Japan’s Cleanup After a Nuclear Accident Is Denounced

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Bags of contaminated soil outside the Naraha-Minami school near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

NARAHA, Japan — The decontamination crews at a deserted elementary school here are at the forefront of what Japan says is the most ambitious radiological cleanup the world has seen, one that promised to draw on cutting-edge technology from across the globe.

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Workers reflected in the glass of the Naraha-Minami Elementary School

But much of the work at the Naraha-Minami Elementary School, about 12 miles away from the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, tells another story. For eight hours a day, construction workers blast buildings with water, cut grass and shovel dirt and foliage into big black plastic bags — which, with nowhere to go, dot Naraha’s landscape like funeral mounds.

More than a year and a half since the nuclear crisis, much of Japan’s post-Fukushima cleanup remains primitive, slapdash and bereft of the cleanup methods lauded by government scientists as effective in removing harmful radioactive cesium from the environment.

Local businesses that responded to a government call to research and develop decontamination methods have found themselves largely left out. American and other foreign companies with proven expertise in environmental remediation, invited to Japan in June to show off their technologies, have similarly found little scope to participate.

Recent reports in the local media of cleanup crews dumping contaminated soil and leaves into rivers has focused attention on the sloppiness of the cleanup.

“What’s happening on the ground is a disgrace,” said Masafumi Shiga, president of Shiga Toso, a refurbishing company based in Iwaki, Fukushima. The company developed a more effective and safer way to remove cesium from concrete without using water, which could repollute the environment. “We’ve been ready to help for ages, but they say they’ve got their own way of cleaning up,” he said.

Shiga Toso’s technology was tested and identified by government scientists as “fit to deploy immediately,” but it has been used only at two small locations, including a concrete drain at the Naraha-Minami school.

Instead, both the central and local governments have handed over much of the 1 trillion yen decontamination effort to Japan’s largest construction companies. The politically connected companies have little radiological cleanup expertise and critics say they have cut corners to employ primitive — even potentially hazardous — techniques.

The construction companies have the great advantage of available manpower. Here in Naraha, about 1,500 cleanup workers are deployed every day to power-spray buildings, scrape soil off fields, and remove fallen leaves and undergrowth from forests and mountains, according to an official at the Maeda Corporation, which is in charge of the cleanup.

That number, the official said, will soon rise to 2,000, a large deployment rarely seen on even large-sale projects like dams and bridges.

The construction companies suggest new technologies may work, but are not necessarily cost-effective.

“In such a big undertaking, cost-effectiveness becomes very important,” said Takeshi Nishikawa, an executive based in Fukushima for the Kajima Corporation, Japan’s largest construction company. The company is in charge of the cleanup in the city of Tamura, a part of which lies within the 12-mile exclusion zone. “We bring skills and expertise to the project,” Mr. Nishikawa said.

Kajima also built the reactor buildings for all six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, leading some critics to question why control of the cleanup effort has been left to companies with deep ties to the nuclear industry.

Also worrying, industry experts say, are cleanup methods used by the construction companies that create loose contamination that can become airborne or enter the water.

At many sites, contaminated runoff from cleanup projects is not fully recovered and is being released into the environment, multiple people involved in the decontamination work said.

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 8, 2013

Earlier versions of this article misspelled the name of the construction company in charge of the cleanup of the city of Tamura. It is the Kajima Corporation, not Kashima.

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Global Update: China Moves to Prevent Spread of Yellow Fever From Africa

In a move that underlines how many Chinese citizens now work in Africa, China’s quarantine officials recently urged greater efforts to make sure that a yellow fever epidemic now raging in Sudan does not come back to China.

Local health authorities were asked to scan all travelers arriving from Sudan for fevers. Chinese citizens planning travel to Sudan were advised to get yellow fever shots. Customs officers were told that containers arriving from Sudan might have stray infected mosquitoes inside.

Sudan’s epidemic is considered the world’s worst in 20 years. Sweden, Britain and other donors have paid for vaccinations. The United States Navy’s laboratory in Egypt has helped with diagnoses.

