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THE CONTACT WEEKLY NEWSPAPER ISSUE - 679, 9 - 15 AUGUST 2016 PH: (905) 671 - 4761

INTEL AGENCIES TRACK PAK-FUNDED HACKER

by Shashank Shekhar Pro-Pakistan hacker Afzal Faizal who breached the firewalls of more than a thousand Indian websites in the last two years has come under the scanner of Indian security agencies, five days after he claimed to have got access to the e-payment system of a nationalized bank.

Intel officials said earlier, Faizal restricted his hacking efforts to defacing random websites and teasing Indian techies, but has now stepped up to target websites of the Indian government and critical institution such as banks.

WAGING A CYBER WAR Cyber security experts went into tizzy when on August 2, Faizal claimed to have got access to E-payment gateway of nationalized bank. Officials, however, claim that no financial loss or data leak took place.

After the defacement, he also challenged Indian hackers to secure the Indian cyber space as Continued on Page 2

DAWOOD PLANNED A TERROR OUTFIT

by Arvind Ojha D-company was trying to trigger communal violence by killing Hindu-leaders and throwing

alcohol bottles at churches in India, reveals chargesheet filed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in the murder case

of two BJP leaders in Bharuch in Gujarat in 2015. Investigation also revealed that international terror module was trying to lure their recruits by offering handsome money and jobs in foreign countries.

NIA investigation shows that a new terror outfit was being planned by D-company and the conspiracy was hatched in Karachi and South Africa. They had asked its recruits in India to throw petrol bombs and indulge in arson in churches. The entire motive to kill Hindu leaders Continued on Page 2

Brides being used to fulfil foreign dreams Boat tragedies and foreign jails This is not an isolated case. have failed to dampen the spirits The commission has received of Punjabis, who continue to half-a-dozen such cases where adopt novel ways to fulfil their women have been subjected to foreign dreams.

The latest is to invest in a bride by sponsoring her education, IELTS test and foreign trip. The Punjab State Women Commission was shocked when it started receiving complaints of this nature.

In her complaint, Navpreet Kaur, a resident of Bathinda in Punjab, told the commission that she got married on September Paramjit Kaur, chairperson of 27, 2014, to a local man Punjab State Women's who wanted to marry a Commission woman with an IELTS certificate. When she failed to harassment by their in-laws go abroad, he allegedly started when they couldn’t qualify in the torturing her. She has now IELTS tests or get a student approached the Punjab State visa.

Women Commission for help.

Continued on Page 2

Issue - 679 (2)

9 - 15 August 2016

BRIDES BEING USED... Intel agencies track Pak-funded...

Continued from Page 1 “The boys in Punjab, Malwa belt in particular, are not as educated as the girls. The boys are either nouveau riche or belong to moneyed families. They approach a poor family whose daughter is brilliant, but not in a position to pursue higher studies.

“They sponsor her education and even the marriage expenses. She is sent abroad for studies to pave the way for a spouse visa. She is harassed if the dreams fail to take off at any stage,” says Paramjit Kaur Landran, chairperson of the Punjab State Women Commission.

Preeti Katoch, 23, who hails from Pathankot in Punjab, wants to pursue higher studies in microbiology. She knows several girls who come from remote areas. “Girls do IELTS for a plethora of reasons, and marrying an NRI is one of them. It has

become a trend to go abroad.

These are not marriage but business proposals,” she says.

The trend has resulted in the word IELTS being frequently used in matrimonial ads.

This has also led to the mushrooming of institutes all over Punjab which provide training in IELTS and groom women and men to earn the IELTS tag or a student visa.

According to an estimate, nearly 50,000 people get student visas in Punjab every year.

While a sizeable chunk of boys drop out of school in the middle, girls outnumber them in senior secondary classes and later pursue higher studies.

IELTS, though, has become a burden for Punjab’s educated women, who are being compelled to pass the test by their grooms to fulfil their foreign dreams.

Why some male frogs have sex on land

Continued from Page 1 he may target more such critical websites in the future.

Similarly, in June this year, he had hacked the websites of the Indian Embassy in up to seven countries and defaced them with proPakistan messages as a warning to India.

The hacked websites had an image of a person in a red and black hooded jacket, with a message: “Intruder Here. You got hacked”.

This included websites of Indian embassies in Dushanbe (Tajikistan), Bucharest (Romania), Athens (Greece), Ankara (Turkey), Mexico City, Sao Paolo and Pretoria. The hackers also left a message on the front page of the website that read, “Hey Indian Government, Don’t Mess with Us.” “Faizal and other members of ProPakistan hacking community have carried out some serious attacks recently. They have hacked several government websites in northeastern and southern states. They have also made a breakthrough in web security system of banks and educational institutions. They are mocking Indian web security at a time when country is pushing for digital India,” a senior officer of central security agency told Mail Today. He explained that all such

attempts are being seriously monitored and as most of these hackers are based out of India.

He added that they are being tracked and monitored online.

Experts believe that Faizal was also tracked in Dubai recently and may be routing his attacks from South-Asian countries, including Indonesia.

VULNERABILITIES NOT BEEN PATCHED YET Earlier, Pakistani hackers used to carry mass defacement but now they are more focused on targeting government websites.

Even state police websites are being defaced by Pakistani hackers where they post anti-India comments with an image of the Pakistan flag.

However, Indian hackers have taken on the mantle for retaliation and claim a similar large scale attacked will be launched against Pakistan. “He has created nuisance in Indian cyber world and we will destroy their web space,” said a hacker, requesting anonymity.

“We had tracked Faizal and even got his accounts blocked in past but now we are working on getting access to their critical establishment and will expose their security by hacking their

bank accounts and websites on August 15 and celebrate our Independence Day,” the hacker told Mail Today.

Cyber security experts say that attacks coming from Pakistan are alarming, but believe that it is the handiwork of young techies.

“These are nationalistic hacker groups and they flaunt each successful hack. But, the damage they could create should not be ignored. Each attack on government websites or banks should be treated seriously, which unfortunately is not being done at the moment.

Indian hackers have informed about several vulnerabilities in Indian banks, which have not been patched yet,” Kislay Chaudhary, a cyber security analyst and CEO of Indian Cyber Army said.

Another cyber crime expert, Deep Shankar believes that recent hack attempts are just warm up before Independence Day. “India and Pakistan’s Independence Days, which fall on August 15 and August 14 respectively, has seen mass defacement the past few years.

My analysis shows that Faizal is still carrying out random attack and they are not targeted,” he said.

Dawood planned a terror outfit

New York When it comes to sex, frogs can do it in water, on land and on leaves, but some male frogs have developed the preference for reproducing on land in order to keep competitors aways, new research suggests. It was earlier assumed that natural selection drove frogs to take the evolutionary step to reproduce on land as a way for parents to avoid aquatic predators who feed on the eggs and tadpoles. The new study, published in the journal American Naturalist, showed that some frogs hide eggs on land to reduce competition from other males who also want to fertilise those eggs. “We thought maybe it’s not just natural selection driving the adaptation to reproduce on land, maybe this is actually sexual selection,” said corresponding

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author Kelly Zamudio, Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In the study, researchers analysed data on reproductive modes for two families of frogs - Hylidae, or tree frogs, and Leptodactylidae, including about 900 species that are mostly found in Central and South America.

Frogs are known to have up to 40 reproductive modes, with new ones still being discovered.

Some species build hidden chambers on land or females lay eggs in folded leaves or in bromeliads, others lay eggs in water and move them or their tadpoles to land, and others get rid of the tadpole stage entirely.

The study sheds light on evolutionary forces that drive diversity. Also, the results give conservationists insights on habitats and species that may need more protection, Zamudio said. “More specialised reproduction modes, like the ones that are terrestrial, are less frequent, and typically, when species get threatened, because of climate change or habitat disturbance, the species that go first are the ones that are more specialised.

They have requirements above and beyond just having a pond,” Zamudio noted.

Continued from Page 1 and attack churches was to create communal tension. The central agency mentioned in the chargesheet against ten accused which was accessed by Aaj Tak. Former BJP president of Bharuch and senior RSS member Shirish Bangali and general secretary of Bharatiya Janta Yuva Morcha Pragnesh Mistry were shot dead in the district by two unidentified gunmen on November 2, 2015.

D-COMPANY NIA Chargesheet mentions that the conspiracy was to kill Hindu leaders allegedly involved in the 2002 Gujarat riots and who were perceived to be anti-Muslim.

The accused youths were lured with money and promise of foreign jobs and some of them were asked to kill Hindus in the name of Islam while others were asked to extort money using the name of ‘D gang’.

The D-Company, through Javed Chikna planned to target Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal leaders who were active in the Gujarat riots of 2002 and who are generally vocal and perceived to be anti-Muslims.

“As part of the plan, Javed Chikna (based in Pakistan) and another senior member of D-Company (based in South Africa) Zahid Miyan alias Jao contacted several of their men including Chikna’s brother Abid Patel and Yunus (also called Manjrao) and asked them to prepare a list of such leaders,” NIA mentioned.

A total of 12 accused were arrested in connection with the case and

were booked under relevant sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, IPC, Arms Act the Gujarat Police Act. The accused are: Abid Patel

(brother of Dawood’s close aide Javed Patel alias Chikna who is based in Pakistan), Saiyed Imran, Zuheb Ansari, Inayat Patel, Mohmad Yunus, Haider Ali, Nissarbhai Sheikh, Mohsin Khan Pathan, Mohmed Altaf Shaikh and Abdul Salim Ghanchi.

Mail Today had earlier reported that ISI has started using the DCompany’s men across the country to set up terror modules.

ISI is once again seeking the help of underworld to strike violence in the country.

TARGETS Funds are being transferred from abroad and local men are picked up by the underworld to target prominent people and places, which eventually can trigger communal violence across the nation.

A senior officer said, men of the D-gang have an easy access to local logistics.

They have reportedly made a hit list of political leaders and prominent people.

The underworld, according to security agencies, is also trying to trigger communal clashes by using the Babri and Godhra slogans.

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Issue - 679 (3)

9 - 15 August 2016

PARTIES FIGHT OVER JANATA DARBARS

By MANJEET SEHGAL Janata Darbars have caught the fancy of Punjab politicians these days.

Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, for instance, has started organising Sangat Darshan (Janata Darbar) in far-flung areas of the state to distribute funds and listen to people’s grievances.

But these events, organised by the CM, haven’t seen smooth sailing.

Controversies have arisen from the fact that Congress workers and MLAs were not allowed to attend.

An interesting detail about his Janata Darbars was that they were also organised in the constituencies of opposition MLAs to woo voters.

Taking a cue from him, Punjab Congress chief and former Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh also launched ‘Lokan Da Darbar’.

Singh listened to the grievances of the people and told them to submit their complaints to his party workers, who in turn promised that this would be done as soon as the Congress formed its government in the state.

“Everybody knows what Badal does in his ‘Sangat Darshan’ programmes. He showers government funds on Akali Dal leaders. These programmes have become a source of wasting public money. People get no solution. I would assure them of a time-bound resolution by setting up a task force in the first 100 days of the Congress government,” said Singh, who started his Janata Darbar from Jalalabad, Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal’s constituency.

CM Badal’s reaction to the Captain’s barbs was equally scathing. He compared his ‘Lokan Da Darbars’ to imperial darbars.

He also slammed Singh for imitating him and said that during his tenure as chief minister, the Captain never bothered to meet the people and was engaging in a futile exercise to woo them.

“Captain (Amarinder) is a king who wants to attain power for enjoying it rather than serving the people. He is gifting false hope to the people as he indulges in selfglorification and bashes political rivals in

his programmes. He goes into hibernation after assuming power. The voters of his constituency (Amritsar), where he rarely pays a visit, can tell the truth,” said Badal senior.

The third politician who could not avoid the

arrogance, cannot listen to others or take questions from them”, he observed.

The Punjab Congress vice-president maintained that the Delhi CM has spent crores of rupees on the advertisement campaign ahead of his ‘Talk to Kejriwal’

lure of Janata Darbars is AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal.

He has so far organised community-based meetings and rallies in the state to woo various sections of voters.

He has also asked people to accept money in case it is offered by the rival parties and justified it by saying that it actually belongs to them.

The numerous Janata Darbars have resulted in a war of words between the Congress and the AAP. The Punjab Congress Committee ridiculed Delhi Chief Minister more as a personal monologue than a public dialogue.

“Captain Amarinder allows the public to speak and ask questions instead of making self-promotional monologues.”

Citing massive support for the Captain, Rana alleged that Kejriwal had been trying to copy the Congress model but failed miserably on that front.

“Kejriwal, given his self-righteous

programme, that virtually ended up in ‘Listen to Kejriwal’.

Taking a dig at Kejriwal, he reminded how these advertisements were circulated more in Punjab newspapers than in Delhi, where he is and should be answerable to the public about what he has done during the past one-and-a-half years.

The AAP, in return, has accused the Captain of arm twisting his party to fulfil his ambition to become a chief minister.

AAP leader Sukhpal Singh Khaira said that a careful perusal of the Captain’s political innings confirmed that he only believed in

Few things you need to know about ‘Iron Lady’ Irom Sharmila Irom Sharmila is on Tuesday expected to end her 16-year hunger strike against alleged army atrocities. Her decision to call off the protest and join politics has invited death threats. Many supporters and some family members want her to continue the fast. As Sharmila embarks on a new journey, here is a look at girl from a small Manipur village who took on the Indian state: 1) Often called the Iron lady of Manipur, Irom Sharmila is the youngest of nine siblings. She wanted to be a doctor but chose to be a rights activist to wage war against the armed forces special powers act (Afspa) that allegedly gives soldiers the “licence to kill”.

2) Sharmila was born in 1972 and was 28 when she began her fast on November 4, 2000, two days after Assam Rifles personnel gunned down 10 people, including teenage students on way to tuition classes, at Malom near Manipur capital Imphal.

3) She has since become the face of the anti-Afspa movement in Manipur and elsewhere in the country, easily recognisable from her free-flowing curly hair and a feeding tube stuck to her nose.

4) Sharmila has been in the custody of

Imphal’s Sajiwa Central Jail but spends her time in the city’s Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences. At least 40 persons, including five doctors, 12 nurses and three policewomen, ensure she gets her injections of nutrients through the nasal tube.

5) After her first arrest in 2000, Sharmila has

been released and rearrested several times for attempt to commit suicide, which is still a crime. The Rajya Sabha on Monday passed a bill that decriminalises suicide bid.

The bill will now go to the Lok Sabha.

6) Sharmila is an author and poet in her native Meiteilon language. Among her literary works is Fragrance of Peace – a collection of 12 poems of “passion, protest and hope” that she wrote before starting the marathon fast.

victory and could never play the role of an effective Opposition leader.

“After leading the Congress to a debacle in 2007 and 2012, the Captain went into wilful political exile and was unable to face the wrath of the current Badal government.

His complete absence from the Vidhan Sabha as a legislator from Patiala (2007-14) and zero performance as deputy leader in the Lok Sabha from 2014 onwards, also substantiate our allegations that he is a non-performer, non-serious and a failed leader,” said Khaira.

The AAP said that the Captain has defended himself and family members in various corruption cases, by paying hefty fees to high-profile lawyers in the High Court and the Supreme Court, but never bothered about the party workers who were facing as many as 50,000 cases.

“Amarinder Singh and his party will lose the 2017 assembly elections in Punjab like the two humiliating defeats in 2007 and 2012. But will he make a commitment to the people of Punjab that he will not run away from active politics and will perform his duty as an Opposition leader? Because, as stated earlier, the Captain is in the habit of cooling his heels either in cozy places of Himachal Pradesh, or safe overseas havens like Dubai and London, after his party suffers defeat,” alleged Khaira.

Janata Darbars are an important way to attract voters.

While the ruling Akali Dal openly uses these gatherings to influence people by offering on-the-spot ‘solutions’, the AAP and the Congress are feasting on those who return empty-handed from Badal’s ‘Sangat Darshans’.

Issue - 679 (4)

9 - 15 August 2016

Holy Cow! Under politic--al pressure, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi broke his silence on “Gau Rakshaks” (cow protectors) after four Dalits (low-caste “untouchables”) in Gujarat were brutally beaten by vigilante Gau Rakshaks for allegedly killing a cow which later investigations revealed to have been killed by a lion. At a town-hall meeting on Saturday, Modi said: “I get so angry at those who are into the GauRakshak business. A Gau-Bhakt (cow devotee) is different, Gau Seva (cow protection) is different. I have seen that some people are into crimes all night and wear the garb of Gau Rakshaks in the day. 70-80% will be those who indulge in anti-social activities and try to hide their sins by pretending to be Gau Rakshaks.

If they are true protectors, they should realize that most cows die because of plastic, not slaughter. They should stop cows from eating plastic.”

Eating of cows has been forbidden by Hinduism for three millennia, but in the

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current generational Crisis era the question of protecting cows has become heavily tied into Hindutva or Hindu nationalism - which sometimes is used to excuse violence towards Muslims, Christians and Dalits. Although Modi and his ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party have not supported or praised these attacks, they haven’t spoken out against them either until Modi’s statement on Saturday. It’s possible that there may be a backlash in the days ahead from the extreme nationalist members of his own party.

Pawan Pandit, who is chairman of one gau rakshak group, the Bhartiya Gau Raksha Dal (BGRD), defends his movement: “We are not anti-Muslim or anti-Dalit. We are a fraternity which wants to save the cow because she is our mother ... because that is what my religion, my parents, my holy book, taught me. ... “Forget that cow slaughter hurts our sensibility, forget that our holy book considers slaughter of cow as the biggest crime, forget that we are a majority ... at least, look at the cow as the biggest source of economy for rural India. And look at the scientific reasons, the benefits of using its products - be it milk, urine or cow dung. I am not the one saying all this. International research claims so. America, in fact, has patented a cow urine drug.”

As far as I can say, there’s a parallel here between India and Pakistan. In India, Hindu nationalists can get somebody killed by falsely accusing him of defiling a cow while in Pakistan, Muslim nationalists can get somebody killed by falsely accusing him of defiling the Koran.

History of cow protection in India and Hinduism The origins of the veneration of the cow in Hinduism can be traced back almost three millennia to India’s Vedic period.

With the rise of the ideal of ahimsa (“noninjury”), the absence of the desire to harm living creatures, the cow came to symbolize a life of nonviolent generosity.

In addition, because her products supplied nourishment, the cow was associated with motherhood and Mother Earth. During the Medieval era, especially when the Muslim Mughal Empire was in the power, there was always tension between Muslims who consider pigs to be unclean and Hindus who consider cows to be venerated. This led to tensions during Generational Awakening eras and sometimes led to wars during Generational Crisis eras.

In the 1850s, veneration of cows became a major trigger in the extremely bloody Generational Crisis war, the 1857 Indian Rebellion, also called India’s First War of Independence from the British colonial power. In the 1850s, the British East India Company, that was governing India, introduced a new sort of ammunition for a

new model of the Enfield rifle. To be SUNNY BAINS loaded, this cartridge had to be torn open so that the powder it contained could be poured down named Veer Savarkar from Maharashtra the barrel of the muzzle-loading gun, and whose book “The Indian War Of because the soldier’s hands were full, this Independence-1857” was published in was done with the teeth. Then the bullet 1909 and contained descriptions like the had to be rammed down the rifled barrel. following: “England seized the innocent To facilitate its passage, the cartridges Hindu villagers, sentenced them to be were greased with tallow that was made hanged and then pierced them with of beef and pork fat. bayonets, and then, Heavens! They thrust These cartridges were used by British beef dripping with blood – the blood of the soldiers and were also issued to sepoys cow – down their throats, at the point of (Indian soldiers) who served under the the bayonet – a desecration to which they command of the British army. There’s would have preferred being hanged and, some dispute as to whether the cartridges even, being burnt alive?” Savarkar was issued to the sepoys were also greased jailed for insurrection, and later on he with beef and pork fat, but there’s no doubt became an extremely violent Hindu that once the issue became public and nationalist terrorist and started the Hindutva suspicions were raised, rumors spread movement which still exists today.

There were two other well-known figures that came out of the generational Awakening and Unraveling periods following the Indian anti British rebellion: Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian peace activist and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became the founder of Pakistan. Gandhi launched a “non-cooperation movement” against the British involving civil disobedience. The Awakening era climax occurred on April 10-12, 1919 with the Jalianvala Bagh Massacre rapidly among the sepoys that the British (Amritsar Massacre) when British troops were defiling their bodies and destroying opened fire on 10,000 Sikhs holding a their lives by breaking their castes which protest meeting, killing hundreds. That was the punishment for eating beef. The event convinced both the British and the Muslim sepoys were also offended that Indians that Britain should completely give they had been eating pork fat. This was a up the control of India.

Generational Crisis era and anti-British Cow protection had already started again xenophobia and nationalism were already as a symbol of Hindu nationalism as early high, but the greased cartridges triggered as 1882, as cow protection societies began riots and mutinies that spread across to be formed at that time. Cow protection India. The war lasted over two years and became more and more important as a resulted in hundreds of thousands of nationalist symbol in the following decades deaths. as a decision was made for India to leave There were dramatic changes during the the British Empire and become an Recovery Era that followed the end of the independent state. The debate in 1946 war. The British Indian Empire was created following World War II centered on two out of the former East India Company, and choices: Should there be a single Indian India was under the direct rule of the state with separate regions under the British Crown. However, the Indian tribes control of Muslims and Hindus, or should and families were given a great deal more there be a two-state solution, a Muslim state autonomy. There was a blossoming of living side-by-side in peace with a Hindu culture with new universities, colleges and state? The argument that won the day was schools opened by Indians and there was that Muslims can’t stand pigs and Hindus new technology, including new railroads can’t eat cows, so they can’t live together. and irrigation systems. However, it’s Finally, Jinnah and Gandhi agreed that there typical of the government in such had to be two separate states, India and situations to do everything possible to Pakistan. prevent anything so horrible from The 1857 rebellion was still fresh in happening again and in this case it meant everyone’s mind, and it was believed that a harshly suppressing any dissent, even new war could be avoided by Britain giving jailing protestors. It’s remarkable that the up control of India. If Britain had tried to histories of the 1857 rebellion, that were keep India as part of the British empire, written in the following decades, were all there might well have been a new war similar written by the British authors and almost to the 1857 rebellion. So that was never by the Indian writers. prevented, but in a generational Crisis era The first major Indian account of the 1857 you have the rise of young generations with Rebellion was by a young Hindu activist no memory of the past, a feeling of invulnerability and a desire for war - any war.

So India and Pakistan were created, leading to the 1947 Partition war between Muslims Union for Conservation of and Hindus, possibly the largest and Nature (IUCN) said in a bloodiest battle of the 20th century, statement. It cited data from eclipsing the bloodiness of the 1857 a survey it carried out with the Rebellion. Since then, India and Pakistan Maldives Marine Research have fought three wars. One of these, the Center (MRC) and the US 1971 war in Bengal (East Pakistan) was a Environmental Protection generational crisis war that created the Agency (EPA). “Preliminary nation of Bangladesh. Today, Hindu findings of the extent of the bleaching are nationalism is again rising, and it will alarming, with initial coral mortality already undoubtedly have the same result that it had in 1946 and 1857. observed,” said Ameer Abdulla.

