Venezuela postpones inauguration for cancer-stricken Chavez

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela will postpone the inauguration of President Hugo Chavez for a new term due to health problems, the government said on Tuesday, another sign the socialist leader's cancer may be bringing an end to his 14 years in power.

The 58-year-old former soldier who has dominated the South American OPEC nation since 1999 has not been heard from since surgery on December 11 in Cuba - his fourth operation since he was diagnosed with an undisclosed type of cancer in June 2011.

The announcement outraged opposition leaders who insist that Chavez must be sworn in before the National Assembly on January 10 as laid out in the constitution, or temporarily step aside and leave an ally in power.

"The commander president wants us to inform that, based on his medical team's recommendations, the post-operative recovery should extend past January 10," said Vice President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's chosen successor, in a letter read to the legislature.

"As a result, he will not be able to be present at the National Assembly on that date."

The letter said authorities would seek another date for the inauguration ceremony but did not say when it would take place or give a time frame for Chavez's return from Havana.

Rather than being sworn in by the legislature, he would take his oath at a later date before the Supreme Court, the letter said, as allowed by the constitution.

Government leaders insist Chavez is completely fulfilling his duties as head of state, even though official medical bulletins say he has a severe pulmonary infection and has had trouble breathing.

The government has called for a massive rally outside the presidential palace on Thursday, and allied presidents including Uruguay's Jose Mujica and Bolivia's Evo Morales have confirmed they will visit Venezuela this week despite Chavez's absence.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has announced plans to visit Chavez in Havana on Friday.

But the unprecedented silence by the president - famous for regularly speaking for hours in meandering broadcasts - has left many convinced he could be in his last days.

His resignation or death would upend politics in the oil-rich nation, where he enjoys a deity-like status among poor supporters thankful for his social largesse.

His critics call him a fledgling dictator who has squandered billions of dollars from crude sales while dashing the independence of state institutions.

CONSTITUTION DISPUTE

The constitution does not specify what happens if the president does not take office on January 10.

The Supreme Court, controlled by Chavez allies, called a news conference for Wednesday. It is widely expected to announce an interpretation of the constitution that will give Chavez leeway to take office when he is fit to do so.

If he dies or steps aside, new elections would be called within 30 days. Before leaving for Havana in December, the president instructed his supporters to back Maduro in that vote if he were unable to continue.

Opposition leaders argue that Congress chief and Chavez ally Diosdado Cabello should take over, as mandated by the constitution if the president's absence is formally declared.

Cabello has ruled that out, saying the president continues to be in charge.

"Who could have believed the opposition would be screaming for Diosdado Cabello to be given the presidency of the republic?" he said during a rambunctious session of Congress. "That's crazy, the opposition is losing it."

Meanwhile opposition deputies accused the Socialist Party of failing to follow Chavez's instructions - a scene that would have been unimaginable before Chavez's prolonged absence.

"President Chavez is the only one among you who has spoken clearly," said opposition leader Julio Borges.

He was drowned out by pro-Chavez deputies clapping and chanting the socialist leader's name and rebuffed by Cabello, who had long been considered a potential successor to Chavez until he was passed over for Maduro.

"It's not my fault you weren't chosen, don't take your frustration out on me," Borges quipped.

Another opposition deputy complained that during the debate a copy of the constitution was thrown across the chamber from the direction of the Socialist Party's deputies.

Chavez's supporters have held near-daily vigils for his recovery, while opposition activists accuse the president's allies of a Cuban-inspired manipulation of the situation.

Maduro has taken over the day-to-day running of the government and looks set to continue in the role past Thursday.

The mustachioed former bus driver lacks Chavez's charisma, but he has sought to imitate the president's style with vituperative attacks on the opposition and televised ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

With the micro-managing Chavez away, major policy decisions in Venezuela, such as a widely expected devaluation of the bolivar currency, appear to be on hold.

Venezuelan bond prices, which had soared in recent weeks on Chavez's health woes, dipped on Monday and Tuesday as investors' expectations of a quick government change apparently dimmed.