Estimates of the number of Chinese working in Africa, many in the oil and mining industries or on major construction projects, range from 500,000 to 1 million. Experts on AIDS have previously warned that the workers could become a new means of bringing that disease to China, which has a low H.I.V.-infection rate.

ProMED-mail, a Web site that follows emerging diseases, has tracked reports about the Sudan outbreak, with its moderators adding valuable context. China’s mosquito-killing winters make a large yellow fever outbreak there unlikely, moderators said. But Sudan’s containment efforts are troubled. For example, vaccinated people cannot get cards proving they have had shots, but the cards are reported to be for sale at police checkpoints.

Australia’s now-endemic dengue fever, according to ProMED moderators, may have come from mosquitoes arriving in containers from East Timor.

Read More..

Global Update: China Moves to Prevent Spread of Yellow Fever From Africa

In a move that underlines how many Chinese citizens now work in Africa, China’s quarantine officials recently urged greater efforts to make sure that a yellow fever epidemic now raging in Sudan does not come back to China.

Local health authorities were asked to scan all travelers arriving from Sudan for fevers. Chinese citizens planning travel to Sudan were advised to get yellow fever shots. Customs officers were told that containers arriving from Sudan might have stray infected mosquitoes inside.

Sudan’s epidemic is considered the world’s worst in 20 years. Sweden, Britain and other donors have paid for vaccinations. The United States Navy’s laboratory in Egypt has helped with diagnoses.

Estimates of the number of Chinese working in Africa, many in the oil and mining industries or on major construction projects, range from 500,000 to 1 million. Experts on AIDS have previously warned that the workers could become a new means of bringing that disease to China, which has a low H.I.V.-infection rate.

ProMED-mail, a Web site that follows emerging diseases, has tracked reports about the Sudan outbreak, with its moderators adding valuable context. China’s mosquito-killing winters make a large yellow fever outbreak there unlikely, moderators said. But Sudan’s containment efforts are troubled. For example, vaccinated people cannot get cards proving they have had shots, but the cards are reported to be for sale at police checkpoints.

Australia’s now-endemic dengue fever, according to ProMED moderators, may have come from mosquitoes arriving in containers from East Timor.

Read More..

American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip

David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, arrived in Pyongyang on Monday.

SEOUL, South Korea — Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, led a private delegation including Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, to North Korea on Monday, a controversial trip to a country that is among the most hostile to the Internet.

Kim Kwang Hyon/Associated Press

Bill Richardson with journalists on Monday after arriving in Pyongyang, North Korea. Mr. Richardson, who has visited the North several times, called his trip a private humanitarian mission.

Mr. Richardson, who has visited North Korea several times, called his four-day trip a private humanitarian mission and said he would try to meet with Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old South Korean-born American citizen who was arrested on charges of “hostile acts” against North Korea after entering the country as a tourist in early November.

“I heard from his son who lives in Washington State, who asked me to bring him back,” Mr. Richardson said in Beijing before boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang. “I doubt we can do it on this trip.”

In a one-sentence dispatch, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed the American group’s arrival in Pyongyang, calling it “a Google delegation.”

Mr. Richardson said his delegation planned to meet with North Korean political, economic and military leaders, and to visit universities.

Mr. Schmidt and Google have kept quiet about why Mr. Schmidt joined the trip, which the State Department advised against, calling the visit unhelpful. Mr. Richardson said Monday that Mr. Schmidt was “interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect,” but did not elaborate. Mr. Schmidt is a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness.

Except for a tiny portion of its elite, North Korea’s population is blocked from the Internet. Under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the country has emphasized science and technology but has also vowed to intensify its war against the infiltration of outside information in the isolated country, which it sees as a potential threat to its totalitarian grip on power.

Although it is engaged in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons and missile programs and habitually criticizes American foreign policy as “imperial,” North Korea welcomes high-profile American visits to Pyongyang, billing them as signs of respect for its leadership. It runs a special museum for gifts that foreign dignitaries have brought for its leaders.

Washington has never established diplomatic ties with North Korea, and the two countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.

But Mr. Richardson’s trip comes at a particularly delicate time for Washington. In the past weeks, it has been trying to muster international support to penalize North Korea for its launching last month of a long-range rocket, which the United States condemned as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning the country from testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology.