‘Alarming’ bleaching of Maldives corals GENEVA Coral reefs in the Maldives are under severe stress after suffering mass bleaching this year as sea temperatures soared, a top conservationist body warned Monday.

Around 60 percent of Maldives’ coral colonies have been bleached, with the figure reaching 90 percent in some areas, the International

Issue - 679 (5)

9 - 15 August 2016

Japan’s ageing emperor hints at abdication

Where do we get our ideas?

From where does creativity spring forth? Sometimes it may feel as if that particular well has run dry and that no matter how much we pump on the handle, our bucket remains empty. But a change in the weather makes all the difference and inspiration can rain down like a monsoon. Where the grounds of your imagination seemed parched and dry, you’ll soon find fertile planting beds for your thoughts to bloom. You’ll have the power to envision a better future for yourself, and the energy to put it into action. !!!

When we want to know someone better, especially if we desire romantic entanglement, we have to step out of our comfort zone.

First, there is the advance: the process of broaching the possibility of taking a relationship to the next stage. Then, of course, there are all the compromises that must be made once a partnership has been established. So why bother? Because nothing brings more comfort than discovering there’s someone with deep feelings that mirror your own. There are two sides to every story, but you can write yours however you want. !!!

Make a shopping list. But don’t just include vegetables, cereals and other sundries. Include some of the bigger items you’d like to put in your basket. Success at work?

Aisle 7. A positive new outlook? Aisle 3, shelf 4.

Untold riches? Well, maybe you won’t find those on the supermarket shelves. But there’s a sense that your heart and mind can work as one, and that what drives you can produce the reward you long for; in both the material and spiritual sense. If the cupboard has felt bare of late, it’s time to restock the larder. !!!

It’s my way or the highway.

You’d better do as I say. I’m in charge here, and I know what’s best for you. I have the solution, and I don’t need your input. Now, here’s what you need to know if you want to have better relationships and encourage harmony: don’t be me. Don’t tell someone how to be and don’t demand that they subscribe to your views. You may well have the answers and believe that you can fix a situation, but if you lead by example, rather than diktat, you’ll find your ideas are graciously received. !!!

Why is it that emotion is taken less seriously than reason? Emotions affect us at a deeper level. The most savvy political operators know this, and the best campaigns are designed to speak to people’s hearts. Studies show that debates only entrench opposite viewpoints, no matter the statistics employed or the evidence presented. Whereas, creating suspicion, blaming and inspiring hope are far more effective tools when it comes to winning an argument. You can learn a lot from Machiavelli. This isn’t a matter for grey matter, but a time to be soulful. !!!

What’s the fastest thing you can think of? Faster than supersonic jets.

Faster, even, than the speed of light in a vacuum.

Nothing, according to science, should be able to travel faster. Nothing material that is. The speed of thought is faster still. In an instant, we can imagine ourselves on Pluto, waiting patiently for light to catch us up. The universe is now urging you to think fast. Of course, there’ll be issues to address, problems to solve and changes to oversee. Fortunately, it also provides you with the sources to deal with all that comes your way.

TOKYO Emperor Akihito said Monday his advancing age and weakening health mean he may no longer be able to carry out his duties, setting the stage for Japan to prepare for an historic abdication. “There are times when I feel various constraints such as in my physical fitness,” the 82-year-old said in a national address. “As we are in the midst of a rapidly ageing society, I would like to talk to you today about what would be a desirable role of the emperor in a time when the emperor, too, becomes advanced in age,” he said.

Speculation about Akihito’s future emerged last month with reports he had told confidantes that he would like to step down in a few years, in what would be the first abdication from the Chrysanthemum Throne in two centuries. “I am worried that it may become difficult for me to carry out my duties as the symbol of the state with my whole being as I have done until now,” he said, wearing a dark suit and sitting at a table in the pre-recorded video. Akihito spoke obliquely - never mentioning the word abdication and stressing he is legally prevented from commenting on the imperial system - but analysts and media said his intention was clear. “His majesty the emperor hints at abdication”, read a two-page extra edition by the top-selling

Yomiuri Shimbun daily. The comments will now allow the government to begin creating the legal mechanism for a royal departure, which currently does not exist.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in a swift response, said the

that 84 percent of people surveyed backed the idea.

Akihito has had surgery for prostate cancer and heart problems, both of which he alluded to in his address, though he stressed that he currently enjoys good

government would take his remarks “seriously”.

“Considering the emperor’s duties, as well as his age and the burden (of the job), we have to firmly look at what we can do,” he said.

Tomitaro Hashimoto, an assistant professor at Reitaku University, said while the emperor did not use the word abdication, “his message clearly called on the public to concretely consider the way for that in the future”. “Legally, he can’t request a revision of law,” said Hashimoto, an expert on the imperial system.

“That’s why he can’t ask directly.” Any eventual move

by Akihito to step down, which would see him replaced by his eldest son Crown Prince Naruhito, appears to have wide support. A survey by the Asahi Shimbun daily published Monday showed

health. Public reaction to the speech was sympathetic.

“Since his majesty is getting so old, I was worried about his health, but he made his intention clear and the abdication issue came up,” said 20-year-old Ryota Utsumi. “It gives me a sense of relief,” added Utsumi, who watched the address on a big screen in a busy Tokyo shopping area. It was only the second time Akihito had spoken directly to the nation. The first was in the days after the March 2011 triple earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster as he sought to calm a nation undergoing its worst crisis since the war. Japan’s imperial house is said to be the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy, and according to legend stretches back some 2,600 years in an unbroken line. It is deeply

ingrained in the nation’s native Shinto religion. The speech came in a historically sensitive month. The country commemorated the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Saturday and does so again on Tuesday for Nagasaki.

And next Monday Japan pauses to recall the anniversary of its defeat in World War II under Akihito’s father Hirohito, an annual event at which the emperor delivers a speech.

At last year’s event Akihito expressed “deep remorse” over World War II. He has keenly embraced the role of symbol of the state imposed after the conflict ended. Previous emperors including his father had been treated as semidivine. Akihito is credited with seeking reconciliation both at home and abroad over the legacy of the war fought in his father’s name.

He has ventured to a number of locales that saw intense fighting, including Okinawa at home and Saipan, Palau and the Philippines abroad, offering prayers for the souls of all the dead and not just Japanese. His life has also been characterised by a more personal openness previously unknown among Japanese royals. His wife Empress Michiko was a commoner when they met and they chose to raise their children themselves, forgoing the traditional use of nannies.

Giant panda cub born in Vienna VIENNA A naturally conceived giant panda cub has been born in Vienna, the city’s main zoo announced on Monday, a rare event that it said is unique in Europe to the Austrian capital.

Getting the shy, bamboo-eating mammals to mate is a famously difficult task, so much so that breeding centres usually turn to artificial insemination instead. “As far as giant pandas are concerned, Vienna is obviously fertile ground,” Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Zoo, set in the landscaped gardens of a former imperial summer residence, said in a statement. Pictures and

video footage released by before, all of which are now 100 grams (3.5 ounces), so the zoo showed the tiny in China. The latest arrival, small that zookeepers have pink newborn clinging to its born on Sunday at 5:05 been unable to determine its gender. “Yang Yang is an experienced mother and is taking great care of her offspring,” the zoo’s director, Dagmar Schratter, said. “But one must bear in mind that the mortality rate of giant pandas within their first year is roughly 40 percent.”

Impotence?

mother Yang Yang, who a.m. local time (0305 has given birth to three other GMT), is just 10 cm (four naturally conceived cubs inches) long and weighs

416-992-5489

Issue - 679 (6)

9 - 15 August 2016

India never far from romance of Fleet Street London As the last two journalists on the iconic Fleet Street left last week, the occasion sparked a wave of nostalgia among reporters and others for an era spanning more than three centuries when the area provided a model for journalism across the English-speaking world, including India.

Located a few minutes’ walk from India House, Fleet Street has long been the metonym for the good, bad and ugly in British journalism since 1702, when London’s first newspaper, Daily Courant, was published from there. History hangs heavy in every part and pub here.

Reflected in films and literature, Fleet Street has reported the first draft of the history of the modern world, including the rise and fall of the British Empire. India featured prominently in its output, even if it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Indian journalists appeared on the scene.

Mihir Bose, noted writer and sports journalist, was among the first Indians on Fleet Street. “It was a different world. Most editors didn’t know anyone of colour, they were not aware that they could write.

It was considered that Indians could not write English

well,” he said.

Bose, who wrote for The Sunday Times and other newspapers, said there were no Indians in the

media magnate Rupert Murdoch took on powerful printers and moved the publication of The Times and The Sun to Wapping. Other

that the other would not visit,” Bose recalled.

An Indian journalist in a leading role was such a novelty even in the 1970s

newsroom of any leading British newspaper based within a half-mile radius on Fleet Street in the 1970s and 1980s.

Other rare Indians at the time were sports writers Dicky Rutnagar and Sukumar Sen and cartoonist Abu Abraham. The main writers on India were those who had returned after reporting the country’s freedom struggle and independence, or prominent journalists such as James Cameron and Ian Jack.

The fortunes of Fleet Street as the centre of British journalism dwindled in the late 1980s, particularly after

newspapers subsequently moved out.

Left behind were memories of an era marked by smoke-filled newsrooms (mostly male-dominated), major technological changes (letter press, typewriters, telegraph, hot metal printing) and a culture that saw specific pubs patronised by specific newspapers and category of journalists.

“There was a lot of drinking. Lunch-time drinking was big. Every editor had a bar cabinet in his office.

Sub-editors, writers, photographers – each group had its own favourite pub

that when prominent broadcaster Kailash Budhwar was appointed the first Indian head of any BBC section in nearby Bush House in 1979, it became national news.

“There was no space for us Indians on Fleet Street. The BBC in fact held a press conference to announce my appointment as the head of Hindi service, it was reported widely. Until then, Indians were only contributors, not at the editorial level,” he said. The first Indian-origin editor of a mainstream publication was Amol Rajan of The Independent, appointed in 2013.

Clocking 380kph, world’s fastest train to be launched in China next month Beijing The world’s fastest train with the maximum speed of 380kph will be launched

in China next month.

The fastest train would run on Zhengzhou-Xuzhou high-speed track from next month, state-run People’s Daily Online reported.

After the new train is launched, the travel time between Zhengzhou, Central China’s Henan province, and Xuzhou, East China’s Jiangsu province, will be shortened from 2hour 33-minute to about 80-minute.

Compared to the last generation bullet train, the new train’s continuous operating speed has increased 50kph to 350kph, and the highest speed is 400kph in testing phase.

In future, the new generation train will be mainly used to carry passengers in China.

China has built about 16,000 kms of his speed train tracks connecting most of its top cities in-

cluding the Beijing-Shanghai train which made a $1billion profit last year.

More lines are being constructed as the government tries to bolster the economy with infrastructure investment and make travel more convenient.

China is also trying to aggressively market its high speed train technology abroad especially in India.

A Chinese train firm is currently conducting feasibility study for Chennai-New Delhi high speed train.

In the 1980s, some Indian newspapers, including Hindustan Times, set up offices on Fleet Street, but closed them over the years.

That was the decade when more Indian journalists were seen on the street, which was facing tumultuous times.

Ashis Ray, who headed the ABP Group office on Fleet Street during 1981-89, said: “Offices of Indian newspapers are part of Fleet Street history. There was much interaction between us Indians and British journalists. We were members of the Scribes club and often interacted with journalists from Daily Mail, Observer.”

Besides providing the model for Indian journalism since 1780, when the first journal was published in colonial Calcutta, Fleet Street had a significant influence on contemporary Indian journalism – now a matter of research in British academia.

Swansea University academic Savyasaachi Jain said: “It was on Fleet Street that Murdoch introduced and perfected his ‘bottom line’ approach to journalism, which was quickly adopted in India since the early 1990s.

The ‘Murdochisation of Indian journalism’ is a reality and now a key theme in jour-

‘Pizza ATMs’ are now a thing in the US Washington Pizza lovers in the US can now relish their favourite cheesy delicacy by using the first-ever ‘Pizza ATM’ in the country installed at a university campus.

The pizza vending machine on the campus of Xavier University (XU) in Ohio can hold seventy 12-inch pizzas and dispense them fresh and hot in just three minutes. Customers can select what kind of pizza they want using the 24hour machine’s touchscreen. The pizza ATM, which opens for public on August 10, has a temperature-controlled refrigeration system that allows the pizza to stay fresh and a convection oven that en-

ables it to be served nice and hot in just three minutes. Once users decide what type they want, the ATM then slides the option

as well as a student card, ‘Tech Times’ reported. According to Jennifer Paiotti, marketing director of XU auxiliary services, it is the

in the oven, cuts it into slices, places the pizza into a cardboard box and ejects the meal. The cost of each pizza is around $10, with the ATM accepting credit and debit cards,

“best pizza” she has ever eaten. The ATM has a dependable process that preserves taste and quality -the pizza and its ingredients never touch any part of the machine, Frenchbased company Paline, which developed the ATM, said on its website. The machine offers full remote communication for custom settings and tracking, realtime email and text alerts, webcam monitoring, remote error and shutdown detection.

Hundreds of Taiwan drivers fined after Pokemon Go launch TAIPEI Nearly 350 drivers in Taiwan were slapped with fines for playing on their phones after Pokemon Go launched on the island, which has already resulted in broken legs and museum bans. The gaming app has sparked a global frenzy since its launch last month as users hunt for virtual cartoon characters overlaid on real-world locations using augmented reality

technology. A total of 349 fines were issued since the game launched in Taiwan on Saturday, with the majority of the offenders

nalism studies.”

India was reflected prominently in Fleet Street’s output in the heydays of the empire. Successive governments from the late 18th century onwards sought the support of Fleet Street while passing legislation related to India in the House of Commons.

The first prominent pro-India editor on Fleet Street was the irrepressible James Silk Buckingham, a Whig who edited the successful Calcutta Journal in Calcutta from 1818 to 1823, but was deported to London after taking on top officials of the East India Company.

Back in London, Buckingham launched the Oriental Herald and Colonial Review and continued his fulminations against the company government in India. During his time in Calcutta and in London, he encouraged the growth of “native” Indian press and sought increasing freedom for it.

Until last Friday, reporters Gavin Sherriff and Darryl Smith were known mostly to readers of the Dundeebased Sunday Post, but will now be known as the last of mainstream print journalists in Fleet Street, also known as the “Street of Shame”.

driving motorcycles, according to the National Police Agency.

While Pokemon Go has been praised for motivating people to become more active, authorities have warned players to remain alert. “Catch the rare creatures, but don’t let accidents catch up with you!” Taiwan’s Premier Lin Chuan said

on the cabinet’s Facebook page. Drivers face fines of Tw$3,000 ($95) if caught using their phone, while motorcyclist have to hand over Tw$1,000.

Issue - 680 (7)

16 - 22 August 2016

Navjot Sidhu still negotiating Billionaire posts $5K reward for NY ice cream thieves terms of joining AAP in Punjab New Delhi Differences seem to have cropped up between former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lawmaker Navjot Singh Sidhu and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) over the terms of his joining the party and campaigning for it in the

Punjab assembly elections. AAP sources said Sidhu, who was to join the party on August 14, is still in talks with its leader Arvind Kejriwal.

Sources in the AAP’s highest decision making body, the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), said Sidhu met Kejriwal in Delhi on August 13 but a final decision on his date of joining is yet to be taken. While a section of leaders said only the date has to be decided between the two sides, others said there is no

agreement on the roles Sidhu and his BJP legislator wife Navjot Kaur Sidhu will be given in the party.

The two did not answer phones or messages.

A source said the party is not willing to make an announcement regarding Sidhu’s role at the time of

his joining nor commit anything to Sidhu and his wife.

The Sidhus are camping in Delhi till August 18 and expected to meet AAP leaders for another round of talks, sources close to them confirmed.

“Sidhu was never a chief ministerial candidate for us. That was propaganda spread by our rivals in Punjab to derail the process. He has been in talks with the party for a long time now,” a senior leader said.

He said Sidhu would only campaign for the party and

not contest. Another AAP leader said the party is unrelenting on bending its rule of ‘only one ticket per family’ for the Sidhus.

AAP’s Punjab in-charge Sanjay Singh refused to divulge what is going on.

“You will be informed at the right time. It is meaningless to talk about what was discussed between them (Kejriwal and Sidhu) till a date (for joining) has been finalised.”

Sources said the party wants him to join later this week but the Sidhu couple has been asking for a later date.

Navjot Kaur Sidhu is a chief parliamentary secretary in Punjab’s Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP government but has been severely critical of the SAD in her recent interviews and social media posts.

In a statement last week, the Amritsar MLA said her husband would not join the Congress because they see no difference between the Badal family or Capt Amarinder Singh, who is leading the Congress charge.

Excessive heat warnings hit millions of Americans NEW YORK Millions of Americans will spend the weekend hot under the collar as soaring East Coast temperatures and stifling humidity slapped excessive weather warnings on New York and Philadelphia.

The combination of heat and humidity would make it feel as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) in the two cities. Temperatures would stay in the mid 90s from Friday through Sunday, with the humidity pushing heat index values higher in New York and Philadelphia, home to around 10 million people combined, meteorologists said. Authorities warned of heat-related health problems, especially for the elderly and those with chronic health problems, and for people who work outdoors. Americans were advised to stay inside and use air conditioning where possible, check on vulnerable friends and neighbors, drink plenty of

fluids to stay hydrated, and not leave children or pets unattended in vehicles. Overall, the heatwave stretched from southwest Ohio to western Virginia and Washington, and north through Philadelphia, New York and Boston, said David Roth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Dallas, Washington, parts of New Jersey and New York’s Long Island could hit record highs on Friday, Roth told AFP. Five other spots stretching from Maryland’s Ocean City to

Connecticut might set similar records on Saturday, before the heat fades Sunday and Monday, he added. In the southern US, heavy rain pummelled parts of Louisiana and Mississippi as an area of low pressure slowly moved west along the Gulf Coast.

Many streams were out of their banks on Friday, the National Weather Service said. The area recorded 10 to 15 inches (25.4 to 38.1 cm) of rain, Roth said.

Another 10 inches were expected in parts of Louisiana over the next two days.

NEW YORK Ice cream thieves are on the rampage in New York and one billionaire has reached melting point.

The supermarket tycoon Friday offered a $5,000 reward leading to their arrests and prosecution.

John Catsimatidis, who owns the Gristedes chain of grocery stores, told AFP he was fed up with a ruthless gang cleaning out his freezer cases and selling luxurious cartons to corner stores for a fraction of the price. “It’s a nice summer reward,” he said. “Our managers have been going through the refrigerator cases and they’re wiped out.”This gang of three to

four people comes in and puts them in large shopping bags, they distract the manager and sell them,” he added.The biggest single theft was around 100 to 125 tubs worth $700-800, with stores in Manhattan the hardest hit, he said. The scam had been going on six months, Catsimatidis complained.

The reward comes with New York in the grip of a heatwave, expected to last With the humidity, it could feel as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) although real temperatures will be lower.Asked whether he thought his $5,000 reward would have an impact, the self-made tycoon replied

that maybe the corner store owner buying the ice cream would turn in the thieves. “We’ve got to get this gang!”

Catsimatidis said.

The billion-aire announced the reward on Twitter, saying “ice cream bandits are wreaking havoc on NYC supermarkets” quoting a headline in the New York Post tabloid.

Police confirmed 250 complaints of ice cream theft and 130 arrests so far in 2016. “We are working closely with the retailers to combat the thefts of ice cream,” a spokesman told AFP. Catsimatidis, who immigrated to New York with his family from Greece as a baby, is valued at $3.4 billion by Forbes. The 67-year-old philanthropist is also a Republican donor who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 2013.

Gristedes operates more than 30 stores throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and suburban Westchester County.

Issue - 680 (8)

16 - 22 August 2016

36-yr-old Sikh man shot dead during robbery at US store New York A 36-year-old Sikh man was shot dead by a masked gunman during an armed robbery at a convenience store in the US. Amanjeet Singh Toor was shot dead early on Monday during the robbery at the store in Arizona where he worked. The assailant then chased the other employees out of the store before returning to grab a bag, the police said.

The police, along with Toor’s family are seeking public’s help to find the attacker. The shooter has been described wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt, face mask and red gloves.

Toor had immigrated from India

six years ago and his wife Kamaldeep Kaur had recently joined him in Phoenix from India, a report in AZCentral, an Arizona news site, said.

“This was a very hard loss for us. He was a role model for most of us,” Toor’s cousin Micky Gill said at Phoenix police headquarters.

About 2,500-3,000 Sikh families live in the Phoenix metro area.

The incident again raised concerns over the safety of SikhAmericans who have been targeted, in the years since the 9/11 attacks, in a slew of hate crimes because of their articles of faith, the beard and turban.

Rana Singh Sodhi, a Sikh and

community activist, spoke on behalf of Toor’s family, calling for the community to come together to find the perpetrator.

“He handed over the money, but was still shot. It begs the question (of racism),” Sodhi said in the report.

“We are new immigrants in this area, but we request the community come out and help get this person behind bars,” he said.

Sodhi’s brother was killed in a hate crime in Mesa just four days after the September 11, 2001, terror attack on the World Trade Center. “Fifteen years later and we are still not treated right,” Sodhi said. “They come into our stores, give us the finger and shout, go

back to your country. This is a common thing for us. Any terrorist attack that happens, we get

affected every year. Our lives have not been the same since 9/11,” Sodhi said.

Holy book desecrated in Silicon Valley mogul who kicked girlfriend California, Sikhs protest jailed in domestic violence case

California The Sikh community in Union City of California on Thursday protested against the desecration of their holy book Guru Granth Sahib by a miscreant.

The incident took place on Wednesday when pages of the holy book were torn and thrown away. “The incident took place last evening when a notorious person tore off the holy book into pieces. This has riled up the people of our community. We, along with our community, will take up this issue. And we expect that American authorities

will find a solution to this and bring the culprits to the book,” said American Gurdwara Committee coordinator Pritpal Singh California mayor Eric Garcetti has assured the protesters of penal action against the miscreants who have attempted to hurt their religious sentiments. Police have registered a complaint in the matter. Expressing concern over the sacrilege incident, Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal has asked Union external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj to take up the issue with the US government

San Francisco A Silicon Valley internet mogul who sold his startup for $300 million at the age of 25 and appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” as a highly eligible bachelor was sentenced on Friday to a year in jail for violating his probation in a domestic violence case.

However, Gurbaksh Chahal, 34, will not immediately begin serving the sentence because San Francisco Superior Court Judge Tracie Brown cited questions about the evidence while giving him time to appeal her ruling.

Brown determined last month that Chahal had violated the probation ordered after he pleaded guilty in 2014 to misdemeanour charges of battery and domestic violence battery.

Prosecutors said surveillance footage from his San Francisco penthouse showed him punching and kicking his girlfriend more than 100 times and trying to smother her with a pillow.

Chahal entered his plea to the reduced charges after the woman stopped cooperating with authorities and a judge said the video could not be used as evidence because it had been

improperly obtained.

He was accused of violating his probation by kicking another girlfriend, who also didn’t cooperate with prosecutors.

Chahal said both women had cheated on him, according to prosecutors.