"The 'regime change' euphoria seems excessive taking into account the unclear legal transition and perhaps, more importantly, the risk that regime change does not allow for policy change," New York-based Jefferies' managing director Siobhan Morden said in a note on the bonds.

(Editing by Daniel Wallis and Eric Beech)

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Obama to host Afghan president Friday at White House

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama will host Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the White House on Friday for talks centered on the long-term security compact between the two countries.

Obama looks forward to "discussing our continued transition in Afghanistan, and our shared vision of an enduring partnership between the United States and Afghanistan," a White House statement said.

The Afghan leader has expressed support for keeping US troops in Afghanistan, but sensitive details -- including immunity for American soldiers and the transfer of detainees into Afghan custody -- are still under negotiation.

Karzai's relationship with Washington has been troubled in recent years and fears remain that attention for Afghanistan, heavily dependent on international aid, could plummet after 2014, plunging it back into political turmoil.

The Afghan president's scheduled trip to the United States was formally confirmed on the same day as Obama revealed his nominations to head up the CIA and the Pentagon during his second White House term.

Obama, who last visited Kabul in May, named Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon and tapped John Brennan to replace scandal-tainted David Petraeus as CIA chief.

The US president last year signed a pact on future relations and declared that the "time of war" was ending in Afghanistan.

But the Defense Department reportedly has prepared plans to leave roughly 3,000, 6,000 or 9,000 America troops in the war-wracked state.

General John Allen, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, had earlier suggested leaving 6,000 to 20,000 American troops, US media reports have said.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the force would focus on preventing Al-Qaeda, which was sheltered by the 1996-2001 Taliban government, from regaining a firm foothold in Afghanistan.

The number of foreign troops battling the Taliban-led insurgency has already fallen to 100,000 from about 150,000. There are currently 66,000 US troops.

The conflict has become increasingly unpopular in the United States, but some lawmakers in Washington have accused Obama of pushing for a hasty exit.

Karzai, who left Kabul on Monday, is expected to kick off his US trip by visiting his wounded spy chief, Asadullah Khalid, at an American hospital on Tuesday.

-AFP/ac

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Inept forensic labs delaying probes

NEW DELHI: Forensic labs play a vital role in nailing culprits of heinous crimes, be they rapes, murders or terror attacks. Often, between crime and punishment, guilt and innocence they are the crucial bits of scientific evidence that connect victim to victimizer. These are the places where samples are matched, medical reports prepared and clinching proof dished out to nail criminals.

But across India, its forensic labs are so inept that they seldom help the cause of fair probe. Take rape trials, for instance. Experts say these should not take more than 15-20 days. However, what happens usually is that just to collate the victims' medical reports it takes months, if not years. For, every such lab in India — whether in Chennai or Chandigarh, Kolkata or Delhi — is hamstrung by a lack of resources, trained staff and technical knowledge.

Just for the record, India has four central forensic labs (Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chandigarh and Delhi) and some 25 state ones. The story, though, is the same in each one of these. Mumbai is a case in point. The state, grappling with rising crime and a poor conviction rate, has between its six state-run labs, roughly 30,000 pending cases. More than 3,840 cases pertain to sexual assault on women.

Vacancy continues to be a huge problem. Kolkata, with a staggering backlog of 9,000 cases, has nearly 30% empty seats to fill up. More than 2,336 rape cases are pending, some for 26 months. In Chandigarh, at its Central Forensic Science Laboratory, the figure is 55%. Lab director S K Shukla says he needs around 80 personnel immediately. Down south, the Chennai lab has more than 600 pending cases. Natural, considering that out of the sanctioned strength of 130, only 90 are available.

Compounding the problem is a chronic absence of infrastructure. "We can't even handle 50 cases daily," admits an official. Coupled with this is the lack of knowledge about how to handle these samples. In some rape cases, hospitals need to dry the samples at room temperature so that they can be preserved for weeks. But liquid samples are sent, leading to contamination, says the official.

