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India on Friday conveyed its sympathies to the government and people of Japan, hours after that country was ravaged by a severe earthquake and tsunami.
The government also expressed its sadness over the loss of life and the extensive damage to property and infrastructure.
The Ministry of External Affairs said that letters of sympathy with offers of assistance are being issued by the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, and External Affairs Minister S.M.Krishna to their counterparts.
The ministry said in a statement that Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao had spoken to Ambassador Saiki of Japan in New Delhi and had conveyed heartfelt sympathies and condolences, as well as offered any assistance that may be required.
The minsitry said that there are no reports of any casualties amongst the approximately 25,000 strong Indian community in Japan which is concentrated in the Kanto and Kansai regions.
It said that the embassy in Tokyo and Indian Consulate in Osaka are in touch with community members and verifying the situation on the ground.
A control room has been established in the Embassy of India, Tokyo which can contacted on phone numbers 00813 32622391 to 97.
The Ministry of External Affairs is monitoring the situation closely and would take all necessary steps required as per exigencies. (ANI

Massive tsunami kills 23 in Japan

The devastating tsunami following a 8.9 earthquake magnitude off the northeastern coast in Japan has reportedly killed 23 people and injuring many others. The earthquake has led to widespread power blackouts, and countries across the Pacific Ocean, from Russia to South America, besides Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States, have been alerted for possible tsunami attack, The New York Times reports. The paper quoted an official as saying that the government had held an emergency session to coordinate response as the death toll rose to 23 in five prefectures. At least 30 people were injured in the cities of Tokyo and Osaka. Following the earthquake, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan had said that the country's disaster management operations have been activated to counter the after effects of earthquake-cum-tsunami. Kan had urged citizens of the country to remain calm and asked those immediately affected to relocate to higher ground, according to local television reports. He had also promised immediate and prompt emergency aid, even as reports surfaced about a number of people missing or dead. He confirmed that five nuclear plants in the country have shut down operations and that one oil refinery had caught fire. The tsunami had hit the coast of northeast Japan following an 8.9 magnitude earthquake about 80 miles offshore. A second major earthquake of 7.4 magnitude was reported as aftershocks shook the region. The U.S. Geological Survey called the 8.9 magnitude earthquake as a "mega" quake. The tremor occurred at about 230 miles northeast of Tokyo and at a depth of about 15 miles. The quake occurred at 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time and its location was off Honshu, Japan's most populous island, the paper said. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center has warned Japan, Russia, Marcus Island and the Northern Marianas to be aware of Tsunami. Japan's meteorological agency warned that a tsunami as high as 20 feet could strike the coast near Miyagi prefecture, closest to the epicenter. (ANI)

Japanese tsunami hits market, Sensex down by about 154 points

Indian stocks today survived a tsunami scare with the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) benchmark Sensex recouping to some extent day's sharp losses but still ended with a loss of 154 points.

Global equity markets plunged after 33-foot tsunami in Japan caused untold damages and panic-striken investors, already worried about boiling unrest in the Middle-East and Spain debt crisis, resorted to hectic selling.
Japanese benchmark index Nikkei closed down 1.72%, the Chinese Shanghai Composite by 0.73%, and Hong Kong's Hang Seng by 1.55%. Singapore's Strait Times closed lower 1.04%.
The tremors of Japan earthquake were felt across European bourses which were trading lower between 0.39% and 0.92% in their afternoon deals.
Tracking global indices, the 30-share Sensex too plummeted to 18,000-level, a steep loss of of over 305 points from day's high levels.
Markets recouped after the government dispelled the possibilities of tsunami hitting the Indian shores.
The Sensex finally settled the day at 18,174.09 points, down 153.89 points from its previous close.
The NSE 50-issue Nifty also dropped by 48.95 points or 0.89% to 5,445.45.
A leading analyst warned that the economic impact of such a natural calamity is yet to be assessed and such assessment may give fresh trigger to the markets.
Meanwhile, reports of industrial growth slowing down to 3.7% in January 2011, against 16.8% in the year-ago period, too weighed on the market mood.
The markets were already struggling after the escalation of violence in Libya and protests in Saudi Arabia fuelling fears of a spike in oil prices that would undermine the global economic growth.
Eleven of the 13 sectoral indices fell with the BSE metal losing the most. The metal index closed lower by 1.91%, the teck index by 1.61% and the BSE-IT by 1.49%.
Overall, 25 out of 30 index-based scrips declined while others gained. BHEL dipped by 3.64%, the REL Com by 3.46%, REL Infra by 3.19%, Sterlite Ind by 3.06%, Jaipra Asso by 2.90% and TCS by 2.48%.
Bharti Airtel fell by 2.08%, Bajaj Auto by 2.02%, M&M by 1.75% and Hindalco by 1.65%.
Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) turned net sellers as they sold shares worth Rs97.19 crore yesterday as per provisional data after pulling out Rs37.10 crore on March 10.
The total market breadth remained negative as 1,928 shares ended with losses and 924 finished with gains at BSE.
The total market turnover shot up to Rs4,010.48 crore from Rs2,995.69 crore yesterday.