Chahal’s attorney, James Lassart, said in court Friday that his client was denied his right to question the woman during his probation revocation hearing when she failed to attend the proceeding.

“In this instance, the constitution requires that my client be allowed to confront his accuser,” Lassart said.

Brown allowed the penthouse video to be admitted as evidence in the probation hearing, and she

Seven-month-old baby found dead after being left all day in hot SUV in Texas Texas A 7-month-old boy died after being left all day in a hot sport utility vehicle in a San Antonioarea Wal-Mart parking lot, authorities said.

The baby’s father, who works at the store in the suburb of Helotes, told officers that he forgot to drop his son off at day care before going to work about 6:15 am Friday, said Helotes police Capt. Anthony Burges. The father found his child dead after finishing work and returning to the SUV about 3 pm. The father was taken to a hospital after reporting chest pains, Burges said.

No charges have been filed, and the identities of the father and boy have not been released.

Temperatures in the area hovered around 100 degrees much of the afternoon.

The death brings the number of children who have died in hot cars in the US this year to at least 27, six in Texas, said Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org, a

national child safety nonprofit based in Philadelphia. On Aug. 4, twin 15-month-old girls died after being found in the back seat of a hot SUV parked in front of a duplex car Carrollton in northwestern Georgia. When police arrived, they found people holding the girls in the water of a baby pool behind the duplex, some with ice packs, trying to cool the girls off.

Last year, there were 15 heatstroke deaths of children in vehicles, Fennell said. The toll began rising sharply in the 1990s with the passing of laws requiring that young children be placed in the back seat to avoid air-bag

injuries. With the children strapped into the back seat, drivers can tend to forget them, Fennell said. Fennell said the numbers of heatstroke deaths of kids in cars fluctuated in the following decades, averaging 37 such deaths a year since 1998.

The worst year was 2010, with 49, according to both a count

by Fennell and Jan Null, a research meteorologist at San Jose State University, who also tracks numbers.

The temperature inside a parked car on a 90-degree day will reach 119 degrees in 20 minutes and 133 degrees after an hour, Null said.

reviewed it privately before issuing her ruling last month.

Lassart said the judge should not consider the video in her sentencing because it had previously been ruled inadmissible.

The footage has not been played in court or made public.

Assistant District Attorney O’Bryan Kenney called for a sentence of 18 months, saying Chahal had shown no remorse and committed a second act of violence just months after his domestic violence conviction.

“He clearly didn’t get the message,” Kenney told the judge. Chahal made $300 million in 2007 when he sold his digital advertising company to Yahoo. A year later, he appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in a segment that highlighted his success and promoted him as a highly eligible bachelor.

Chahal’s legal woes extend beyond the criminal case. Two former employees have sued him for discrimination, painting him as a bullying boss who thought little of women.

CHARGED

DRUNK & DRIVING? CALL VICKY SINGH

416-992-5489

Issue - 680 (9)

16 - 22 August 2016

Homosexual high school students in US raped, attacked more often

New York Gay, lesbian and bisexual high school students are far more likely than their classmates to be raped or assaulted in a dating situation, according to the first national survey of its kind.

The research also found gay teens were far more likely to have attempted suicide, taken illegal drugs and engaged in other risky behaviours.

The finding echoes results of smaller surveys and findings from advocacy groups, but it is the first government survey to look at the issues across the entire country.

For years, advocacy groups have been saying gay and lesbian kids are more often bullied, ostracized and at high risk for many other problems. But earlier research by the government was

Arianna Huffington to leave Huffington Post

New York Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington said on Thursday she would leave the company to focus on running her new venture, health and wellness startup Thrive Global.

“I thought HuffPost would be my last act. But I’ve decided to step down as HuffPost’s editor-inchief to run my new venture, Thrive Global,” she tweeted.

Thrive Global, which will offer services to companies to improve the well-being of their employees, recently closed a Series A funding round ahead of a launch in the fall. The Huffington Post is now owned by Verizon Communications Inc, and her departure comes several weeks after Verizon said it was buying the media properties of Yahoo Inc. for about $4.8 billion.

The site is known for its celebrity and newsmaker blogs and for cobbling together articles using information from different newspapers and other sources.

In 2012, the site won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on its series of stories about wounded veterans.

limited to a small number of states and cities. The new survey includes students in rural areas and other parts of the US. “This is the first time we can say that nationwide these are consistent challenges faced by lesbian, gay and bi- youth,” said David W Bond of The Trevor Project, a national suicideprevention organisation focused on gay, lesbian, bisexual and

transgender youth.

Shontay Richardson says the survey reflects her experience in high school. “There’s of course the physical bullying, but also the emotional bullying that takes place,” she said.

Now 24 and a graduate student at Purchase College in suburban New York, she says she was lesbian but tried to hide it from her classmates. Still, she was seen as different. She was ostracized by her classmates and sexually assaulted by a boy she knew, she said.

The research results are based on responses from about 15,600 students to an anonymous survey conducted last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC released the report Thursday.

Of the survey participants, about 2% said they were gay or lesbian, 6% said they were bisexual and 3% said they weren’t sure of their sexual identity.

That suggests that of the 16 million students who attended public and private high schools

last year, roughly 321,000 were gay or lesbian and 964,000 were bisexual, CDC officials said.

Among the findings Nearly 1 in 5 of the gay, lesbian and bisexual students said they’d been raped at some point in their lives, compared to 1 in 20 heterosexual students.

Nearly 1 in 5 who had gone out with someone in the past year said their date had hit them, slammed them against a wall, or committed some other form of physical violence. That was more than twice what straight kids reported.

About 1 in 3 said they had been bullied at school, while 1 in 5 straight kids had.

More than 1 in 10 said they’d missed school the past month because of safety concerns. Less than 1 in 20 heterosexual kids reported that.

More than 1 in 4 said they has attempted suicide in the previous 12 months. In contrast, about 1 in 16 straight kids reported recent suicide attempts.

Dallas shooting: Indian-Americans donate $60,000 to families of cops killed Dallas The Indian -American community has donated $60,000 to family members of five police officers who were fatally shot by snipers who targeted them during rallies in Dallas to protest against the fatal shooting of two black men by police.

A cheque of $60,000 was recently presented to the Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings and executive assistant to Dallas Police Chief David Pughes, by a group of IndianAmerican community leaders led by AK Mago, founding chair of the US India Chamber of Commerce in Dallas.

“We appreciate the protection you give us. We wanted to recognise what you do for us every day,” Mago was quoted as saying by the local Dallas Morning News. “This is more

than generous. I have such respect for the Indian community,” Rawling said.

About half of the amount came from US India Chamber and its members.

Other groups, such as the Dallas Indian Lions Club, DFW Hindu Temple, the DFW Gujarati Samaj, the Karya

Siddhi Hanuman Temple, the Jain Society of North Texas and the India Association of North Texas, donated about $5,000 each, the daily said.

On July 7, a sniper ambushed and fired upon a group of police officers in Dallas, killing five officers and injuring nine others.

Baby slammed against car roof by brother for crying, dies while mum shops Florida A 62-year-old Florida woman is charged with aggravated manslaughter after authorities said her 6-year-old son beat his newborn sister to death while the children and their 3-year-old brother were left alone in the family’s minivan.

During a news conference Thursday, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gulatieri said the baby 13day-old Kathleen Bridget Steele was pronounced dead Monday afternoon at St. Petersburg General Hospital.

But investigators believe she died earlier, inside the van where her mother, Kathleen Steele, had left the children for 38 minutes while she visited a cellphone repair

shop.

“It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen,” the sheriff said.

The Tampa Bay Times reports Steele took the baby to a paediatrician Monday morning because she wasn’t eating properly. The doctor found nothing wrong with the baby and later told investigators there were no signs of bruising or trauma.

Investigators say Steele went into the cellphone store at 1:50 p m on Monday.

The 6-year-old boy told investigators the baby started fussing and he tried to calm her.

But deputies said the boy later used a doll to show how he repeatedly slammed the infant’s head into the minivan’s ceiling,

dropping her on the floor, flipping her over and pummeling her.

According to investigators, when the mother returned to the van, the boy tried to tell her something was wrong with the baby. They said she disregarded him and stopped at another business before going home. That’s when she noticed the baby’s injuries.

“The baby was beaten and traumatized,” the sheriff said.

“There was gross swelling in her face. Her skull was cracked in numerous places.”

Even so, Gulatieri said Steele didn’t call 911. Instead, she called a neighbor who is a nurse.

The nurse recognized the baby was dead, but performed CPR until paramedics arrived.

Investigators interviewed Steele Monday night. The sheriff said during the first hour, Steele never asked about the baby and even seemed aloof. He said Steele said, “I guess I have to plan a funeral.” Gulatieri said the boy will not face criminal charges.

“The mistake is with the adult Kathleen Steele, not a 6-year-old boy,” Gulatieri said.

Steele was already being scrutinized by child protection investigators, Gulatieri said. Just three days after the girl was born, an accidental fire forced the family to stay in a hotel July 29, he said. When the fire alarm went off, Steele told deputies she put the baby in the car carrier but tripped going down the stairs and

the baby tumbled out, striking her head. The baby was diagnosed with a minor brain bleed and stayed for two nights in the hospital, according to Gulatieri.

Erection Problem?

416-992-5489

Issue - 680 (10)

Punjabi Sikh parents seek a match for their Canadian born & raised, clean shaven son, 33 yrs. old, 6’-1" tall, handsome, Doctor M.D., completed internal Medicine residency & fellowship (Specialization), now working as a specialist in G.T.A. The girl should be resident Doctor/M.D. or Physician, Born & raised in Canada from Ontario, beautiful atleast 5’-6" tall with family values. Please send your biodata and recent picture to: sm9058@hotmail.com ***682*** Saini Sikh parents invite matrimonial alliance from the GTA for their slim, fair, beautiful, 5’2"/’83 born daughter, born, raised, educated in Canada, Bachelors in Business Management, and employed in the Finance division of a reputable Canadian company.

The boy should be clean shaven, born, raised and educated in Canada & professionally employed.

Please email sub2405@gmail.com or call 416-741-0777 *** 680*** Well settled Press Reporter in Canada, age 50+, 6’ tall, B.Sc., M.A.B.Ed, Post graduate diploma in journalisim, retired as Prinicpal from India, earning good pension, wife expired in 2010.

Looking for a life partner between 45-55, family oriented, must hae Master’s degree, Ph.d or having experience in journalism, prefered Pakistani West Punjabi.

Two daughter’s married and well settled in Canada. Owns property in India. Divorced may also be considred.Please Call : 647-821-7170 ***680*** Hindu Pujabi Khatri parents looking for a suitable match for their daughter, 39 yrs., 5’-5” tall, working as Administrative Manager in a reputed concern in India, widow (Two sons 15 and 12 yrs.) The boy should be Canadian Immigrant/Citizen and family oriented. Parents and two real brothers are very well settled in Milton (Canada) for the last 16 yrs. Caste no bar. PleaseCall : 647-892-6498 Or : 289-878-9285 ***680*** Jat Sikh parents invite a matrimonial alliance for their daughter, 33 yrs. old, 5’-6” tall, Canadian Citizen, Post graduate, employed in one of the reputed banks of Canada, divorced after a brief marriage (no kids). The boy should be Canadian Citizen, Jat Sikh, well educated and professionally employed. Please email recent picture and bio-data to: gill.roop@hotmail.com Or Call : 1-604-615-4316 Or : 1-778-9547274 ***680** Jat Sikh parents invite a matrimonial alliance for their daughter, 29 yrs. old, 5’-6” tall, Diploma in Hair dressing from Australia, beautiful, family oriented from a good family background, living in India and managing Canadian family

16 - 22 August 2016

business in India and Africa, widw (one daughter). The boy should be Canadian/American, Immigrant/Citizen, well educated, settled with family values. Whole family is well settled in Canada.

Respond with family details to:dsahsi@gmail.com Or Call : 1-604-618-5834 ***680*** Well settled Jat Sikh parents seeking professionally qualified Jat Sikh match from U.S.A. or willing to relocate in U.S.A. for their daughter, 36 yrs. old, 5’-6” tall, American Citizen, Graduated, Currently Working as Human Resource Information Systerm “HIRS” Analyst with well known Health Care Organisation in Bay Areas, California. Please send your biodata and recent picture to: wss4279@gmail.com Or Call : 1-408-657-7644 ***680*** Sikh Khatri parents seek a suitable match for their teetotaler, US Citizen son, 28 yrs. old, 5’4’’ tall, master’s degree in engineering from a top US university, working at a private company in New York area. The girl should be family oriented, educated, beautiful, preferably residing in US. Please send your biodata & recent pictures to: chhabra.harjitsingh59@gmail.com or call: 1- 347- 921-1453 *** 680*** Punjabi Brahman Doctor parents seek a suitable match beautiful girl for their son, 28 yrs. old, 6’ tall, doctor in punjab. The girl should be beautiful, preferably from medical line. The boy wants to settle his own business in Ontario. Any upper caste also welcome. Younger brother software engineer is in Ottawa and relatives are well settled in Ontario & Quebec. Please send your bio-data & recent picture to:ishan247@yahoo.co.in or call: or call: 011-91- 91987-2614118 *** 680*** Jat Sikh educated family seek a suitable match for their American citizen daughter, 31 yrs. old (born in 1985), 5'-3" tall, well settled in job. Boy preferred to be in USA or have a work permit.Please send your bio-data & recent picture to: bobby21_52@yahoo.com or call: 1- 209-629-3506 *** 680*** Suitable match for Jassal boy, 26 yrs. old, 5’-10” tall, clean shaven, B.Pharma, Own Business in India. The girl should be Canadian Immigrant or Citizen. Parents Currently in Canada on visitor visa. The boy’s two sisters are well settled in Canada. Caste No Bar. Please Call : 416-540-0080 ***680*** Jat Sikh parents seek a suitable match for their Mangleek son, 25 yrs. old, 5’-10” tall, Canadian Immigrant, Bachelor in IT, well settled. The girl should be Canadian/American, Immigrant/ Citizen, educated with family values atleast 5’-5” tall. First preference goes to Chandigarh,

Mohali and Patiala. Please email recent picture and bio-data to: barren44@gmail.com Or Call : 1-206-229-3330 ***680*** Jat Sikh Gill family seeks a suitable match for their daughter, 33 yrs. old, 5’-6” tall, College graduate with diploma in Business Administration and Accounting. The boy should be 33-37 yrs. of age, well qualified and raised in Canada. Please Call : 905-874-0721 ***680*** Tonk Kshatriya Sikh parents seeking a suitable match for their Canadian Citizen daughter, 28 yrs. old, 5’-3” tall, B.Com, CGA, Working with the government.

The boy should be Canadian Citizen or PR, equally qualified, well settled in job in Toronto or surrounding area. Preferebly clean shaven. Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: singhjag_@hotmail.com Or Call : 416-722-9771 ***680*** Looking for suitable match for 34 yrs. old, Canadian born male, 5’5” tall, with athletic built, minor physical disability, however fully independent and capable. The girl should be from Canada/ America only. Divorced may also be considred. Please Call : 1604-722-0279 Or : 1-604-525-8062 ***680*** Jat Sikh parents seek a suitable match for their daughter, 26 yrs. old, 5’-2.5” tall, American Citizen, Registered Nurse (RN).

The boy should be professionally educated. Seattle (USA), Malwa (India) prefered. Please email recent picture and bio-data to: rurkaps08@yahoo.com Or Call : 1-206-391-8477 ***680*** Saraswat Brahmin family seek a suitable match for their son, 28 yrs. old, 5’-7” tall, M.Tech.

Mechanical, College Professor in India. The girl should be educated, American/Canadian Immigrant or Citizen. Uncle is well settled in U.S.A. Caste No Bar. Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: ashokkumar1955@hotmail.com Or Call : 1-408-960-9190 ***680*** Well settled Ramgarhia Sikh family seeks a professionally qualified match from Canada for their beautiful, fair daughter, 25 yrs. old, 5’-3” tall, Architect, P.R. Applied, based at Hyderabad India. Father retired Army Major & Businessman.

Please respond with bio-data and recent picture to: gurubani97@hotmail.com Or Call : 647-669-7997 ***680*** Punjabi Brahmin family seek a suitable match for their son, 28 yrs. old, 6’ tall, M.S. (Artho Doctor), working in Govt. Hospital in India as a surgeon, wants to settle his own Business in Canada. The girl should be from Medical Profession, beautiful, Canadian Immigrant/Citizen atleast 5’-6” tall or above. Caste

No Bar. Brother & Close relatives are well settled in Canada. Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: mehta_tarun@yahoo.com Or Call : 647-282-9503 Or : 647-347-3685 ***680*** Jat Sikh family seek a suitable match for their daughter, 33 yrs. old, 5’-7” tall, U.S.A. born, beautiful, Degree in Accounting & Finance, working in her own field, family oriented. The boy should be atleast 6’ tall, handsome, equally educated, preferably from Bay Area. The boy on HI Visa can be considred. Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: balwindersaran2560@gmail.com Or Call : 1-408-849-1525 ***680*** Sikh Khatri parents invite matrimonial alliance for their son, 32 yrs. old, 5’-7” tall, teetotaller, working as software consultant in Wisconsin on H1B Visa. Green Card is in process. Looking for a family oriented educated girl.Please respond with bio-data and recent picture to: rktsp4554@yahoo.com Or Call : 1-414-552-7913 ***680*** Sharma family seek a suitable match for their son, 34 yrs. old, 5'-8'’ tall, fair, Masters degree in business and technology from University of Waterloo, Masters in computers applications from India, Canadian immigrant (PR), working as an I.T engineer in Tata Consultancy services / BMO in Toronto. The girl should be Canadian/American immigrant/ Citizen, well educated/qualified.

The girl on student visa or work visa can also contact. Caste no bar. Please send your bio-data & recent picture to: aseemsharma27@gmail.com *** 680*** Punjabi Sikh parents seeking a match for their Canadian born & raised, clean shaven son, 33 yrs. old, 6’-1” tall, handsome, Doctor M.D., completed internal Medicine residency & fellowship (Specialization), now working as a specialist in G.T.A. The girl should be resident Doctor/M.D. or Physician. Born & raised in Canada from Ontario, beautiful atleast 5’-6” tall with family values.

Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: sm9058@ hotmail.com ***680*** Khatri parents seeking a suitable match for their daughter, 28 yrs. old, 5’-2” tall, Amrican Citizen, professionally settled (Doctor) in her job. The boy should be American Citizen, well educated

and well settled in job. Please Call : 1-347-251-9112 ***680** Prajapat parents invite matrimonial alliance for their daughter 25 yrs. old, 5’-2” tall, B.Sc. Nursing degree holder, working in govt. job in India, beautiful, family oriented.

The boy should be American Citizen, educated and from a good family background. Close relatives well settled in America. Please Call : 1-916-505-8907 Or : 011-9195929-25551 ***680*** Saini parents invite matrimonial alliance for their daugher, 28 yrs. old, 5’-2” tall, beautiful, family oriented American Citizen, Master’s degree in Computer information systems and working in IT Deptt. The boy should be well educated, professionally employed with family values from California or willing to relocate to California. Doaba area prefered.

Please email recent picture and bio-data to: saini.bayarea@gmail.com Or Call : 1-408-338-7681 ***680*** Jat Sikh parents invite matrimonial alliance for their beautiful daugher, 25 yrs. old, working as RN in Seattle (USA), completed BSN in Nursing. The boy should be born in Canada/Ameriaka, well educated, professionally (Doctor, Dentist) employed and with moderate family values from BC only. Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: madamk1940@gmail.com Or Call: 1-778-564-5300 ***680*** Arora Sikh parents invite matrimonial alliance for their daugher, 34 yrs. old, 5’-4” tall, B.A. B.Ed., M.B.A., Certification in beautician, beautiful, family oriented, living in India. The boy should be American Citizen/Green Card holder, educated, well settled, non-drinker in America.

Please email recent picture and bio-data to: kumarsonia660@gmail.com Or Call: 1-408-476-0721 ***680*** Sikh Saini family seeking suitable match for their US-born son, 25 yrs. old, 6' tall, Masters in Biomedical Engineering and working in a medical company.

The family resides in California USA. The girl should be educated, tall, family oriented. The family resides in California. USA Preferred. Please send your biodata & recent picture to: cheraj@msn.com or call: 1-408612 4563 *** 680***

Lady Helper White House Canada in Brampton, requires a Live-in lady helper. Hotel experience preferred but will train the suitable candidate. Must be available to stand, walk and bend for extended periods of time. Duties include making beds, dusting, cleaning bathroom, vacuuming, replenishing supplies, cooking and elderly care (1 hr. daily approx)

Pls. call

647-632-3999

Issue - 680 (11)

16 - 22 August 2016

Pentagon clamps 20 science questions for US down on Pokemon Go

presidential candidates

MIAMI A coalition of US groups representing more than 10 million scientists and engineers published 20 questions on Wednesday they want every US presidential candidate to answer ahead of November’s vote. The questions range from how to support vaccine science, to defining the scope of America’s goals in space, to the candidates’ views on climate change and what would they would do about it.

Stances on nuclear power, protecting the world’s oceans, reducing the human and economic costs of mental illness, and the controversy over visa programs that allow

highly skilled immigrants into the United States also feature in the list, made public by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). “Voters should have a chance to know where the presidential candidates stand,” said Rush Holt, chief executive officer of AAAS, which publishes the journal Science.

“We want journalists and voters to ask these questions insistently of the candidates and their campaign staff.” The full list is available at ScienceDebate.org/20qs. The 56 groups that helped create the list by crowd sourcing the questions has asked for the candidates to answer the questions by September 6. All

Woman’s skull, bones along with ‘Victoria’s Secret’ pants found in suitcase Buford Police are trying to identify the remains of a woman whose skull and bones were found in a suitcase along a Georgia interstate northeast of Atlanta.

The investigation into the macabre case began after a state construction worker found the remains July 29.

On Friday, Gwinnett County police released a description of the clothes found along with the remains: a black Miley Cyrus

hoodie sweatshirt, size large; black Victoria’s Secret pants, small, with “Love Pink” on the leg; and pink 2014 Nike Air Max Cage sneakers, size 7.

Police have said the county medical examiner’s office believes the woman was Hispanic or mixed race and between 20 and 30 when she died about six months ago.

A reward of up to $2,000 is being offered for information leading to an arrest and indictment.

Muslim woman sues Chicago, 6 officers for false terrorist ID Chicago A Muslim woman is suing the city of Chicago and six officers who falsely singled her out as a potential terrorist on July 4, 2015, as she left a subway station wearing a headscarf, face veil and carrying a backpack.

Itemid Al-Matar’s federal lawsuit filed on Thursday says officers pulled off her religious garb, arrested her and later stripsearched her. The 32-year-old was acquitted of obstructing justice.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations says “blatant xenophobia, Islamophobia and racial profiling” motivated the arrest.

A public police report says officers “were on high alert of terrorist activity” on the national holiday and that Al-Matar was exhibiting “suspicious behaviour.”

