IANS
Sunday, September 07, 2008 15:35 IST
PATNA: Setting an example of communal harmony in relief camps in flood-hit Bihar, Hindus are helping Muslims keep Ramadan fast by sharing their meagre resources.
"What is interesting to note that Hindus are helping Muslims to keep fast by providing whatever possible in relief camps," said Bihar Disaster Management Minister Nitish Mishra.
The majority of Muslims in relief camps were keeping fast while sharing everything with others.
It was reported that several NGOs have been providing food to Muslims keeping fast outside government control relief camps.
"People, mostly Hindus are arranging fruits, sweets and dinner for Muslims keeping fast outside relief camps," said Ranjeev, an activist in Saharsa district. Read more
Monday, September 8, 2008
Friday, September 5, 2008
The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
Goodbye America? Not yet
Manish Chand, Indo-Asian News Service
August 28, 2008
First Published: 18:21 IST(28/8/2008)
Last Updated: 18:38 IST(28/8/2008)
The Post-American World
Author: Fareed Zakaria;
Publisher: Penguin/Viking;
Price: Rs 499
Don't write an obituary of the American superpower yet. It's not that America is declining, but everyone else is rising - this is the "great story of our times" Fareed Zakaria tells in his new book that goes to the heart of tectonic power shifts to the non-Western world in the 21st century.
Take a few random examples, says Zakaria, of this "great transformation taking place around the world". The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei, the world's richest man is Mexican, its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese, the biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, the biggest refinery is under construction in India, and the world's largest factories are all in China.
What's more, Zakaria says, "quintessentially American icons have been appropriated by foreigners" with Singapore flaunting the world's largest Ferris wheel and Macau showing off the world's largest casino.
"The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Of the top 10 malls in the world, only one is in the US; the world's biggest is in Beijing," he writes.
If all this gives the impression that "the most powerful country in the world since ancient Rome" is fading into the sunset, don't be gulled by appearances. In The Post-American World, Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and one of the most influential commentators in Washington, tries to deflate the hype about the "rise of Asia" and pits it against hard facts about American power.
The US economy has averaged about 25 percent of global GDP for 130 years and will continue to do so; it's economy at $14 trillion is more than four times that of China; and nearly 14 times that of India. Its military spending is nearly equivalent to what the rest of the world spends on defence.
Read more
Manish Chand, Indo-Asian News Service
August 28, 2008
First Published: 18:21 IST(28/8/2008)
Last Updated: 18:38 IST(28/8/2008)
The Post-American World
Author: Fareed Zakaria;
Publisher: Penguin/Viking;
Price: Rs 499
Don't write an obituary of the American superpower yet. It's not that America is declining, but everyone else is rising - this is the "great story of our times" Fareed Zakaria tells in his new book that goes to the heart of tectonic power shifts to the non-Western world in the 21st century.
Take a few random examples, says Zakaria, of this "great transformation taking place around the world". The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei, the world's richest man is Mexican, its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese, the biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, the biggest refinery is under construction in India, and the world's largest factories are all in China.
What's more, Zakaria says, "quintessentially American icons have been appropriated by foreigners" with Singapore flaunting the world's largest Ferris wheel and Macau showing off the world's largest casino.
"The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Of the top 10 malls in the world, only one is in the US; the world's biggest is in Beijing," he writes.
If all this gives the impression that "the most powerful country in the world since ancient Rome" is fading into the sunset, don't be gulled by appearances. In The Post-American World, Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and one of the most influential commentators in Washington, tries to deflate the hype about the "rise of Asia" and pits it against hard facts about American power.
The US economy has averaged about 25 percent of global GDP for 130 years and will continue to do so; it's economy at $14 trillion is more than four times that of China; and nearly 14 times that of India. Its military spending is nearly equivalent to what the rest of the world spends on defence.
Read more
A Crtique of Evangelization by Dr.BABUSUSEELAN
Monday, September 01, 2008
Evangelization and destabilisation of states
Three reports:
1. Seven hundred plans to evangelize the world
2. Ram Swarup's expose of christism
3. Robert Kaplan's idea of bringing in Baptists and other missionaries to subvert the Burmese state
k
“EVANGELIZATION: THE GREAT COMMAND AND A COSMIC AUDITING"
(A REVIEW ARTICLE OF ‘SEVEN HUNDRED PLANS TO EVANGELIZE THE WORLD: THE RISE OF A GLOBAL EVANGELIZATION MOVEMENT, by, DAVID B. BARRATT and JAMES W. REAPSOME. PUB: THE A.D.2OOO SERIES.)
Continue to read
Evangelization and destabilisation of states
Three reports:
1. Seven hundred plans to evangelize the world
2. Ram Swarup's expose of christism
3. Robert Kaplan's idea of bringing in Baptists and other missionaries to subvert the Burmese state
k
“EVANGELIZATION: THE GREAT COMMAND AND A COSMIC AUDITING"
(A REVIEW ARTICLE OF ‘SEVEN HUNDRED PLANS TO EVANGELIZE THE WORLD: THE RISE OF A GLOBAL EVANGELIZATION MOVEMENT, by, DAVID B. BARRATT and JAMES W. REAPSOME. PUB: THE A.D.2OOO SERIES.)
Continue to read
Korean Buddhists Rally against 'pro-Christian bias
Fri, 2008-09-05 05:15
Seoul, 05 September, (Asiantribune.com): The Buddhists of South Korea strongly protested accusing President Lee Myung Bak and his administration of showing religious bias against Buddhists and favoring Christians.
South Korea by law is a secular state. Article 20 of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea stipulates the prohibition of state religion, and the separation of religion and politics.
It was alleged that, since the inauguration of the new government, some of the high government officials and the President himself have been violating the Constitution as if intent upon turning the country into a Christian state. We strongly regret the government's physical suppression of the civil rights of peaceful assembly and demonstrations demanding the principle of democracy.
However due to the phenomenal rise in the size and power of the Christian community in recent decades, it has the Buddhist community here gripped by apprehension.
Read more
Seoul, 05 September, (Asiantribune.com): The Buddhists of South Korea strongly protested accusing President Lee Myung Bak and his administration of showing religious bias against Buddhists and favoring Christians.
South Korea by law is a secular state. Article 20 of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea stipulates the prohibition of state religion, and the separation of religion and politics.
It was alleged that, since the inauguration of the new government, some of the high government officials and the President himself have been violating the Constitution as if intent upon turning the country into a Christian state. We strongly regret the government's physical suppression of the civil rights of peaceful assembly and demonstrations demanding the principle of democracy.
However due to the phenomenal rise in the size and power of the Christian community in recent decades, it has the Buddhist community here gripped by apprehension.
Read more
Monday, August 25, 2008
Blog Beauty Contest for Nuns
Italian Priest Organizes Beauty Contest for Nuns
Italian Priest Says He is Organizing an Online Beauty Pageant for Nuns
ROME August 24, 2008 (AP)
The Associated Press
An Italian priest and theologian said Sunday he is organizing an online beauty pageant for nuns to give them more visibility within the Catholic Church and to fight the stereotype that they are all old and dour.
The "Miss Sister 2008" contest will start in September on a blog run by the Rev. Antonio Rungi and will give nuns from around the world a chance to showcase their work and their image.
More
Italian Priest Says He is Organizing an Online Beauty Pageant for Nuns
ROME August 24, 2008 (AP)
The Associated Press
An Italian priest and theologian said Sunday he is organizing an online beauty pageant for nuns to give them more visibility within the Catholic Church and to fight the stereotype that they are all old and dour.
The "Miss Sister 2008" contest will start in September on a blog run by the Rev. Antonio Rungi and will give nuns from around the world a chance to showcase their work and their image.
More
Oprah Winfrey and Jesus Christ
Oprah Winfrey is a hero of tens of millions of television viewers. "How can there be only one way to heaven or to God?" She asks her audience. She is of the opinion that there are now millions of ways to get to heaven.
When a lady in her audience asked, "What about Jesus?" Oprah defiantly answered her by repeating the question, "What about Jesus?" Oprah went on to explain how she had been a Baptist until she heard a charismatic Pastor make the statement that God was a jealous God. She told her viewers in her opinion God was simply love and God being described as a Jealous God made her really stop and think.
On her television show Oprah Winfrey has been pushing a new book by Eckhart Tolle called A New Earth.
Read more
When a lady in her audience asked, "What about Jesus?" Oprah defiantly answered her by repeating the question, "What about Jesus?" Oprah went on to explain how she had been a Baptist until she heard a charismatic Pastor make the statement that God was a jealous God. She told her viewers in her opinion God was simply love and God being described as a Jealous God made her really stop and think.
On her television show Oprah Winfrey has been pushing a new book by Eckhart Tolle called A New Earth.
Read more
Friday, August 22, 2008
Teacher Arrested for Sex Acts With Student
Another Teacher Arrested for Sex Acts With Student
Police Say the Affair Started When the Student was 15 Years Old
By SARAH NETTER
Aug. 22, 2008
A 24-year-old Maryland woman has become the latest high school teacher to be arrested and charged with having sexual activity with an underage student.
Autumn Leathers was charged after police say she performed sex acts with a student.
Police say teacher Autumn Leathers had a sexual relationship with a teenage student.
Autumn Leathers, of Frostburg, Md., was charged Thursday with child abuse, fourth-degree sex offense, perverted practice and second-degree assault. She is alleged to have been having sexual relations regularly this summer with a 16-year-old boy from Mountain Ride High School in Frostburg. Leathers taught at the school, but it was unclear whether the boy was one of her students.
Read more
Police Say the Affair Started When the Student was 15 Years Old
By SARAH NETTER
Aug. 22, 2008
A 24-year-old Maryland woman has become the latest high school teacher to be arrested and charged with having sexual activity with an underage student.
Autumn Leathers was charged after police say she performed sex acts with a student.
Police say teacher Autumn Leathers had a sexual relationship with a teenage student.
Autumn Leathers, of Frostburg, Md., was charged Thursday with child abuse, fourth-degree sex offense, perverted practice and second-degree assault. She is alleged to have been having sexual relations regularly this summer with a 16-year-old boy from Mountain Ride High School in Frostburg. Leathers taught at the school, but it was unclear whether the boy was one of her students.
