Washington, Sept 20 : Increasing number of suicidal deaths in low to middle income countries like India, Brazil, Sri Lanka, can be reduced with a low cost intervention strategy to keep in contact with people, who have previously attempted suicide, according to a new research.

The low cost strategy including a one-hour information session about suicidal behaviours, risk factors, constructive coping strategies and referral options has the potential to reduce the economic and societal loss of young people in their most productive years of life.

The researchers found that the subsequent suicide deaths reduced from 2.2 per cent in people treated with usual care to 0.2 per cent in the people given extra contact.

London, Sep 20: US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said that American military chiefs are in close contact with the new Pakistani leadership and are on the ‘most productive path’ in dealing with al Qaeda, the Taliban and other insurgents in co-operation with the country.

Gates was in London for the NATO Defence Ministers’ meeting in which the United States is seeking 20 billion dollars from its allies to help stabilise Afghanistan by sending more troops to confront the growing insurgency.

London, Sept. 20: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Daily Show last night that his decision to send British troops into Iraq and Afghanistan, had a lot to do with his equation with U. S. President George W Bush.

When interviewer Jon Stewart, said to Blair: "Your relationship with George Bush seems inexplicable," Blair replied: "Here's something I find always goes down well, particularly back home: I like him."

Stewart retorted: "I would probably like him too, if he wasn't in charge of me."

Washington, Sep 20 : A resurgent Taliban “has turned much of Afghanistan into ‘No Go’ zones for aid workers and civilians”, according to a new report.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report says that the security situation in Afghanistan is assessed by most analysts as having deteriorated at a constant rate through 2007.

Statistics show that although the numbers of incidents are higher than comparable periods in 2006, they show the same seasonal pattern.

The nature of the incidents has, however, changed considerably since last year, with high numbers of armed clashes in the field giving way to a combination of armed clashes and asymmetric attacks countrywide.

Washington, Sep 20: Congressman Edward J Markey has slammed the US State Department for its misleading Senate testimony on the Indo-US civil nuclear deal.

Markey, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and founder of the House Bipartisan Task Force on Non-proliferation, said in a statement that President Bush’s State Department continued its three-year campaign to undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by ignoring glaring non-proliferation problems with the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Washington, September 20 : NASA''s Swift satellite has found the most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected, designated GRB 080913, which arose from an exploding star 12.8 billion light-years away. 

"This is the most amazing burst Swift has seen," said the mission''s lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA''s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It''s coming to us from near the edge of the visible universe," he added.

Because light moves at finite speed, looking farther into the universe means looking back in time.

GRB 080913''s "lookback time" reveals that the burst occurred less than 825 million years after the universe began.