The CPD declined to comment but said in a statement that police “strive to treat all individuals with the highest levels of dignity of respect.”

are described by AAAS as nonpartisan groups, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Chemical Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists. The effort was organized by ScienceDebate.org, which commissioned a national poll last that found 87 percent of Americans said it was important that candidates for president and Congress have a basic understanding of the science informing public policy issues. “Taken collectively, these twenty issues have at least as profound an impact on voters’ lives as those more frequently covered by journalists, including candidates’ views on economic policy, foreign policy, and faith and values,” said ScienceDebate.org chair Shawn Otto. Otto urged the candidates - Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, Libertarian Gary Johnson, and the Green Party’s Jill Stein - to answer the questions “in writing and to discuss them on television.”

WASHINGTON The Pentagon doesn’t like Pikachu. In the latest bizarre news surrounding the global phenomenon that is Pokemon Go, US Defense Department officials on Friday said employees should not download the game onto their governmentissued smartphones. “You can imagine a number of reasons [why] that wouldn’t necessarily be a prudent thing to do,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Gordon Trowbridge told reporters. “Aside from any security concerns, I think taxpayers would appreciate government phones being used for government business.”

Pokemon Go is an augmented reality app through which users hunt fictional digitized animal characters like the furry yellow

Pikachu, which have been scattered around the world, often in unlikely locations. The game has become a global craze, with crowds of players dashing to locations to try to snag characters. Several military installations have warned troops about the possible perils of playing Pokemon Go on bases, including near runways.Trowbridge jokingly said he could not definitively confirm reports a Pokemon “gym” - a virtual battle arena has been placed in the courtyard in the middle of the vast Pentagon building. “Last I heard, there was still a gym in center courtyard. I’m not a player myself so I will defer to others,” Trowbridge said.”I can confirm it,” quipped Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis.

Multiple gunshots rock North Carolina mall, no casualties reported WASHINGTON Police in North Carolina have responded to a shooting at a busy mall in an affluent area of Raleigh.

Several news outlets report that police in Raleigh were working to secure Crabtree Valley Mall on Saturday afternoon after gunshots were fired inside.

Multiple shots were reportedly fired in the premises of Crabtree Valley Mall. Police rushed to the spot after they received calls complaining about the gunshots.

According to the police, no shooter nor any shell casings were found on the spot. The police confirmed that the people heard gunshots and that they were evaluating all possibilities.

NO SUSPECTS TAKEN INTO CUSTODY The station says no suspects have been taken into custody.

The number of injured is unknown, although emergency personnel apart from police were called to the scene.

Helicopters buzzed overhead.

John Riggleman and Kristin Warring told The Associated Press that they were heading to a video game store when they heard shots coming from the mall’s food court. They ran into the store with dozens of others before the doors of the mall were

locked.

Warring said she heard an additional series of shots. Police told them they could leave the store at about 3 pm. An interstate exit to reach the mall was closed.

Police in North Carolina have responded to a shooting at a busy mall in an affluent area of Raleigh.

Several news outlets report that police in Raleigh were working to secure Crabtree Valley Mall on Saturday afternoon after gunshots were fired inside.

Multiple shots were reportedly fired in the premises of Crabtree Valley Mall. Police rushed to the spot after they received calls complaining about the gunshots.

According to the police, no shooter nor any shell casings were found on the spot. The

police confirmed that the people heard gunshots and that they were evaluating all possibilities.

NO SUSPECTS TAKEN INTO CUSTODY The station says no suspects have been taken into custody.

The number of injured is unknown, although emergency personnel apart from police were called to the scene. Helicopters buzzed overhead.

CAUGHT

DRUNK DRIVING? CALL VICKY SINGH AT:

416-992-5489

Issue - 680 (12)

Indian boy reaches Lahore without travel documents, detained

An Indian boy who reached Lahore without travel documents was detained by Pakistani authorities and handed over to counterterrorism officials for questioning, police sources said.

The boy, who gave his name as Mohammed Aslam, reached Lahore from India by Samjhauta Express and was arrested at the Lahore railway station, the source told IANS. Only Indian currency was recovered from Aslam’s possession. An official said it was being probed how the boy, whose age was not given, reached the Punjab capital despite high security at various posts.

16 - 22 August 2016

Robin hood Army feed poor, fight against starvation Faces of kids living in slums behind the Ansal mall in Greater Noida lit up with joy when volunteers of the Robin Hood Army distributed free food to economically-backward people to celebrate the Independence Day of Pakistan on Sunday. The Greater Noida chapter alone aims at reaching out to 15,000 needy people with free packets of food to achieve Mission500k - a global project that aims to bring together people from India and Pakistan to feed five lakh needy people, on their respective Independence days.

The day of 125 working professional volunteers in Greater Noida started before the sunrise as they procured around 700kg of rice, 145kg of pulses, 150kg of potatoes along with other fresh vegetables to cook healthy and nutritious ‘pulao’ for the distribution. Volunteers distributed food to people living in slums, pavements and old age homes along with differently abled across the city on the Independence Day. FOOD DRIVE Instead of being armed with bow and arrow, members of the Robin Hood Army in Greater Noida travelled to remotest villages with 5,000kg of pulao, bananas, breads and biscuits.

A similar drive will be carried out by the Delhi, Noida, Gurugram and Ghaziabad chapters, which has set a target to feed to 25,000, 30,000, 10,000 and 5,000 people, respectively, on August 15.

VISION TO FIGHT STARVATION The Robin Hood Army initiative was started in 2014 in Delhi with a vision to fight starvation. The team now has over 5,000 volunteers spread across 30 cities in India, and with chapters

Khali extends support to AAP candidate Sajjan Singh Cheema in Punjab elections

Wrestler Dalip Singh Rana, popularly known as ‘The Great Khali,’ on Sunday extended unconditional support to Aam Aadmi Party candidate Sajjan Singh Cheema in Punjab where elections are due next year.

Cheema is AAP’s candidate from Sultanpur Lodhi.

Best known for his time with WWE, Rana became the World Heavyweight Champion in 2007.

Before becoming professional wrestler, he was an officer for the Punjab state police. He was also a contestant in reality show Bigg Boss and has appeared in four Hollywood films and two Bollywood films.

AAP has emerged as an alternative in Punjab where Akali Dal and Congress have ruled for many years. Former cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu, who

Japan man arrested over unpaid taxi fare TOKYO A Japanese man was arrested for allegedly stiffing a taxi driver after

having promised to pay when embarking on an 850-kilometre (528-mile) journey, police said Monday. Takafumi Arima, 26 and

jobless, climbed into the cab in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, late Saturday and told the driver to go to Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku in southwestern Japan, a Matsuyama police officer told AFP. Arima had allegedly said he would pay the fare upon arrival and the driver believed him, the officer added. But after driving overnight for more than nine hours, the fare meter came to 270,000 yen ($2,600) and Arima confessed that he had no money, the officer said.

recently quit as BJP’s Rajya sabha MP, will also formally join the Aam Aadmi party on August 15.

Meanwhile, ending an over 45yearlong association with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), Balbir Singh Batth (74), a threetime MLA from Sri Hargobindpur, also joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Chandigarh. Late Akali leader Capt Kanwaljit Singh’s wife Sarbjeet Kaur and daughter Manpreet Kaur, besides singer Sukhwinder Singh Sukhi, also entered the AAP fold. A local political outfit, Secular Lok Raj, led by former Congress leader Harchand Singh Barsath, announced its unconditional merger with AAP. Batth said Taksali Akalis like him had been ignored for long by the SAD, which had become a fiefdom of the Badal family.

“Despite being a member of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), I was not invited to any meeting in the past four years. I have joined AAP because I share the party’s political ideals,” he said.

The ex-MLA added that he had sent his resignation to SAD president Sukhbir Badal. Later, replying to queries on the protest

by AAP volunteers against the ticket allotment for 19 seats, state political affairs incharge Sanjay Singh said, “We make it clear to every person who joins us that if his aim is only to get the ticket, then he should go elsewhere.”

in Pakistan, Indonesia, Australia and Philippines. It has served about six lakh people till date.

“This Independence Day, chapters of India and Pakistan unite together to fight the common enemy - hunger, and targets to feed 5 lakh people across borders,” said Shashank Shekhar, a doctor by profession, who has been spearheading the drive in Greater Noida.

ZERO MONETARY POLICY He explained that the army follows an absolute zero-

monetary policy. “We are a group of highly enthusiastic volunteers from schools, colleges and young professionals collect leftover food from restaurants every Sunday, and distribute it among the needy. “For the Independence Day, food was cooked at one location - Simply South restaurant - and transported to slums, orphanages, oldage homes, labour camps, schools for the specially-abled,” Shekhar said.

Ludhiana girl who vowed to unfurl tricolour at Lal Chowk on Independence day sent back

A 15-year-old girl from Ludhiana, who publicly vowed to hoist the national flag at the historic Lal Chowk in Srinagar and had dared the separatists to stop her, was on Sunday turned back by authorities from Srinagar International Airport. Jhanvi Behal accompanied by 30 others arrived at the airport but all of them were sent back, a police official said, without assigning any reason for the step.Behal had grabbed the headlines earlier this year by challenging JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar to a debate on nationalism. The police official said while six persons including Behal had come in a flight from

Chandigarh, 25 others had arrived here in another flight from Delhi. ”All of them were sent back by the same flight in which they came,” the official said.

After the outbreak of violent protests in Kashmir following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, Behal gave an online statement expressing her intention to unfurl the natinal flag at Lal Chowk.

“I would hoist the tricolour at Lal Chowk in Srinagar on August 15 because that is a place where the national flag was insulted. ”I challenge all those, including the separatists and the Pakistanis, to stop me if they can,” she had said on July 23.

Issue - 680 (13)

16 - 22 August 2016

India factor may decide Pakistan’s next army chief Islamabad Prime minister Nawaz Sharif is likely to pick Pakistan’s next army chief from among four generals, and a key factor will be the officer’s views on India, a newspaper said on Sunday.

The four officers in line to succeed incumbent General Raheel Sharif are Lt Gen Zubair Hayat, Lt Gen Ishfaq Nadeem Ahmed, Lt Gen Javed Iqbal Ramday and Lt Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, the Dawn reported.

The daily quoted an unnamed politician close to the Prime Minister as saying that Nawaz Sharif would consider his working relationship with the officers who have interacted with him frequently.

“In addition, the position of the candidates on political developments in the country ... will also be a deciding factor.

“For this, it is said, the Prime Minister will be relying on intelligence reports he has been receiving,” the Dawn added.

It said another consideration likely to be taken into account “would be the prospective candidates’ views on foreign policy issues, particularly ties with India”.

The Prime Minister holds a one-on-one consultation with the army chief on prospective candidates, it said.

“Gen Raheel Sharif would not like to become controversial and would not like the Prime

Minister to use his recommendation as an excuse to distort the seniority list,” a retired general was quoted as saying. Lt Gen Hayat is from the artillery and the serving chief of general staff (CGS).

His father retired as a major general while two of his brothers are generals.

Lt Gen Nadeem Ahmed is considered to have had a

textbook career. He is currently serving as Multan corps commander. He belongs to the Azad Kashmir Regiment.

Lt Gen Ramday now leads the Bahawalpur corps and was previously president of the National Defence University in Islamabad.

Lt Gen Bajwa is considered a dark horse “and someone who

needs to be closely watched”, the Dawn said. He has extensive experience of handling affairs in Kashmir and the northern areas of the country.

The Dawn said all the candidates appeared to be evenly poised “and there are no clear front-runners”.

Gen Raheel Sharif is set to retire at the end of November.

NIA officers take training in Urdu, Boxer’s family misses bout as transformer removed; power official suspended Arabic to counter terror groups Kolkata The officers of National Investigating Agency (NIA) are learning Urdu, Arabic and Persian languages to counter the growing influence of terrorist organisations like Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) in the eastern region. The necessity to have the basic knowledge of Arabic, Urdu and Persian was first realised after the Khagragh blast incident in West Bengal’s Birbhum district in 2014. The NIA, which was handed over the responsibility to investigate the incident, faced problems when they stumbled upon large amount of literature in Persian, Urdu and Arabic language. “We had to look for experts to understand what was written on these materials. It was then realised that the officers need

to have at least an elementary knowledge about these languages,” a senior NIA official who was part of Khagarh blast investigation told PTI. “Our officers and investigators know English, Hindi and their own mother tongue. But the knowledge of an extra language would give us an edge in our counter-terrorism measures,” an NIA official said.

Then NIA SP posted in Kolkata, Vikram Khalate, wrote to Calcutta University requesting them to make arrangements for language training classes as the agency at times was finding it difficult to find translators. “From the month of May this year their language training has started,” a Calcutta University official confirmed the report.

Chandigarh A Haryana power department employee was suspended after boxer Manoj Kumar’s brother alleged that a transformer was removed from in front of their house in Kaithal district, as a result of which their parents “could not watch his bout” in Rio Olympics. An official later said another transformer had been installed again at the spot.

“I got the transformer installed by requesting the previous chief minister. But some rowdy elements of the village took away the transformer. My parents feel harassed as they did not get to watch Manoj’s match,” alleged Rajesh Kumar in his letter to Haryana sports minister Anil Vij. Rajesh, who is in Rio with his brother, sought strict action against the “rowdy elements” and an electricity department employee for “uninstalling” the

Mumbai and prompting them to join the Islamic State (IS), to police custody till August 20.

The crime branch of the Mumbai Police produced him in a city court on Sunday after

he was arrested from Peringathoor area of Kannur district of Kerala on Saturday night. Police suspect Haneef is an important link to unearth the IS network in India.

A team of Mumbai Police led by senior police inspector Vinayak Ghorpade from the crime branch’s intelligence unit carried out the arrest.

The 26-year-old cleric hails from Kambalakkad in Kerala’s Wayanad district.

Haneef was among those booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) by Mumbai Police on August 6 following a complaint

by Abdul Majeed Kadar Khan, the father of Ashfaque, one of the 21 youths from Kerala who have gone missing and have allegedly joined the IS after

being indoctrinated.

Khan had accused Haneef of indoctrinating his son.

Arshi Qureshi, guest relationship manager of Zakir Naik’s Islamic Research Foundation and Rizwan Khan, a volunteer with Al-Birr Foundation, who were arrested last month by the Kerala police have also been booked in the same case.

One more accused in the case, Rashid Abdulla is believed to have left the country and joined the IS. In his complaint, Khan also claimed that Ashfaque had been meeting Haneef at his native in Kasaragod district in Kerala where the indoctrination took place.

Haneef allegedly introduced Ashfaque to Qureshi and

transformer from in front of his house at Rajound.

Major Kumar, an Asian Games bronze-medallist and Commonwealth Games goldmedallist, was gearing for his pre-quarterfinal bout at the Olympics. In his reply, Vij said that he has asked superintendent of police Kaithal Sumer Partap Singh to send police personnel to their home to investigate the matter. An assistant foreman, identified as Satpal, who was allegedly involved in shifting the transformer has been suspended, an Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam (UHBVN) official said.UHVBN executive engineer PC Saini said, “We have reinstalled the transformer.”

The SP said two cops have been deployed outside the house of Manoj Kamar after Vij told him about the complaint.

Mumbai court sends cleric accused of radicalising 21 youths to police custody

Mumbai A Mumbai court on Sunday sent Mohammed Haneef, a cleric arrested on charges of indoctrinating and radicalising Muslim youths in Kerala and

Rizwan Khan and the trio met several times in Kerala and also in Mumbai at the IRF office in Dongri. The Kerala Police is also probing a similar case of indoctrination filed by the brother of one Merin alias Mariyam, who is among the missing 21 youths.

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Issue - 680 (14)

16 - 22 August 2016

Doctor booked in attempt to murder her ailing father for sign on documents

Chennai A Coimbatore-based woman doctor has been booked in an attempt to murder of her 82 year-old father last year.

A CCTV footage of the September 2015 incident purportedly showing a woman tampering with the medical support system of an elderly man after allegedly getting his thumb impression in some documents has gone viral on social media.

She is then seen swiftly moving out after the hospital staff came to the room.

The elderly man passed away a few days after the incident.

A case under different sections of IPC 307 (attempt to murder), extortion and trespass has been filed against the doctor, police said on Saturday.

The case was filed after a complaint against the woman by her Chennaibased brother, at whose hospital the father was admitted.

The woman doctor’s brother has also moved the Tamil Nadu State Medical Council, seeking

disqualification of his sister as a medical professional.

Council vice-president J A Jayalal said that some enquiries have been held already and the woman doctor has sought time to respond.

“It is a family issue. The allegation (by the complainant) is that she was trying to intimidate (her father) and attempted to do some mischief. Her brother has submitted the video footage,” he told PTI. However, the veracity of the video needs to be ascertained and it needs more expert scrutiny, Jayalal said.

“Overall it looks like getting some (thumb) impression (on documents). Somebody is in death bed and you cannot force someone to (sign papers),” he said, adding the council will hold detailed enquiries into the matter.

Baloch leaders welcome PM Modi’s stand to expose Pak atrocities

New Delhi Two Baloch leaders welcomed on Saturday Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stand to expose Pakistan’s brutalities in Balochistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

World Baloch Women’s Forum president Naela Quadri Baloch said the people of the region supported Modi.

“We hope that you (PM Modi) will raise the Balochistan issue and Baloch people’s suffering in the UN session in

September.

“And, we are with you.

People of Balochistan, Baltistan and Pakistanoccupied Kashmir, we all thank you,” Naela told ANI. Hammal Haider Baloch, another Baloch leader, said: “It is for the first time that an Indian Prime Minister has expressed his wish to support the Baloch people. And, I think it is a very crucial decision made by the Indian government.”

Hammal, spokesperson of the Baloch National

Movement (UK), said the people of Balochistan were secular and believed in democratic principles as he requested the international community to usher in peace and stability.

He alleged that Pakistan, a “failed state”, was butchering people and supporting dangerous religious groups, which are radical in their approach and are a threat to ethnic groups in the country.

Their appeal came a day after the Modi government launched a fresh offensive against Islamabad for igniting the latest unrest in Kashmir after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani last month.

Kashmir has been on the boil for more than a month with at least 58 killed and thousands wounded during protests against Wani’s killing.

Indian cricketer fined $300 for lion selfies AHMEDABAD Indian cricketer Ravindra Jadeja has been fined $300 for clicking selfies with endangered Asiatic lions in the country’s west despite a ban on such photos, a senior forest official said on Wednesday.

Officials had ordered an investigation in June after photos of Jadeja posing in front of a pride of lions during a safari in Gir forest went viral on social media.

“We had instituted a probe

and called Jadeja for a statement,” A.P. Singh, chief forest conservator in Gujarat state, told AFP. “But since he was not available, his father-in-law Hardevsinh Solanki gave a written statement on his behalf and paid the fine of 20,000 rupees ($300),” he said. In one of the photos on Instagram, the allrounder is seen smiling and pointing at a pride of big cats resting behind him with a caption “family photo, having good time in

Sasan (Gir)”.

Another is a selfie of Jadeja and his wife as a lion looks on in the background. The 27-yearold is currently on tour with the Indian team in the West Indies.

The photos were taken just days after the Gujarat forestry department advised tourists and locals against taking selfies with lions, following a spate of attacks in which villagers were killed or injured by the cats.

President’s daughter Sharmistha names and shames ‘pervert’ on Facebook

Kolkata Sharmistha Mukherjee, a Congress leader and the daughter of President Pranab Mukherjee, named and shamed on Saturday a man identifying himself Partha Mandal for sending her obscene messages on Facebook and vowed to fight against such perverts.

“This pervert Partha Mandal is sending me dirty sexual messages.

My first reaction was to ignore & block him. But then I thought the silence would encourage him to find other victims,” Sharmistha wrote on Facebook.

The Congress leader, who fought the 2015 assembly elections in Delhi, said she made her profile public after joining politics in order to get suggestions and

complaints from people.

Mondal had allegedly sent obscene messages to Sharmistha on Friday night.

Such harassment is not anything new on the internet and hundreds of thousands of people suffer it every day on social media. But instead of letting the matter go, Sharmistha decided to fight back by sharing the obscene message to publicly shame her harasser. She told HT that she would also lodge a complaint with police.

“Just blocking & reporting is not enough. I strongly feel such people should be publicly exposed & humiliated. I’m posting screenshots of his profile & messages he sent me,” she wrote. “I’m also tagging him. Please share this post & tag this rat as a message that

these pervert acts will not be taken lightly.”

When HT got in touch with Sharmistha, she said she initially thought of ignoring the message but she realised that the “offender will offend other women”.

“I decided to share the messages because there is a need for public exposure and public humiliation of such people,” Sharmistha said over the phone from Delhi. “Generally girls or women block such a person. But that never helps because the offenders take advantage of the situation and humiliate others.”

She said police would take immediate action in her case only because she is President Pranab Mukherjee’s daughter, but she doesn’t want any special treatment. “I want the police to be active in case of complaint lodged by any women. Therefore, I will quietly go to the police and lodge a complaint. I will fight as a general person. I will approach the police as a common person,” Sharmistha said.

Issue 680 (15)

16 - 22 August 2016

Akshay Kumar brings KM Nanavati back to life

by Ananya Bhattacharya Cast: Akshay Kumar, Ileana D’Cruz, Esha Gupta, Kumud Mishra, Pavan Malhotra, Arjan Bajwa, Sachin Khedekar Direction: Tinu Suresh Desai Rating: 3 Stars Akshay Kumar is back with yet another patriotic film, Rustom. After his January 26 Airlift, comes Rustom, the Independence Day treat from Akshay Kumar and director Tinu Suresh Desai. Will the film be able to make an impact on the audience, and recreate the Airlift effect? Commander Rustom Pavri’s (Akshay Kumar) trial is underway in court. Akshay is a vision in white. A decorated Naval officer, Rustom has the charge of killing Vikram Makhija (Arjan Bajwa), his wife’s lover on him. Prosecution lawyer Lakshman Khangani (Sachin Khedekar) pulls up Rustom for being in his pristine white uniform all the time.

He goes ahead to remind the jury to not be swayed by the uniform, “Uniform ke

peechhe chhupa ek criminal hai.”

Director Tinu Suresh Desai uses Akshay in the uniform to invoke as much sympathy from the jury on film as his audience off it. He is in his uniform in jail, in court, on his ship, in his house.

Bombay, 1959. Rustom’s ship drops anchor a few days before it was supposed to have. The Commander reaches home, picking up flowers for his wife Cynthia (Ileana D’Cruz). Cynthia hasn’t been home for the last two days. There’s a Whiskey Lullaby-ish feel in the air as the audience prepares themselves to come to terms with Cynthia’s affair with Vikram (Arjan Bajwa).

Rustom drives to Vikram’s home, finding his wife and her lover on the balcony.

His eyes do the rest of it.

Cynthia gets home to a drunk, angry-yet-calm Rustom; a storm in the offing. Rustom goes to Vikram’s place, armed with a pistol from the armoury.

Three shots are heard from Vikram’s bedroom. The servant runs upstairs to find Rustom standing over a dead Vikram, pistol in

hand.

Much like the KM Nanavati case, Rustom then goes to the police station and turns himself in. Senior inspector Lobo is shocked.

The case reaches the court. Rustom the film is more a courtroom drama than a thriller.

The film draws heavily from the Nanavati case. Right from people selling the ‘Rustom pistol’ and the ‘Vikram towel - marne pe bhi nahi girte hai’ outside the court to the self-defence vs pre-mediated murder arguments.