Read more
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
At 138 years, India's oldest man dies
Wed, Aug 20 03:27 AM
Read the full story
India's oldest man, Habib miyan, who entered the Limca Book of World Records in 2005, died early on Tuesday morning in his Jaipur house at the age of 138 years. The centurion fell ill with fever and dysentery on Sunday and succumbed in Jaipur's SMS Hospital. Incidentally, Habib decided not to celebrate his 138th birthday on May 20 this year following the serial blasts in Jaipur on May 13.
Born in Rajgarh in Rajasthan's Alwar district on May 20, 1870, Habib grew up to become a clarinet player with the Jaipur Royal Palace band. His close friend, Rajesh Nagpal, a bank employee, recalls, "I noticed him when he came to collect pension for years from the bank. He started with a pension of Rs 1.28 in 1938, which finally rose to Rs 2,698."
Read the full story
Monday, August 18, 2008
The Shroud of Turin Controversy
From the Los Angeles Times
A Colorado couple researching the shroud dispute radiocarbon dating of the alleged burial cloth of Jesus, and Oxford has agreed to help them reexamine the findings.
By DeeDee Correll | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 17, 2008
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.
In 1988, science seemed to put that question to rest.
Findings Radiocarbon dating by three separate laboratories showed that the shroud originated in the Middle Ages, leaving the "shroud crowd" reeling. Shroud skeptics responded, "We told you so." The Catholic Church admitted that it could not be authentic. Many scientists backed away.
But John Jackson, one of the shroud's most prominent researchers, was among those who insisted that the results made no sense. Too much else about the shroud, they said, including characteristics of the cloth and details in the image, suggested that it was much older.
Twenty years later, Jackson, 62, is getting his chance to challenge the radiocarbon dating. Oxford University, which participated in the original radiocarbon testing, has agreed to work with him in reconsidering the age of the shroud.
If the challenge is successful, Jackson hopes to be allowed to reexamine the shroud, which is owned by the Vatican and stored in a protective chamber in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.
Jackson, a physicist who teaches at the University of Colorado, hypothesizes that contamination of the cloth by elevated levels of carbon monoxide skewed the 1988 carbon-14 dating by 1,300 years.
On that point, Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, seems to agree.
"There is a lot of other evidence that suggests to many that the shroud is older than the radiocarbon dates allow, and so further research is certainly needed," says a statement on his website. "Only by doing this will people be able to arrive at a coherent history of the shroud which takes into account and explains all of the available scientific and historical information."
Steven Schafersman, a geologist who maintains a website skeptical about the shroud, dismisses the effort as one that's bound to fail.
At a conference sponsored by the Shroud Science Group at Ohio State University this weekend, the Los Alamos National Laboratory presented findings that the 1988 test results were flawed because the samples tested came from a portion of cloth that may have been added to the shroud during medieval repairs.
The shroud's historical record dates back to 1349, when a French knight wrote to the pope of his possession of a cloth he described as the burial shroud of Christ. In 1978, a team of scientists led by Jackson conducted a series of tests on the shroud, including X-rays and chemical analyses. They concluded that the shroud was not painted, dyed or stained and that the blood stains were real. But those findings did little to quell the controversy surrounding the shroud.
Many believe that Jesus imprinted his image on his burial cloth during his resurrection, and others think that the shroud is the authentic burial cloth but that the image was formed by natural processes. Skeptics maintain that the shroud is a forgery created by a medieval artist seeking to display it to relic-hungry pilgrims. The debate often is bitter; each side accuses the other of twisting facts and ignoring evidence that doesn't fit its view.
A former professor at the Air Force Academy and scientist at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Jackson holds a doctorate in physics from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Born and raised in Denver, he also is a devout Catholic who has been transfixed by the shroud since he first saw its image at age 13.
Read it full
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/la-na-turin17-2008aug17,0,7350329,full.story
A Colorado couple researching the shroud dispute radiocarbon dating of the alleged burial cloth of Jesus, and Oxford has agreed to help them reexamine the findings.
By DeeDee Correll | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 17, 2008
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.
In 1988, science seemed to put that question to rest.
Findings Radiocarbon dating by three separate laboratories showed that the shroud originated in the Middle Ages, leaving the "shroud crowd" reeling. Shroud skeptics responded, "We told you so." The Catholic Church admitted that it could not be authentic. Many scientists backed away.
But John Jackson, one of the shroud's most prominent researchers, was among those who insisted that the results made no sense. Too much else about the shroud, they said, including characteristics of the cloth and details in the image, suggested that it was much older.
Twenty years later, Jackson, 62, is getting his chance to challenge the radiocarbon dating. Oxford University, which participated in the original radiocarbon testing, has agreed to work with him in reconsidering the age of the shroud.
If the challenge is successful, Jackson hopes to be allowed to reexamine the shroud, which is owned by the Vatican and stored in a protective chamber in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.
Jackson, a physicist who teaches at the University of Colorado, hypothesizes that contamination of the cloth by elevated levels of carbon monoxide skewed the 1988 carbon-14 dating by 1,300 years.
On that point, Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, seems to agree.
"There is a lot of other evidence that suggests to many that the shroud is older than the radiocarbon dates allow, and so further research is certainly needed," says a statement on his website. "Only by doing this will people be able to arrive at a coherent history of the shroud which takes into account and explains all of the available scientific and historical information."
Steven Schafersman, a geologist who maintains a website skeptical about the shroud, dismisses the effort as one that's bound to fail.
At a conference sponsored by the Shroud Science Group at Ohio State University this weekend, the Los Alamos National Laboratory presented findings that the 1988 test results were flawed because the samples tested came from a portion of cloth that may have been added to the shroud during medieval repairs.
The shroud's historical record dates back to 1349, when a French knight wrote to the pope of his possession of a cloth he described as the burial shroud of Christ. In 1978, a team of scientists led by Jackson conducted a series of tests on the shroud, including X-rays and chemical analyses. They concluded that the shroud was not painted, dyed or stained and that the blood stains were real. But those findings did little to quell the controversy surrounding the shroud.
Many believe that Jesus imprinted his image on his burial cloth during his resurrection, and others think that the shroud is the authentic burial cloth but that the image was formed by natural processes. Skeptics maintain that the shroud is a forgery created by a medieval artist seeking to display it to relic-hungry pilgrims. The debate often is bitter; each side accuses the other of twisting facts and ignoring evidence that doesn't fit its view.
A former professor at the Air Force Academy and scientist at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Jackson holds a doctorate in physics from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Born and raised in Denver, he also is a devout Catholic who has been transfixed by the shroud since he first saw its image at age 13.
Read it full
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/la-na-turin17-2008aug17,0,7350329,full.story
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The story of Asaram Bapu and controversy of child deaths in his ashram
http://in.news.yahoo.com/48/20080811/814/tnl-cult-controversy-the-story-of-asaram.html
Search:
Cult & Controversy: the story of Asaram ashram
Mon, Aug 11 03:48 AM
For the phenomenally influential religious guru, Asaram Bapu, his 37-year-long spiritual career had never been a cakewalk and the four mysterious deaths in his ashramss here and in Madhya Pradesh and the public ire he has been courting are only the latest that he hopes to shrug off.
His spiritual domain is spread across 300 ashrams throughout India, as also in the US, with lakhs of his followers and admirers flooding his commune with funds. Sixty-seven-year-old Bapu has even delivered a speech at the parliament of world religions.
Few controversies connected with his ashrams have invited media attention the way the deaths of four children in his two ashrams - in Ahmedabad and Chhindwara - did in just one month. His ashram, in both the cases, is facing serious problems, with investigators finally getting down to grilling inmates of the ashrams in connection with the deaths.
Asaram Bapu may not have had to look back ever since he set up his first kutia or hutment in Motera village here in 1971, but the path had all along been strewn with scandals.
Sindh-born Asaram, who had migrated to Ahmedabad with his parents during Partition, is facing about dozen-odd cases at different places - all of them pertaining to alleged land grabbing by his Sant Asaram Bapu Trust. One of the villagers in Motera, Ashok Thakore, has moved the court to get back five acres of his family's land allegedly grabbed by the ashram. According to Thakore, the land is situated adjoining the ashram and was used for erecting tents on the Guru Purnima day. Permission to this effect was given by his father to the ashram. After his father's death, the ashram grabbed it by saying that Thakore's father had 'gifted' it to the ashram. However, the ashram has not been able to substantiate its claim with proofs.
In another case, Anil Vyas, a farmer from Jehangirpura village near Surat, where the ashram is facing several allegations of land grabbing, is fighting a prolonged battle for recovery of his 34,400 square metres of prime land from the ashram. According to Vyas, despite the fact that the ashram's claim over the land was challenged in the court, the state Government regularised the unauthorised encroachment on January 24, 1997. However, the Gujarat High Court on December 8, 2006, held the regularisation illegal and decreed in favour of the farmer. The Ashram then appealed to the Division Bench against the order.
A Delhi-based widow, Sudarshan Kumari, is also fighting a legal battle against Asaram Bapu whose Trust, she alleges, had fraudulently got some papers signed by her. The paper later turned out to be a 'gift deed' to the ashram. The documents say that she has gifted the ground floor of her house in Rajouri Garden, New Delhi, to the ashram. According to her complaint, on July 6, 2000, on the pretext of taking her to Asaram satsang, she was taken to the office of Sub Registrar in Janakpuri, New Delhi. One of the inmates of the ashram, identified as Mani Kaka, hypnotised her and made her sign a number of documents, without allowing her to go through the content. The other person who signed the papers there, according to her, was Narayan Swamy, son of Asaram Bapu. She came to know about the gift deed when officials from the Municipal Committee of Delhi came to confirm it.
The ashram authorities at Rajokri village, near Gurgaon, have allegedly forged documents pertaining to the registration of the ashram. Bhagwani Devi, a resident of Rajokri, has also approached the Delhi High Court levelling allegations of land grabbing against Asaram's Rajokri ashram.
Even Government agencies have levelled allegations of land grabbing against Asaram's Trust. A few months ago, the Bihar State Board of Religious Trusts (BSBRT) had served a notice to the Trust's headquarters in Ahmedabad, asking it to vacate a land belonging to BSBRT, worth Rs 80 crore. And in April 2007, a retired judge of the Patna High Court had filed a criminal complaint in Kadamkuan police station, Patna, alleging grabbing of his land by Asaram Bapu and others.
