Jakarta - Annisa Nurul Jannah, 11, was learning about how devices transmit heat, sound and electricity. "I like science because it teaches me a lot," the sixth grader at Petamburan 04, a school in a working-class part of Jakarta, said about her favorite subject. "I'd be sad if it was removed from school."

Millions of children in Indonesian elementary schools may no longer have separate science classes starting in June, the beginning of their next school year, if the government approves a curriculum overhaul that would merge science and social studies with other classes so more time can be devoted to religious education.

A draft of the proposal was posted online in November and December for public comment. The government is analyzing the feedback and will meet with a team of experts shortly to develop new lesson plans.

Ibnu Hamid, an Education Ministry spokesman, said feedback showed that people generally agreed with the curriculum changes but were worried that there would not be enough time to train teachers and prepare new books. The comments have not been released to the public, however, and some critics question whether they truly reflect broader opinion.

Officials who back the changes say that more religious instruction is needed because a lack of moral development has led to an increase in violence and vandalism among youths, and that could fuel social unrest and corruption in the future.

"Right now many students don't have character, tolerance for others, empathy for others," Musliar Kasim, the deputy minister of education, said in an interview in November. He proposed the changes in September.

He is part of a team of officials, academics and advisers from the office of Vice President Boediono working to streamline the curriculum in 2013.

Mr. Hamid said that the aim was to create a "balance between attitude, skills and knowledge."

Turkey has decided to build its first nuclear power plant at a controversial location on the Mediterranean coast that had been previously dropped, Energy Minister Hilmi Guler said Tuesday.

"The place where everything is currently ready (for construction) is Akkuyu," Guler told the NTV news channel.

An earlier plan to build a nuclear reactor at Akkuyu, in the southern province of Mersin, was dropped in July 2000 amid financial difficulties and protests from environmentalists in Turkey and neighbouring Greece and Cyprus. Opponents raised safety concerns, arguing that the proposed site is only 25 kilometres (15 miles) from a seismic fault line.

The government is expected to make the tender announcement on February 21 and the winning company should start construction later this year. The plant is expected to become operational in 2013 or 2014.

Calling the Delhi gang-rape "the worst in the world", police officers are calling for urgent amendments in the archaic Indian Penal Code (IPC) to provide justice to women in distress.

Even police officers who have over the decades seen countless bodies and battered humans are unable to control their emotions as they talk about the savagery committed Dec 16 on the victim who finally died Dec 29.

"We have never seen a beastly crime like this," one officer told IANS. "Forget the details... I can tell you with authority that there has never been a rape like this anywhere in the world."

This is a rare case when most police officers surprisingly are in agreement with what protesters are demanding on the streets: death for all six rapists.

"What happened on Dec 16 was shocking," another officer added. "We too are human, we too have daughters, wives and mothers. It is impossible to tell anyone what this woman underwent in the (moving) bus."

Spiritual leader Asaram Bapu was Monday reported as saying that the Delhi gang-rape victim should have called her attackers "brothers" and recited the Saraswati mantra to avert the tragedy.

This provoked both the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP to lash out at the comments as disturbing and condemnable.

Asaram Bapu reportedly said, "The victim is as guilty as her rapists", adding one hand cannot clap.

The victim should have "begged" in front of the culprits, he said.

Speaking to a gathering of followers at Tonk town, some 100 km from Jaipur, Asaram Babu said: "The five or six drunken men were not the only ones guilty. The girl was also responsible..."

The residents of Hong Kong, like many in Asia, have a thing for shark fin soup. There's been efforts to educate and regulate... But despite it all, the appetite for it is still going strong, which leads to tens of millions of sharks getting mutilated and thrown back in the water to slowly die, every single year.

The photos in this slideshow were taken on the rooftops of buildings in Hong Kong (a big hub in the shark finning industry), and they show thousands and thousands of mutilated shark fins. Remember: Each one represents a dead shark that was killed just for this little piece of cartilage. I find those photos extremely sad, and if you go all the way to the last slide (you can navigate with the arrows on the top right of the images), there's a video showing the same location. Truly sickening.