Desai packs in every element possible of the late-50s /early-60s Bombay in Rustom.

Santosh Thundiyil’s cinematography and the production design are both winners in Rustom, the Paul Perret watch on Pavri’s wrist and his vintage Merc in tow.

Akshay Kumar, the poster boy of patriotism in Bollywood, gets his act right as Rustom Pavri. He plays the Commander to perfection, both as the cuckolded husband to the man defending himself in court.

Kumar keeps his performance largely understated, conveying more with his silences than words. Ileana D’Cruz works

well as the guilty wife, but fails to make an impact when she is not silent or not weeping. Esha Gupta as socialite Preeti

Makhija, Vikram’s sister, isn’t a fleshed out character. Her blood-red lips take away more attention than her acting.

running towards ‘something’ and they stop and tell Sarman, “Lag raha hai phir se koi ghatana ghati hai.”

Gowariker’s simplistic and

heavy-handed treatment of the film, is frankly, a dumbing down of the filmmaking style we saw in his seminal film Lagaan.

Hrithik Roshan’s film can’t be taken seriously

by Devarsi Ghosh Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Pooja Hegde, Kabir Bedi, Arunoday Singh Direction: Ashutosh Gowariker Ratings: 2 Stars Ashutosh Gowariker cannot, overnight, become a bad filmmaker. This man has given two blockbusters in the last decade - Lagaan and Jodhaa Akbar - both steeped in Indian history and containing Hindi cinema’s most popular narrative devices. And both were such big hits, thanks to the way Gowariker handled them. So why did Mohenjo Daro get the bad pre-release rap?

That’s because it’s 2016, where the online world of information is accessible to the Indian youth, more than ever before, and in a world where these people have the outlet to voice their opin-

ion on the internet, where anything and everything can go viral, Gowariker’s Mohenjo Daro doesn’t quite cut it. Gowariker took huge liberties with the historical details of the period, understandably, in the service of a grand, commercial film that would appeal to one and all, but in the process, ended up making something that just cannot be taken seriously.

Before going any further, Mohenjo Daro is the story of an indigo farmer Sarman (Hrithik Roshan) who travels to the fabled land of Mohenjo Daro for better business opportunities, only to fall in love with Chaani (Pooja Hegde). Chaani is set to marry the son of the city’s despotic ruler Maham (Kabir Bedi). And the tale unfolds...

Mohenjo Daro, a Sindhi word that literally means

‘Mound of the Dead’, was not a name that the-then inhabitants of the 5000-year old civilisation used to call the city. That the people in the film keep referring to the place as Mohenjo Daro is not the point; it is one of the many known factual fallacies of the film. The problem is the strange narrative - Mohenjo Daro, in the film, happens to be a city going through recession because agricultural produce is at an all-time low as a result of Maham’s decision to build a dam across river Sindh to mine all the gold underneath because he is greedy, evil and adequately one-dimensional and stupid for a filmy villain. If anyone speaks against Maham, he is killed in public view, and then their bodies are not allowed to be cremated. All in all, the ruling class is

hated in the city. Despite all of that, for some reason, people of the city gather for a celebration of their city as a tribute to, supposedly, Maham, which is the song Mohenjo Mohenjo.

Here are people, who are shown to be distressed under a dictatorship, coming together to literally chant “Mound, mound”. As such, it is impossible to cut this film any slack after a point.

For exposition’s sake, Mohenjo Daro’s characters explain basic plot points with absurd dialogue.

When Sarman and his friend walks into the royal township within the city because Sarman has to check out Chaani, the friend exclaims, “Lag raha hai ki hum dusre nagar mein hain.” Well, duh.

In another part, a few excited townsfolk are seen

Issue 680 (16)

16 - 22 August 2016

Want to have all-female version of ‘Rock On!!’ says Prachi Desai Prachi Desai is excited about for the upcoming sequel of ‘Rock On!!’ franchise but the actress says it would be great to have a series made with all-female cast.

‘Rock On!!’, which released in 2008, was about a music band of four boys, played by Farhan Akhtar, Arjun Rampal, Purab Kohli and Luke Kenny.

Prachi, who played Farhan’s wife in the first film, says the kind of bond today’s actresses share with each other should be interesting enough for a filmmaker to think about a musical with an all-female star cast. “Having a film on those lines would be a lot of fun. I don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought about that. Today, Bollywood is getting so much more experimental, why should women be behind,” Prachi told PTI. “The kind of camaraderie we women share, it is a subject worth going into.

Even the audience today is accepting films of diverse genres.”

‘Rock On!!’ also featured actresses Shahana Goswami and Koel Poorie. Prachi reveals the ladies used to joke that there should be an all-girl band movie.

“In fact during ‘Rock On!!’, there were so many women on set that sometimes we used to joke that if this becomes successful, there should be an all-girls-band film next,” the ‘Azhar’ actress said.

‘Rock On!! 2’ is set to hit theatres on November 11.

While the first was directed by Abhishek Kapoor, the sequel has

PRACHI DESAI

been helmed by Shujat Saudagar. Its cast has an addition in form of actress Shraddha Kapoor. She says even though the film is about

male-bonding, it will have equal important parts of everybody in the cast.

“This film is a contribution of every character’s story put together. Some might

relate with the character of Farhan, some Arjun, some mine. All are equally important, without one, the other can’t move ahead,” Prachi said.

Tiger Shroff to star in ‘Student of the Year 2’ Filmmaker Karan Johar on Monday announced sequel of the 2012 film “Student of the year” (SOTY) with actor Tiger Shroff as the male lead. Karan took to Twitter to confirm the news that was doing the rounds about Tiger being roped in for “Student of the Year 2”.

He posted: “It’s official...Directed by Punit Malhotra ‘Student of the Year 2’ (‘SOTY2’) with Tiger Shroff.” Tiger, who is awaiting the release of his superhero film “A Flying Jatt”, is excited to be part of the project. Tiger tweeted: “Wound up and charged sir! Yahoo Karan Johar,

Here’s why Nargis Fakhri learnt Marathi

Punit Malhotra, ‘Student of the Year 2’.”

“Student of the Year” is a coming-of-age

romantic comedy, which was produced by Hiroo Yash Johar under the banner of Dharma Productions and in collaboration with superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s production banner Red Chillies Entertainment.

Directed by Karan, the film marked the debut of actors Sidharth Malhotra, Alia Bhatt and Varun Dhawan.

And Sidharth shared that he “can’t wait to watch” the second part of the hit film. He tweeted: “Sounds exciting Karan Johar can’t wait to watch it best of luck Punit Malhotra and Tiger Shroff.”

Nargis Fakhri has finally faced the media during launch of her film Banjo after a long time. She has been missing from the scene due to her alleged illness. A source says, “Nargis plays character of DJ and was not required to learn

Marathi at all. However the actress was curious to know what her director Ravi Jadhav and co-star Riteish Deshmukh are discussing, so she would ask unit members to teach her couple of words and has learned few of them.”

Arbaaz Khan has no plans to quit acting Arbaaz Khan says he took a break from acting due to his commitments as a filmmaker but now he has many releases coming up and he will continue to be in front of the camera. “I have completed four films in the recent past. It’s just that they will be releasing now. I had taken a bit of a sabbatical because I was producing and directing films. But acting has always been my passion and it is something that I will continue to do,” Arbaaz told PTI. Arbaaz, who made his debut in 1996 release “Daraar” in a villainous role, went on to do many multi-starrer hits such as “Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya”, “Garv: Pride and Honour”, “Hello Brother”, and comedies like “Hulchul”, “Malamaal

Weekly”, “Bhagam Bhag” among others. “I want to focus on my filmmaking career. But acting is

something I want to do for passion,” he said. The 49year-old star ventured into film production with “Dabangg” (2010) starring brother Salman Khan, which went on to become one of the highestgrossing Bollywood films of all time.

Issue 680 (17)

16 - 22 August 2016

Nina Dobrev to return to ‘Vampire Diaries’?

Actress Nina Dobrev is in negotiations to return as Elena for the final season of ‘Vampire Diaries’.

Showrunner Julie Plec and The CW’s president Mark Pedowitz confirmed that they are in discussions with Dobrev, reported a website. “There are discussions going on with Nina, we’d love to have her back.

She was integral to The Vampire Diaries. Hopefully she’ll be back, but should it not work out, Julie has planned out a great series finale for fans,” Pedowitz said.

Asked if there will be a time jump to bring back Elena, Plec said, “(Cocreator) Kevin (Williamson) and I have two very different points of view about flash forwards.

He and I will be doing a lot of talking in a good way, (to decide) the right path to take this series to an end.”

Chloe Grace Moretz makes a shocking confession!

Chloe Grace Moretz has admitted that Hollywood insiders frequently suggested she change her appearance in order to boost her chances of success. She said, “I used to get told to change my teeth all the time, because I had a gap, and I was told that to help give

me more of a waistline, they could take out some ribs. The 19 year-old admits that she begged her mother to let her have “a boob job, the fat pad beneath my chin removed and a butt reduction” when she was just 16, but she is thankful that she was told no.

Freida Pinto filming No more pizza for Adele ‘Guerrilla’ in London

US-based Indian actress Freida Pinto, who will be starring in John Ridley’s six-part limited TV series “Guerrilla”, has started filming for it here. The show, which will also

feature actor Idris Elba, is based on black activism in London in the 1970s.

“I’m thrilled to be working with an artiste like John Ridley who has written these compelling scripts

filled with thoughtful and complicated characters,” Frieda said in a statement.

Frieda will be essaying the role of Jas Mitra, a passionate and politically driven individual who is part of a radical underground cell that helps liberate a charismatic convict from prison to lead the street fight against social injustice in 1971 London.

Along with Ridley and Elba, the executive producers will be Patrick Spence and Katie Swinden for Fifty Fathoms, Tracy Underwood for ABC Signature, and Michael McDonald for Stearns Castle.

Singer Adele has stopped eating pizza for the sake of her voice.

She has been warned that excessive consumption of the cheese and tomato dish which are her favourite food, could damage her throat and affect her singing ability. “I can’t eat pizza anymore, guys! How bad is that? Because it’s got cooked tomatoes on it which are bad for your throat and give you acid reflux. How bad is that, that I can’t eat pizza,” Adele said during a

concert.

The 28-year-old is currently touring the west coast in US which is famous for its mouthwatering pizzas, which would explain the Send My Love singers plight.

“I’m in America and I can’t eat pizza no more.

It’s worse than Romeo and Juliet! If only Shakespeare was alive, he could write about it,” she said.

Meanwhile, speaking on stage in Manchester earlier this year, she said: “I’m unable to

sample Rusholme’s curry mile tonight as I’ve been told I’ve got to carefully protect my vocal cords.”

Erection Problem?

416-992-5489

Issue 680 (18)

16 - 22 August 2016

42 years after child abuse, Canadian woman of Indian origin files case against paedophile Chennai A 52-year-old Canadian woman of Chennai origin filed a complaint of child abuse with the Chennai Police.

The incident occurred

way back when she was 10 years old but the scars have not healed even after forty years.

She was then staying at different homes in Anna Nagar and Shenoy Nagar.

WHAT HAPPENED One of her relatives had abused her multiple times. She was too young to even realize what he was doing to

her. She protested because of uneasiness and he stopped.

But to even realize what had happened, it took many years. It took almost 10 years for her

to decide to break her silence.

In her 20s, she decided to file a complaint through her brother in India. However, it did not work as much clarity was not there about sexual abuse in India.

Her family knew what she had gone through and ensured that she never saw the predator again.

AFTER DECADES, SHE DECIDED TO EXPOSE HIM Even after 25 years, she could never find peace. She finally approached the Canadian Police and a file was created on the case but as the victim and the culprit were not in Canada when it happened, they suggested that the case be transferred to Chennai.

She did so with not much hope.

She mailed the case file back in March thinking nothing would turn up but to her surprise, she got a call from the cops in Chennai.

A senior officer met with her and an investigation has now been initiated.

The state has become a mixing point for tradition and modernisation and is constantly undergoing transformation where elders spend time with kids lesser and lesser by day.

Harvard tops Chinese ranking of best universities

SHANGHAI Universities from mainland China broke into the global top 100 in an annual ranking for the first time Monday, but Harvard remained number one for the 14th consecutive year.

China’s prestigious Tsinghua University was 58th, beating elite Peking University in 71st place, in the “Academic Ranking of World Universities” compiled by the independent Shanghai Ranking Consultancy. The National University of Singapore also entered the top 100 for the first time, tying for 83rd, it said.

For the top 10, Stanford maintained second place but MIT dropped from third to fifth, with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cambridge each moving up one spot to take third and fourth. The Shanghai Ranking is consistently largely static at its top levels, and this year nine of the top 20 were in unchanged positions, and another nine moved by

only one place. The biggest change was by Britain’s Oxford University,

grading. According to the statement the rankings use “objective indicators”

which climbed three spots from 10th to seventh.

Princeton University was sixth again, with another three US institutions - the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University and the University of Chicago in places eight to 10. The ranking, which was launched in 2003, has generated controversy in the past for what critics say is stressing science over the humanities in its

including the number of staff and alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, and articles published in the journals of “Nature” and “Science”, according to a statement.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the University of Tokyo was top at number 20 overall.

Issue 680 (19)

16 - 22 August 2016

One person shot in Milwaukee protest but no repeat of riots Milwaukee Police said one person was shot at a Milwaukee protest on Sunday evening and officers used an armored vehicle to retrieve the injured victim during a second night of unrest over the police shooting of a black man, but there was

no repeat of widespread destruction of property.

Some two dozen officers in riot gear confronted a group who were throwing rocks and other objects at police near where the black man was fatally shot a day earlier. Police moved in to try to disperse the crowd and warned of arrests. Police took the injured person to a hospital in an armored vehicle.

Local television showed police forming a line and using shields to deflect the objects.

One police officer fell to the ground after apparently being hit by one of the objects and was moved away by fellow officers. Police also said an injured officer was taken to hos-

pital after a rock broke the windshield of a squad car.

Earlier, video taken from a media helicopter showed a small group of protesters running through the streets, picking up orange construction barriers and hurling them out of the way. Police posted on

Twitter three locations where they said shots were fired.

There were no other reports of injuries and no major destruction of property after six businesses were burned in the unrest Saturday.

Police Chief Edward Flynn said at a press conference on Sunday that the man whose death touched off Saturday night’s rioting was shot after he turned toward an officer with a gun in his hand.

Flynn cautioned that the shooting was still under investigation and authorities were awaiting autopsy results, but that based on the silent video from the unidentified officer’s body camera, he “certainly

appeared to be within lawful bounds.”

At the same news conference, Mayor Tom Barrett said a still image pulled from the footage clearly showed a gun in 23-year-old Sylville K. Smith’s hand as he fled a traffic stop Saturday.

“I want our community to know that,” Barrett said. But he also called for understanding for Smith’s family.

“A young man lost his life yesterday afternoon,” the mayor said.

“And no matter what the circumstances are, his family has to be hurting.”

Flynn declined to identify the officer who shot Smith but said he is black. The police chief said he wasn’t sure what prompted the stop but described Smith’s car as “behaving suspiciously.”

After watching the officer’s body camera footage, Flynn said the entire episode took about 25 seconds, from the start of the traffic stop until shots were fired. He said Smith ran “a few dozen feet” and turned toward the officer while holding a gun.

“It was in his hand. He was raising up with it,” the chief said. He said the officer had told Smith to drop the gun and he did not do so. It was unclear how many rounds the officer fired. Smith was hit in the chest and arm, Flynn said.

Former Sri Lanka president’s son arrested in money laundering case Colombo In the latest legal difficulty for Sri Lanka’s once-powerful family, financial crime police arrested the eldest son of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa

by officers from the Financial Crimes Investigations Division investigating the trails of money he invested in two companies, the lawyer said.

“He was arrested by police

on Monday on suspicion of laundering money, his lawyer said. Sri Lanka’s new president, Maithripala Sirisena, is facing pressure to act on allegations of corruption dating back to the Rajapaksa era, especially from civil society organisations that backed his successful bid to oust Rajapaksa last year.

The son, Namal Rajapaksa, who is also a member of parliament, had been questioned

under the anti-money laundering act,” lawyer Premanath C Dolawatta told Reuters.

He later appeared in court and was remanded for a week, Dolawatta said.

Neither Namal Rajapaksa nor his family members were immediately available for comment but they have in the past all publicly denied wrongdoing. It is the second time he has been arrested.

In July, he was arrested in

connection with a separate case on suspicion of misappropriating of funds in a $650million apartment project and was released on bail after seven days in detention on remand.

Namal’s uncle, the former president’s brother, Basil Rajapaksa, who headed the economic development ministry, has also been arrested three times twice over suspicion of misuse of anti-poverty funds and a once over suspicion of laundering money.

Since he took power in January 2015, President Sirisena has launched a series of investigations into deals cleared by his predecessor and several members of his family.

Mahinda Rajapaksa was president for a decade until January 2015 and is now an opposition legislator.

He is popular among ethnic majority Sinhala Buddhists who credit him with ending a 26-year war against ethnic minority Tamil separatist rebels in 2009.

Texas mom matter-of-factly says she drowned her kids, buried them under a house

Houston Two children were found dead under a neighbour’s house on Sunday after their mother matter-offactly told someone helping her move that she had drowned them in a bathtub, authorities said.

Sheborah Thomas, 30, was charged with capital murder and “all indications are she is the one who acted alone” in the deaths of her 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, Houston police spokesman Kese Smith said. Authorities have not yet confirmed a cause of death but said the woman allegedly told an acquaintance that she had drowned the children.

Smith said investigators were still interviewing the woman and had not determined a motive. She was turned in to police by the acquaintance, who came upon her throwing away trash in a field, where she allegedly told him she needed help moving right away.

When the man asked about her kids, she calmly said she had killed them, Smith said.

“She was so matter of fact about it he didn’t think she was serious.

He thought she was joking,” Smith said. “He continued to help her

pack.”

Smith said the man eventually realized something was wrong when he asked again and got the same answer. He then drove the woman toward a nearby police precinct and flagged down an officer, Smith said.

The mother apparently tried burying the children at first but put them under a neighbour’s house when that proved too difficult, Smith said.

Authorities were not immediately aware of the woman having any history of mental health problems, Smith said. He said police had been to the home before but for “nothing major.”

State child welfare officials had previously visited with the family, said Tejal Patel, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. She said she could not disclose the nature of those visits but said a “top to bottom review” of the family will be done. Neighbours told the Houston Chronicle that the family had moved in just a few months earlier. “She would just take her kids to the park; that’s all everyone saw of them,” neighbour Mike Polk told the newspaper.

Issue 680 (20)

+(52,& 7,*(5 /($36 72 =22.((3(5·6 5(6&8(

By JOHN HUTCHINSON This is the dramatic moment a zookeeper was saved from a potential leopard attack by a tiger. The incredible footage shows Dharma the leopard making a bounding move towards Eduardo Serio, before it is knocked off track by the tiger, called Aztlan.

Serio was being filmed up close and personal with big cats at the Black Jaguar White Tiger zoo in Mexico City. As he leans down with a group of white lions, the leopard can be seen in the background making its move towards the front of the enclosure.

There are six lions relaxing on the grass, with Aztlan the tiger only a few feet away.

Serio stands up to take a quick look around, but with the leopard possibly obscured from his view by a tree, he leans down to play with the lions.

But soon Dharma begins to run towards Serio. But in a flash Aztlan is on his feet and swoops to knock the leopard off his feet.

Serio is caught unawares as both animals then run towards him. The leopard reaches

a paw at Serio’s leg, but a slap down from who is boss. Serio even goes as to thank a potential big cat attack. The clip, that is has been viewed over 640,000 times since the zookeeper, and the tiger, shows Dharma the tiger for the part he just played in foiling believed to have been filmed in October 2015, being shared on YouTube.

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Women can become radicalised to become terrorists if they put on Islamic dress, the President of Kyrgyzstan, Almazbek Atambayev, has claimed in his most recent intervention in a national debate on cultural identity. Speaking at a press conference last week, President Atambayev also attacked those in his country, where 80% of the population is Muslim, who are critical of women who wear more revealing outfits.

His remarks followed several weeks of controversy over government-sponsored hoardings or banners put up in the streets of the capital Bishkek to try to dissuade Kyrgyz women from wearing Islamic clothing, notably the hijab, niqab and burka, ahead of a visit to the country by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in mid-July.

The hoardings, which, like the president’s remarks, have offended many, showed contrasting photos: one side shows women wearing the traditional nomadic clothing of

Kyrgyzstan, the other shows women in niqabs and burkas, the full veils worn by some Muslim women. The caption underneath said: “Poor people! Where are we heading to?”

Addressing criticism of the design, President Atambayev said: “When we erected banners some smart people appeared and started pointing at miniskirts. Our women have been

wearing miniskirts since 1950s, and they never thought about wearing an explosive belt.

“You can wear even tarpaulin boots on your head, but do not organise bombings. This is not religion. Let them wear even miniskirts but there must not be any blasts.” He portrayed the wearing of some Islamic clothing as not only out of step with contemporary Kyrgyz national culture but also potentially dangerous. “Terrorists are insane people,” he said. “Clothes also can change one’s thoughts sometimes. When we were searching for prisoners who had escaped a detention centre, Melis Turganbayev (the former interior minister) came to me and said that they had been eavesdropping on telephone conversations of wives and mistresses of criminals. Their wives and mistresses wore sacks on their heads and they wanted to organise bombings. “If you do not like Kyrgyzstan you can leave our country and go wherever you want. We

can pay your travel expenses, even to Syria,” the president said - an apparent reference to his government’s claim that around 350 Kyrgyz citizens are fighting with jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq. Many people in the Central Asian state have been outraged by the anti-Islamic clothing campaign. A tongue-in-cheek Facebook group was created contrasting the traditional Kyrgyz head-dress, the Elechek, with Western women in tighter outfits. The inference was clear: was this option - the Elechek - any less conservative than the hijab when compared with Western clothing? However, in 2014, while speaking at a session of Kyrgyzstan’s Security Council, President Atambayev said that it was not the conservative clothing, or Muslim traditions, that he had a problem with, but more the “Arabisation of society [and the] deprivation of the Kyrgyz nation of its language and traditions”.

(21)

16 - 22 August 2016

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By PATRICK LION It has become the symbol of the host city of the 2016 Olympic Games, towering over Rio De Janeiro as athletes from around the world compete below. But the Christ The Redeemer statue - sitting 700 metres above the city’s beaches and favelas on Corcovado mountain - has a life story worthy of Olympic legend. Inspired by bolstering Christianity in the wake of Brazil becoming a republic at the end of the 19th century, the 38-metre high statue was still being designed and crafted by a team of artists, engineers and architects from across the world while being built atop the mountain during the 1920s.

Workers were marching towards ‘inevitable artistic failure’, as Brazilian architect Heitor da Silva Costa reportedly said, without being able to go back. But they kept moving forward. And the result is one of the most memorable religious, cultural, tourist and photographic sites on the planet. The first idea of a statue emerged in the 1850s when a local Rio De Janeiro priest suggested placing a Christian monument on Corcovado. He requested funds from Brazilian Princess Isabel to build one.