In Ratlam, Asaram's Trust had to vacate a piece of land after a prolonged litigation. In January 2007, power theft amounting to Rs 4.7 lakh was detected from his Rajkot ashram.
Despite all these cases and allegations, Asaram Bapu's popularity is on the rise - particularly among the ruling party politicians in the state. "It is due to the clout of Asaram that no criminal case was registered against any of his ashram-members nor was anyone from the ashram arrested after the two boys of his gurukuls died under mysterious circumstances," said a rebel BJP leader, requesting anonymity.
The popularity of Asaram can be gauged from the fact that his photographs can be spotted in every government office across the state and even state transport corporation's buses display his photos and messages.
When the Gujarat Government in 2005 decided to rejuvenate the Saraswati river by filling long tracts of land considered to be the vestiges of the mythical river at Sidhpur town in Mehsana district, Asaram Bapu was the chief guest at the launch of the project. Though there are other religious leaders in the state, inviting him to such a high-profile programme as the chief guest explains the popularity of the man among the ruling party.
Again, when the state Government temporarily launched Vande Gujarat TV channel, telecasting its developmental achievements on the eve of December 2007 Assembly polls, the channel regularly carried footages of Asaram Bapu.
This explains the clout of Asaram Bapu whose religious movement has taken the shape of a cult, having followers in every section of the society. With his influence growing, there are many politicians, including Minister of State for Home Amit Shah, visiting his ashram regularly.
Senior BJP leader L K Advani is also believed to be one of the regular visitors to the ashram. The Ashram manager in Ahmedabad, Arvind Patel, is a senior BJP functionary.
Search:
Cult & Controversy: the story of Asaram ashram
Mon, Aug 11 03:48 AM
For the phenomenally influential religious guru, Asaram Bapu, his 37-year-long spiritual career had never been a cakewalk and the four mysterious deaths in his ashramss here and in Madhya Pradesh and the public ire he has been courting are only the latest that he hopes to shrug off.
His spiritual domain is spread across 300 ashrams throughout India, as also in the US, with lakhs of his followers and admirers flooding his commune with funds. Sixty-seven-year-old Bapu has even delivered a speech at the parliament of world religions.
Few controversies connected with his ashrams have invited media attention the way the deaths of four children in his two ashrams - in Ahmedabad and Chhindwara - did in just one month. His ashram, in both the cases, is facing serious problems, with investigators finally getting down to grilling inmates of the ashrams in connection with the deaths.
Asaram Bapu may not have had to look back ever since he set up his first kutia or hutment in Motera village here in 1971, but the path had all along been strewn with scandals.
Sindh-born Asaram, who had migrated to Ahmedabad with his parents during Partition, is facing about dozen-odd cases at different places - all of them pertaining to alleged land grabbing by his Sant Asaram Bapu Trust. One of the villagers in Motera, Ashok Thakore, has moved the court to get back five acres of his family's land allegedly grabbed by the ashram. According to Thakore, the land is situated adjoining the ashram and was used for erecting tents on the Guru Purnima day. Permission to this effect was given by his father to the ashram. After his father's death, the ashram grabbed it by saying that Thakore's father had 'gifted' it to the ashram. However, the ashram has not been able to substantiate its claim with proofs.
In another case, Anil Vyas, a farmer from Jehangirpura village near Surat, where the ashram is facing several allegations of land grabbing, is fighting a prolonged battle for recovery of his 34,400 square metres of prime land from the ashram. According to Vyas, despite the fact that the ashram's claim over the land was challenged in the court, the state Government regularised the unauthorised encroachment on January 24, 1997. However, the Gujarat High Court on December 8, 2006, held the regularisation illegal and decreed in favour of the farmer. The Ashram then appealed to the Division Bench against the order.
A Delhi-based widow, Sudarshan Kumari, is also fighting a legal battle against Asaram Bapu whose Trust, she alleges, had fraudulently got some papers signed by her. The paper later turned out to be a 'gift deed' to the ashram. The documents say that she has gifted the ground floor of her house in Rajouri Garden, New Delhi, to the ashram. According to her complaint, on July 6, 2000, on the pretext of taking her to Asaram satsang, she was taken to the office of Sub Registrar in Janakpuri, New Delhi. One of the inmates of the ashram, identified as Mani Kaka, hypnotised her and made her sign a number of documents, without allowing her to go through the content. The other person who signed the papers there, according to her, was Narayan Swamy, son of Asaram Bapu. She came to know about the gift deed when officials from the Municipal Committee of Delhi came to confirm it.
The ashram authorities at Rajokri village, near Gurgaon, have allegedly forged documents pertaining to the registration of the ashram. Bhagwani Devi, a resident of Rajokri, has also approached the Delhi High Court levelling allegations of land grabbing against Asaram's Rajokri ashram.
Even Government agencies have levelled allegations of land grabbing against Asaram's Trust. A few months ago, the Bihar State Board of Religious Trusts (BSBRT) had served a notice to the Trust's headquarters in Ahmedabad, asking it to vacate a land belonging to BSBRT, worth Rs 80 crore. And in April 2007, a retired judge of the Patna High Court had filed a criminal complaint in Kadamkuan police station, Patna, alleging grabbing of his land by Asaram Bapu and others.
In Ratlam, Asaram's Trust had to vacate a piece of land after a prolonged litigation. In January 2007, power theft amounting to Rs 4.7 lakh was detected from his Rajkot ashram.
Despite all these cases and allegations, Asaram Bapu's popularity is on the rise - particularly among the ruling party politicians in the state. "It is due to the clout of Asaram that no criminal case was registered against any of his ashram-members nor was anyone from the ashram arrested after the two boys of his gurukuls died under mysterious circumstances," said a rebel BJP leader, requesting anonymity.
The popularity of Asaram can be gauged from the fact that his photographs can be spotted in every government office across the state and even state transport corporation's buses display his photos and messages.
When the Gujarat Government in 2005 decided to rejuvenate the Saraswati river by filling long tracts of land considered to be the vestiges of the mythical river at Sidhpur town in Mehsana district, Asaram Bapu was the chief guest at the launch of the project. Though there are other religious leaders in the state, inviting him to such a high-profile programme as the chief guest explains the popularity of the man among the ruling party.
Again, when the state Government temporarily launched Vande Gujarat TV channel, telecasting its developmental achievements on the eve of December 2007 Assembly polls, the channel regularly carried footages of Asaram Bapu.
This explains the clout of Asaram Bapu whose religious movement has taken the shape of a cult, having followers in every section of the society. With his influence growing, there are many politicians, including Minister of State for Home Amit Shah, visiting his ashram regularly.
Senior BJP leader L K Advani is also believed to be one of the regular visitors to the ashram. The Ashram manager in Ahmedabad, Arvind Patel, is a senior BJP functionary.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
Magazine Preview - Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling - NYTimes.com
Magazine Preview - Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling - NYTimes.com
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Robbie Cooper for The New York Times
The Trolls Among Us: Weev (not, of course, his real name) is part of a growing Internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.
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By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ
Published: August 3, 2008
This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.
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Blogrunner: Reactions From Around the Web
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Robbie Cooper for The New York Times
“A normal person who does insane things on the internet.” Jason Fortuny in real life.
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.
Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.
Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”
/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world.
But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.
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Mattathias Schwartz last wrote for the magazine about online poker. He is a staff writer at Good magazine and lives in New York.
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Robbie Cooper for The New York Times
The Trolls Among Us: Weev (not, of course, his real name) is part of a growing Internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.
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By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ
Published: August 3, 2008
This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.
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Virginia Heffernan talks to the existence of trolls, mad scrollers and all matter of Internet denizens.
Comment Post a Comment at The Medium
Blogrunner: Reactions From Around the Web
Enlarge This Image
Robbie Cooper for The New York Times
“A normal person who does insane things on the internet.” Jason Fortuny in real life.
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.
Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.
Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”
/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world.
But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.
* 1
* 2
* 3
* 4
* 5
* 6
* 7
Next Page »
Mattathias Schwartz last wrote for the magazine about online poker. He is a staff writer at Good magazine and lives in New York.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Unsigned passport
Malayala Manorama Indian Newspaper of Malayalam Language from eight places in Kerela
Unsigned passport lands official in trouble
New Delhi: Anuradha Thadipathri Gopinath's plan to visit Dubai was dashed at Mumbai airport because she had been issued an unsigned passport. Now a court has pulled up the passport officer for "serious deficiency in discharge of duties".
National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission pulled up the passport officer posted at the Bangalore regional passport office last week for the negligence and asked him to pay a compensation of Rs.10,000 and cost of Rs.2,000 to Gopinath.
Observing that travelling on such a passport could have invited unnecessary trouble for her, commission president M.B. Shah said: "A passport, which is issued without the signature of the competent authority, is on the face of it invalid which would have placed the complainant in a precarious position and she might have been hauled up for various offences if she had tried to go abroad on that passport.
"Such lapse amounts to a serious deficiency in discharge of duties, which is in the nature of rendering of service," said Shah.
Gopinath was issued a passport by the official, who did not sign it at the time of its issuance. She got a visa too.
She reached Mumbai airport to embark on her journey to Dubai. But at the airport, the lacuna came to light and the airport authorities asked her to go back. She lost the opportunity of going abroad on a trip that her company had sponsored.
Gopinath went to the Karnataka District Forum. The forum directed the officer to pay a compensation of Rs.10,000 and costs of Rs.2,000 to her.
The passport officer appealed to the Maharashtra State Commission which upheld the original order.
The official then appealed to the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission. He said he was "exercising a sovereign function" while issuing the passport. He was not charging a fee, and therefore this could not be a consumer dispute, the official contended.
But the commission ruled: "In our view, issuance or non-issuance of a passport may be a statutory duty and may not be a consumer dispute but issuance of an invalid passport which is not signed by the passport officer, would be deficiency in service on the part of the officer concerned."
Everybody pays a fee for getting a passport, the commission, and dismissed the appeal.
Unsigned passport lands official in trouble
New Delhi: Anuradha Thadipathri Gopinath's plan to visit Dubai was dashed at Mumbai airport because she had been issued an unsigned passport. Now a court has pulled up the passport officer for "serious deficiency in discharge of duties".