An argument over a restaurant bill spiraled out of control in a western Indian city, triggering violent clashes between Muslims and Hindus that killed four people. The mass brawl damaged the surrounding neighborhood and left at least 175 injured.

The four casualties of the riots were killed in police fire as officers resorted to live ammunition to bring the rival brawlers under control in the city of Dhule on Sunday night. They also used sticks, teargas and plastic bullets to bring the rioters to heal.

Over 113 police were among the injured.

Investigations are still underway into the root causes of the brawl, but police say a dispute over a restaurant bill in an establishment triggered the unrest.

The antagonistic parties in the dispute are suspected by police to be from rival Muslim and Hindu communities.

"The customer went and took 50 people from his community and assaulted the restaurant owner, and people from the owner's community also gathered and started arsoning [sic] and rioting," said special inspector general Deven Bharti to AFP. He declined to identify the parties involved in the initial incident.

Larry B. Seabrook, a pillar of Bronx politics whose nearly three-decade tenure has included stints as an assemblyman, state senator and city councilman, was sentenced to five years in prison on Tuesday for his conviction on political corruption charges.

Mr. Seabrook, 61, was also ordered to pay $620,000 in restitution to the City of New York.

He was convicted in July of orchestrating a broad scheme to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars in city money to friends, relatives and a girlfriend through a network of nonprofit groups that prosecutors said he controlled.

Kenyan wildlife rangers on Tuesday were tracking a team of poachers who massacred a family of 11 elephants in what they said was the worst single such killings in the country in the past three decades.

"We have not lost as many elephants in a single incident since the early 1980s," said Patrick Omondi, head of the elephant programme at the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). "This is a clear signal that things are getting worse."

The bullet-riddled corpses of the elephants - all with their tusks hacked off, and including a two-month old baby - were found Saturday in south-eastern Kenya's vast Tsavo East National Park.

"Our initial investigations show that the poachers numbered at least 10 and were armed with an assortment of guns," Omondi said, adding that the normal weapon of choice for poachers is an AK-47 assault rifle.

Rangers were tracking the poachers in "hot pursuit" but had so far not caught the gang, KWS said.

Congress may be gridlocked but the latest figures from the porn industry give new meaning to the old adage, greasing a politician's palm. Washington, D.C. ranked No. 1 for the most online porn videos viewed per person last year.

The figure takes into account population differences.

Now you know what all those pols and government workers are doing with your hard-earned tax dollars.

Pornhub.com, an online site that shows previews and snippets of adult videos of every stripe, released the figures today, gleaned from the viewing habits of people who visited last year.

Base on its tabulations, the District of Columbia, which includes Congress, the White House and most federal government offices, ranked No. 1 per capita with 14.18 porn videos watched.

With a population of 617,996, based on the latest U.S. census data, that works out to just over 8.7 million video views in gross terms.

A communication professor known for conspiracy theories has stirred controversy at Florida Atlantic University with claims that last month's Newtown, Conn., school shootings did not happen as reported - or may not have happened at all.

Moreover, James Tracy asserts in radio interviews and on his memoryholeblog.com. that trained "crisis actors" may have been employed by the Obama administration in an effort to shape public opinion in favor of the event's true purpose: gun control.

"As documents relating to the Sandy Hook shooting continue to be assessed and interpreted by independent researchers, there is a growing awareness that the media coverage of the massacre of 26 children and adults was intended primarily for public consumption to further larger political ends," writes Tracy, a tenured associate professor of media history at FAU and a former union leader.

In another post, he says, "While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place - at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described."

FAU is distancing itself from Tracy's views.

"James Tracy does not speak for the university. The website on which his post appeared is not affiliated with FAU in any way," said media director Lisa Metcalf.

Tracy said he knows he has sparked controversy on campus. In one of his courses, called "Culture of Conspiracy," Tracy said some students have expressed skepticism about his views.

"But I encourage that," said Tracy, 47, a faculty member for 10 years. "I want to get students to look at events in a more critical way."