However, the Princess was not enthusiastic about the project. By the time the Republic of Brazil was founded in 1889, separating church and statue, the idea was scrapped.

The project is said to have re-emerged after

World War One when a group of Brazilians, including the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro, feared a lack of religion in Brazilian life after the separation of Church and state in the new republic and wanted to make a bold statement in the name of Christianity. There were thoughts of using nearby Sugar Loaf Mountain - now also a major tourist attraction - for the statue but Corcovado was chosen for its towering height and ability to be seen from vantage points around the city. The Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro reportedly proposed in 1921 that a statue of Christ be built on the mountain and citizens petitioned then President EpitĂĄcio Pessoa to allow the project to proceed.

Brazilian architect Heitor da Silva Costa won the design competition in early 1922, reportedly imagining the statue to face the rising sun. ‘The statue of the divine saviour shall be the first image to emerge from the obscurity in which the earth is plunged and to receive the salute of the star of the day which, after surrounding it with its radiant luminosity, shall build at sunset around its head a halo fit for the Man-God,’ he said, according to the BBC. An initial design involved a statue of Christ carrying a cross in one hand and a globe in his other hand - though this was often wrongly interpreted at the time as a

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By MATT ROPER was called in South American The Brazilian diver who allegedly media, allegedly left Oliveira’s banished her synchronised teammate Giovanna Pedroso, partner from their shared room 17, furious – and they have now at Rio 2016 for a ‘marathon split. And today it was revealed night of sex’ with a canoeist has that Oliveira was lambasted for been in trouble before - for posting a ‘provocative’ photo of posting sexy photographs herself in a swimsuit the day before her first individual jump online ahead of a big tournament. Ingrid Oliveira, 20, at the Pan American Games in is claimed to have slept with Toronto last year. Brazilians accused the athlete, then aged compatriot Pedro Goncalves at her room in the Olympic Village 19, of ‘being more interested in the night before she was due to dive at the posting photos of her behind than winning Games . Their ‘marathon night of sex’, as it medals’.

ball. The foundation stone for the statue was laid in 1922.

But the design and finish had still not been finalised - and would not be for years, even as a steel frame was erected on the top of the mountain well into the late 1920s. ‘We were marching towards the inevitable artistic failure, without being able to go back,’ Silva Costa reportedly said.

A defining moment in the project came when the design, now utilizing the skills of artist Carlos Oswald, instead made Christ himself the cross - an iconic symbol that would tower over Rio. Da Silva Costa is said to have visited Europe in 1924 to seek help from the leading French engineer with reinforced concrete, Albert Caquot, meeting a range of sculptors along the way. Polish-French sculptor Paul Landowski was chosen. He has been praised as the man behind the design of the figure’s head and hands, with the BBC saying he produced the pieces fullsized in clay before shipping them to Brazl to be reproduced in concrete. Silva Costa was not a fan of concrete as a finish. Too rough and crude, he thought.

Then he walked past a fountain covered in a silvery mosaic in an arcade on the Champs Elysees in Paris. ‘By seeing how the small tiles covered all the curved profiles of the fountain, I was soon taken by the idea of using them on the image which I always had in my thoughts,’ wrote Silva Costa according to the BBC. Caquot was enlisted to help build the project under Silva Costa’s supervision. The materials were carried up the mountain by a railway.

When the statue was opened on October 12, 1931, the finished statue was 38 metres

tall, including the 8-metre pedestal, with arms that stretched 28 metres wide.

The cost was reportedly USD $250,000 about $3.4million in today’s money, according to Newsday. Located at the peak of the 700-metre Corcovado mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park overlooking the beaches and favelas of Rio, it quickly became a defining image of Rio De Janeiro and Brazil.

As it was first imagined, it has also become one of the most memorable images of Christianity on the planet - with even papal visits occurring. The statue has become one of the Seven New Wonders of The World alongside far older structures such as The Colosseum in Rome and the Great Wall of China. Still, the work has continued atop Corcovado. Modern luxuries such as escalators and elevators have been added in recent decades to ease the stair climb for tourists making the pilgrimage to the statue, especially in big numbers during the recent hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and now the Olympics.

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Issue 680 (22)

16 - 22 August 2016

Are British trains worse than Indian ones?

London The British may have introduced railways in India, where the rapidly improving network is one of the world’s largest, but things are not exactly the same in UK: strikes, steep prices and congestion have irked many commuters, who are now calling for its nationalisation. So much so that when Indian-origin standup Nish Kumar used humour in a Monday article to cut through the complex issues and claimed that British trains were worse than Indian ones, many agreed, but some were thrown off-track.

“When I was growing up, and periodically going to India to visit my grandmother, my classmates would often ask me about the trains. There was an exotic fascination with people sitting on top of the carriages.” ”Well, just to clear this up, British trains are now worse than Indian trains. Even if you sat on the roof, at least you get a seat,” he wrote in The Guardian, provoking nearly 1,000 comments from readers comparing their experience of

travelling in India, Britain and elsewhere. The introduction of railways in India in 1853 is often cited as part of the ‘good’ that British rule purportedly did in India, but critics have insisted that it was introduced mainly to facilitate

revenue extraction rather than to transport ‘natives’ across the subcontinent.

Today, Britain is reputed to have the highest train fares in Europe. Unless booked days in advance at a discounted price, travelling by train by purchasing a ticket on the day of travel can be costlier than travelling by air - as many Indian tourists realise. ”If you want to travel from London to Manchester, and have not booked a ticket, be prepared to sell a kidney or stay at home. Frequent train travellers have to plan ahead, booking months in

Man detained for hoisting Pakistan’s flag on roof of house in Jaipur

Jaipur A man was detained for allegedly hoisting a Pakistani flag atop the roof of his house in Mansarover area of Jaipur.

The man, identified as Kapil Shastri, is mentally disturbed and had hoisted the flag on Sunday. On information by locals, he was detained and the flag was seized, police said.

A case against Shastri was registered under section 153 A (Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, residence and

295 (insult the religion of any class) of IPC. “Primary probe reveals that the accused is not mentally fit and said that he picked up the flag few years ago from a slum area and brought to his house.”

“His grandfather was a freedom fighter,” Anil Jaimini, SHO of the Mansarover police station, said on Monday.

He was detained and released.

A medical examination of the accused will be conducted on Tuesday, he added.

advance to avoid massive fares,” Kumar wrote.

One of the private companies running trains, Southern Rail, went on a five-day strike earlier this month, prompting renewed calls for nationalisation of Britain’s rail network. It is

a cause espoused by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, winning him increasing supporters.

Kumar, who is performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, added: “Nationalisation might seem like the preserve of old-fashioned, duffel-coatwearing, Red-Flag-singing socialists, but it also appears to be economically efficient.” “Labour adopted renationalisation as a policy at its 2015 autumn conference, and Jeremy Corbyn is trying to make this a key platform in his plans to be the next prime

minister. Corbyn might be on to a winner here.

Time will tell. Anyway, I had better head off – I’ve got to start booking some train tickets for October 2025.”

British rail was privatised by the John Major government, when the infrastructure, maintenance and ownership of trains were each sold off to private companies in a process that lasted three years from 1994. It led to more investment, but also higher fares over the years.

Passionate comments on Kumar’s article included good, bad and ugly experiences of Britons travelling on Indian trains, but many agreed that commuting by rail in Britain is anything but a pleasure any more.

Some objected to Kumar’s assumption in the article that Indian trains are bad, and pointed out the improvements and investments in recent years. Others insisted there was scope for improvement and rail travel in India would certainly be better than that in Britain in a decade.

Did PM Modi’s speech put Kejriwal to sleep?

Sisodia thinks so

New Delhi Did Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day speech put Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to sleep?

Yes. If you go by the tweet that was sent out by Kejriwal’s deputy Manish Sisodia after the state broadcaster Doordarshan tweeted a picture of the chief minister with his eyes shut.

“It seems Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech was very boring,” the Delhi deputy CM tweeted. The message was retweeted

by Kejriwal, who was sitting among the audience at the Red Fort next to Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad.

Modi’s third address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort ran close to 100 minutes in which he

presented a report card of his government, highlighting its achievements and promising growth.

Sporting a red, pink and yellow turban and dressed in his trademark halfsleeved white kurta, Modi called for unity and took aim at supporters of “terrorism”. In a marked departure, he even talked about Pakistan’s troubled province of Balochistan.

Kejriwal has been at loggerheads with the Centre over transfers, control of police and routing of files.

The two sides are locked in legal battles as well.

Recently, the high court ruled that the lieutenant governor, who represents the Centre, had the final word on administrative control of Delhi, dealing a blow to the Kejriwal government.

Days after India’s rejection, Pakistan offers talks on Kashmir again New Delhi Pakistani foreign secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry invited his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar on Monday to visit Islamabad for a dialogue on Kashmir, which New Delhi has already rejected outright.

The invitation letter was handed to high commissioner Gautam Bambawale, two days after Sartaj Aziz, the foreign affairs adviser to Pakistani premier Nawaz Sharif, said his country has planned to invite the Indian foreign secretary for peace talks on Kashmir.

“The letter highlights the international obligation of both countries, India and Pakistan, to resolve the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions,” said a statement from the Pakistani foreign office.

New Delhi rejected the Pakistani talks plan on Saturday, saying a dialogue can be had only on “contemporary and relevant issues in India-Pakistan relations”, especially

cross-border terrorism.

Islamabad has been long accused of training and pushing militants into India, and supporting terrorists such as Lashar-eTaiba founder Hafiz Saeed, the Pakistan-based lynchpin of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks in 2008.

The letter came hours af-

killing of a militant leader a month ago. More than 50 people have died and thousands were wounded in the unrest.

He repeated his tough stand on Pakistan in his August 15 address, expressing his gratitude to the people of Balochistan, Gilgit, and PoK “for the way

ter Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his stand on Balochistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) during his 90-minute Independence Day speech.

Modi said last week the time has come to expose Pakistani atrocities in Balochistan and PoK, in a tit-for-tat response to Islamabad’s tirade over protests in Kashmir after the

they wholeheartedly thanked me”. This was the first time an Indian Prime Minister mentioned the Pakistan-controlled restive areas during his Independence Day speech.

Balochistan chief minister Nawab Sanaullah Zehri dismissed Modi’s remarks that the province was suffering from repression and accused India of fomenting trouble there, reports PTI.

He said there was no fight for freedom in Balochistan, and only a few misguided youth were involved in militancy and anti-peace activities in the province.

Ties between India and Pakistan have been on a downswing after the Pathankot airbase attack in January, in which seven soldiers and four Pakistanbased terrorists were killed. Foreign secretaries of the two nations were scheduled to resume talks in mid-January, but the meeting was postponed after the attack.

Hostilities between the neighbours escalated in the month since security forces gunned down Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in Kashmir on July 8, which triggered a wave of protests in the state. Pakistani flags were hoisted in the Kashmir Valley on Sunday, the neighbouring country’s Independence Day. High commissioner Abdul Basit dedicated the occasion to “Kashmir’s freedom”, deepening tension between the two countries.

Issue 680 (23)

16 - 22 August 2016

MUMMIFIED WITH SMOKE

The hidden mountain tribe in Papua where villagers mummified their ancestors with SMOKE and have kept their remains in a nearly perfect state for hundreds of years

By ASHLEIGH DAVIS Extraordinary photos have emerged showing a tribe chief holding the perfectly mummified remains of one of his ancestors in a remote Indonesian village.

Dani tribe chief Eli Mabel is pictured holding the remains of Agat Mamete Mabel in the village of

Wogi in Wamena in West Papua, an island in the centre of Papua New Guinea.

The indigenous tribe, who live in a remote area of the Papuan central highlands, used to preserve their ancestors by smoking their bodies, which kept them in a near-perfect state for

hundreds of years.

The smoking mummification is no longer practiced, but the Dani tribes people still preserve a number of mummies as a symbol of their highest respect for their ancestors.

In recent years the Dani tribe has attracted tourists from around the world,

with some villages even showing their original customs and holding mock wars.

Every August the Dani hold mock battles with neighbouring tribes - the Lani and Yali peoples - to celebrate the fertility and welfare of the Papua province as well as upholding

Syrians experience freedom after US forces liberate Manabji from IS terrorists Thousands of displaced residents streamed back into the northern Syrian town of Manbij on Saturday after U.S.-backed fighters ousted the last Islamic State militants from their former stronghold, residents and U.S. allies said.

The U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) announced on Friday they had seized full control of the city near the Turkish border after the departure of the last of the militants, who had been using civilians as human shields.

RESIDENTS RETURN TO WAR TORN CITY Hundreds of cars and vehicles carrying families and their belongings flocked into the city from makeshift camps and villages in the countryside, where many of the city’s residents took shelter during the twomonth campaign, according to an SDF official and relatives who were in contact with residents.

“Thousands are coming back and shops are opening. Today is the first day life is returning to normal,” said Sharfan Darwish, spokesman for the SDFallied Manbij Military Council told Reuters from the city, adding they were

working to restore basic services.

SYRIANS REJOICE Pro-SDF news sites showed jubilant families who had been trapped in the city during the fighting talking about how harsh life was under Islamic State and its imposition of strict dress codes in public.

Their footage showed men shaving their beards and veiled women setting fire to niqabs they were forced to wear in public that covered their entire face apart from the eyes.

The militants were finally ousted after a deal was reached on Friday that secured their departure together with some 2,000 civilians, believed to have been their relatives, towards their stronghold of Jarablus near the border with Turkey, a Syrian from Manbij who is in touch with relatives there said.

It was not clear whether

those leaving were hostages or had left voluntarily, a Kurdish source said.

The SDF, formed last year by recruiting Arabs to join forces with the powerful

YPG Kurdish militia, launched an offensive with the support of U.S.-led strikes at the end of May to remove Islamic State from areas it controls along the Turkish border.

BLOW TO MILITANTS The loss of Manbij, occupied by Islamic State since

early 2014, is a big blow to the militants as it is of strategic importance, serving as a conduit for the transit of foreign jihadists and provisions from the Turkish border.

The operation, in which U.S. special forces played a significant role on the ground, marks the most ambitious advance by a group allied to Washington in Syria since the United States launched its military campaign against Islamic State two years ago.

Darwish attributed the speedy return to life in the city to a military and aerial campaign that he said spared many neighbourhoods where thousands of civilians had remained even at the height of fighting.

Despite intensive US bombing of bridges, several hospitals and a large silo in the course of the campaign, the city appears to have been spared the devastation of other cities in the Syrian conflict.

ancient traditions.

The people of Baliem Valley, the Dani, Lani and Yali tribes, were discovered accidentally by American zoologist and philanthropist Richard Archbold, while on a zoological expedition to New Guinea in 1938.

In the Dani tribe, the men

wear distinctive tribal attire, including face paint, feathers, animal bones and intricate penis sheaths named Koteka.

The women wear skirts made from woven orchid fibres decorated with straw and woven bags, worn from the head, named ‘noken’.

Pakistan will avenge Quetta massacre says President Mamnoon Hussain

Pakistan government will avenge every life lost to terrorists in Quetta, President Mamnoon Hussain said on Sunday.

“We are shocked at the Quetta terrorist attack and we stand with the bereaved families,” Hussain said whiled addressing the country on Independence Day. A suicide bomber killed 74 people in a Quetta hospital on August 8 “Every Pakistani feels the pain,” Hussain said.

“The blood of the innocent people will not go waste.

“I announce here, the government will take revenge for the blood of the innocent people.”

The Islamic State and a Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the suicide attack. Most victims were lawyers.

“Every visible and invisible enemy will be chased and crushed in order to establish durable peace in the country,” said the President.

He said the menace of terrorism would be eliminated from the country with decisive actions and renewed determination.

Issue 680 (24)

16 - 22 August 2016

This actionoriented week can bring promising results if you channel your energy into key goals and ambitions. The more willing you are to override your limitations, the more successful you can be. Tread with care on Tuesday, as a fiery combination could cause an argument or even a minor accident. This is one day when it pays to go slowly.

Feelings could be intense, yet you might keep them to yourself, which wouldn’t be such a good idea. The pressure could be explosive, especially on Tuesday, causing a bout of anger and frustration. To avoid this, it would be best to tackle issues as they arise and discuss them with those who need to know.

Not only will this help create a solution but can save you a lot of stress as well.

Your social life bubbles with excitement and opportunity. The more people you meet, the more your life opens up in interesting ways. It would be best to avoid cantankerous folks or those looking for trouble on Tuesday. Keep a low profile.

Mercury eases into Pisces and your career sector on Thursday, encouraging you to research your options, apply for jobs.

There’s plenty of activity in your career, kickstarting a new phase. If you’re looking for work, the presence of Mars encourages a proactive approach to getting what you want. Use creative solutions and try to stand out from the crowd and showcase your skills. Avoid impulsive moves on Tuesday, particularly when dealing with those in authority.

The desire for adventure continues to show up this week, spurring you to take up new challenges. An unexpected romantic opportunity could appear, disrupting your best-laid plans. Think very carefully about getting too involved, as it might not be in your best interests and could even have negative consequences.

Go easy regarding finances this week, as it could be all too easy to make the wrong moves.

Overspending or the unwise use of funds in general could leave you struggling at a later date. If you need to talk, discuss things with a professional adviser who can help set you on the right track. Tuesday is the day to watch out for splurging and melting your plastic.

Your relationships can be very direct and honest this week. An upbeat aspect on Monday could encourage you to melt the ice concerning someone you’ve admired for some time. You’ll need to be careful and sensitive to other people’s feelings on Tuesday. Even an innocent remark could cause a spat, leaving you hurt as a result.

There’s a pleasant focus on your romance sector, paving the way for some wonderful date nights. Use your leisure time to channel your creative skills, as doing so can be very therapeutic now.

You can make great strides this week where your job and career are concerned if you focus on one goal and work to achieve it.

The fun meter is set on high, with many opportunities for leisure and pleasure providing thrills and spills. Romance can also be a heady subject, bringing passion and intensity your way. There’s little chance you’ll want to make a commitment, however, which is just as well. Avoid dangerous sports or activities on Tuesday, when it’s best to keep things low-key.

It’s “all systems go” at home, with a chance that the days ahead could be fun yet disruptive. Unexpected events will mean that your best-laid plans may fall by the wayside. Avoid frustration if possible, as that will only make things worse. If you’re feeling annoyed or edgy, channel your energy into exercise or a long walk. Doing so will be calming and therapeutic.

Communication is fast paced this week. You may be busy closing deals, discussing ideas, and generally interacting with others. There’s a lot to be gained from expanding your network and meeting new people, as the lucky breaks will come rolling in. It would be to your advantage to avoid arguments on Tuesday.

An upbeat aspect on Monday can be excellent for attending interviews and meetings with a view toward getting results. Your ability to project a confident demeanor can go a long way to helping you succeed. Avoid impulsive spending on Tuesday, as it will certainly do more harm than good. Channel your energy into exercise instead, which will leave you feeling calm and centered.

Issue 680 (25)

16 - 22 August 2016

Technology New tool can recover smartphone data to help solve crimes Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have developed a new technique that could help law enforcement officials gather data from smartphones while investigating crimes.

The increasing use of mobile technology in today’s society has made information stored in the memory of smartphones just as important as evidence recovered from traditional crime scenes.

The new technique, called RetroScope, moves the focus from a smartphone’s hard drive, which holds information after the phone is shut down, to the device’s RAM, which is volatile memory.

“We argue this is the frontier in cybercrime investigation in the sense that the volatile memory has the freshest information from the execution of all the apps,” said Dongyan Xu,

professor at Purdue University, who led the research along with colleague Xiangyu Zhang. “Investigators are able to obtain more timely forensic information

toward solving a crime or an attack,” Xu said.

Although the contents of volatile memory are gone as soon as the phone is shut down, it can unveil surprising amounts of forensic data if the device is up and running.

It was discovered that apps left a lot of data in the volatile memory long after that

data was displayed, Xu said.

To uncover that data, researchers including doctoral students Rohit Bhatia theorised that

rather than focusing on searching for that data, the phone’s graphical rendering code could be re-targeted to specific memory areas to obtain and bring up several previous screens shown by an app.

RetroScope makes use of the common rendering framework used by An-

Linux operating systems vulnerable to cyber attacks Researchers from University of California-Riverside have identified a weakness in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) of all

Linux operating systems that enables attackers to remotely hijack users` internet communications.

Such a weakness could be used to launch targeted attacks that track users` online activity, forcibly terminate a communication, hijack a conversation between hosts or degrade the privacy guarantee by anonymity networks such

as Tor. To transfer information from one source to another, Linux and other operating systems use the Transmission Control Pro-

tocol (TCP) to package and send data, and the Internet Protocol (IP) to ensure the information gets to the correct destination. When two people communicate by email, TCP assembles their message into a series of data packets, identified by unique sequence numbers, that are transmitted, received, and reassembled into the original message.

Those TCP sequence numbers are useful to attackers, but with almost four billion possible sequences, it is essentially impossible to identify the sequence number associated with any particular communication by chance. The researchers led by Yue Cao, computer science graduate student, identified a subtle flaw in the Linux software that enables attackers to infer the TCP sequence numbers associated with a particular connection with no more information than the IP address of the communicating parties.

This means that given any two arbitrary machines on the internet, a remote blind attacker without being able to eavesdrop on the communication, can track users’ online activity, terminate connections with others and inject false material into their communications.

droid to issue a redraw command and obtain as many previous screens as available in the volatile memory for any Android app.

The screens recovered, beginning with the last screen the app displayed, are presented in the order they were seen previously.

“Anything that was shown on the screen at the time of use is indicated by the recovered screens, offering investigators a litany of information,” Xu said.

In testing, RetroScope recovered anywhere from three to 11 previous screens in 15 different apps, an average of five pages per app.

The apps ranged from popular social media platforms Facebook and Instagram to more privacy-conscious apps and others.

“We feel without exaggeration that this technology really represents a new paradigm in smart phone forensics,” Xu said.

“It is very different from all the existing methodologies for analysing both hard drives and volatile memories,” he said.

Gmail to be more secure; users to get alerts on unauthenticated senders

Opening the email of an unknown sender has always been a matter of dilemma. Sometimes you can’t avoid these emails because they could be important for you. But soon, you will get over with this dilemma, as Google will roll out a new security feature on Gmail that will alert you if you recieve mail from unauthenticated senders.

Google in its blogpost wrote, Starting this week, we’re introducing two new security warnings in Gmail to help you keep your email safer.

1. On the web or Android, if you receive a message that can’t be authenticated with either Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or DKIM, you’ll see a question mark in place of the sender’s pro-

file photo, corporate logo, or avatar.

2. On the web, if you receive a message with a link to a dangerous site known for phishing, malware, and Unwanted Software, you’ll begin to see warnings when you click on the link. These warnings are an extension of the Safe Browsing protection available to various web browsers today.

However Google has also added that not all affected email will “necessarily be dangerous”. It said, “we encourage you to be extra careful about replying to, or clicking on links in messages that you’re not sure about. And with these updates, you’ll have the tools to make these kinds of decisions.”

