quite easy to imagine a world where an iPad is more powerful than a home console, where it wirelessly talks to your TV and wirelessly talks to your controller and becomes your new console," Capps said in an interview. 

Meanwhile, the industry is bracing for change. Frank Gibeau, president of Electronic Arts' Labels (EA.O), who oversees the company's biggest games such as "Battlefield 3" and "Star Wars: The Old Republic," said the company is eyeing Apple's moves closely. 

"When the iPad gets to the processing power that's equal to an Xbox 360 and it connects to a television, that's no big deal to us. We'll put the game through the iPad and have it display through the television." Gibeau said. 

BRING ON THE GAMES 

EA has already brought some games from its marquee franchises to the iPad: "Dead Space" and "Mass Effect". 

For publishers, "it used to be, oh hey, it's just the Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft show, but that's not the case anymore," Gibeau said. 

Germany's Crytek, which developed "Crysis 2" for consoles and PCs, is working on its first game for the iPad, due out in the spring. While that game will be puzzle-based -- minus the free-wheeling pyrotechnics -- the company said it could one day bring that genre of hardcore games to the device. 

"As more people come to these platforms, we have to follow our fans," said Kristoffer Waardahl, a Crytek studio manager. 

While speedier iPads will soon be getting into more gamers hands, Jeremy Parish, editor in chief of gaming blog 1UP.com, said it does not necessarily put pressure on console makers to come out with a new product any faster. The Xbox 360 launched in 2005 and the PlayStation 3 came out in 2006. 

"For the console makers, it has got be a little bit of an embarrassment to say that this tablet has more power and better screen resolution. But at the same time, this will not be the motivating factor to get them to jump into a new generation of consoles," Parish said. 

Yet the industry is counting on a new wave of gaming hardware in the near future. Nintendo will release the "Wii U," its first console with high-definition graphics, later this year. 

For now, experts are divided as to whether the new iPad will make a dent on consoles but at least one investor said he does expect sales of rival gaming products to be hurt. 

"While consoles won't cease to exist, it does create pressure on them by hurting their growth and taking away some of their customers," said Michael Yoshikami, CEO of Destination Wealth Management. 

Sony spokesman Dan Race said "the PlayStation 3 business is having its strongest year ever" and the "PlayStation $249 price point is resonating with gamers and families alike." 

Nintendo's U.S. executive vice president of sales and marketing, Scott Moffitt said "Regardless of the device, consumers have repeatedly demonstrated that they care more about the experience than the tech specs." 

Microsoft declined to comment. 

Apart from the iPad, Apple's fledgling TV product is also being watched closely by video game companies. Hudson Square analyst Dan Ernst said he doubts the iPad will affect console sales, but said an Apple TV with an app store could one day pose a viable threat.