Finding a Soul Mate for North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un

SEOUL — At first she did not know what to make of being romantically matched with Kim Jong-un, that roly-poly bachelor, the presumptive future lord and master of North Korea. Should she be offended, amused, angry, what?

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Gao Haorong/Xinhua, via Associated Press

Kim Jong-un.

After some thought, she said: “I felt proud to be selected. I thought, ‘Cool. It means you’re in the elite.’ If he was South Korean, he’d be in the top 1 percent of the men.”
Miss Kim, 28, a Korean-American who declined to be identified by her full name, was among four possible marriage partners selected for Mr. Kim by Couple.net, one of the leading matchmaking agencies in South Korea.
The online dating industry here is large, lucrative and fiercely competitive, with more than 1,000 companies vying for customers and nuptials. Couple.net ran Mr. Kim’s profile through its computer-selection algorithm as a promotional idea before White Day on March 14. (The faux holiday, highly promoted by the candy industry, has South Korean men giving sweets to the women who gave them chocolates on Valentine’s Day.)
“We try lots of interesting matches, and this time we went a little wild, just in time for White Day,” said Erica Oh, a marketing executive with Couple.net.
The computer kicked out 36 highly compatible matches for Mr. Kim, before veteran matchmakers from the company winnowed those down to a final four.
The woman chosen as the very best match declined to be interviewed, citing Mr. Kim’s notoriety, and none of the selectees wanted their full names to be used.
One of the likely matches, a 25-year-old high school art teacher, said she had heard some nice things about Mr. Kim’s father, the dictator Kim Jong-il.
“I heard that Kim Jong-il is really into the arts and theater, and assuming Kim Jong-un inherited the same interest, as an art teacher I would share a common interest with him,” said the woman. “However, I’ve also seen him portrayed in the media as a hostile and radical person, and that aspect of him doesn’t appeal to me.”
Another woman, a pharmacist, 27, said: “My general perception of him is not positive because he’s not my type. However, if I were to meet him I would gladly take the chance to ask him many questions.”
Couple.net said its formula for matching people — company executives refer to it almost reverentially as The Logic — came from a decade of empirical data on proven, successful couplings. The agency claims to have matched 23,000 people over the past 20 years using Korea-specific criteria that emphasize their clients’ jobs and educations, their families’ assets and their parents’ levels of education, especially which universities their fathers attended.
The result is a score that the agency calls its Soulmate Index, essentially a number that rates a person’s attractiveness as a potential marriage partner. The top woman scored 90 out of 100, two of the women scored 89s, and Miss Kim had a 76. Good matches all.
“Of course these women have virtually no possibility of meeting Kim Jong-un,” said James Lee, the founder and chairman of Sunoo, his original matchmaking business that is being rebranded as Couple.net as it goes global. “We have analyzed Kim’s potential as a marriage partner, not as a political leader but rather as a man.”
Mr. Lee, who got his start as an entrepreneur peddling toilet paper from a Seoul pushcart, added that “one of our greatest hopes as a company is establishing a branch in Pyongyang,” the North Korean capital.
Despite Kim Jong-un’s position as a four-star general and the heir apparent to his father, he remains something of an enigma. Few verifiable details are known about him, including his exact age, which is believed to be 28 or 29. He is thought to have been schooled in Switzerland for a time, or maybe not. His height and weight are uncertain. He is not known to be married.
But The Logic was able to crunch other available data about Mr. Kim — primarily his university education in North Korea, his lofty job titles, the family’s assets and his father’s schooling and socioeconomic status.
“His assets are off the charts,” said Ms. Oh, adding that the company had rated his physical appearance as “average.”
“Looks are not so important for Korean females as long as the guy is highly educated, successful and financially stable,” said Ms. Oh. “For Korean men, looks are the most important thing.”
In the end, The Logic awarded Mr. Kim a score of 89 points on the Soulmate Index. That would put him among the top 2 percent of eligible single men in South Korea, according to company indices. In other words, the young general is a real catch.
“Look, he’s a Pig!” Ms. Oh exclaimed as she reviewed a listing of Mr. Kim’s personal details. She was not unkindly referring to his girth or grooming habits. Rather, she had noticed that Mr. Kim, according to company research, was born Jan. 8, 1983, in the Year of the Pig under the Chinese zodiac.
Pigs, coincidentally, are considered good matches for each other, which would enhance Miss Kim’s compatibility with Mr. Kim. She, too, is a Pig.