National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission pulled up the passport officer posted at the Bangalore regional passport office last week for the negligence and asked him to pay a compensation of Rs.10,000 and cost of Rs.2,000 to Gopinath.
Observing that travelling on such a passport could have invited unnecessary trouble for her, commission president M.B. Shah said: "A passport, which is issued without the signature of the competent authority, is on the face of it invalid which would have placed the complainant in a precarious position and she might have been hauled up for various offences if she had tried to go abroad on that passport.
"Such lapse amounts to a serious deficiency in discharge of duties, which is in the nature of rendering of service," said Shah.
Gopinath was issued a passport by the official, who did not sign it at the time of its issuance. She got a visa too.
She reached Mumbai airport to embark on her journey to Dubai. But at the airport, the lacuna came to light and the airport authorities asked her to go back. She lost the opportunity of going abroad on a trip that her company had sponsored.
Gopinath went to the Karnataka District Forum. The forum directed the officer to pay a compensation of Rs.10,000 and costs of Rs.2,000 to her.
The passport officer appealed to the Maharashtra State Commission which upheld the original order.
The official then appealed to the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission. He said he was "exercising a sovereign function" while issuing the passport. He was not charging a fee, and therefore this could not be a consumer dispute, the official contended.
But the commission ruled: "In our view, issuance or non-issuance of a passport may be a statutory duty and may not be a consumer dispute but issuance of an invalid passport which is not signed by the passport officer, would be deficiency in service on the part of the officer concerned."
Everybody pays a fee for getting a passport, the commission, and dismissed the appeal.
Friday, July 25, 2008
ABC News: Randy Pausch, 'Last Lecture' Professor Dies
ABC News: Randy Pausch, 'Last Lecture' Professor Dies
Carnegie Mellon Professor, Author of 'The Last Lecture,' Succumbs to Cancer
By GEOFF MARTZ, SAMANTHA WENDER and CHRIS FRANCESCANI
July 25, 2008
Randy Pausch, the charismatic young college professor who chronicled his battle with pancreatic cancer in a remarkable speech widely-known as the "Last Lecture," has died at the age of 47. He was at home, surrounded by his wife, Jai, and his three children.
A dear friend to Diane Sawyer and "Good Morning America," Pausch's lecture and subsequent interview was one of the most powerful accounts of hope, grace and optimistism ABC News has ever featured, and drew a worldwide response.
"I'd like to thank the millions of people who have offered their love, prayers and support," Jai Pausch said in a statement. "Randy was so happy and proud that the lecture and book inspired parents to revisit their priorities, particularly their relationships with their children. The outpouring of cards and emails really sustained him."
Tune in to "Good Morning America" Monday July 28 and Tuesday July 29 for a special tribute to Professor Pausch. Then be sure and catch "The Last Lecture: A Celebration of Life" Tuesday July 29 on "Primetime" at 10 p.m. ET and click here to see ABC News' full coverage of his story.
It all began with one, age-old question: What would you say if you knew you were going to die and had a chance to sum up everything that was most important to you?
That question had been posed to the annual speaker of a lecture series at Carnegie Mellon University, where Pausch was a computer sciences professor. For Pausch, though, the question wasn't hypothetical.
Pausch, a father of three small children with his wife Jai, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer -- and given six months to live.
Friends and colleagues flew in from all around the country to attend his last lecture. And -- almost as an afterthought -- the lecture was videotaped and put on the Internet for the few people who couldn't get there that day.
That was all it took.
Alice: Randy Pausch's Computer Software for Kids
Somehow amid the vast clamor of the Web and the bling-bling of million-dollar budgets, savvy marketing campaigns and millions of strange and bizarre videos, the voice of one earnest professor standing at a podium and talking about his childhood dreams cut through the noise.
The lecture was so uplifting, so funny, so inspirational that it went viral. So far, 10 million people have downloaded it.
And thousands have written in to say that his lecture changed their lives.
If you had only six months to live, what would you do? How would you live your life? And how can all of us take heart from Pausch's inspiring message to live each day to its fullest?
Pausch's answers to these questions, both in the lecture and in three separate interviews over a series of months with Diane Sawyer, are moving, funny, thought-provoking and extraordinary.
According to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, an advocacy organization for the pancreatic cancer community, approximately 37,170 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008 and 33,370 will die from it. The Pausch family has asked that donations on Randy's behalf be sent to the organization or to Carnegie Mellon's Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.
Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States, and unlike other cancers, during the last 30 years the medical community has seen very little advancement in prolonging the lives of pancreatic cancer patients.
But instead of focusing on his death, Pausch spoke about his childhood dreams. "You may not agree with the list but I was there. ... Being in zero gravity, playing in the National Football League, authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia -- I guess you can tell the nerds early. ... I wanted to be one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park."
He went on to attain almost all of those dreams, but they didn't all come easy.
In the lecture, he spoke of overcoming the obstacles that may seem insurmountable.
Although he graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, he nearly didn't get in to Brown in the first place -- he was wait listed. It was a brick wall that some might have walked away from. But Pausch had a novel way of looking at obstacles:
"The brick walls are there for a reason," he said during his lecture. "The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something."
He kept calling the college until it let him in.
Pausch maintained that his most formidable brick wall was a beautiful graduate student named Jai Glasgow. Pausch was 37, with a reputation as something of a ladies' man, when he met her at a lecture. Pausch was smitten, but she resisted. However, he refused to give up, and they eventually married and had three children.
Pausch spoke movingly of how he was trying to create memories for his three kids, Dylan, 6, Logan, 3, and Chloe, 18 months, and why he couldn't allow himself to wallow in self pity.
"I mean, the metaphor I've used is ... somebody's going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon, and I won't be there to catch them. And that breaks my heart. But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall. So, I can curl up in a ball and cry, or I can get to work on the nets."
Pausch was already a popular professor, and one of the foremost teachers in the field of virtual reality, when he proposed a class that would become legendary at CMU: It was called Building Virtual Worlds, a high-wire act that brought together students from many different disciplines, writers and computer programmers and artists who were forced to work together intensively in small groups.
Pausch told Sawyer that while the course was ostensibly about designing virtual reality worlds, there was a stealth message as well: "How do you behave with integrity? How do you behave in a way that other people will respect you and want to keep working with you?"
The result was so popular that it eventually spawned an entire program at the university. Together with drama professor Don Marinelli, Pausch started the Entertainment Technology Center, which over the years has become the go-to school for video gaming and Hollywood high tech.
At the ETC, students were encouraged to try the unconventional and the risky.
As former student Phil Light said, "We went to him and said, 'We have these ideas, we have a couple of ideas. This idea here is very safe. This idea here is risky.' He said, 'Go for the risk. It's better to fail spectacularly then to pass along and do something which is mediocre.'"
Pausch said that over the years, he went from attaining his own childhood dreams to learning to enable the dreams of his students, which he maintained is every bit as satisfying.
'Never Lose the Childlike Wonder'
To enable dreams on a grand scale, Pausch began his latest venture, called Alice. Alice is a free computer application that teaches kids to program, while giving them the impression that they are simply creating animated stories.
Created by a Carnegie Mellon team including Wanda Dann, Dennis Cosgrove and Caitlin Kelleher, Alice has already been downloaded more than a million times. The new version of Alice will feature characters from the popular computer game "The Sims."
After his diagnosis, Pausch devoted almost all of his time to his family, moving to a location near his wife's family, so that she would have some emotional support, and spent a lot of time with his three kids.
He had tried to approach what he called his "engineering problem" as a scientist: He interviewed people who'd lost their parents and asked them what they would have wanted to have as keepsakes; what they wished their parents had told them before they died. Pausch said he wanted to make sure he gave his wife and children what they would need to remember him, and to know that he loved them.
He and his wife, Jai, consulted psychotherapist Michele Reiss and other experts to help them grapple with such issues as when to tell the children. Reiss says very young children "have no particular time orientation yet. So you can talk to a young child in terms of breakfast time, or lunchtime, or dinnertime, or nap time, but you can't talk about the day after tomorrow, or next week, or next month, much less three to six months from now."
Therefore, the decision was made not to tell the children until their father was much sicker. The Pausch family had asked any viewers who might run into them to respect the experts' opinion and say nothing.
One of the things Pausch left behind for his kids: the lecture. He called it a message in a bottle. The lecture, along with private videos he made for their eyes alone, and a book he wrote called "The Last Lecture" would help give his children -- at least one of whom is too young now to be able to have distinct memories of her father -- a sense of how much he loved them.
Sawyer asked Pausch about his children, in particular Chloe, the youngest. "I hope that her passion will take her to wherever she goes. And the same for Dylan and Logan. I just hope that they have passion for things, and I'm sure they will. I'm sure their mother will instill that in them. And whatever they see of me in direct memories and indirect memories, uh, will send that signal. Because if they have passion for things, then I'm happy for whatever they have passion for."
Worldwide Impact
But if Pausch's lecture was written for an audience of only three, it has touched millions of others as well. People around the country told ABC News about the many ways his lecture had helped bring magic into their lives.
Alfred Nicolosi of Salem, N.J., said the night he watched Pausch's lecture was the "same night when Randy's life turned mine around." Battling depression, cancer surgery and facing heart problems, Nicolosi cleaned up his life, literally.
"I had never been very organized person, but this was exceptional. I'd allowed piles of boxes, groceries, laundry, books scattered everywhere. There was absolutely no order to my life, no way to find things, it was just lost. So immediately after seeing the lecture, I began to organize my house, and I felt like I was rediscovering my life in the process."
Peter Riebling, a lawyer from Vienna, Va., handed his 10-year-old daughter, Kimberly, a pencil and gave her free reign on her bedroom walls. "He told me to go draw on my walls, so at first I honestly thought he had gone crazy, because most parents wouldn't let their children draw on the walls, especially when they are brand new and painted and stuff. So I did start drawing on my walls -- and then I actually found it was extremely fun so I kept doing it," said Kimberly.
Diane Gregory from Las Vegas encouraged her teenage son Matt to express himself by hanging every piece of sports memorabilia he had collected on his walls. Matt jumped at the opportunity and with the tacks and double-sided tape went to work. Harry Wooten, a choir minister from Dallas, uses Pausch's message to touch his congregants through prayer and song.