All is not lost, though. Ahmedabad's DFS (Directorate of Forensic Sciences) stands out in this sea of ineptitude. Besides handling some 3.5 lakh cases annually, it also helps out in nearly 900 cases from other states and central agencies, and earned Rs 1.38 crore in 2012 in this fashion. It has, after all, an integrated ballistics indentification system, suspect detection system and cyber and wildlife forensics and was instrumental in solving the Nithari murders, Telgi scam and Gir lion poaching cases.

JM Vyas, director general of the Ahmedabad lab, says, "We have no pending cases above one month. Cases such as rape, assault and murder are given priority. However, viscera samples take two to three months due to chemical process."

Though appointment at senior levels has not been done in a decade, the establishment of Gujarat Forensic Sciences University is expected to infuse fresh blood to fill 15% vacancies.

Other states should take a leaf out of Ahmedabad's book. The lives of countless rape victims depend on it.

Reports by Sumitra Deb Roy in Mumbai; Krishnendu Bandyopadhyay in Kolkata; A Selvaraj in Chennai; Umesh Isalkar in Pune, and Parth Shastri in Ahmedabad

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Lenovo makes computer play a family affair

SAN FRANCISCO: Lenovo on Sunday unveiled a home tabletop touch-screen computer aimed at turning typically solitary online activities into family affairs.

The Chinese computer colossus proclaimed the arrival of the "interpersonal PC" with the debut of the IdeaCentre Horizon Table in Las Vegas, where the Consumer Electronics Show gadget gala is set to start.

"It's definitely a new category; the world's first home table personal computer," Lenovo director of global marketing Dee Kumar said while giving AFP an early glimpse at the creation in San Francisco.

"This can be a full-power 27-inch PC, but at the same time we want families using this device," she said.

The "multi-user, multi-touch, multi-mode" table computer with a starting price of $1,699 can be used by several people simultaneously for communal activities such as games or for individual endeavours such as updating Facebook.

"We want to take social to the next level," Kumar added. "Smartphones and tablets provide one-to-one interaction, but it is great for a family to come back home and use this device to consume content."

Lenovo worked with videogame industry stalwarts including Ubisoft and Electronic Arts to tailor titles for group play on Horizon table computers.

"These games are simple mechanics-wise but really fun to play in a social space," Pixel, a member of an Ubisoft-backed group of girl gamers known as the Frag Dolls, said as she killed virtual zombies and raced cars on Horizon.

Lenovo promised to showcase a slew of Horizon games and applications at CES, which begins Tuesday.

Horizon is powered by Microsoft Windows 8 software designed with touch-screen controls in mind and recognizes commands from as many as 10 fingers at a time.

"Windows 8 definitely opened the doors to social with 10-finger touch," Kumar said. "You are seeing touch interfaces on bigger devices, and this is kind of the next extension."

Horizon weighs about 18 pounds and is built with a hinged stand in the back so it can be propped upright to serve as a television or desktop computer screen.

Wheeled stands and joysticks are among accessories sold separately. Lenovo said that Horizon table computers would hit the market by the middle of this year.

"Horizon makes personal computing interpersonal computing with shared, collaborative experiences among several people," said Lenovo product group president Peter Hortensius.

Lenovo has been striving to become the world's top computer maker and has made strides with a "protect and attack" strategy when it comes to market share.

Analysts have described Lenovo as a success story due to its tactic of fielding a diverse line-up of products in a global computer industry being roiled by the rise of tablets and smartphones.

Gartner Research in October released preliminary figures indicating Lenovo may have taken Hewlett-Packard's crown as top computer maker in the third quarter of last year.

IDC figures, however, showed that HP retained a tenuous hold on the throne.

Still, "our protect-and-attack strategy is clearly working," Kumar said, "We go after high growth areas and protect core business."

-AFP/fl

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Tourists throng Himachal for warm sunbath

MANALI: Battered by fog, cold and humidity, people from plains have started thronging tourist resorts across Himachal to enjoy some sunny days. Though the nights in hills are chilling, lack of humidity is offering warm days perfect for winter sunbaths.