Facebook blocks adblockers Know what it means for you In a move seen in favour of publishers, social media giant Facebook on Tuesday introduced a technology by which the advertisements on the platform would bypass the adblockers on desktop browsers making it harder for people to avoid seeing them. The Menlo Parkheadquartered company has also asked its users to identify which ads they do not like to allow the firm to collect in-depth information for marketers. Facebook commissioned a research to investigate why 70 million Americans and nearly 200 million people worldwide use adblockers, Tech Crunch reported.

According to the report, the main reasons cited for using ad blockers include

avoiding disruptive ads (69 per cent), ads that slow down their browsing expe-

tween people and businesses which adblockers prevent,” Facebook`s Vice

rience (58 per cent) and security/malware risks (56 per cent). “So Facebook thinks if its can make its ads non-interruptive, fast, and secure, people would not mind,” the report said.

“The rationale for the change is that part of the mission of the company is to create connections be-

President of ads Andrew Bosworth was quoted as saying.

“Ads on Facebook do not pay for Facebook for one person. They pay for a service that is free around the world. The participation of everyone really helps the global community,” Bosworth added.

Issue 680 (26)

16 - 22 August 2016

Syrian refugees invent app for Germany’s bureaucracy BERLIN Interminable queues, impenetrable paperwork, unpronounceable German words - the hurdles for any newcomer to Europe’s top economy can be daunting but now there’s an app for that, says a team of enterprising Syrian refugees. It’s called Bureaucrazy, after the often Kafkaesque process of getting housing, health care and a bank account, not to mention seeking asylum. The team is made up of six budding programmers from Berlin’s ReDI School of Digital Integration, a non-profit organisation that trains refugees in coding and entrepreneurship. Its first class started in February with 42 students, of whom 35 were awarded diplomas in June.

“I was shocked by the long waits in line and when I first arrived, I waited two weeks for a paper called ‘Kostenuebernahme’ - it’s a permission for staying in an apartment or hotel” at state expense, said one of the developers, 30-year-old Omar Alshafai. “Also when I signed the paper - it was in

German - we didn’t know what we were signing,” said Alshafai, who came from Damascus in April 2015.

The thicket of red tape facing Germany’s refugees was highlighted last month by a Chinese backpacker

who made global headlines after he accidentally signed an application for asylum when he lost his wallet. He was only able to sort out the mistake and retrieve his passport after spending 12 days in a refugee shelter.

Alshafai’s teammate Ghaith Zamrik, a 19-year-old from the war-ravaged Syrian capital, arrived in Berlin last

Christmas Day. Just two months later, he was enrolled at the ReDI school. “At the first session we were doing some brainstorming - we were discussing what problems we had and how technology could

solve these problems,” he said. “We had two main issues, the first was the language and the other was bureaucracy because we couldn’t understand it, how the system works here.” But while the market was flooded with translation apps, the team saw a potentially huge audience for technology that could offer

downloads of required documents, map the locations of relevant offices and address frequently asked questions.

The pair howled in mock pain as they recalled the German tongue-twisters necessary to open doors, with “Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung” (proof that you don’t own rent for a previous flat) among the most devilish. Even Germans they asked for help were often bewildered by the jargon of official correspondence, making their app a potential godsend for more than just asylum seekers. “We’re hoping to also help all the migrants, or anybody who comes new to Germany, with the bureaucratic system,” Zamrik said. The team started work in February and by early June had a successful demonstration at Berlin’s Startup Europe Summit. Anne Kjaer Riechert, the CEO and cofounder of ReDI, noted Germany had an estimated 43,000 unfilled jobs in the IT sector and that refugees represented untapped potential.

Podium to proposal as Chinese pair dive into marriage

RIO DE JANEIRO Chinese diver He Zi had a day to remember as no sooner had she stepped down from the podium than boyfriend and fellow Olympic medallist Qin Kai got down on one knee to propose. He grabbed silver in the women’s 3m springboard Sunday, but Qin - who won bronze in the men’s 3m synchronised springboard last week - won gold for bravery as he popped the question in front of a global TV au-

dience. Thankfully, she said yes. “We’ve been dating for six years, but I didn’t expect him to propose today,” said He, proudly sporting the sparkling new ring. “He said a lot of things, made a lot of promises, but I think the thing that touched me the most is I think this is the guy I can trust for the rest of my life.”

Issue - 680 (27)

16 - 22 August 2016

57 patients sue Indian-origin surgeon for 90-metre cigar for Fidel’s 90th birthday needless prostate cancer treatment London An Indian-origin surgeon is being sued by 57 of his former patients in the UK over claims he carried out unnecessary operations on them.

Dr Arackal Manu Nair, who it is alleged gave prostate cancer treatment to patients who did not have the disease, is also being investigated by the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC), it emerged on Friday.

The consultant urologist is also alleged to have given some patients laser treatment - a high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) - which was yet to be approved by the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice). The GMC has placed a number of restrictions on the doctor’s license until July 2017.

Around 170 men who had their prostate removed have been contacted by the Heart of England NHS Trust which runs Heartlands NHS Hospital in

Birmingham, where Nair used to work, according to local media reports. The surgeon, who also worked at Spire Hospitals in Solihull, near Birmingham, resigned from the NHS Trust in July 2015.

“We would like to unreservedly apologise for any distress this has caused,” a spokesperson for the trust said.

Swedish education minister quits after being caught drunk driving

Sweden’s minister for higher education says she’s resigning immediately from the centreleft minority coalition after being caught drunk driving after having two glasses of wine.

Aida Hadzialic told a news conference Saturday that she was stopped on Thursday evening by police in the southern Swedish city of Malmo with a blood-alcohol level of .02, which is illegal in Sweden. She faces a sentence of up to 6 months in

prison.The 29-year-old Hadzialic told Prime Minister Stefan Lofven on Friday about “my life’s biggest mistake” and decided to step down.

Born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hadzialic became Sweden’s first Muslim minister when she joined Lofven’s government in 2014. She came to Sweden at age five.

European nations are strict about drunk driving and have much lower allowable alcohol limits than the United States.

Lawyers representing former patients are now urging anyone who fears they may have suffered medical negligence to come forward by September 30.

Nair has also appeared on a television show in the UK called ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ as a medical expert.

He has not made a comment on the allegations so far.

HAVANA A Cuban tobacconist finished rolling a 90-meter cigar on Friday to celebrate the 90th birthday of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.

“It is 90 meters long, to commemorate 90 years of our comandante,” the maker, Jose Castelar, told AFP. The cigar is part of the iconic image of the communist former president. He was photographed in his younger days with one in his mouth while dressed in his military fatigues.”I

don’t think he knows about me,” Castelar said. “He hasn’t smoked for years, but the gift we are offering him is the hard work that we have done to commemorate his birthday.”

Castelar made his giant creation aiming to break the Guinness World Record for the world’s longest cigar for the sixth time.

He and his team worked 12 hours a day for 10 days to roll the cigar, which is the width of an ordinary one.

Cambodia’s ‘jungle woman’ returned to Vietnamese father PHNOM PENH A “jungle woman” who was discovered scavenging naked by a farmer in Cambodia nine years ago, was reunited with her father in Vietnam on Saturday, her adoptive family said. In 2007 the farmer found the woman caked in dirt, hunched over like a monkey and looking on the ground for pieces of dried rice.

She was taken in by a Cambodian family who identified her as Rochom P’ngieng, a girl who went missing in 1989 while herding water buffalo in a northeastern province that borders Vietnam and is home to some of Cambodia’s wildest jungle. It was believed she had spent some 18 years living in the jungle.

But nearly a decade later, a 70year-old Vietnamese man named Peo claimed to be her real father, saying his daughter went missing in 2006 - just a year before she was found - and has

a history of mental health issues.

In a letter given to her Cambodian adopted family last month, Peo said he recognised his daughter, named Tak, after seeing recent photos on Facebook.Rochom Khamphy, a member of her adoptive Cambodian family, told AFP she was returned to the Vietnamese man Saturday morning after authorities approved his paternity claim.”We gave her

back to his Vietnamese father.

Both my family and Vietnamese relatives cried while watching their reunion,” he said, adding that the family believed Peo to be her biological father.”We are going to miss her,” Rochom Khamphy told AFP, adding that the woman left his family with no belongings, only “the clothes she was wearing”.The Vietnamese father has agreed to pay the adoptive family $1,500 for taking care of his daughter.

Blazing toilet rolls help Australian medic plane land SYDNEY It was a bizarre sight - 20 toilet rolls set on fire and lined up in rows after being drenched in fuel. But for pilot Geoff Cobden, it was the

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only way he could safely land his plane in the dark of night in a remote area of Australia to help fly a critically ill woman to the nearest hospital hundreds of kilometres away. The flight on July 31 in northern Queensland state was a hit on Facebook when it was posted by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and highlighted the challenges faced by their teams, who are often the only way people who work on cattle stations - some of which are bigger than small European nations - reach medical help.

“This particular night, we got a call that there’s a patient. We discuss different ways of lighting the

airstrip and we came up with dunny (toilet) rolls as the best option,” Cobden, who was flying a Beechcraft King Air twin-turboprop aircraft, told AFP. The ill farm hand had been taken to

Burke and Wills Roadhouse, a service station some 250 kilometres (155 miles) or 30 minutes flight from where Cobden was based.

“They said ‘yeah, yeah’ we have

plenty of dunny rolls and so we explained how to set up... so basically soak them in diesel and they’ll burn for about half an hour, and set them up 30 metres wide.

“We say don’t light them until we get there. We’ve got UHF radio so we talk to them from the aeroplane once we are overhead and get them to run along and light them all up.”

Cobden said toilet rolls were a good way to light up airstrips if the cattle farms - some of which are about 10,000 square kilometres (4,000 square miles) in size - did not have working flares. The “absolute last resort” would be using the lights from vehicles, he added.

Issue - 680 (28)

16 - 22 August 2016

Bangladeshi boy with ‘old man’ illness baffles doctors DHAKA A four-year-old Bangladeshi boy suffering from a mysterious illness that makes him look like an old man has been admitted to hospital for tests, doctors and his family said. Doctors at a top hospital in Dhaka have agreed to try to diagnose and treat Bayezid Shikdar, who comes from a poor farming family, for free after learning of his plight on the weekend.

Born with excess skin that hangs from his limbs and face causing it to sag, Bayezid also suffers from related heart, vision and hearing problems.

His father, Lablu Shikdar, said numerous doctors have been at a loss to explain his condition.

“We sold our land to treat him at local hospitals. We took

him to religious healers and herbal doctors, but his condition did not change. This hospital is our last hope,” Shikdar told AFP at Dhaka Medical College Hospital this week. “We hope they’ll make him look like any other normal child.” Doctors initially suspected he suffered from progeria which causes rapid and premature ageing shortly after birth, leading to severe health complications. The extremely rare genetic disorder was the subject of Hollywood movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” starring Brad Pitt. But doctors at the Dhaka hospital expressed caution, saying extensive tests were needed. “In progeria, the ageing process accelerates with time,” Abul Kalam, head of the hospital’s burns and plastic surgery unit, told AFP on

Parents insisting on vegan diet for children may risk going to jail in Italy

London If parliamentarian Elvira Savino has her way, Italian parents who insist on a vegan diet for their children will risk up to four years in jail.Savino, from the conservative Forza Italia party, has put forward a law that would hold parents legally responsible for feeding their children on “a diet devoid of elements essential for healthy and balanced growth”, according to its text.”I have nothing against vegans or veganism as long as it is a free choice by adults,” she told Reuters in a telephone interview on Wednesday, days after she presented the proposed law in the lower house Chamber of Deputies.”I just find it absurd that some parents are allowed to impose their will on children in an almost fanatical, religious way, often without proper scientific knowledge or medical consultation,” she said.”Do-ityourself on these matters terrorizes me.”Some pediatricians advise against feeding children on a vegan diet,

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which they say can lack sufficient nutrition. Vegetarians do not eat meat, fish, or poultry and vegans also do not eat animal products such as eggs and dairy foods.The law proposes jail sentences of a year for raising a child on a vegan diet, up to four years if the child develops a permanent health problem and up to seven years if the child dies as a result.It would apply to children under 16 and penalties would increase by a year if the child is under three.Savino, 39, who has a seven-year-old son and who eats meat “but not too much”, said she proposed the law after being shocked by several recent incidents in Italy.Last month in the northern city of Milan, doctors determined that a oneyear-old boy who was taken to a hospital had the weight of a three-month-old because of a vegan diet. In 2015, an Italian court ordered a divorced mother to stop raising her 12-year-old son on a vegan diet after the boy’s father filed a complaint that it was stunting his growth.”If even only one child ends up in a hospital because of this behavior, I feel we have to protect them all,” said Savino, noting that she believes pediatricians should be obliged to report vegan parents to authorities just as they would if they noticed signs of physical abuse on a child.The draft will be discussed by parliamentary committees before it goes to the floor for debate. That is expected this year.

Monday.

“But Bayezid’s parents have said the ageing of their boy has been halted recently. He has shown signs of improvement.

“We’re investigating his condition. In addition to loose skin, he has problems in his heart, ear, eyes and penis.”

Doctors said his genetic condition may also be the result of inbreeding, with marriage among relatives including first cousins common in Bangladesh’s rural areas.

Bayezid’s mother, Khatun, stressed that her son was just like any other child.

“He is very fond of fish and rice.

He plays football and hide and seek with his cousins,” she told AFP after her son’s case was highlighted in Bangladesh media on the weekend.

“When I first saw him he looked

like a bundle of skin. We had no idea what he was afflicted with.

We thought the condition would go away soon.”

“He is an extremely talented boy.

There are days he grabs books and wants to go to school. But

we thought he’s still too young.” Doctors at the same hospital have also been treating a 26-year-old father dubbed “Tree Man” for the rare and massive bark-like growths on his hands and feet.

Hunt for Nazi ‘gold train’ resumes in Poland

WALBRZYCH Treasure hunters on Friday relaunched their search for a lost Nazi gold train allegedly loaded with loot and buried in southwestern Poland, despite there being no scientific evidence it exists.

“The train isn’t a needle in a haystack, if it’s there, we’ll find it,” project spokesman Andrzej Gaik told AFP. The story sparked a global media frenzy last August when two men claimed to have discovered an armoured Nazi-era train using ground-penetrating radar near the city of Walbrzych.

At the time, Piotr Koper, a Pole, and German national Andreas Richter said they had discovered several train carriages measuring a total of 98 metres (320 feet) which were buried some eight to nine metres (26 to 28 foot) underground.

They said they believed the contents were mostly weapon prototypes, though local legend spoke of artwork, jewels and gold stolen by the Nazis. The Nazis made prisoners of war dig a network of tunnels in the area, and some locals have claimed the Germans tried to spirit the gold away as Russia’s Red Army closed in. But so far there has been little to back up the claims, with geologists from

Krakow’s prestigious AGH University of Science and Technology finding no evidence for the train’s existence during tests run in December.

Professor Janusz Madej said at the time he was “100 percent sure there is no train... maybe a tunnel” based on magnetic, gravimetric and geo-radar studies.

It has done little to dampen the treasure hunters’ enthusiasm.

“Even if we find a tunnel, that’ll also be a success. The train could be hidden in it,” Gaik said on Friday. As the search began, Koper said he hoped to have answers within a week. “It should all be clear by Thursday” next week, he told Poland’s TVP public news channel as his

team began clearing the area of vegetation. He said they would sweep the area with geo-radar on Monday before diggers move in on Tuesday.

“We’ll dig down six metres in three areas along a 100-metre stretch of the old railway tracks,” Gaik said. News about the alleged discovery of the gold train made headlines around the globe last year, triggering an influx of treasure hunters to the site. The intrigue has been further fuelled by the site’s proximity to a massive network of secret underground tunnels built by the Nazis, some of which are around the massive Ksiaz Castle where legend has it the Third Reich stashed looted valuables.

London schoolgirl who left to join Islamic State dead: Lawyer One of three schoolgirls who left London in February 2015 to join the Islamic State (IS) has died, her family lawyer told Reuters on Thursday. Attorney Tasnime Akunjee said the family of Kadiza Sultana learned of her death in Raqqa, Syria, a few weeks ago. She was believed to have been killed by a Russian air strike in Raqqa, ITV News reported earlier on Thursday.

Sultana was making plans to return to Britain and her family

was communicating with her to discuss her possible escape from Raqqa, according to an interview published by ITV with Sultana’s sister, which includes recordings of purported phone calls between the sisters.Sultana, 16, along with two other friends, flew from London’s Gatwick Airport to Turkey on Feb. 17, 2015. The British home office and British interior ministry could not be reached immediately for a comment.

Issue - 680 (29)

16 - 22 August 2016

Australia accuses refugees of falsely reporting sexual abuse

Sydney Australia on Thursday accused asylum seekers held in Pacific detention camps of falsely reporting sexual assault in order to get sent to Australia, a day after a newspaper published leaked documents detailing abuse at the Nauru immigration centre.

More than 2,000 incidents, including sexual abuse, assault and attempted self-harm, were reported over two years at the Australian-funded Nauru detention centre, more than half involving children, Guardian Australia reported.

Immigration Minister Peter

Dutton on Thursday said asylum seekers were lying about sexual abuse and repeated comments he made earlier this year that refugee advocates were encouraging detainees to self-harm and set themselves on fire.

“I have been made aware of some incidents that have reported false allegations of sexual assault, because in the end, people have paid money to people smugglers and they want to come to our country,” Dutton said in an interview on Australian radio.

“Some people have even gone to the extent of self-harming and

Record new HIV cases in Philippines prompt call for action

JAKARTA The Philippines has posted a record number of new HIV infections, prompting campaigners to call on authorities to step up efforts to battle the potentially deadly disease.

A total of 841 new cases were recorded in June, the highest ever monthly figure since the country’s first reported case in 1984, according to the health department’s latest statistics released this week.

Over 90 percent, or 777 cases, were transmitted through sexual contact, the majority of them among men who have sex with men. Injecting drug users accounted for 60 new cases and the remaining four were cases of mother-to-child transmission.

The Philippines saw new infections double between 2001 and 2012, according to a U.N. AIDS agency (UNAIDS) report in 2013 which showed the epidemic was also expanding in Indonesia and Pakistan.

New cases of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

which can lead to AIDS have been rising in the Philippines, bucking the international trend which shows new infections falling.

“This is a cause of concern for us,” Gerald Santos from Manilabased campaign group Project Red Ribbon told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday.

“But to look at it with the glass half full, it also shows awareness is at an all-time high, meaning more people are aware of HIV and are getting tested.”

However, he said the actual number of new infections could be higher, as stigma associated with HIV prevents at-risk group from getting tested.

“The government should double their efforts in spreading awareness about HIV before it is too late,” added Santos, the group’s treasurer.

Increasing infections among injecting drug users sharing contaminated needles combined with low condom use and high fertility rates have raised concern over “downstream” HIV infections - when the virus spreads to people not typically at risk of HIV, like children who acquire the virus through mother-to-child transmission.

There have been 34,999 HIV cases in the Philippines since record-keeping started in 1984, with 83 percent diagnosed in the last five years, according to the health department.

Globally, some 36.7 million people are living with HIV, according to UNAIDS.

people have self-immolated in an effort to get to Australia.

Certainly some have made false allegations.” Under its hardline immigration policy, asylum seekers intercepted trying to reach Australia by boat are sent for processing to Australianfunded camps on Nauru, which holds about 500 people, and on Manus island in Papua New Guinea. They are told they will never be settled in Australia.

The harsh conditions and reports of systemic child abuse at the camps have drawn wide criticism at home and abroad.

Australia, however, has vowed there will be no change to the policy, which has been pursued by successive governments.

Australia says the policy is needed to stop asylum seekers dying at sea on the dangerous boat journey from Indonesia to Australia. Hundreds of people died attempting the trip in the years before the policy was put in place. Refugee advocates said the leaked reports show the urgent need to end Australia’s offshore detention policy and that asylum seekers must be given medical and psychological support.

Canadian dies after crashing stolen plane in Peterborough: Police

Ottawa A man was killed early Friday after crashing a stolen airplane on a roadway east of Toronto, police said.

The Piper PA-38-112 Tomahawk went down south of downtown Peterborough on the shores of Lake Ontario at 1:20 am local time (0520 GMT).

Images of the wreck showed a crushed nose and cockpit, and broken wings.

Peterborough police inspector Lynne Buehler told a press conference the man appeared to have been “attempting to land the plane.”

He was pronounced dead at the scene. It was unclear if he was licenced to fly or had any cockpit experience.

The aircraft was reported stolen

from a rural airstrip near Markham, Ontario, about 100 kilometers west of the crash site, said York Regional Police, which has taken over the investigation.

Canada’s Transportation Safety Board has also sent investigators to the site to determine the cause of the accident.

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Pakistani-British woman killed by former husband for marrying Shia Lahore The mystery surrounding the murder of a Pakistani-origin British woman has been solved with her former husband confessing to having killed her for marrying a person from the Shia sect, police said on Saturday.

Samia Shahid, 28, was found dead on July 20 at her parents’ house in Mangla area of Jhelum district in Punjab province.

“Chaudhry Shakil, the first husband of Samia, has confessed to have strangled her on July 20. He said he had a grudge against her for marrying a man of other sect,” said a police official.

He said police are also investigating the role of Samia’s parents for abetment to murder.

“It appears that Shakil murdered Samia with the consent of her parents who changed their statements to save the accused,” the official said, adding that Samia’s father’s different claims about her death were to cover up the crime.

Chaudhry Shahid, Samia’s father, earlier had claimed that she died of cardiac arrest and later changed his statement to claim that she had committed suicide. “He (Shakil) has been arrested along with the father of the murdered woman and further legal proceeding will be worked out,” another police official said.

Samia, a resident of Dhok Pandori village, some 230 km from Lahore, had come to Pakistan from Dubai in mid July

to see her ailing father and was allegedly murdered on July 20.

Her murder came over a week after social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch was strangled by her brother “for disgracing” family honour which caused international uproar forcing the Pakistani government to announce the introduction of strict legislation against those involved in honour killings.

Syed Mukhtar Kazim, second husband of Samia, told police that his wife had been killed by her family members for marrying against the will of her parents.

“My wife converted to Shia my sect before wedding which had irked her parents,” Kazim had said, calling upon the UK and Pakistani governments to ensure justice is done.

Police have registered the case against five accused, including Samia’s father, mother Imtiaz

Bibi, sister Madiha Shahid, cousin Mobeen and Samia’s first husband Shakil under sections 302 (murder), 34 and 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code. According to the autopsy report, Samia had marks on her neck, suggesting that she had been strangled.

Kazim and Samia, both BritishPakistani dual citizens, had been married for two years and were living in Dubai. A beauty therapist from Bradford, Samia had previously been married to her first cousin Shakil but the couple parted ways after divorce in May 2014. She then married Kazim of Taxila in September 2014 and both started living in Dubai.

“Samia’s mother phoned her on July 11 and asked her to come to Pakistan to see her ailing father. Samia arrived in Pakistan on July 14,” Kazim said.

Issue - 680 (30)

16 - 22 August 2016

Modern China’s historical hub Looking at the roaring, modern Xi’an that exists today, it’s hard to believe that this bustling metropolis of more than eight million people was once the starting point of the ancient Silk Road, a 6,400km trading route that linked China with the Roman Empire starting in the 2nd Century BC. But it’s exactly that history that gives this city one of its most interesting modern-day enclaves.