North Korea has often required visits by high-profile Americans, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, before releasing American citizens held there on criminal charges. Mr. Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Pyongyang in 1996 to negotiate the release of Evan Hunziker, who was held for three months on charges of spying after swimming across the river border between China and North Korea.

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With Eye on China, Japan Weighs Raising Military Spending

TOKYO — Japan’s new conservative government announced a review of national military strategy on Monday that analysts said was aimed at offsetting China’s growing military power and that may increase defense spending for the first time in a decade.

Franck Robichon/European Pressphoto Agency

One of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s campaign promises was to strengthen the military.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered his government to replace the nation’s five-year military spending plan and to review defense guidelines adopted in 2010 by the left-leaning Democratic Party, which his party defeated in elections last month. Those guidelines called for gradual reductions in defense spending, and in the size of Japan’s military, particularly in the number of tanks and infantry members.

Mr. Abe had promised during the election campaign to strengthen the military to defend Japan’s control of islands in the East China Sea that are also claimed by China.

Mr. Abe did not release details of his intent on the military revisions, but news reports said the replacement plan would probably reverse the Democrats’ cuts, starting with a 120 billion yen, or $1.4 billion, increase in the military budget in the 2013 fiscal year, which begins in April. That would be the first increase in Japanese military spending since 2002, as the nation has tightened its belt during a long economic decline.

The reports said the new spending plan, proposed by members of Mr. Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party, would seek to increase the number of ground troops, strengthen air and sea defenses around the disputed islands, and buy new early-warning aircraft to guard against Chinese intrusions near the islands, as well as missile launchings by North Korea.

The reports said the plan could also include financing for a feasibility study on acquiring Osprey aircraft, American vertical-takeoff transport planes whose introduction last year to a Marine airfield on Okinawa set off protests. The Osprey can fly farther and faster than Japan’s current helicopters, allowing its troops to more easily reach the disputed islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

Despite a decade of defense cuts, analysts said Japan last year had the world’s sixth-largest military budget, spending 4.65 trillion yen, or $53.3 billion, on defense. Japan has one of the largest and most advanced militaries in Asia, though it has kept a low profile to avoid stirring bitter memories of its early-20th-century empire building.

Mr. Abe’s efforts to raise Japan’s military profile in the region are intended not only to bolster his nation’s declining influence, but also to help an economically ailing ally, the United States, counter China’s rising military prowess.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 7, 2013

A previous version of this article gave an incorrect dollar equivalent for Japan’s 4.65 trillion yen in defense spending last year. It was equivalent to $53.3 billion, not $5.3 billion.

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Future of TV to Be Displayed at Electronics Show

LAS VEGAS — Your smartphone is the screen in your pocket. Your computer is the screen on your desk. Your tablet is a screen for the couch.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Samsung’s exhibit at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, which attracted 140,000  to the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Yuriko Nakao/Reuters

Sony, which exhibited 84-inch TVs at an electronics show last October in Chiba, Japan, will show its wares in Las Vegas.

Almost every major electronic device you own is a black rectangle that is brought to life by software and content. So how can hardware companies make their products stand out in a sea of black rectangles?

That challenge will be on display at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Tuesday through Friday at the 46th annual Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest technology conventions based on attendance, which is expected to exceed 150,000 this year. And one that is particularly acute for television makers. “The hardware is no longer what’s driving the future,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst for Forrester Research. “The hardware is kind of boring.”

More exciting things are happening in software, Mr. McQuivey said. For example, dozens of tablets are on the market, but Apple and Amazon lead the pack because of the impressive apps and digital content available for their devices, he said.

This year, television makers like Samsung, Sony, LG and Panasonic are trying to grab attention by supersizing their television screens and quadrupling the level of detail in their images. And manufacturers continue to push the idea of “smart” sets by adding apps and other interactive elements.

For the electronics industry, the television is an important but increasingly difficult product to sell. Just seven years ago, big-screen sets that cost thousands of dollars were major profit generators. But more recently, even as televisions have gotten bigger and better looking, they have dropped significantly in price amid heated competition.