After battling breast cancer, Kaje Lane of Los Angeles says Pausch has inspired her to pursue singing -- a passion she had put aside for many years.
"I think so many people relate to Randy because every one of us has some sort of dream they want to make real, or some sort of passion that they want to tap into if they're not already thinking that way. … I think people are just drawn to that. It's very magnetic to see someone positive not just about the big things but the little things."
'Leave It All on the Field'
Even though he had enabled the dreams of so many others, we couldn't help but notice that there was one dream Pausch had never been able to fulfill -- playing in the NFL.
So ABC News made a couple of phone calls, and in October, Pausch took the field with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was wearing the jersey of his favorite player: wide receiver Heinz Ward.
Moments later he was catching balls thrown by Ward.
He caught every pass -- and even kicked a field goal, on his first attempt.
"There was a definite sense," Pausch told Sawyer, "when I put that talk together, to use another football expression, you know, I wanted to leave it all on the field. … If I thought it was important, it's in there. I played in football games where you walk off the field and the scoreboard didn't end up the way you wanted. But you knew that you really did give it all. And the other team was too strong. Yeah, I'm not going to beat the cancer. I tried really hard … but sometimes you're just not going to beat the thing…I wanted to walk off the stage and say anything I thought was important, I had my hour."
After a bout earlier this year in the hospital to overcome kidney and congestive heart failure -- side effects of his chemotherapy -- Pausch returned home to his family.
"His fate is, is our fate, but it's just sped up," said co-author Jeff Zaslow. "He's, you know, 47, and, and we don't know when we're gonna go, but we all have the same fate. We're all dying, just like Randy is … when we can see him, how he's, how he's traveling, it makes us think about how we're going to travel."
Millions of people around the globe have been touched by his message of optimism.
Last spring, Sawyer asked Pausch what was the best thing that had happened to him that day. He replied, "Well, first off, I'd say the day's not over yet. So there's always a chance that there will be a new best."
Lasting Legacy
Carnegie Mellon University will honor Pausch's commitment to collaboration by building the Randy Pausch Memorial Footbridge to connect a computer science center under construction with a nearby arts building.
Announcing the project last September, Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon said, "Randy, there will be generations of students and faculty who will not know you, but they will cross that bridge and see your name and they'll ask those of us who did know you. And we will tell them."
In a statement released by the university today, Cohon expressed the community's sadness at Pausch's passing.
"Randy had an enormous and lasting impact on Carnegie Mellon," Cohon said . "He was a brilliant researcher and gifted teacher. His love of teaching, his sense of fun and his brilliance came together in the Alice project, which teaches students computer programming while enabling them to do something fun -- making animated movies and games. Carnegie Mellon -- and the world -- are better places for having had Randy Pausch in them."
The family requests that donations on Randy's behalf be directed to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, 2141 Rosecrans Ave., Suite 7000, El Segundo, CA 90245, or to Carnegie Mellon's Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.
Carnegie Mellon Professor, Author of 'The Last Lecture,' Succumbs to Cancer
By GEOFF MARTZ, SAMANTHA WENDER and CHRIS FRANCESCANI
July 25, 2008
Randy Pausch, the charismatic young college professor who chronicled his battle with pancreatic cancer in a remarkable speech widely-known as the "Last Lecture," has died at the age of 47. He was at home, surrounded by his wife, Jai, and his three children.
A dear friend to Diane Sawyer and "Good Morning America," Pausch's lecture and subsequent interview was one of the most powerful accounts of hope, grace and optimistism ABC News has ever featured, and drew a worldwide response.
"I'd like to thank the millions of people who have offered their love, prayers and support," Jai Pausch said in a statement. "Randy was so happy and proud that the lecture and book inspired parents to revisit their priorities, particularly their relationships with their children. The outpouring of cards and emails really sustained him."
Tune in to "Good Morning America" Monday July 28 and Tuesday July 29 for a special tribute to Professor Pausch. Then be sure and catch "The Last Lecture: A Celebration of Life" Tuesday July 29 on "Primetime" at 10 p.m. ET and click here to see ABC News' full coverage of his story.
It all began with one, age-old question: What would you say if you knew you were going to die and had a chance to sum up everything that was most important to you?
That question had been posed to the annual speaker of a lecture series at Carnegie Mellon University, where Pausch was a computer sciences professor. For Pausch, though, the question wasn't hypothetical.
Pausch, a father of three small children with his wife Jai, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer -- and given six months to live.
Friends and colleagues flew in from all around the country to attend his last lecture. And -- almost as an afterthought -- the lecture was videotaped and put on the Internet for the few people who couldn't get there that day.
That was all it took.
Alice: Randy Pausch's Computer Software for Kids
Somehow amid the vast clamor of the Web and the bling-bling of million-dollar budgets, savvy marketing campaigns and millions of strange and bizarre videos, the voice of one earnest professor standing at a podium and talking about his childhood dreams cut through the noise.
The lecture was so uplifting, so funny, so inspirational that it went viral. So far, 10 million people have downloaded it.
And thousands have written in to say that his lecture changed their lives.
If you had only six months to live, what would you do? How would you live your life? And how can all of us take heart from Pausch's inspiring message to live each day to its fullest?
Pausch's answers to these questions, both in the lecture and in three separate interviews over a series of months with Diane Sawyer, are moving, funny, thought-provoking and extraordinary.
According to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, an advocacy organization for the pancreatic cancer community, approximately 37,170 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008 and 33,370 will die from it. The Pausch family has asked that donations on Randy's behalf be sent to the organization or to Carnegie Mellon's Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.
Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States, and unlike other cancers, during the last 30 years the medical community has seen very little advancement in prolonging the lives of pancreatic cancer patients.
But instead of focusing on his death, Pausch spoke about his childhood dreams. "You may not agree with the list but I was there. ... Being in zero gravity, playing in the National Football League, authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia -- I guess you can tell the nerds early. ... I wanted to be one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park."
He went on to attain almost all of those dreams, but they didn't all come easy.
In the lecture, he spoke of overcoming the obstacles that may seem insurmountable.
Although he graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, he nearly didn't get in to Brown in the first place -- he was wait listed. It was a brick wall that some might have walked away from. But Pausch had a novel way of looking at obstacles:
"The brick walls are there for a reason," he said during his lecture. "The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something."
He kept calling the college until it let him in.
Pausch maintained that his most formidable brick wall was a beautiful graduate student named Jai Glasgow. Pausch was 37, with a reputation as something of a ladies' man, when he met her at a lecture. Pausch was smitten, but she resisted. However, he refused to give up, and they eventually married and had three children.
Pausch spoke movingly of how he was trying to create memories for his three kids, Dylan, 6, Logan, 3, and Chloe, 18 months, and why he couldn't allow himself to wallow in self pity.
"I mean, the metaphor I've used is ... somebody's going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon, and I won't be there to catch them. And that breaks my heart. But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall. So, I can curl up in a ball and cry, or I can get to work on the nets."
Pausch was already a popular professor, and one of the foremost teachers in the field of virtual reality, when he proposed a class that would become legendary at CMU: It was called Building Virtual Worlds, a high-wire act that brought together students from many different disciplines, writers and computer programmers and artists who were forced to work together intensively in small groups.
Pausch told Sawyer that while the course was ostensibly about designing virtual reality worlds, there was a stealth message as well: "How do you behave with integrity? How do you behave in a way that other people will respect you and want to keep working with you?"
The result was so popular that it eventually spawned an entire program at the university. Together with drama professor Don Marinelli, Pausch started the Entertainment Technology Center, which over the years has become the go-to school for video gaming and Hollywood high tech.
At the ETC, students were encouraged to try the unconventional and the risky.
As former student Phil Light said, "We went to him and said, 'We have these ideas, we have a couple of ideas. This idea here is very safe. This idea here is risky.' He said, 'Go for the risk. It's better to fail spectacularly then to pass along and do something which is mediocre.'"
Pausch said that over the years, he went from attaining his own childhood dreams to learning to enable the dreams of his students, which he maintained is every bit as satisfying.
'Never Lose the Childlike Wonder'
To enable dreams on a grand scale, Pausch began his latest venture, called Alice. Alice is a free computer application that teaches kids to program, while giving them the impression that they are simply creating animated stories.
Created by a Carnegie Mellon team including Wanda Dann, Dennis Cosgrove and Caitlin Kelleher, Alice has already been downloaded more than a million times. The new version of Alice will feature characters from the popular computer game "The Sims."
After his diagnosis, Pausch devoted almost all of his time to his family, moving to a location near his wife's family, so that she would have some emotional support, and spent a lot of time with his three kids.
He had tried to approach what he called his "engineering problem" as a scientist: He interviewed people who'd lost their parents and asked them what they would have wanted to have as keepsakes; what they wished their parents had told them before they died. Pausch said he wanted to make sure he gave his wife and children what they would need to remember him, and to know that he loved them.
He and his wife, Jai, consulted psychotherapist Michele Reiss and other experts to help them grapple with such issues as when to tell the children. Reiss says very young children "have no particular time orientation yet. So you can talk to a young child in terms of breakfast time, or lunchtime, or dinnertime, or nap time, but you can't talk about the day after tomorrow, or next week, or next month, much less three to six months from now."
Therefore, the decision was made not to tell the children until their father was much sicker. The Pausch family had asked any viewers who might run into them to respect the experts' opinion and say nothing.
One of the things Pausch left behind for his kids: the lecture. He called it a message in a bottle. The lecture, along with private videos he made for their eyes alone, and a book he wrote called "The Last Lecture" would help give his children -- at least one of whom is too young now to be able to have distinct memories of her father -- a sense of how much he loved them.
Sawyer asked Pausch about his children, in particular Chloe, the youngest. "I hope that her passion will take her to wherever she goes. And the same for Dylan and Logan. I just hope that they have passion for things, and I'm sure they will. I'm sure their mother will instill that in them. And whatever they see of me in direct memories and indirect memories, uh, will send that signal. Because if they have passion for things, then I'm happy for whatever they have passion for."
Worldwide Impact
But if Pausch's lecture was written for an audience of only three, it has touched millions of others as well. People around the country told ABC News about the many ways his lecture had helped bring magic into their lives.
Alfred Nicolosi of Salem, N.J., said the night he watched Pausch's lecture was the "same night when Randy's life turned mine around." Battling depression, cancer surgery and facing heart problems, Nicolosi cleaned up his life, literally.