Seoul investigates sex-for-visas scandal

outh Korea will send a team of officials to China to investigate an alleged sex-for-favours scandal that has engulfed its consulate in Shanghai.
Three South Korean diplomats are suspected of having affairs with the same Chinese woman who then used her influence to secure visas.
The affairs were exposed when the husband of the 33-year-old Chinese woman wrote to the South Korean government and exposed the diplomats' affairs with his wife.
At least three diplomats are suspected of giving the woman work visas in exchange for sex.
She is also alleged to have received confidential information, including the phone numbers of South Korean government leaders.
Seoul will send a team of officials to Shanghai next week to investigate the scandal.

China's Debt Burden Limits Policy Leeway

BEIJING—New Chinese government figures show its national debt load remains low compared with other major economies. But including the debts of local governments and many parts of the state-owned banking sector, as many economists say is proper, shows the constraints facing Beijing in the fight against inflation, its top economic priority.

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A worker does construction at a railway site in Suining in southwest China's Sichuan province this month.In a report issued during the annual session of the National People's Congress, China's legislature, the Ministry of Finance said central government debt at the end of 2010 was $1.03 trillion. That number is equal to about 17% of China's gross domestic product, far below the levels of the U.S., Japan, and major European countries.

China's government debt is mostly held domestically. In contrast, about half of the U.S. federal government's debt is held by China and other foreigners, a source of anxiety among policy makers and the public who fear it makes the U.S. vulnerable to pressure from foreign creditors.
China, meanwhile, sits on foreign-exchange reserves that have grown to $2.85 trillion.
But the official Chinese debt tally doesn't include debt owed by a number of large state-owned entities, local governments and even a central government ministry. Among the debts not counted are those of state-owned policy lenders like China Development Bank and by asset-management companies that hold nonperforming loans from state-owned commercial banks. The official total also excludes debts from local governments and central departments outside the Finance Ministry.
China's railways aren't included either though they are run by a central government ministry. Saturday, China's railways minister said debt incurred by rail companies totals more than $270 billion—which the Finance Ministry would be on the hook for if the railways couldn't pay.

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Adding up the official debt data from these other parts of the government as well as from state banks and estimated debt of asset-management companies puts China's total government liabilities at $3.55 trillion, equivalent to 59% of GDP. Some economists who follow the issue say those official data underestimate items like nonperforming loans created by a lending surge over the past two years. Stephen Green, China economist at Standard Chartered Bank, estimates total debt, including contingent liabilities, at 77% of GDP. Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Beijing-based research firm Dragonomics, puts the total debt at 75% of GDP.

At a press conference this week, Minister of Finance Xie Xuren didn't directly answer a question about whether debts from other government arms should be considered part of the official total. The ministry's news office didn't respond to a request to comment.
Direct comparisons of the debts of the U.S. and Chinese governments are difficult because the Chinese government plays a much bigger role in its economy, industry and banking system. The gross debt of the U.S. federal government was $13.53 trillion, or 93% of GDP, much higher than China's reported 17%. Excluding debt owed by one arm of the government to another, such as Social Security, the U.S. debt was 62.2%, the highest in half a century. The figures don't include the liabilities of the government to pay retirement and health benefits in the future nor the debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage companies that have been nationalized, nor the debts of state and local governments.
The U.S. federal government isn't legally liable for the debts of state and local governments, though there is persistent speculation that Washington would bail them out if they ran into trouble. If China's local governments can't pay their debts, the central government will either have to bail them out directly, or take losses in the state-owned banking system.
Analysts don't think China is on the verge of a debt crisis. Tax revenue is rising quickly, the state has considerable assets, and almost all of its debt is denominated in domestic currency. Unlike Greece, which faces low growth rates and high borrowing costs—the yield on 10-year Greek government debt is currently more than 12%—China's economy is expected to continue growing by near double-digit rates, and its 10-year bonds trade at a yield of 3.94%. But a larger debt burden than widely understood does point to growing constraints on Beijing's policies and also reflects a wider difficulty with the opacity of China's official data that makes it difficult to understand the world's second-biggest economy.
A crucial piece of the debt puzzle is held by local governments. In theory, provincial and city-level administrations aren't allowed to borrow. In practice, officials have found ways around the restrictions. The true level of China's local government debt is unclear. In his report to the National People's Congress on Saturday, Premier Wen Jiabao promised a full audit.
The China Banking Regulatory Commission estimates that investment vehicles backed by local government guarantees borrowed $1.17 trillion over the course of 2009 and the first half of 2010. An article this week in Century Weekly, a leading Chinese financial magazine, puts the total for local government debt at the end of 2010 at $1.52 trillion.
"The alarming thing is that no one, not even the central government, knows how much debt there is in the system," says Victor Shih, a professor at Northwestern University who has studied the issue.
Consumer prices in January rose 4.9% from a year earlier. The central bank has raised interest rates three times since October to combat inflation. But Zhang Ming, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, says the debt burden limits the room for maneuver on monetary policy. "Every increase in interest rates increases the burden on local government debtors, and that weighs into the central bank's decision making on raising rates," he said.
At the end of 2010, total outstanding debt issued by China Development Bank and other policy banks—which play an important role in funding public infrastructure projects—was equal to $785 billion. The policy banks are able to raise funds at rates only slightly higher than the Finance Ministry, underlining the market view that their borrowing is government-backed.
Beijing also faces potential liabilities from the government's role in the banking system. Mr. Shih estimates that undigested obligations in the asset-management companies that took on the banks' nonperforming loans add $228 billion to the government's contingent liabilities. The China Banking Regulatory Commission no longer publishes data on the asset-management companies' resolution of the nonperforming loans they acquired, but one consultant involved in the nonperforming loan market confirmed that Mr. Shih's estimate was reasonable.
—David Wessel in Washington contributed to this article.