To make matters worse, consumers are buying new televisions as often as they buy a new car, not as often as a new computer or phone. And people can now watch video on smartphones, tablets and computers, reducing the need to buy a television at all.

Sales of televisions over the holiday season were down 2 percent from the previous year, according to Stephen Baker, an analyst for the NPD Group. Mr. Baker said one problem for television makers was that bigger screens, ranging from 50 inches to 55 inches were taking sales from televisions in the 40- to 49-inch range, once an especially popular category.

The average selling price of a 45- or 49-inch set was $615, but sets in the range of 50 to 54 inches actually had a lower average price, $520, Mr. Baker said. This is because people who bought the smaller televisions opted for features like LED screen technology and Internet capability, but more budget-conscious consumers chose size over other features.

As they try to prop up profits, electronics makers are trying hard to establish a new high-end category of televisions. They are promoting what they call Ultra High-Definition televisions, which have four times as many pixels as their high-definition predecessors. Some of these new televisions can cost as much as a car, like Sony’s 84-inch Ultra HDTV, which is priced at $25,000. But Sony says it will unveil Ultra HDTVs at the show that are smaller and less expensive.

Mike Lucas, a senior vice president at Sony, called its 84-inch set the Ferrari of televisions. But he said that with the new versions, “we’re moving out from the Ferrari world and more into the Audi, Lexus and Mercedes side of the world.” He declined to say how much the smaller Ultra HD sets would cost, but said they would be more expensive than the older HDTVs.

Samsung will also introduce new televisions this week, including an Ultra HDTV that emphasizes software. Joe Stinziano, senior vice president for home entertainment at Samsung Electronics America, said a majority of the new Samsung sets this year would be smart televisions — Internet-enabled televisions that run apps for things like Netflix and Facebook.

“The television has always been the center of the entertainment of the home,” Mr. Stinziano said. “Now it will be the center of a connected home.”

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Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

Mark Holm for The New York Times

Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.

ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.

Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.

“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”

For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.

At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.

Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.

In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.

Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.

Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.

“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”

Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.

Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.

The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.

Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.

“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.

“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.

Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.

Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.

While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”

In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.

Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.

Read More..

Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

Mark Holm for The New York Times

Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.

ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.

Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.

“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”

For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.

At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.

Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.

In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.

Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.

Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.

“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”

Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.

Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.

The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.

Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.

“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.

“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.

Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.

Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.

While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”

In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.

Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.

Read More..

Virtual U.: Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times

Coursera has 35 employees in Mountain View, Calif. An employee works on a laptop near a new reception area.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.

“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.

“Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point,” said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates. “What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years.”

But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera’s university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.

“We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,” said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. “I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.”

Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.

Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.

This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee — Ms. Koller would not say how much — to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.

“We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price,” she said.

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India Ink: India's Rape and Sexual Assault Laws Under Scrutiny

The death of a young rape victim in from Delhi has reopened a debate in India about the country’s sexual assault and rape laws, as sweeping changes are being demanded to improve women’s rights in the country.

Compared to the much of the rest of the world, sections of India’s laws covering rape are inadequate and narrowly defined, critics say. And India’s way of delivering justice to rape victims is replete with loopholes, they say.

The debate comes as the Indian government reviews the country’s laws and punishments for sexual assault, in the wake of widespread protests and calls for judicial action. The government has formed a panel of three legal experts, headed by a former chief justice of India, J.S. Verma, to review possible amendments, including those that would impose more stringent punishment. The committee is expected to submit its report by the end of January.

India’s current definition of rape is steeped in outmoded traditions, making the possibility of a conviction unlikely in many cases, human rights activists said. The law, which dates from 1860, has been amended only twice since then, in 1983 and 2003. “There is need for a much broader definition of rape, as is accepted by international standards,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

Currently, section 375 of the Indian Penal Code is defined as vaginal-penile intercourse against a woman’s consent. Excluded from the law is the rape of a woman by her husband if the woman is above 15 years of age.

“The world is changing, and because there are changes in society we need to modify the definition of the rape law,” said Monica Joshi, a law officer at the Human Rights Law Network in New Delhi who specializes in women’s cases. “The law needs to include things like oral penetration, anal penetration, insertion of a foreign object into a woman’s body, dating rape, marital rape and deal with direct and indirect consent.”