In Manali, tourists can be spotted basking under the sun all the day. There are no signs of fog in the hill state except for lower regions like Solan, Sundernagar, Una and parts of Kangra, where night temperature is plunging below 0 degree Celsius. Tourists from Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi and UP are rushing to Himachal, especially Manali and Shimla, to regale under the warmth of bright shining sun.

"I do not feel like leaving the bench on the Mall Road basking under the sun," said Anjum Solanki, a tourist from Delhi. According to him, he has enjoyed the real warmth of sun after a long time as fog has made life miserable in Delhi.

For Sunil Rajpoot, another tourist from Chandigarh, Manali is warmer than Chandigarh during daytime. "Though nights are chilling cold here, days are unusually pleasant. We were unnecessarily scared of making a winter tour to Himachal," he added.

Lower regions of Himachal, where fog is preventing sunrays from reaching the ground, are also colder than the high altitude tourist towns. While minimum temperature of Shimla, at an altitude of 7,234 feet, was 0.9 degree Celsius, lower regions like Sundernagar (2,825ft), Bhuntar (3,573ft) and Solan (5,180ft) recorded minimum temperature of -0.6, -1 and -3.5 degrees celsius respectively.

The day temperature of both Shimla and Manali is hovering around 11 degrees Celsius and dry weather with nominal humidity has increased the joy of basking under the sun. Meanwhile, cold waves are continued to sweep Lahaul valley where icy winds have confined the maximum temperature to 2.9 degrees Celsius. Here, the minimum temperature has again plunged to -10.4 degrees Celsius.

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Hagel to Be Obama's Defense Secretary Nominee

Jan 6, 2013 4:52pm

(Junko Kimura/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama will nominate former senator Chuck Hagel to be his next Secretary of Defense tomorrow.

Senior officials within the administration and Capitol Hill confirmed the pick to ABC News today after the Nebraska Republican had emerged as a frontrunner among potential candidates several weeks ago.

Hagel, 66, is a decorated Vietnam veteran and businessman who served in the senate from 1997 to 2009. After having sat on that chamber’s Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees,  he has in recent years gathered praise from current and former diplomats for his work on Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board as well as the policy board of the current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

But the former lawmaker faces an upscale battle in the coming confirmation hearings in Congress; critics on both sides of the aisle have taken aim at his record toward Israel and what some have called a lack of experience necessary to lead the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy or its operations.

Progressives have also expressed concern about comments he made in 1998, questioning whether an “openly, aggressively gay” James Hormel could be nominated to an ambassador position by then-President Clinton. Hagel apologized for the comments last month, adding that he also supported gays in the military – a position he once opposed.

Who Is Chuck Hagel? Meet Obama’s Top Pentagon Pick

The friction with his former colleagues has left a degree of uncertainty in the air going into the hearings. Today on ABC’s “This Week,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell demurred when asked whether he would support the man who, in 2008, he had championed for his candidness and stature in foreign policy.

“I’m going to wait and see how the hearings go and see whether Chuck’s views square with the job he would be nominated to do,” he told George Stephanopoulos.

Senator Lindsey Graham was more blunt in his opposition to Hagel on CNN. The Georgia Republican called Hagel an “in your face nomination,” and said he “would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense towards the state of Israel in our nation’s history.”

If confirmed, Hagel will join a crop of new cabinet members expected to join the president in his second term, including Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who was nominated in December to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

ABC’s Elizabeth Hartfield and Devin Dwyer contributed reporting.

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Activists wary as India rushes to justice after gang rape

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - It's no surprise the Indian street wants faster, harsher justice for sexual crimes after a horrific gang rape that rocked the nation, but some activists worry the government will trample fundamental rights in its rush to be in tune with popular rage.

Last month's rape of a physiotherapy student on a moving bus and her death on December 28 in hospital triggered a national debate about how to better protect women in India, where official data shows one rape is reported on average every 20 minutes.

