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Trading had already been halted earlier, after investors pushed stocks above their daily maximum limit.
The Congress victory gives the party a strong mandate to continue reforms that have spurred Indian economic growth.

‘Big bang’

The broader Nifty index, traded on the National Stock Exchange, also rose 17%, over 500 points, to 4,308. Trading was also halted earlier and the stock exchange was closed down.

Meanwhile, the Indian rupee jumped over 2% to 48.32 a dollar, its biggest gain since 1998.

“This was the big bang event that investors were looking for,” said Hitesh Agrawal, head of research with Angel Broking. “We expect the government to have greater flexibility to boost economic reform and growth from here on.”

The Congress-led alliance is projected to win 260 seats, with rivals the BJP on 157. This confounded projections of a close election.

The communist parties, who had blocked reforms in insurance, pension funds and the selling off of state-owned companies, lost more than half their parliamentary seats.

Shares in some of India’s largest companies also climbed. Reliance gained 37% and ICICI Bank jumped 25.3%, while carmaker Tata gained 40% and IT firm Infosys rose 9.8%.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa had already declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) the day before, and the military said the bulk of the fighting was over by the time the rebels said they had been beaten.

Even though there was little doubt about the final outcome of Asia’s longest modern war, sporadic battles were still being fought late on Sunday and no one was willing to predict when the last bullet would be fired.

“We are doing the mopping-up operations,” military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said. “Suicide cadres are coming in front of troops in the frontline and exploding themselves.”

Rajapaksa was due to make a formal victory announcement in parliament on Tuesday morning, but already flags were flying, people were dancing and lighting off fireworks in celebration.

The last act was playing out in what the military said was less than 1 square km (0.5 sq mile), where the LTTE carried out suicide attacks on Sunday before troops freed the last of 72,000 civilians who have fled over four days.

LTTE founder-leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran’s fate remained a mystery, although military sources said a body believed to be his was recovered and its identity was being confirmed.

The LTTE, founded on a culture of suicide before surrender, at the last minute issued a statement from its diplomatic chief saying: “This battle has reached its bitter end.”

According to a report, while recently attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, an annual event where powerful politicians and media elite get a chance to cozy up to one another, Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the old U.S. Naval Observatory, which is now the home of the vice president.

The bunker is believed to be the secure, undisclosed location former Vice President Dick Cheney remained under protection in secret after the 9/11 attacks.

Eleanor Clift, Newsweek magazine’s Washington contributing editor, said Biden revealed the location while filling in for President Obama at the dinner, who, along with Grover Cleveland, is the only president to skip the gathering.

According to the report, Biden “said a young naval officer giving him a tour of the residence showed him the hideaway, which is behind a massive steel door secured by an elaborate lock with a narrow connecting hallway lined with shelves filled with communications equipment.”

Clift continued: “The officer explained that when Cheney was in lock down, this was where his most trusted aides were stationed, an image that Biden conveyed in a way that suggested we shouldn’t be surprised that the policies that emerged were off the wall.”

In December 2002, neighbors complained of loud construction work being done at the Naval Observatory, which has been used as a residence by vice presidents since 1974.

The upset neighbors were sent a letter by the observatory’s superintendent, calling the work “sensitive in nature” and “classified” and that it was urgent it be completed “on a highly accelerated schedule.”

Residents said they believed workers were digging deep into the ground, which would support Biden’s report of a secret bunker, but officials never confirmed the purpose of the work performed.

The revelation is the latest from Biden, who has a long history of political blunders.

The disclosure will likely to provoke further concern over the £5.5 billion project, which has been condemned as a waste of money and an invasion of privacy.

Campaigners have already raised fears the Home Office, police, and security officials would have access to the scheme’s database.

The scheme’s log records each time an ID card is used to verify a person’s identity when they make a high value purchase, open a bank account or take out a mortgage.

Tax officials could use the system to look for cases where large numbers of high value purchases have been recorded, which might indicate that a person earns more than they declare.

The database will also include information on checks made by employers that job applicants are eligible to work in Britain. This could alert the taxman to people who have undeclared second occupations.