Serious issues beckon him

ears before US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke was nominated as the next US ambassador to China, he made the first of a series of official visits to the country of his father’s birth, after his election in Washington state as America’s first Chinese-American governor.
“He was a rock star. He was treated very much as a head of state there. People in supermarkets came up to him and recognised him,” said Roger Nyhus, Locke’s former communications director.When Chinese President Hu Jintao made his first state visit to the US in 2006 to meet with former President George W Bush, he stopped first in Seattle for a tour at Boeing Co. and dinner at the home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates in a visit coordinated, at the request of the Chinese government, by Locke.There was a payoff. The Starbucks store Locke helped open in Guangzhou was part of what became a doubling of Washington state exports to China to more than $5 billion a year.Locke aggressively talked up Boeing jets, argued for intellectual property protections for Microsoft software, praised the taste of double-shot lattes, played up the healthfulness of Washington state potatoes and pushed, on the US side, for wider freedoms in exporting high-tech equipment to China.President Barack Obama named him Wednesday to succeed former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman in Beijing, calling the relationship with China “one of the most critical of the 21st century.”Locke, a 61-year-old lawyer by training, comes to what is arguably America’s most crucial foreign diplomatic posting. Many caution that he has little experience in some of the stiffest dilemmas the US faces in its dealings with China: how to manage an increasingly assertive China in talks over North Korea, Iran and possibly now Libya; balancing escalating oil imports and attempts to limit greenhouse gases; ongoing concerns over human rights in China; fractious discord over valuation of China’s currency. While most analysts reckon Locke’s confirmation will be a shoo-in, Republican lawmakers have suggested they may use the occasion to criticise the Obama administration’s China policies. Critics in both parties have complained about the administration’s soft hand in addressing China’s undervalued currency, which many see as a big culprit in the huge US trade deficit with China.“There are a lot of reasons we could imagine that he’s not going to sail through as he did with his nomination as commerce secretary,” said David M Bachman, political science professor and former China studies chair at the University of Washington.Locke was the son of an immigrant Chinese grocer, spending his early childhood in an ethnically mixed housing project in Seattle.“It is little over a century that my grandfather first came to America to work as a houseboy for a family in Washington state in exchange for English lessons,” Locke said Wednesday. “I’m going back to the birthplace of my grandfather and father, and I’ll be doing so as a devoted and passionate advocate for America.”Locke graduated from Yale University in 1972 and earned his law degree from Boston University three years later. His career in politics began with his election to the Washington state House of Representatives in 1982, where for five years he chaired the appropriations committee and earned an enduring reputation as a technocrat who reveled in the policy details of running government.Locke went on to become King County executive in 1993 and governor in 1996. Locke presided as governor over some of the Oz-like years of the dot-com boom, when the stunning growth of Microsoft, Real Networks and Amazon.com left urban Washington awash in cash, but also had to oversee years of heavy cuts in public spending that disillusioned some liberal supporters.Locke as commerce secretary has worked to successfully forge new opportunities for US companies, said business leaders, who were generally positive about Wednesday’s nomination. “Over the long run, innovation, economic growth and diplomatic harmony are most effectively achieved by free and fair trade and open dialogue,” said Muhar Kent, CEO of the Coca-Cola Co. and chairman of the US-China Business Council. Dave Cote, the Honeywell CEO who has worked with the administration to open Chinese markets, said, “Locke’s experience in working through tough issues at Commerce and as governor of Washington make him uniquely qualified for this role.”