Cargo plane crashes in Brazzaville, 3 dead

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (AP) — A cargo plane owned by a private company crashed Friday near the airport in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, killing at least three people, officials said.

The Soviet-made Ilyushin-76 belonged to Trans Air Congo and appeared to be transporting merchandise, not people, said an aviation official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The plane was coming from Congo‘s second-largest city, Pointe Noire, and tried to land during heavy rain, he said.

Ambulances rushed to the scene in the Makazou neighborhood, located near the airport, but emergency workers were hampered by the lack of light in this capital, which like so many in Africa has a chronic shortage of electricity.

“At the moment, my team is having a hard time searching for survivors in order to find the victims of the crash because there is no light and also because of the rain,” Congolese Red Cross head Albert Mberi said.

He said that realistically, they will only be able to launch a proper search Saturday, when the sun comes up.

Reporters at the scene fought through a wall of smoke. Despite the darkness, they could make out the smoldering remains of the plane, including what looked like the left wing of the aircraft. A little bit further on, emergency workers identified the body of the plane’s Ukrainian pilot, and covered the corpse in a blanket.

Firefighters were trying to extinguish the blaze of a part of the plane that had fallen into a ravine. They were using their truck lights to try to illuminate the scene of the crash. Although the plane was carrying merchandise, emergency workers fear that there could be more people on board.

Because of the state of the road connecting Pointe Noire to Brazzaville, many traders prefer to fly the roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles).

Africa has some of the worst air safety records in the world. In June, a commercial jetliner crashed in Lagos, Nigeria, killing 153 people, just a few days after a cargo plane clipped a bus in neighboring Ghana, killing 10.

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Facebook Powerball frenzy: Purported winner offers to ‘share’ $1 million

His name is Nolan Daniels, and he’s just about to give some random dude or dudette $ 1 million. Or so he claims.

Purporting to be the second Powerball winner in Wednesday’s $ 588 million payout, Mr. Daniels posted a Facebook photo late Thursday of himself holding a ticket showing the winning numbers. The photo is the only one visible on Daniels’s account, which dates to 2008.

“Looks like I’m not going to work … EVER!!!” the smiling purported winner exclaimed. The numbers on his ticket – 5-23-16-22-29-Powerball 6 – correspond to the winning combination, but the ticket has not been publicly verified.

To make the Facebook announcement that much more bizarre, Daniels vowed to give $ 1 million of his winnings to a “random” person who “shares” his photo.

That set off a frenzy Friday as thousands of Facebook users got in on the action, with the photo being shared over 1,000 times a minute, with over 100,000 shares as of 3:30 p.m.

On his Facebook page, Daniels chastised skeptics and suggested, “Anyone who doubts the legitimacy of this photo will not be included in the 1 million dollar drawing.”

There were two winners in the drawing. The only winners confirmed so far are Cindy and Mark Hill of Dearborn, Mo., who decided to take a lump sum payment. Lottery authorities have not revealed the name of the other winner, who bought a ticket in Arizona. Earlier on Friday, some guessed that a video of a man celebrating in Maryland might show the winner.

The payout is the second largest in US history after three ticket buyers shared a $ 656 million jackpot in March. As the amount grew this week, tickets were selling at a rate of 130,000 a minute.

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Putin aide denies Russian president has health problems

TOKYO/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin is in good health, his chief of staff said on Friday after Japanese media said Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had postponed a visit to Moscow next month because the Russian president had a health problem.

A former KGB officer who enjoys vast authority in Russia, Putin has long cultivated a tough-guy image, and health issues could damage that. His condition though has been questioned in some media since he was seen limping at a summit in September.

Three Russian government sources told Reuters late in October that Putin, who began a six-year term in May and turned 60 last month, was suffering from back trouble, but the Kremlin has dismissed talk that he had a serious back problem.

Putin’s health troubles stem from a recent judo bout, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said this week.

Then on Friday Japanese news agencies Kyodo and Jiji reported that Prime Minister Noda talked about the delay of a visit planned for December in a meeting with municipal officials on the northern island of Hokkaido.

“It’s about (President Putin’s) health problem. This is not something that can easily be made public,” Jiji cited one of the officials as quoting Noda as saying.

But Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov denied there was any problem.

“Please don’t worry, don’t be concerned. Everything is in order with his health,” Putin’s said in Vienna, according to state-run Russian news agency RIA.

In an interview published on Friday in the popular Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said rumors about a spine problem were “strongly exaggerated”.

“He is working as he has before and intends to continue working at the same pace,” Peskov said.

“He also does not plan to give up his sports activities and for this reason, like any athlete, his back, his arm, his leg might sometimes hurt a little – this has never gotten in the way of his ability to work.”

Putin had been expected to make several foreign trips in late October or November, but they did not take place.

Putin is however due to visit Turkey on Monday and Turkmenistan on Wednesday.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, made amply clear the Kremlin was displeased by the public discussion of scheduling by Japanese officials and denied that Noda’s visit had been postponed, saying no date had been set.

“It is just unethical to name the dates that were discussed. There were several: at first it was October, November, December, January … then we even shifted to February,” Ushakov said, adding that the sides eventually agreed tentatively on January.

He said the diplomatic process of agreeing dates for the visit should have been “hermetically sealed”.

Putin’s image as a fit, healthy man helped bring him popularity when he rose to power 13 years ago because of the stark contrast with his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who was sometimes drunk in public and had heart surgery when president.

He has used activities like scuba diving and horseback riding to maintain that image.

On Friday, Putin met leaders of parliamentary factions in his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. He appeared in good health and was walking without any sign of a limp.

Likely to be on the agenda in talks between Russian and Japanese officials are energy cooperation and a decades-old dispute over islands north of Hokkaido known as the Southern Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan.

(Additional reporting by Darya Korsunskaya; Writing by Tomasz Janowski and Steve Gutterman; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jon Hemming)