Many women's rights groups are cautiously hopeful the protests and outrage that followed the crime can be channeled into real change - fast-track courts for sexual offences and a plan to hire 2,500 new women police in Delhi are measures already in the works.

But legal experts and some feminists are worried that calls to make rape punishable with death and other draconian penalties will cramp civil liberties and are unconstitutional. They say India needs better policing and prosecutions, not new laws.

"If there are not enough convictions, it is not because of an insufficiency of law, but it is the insufficiency of material to base the conviction on," said retired Delhi High Court judge R.S. Sodhi.

Five men have been charged with the student's rape and murder and will appear before a New Delhi court later on Monday. They are due to be tried in a newly formed fast-track court in the next few weeks. A teenager also accused will likely be tried in a juvenile court.

Ahead of Monday's court appearance the five still had no defense lawyers - despite extensive interrogations by the police, who have said they have recorded confessions - after members of the bar association in the South Delhi district where the case is being heard vowed not to represent them.

GROUNDS FOR APPEAL

The men will be assigned lawyers by the court before the trial begins, but their lack of representation so far could give grounds for appeal later should they be found guilty - similar cases have resulted in acquittals years after convictions.

"The accused has a right to a lawyer from point of arrest - the investigations are going on, statements being taken, it is totally illegal," said Colin Gonsalves, a senior Supreme Court advocate and director of Delhi's Human Rights Law Network.

Senior leaders of most states on Friday came out in support of a plan to lower to 16 the age that minors can be tried as adults - in response to fury that the maximum penalty the accused youth could face is three years detention.

A government panel is considering suggestions to make the death penalty mandatory for rape and introducing forms of chemical castration for the guilty. It is due to make its recommendations by January 23.

"The more you strengthen the powers of the state against the people, the more the possibility you create a draconian regime," said Sehjo Singh, Programme and Policy Director with ActionAid in India and an expert on Indian women's social movements.

"We want to raise the bar of human rights in India, we want to raise the standards, not lower them."

The Indian Express newspaper warned against "knee-jerk" reaction and said any change to the juvenile law "must come after rigorous and considered debate. It cannot be a reaction to a fraught moment".

Courts are swamped with a backlog of cases in the country of 1.2 billion people and trials often take more than five years to complete, so the launch by Chief Justice Altamas Kabir of six fast-track courts in the capital to deal with sexual offences was widely greeted as a welcome move.

Several other states including Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra are now looking at following Delhi's example.

But Gonsalves says while the courts are a good idea on paper, similar tribunals in the past delivered dubious verdicts and put financial pressure on the rest of the justice system.

FAST TRACK COURTS

India set up 1,700 fast-track courts in 2004, but stopped funding them last year because they turned out to be costly. The courts typically work six days a week and try to reduce adjournments that lead to long delays in cases.

"The record of the fast-track courts is mixed," Gonsalves said. Conviction rates rose, he said, but due process was sometimes rushed, leading to convictions being overturned.

"Fast-track courts were in many ways were fast-track injustice," he said.

The real problem lie with bad policing and a shortage of judges, Gonsalves said. India has about a fifth of the number of judges per capita that the United States has.

Indian police are often poorly trained and underpaid, and have sometimes been implicated in organized crime. Rights groups complain the mostly male officers are insensitive to victims of sexual crimes.

Resources for, and expertise in, forensic science is limited in most of the country's police forces and confessions are often extracted under duress. The judiciary complains it is hard to convict offenders because of faulty evidence.

Human Rights Watch said reforms to laws and procedures covering rape and other sexual crimes should focus on protection of witnesses and modernizing support for victims at police stations and hospitals.

The rights organization has documented the continued use of archaic practices such as the "finger test" used by some doctors on rape victims to allegedly determine if they had regular sex.

"Reforms in the rape laws - these are needed. But not in terms of enhancing punishment," said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director of Human Rights Watch.

"Why they are not investigated, why there are not enough convictions, those are the things that need to be addressed."

