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Warning of tsunami greater than 2004 By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 6:01pm BST 05/09/2007 Tens of millions of people who live in the Bay of Bengal face the threat of a tsunami as massive as the one that devastated the Sumatran coast in 2004, a leading geologist warns today. Satellite images showing Banda Aceh before (top) and after (bottom) the 2004 tsunami While the Boxing Day 2004 disaster took the scientific community by surprise, killing around a quarter of a million people, one geologist who had sounded the alert about the dangers in the Indian Ocean now says...

Baby tiger's birth adds to rare species   Last Edited: Friday, 09 Mar 2007, 7:41 PM EST Created: Friday, 09 Mar 2007, 6:54 PM EST     A rare tabby tiger has been born in Polk County. Related Items Videos DAVENPORT - Sounds of life fill the air at Horseshoe Creek Wildlife Foundation.  Spring is dawning, and that means babies being born.All the births are a joy for Horseshoe Creek founder Darryl Atkinson. "It's like being a father all over again.  I can't explain -- they are my children," Atkinson said.   He is especially thrilled by the recent birth...

More than 20,000 tribes people have come on to the streets of a remote district of India's West Bengal state to demand a separate tribal homeland. The Rajbongshi tribes people are blocking roads a day after violent protests had left five dead and more than 100 injured. Police killed two people on Tuesday when they fired on protesters who went on the rampage, killing three officers. The state government has sent a huge number of troops to quell the unrest. Armed groups Intelligence officials say tension is high, with the Rajbongshis demanding an inquiry into Tuesday's police shootings. Police had...

Calcutta's famous hand-pulled rickshaws will soon be banned, according to the chief minister of the Indian state of West Bengal. The rickshaws had long been considered "inhuman" and did not exist anywhere else, Buddhadev Bhattacharya said. The rickshaw, immortalised as a living symbol of Calcutta in films such as City of Joy, will be phased out in four to five months. The hand-pulled rickshaw came from China in the 19th century. Mr Bhattacharya said: "We have taken a policy decision to take the hand-drawn rickshaw off the roads of Calcutta on humanitarian grounds. "Nowhere else in the world does this...

Bangladesh police have held 24 people for questioning following a bomb attack on a shrine in the city of Sylhet on Monday that killed three people. The bomb, which injured around 30, went off during a festival at the shrine of Muslim saint Hazrat Shah Jalal. A 14-year-old boy and an unidentified man died instantly and another man died later in hospital. Shrine officials said up to 50,000 devotees had gathered for the three-day Urs Sharif festival. Police said the explosion was the first act of violence at the 700-year-old shrine in Sylhet, 192 kilometres (120 miles) north-east of the...

The buried palace of Gaur SUHRID SANKAR CHATTOPADHYAY in Malda Excavations in Malda throw light on the architecture and engineering of Gaur, the capital of the medieval Muslim rulers of north Bengal. PICTURES: SUSHANTA PATRONOBISH The Bais Gazi wall, which surrounds the palace area. IN his book Memoirs of Gaur and Pandua, the historian Khan Sahib Abid Ali, who himself hailed from Malda, wrote: "Excavations have been made in different parts of the ruined city by village cultivators in search of treasure, which have revealed traces of spacious halls, pavements, staircases, subterranean passages, and a good many other relics, all...

A 42-year-old man in Kolkata on Sunday tested positive for SARS taking the number of infected people in the country to seven even as pathological results of 13 more suspected cases in six states were awaited.The textile engineer contracted SARS during a recent trip to China and a few other Southeast Asian countries between March 28 and April 14.After returning to Kolkata, he took ill and was admitted to a private hospital. He was allowed to go home after a few days.But he was readmitted following high fever and chest congestion. The nursing home then referred him to a specialty...

An Ancient Link to Africa Lives on in Bay of Bengal By NICHOLAS WADE Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago east of India, are direct descendants of the first modern humans to have inhabited Asia, geneticists conclude in a new study. But the islanders lack a distinctive genetic feature found among Australian aborigines, another early group to leave Africa, suggesting they were part of a separate exodus. The Andaman Islanders are "arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet," a team of geneticists led by Dr. Erika Hagelberg of the University of Oslo write in the journal Current...