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The Economy of Surgery

When I was twelve, my sister and I accompanied my grandparents to their annual yoga retreat in the hilly ranges of southern India. We had never been before, but the summer heat was particularly blistering that year, so we persuaded our grandparents to take us along. I envisioned a blissful two-week vacation in a photogenic little hamlet, nestled among tea plantations, in temperatures that were thirty degrees cooler than on the mainland. It was just that, and yet, it was even less complicated than that.The mean age of folk at the retreat was 67. Bells sounded every morning at 3:30am, and everyone filed out of their cabins and to a little gymnasium in the center of the dwelling, where we all meditated for two hours to the sounds of sitar music and transcendental humming. Meals were served at strict hours three times a day, and consisted of boiled vegetables and grains, with not a lick of salt or spice. The library in the middle of this utopian dwelling held only spiritual and philosophical texts, not the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys I hoped for. In the afternoons, there were a variety of classes offered – cooking lessons, devotional classes, music and instrumental classes, and yoga. My sister and I stopped by the latter occasionally, and were always put to shame by octogenarians holding themselves up in impossible poses, such as balancing their entire habitus on the tips of their fingers. I journaled in the evenings, writing each day about a new facet of human life that I’d observed. In the absence of stimulus, my dreams grew vivid and exceedingly detailed.Over the course of the two weeks, my sister and I grew quiet and reflective. It was then that we began an important switch in our minds, something that has lasted to this day. We began to see value in living leanly, economically, functionally. We began to separate needs from wants, and to discard the ornamentation.*Third year of medical school has finally brought me around to my surgery rotation: three months of waking up at 4am, stuffing my white coat pockets to the brim with gauze and tape, retracting skin and fat during long abdominal surgeries, and practicing suturing techniques on pig’s feet procured at the local Stop&Shop grocery market. It’s fast and exhilarating, and deeply satisfying. I was skeptical when I first heard that my preceptor’s favorite procedure of all time was draining a deep-seated abscess. But when I saw it being done in clinic, how a single stab of the thing blade led to the gushing of what felt like liters of pus, I couldn’t help but agree. What a joy to just go in and fix a problem so dramatically, reconstruct a failing human body in a matter of hours!During orientation on the first day of the rotation, two residents sat down and gave my classmates and me some hard advice. Surgery is a demanding rotation, they said, and it reflects the demanding residency ahead that awaits the select few. We could expect to go in while it is still dark out, and leave after the sun had set, almost every day. Residents and attendings can be rough around the edges, and may be gruff with you, even kick you out of their operating room if they feel like it, but it’s not personal. Or even if it is, we’ve got to shrug it off and keep it moving. Gone are the days of noon conferences and luxurious afternoon didactics, with their promise of free lunches and coffee. We were to eat when we can, sit when we can, sleep when we can.After an hour of such grim prognostications, my classmates and I took a break and debriefed our feelings with each other outside the bathrooms. Some were giggling nervously with panicked eyes, but most looked inspired. I too felt like I had voluntarily signed up for a warrior training program, and was feeling pretty zen about it. I saw it as a character-building experience: surgery was the time to cut out the silly frills, and embrace a leaner, meaner way of living. It was time to lose the pretty business casual outfits and fancy footwear of internal medicine, and trade them in for utilitarian scrubs and clogs. It promised to be a time of talking less and getting things done.*During a recent health management class, my classmates and I discussed the case of a medical center based in Seattle that benefited from industry principles gleaned from, of all places, the Toyota car manufacturing company. Toyota’s revolution as a manufacturing miracle began in the supply-scarce post-WWII Japan, when management was confronted with the challenge of meeting customer needs in the face of little spare capital to hold inventory as a buffer to fluctuating demand. The company then developed a set of principles focused on cutting muda or waste, while pursuing kaizen, or continuous self -improvement by way of complete intolerance for redundancy. Toyota integrated these principles into every step of production and management.For instance, Toyota emphasizes innovation on the shop floor by frontline workers to solve problems in production in real time. If a problem is discovered that cannot be fixed within the production cycle time, workers pull a cord that halts the entire assembly line and brings a senior supervisor to the scene. The management aggressively seeks ideas for improvement from employees, resulting in an average yield of close to a million ideas annually, 90% of which go on to be implemented.Analysts attribute Toyota’s success to its emphatic optimization of flow – information flow, physical flow of parts, and overall production flow, via standardized processes and continuous improvement. Standardized processes are ones that are streamlined to eliminate aberrations and unplanned redundancies. Waste, measured even in the seconds, is simply not tolerated, forcing a redesign of processes, again and again, which any employee can take on.In 2004, Toyota surpassed Ford Motors to become the world’s second-largest manufacturer of cars and trucks, surpassing the latter consistently in quality, dependability and value assessments. In turn, Ford began to take cues from Toyota, transforming its assembly-line system to similarly cut out waste.*There are two kinds of people in the world: surgeons, and everyone else.Really, what does it mean to live leanly? I rediscovered it in this rotation. A life in surgery isn’t for everyone, but such an experience is something I truly feel everyone should have. These past 6 weeks have been teaching me to think fast, move fast. They’ve been teaching me to suffice with less, be it food, sleep, or words of appreciation. They’ve been teaching me to appreciate the vulnerabilities of the human body – for no matter how exhausted or sleep-deprived I may feel, actually laying hands on the more tangible deficits of another’s is always startling and humbling. The end result is a beautiful dance, for surgeons and their assistants, working with their hands, rediscovering the grace of human movement, bring art back into medicine.I never leave the OR thinking that more is better. I watch instruments fly, I watch the players push and pull, cut and stitch, wash and dry, and I think about things like symmetry, precision, and above all, the beauty of economy.

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs.Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
© 2012 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.
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News Corp to name Thomson as Publishing Co CEO next week: sources

(Reuters) – News Corp is expected to name Robert Thomson, a close confidant of Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, to lead its new publishing company by the end of next week, according to sources familiar with News Corp’s plans.

Thomson is currently managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and editor in chief of its publisher Dow Jones & Co, which News Corp acquired in 2007. Gerard Baker, currently the deputy editor of the Journal, is expected to succeed Thomson, according to these sources.

Murdoch will be relying on his trusted lieutenant to steer the new company – whose main assets apart from Dow Jones include its British and Australian newspapers and HarperCollins book publishing business – at a difficult time. Newspapers in many developed markets are suffering from a severe drop in advertising revenue and circulation is being hit as readers are choosing to get their news on smartphones and tablets.

Among the key decisions Thomson will have to make include what to do about the financially struggling New York Post and whether the new company will go on an acquisition spree for other U.S. newspapers that could come on the market, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Thomson and Baker were not immediately available for comment. Representatives for Dow Jones and News Corp were also not immediately available.