Both Britain and most states in the United States consider marital rape a legal offense, noted Pinky Anand, a Supreme Court lawyer who specializes in cases for women, constitutional law and international law.

Still, there is a “progressive” part of Indian law compared to laws in some parts of the United States and in Britain, said Mrinal Satish, an associate professor at the National Law University in Delhi, who is completing his doctoral dissertation at Yale Law School. In India, the prosecution is required to prove that the defendant knew that the woman was not consenting to intercourse and only relies on the victim’s testimony, not the defendant’s belief, Mr. Satish said.

But this is also where the ambiguities arise. The court, said Mr. Satish, has to be satisfied that the woman’s testimony is reliable. Stereotyping based on certain characteristics, like whether the victim is a virgin or married, plague judgments in rape cases and usually have a negative impact, he said.

The current law also lacks clarity about punishments for a convicted rapist. According to section 376 of the Indian Penal Code, the minimum sentence for a convicted rapist is seven to 10 years, while the maximum sentence is life imprisonment. Gang rape carries a punishment of 10 years to life imprisonment. However, in certain situations a convicted rapist can get away with serving less time.

“The law allows the judge discretion to award a lesser punishment in special cases such as an aged person or a person of unsound mind,” says Ujjwal Nikam, a special public prosecutor for the government of Maharashtra whose expertise is in criminal law.

Sentencing guidelines for judges in India are nonexistent, which could lead to lenient sentences in rape cases, critics say.

“Unlike some other countries, such as the United States and England, India does not have sentencing guidelines, which provide rules and principles for judges to follow while sentencing,” said Mr. Satish. This contributes to the “rampant disparity” in punishments for rape cases, he said.

Legal experts in India are debating increasing the maximum punishment for rape in India, which could include the death penalty.

Some activists and advocates believe that an enhancement in the punishment will create a greater deterrent against rape. “The principle problem with rape laws in the country is that they don’t seem to be serving enough of a deterrent to criminals,” said Ms. Anand. “The rate of rape is horrifying, and the conviction rate is unsatisfactory. Capital punishment is the only answer.”
·
However, activists warn of the dangers of imposing the death penalty in rape cases, citing the increased chances that rapists would attempt to kill their victims, among other risks.

Another punishment being considered is chemical castration, the administration of medication designed to decrease libido and sexual activity, which is used on sex offenders in South Korea, Russia and Israel. In the United States, chemical castration is used in California, Florida and Louisiana.

Several legal experts argue there is also need to review the sexual assault law in India. Under section 354 of the Indian Penal Code, sexual assault is described as “outraging the modesty of a woman” – a description considered archaic, subjective and limited by legal experts. “We need to increase the ambit of sexual assault to include harassment, verbal abuse, groping, acid attacks, stalking and cyber crime,” said Ms. Anand.

Punishment for sexual assault should also be increased, activists said. Currently sexual assault crimes carry a maximum punishment of two years, but most convicted criminals can walk away by paying a small fee. “Criminals who repeatedly commit sexual assault if not convicted will then progress to higher crimes like rape,” said Ms. Anand.

A sexual assault bill currently pending in Parliament introduces some of these measures by increasing the punishment for molestation from two years to five years in prison, and sexual harassment from one year to three years.

The law itself is not the only problem. “When it comes to the problems – they lie in the system and how the legal system deals with rape cases,” Mr. Satish said. It’s important that the evidence is built. And if that’s weak, then the court is left with evidence on the bases it cannot convict.”

A draft bill has been submitted to the panel by the ruling Congress Party suggests chemical castration of rapists in rare cases, longer sentences for rape and setting up fast-track courts.
The bill should be named after the Delhi gang rape victim, Shashi Tharoor, the Indian minister of state for human resource development, said on Twitter on Jan. 1. The thought struck a chord with the victim’s parents, according to local media reports. (The woman’s name has only been reported so far by a British newspaper, which said it had the father’s permission. Reports Monday said his permission had not been given.)

Lawyers and activists are hopeful that the national attention garnered by this particular rape will spur the government to action. “Gender issues have not been given primacy up until now, but this time around civil society has raised enough of a voice that it cannot be ignored,” said Ms. Anand.

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