"I had never been very organized person, but this was exceptional. I'd allowed piles of boxes, groceries, laundry, books scattered everywhere. There was absolutely no order to my life, no way to find things, it was just lost. So immediately after seeing the lecture, I began to organize my house, and I felt like I was rediscovering my life in the process."
Peter Riebling, a lawyer from Vienna, Va., handed his 10-year-old daughter, Kimberly, a pencil and gave her free reign on her bedroom walls. "He told me to go draw on my walls, so at first I honestly thought he had gone crazy, because most parents wouldn't let their children draw on the walls, especially when they are brand new and painted and stuff. So I did start drawing on my walls -- and then I actually found it was extremely fun so I kept doing it," said Kimberly.
Diane Gregory from Las Vegas encouraged her teenage son Matt to express himself by hanging every piece of sports memorabilia he had collected on his walls. Matt jumped at the opportunity and with the tacks and double-sided tape went to work. Harry Wooten, a choir minister from Dallas, uses Pausch's message to touch his congregants through prayer and song.
After battling breast cancer, Kaje Lane of Los Angeles says Pausch has inspired her to pursue singing -- a passion she had put aside for many years.
"I think so many people relate to Randy because every one of us has some sort of dream they want to make real, or some sort of passion that they want to tap into if they're not already thinking that way. … I think people are just drawn to that. It's very magnetic to see someone positive not just about the big things but the little things."
'Leave It All on the Field'
Even though he had enabled the dreams of so many others, we couldn't help but notice that there was one dream Pausch had never been able to fulfill -- playing in the NFL.
So ABC News made a couple of phone calls, and in October, Pausch took the field with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was wearing the jersey of his favorite player: wide receiver Heinz Ward.
Moments later he was catching balls thrown by Ward.
He caught every pass -- and even kicked a field goal, on his first attempt.
"There was a definite sense," Pausch told Sawyer, "when I put that talk together, to use another football expression, you know, I wanted to leave it all on the field. … If I thought it was important, it's in there. I played in football games where you walk off the field and the scoreboard didn't end up the way you wanted. But you knew that you really did give it all. And the other team was too strong. Yeah, I'm not going to beat the cancer. I tried really hard … but sometimes you're just not going to beat the thing…I wanted to walk off the stage and say anything I thought was important, I had my hour."
After a bout earlier this year in the hospital to overcome kidney and congestive heart failure -- side effects of his chemotherapy -- Pausch returned home to his family.
"His fate is, is our fate, but it's just sped up," said co-author Jeff Zaslow. "He's, you know, 47, and, and we don't know when we're gonna go, but we all have the same fate. We're all dying, just like Randy is … when we can see him, how he's, how he's traveling, it makes us think about how we're going to travel."
Millions of people around the globe have been touched by his message of optimism.
Last spring, Sawyer asked Pausch what was the best thing that had happened to him that day. He replied, "Well, first off, I'd say the day's not over yet. So there's always a chance that there will be a new best."
Lasting Legacy
Carnegie Mellon University will honor Pausch's commitment to collaboration by building the Randy Pausch Memorial Footbridge to connect a computer science center under construction with a nearby arts building.
Announcing the project last September, Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon said, "Randy, there will be generations of students and faculty who will not know you, but they will cross that bridge and see your name and they'll ask those of us who did know you. And we will tell them."
In a statement released by the university today, Cohon expressed the community's sadness at Pausch's passing.
"Randy had an enormous and lasting impact on Carnegie Mellon," Cohon said . "He was a brilliant researcher and gifted teacher. His love of teaching, his sense of fun and his brilliance came together in the Alice project, which teaches students computer programming while enabling them to do something fun -- making animated movies and games. Carnegie Mellon -- and the world -- are better places for having had Randy Pausch in them."
The family requests that donations on Randy's behalf be directed to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, 2141 Rosecrans Ave., Suite 7000, El Segundo, CA 90245, or to Carnegie Mellon's Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Abhishek, two Bollywood Khans in Forbes' 10 'cell celebs' list - Yahoo! India News
Abhishek, two Bollywood Khans in Forbes' 10 'cell celebs' list - Yahoo! India News
Abhishek, two Bollywood Khans in Forbes' 10 'cell celebs' list
Thu, Jul 17 07:14 PM
New York, July 17 (IANS) Three Bollywood stars, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Abhishek Bachchan, feature in Forbes magazine's list of 10 celebrities who are brand ambassadors for different mobile phone companies.
The three Indian actors are joined by football star David Beckham and tennis champion Maria Sharapova on the list released by the US magazine, otherwise known for its billionaire rankings. Sharapova endorses Sony Ericsson phones and Beckham lends his name to the Motorola RAZR2 phone.
While Shah Rukh lends star power to mobile phones made by Nokia, Abhishek and Aamir endorse Motorola and Samsung phones respectively.
The Forbes report said that Nokia, the world's largest phone manufacturer, 'doesn't work with many celebrities but makes an exception for Shah Rukh, who says he has used Nokia phones for more than a decade.'
It added that after a popular commercial last December, the company sponsored Shah Rukh's Indian Premier League cricket team earlier this year.
The magazine said Abhishek, a former LG Electronics' brand ambassador, now represents Motorola phones in India, and that he is 'Bollywood royalty, thanks to his famous actor father, Amitabh Bachchan, and glamorous actress wife Aishwarya Rai'.
About Aamir, the report said: 'After appearing in his first movie at eight, Bollywood star Aamir now produces and directs films, as well as acts. Samsung has said it is counting on his popularity to help it double its market share in India this year.'
Samsung also claimed that Aamir's work mirrors their brand's 'qualities of innovation, change, discovery, self-expression and excellence in performance'.
Explaining how mobile phone companies are now emulating perfume and designer jean makers in hiring celebrities, Forbes said: 'As nearly everyone on the planet seems to have a cellphone, device makers must work harder to win new customers. Cool designs and low prices help, of course. But so do celebrities. That's led phone makers to recruit some A-listers from Usher (a singer) to David Beckham to lend an ear and a smile to selling cellphones.'
Others in the magazine's 'Ten Celebs and Their Cells' list are singers Fergie, Rain (also known as Jung Ji Hoon), Andy Lau and race car driver Danica Patrick.
Abhishek, two Bollywood Khans in Forbes' 10 'cell celebs' list
Thu, Jul 17 07:14 PM
New York, July 17 (IANS) Three Bollywood stars, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Abhishek Bachchan, feature in Forbes magazine's list of 10 celebrities who are brand ambassadors for different mobile phone companies.
The three Indian actors are joined by football star David Beckham and tennis champion Maria Sharapova on the list released by the US magazine, otherwise known for its billionaire rankings. Sharapova endorses Sony Ericsson phones and Beckham lends his name to the Motorola RAZR2 phone.
While Shah Rukh lends star power to mobile phones made by Nokia, Abhishek and Aamir endorse Motorola and Samsung phones respectively.
The Forbes report said that Nokia, the world's largest phone manufacturer, 'doesn't work with many celebrities but makes an exception for Shah Rukh, who says he has used Nokia phones for more than a decade.'
It added that after a popular commercial last December, the company sponsored Shah Rukh's Indian Premier League cricket team earlier this year.
The magazine said Abhishek, a former LG Electronics' brand ambassador, now represents Motorola phones in India, and that he is 'Bollywood royalty, thanks to his famous actor father, Amitabh Bachchan, and glamorous actress wife Aishwarya Rai'.
About Aamir, the report said: 'After appearing in his first movie at eight, Bollywood star Aamir now produces and directs films, as well as acts. Samsung has said it is counting on his popularity to help it double its market share in India this year.'
Samsung also claimed that Aamir's work mirrors their brand's 'qualities of innovation, change, discovery, self-expression and excellence in performance'.
Explaining how mobile phone companies are now emulating perfume and designer jean makers in hiring celebrities, Forbes said: 'As nearly everyone on the planet seems to have a cellphone, device makers must work harder to win new customers. Cool designs and low prices help, of course. But so do celebrities. That's led phone makers to recruit some A-listers from Usher (a singer) to David Beckham to lend an ear and a smile to selling cellphones.'
Others in the magazine's 'Ten Celebs and Their Cells' list are singers Fergie, Rain (also known as Jung Ji Hoon), Andy Lau and race car driver Danica Patrick.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Mukesh Ambani's $2 bn home world's most expensive: Forbes
tag: luxuary
Economic Times - Indian Newspapers in English Language from seven editions.
Mukesh Ambani's $2 bn home world's most expensive: Forbes
2 May, 2008, 1225 hrs IST, PTI
NEW YORK: The 27-storey skyscraper being built in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani, the richest person in India, could be the world's largest and costliest home with a price- tag nearing two billion dollar, according to Forbes magazine. ( Watch )
"When the Ambani residence is finished in January, completing a four-year process, it will be 550 feet high with 4,00,000 square feet of interior space," Forbes said in a report on its website.
Earlier in March, Mukesh Ambani was ranked as the fifth richest person in the world with a net worth of 43 billion dollars by the Forbes magazine in its annual list of world's wealthiest billionaires. While Lakshmi Mittal, who is an Indian citizen was ranked higher at fourth, he is a British resident. Among resident Indians, Mukesh was ranked at top.
"The only remotely comparable high-rise property currently on the market is the 70 million dollar triplex penthouse at the Pierre Hotel in New York, designed to resemble a French chateau, and climbing 525 feet in the air," Forbes said in its report titled, "Inside The World's First Billion-Dollar Home."
Mukesh Ambani heads India's most valuable firm Reliance Industries, an oil and petrochemicals giant.
"Like many families with the means to do so, the Ambanis wanted to build a custom home. They consulted with architecture firms Perkins + Will and Hirsch Bedner Associates, the designers behind the Mandarin Oriental, based in Dallas and Los Angeles, respectively," the report said.
Economic Times - Indian Newspapers in English Language from seven editions.
Mukesh Ambani's $2 bn home world's most expensive: Forbes
2 May, 2008, 1225 hrs IST, PTI
NEW YORK: The 27-storey skyscraper being built in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani, the richest person in India, could be the world's largest and costliest home with a price- tag nearing two billion dollar, according to Forbes magazine. ( Watch )
"When the Ambani residence is finished in January, completing a four-year process, it will be 550 feet high with 4,00,000 square feet of interior space," Forbes said in a report on its website.