In June, News Corp said it was separating its publishing and entertainment assets in response to shareholders who had pressed News Corp to get rid of its troubled newspapers business after a phone hacking scandal tainted its British newspapers and forced the company to drop its proposed acquisition of pay-TV group BSkyB.

News Corp is still finalizing the details of other executive appointments within the new company – a decision that could delay the announcement of the appointments of Thomson and Baker, one of the sources said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the role of Dow Jones CEO Lex Fenwick will change in any way.

Murdoch will hold the chairman title at the publishing company after its split from the entertainment side, which will include most of the group’s TV and movie studio assets and where he will remain chairman and CEO.

The confirmation of Thomson’s long-rumored appointment to CEO of the publishing company appears to have sidelined any plans Murdoch may have had to bring his eldest son, Lachlan, back into the family business fold. News Corp watchers and industry experts had assumed that Murdoch would push hard to recruit Lachlan given his son previously had some success as publisher of the New York Post.

The Australian-born Thomson was appointed to oversee the newsroom of the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires shortly after News Corp’s $ 5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones from the Bancroft family in 2007. Thomson was editor of News Corp’s Times of London and before that he was at the Financial Times where he led that paper’s expansion in the U.S.

He recruited Baker in 2008 from the Times of London where he was heading up its coverage in the U.S.

While the newspaper industry is facing stiff challenges, News Corp has invested in the Wall Street Journal, adding new sections – including one that covers New York and one that focuses on real estate, while other papers have retrenched by slashing pages and frequency of publication. The Journal has risen to become the No. 1 daily newspaper in the U.S. and has broadened out its coverage beyond Wall Street to include more political and general news in an effort to compete with the New York Times.

The splitting of News Corp into two publicly traded companies will likely be completed by the end of June.

New Corp’s film and television businesses include the 20th Century Fox film studio, Fox broadcasting network and Fox News channel. The entertainment business, which generated revenues of $ 24.7 billion in the year ending June 2012, would dwarf the publishing unit, which posted $ 8.2 billion in revenue.

(Reporting By Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Peter Lauria and Martin Howell)

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Gotye wins big at Australia’s Aria music awards

SYDNEY (AP) — Gotye has taken home album of the year at Australia‘s Aria music awards for his internationally acclaimed “Making Mirrors.”

The album features the Belgian-born, Australian-raised singer’s multiplatinum hit “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which was the top song of the year on digital music service Spotify.

Gotye won three other awards at Thursday night’s Arias, including best pop release, best Australian live act and best male artist.

The annual awards show is Australia’s version of the Grammys. This year’s gala featured appearances by Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj and Russell Brand.

Fans shrieked with glee when British pop group One Direction was dubbed best international artist. The quintet thanked their Aussie supporters via video link.

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AIDS drug roll-out boosts South African life expectancy

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa has achieved a “stunning” increase in life expectancy in the last three years due to a government push to roll out antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to people with HIV/AIDS, researchers said on Thursday.

The average South African is now likely to live to the age of 60, a study in the Lancet medical journal said, compared with just 56.5 in 2009 when President Jacob Zuma came to power with promises of a new approach to the country’s HIV/AIDS burden.

Africa’s biggest economy is home to 6 million HIV/AIDS sufferers but under Zuma’s predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, the government was reluctant to provide the life-prolonging drugs, the study said.

Nearly 2 million people are now taking ARVs daily in what is the world’s largest ARV programme. That total compares with 912,000 in 2009 and just 235,000 three years before that.

Although overall infection rates have stayed constant at around 10 percent since 2006, the study’s authors said such a dramatic increase in life expectancy was unheard-of.

“There are many factors that contribute to life expectancy but the single most important one was the expansion of the ARV treatment programme,” said Professor Salim Abdool Karim, director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa and a member of the Lancet South Africa team.

“That increase in life expectancy is nothing short of stunning. You don’t see those kinds of increases in the real world.”

Lead researcher Bongani Mayosi from the University of Cape Town singled out Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi for praise in reversing the policies of Mbeki, whose health minister outraged activists by questioning the effectiveness of ARVs and championing the benefits of garlic and beetroot instead.