Companies will be allowed to check details on the database for a fee of around 60p per inquiry. Each time a check is made against the ID card, it will be logged on the National Identity Register.

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID campaign, told the Daily Mail: “It would be hypocrisy of the highest order for politicians so reluctant to come clean on their own personal finances to pass legislation that would let the taxman snoop through all of ours.

“The big lie of the ID scheme is that it’s for our benefit – the detail shows it’s all about giving the bureaucrats and bean-counters more control.”

“The IRF team sprayed Mr. Deghayes with mace; they threw him in the air and let him fall on his face … ” according to the Spanish investigation. Deghayes says he also endured a “sexual attack.” In March 2004, after being “sprayed in the eyes with mace,” Deghayes says authorities refused to provide him with medical attention, causing him to permanently lose sight in his right eye. Stafford Smith described the incident:

“They brought their pepper spray and held him down. They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes.

“Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks, but he gradually got sight back in one eye.

“He’s totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all white and milky — he can’t see out of it because he has been blinded by the U.S. in Guantánamo.”

In fact, Stafford Smith says his blindness was caused by a combination of the pepper spray and the fact that an IRF team member pushed his finger into Deghayes’ eye.

The Spanish investigation into Deghayes’ torture draws much from the March 2005 memo, which described several acts of abuse of Deghayes at the hands of the IRF teams. (The memo refers to IRF by its alternative acronym ERF):

ERF-ing Omar — The Feces Incident

On one of the ERF-ing incidents where Omar was abused, the officer in charge himself came into the cell with the feces of another prisoners [sic] and smeared it onto Omar’s face. While some prisoners had thrown feces at the abusive guards, Omar had always emphatically refused to sink to this level. The experience was one of the most disgusting in Omar’s life.

ERF-ing Omar — The Toilet Incident

In April or May 2004, when the Guantánamo administration insisted on taking Omar’s English-language Quran, he objected. The ERF team came into Omar’s cell and put him in shackles. He was not resisting. They then put his head in the toilet, pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it.

ERF-ing Omar — The Beating

In one ERF-ing incident, Omar was shackled by three American soldiers in their black Darth Vader Star Wars uniforms. The first was going to punch Omar, but before he could, the second kneed Omar in the nose, trying to break it. The third queried this, and the second said, “If his nose is broken, that’s good. We want to break his ******* nose.” The third soldier then took him to hospital.

ERF-ing Omar — The Drowning

The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. He was totally shackled, and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present, and they would join in. Omar is particularly affected by the fact that there was one nurse who “had been very beautiful and kind” to him to [sic] took part in the process. This happened three times.

ERF-ing Omar — Tango Block

Omar was out on the Tango block rec yard when 15 ERF soldiers came, with two other soldiers in the towers, armed with guns. They grabbed him (and others) and sprayed him.

They then pulled him up into the air and slammed his face down, on the left side, on the concrete. They had someone from the hospital there, and she just watched. She then came up to him and asked whether he was OK. He was taken off to isolation after that.

German media outlets reported last week that a Saudi inventor’s application to patent a “killer chip,” as the Swiss tabloids put it, had been denied.

The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person’s skin, so that authorities could track him easily.

Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he’d become a public threat.

The inventor said the chip could be used to track terrorists, criminals, fugitives, illegal immigrants, political dissidents, domestic servants and foreigners overstaying their visas.

The victims, ages 19 to 23 years old, were found tied up on Saturday, but their deaths were not reported earlier because they were under investigation, said Fermin Gomez, an assistant state prosecutor in Baja California.

U.S. consular officials in Tijuana said the victims — two men and two women from the San Diego and Chula Vista areas — were U.S. citizens. The state attorney general’s office in Baja California said one of the women was Mexican.

Their deaths are the latest in a string of violence in Tijuana that authorities blame on a bloody turf war between drug cartels.

“I just don’t think kids should be going to Tijuana right now,” Chula Vista police Lt. Scott Arsenault told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “They ran into the wrong people, obviously.”

The pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. It also tried cooking the vegetables at high temperatures, a strategy the industry calls a “kill step,” to wipe out any lingering microbes. But the vegetables turned to mush in the process.

So ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”

Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show.