Earlier in March, Mukesh Ambani was ranked as the fifth richest person in the world with a net worth of 43 billion dollars by the Forbes magazine in its annual list of world's wealthiest billionaires. While Lakshmi Mittal, who is an Indian citizen was ranked higher at fourth, he is a British resident. Among resident Indians, Mukesh was ranked at top.
"The only remotely comparable high-rise property currently on the market is the 70 million dollar triplex penthouse at the Pierre Hotel in New York, designed to resemble a French chateau, and climbing 525 feet in the air," Forbes said in its report titled, "Inside The World's First Billion-Dollar Home."
Mukesh Ambani heads India's most valuable firm Reliance Industries, an oil and petrochemicals giant.
"Like many families with the means to do so, the Ambanis wanted to build a custom home. They consulted with architecture firms Perkins + Will and Hirsch Bedner Associates, the designers behind the Mandarin Oriental, based in Dallas and Los Angeles, respectively," the report said.
Monday, July 7, 2008
karnataka BJP paid MLAs Rs 5 cr to switch
Deccan Chronicle - Indian Newspapers in English Language from Secunderabad
BJP paid MLAs Rs 5 cr to switch
Bengaluru, July 7: The four MLAs who quit their Assembly membership last week were paid Rs 5 crores each to switch sides. Sources in the BJP said the party — that worked out a strategy to pre-empt the Congress’ strategy to bring down the BJP government midway through the Budget Session of the state legislature — agreed to a long list of demands put forth by these leaders.As part of the deal, Rs 5 crores was paid to each MLA on resignation. At least two of the MLAs, Balachandra Jarkiholi and Narasimha Swamy, will be inducted into the Cabinet on Wednesday.
Two others are likely to be made chairmen of boards and corporations. Besides this, the party will bear the expenses of the by elections in which the MLAs will contest as BJP candidates. Also, they will be helped in retaining political clout in their constituencies.Sources in the party said that the entire episode was strategised when the Congress Rajya Sabha MP Anil Lad tried to persuade BJP MLAs Shankarlige Gowda and A. Narayanaswamy to quit their Assembly membership midway through the Budget Session besides cajoling the six independent MLAs to rock the BJP’s boat in exchange for a fat sum that was promised by the Congress leaders.
The Congress’ strategy, is to woo disgruntled BJP MLAs and persuade them to leave the party. In fact, BJP approached Mr V. Somanna, who had promised to resign, but he is believed to be bargaining for a ministry. The BJP spin doctors found it easy to convince the four MLAs who quit to defect. BJP strategists are working overtime to persuade a few more MLAs into quitting the Congress and Janata Dal (S). The names doing the rounds include Umesh Katti, Mahadev Prasad, Cada Venkatesh and H.C. Mahadevappa.
BJP paid MLAs Rs 5 cr to switch
Bengaluru, July 7: The four MLAs who quit their Assembly membership last week were paid Rs 5 crores each to switch sides. Sources in the BJP said the party — that worked out a strategy to pre-empt the Congress’ strategy to bring down the BJP government midway through the Budget Session of the state legislature — agreed to a long list of demands put forth by these leaders.As part of the deal, Rs 5 crores was paid to each MLA on resignation. At least two of the MLAs, Balachandra Jarkiholi and Narasimha Swamy, will be inducted into the Cabinet on Wednesday.
Two others are likely to be made chairmen of boards and corporations. Besides this, the party will bear the expenses of the by elections in which the MLAs will contest as BJP candidates. Also, they will be helped in retaining political clout in their constituencies.Sources in the party said that the entire episode was strategised when the Congress Rajya Sabha MP Anil Lad tried to persuade BJP MLAs Shankarlige Gowda and A. Narayanaswamy to quit their Assembly membership midway through the Budget Session besides cajoling the six independent MLAs to rock the BJP’s boat in exchange for a fat sum that was promised by the Congress leaders.
The Congress’ strategy, is to woo disgruntled BJP MLAs and persuade them to leave the party. In fact, BJP approached Mr V. Somanna, who had promised to resign, but he is believed to be bargaining for a ministry. The BJP spin doctors found it easy to convince the four MLAs who quit to defect. BJP strategists are working overtime to persuade a few more MLAs into quitting the Congress and Janata Dal (S). The names doing the rounds include Umesh Katti, Mahadev Prasad, Cada Venkatesh and H.C. Mahadevappa.
The Telegraph - Indian Newspapers in English Language from Kolkatta (Calcutta) India.
The Telegraph - Indian Newspapers in English Language from Kolkatta (Calcutta) India.
Goddess of small change
- 100kg of coins in retired alms-seeker’s shanty
Calcutta, July 7: Lakshmi started begging from the age of 16 but it wasn’t for nothing that her parents had named her after the goddess of wealth. Over 100kg of coins stored in four iron buckets have been found in her one-room shanty.
At 60, Lakshmi Das is worth anywhere between Rs 20,000 and Rs 30,000.
Shantanu Neogi and J.P. Singh, two employees of the Central Bank of India’s Manicktala branch, expect that it will take them three days or more to count the woman’s life’s savings.
Partho Mondal, a constable at Burtolla police station, watches the counting, which started today, in the branch manager’s cabin. Lakshmi, physically challenged, looks hawk-eyed from her chair, springing to pick up a coin when it falls.
“I used to beg at the Hatibagan crossing and would keep the coins in buckets. I thought these coins would buy me food and clothes when I became too old to beg,” she said.
From a one-paisa coin going back to 1961 to the more recent Rs 5 coin, the buckets contain denominations of all kinds.
“It is taking a lot of time. There are several coins which have become obsolete over the years but we have to accept them as directed by the Reserve Bank of India,” said Singh.
Neogi, who guessed that it would take two more days or maybe more to go through the three other buckets, put the value at Rs 25,000-30,000. It cannot be less than Rs 20,000 even on the rough assumption that each is a Re 1 coin, whose latest version weighs 4.85 gm.
Lakshmi was dipping into her savings to meet her daily expenses as she had retired from begging until one day a few weeks ago a teenaged boy chanced upon her treasure that she had covered with jute bags while playing.
Four days back, some local youths entered her shanty at Nandanbagan looking for the coins. She raised an alarm and her neighbours informed Burtolla police station.
The police visited the shanty where Lakshmi lives alone and took away the buckets. When she did not hear from them for a couple of days she thought her money was gone.
The cops were wondering what to do with her and her buckets.
“Our officers were stunned to see such a huge quantity. Realising that Laskhmi stays alone and these coins would be stolen, the officers brought them to the police station,” said Baidyanath Saha, the officer-in-charge of Burtolla police station.
Banks would usually not accept currency that has ceased to be legal tender, though there is a Reserve Bank directive to do so. Saha said the police narrated Lakshmi’s story to the Central Bank manager who was so touched that he agreed to open a savings account for her.
But before that the coins have to be counted.
“This is the first time we have a customer who has come with such a huge number of coins to open a bank account. She is poor and we want to help her,” said Neogi.
All that Lakshmi has for family is a sister, Asha, who lives nearby. “She is very possessive about her coins and never allowed me to touch them,” Asha said.
Lakshmi doesn’t remember her parents or when she lost them. Nor may she be aware that in her own way she has lived up to the name they gave her.
Goddess of small change
- 100kg of coins in retired alms-seeker’s shanty
Calcutta, July 7: Lakshmi started begging from the age of 16 but it wasn’t for nothing that her parents had named her after the goddess of wealth. Over 100kg of coins stored in four iron buckets have been found in her one-room shanty.
At 60, Lakshmi Das is worth anywhere between Rs 20,000 and Rs 30,000.
Shantanu Neogi and J.P. Singh, two employees of the Central Bank of India’s Manicktala branch, expect that it will take them three days or more to count the woman’s life’s savings.
Partho Mondal, a constable at Burtolla police station, watches the counting, which started today, in the branch manager’s cabin. Lakshmi, physically challenged, looks hawk-eyed from her chair, springing to pick up a coin when it falls.
“I used to beg at the Hatibagan crossing and would keep the coins in buckets. I thought these coins would buy me food and clothes when I became too old to beg,” she said.
From a one-paisa coin going back to 1961 to the more recent Rs 5 coin, the buckets contain denominations of all kinds.
“It is taking a lot of time. There are several coins which have become obsolete over the years but we have to accept them as directed by the Reserve Bank of India,” said Singh.
Neogi, who guessed that it would take two more days or maybe more to go through the three other buckets, put the value at Rs 25,000-30,000. It cannot be less than Rs 20,000 even on the rough assumption that each is a Re 1 coin, whose latest version weighs 4.85 gm.
Lakshmi was dipping into her savings to meet her daily expenses as she had retired from begging until one day a few weeks ago a teenaged boy chanced upon her treasure that she had covered with jute bags while playing.
Four days back, some local youths entered her shanty at Nandanbagan looking for the coins. She raised an alarm and her neighbours informed Burtolla police station.
The police visited the shanty where Lakshmi lives alone and took away the buckets. When she did not hear from them for a couple of days she thought her money was gone.
The cops were wondering what to do with her and her buckets.
“Our officers were stunned to see such a huge quantity. Realising that Laskhmi stays alone and these coins would be stolen, the officers brought them to the police station,” said Baidyanath Saha, the officer-in-charge of Burtolla police station.
Banks would usually not accept currency that has ceased to be legal tender, though there is a Reserve Bank directive to do so. Saha said the police narrated Lakshmi’s story to the Central Bank manager who was so touched that he agreed to open a savings account for her.
But before that the coins have to be counted.
“This is the first time we have a customer who has come with such a huge number of coins to open a bank account. She is poor and we want to help her,” said Neogi.
All that Lakshmi has for family is a sister, Asha, who lives nearby. “She is very possessive about her coins and never allowed me to touch them,” Asha said.
Lakshmi doesn’t remember her parents or when she lost them. Nor may she be aware that in her own way she has lived up to the name they gave her.