“We have no doubt that the new administration that came in 2009 was eager to make an improvement on the disastrous record of the first 15 years of the ANC government,” Mayosi said.

South Africa still faced formidable challenges however, particularly in reducing huge racial disparities in housing, employment and access to health services, Mayosi said.

Just 10.3 percent of black South Africans, who make up 80 percent of the population, have medical insurance, compared with 70.9 percent for whites, who make up just 10 percent of the overall 52 million population, the study showed.

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Dollar-Less Iranians Discover Virtual Currency

Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s one currency in Iran that has kept its value and can be used to purchase goods from abroad: bitcoins, the online-only currency.

Created in 2009 by a mysterious programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoins behave a lot like any currency. Their value is determined by demand, and they can be used to buy stuff. Bitcoin transactions are encrypted and handled by a decentralized global network of tens of thousands of personal computers. Merchants around the world accept the currency, from a bakery in San Francisco to a dentist in Finland. Individuals who own bitcoins and wish to exchange them for physical currencies like euros or dollars can use exchange sites such as localbitcoins.com, a Finland-based site founded by Jeremias Kangas. “I believe that bitcoin is, or will be in the future, a very effective tool for individuals who want to avoid sanctions, currency restrictions, and high inflation in countries such as Iran,” Kangas wrote in an e-mail.

The advantage for Iranians is that bitcoins can be swapped for dollars that can then be kept outside the country. Another plus: Regulators can’t easily track the transactions, since bitcoins aren’t issued from a central server. Bitcoin users can conduct business on virtual private networks, which hide customers’ identities.

At online store coinDL.com, shoppers can use bitcoins to buy Beyond Matter, the latest album from Iranian artist Mohammad Rafigh. Anyone in the U.S. downloading songs, which fetch .039 bitcoins or 45¢ each, risks violating U.S. sanctions. That doesn’t bother Rafigh, who’s studying computer engineering as well as playing music. “Bitcoin is so interesting for me,” Rafigh wrote in an e-mail. “I wish the culture of using digital money spreads all over the world, because it does not have any dependency on anything like politics.” Rafigh has translated some bitcoin software into Farsi for his friends. “I love Iran, and if bitcoin is good for me, it can be good for more Iranians like me.”

Iranian-American bitcoin consultant Farzhad Hashemi recently traveled to Tehran and talked up bitcoin to his friends. “They are instantly fascinated by it,” he says. “It’s a flash for them when they realize how it can solve their problems.” Iranians working or living abroad can send bitcoins to their families, who can use one of the online currency matchmaking services to find someone willing to exchange bitcoins for euros, rials, or dollars. Bitcoins are useful to Iranians wishing to move their money abroad, either to children studying in Europe or America or simply to stash cash in a safe place.

As the value of the rial plunges, many Iranians are trying to acquire foreign currencies. “We have no idea what will happen,” says Amir-Hossein Madani, who says he’s traded tens of millions of street market dollars in Tehran over the past two years. “These days prices change every 10 minutes.”

The uncertainty has led some Iranian software developers to ask clients to pay them in bitcoins. “Anyone with a computer is able to own, send, and receive them. You can be at an Internet cafe in Iran and managing a bitcoin account,” says Jon Matonis, a founding board member of the Bitcoin Foundation, a Seattle nonprofit that promotes the currency. The exchange rate in Iran is 332,910 rials per bitcoin. It isn’t known how many Iranians use bitcoins to skirt sanctions. According to localbitcoins’ Kangas, 32 people in Iran have contacted each other through his site.

An internal FBI report in April expressed concern over the online currency. The report was leaked to Wired and Betabeat. “Since Bitcoin does not have a centralized authority, law enforcement faces difficulties detecting suspicious activity, identifying users, and obtaining transaction records—problems that might attract malicious actors to Bitcoin,” says the report. For now, Iranians are using bitcoins to maintain a fragile connection to the outside world.

The bottom line: Iranians are resorting to virtual currency to move money into and out of the country in a way that Western authorities find hard to detect.