(Additional reporting by Satarupa Bhattacharjya, Shashank Chouhan and Annie Banerji; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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Turkey lifts ban on thousands of books

ISTANBUL: From communist works to a comic book, thousands of titles banned by Turkey over the decades were taken off the restricted list Saturday, thanks to a government reform.

In July, the parliament adopted a bill stipulating that any decision taken before 2012 to block the sale and distribution of published work would be voided if no court chose to confirm the ruling within six months.

The deadline came and went Saturday and no such judicial decisions were recorded, the head of Turkey's TYB publisher's union, Metin Celal Zeynioglu, told AFP.

"All bans ordered by (the courts in the capital) Ankara will be lifted on January 5," city prosecutor Kursat Kayral confirmed to AFP.

Kayral had announced last month that he would let lapse every ban in his jurisdiction, a decision that cleared 453 books and 645 periodicals in that area alone.

Among them were several communist works such as the "Communist Manifesto" written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as writings by Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin and Russia's revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin.

Others included a comic book, an atlas, a report on the state of human rights in Turkey and an essay on the Kurds.

But the books under Kayral's jurisdiction make up only a fraction of all the titles affected, a total of up to 23,000 works according to Zeynioglu, who said he learned the number from the justice ministry.

The ministry did not immediately confirm the total, a number that Zeynioglu added was hard to nail down.

"These bans weren't implemented in a centralised fashion: they were ordered by different institutions in different cities at different times," he said.

"Besides, most have been forgotten over the years and publishers have resumed printing the banned books."

As an example, the complete works of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, who died in exile in Moscow in 1963, had already been stocked in libraries for years despite the ban.

The reform is thus largely symbolic, and some are sceptical of whether it reflects any true change within the Turkish state.

"The mindset hasn't changed and people (in the administration) will continue to do whatever they think is right," said Omer Faruk, a former head of the Ayrinti publishing house.

He cited as an example the fate of one of his published books: the erotic "Philosophy in the Bedroom" by French writer Marquis de Sade.

Deemed licentious, the text was banned, but the Supreme Court overturned the decision. Yet "despite the ruling, the book continues to be seized", Faruk said.

This scepticism is reinforced by the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party's record in matters of freedom of speech.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said last month that Turkey had, at 49 people, the highest number of journalists behind bars, with most of them Kurds.

In late November, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself took the directors of a television series to task, saying their script was in conflict with history and Muslim morals.

"Those who toy with the people's values must be taught a lesson," Erdogan said.

But despite his reservations, Zeynioglu said there would be at least one concrete result of letting the bans lapse.

"Many of the students arrested in demonstrations are kept in prison because they're carrying banned books," he said.

"From now on, we won't be able to use that as an excuse."

- AFP/fa

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Minor girl raped repeatedly, pregnant

SHIMLA: A 13-year-old pregnant rape victim's life is at risk as doctors have ruled out abortion in Himachal Pradesh's Kullu district.

The orphaned girl was allegedly raped repeatedly by her maternal uncle and medical examination found she is 29-week pregnant.

The elder sister of the girl had approached the Manali police on December 25 after she found out her sister was raped. After the death of their parents, they had been living with their 85-year-old maternal grandfather where the incidents occurred.

Police had registered a case but failed to arrest the accused so far. The victim was shifted to Shimla on December 28 where her medical examination was done.

As poor health and delayed detection have wiped out the chances of abortion, medical experts now say that delivering the child too will not be an easy task as her body is not ready to deliver a baby putting her life at risk.

According to sources, victim has slipped into depression.

A gynecologist from a prominent Shimla hospital said the victim would face complications during pregnancy as her body is not developed. "She would face problems related to anemia, bone and calcium besides undergoing mental trauma." She said as the minor cannot go through normal delivery so she would have to undergo delivery by a cesarean operation which will also be risky.

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FDA: New rules will make food safer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration says its new guidelines would make the food Americans eat safer and help prevent the kinds of foodborne disease outbreaks that sicken or kill thousands of consumers each year.

The rules, the most sweeping food safety guidelines in decades, would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. The new guidelines were announced Friday.

Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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