ABC News: Blood Atonement: Survivors of Sect Ritual
ABC News: Blood Atonement: Survivors of Sect Ritual
Two Polygamist Sect Survivors Tell Their Stories
"When I Thought of My Dad, I Thought of Him Being God"
by JEN PEREIRA, KIRAN KHALID and EMILY YACUS
July 7, 2008
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There's been a lot in the news recently about polygamist groups, but what is it really like for the children who grow up in them? Amber Dawn Lee and Estephania LeBaron are two women who spent their childhoods in two very different -- and very troubled groups -- and later escaped.
Two women discuss growing up in secret societies.
The women shared with "Good Morning America" what it is like to live in and to survive the secret society of a renegade polygamist sect.
"The children were all taught that if we were ever to talk about what happened sexually inside the group, that we will go straight to hell," Lee said of her time spent inside the Zion Society.
After she was abandoned by her mother, Lee was adopted and her new parents joined the Zion Society, a group led by a retired landscaper and excommunicated Mormon named Arvin Shreeve.
"I always had a feeling that something wasn't right. That it wasn't normal," said Lee.
Related
Sect Members: Brainwashed or Faithful?
Children of Polygamy: Life on the Outside
WATCH: Mother Escapes Polygamist Cult
Shreeve divided the women into groups called Sister Councils in which it was their job to sew lingerie to sell to local strippers. But first they had to model the lingerie. Shreeve reportedly even hired strippers to train his wives for the sect's fashion shows.
Lee, who as part of a Sister Council learned to sew at a young age, said that she "hoped that I could stand out somehow to Arvin, and that he'll notice that I'm here too."
Lee also said that the children suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse. "A 15-year-old girl would be instructed to teach the 9-year old girl how to sexually satisfy a man or woman," she said.
"Arvin sort of came out of nowhere. There are a lot of independent polygamists," according to senior reporter Mike Watkiss at KTVK in Phoenix. "That's what they call themselves, and they're just guys who basically put their hands up and say, 'I'm a prophet.'"
Estephania LeBaron said she knew about the horrors from a different sect. She is the daughter of polygamist Ervil LeBaron, founder of the Church of the Lamb of God.
"When I thought of my dad, I thought of him being God," she told "GMA." "I just had a huge feeling of awe." She also feared that if she deviated from her father's sect, she "might not get into heaven."
Two Polygamist Sect Survivors Tell Their Stories
"When I Thought of My Dad, I Thought of Him Being God"
by JEN PEREIRA, KIRAN KHALID and EMILY YACUS
July 7, 2008
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There's been a lot in the news recently about polygamist groups, but what is it really like for the children who grow up in them? Amber Dawn Lee and Estephania LeBaron are two women who spent their childhoods in two very different -- and very troubled groups -- and later escaped.
Two women discuss growing up in secret societies.
The women shared with "Good Morning America" what it is like to live in and to survive the secret society of a renegade polygamist sect.
"The children were all taught that if we were ever to talk about what happened sexually inside the group, that we will go straight to hell," Lee said of her time spent inside the Zion Society.
After she was abandoned by her mother, Lee was adopted and her new parents joined the Zion Society, a group led by a retired landscaper and excommunicated Mormon named Arvin Shreeve.
"I always had a feeling that something wasn't right. That it wasn't normal," said Lee.
Related
Sect Members: Brainwashed or Faithful?
Children of Polygamy: Life on the Outside
WATCH: Mother Escapes Polygamist Cult
Shreeve divided the women into groups called Sister Councils in which it was their job to sew lingerie to sell to local strippers. But first they had to model the lingerie. Shreeve reportedly even hired strippers to train his wives for the sect's fashion shows.
Lee, who as part of a Sister Council learned to sew at a young age, said that she "hoped that I could stand out somehow to Arvin, and that he'll notice that I'm here too."
Lee also said that the children suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse. "A 15-year-old girl would be instructed to teach the 9-year old girl how to sexually satisfy a man or woman," she said.
"Arvin sort of came out of nowhere. There are a lot of independent polygamists," according to senior reporter Mike Watkiss at KTVK in Phoenix. "That's what they call themselves, and they're just guys who basically put their hands up and say, 'I'm a prophet.'"
Estephania LeBaron said she knew about the horrors from a different sect. She is the daughter of polygamist Ervil LeBaron, founder of the Church of the Lamb of God.
"When I thought of my dad, I thought of him being God," she told "GMA." "I just had a huge feeling of awe." She also feared that if she deviated from her father's sect, she "might not get into heaven."
Friday, July 4, 2008
Indo-US nuclear deal Good for us: A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Good for us: Kalam
Faraz Ahmad
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, July 3
Having secured the endorsement of former President of India A. P. J. Abdul Kalam for the Indo-US nuclear deal, the Samajwadi Party for the first time came out in open support of the deal ditching its partners in the United Progressive National Alliance (UNPA).
This decision of the SP with 39 MPs in the Lok Sabha has also put the Left under greater pressure to announce withdrawal of support to the four-year-old United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leaves for Tokyo on July 6 to attend the G8 Summit.
Late on Thursday evening, SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav announced that the “Nuclear deal is in the interest of the country.” He said this soon after meeting former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and said, “Kalam told us that the deal is in the interest of the nation and it is beneficial. Kalam explained to us the nuclear deal. Now we will decide what to do.”
The SP chief declared, ”Without the interest of the nation there is no politics.”
Earlier in the day, Mulayam and his confidant general secretary Amar Singh made a big show of camraderie and bonhomie with his UNPA colleagues N. Chandrababu Naidu of TDP and Om Prakash Chautala of INLD, others and swore by their loyalty to the UNPA at Amar Singh’s residence.
They endorsed Chautala’s declaration that “We will not give a certificate to the Prime Minister before July 6. Till we are convinced we will never give our ascent,” Chautala asserted.
In fact, Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh had said, This is a national issue. It should be debated nationally It dosn’t just concern the SP or the UNPA.”
To avoid the embarrassment of answering for the capitulation of SP leaders, the other UNPA leaders went underground. While Naidu remained incommunicado, his parliamentary party leader here K. Yerrannaidu refused to speak to The Tribune pleading urgent business.
Simultaneously, the Left is busy making preparations to pull out support from the UPA government as soon as the government says it is going ahead with the deal, either before July 6 or after the Prime Minister returns, depending on the government’s response.
The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) has already authorised its leaders Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury to take the necessary steps as and when the government finalises its decision to go to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to sign the Nuclear Safeguards Agreement.
The Communist Party of India (CPI) central secretariat also met here on Thursday authorising Bardhan and Raja to decide together with the other Left parties the timing of withdrawing support to the UPA government and the contents of the letter to be given jointly to President Pratibha Patil.
The other two Left parties, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and the Forward Bloc, also conducted a similar exercise.
After the meeting Bardhan said, “We will demand tomorrow from the government to tell us as to when it is going to the Board of Governors of the IAEA. The question is not whether they are going (to IAEA). The fact that they are going ahead is clear, but when is the question,” he said.
”There are no two opinions (about the Left decision to withdraw support). Modalities will be decided ... We have to write to the President (to declare withdrawal of support) ... all these things will be decided,” he said.
Asked whether the Left parties had any indication as to when the government would move the IAEA, Bardhan said “The government itself is in a hurry. If they are going (to IAEA), they are going within this week... Within the next seven, eight or 10 days.”
Asked whether the Left will wait for the Prime Minister to return from G8 Summit, Bardhan said, “If they tell us they are going on the 5th or 6th, we will withdraw then itself. But in the normal course, we will wait till he comes back.”
Faraz Ahmad
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, July 3
Having secured the endorsement of former President of India A. P. J. Abdul Kalam for the Indo-US nuclear deal, the Samajwadi Party for the first time came out in open support of the deal ditching its partners in the United Progressive National Alliance (UNPA).
This decision of the SP with 39 MPs in the Lok Sabha has also put the Left under greater pressure to announce withdrawal of support to the four-year-old United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leaves for Tokyo on July 6 to attend the G8 Summit.
Late on Thursday evening, SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav announced that the “Nuclear deal is in the interest of the country.” He said this soon after meeting former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and said, “Kalam told us that the deal is in the interest of the nation and it is beneficial. Kalam explained to us the nuclear deal. Now we will decide what to do.”
The SP chief declared, ”Without the interest of the nation there is no politics.”
Earlier in the day, Mulayam and his confidant general secretary Amar Singh made a big show of camraderie and bonhomie with his UNPA colleagues N. Chandrababu Naidu of TDP and Om Prakash Chautala of INLD, others and swore by their loyalty to the UNPA at Amar Singh’s residence.
They endorsed Chautala’s declaration that “We will not give a certificate to the Prime Minister before July 6. Till we are convinced we will never give our ascent,” Chautala asserted.
In fact, Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh had said, This is a national issue. It should be debated nationally It dosn’t just concern the SP or the UNPA.”
To avoid the embarrassment of answering for the capitulation of SP leaders, the other UNPA leaders went underground. While Naidu remained incommunicado, his parliamentary party leader here K. Yerrannaidu refused to speak to The Tribune pleading urgent business.
Simultaneously, the Left is busy making preparations to pull out support from the UPA government as soon as the government says it is going ahead with the deal, either before July 6 or after the Prime Minister returns, depending on the government’s response.
The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) has already authorised its leaders Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury to take the necessary steps as and when the government finalises its decision to go to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to sign the Nuclear Safeguards Agreement.
The Communist Party of India (CPI) central secretariat also met here on Thursday authorising Bardhan and Raja to decide together with the other Left parties the timing of withdrawing support to the UPA government and the contents of the letter to be given jointly to President Pratibha Patil.
The other two Left parties, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and the Forward Bloc, also conducted a similar exercise.
After the meeting Bardhan said, “We will demand tomorrow from the government to tell us as to when it is going to the Board of Governors of the IAEA. The question is not whether they are going (to IAEA). The fact that they are going ahead is clear, but when is the question,” he said.
”There are no two opinions (about the Left decision to withdraw support). Modalities will be decided ... We have to write to the President (to declare withdrawal of support) ... all these things will be decided,” he said.
Asked whether the Left parties had any indication as to when the government would move the IAEA, Bardhan said “The government itself is in a hurry. If they are going (to IAEA), they are going within this week... Within the next seven, eight or 10 days.”
Asked whether the Left will wait for the Prime Minister to return from G8 Summit, Bardhan said, “If they tell us they are going on the 5th or 6th, we will withdraw then itself. But in the normal course, we will wait till he comes back.”
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