With Ladane Nasseri, Yeganeh Salehi, and Peter S. Green

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Myanmar cracks down on mine protest; dozens hurt

MONYWA, Myanmar (AP) — Security forces used water cannons and other riot gear Thursday to clear protesters from a copper mine in in northwestern Myanmar, wounding villagers and Buddhist monks just hours before opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was to visit the area to hear their grievances.

The crackdown at the Letpadaung mine near the town of Monywa risks becoming a public relations and political fiasco for the reformist government of President Thein Sein, which has been touting its transition to democracy after almost five decades of repressive military rule.

The environmental and social damage allegedly produced by the mine has become a popular cause in activist circles, but was not yet a matter of broad public concern. However, hurting monks — as admired for their social activism as they are revered for their spiritual beliefs — is sure to antagonize many ordinary people, especially as Suu Kyi’s visit highlights the events.

“This is unacceptable,” said Ottama Thara, a 25-year-old monk who was at the protest. “This kind of violence should not happen under a government that says it is committed to democratic reforms.”

According to a nurse at a Monywa hospital, 27 monks and one other person were admitted with burns caused by some sort of projectile that released sparks or embers. Two of the monks with serious injuries were sent for treatment in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second biggest city, a 2 ½ hour drive away. Other evicted protesters gathered at a Buddhist temple about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the mine’s gates.

Lending further sympathy to the protesters’ cause is whom they are fighting against. The mining operation is a joint venture between a Chinese company and a holding company controlled by Myanmar’s military. Most people remain suspicious of the military, while China is widely seen as having propped up army rule for years, in addition to being an aggressive investor exploiting the country’s many natural resources.

Government officials had publicly stated that the protest risked scaring off foreign investment that is key to building the economy after decades of neglect.

State television had broadcast an announcement Tuesday night that ordered protesters to cease their occupation of the mine by midnight or face legal action. It said operations at the mine had been halted since Nov. 18, after protesters occupied the area.

Some villagers among a claimed 1,000 protesters left the six encampments they had at the mine after the order was issued. But others stayed through Wednesday, including about 100 monks.

Police moved in to disperse them early Thursday.

“Around 2:30 a.m. police announced they would give us five minutes to leave,” said protester Aung Myint Htway, a peanut farmer whose face and body were covered with black patches of burned skin. He said police fired water cannons first and then shot what he and others called flare guns.

“They fired black balls that exploded into fire sparks. They shot about six times. People ran away and they followed us,” he said, still writhing hours later from pain. “It’s very hot.”

Photos of the wounded monks showed they had sustained serious burns on parts of their bodies. It was unclear what sort of weapon caused them.

The protest is the latest major example of increased activism by citizens since the elected government took over last year. Political and economic liberalization under Thein Sein has won praise from Western governments, which have eased sanctions imposed on the previous military government because of its poor record on human and civil rights. However, the military still retains major influence over the government, and some critics fear that democratic gains could easily be rolled back.

In Myanmar’s main city of Yangon, six anti-mine activists who staged a small protest were detained Monday and Tuesday, said one of their colleagues, who asked not to be identified because he did not want to attract attention from the authorities.

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X Factor judge Louis Walsh settles defamation case

DUBLIN (Reuters) – Television personality and pop music producer Louis Walsh on Wednesday settled a 500,000 euro ($ 640,000) defamation case against News Group Newspapers in Ireland.

The deal came after Walsh, best known for his role as a judge on the hit television show “The X Factor”, sued the group for publishing a story last year based on false allegations that he had groped a man in a Dublin night club.

Leonard Watters, who made the accusations before later retracting them, was jailed for six months earlier this year.

Paul Tweed, Walsh’s solicitor, said: “The publishers of the Irish, UK and online editions of the Sun have this morning unreservedly apologized to Louis Walsh.

“They have also agreed to pay very substantial damages of 500,000 euros together with his legal costs.”

Walsh, who managed Irish boy bands Westlife and Boyzone, said the story had a “terrible effect” on him.

“I’m very satisfied with this morning’s total vindication for me, but I remain very angry at the treatment I received at the hands of the Sun,” he said outside court.

“I have the utmost respect and time for most journalists with whom I’ve always enjoyed a good relationship, and I’m therefore absolutely gutted and traumatized that these allegations should have been published

“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

The Sun said it apologized “unreservedly”.

(Reporting by Sarah O’Connor)

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