The introduction of Islam More than just a source of goods, the Silk Road brought new cultures and religions into China – many of which continue to thrive today. In fact, the country’s 10 million ethnic Chinese Muslims can largely link their religion back to the Arab and Persian traders that spread various elements of Islam as they travelled along the Silk Road.

Today, about 70,000 of China’s ethnic Muslims live in Xi’an’s Muslim quarter, a bustling district that palpitates with energy and character. Here, it’s easy to get lost in the mishmash of colourful alleys, chock full of street food, local produce, antiques and knickknacks.

A monument to Muslim architecture

Chinese street food, Hui-style

There are about 10 mosques in the city’s Muslim quarter, the oldest of which is the Great Mosque of Xi’an, built in 742 AD. It’s thought to be the oldest – and one of the largest – mosques in China.

A smorgasbord of Hui street grub, most of which is certified as halal (or qingzhen in Mandarin), is one of the Muslim quarter’s prime draws. While mutton and lamb are the predominant ingredients, Xi’an’s Hui people have incorporated Chinese cooking methods such as braising and roasting into their cuisine. Some of the quarter’s most typical dishes include chuanr (meat kebab skewers), oven-baked na’an (bread) and yang rou pao mo (crumbled flatbread in mutton stew).

It’s the perfect fuel for a day spent diving into Xi’an’s thriving Muslim history.

Mainly MainlyChinese Chinesearchitectural architecturalfeatures features Unlike most mosques in the Middle East or Central Asia, the Great Mosque of Xi’an has mainly Chinese architectural features, including a glaze-tiled roof, phoenix statues and Chinese pagodas. Hints of Arabic influence can be seen in the inscription of the Muslim declaration “God is one” in the One God Pavilion.

Open for visitors Today, the prayer hall in the Great Mosque’s Xingxin Tower sees up to 1,000 people for each of the five daily services. The mosque is open to visitors from 8 am to 7:30 pm each day, although nonMuslims are not allowed into the prayer hall.

The Hui people Many of the residents in Xi’an’s Muslim quarter are Hui. “We are ethnically similar to Han Chinese except that we practice Islam,” explained Zhang.

“We have our own food and way of dressing, but we still feel Chinese.”

An ethnic revival As we made our way through the Muslim quarter, Zhang Jie (my guide from China Odyssey Tours) pointed out other smaller mosques, often tucked between the alleys. They are hidden, he explained, because during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (19661976), many minority cultures were suppressed and Muslim prayer services were forbidden. During this time, China’s Communist party destroyed more than 29,000 mosques, burned copies of the Koran and paraded imams around with paint splashed on their bodies. The government began to relax its policies towards Muslims in 1978, and these days, the Hui people – descendants from Silk Road traders who married Hans – can pursue their religion openly.

“When I was a child, it was forbidden to study in the mosque,” said Zhang. “Now we have much more freedom of Islamic expression in China.”

Issue - 680 (31)

16 - 22 August 2016

Japan’s Abe forgoes visit to controversial war shrine, sends offering Tokyo

London Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent a ritual donation to a controversial Tokyo war shrine Monday, the 71st anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, but avoided visiting, in an apparent nod to China and South Korea.

Yasukuni Shrine honours millions of mostly Japanese war dead, as well as senior military and political figures convicted of war crimes after the war.

The indigenous Shinto religious shrine has for decades been a flashpoint for criticism by countries that suffered from Japan’s colonialism and aggression in the first half of the 20th century.

Abe visited in December 2013 to mark his first year in power, a pilgrimage that sparked fury in Beijing and Seoul and earned a diplomatic rebuke from close ally the United States, which said it was “disappointed” by the action.

He and other nationalists say the shrine is merely a place to remember fallen soldiers and compare it to burial grounds such as Arlington National Cemetery in the US. But he has since refrained from going and reactions by China and South Korea to Yasukuni visits by Cabinet ministers and lawmakers, while remaining critical, have become less intense. Abe sent the offering today as president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party not as

prime minister in an apparent bid to lessen any criticism.

Speaking to reporters, Yasutoshi Nishimura, a party aide to Abe who made the donation on his behalf, said it came from Abe’s own money.

“Personally, I offered my condolences to the spirits of the war dead who fought for the country,” he told reporters on a muggy morning in Tokyo amid the sound of chirping cicadas.

“We should carry on the path of a peaceful country and should never initiate war.”

Yasukuni Shrine also confirmed the donation. Koichi Hagiuda, deputy chief Cabinet secretary, visited the shrine as did Gen Nakatani, the former defence minister. But Tomomi Inada, Abe’s hawkish new defence chief who has been a frequent visitor to the shrine in past years, was on an official visit to Djibouti.

Speculation had been intense over whether she would visit, but the overseas trip appeared to provide a convenient way to avoid angering China and South Korea.Japanese media reported that Sanae Takaichi, a rightleaning member of Abe’s Cabinet, was expected to visit sometime during the day.

An official annual ceremony commemorating the end of the war will take place later today inside a Tokyo arena and be attended by Abe as well as Emperor Akihito.

MOROGORO They have proven their worth in detecting landmines but Africa’s giant pouched rats have a lesser-known but equally critical vocation saving lives by speeding up tuberculosis detection. It’s all in the nose, says the Belgian non-governmental organisation APOPO. Its founders, in 1997, saw potential for these abundant rodents with a sense of smell as keen as a dog’s but dismissed as pesty vermin - or a potential meal. “The biggest obstacle has been the negative perception that people have of the rat,” said APOPO director Christophe Cox, whose NGO has been based

in Morogoro in Tanzania’s eastern highlands since 2000.

Yet 83,000 landmines have been neutralised in Africa and

Canadian PM Trudeau joins Montreal gay pride parade Montreal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marched with thousands of people in Montreal’s annual Gay Pride parade, his third such appearance of the summer.

Large crowds along the parade route greeted the youthful politician whose popularity is soaring, as he walked through the city’s downtown alongside colorful floats, dancers and musicians.

Trudeau made history in July when he became Canada’s first sitting prime minister to participate in Toronto’s Gay Pride parade, and also attended Vancouver’s pride event.

Canada is “an open, positive society,” the prime minister said, speaking in French. “It’s an example that we should provide to the whole world.”

Among G7 countries he is the only head of government or head of state to have participated in a Gay Pride parade.

Government representatives from all of Canada’s political parties joined Trudeau in Montreal.

“It’s important that all parties

are here to recognise that the rights of the LGBT community are Canadian and human rights,” Trudeau said before the event, sporting a seafoam green button-up and white pants.

Two girls led the procession holding a banner bearing the names of the 49 victims killed in the June 12 nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida.

“The Orlando massacre was a dark moment, and it’s important to denounce these acts daily,” said Quebec Justice Minister Stephanie Vallee, who is

heading an action plan against homophobia. “We must fight against homophobia, transphobia and aversion to diversity throughout the entire country,” Vallee said. Trudeau noted that the government would focus on recognising transgender rights this year. His government unveiled legislation in May that would add “gender identity” as a banned grounds for discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, alongside race, religion, age, sex and sexual orientation.

Armed with knife, flammable fluid man attacks people on Swiss train, injures six London A man armed with a knife and flammable fluid injured six people in an attack on a Swiss train on Saturday, St Gallen cantonal police said. A police statement said the assailant was a 27-yearold Swiss citizen and that he was also injured in the incident and hospitalized, as were his six victims - three adults, two 17year-olds and a child aged six with stab and burn wounds.

It did not spell out whether the man was under arrest or provide any information on a possible motive for the attack, but did say a criminal inquiry was under way.

Swiss police spokesman says possibility of terrorism seems “very, very far-fetched”. The police is not ruling out the possibility of crime of passion.

“According to current information a 27-year-old Swiss man poured out a flammable liquid. He was also armed with at least one knife.

The liquid caught fire,” the

statement said. The attack occurred at 2:20 p.m. (1220 GMT) as the train neared the Salez station on a trip between Buchs and Sennwald in St. Gallen, a canton in the northeast of the Alpine republic, the police statement said. It was the first attack of its kind in Switzerland in recent memory. There have been a string of assaults on the public in neighbouring France and Germany, as well as Belgium, over the past 18 months, most of which were claimed by the Islamic State militant group and killed more than 250 people.

Tanzanian rats with nose for trouble train to save lives Asia thanks to the rodents, APOPO says, saving countless lives where explosives still maim and kill

up to 20,000 people - many of them children - each year.

Eyebrows were also raised when the group - whose acronym stands for AntiPersonnel Landmines Detection Product Development - branched out in 2007 to use rats for TB detection, under contracts with local authorities.

“When I first heard about this technique I was a bit shocked, but it proved to be quite efficient, in fact more efficient than the microscopy we use,” said Daniel Magesa, a doctor at Pasada Upendano Clinic in the capital Dar es Salaam which now sends APOPO’s Morogoro base some 200

human sputum samples every month.

Africa accounts for most of the million-plus people who die of TB each year and untreated carriers can infect dozens of others, making speedy detection essential.

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Issue - 680 (32)

16 - 22 August 2016

Palestinian wedding season can hit the wallet hard ABU QASH For Palestinians, summer is wedding season - time for brides and grooms to celebrate. But for guests, who are expected to help cover the costs, it can mean financial misery.

The tradition of “naqout” encourages those invited to donate cash to help pay for the often lavish feasts.

They pick up an envelope, fill it with cash, usually sign it and place it in a box strategically placed at the entrance.

Technically the donations are voluntary, but hosts take a dim view of those failing to meet expectations.

Some Palestinians see the tradition as a way to share the costs of important community events. But others say the social pressure to contribute

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pushes them into dire financial straights.

Murad Shriteh, 46, from near the West Bank city of Ramallah, said he feels swamped after being invited to more than one wedding a week.

He spent $400, nearly half his monthly salary, in just two weeks of weddings, he told AFP at a wedding party in the West Bank town of Birzeit.

“I have already received several invitations for the rest of August, but I think I will refuse a few,” he said.

The West Bank sees more than 25,000 weddings a year, according to Palestinian statistics.

Social pressures and tradition mean that most are extravagant celebrations, with much of the community invited.

They tend to involve mountains of food, live music and a photographer. The most lavish celebrations even offer each guest a traditional Palestinian scarf or a rosary.

A wedding can cost up to $30,000, while even a poor family may shell out $10,000.

That’s a major in expense in the West Bank, where more than a quarter of people live under the poverty line after nearly 50 years of Israeli occupation.The costs come out of the pockets of the

Pokemon hunt leads to glory for Google-born Niantic

SAN FRANCISCO Born in Google’s shadow, Niantic strode into the spotlight with a mobile internet spin on hunting Pokemon but can the obsession with the game lead to long-term financial success?

Niantic founder and chief executive John Hanke has told a story of naming the company after a whaling ship abandoned in San Francisco Harbor by crew members who rushed off to seek fortunes during the famed Gold Rush.

The ship was run aground and converted into a store.

The notion of such long-forgotten wrecks prompted Hanke six years ago to use the name Niantic to christen a quest to combine gaming, mobile mapping and augmented reality to playfully reveal virtual things hidden in the real world.

Niantic was a side-project for Hanke at Google, which had bought the entrepreneur’s startup Keyhole in 2004 and turned it into the free mapping

service Google Earth.

Hanke spent years as a top executive in a Google “geo” division producing widely used services such as Maps and Street View.

The gamer wanted to go beyond helping people navigate and have fun with the ability for mobile devices to detect people’s locations.

The entrepreneur toyed with the idea of launching a new startup, but instead kept Niantic anchored in the Silicon Valley technology powerhouse.

“Staying at Google gave us the advantage of being able to tap into the data we have at (mapping division) Geo and the infrastructure of Google,” Hanke was quoted as saying in a 2012 Inc. magazine article.

The Niantic project fielded its first offering in 2011 in the form of a mobile application called Fieldtrip that served up information about where smartphone users were or nearby places of interest.

family - traditionally the father of the bride. Naqout is a way of sharing the burden.

Khaled Abdallah, 50, recently celebrated his son’s marriage in a village near Ramallah in the West Bank. He splashed out $10,000 on the big day, but recouped the entire amount in donations. For him it was payback for decades of paying for other people’s weddings.

“The naqout endures because it is a part of solidarity,” he said.

Some see their donations as

investments, expecting similar sums in return when one of their family marries.

“It is a form of social security,” said Majdi al-Malki, a professor of social sciences at the Birzeit University near Ramallah. “It is presented as a gift, but it is actually a practical and useful way to share the costs of marriage.”

He said the tradition is a legacy of ancient Palestinian tribal society.

At some weddings, donations

are even exposed for all to see: the cash is triumphantly hung around the neck of the groom in the midst of the guests. “It’s a way to show pride, to show off the size of the donations” and to thank donors, Malki said.

But it doesn’t always work like that. One father who recently paid for a wedding said some guests had left empty, unmarked envelopes.“Thanks to video recordings, I could work out who they were,” he told AFP, speaking anonymously.

Competition brewing for London afternoon teas LONDON The popularity of afternoon tea has London hotels vying to attract a new wave of customers by inventing twists on the classic English indulgence although with tapas and takeaways on offer, some say the trend is going too far.

London’s Sanderson hotel won this year’s themed afternoon tea of year award for its Mad Hatter’s version, with every item inspired by the “Alice in Wonderland” story.

The K West Hotel and Spa has given theirs a “glam-rock makeover”, with tea-infused cocktails and electric blue teapots, served on vintage album covers.

And the Lancaster London has a takeaway version to be enjoyed in Hyde Park just across the road, plus an ARTea, delivered in a painter’s box with jam and cream in paint tubes and featuring “miniature edible paintings”.

“There is a lot of competition so you have to stand out from the crowd,” said Keith Newton, the founder of national Afternoon Tea Week, which takes place in midAugust.

“But you have to be careful because people do want the traditional,” he told AFP. “Sandwiches, scones, desserts: you can be creative within that structure but not stray too far away.”

Afternoon tea conjures up a bygone age of English aristocratic refinement, luxury and leisure. Attributed to the duchess of Bedford in the mid1840s, it came about as a way for the elite to fill the gap between lunch and increasingly late formal dinners.

It is typically served in three rounds on plates stacked on a holder: sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, and a selection of desserts or cakes - plus, of course, the tea.

“Afternoon tea was all about accentuating the tea: tea was the expensive product,” said Max “Mr Tea” Eisenhammer, of the Rare Tea Company, which supplies Claridge’s hotel and the Noma restaurant in Copenhagen.

He visits hotels to ensure they are serving the tea properly, through the correct leaf-to-water ratio, water temperature and

infusion time for each different tea. “We provide training. People who go to afternoon tea are expecting the best,” he told AFP. Newton said the afternoon tea sector had witnessed strong year-on-year growth, leading some outlets to try shaking up the formula in a bid to stay ahead. “For foreign visitors, it’s on their list of things to do - but most of our business is actually from people within the UK,” he said. “We’ve seen a big rise since 2012 when we had Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee and the London Olympics: there was a massive interest in all things British.”

Prices can cost from £10 ($13, 11.50 euros) to more than £50 ($65, 58 euros) at the top hotels.

At The Kensington Hotel in west London, the tea selection on offer includes silver tip jasmine tea from China, scented over six days with fresh jasmine flowers.

Issue - 680 (33)

16 - 22 August 2016

Islamic State resilient in Afghanistan despite leader’s death The killing of the Islamic State group’s leader in Afghanistan and Pakistan has dealt a major blow to the jihadists, but despite a USbacked scorched earth offensive the regional franchise is far from over, observers said Saturday.Hafiz Saeed was killed in a US airstrike in eastern Nangarhar province last month, the Pentagon announced Friday, as Afghan forces mount an operation against the militants after they claimed the deadliest attack in Kabul for 15 years.The death of Saeed, the second prominent militant to be killed in a US regional strike in recent months, is a setback to the group’s efforts to expand beyond its heartland of Syria and Iraq into Afghanistan and Pakistan.”The killing of IS leader Hafiz Saeed in a US airstrike is a major blow to the group, which will struggle to make gains without a strong leadership,” Kabulbased political analyst Haroun Mir told AFP.”But the IS threat in the region is still far from over.”The group claimed twin bombings last month that tore through

crowds of minority Shiite Hazaras protesters in Kabul, killing 80 people in the deadliest attack in the capital since 2001.The devastating attack in the capital represented a major escalation for IS, which so far has largely been confined to its stronghold in Nangarhar province, where it is notorious for brutality including beheadings.

Turning point But officials denied that it marked a turning point for IS in Afghanistan, saying the group has been under heavy pressure from both US air strikes and a ground offensive led by Afghan forces.The US military says the group’s nascent presence in Afghanistan has dwindled, with fighters largely confined to two or three districts in Nangarhar from around nine in January.But despite the offensive, residents of Nangarhar say the group is still maintaining its reign of tyranny in the region.”The offensive is going on and the government says they are winning,” a tribal leader in Hiska Mina, one of the worsthit districts in Nangarhar, told AFP.”But Daesh fights every

IS fighters free hundreds of civilians hostages in north Syria

Beirut The Islamic State has freed hundreds of civilians used by the jihadists as human shields while retreating in northern Syria, US-backed forces and a monitor said on Saturday. A source from the Syrian Democratic Forces, which pushed IS out of the city of Manbij this week with the aid of US-led air strikes, told AFP that some of the civilians were able to escape while “others were freed”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britishbased monitor, said that several hundred of the civilians taken were no longer held by IS. The SDF, an Arab-Kurdish alliance, launched an assault in May on Manbij, on a key jihadist supply route between the Turkish border and IS’s de facto Syrian capital Raqqa.

IS fighters seized around 2,000 civilians as they fled Manbij on Friday, using them as protection against air

strikes en route to the jihadist-held town of Jarabulus, on the TurkishSyrian border.

“Among the civilians taken by IS there were people used as human shields but also many who chose voluntarily to leave the town due to fear of reprisals” by the SDF, observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The jihadists, who have suffered a string of losses in Syria and Iraq, have often staged mass abductions when they come under pressure to relinquish territory they hold.

IS has also booby-trapped cars and carried out suicide bombings to slow advances by their opponents.

According to the observatory, 437 civilians, including more than 100 children, were killed in the battle for Manbij and surrounding territory. Around 300 SDF fighters died, along with more than 1,000 jihadists, it said.

night, and the insecurities have increased, not decreased,” he added, using the Arabic acronym for IS.Local tribal leaders say the Taliban, a stronger group than IS, has forged an informal alliance with the jihadists after a year of fierce rivalry in order to effectively combat government forces.”The Daesh and Taliban have stopped fighting each other and are both fighting the government,” said Malek Haseeb, a tribal leader in Kot, a mountainous district from where IS militants were last

month flushed out by government troops.

Informal insurgent alliance An army commander in Nangarhar confirmed the informal insurgent alliance but the Taliban have strongly denied joining hands with IS.The Taliban have publicly sought to appear as a bulwark against IS’s reign of brutality and as a legitimate group waging an Islamic war.The NATO-led coalition estimates there are around 1,500 IS militants in Afghanistan mostly disaffected Pakistani and

Afghan Taliban, as well as Uzbek militants and local residents of Nangarhar.The group has so far not announced a successor to Saeed.Afghan authorities erroneously believed Saeed had been killed in another strike in July 2015, when a US drone targeted dozens of ISlinked cadres in Nangarhar, close to the Pakistani border.News of his death comes after former Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in another US drone strike inside Pakistan in May.

Italy expels ‘jihadist’ for planning attack on Leaning Tower of Pisa

Rome Italian authorities on Friday ordered the expulsion of a Tunisian national suspected of planning an attack at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, according to media reports.

Bilel Chiahoui, 26, was arrested on Thursday after posting messages on social media praising those behind the jihadist attacks in Europe and saying he would attack the Tuscan city’s famous monument, a huge tourist attraction.

His expulsion order was signed by a judge Friday according to a police report, which said there was “evidence the Tunisian sympathised with jihadist extremism and IS,” a reference to the Islamic State

group.

The police statement did not provide details on the target of the suspected attack.

There has been mounting concern about the possibility of Italy being hit by “lone wolf”

terror attacks of the kind seen in neighbouring France and Belgium. Recent weeks have seen a string of suspected Islamists expelled from the country on the order of interior minister Angelino Alfano.

Two years on, Islamic State faces uphill ‘branding war’ in Afghanistan, Pakistan The US drone strike that killed the Islamic State’s commander for Afghanistan and Pakistan was the latest blow to the Middle East-led movement’s ambitions to expand into a region where the long-established Taliban remain the dominant Islamist force.

Islamic State (IS) has enticed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jihadist fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan to switch loyalty

and has held a small swathe of territory in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, where leader Hafiz Saeed Khan was killed on July 26 by a US drone, Washington confirmed late on Friday. But outside that pocket of territory, security officials and analysts say that Islamic State remains for now more of a “brand name” than a cohesive militant force in much of the region.

Issue - 680 (34)

16 - 22 August 2016

Twitter not responsible for rise of Islamic State, rules US court

New York A US judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Twitter that accused the micro-blogging site for the rise of the Islamic State (IS) terror group by providing “material support to IS” on its platform.

The lawsuit - filed by the family of Lloyd Fields who died in an IS attack in Jordan in 2015 sought to hold Twitter

responsible for the attack, accusing it for letting IS supporters and sympathisers use its social media platform.

The complaint alleged widespread fundraising and recruitment through Twitter, attributing 30,000 foreign actors recruited through IS Twitter accounts in 2015 alone, The Verge reported on Thursday.

“Apart from the private nature of

Direct Messaging, plaintiffs identify no other way in which their Direct Messaging theory seeks to treat Twitter as anything other than a publisher of information provided by another information content provider,” said the ruling.

Even the private nature of Twitter ’s Direct Messaging feature “does not remove the transmission of such messages

Dhaka Attack: Varsity teacher Hasnat Karim has been named as main accused

Bangladeshi court extended the remand of a British national by eight days and a Canadian citizen by six days for their alleged involvement in the Dhaka cafe attack last month that killed 22 people, including an Indian girl.

47-year-old Hasnat Reza Karim a teacher of North South University has been the named as the prime accused of Dhaka attacks. His lawyer Mahbubul Alam Dulal sought cancellation Hasnat’s remand. The court overruled the order.The police filed a case under the terrorism act against an unknown number of people , two days after the attack.

HASNAT HARASSED IN CUSTODY Hasnat was one of the rescued hostages on the day of the attack. He was questioned in a commando vehicle for his militant connection. After hearing an unsatisfactory answer, the police arrested him a month later and placed him in custody for 10 days which Monirul Islam, Chief of Counter terrorism unit confirmed.

The investigating officer Humayun Kabir sought custody

for Tahmid Hasib Khan, the son of Fazle Rahim Khan Shahriar the Managing Director of Altaf Multipurpose Farms who was also arrested under section 54 and placed under police custody.

TAHMID BEING INTERROGATED However, Tahmid, a permanent resident of Canada, has not yet been shown arrested for the cafe attack in the heart of Dhaka’s diplomatic enclave.

The 11-hour standoff ended after commandos stormed into the cafe and killed the hostagetakers. When asked for clues, the police remained mum. The

detectives doubted his etiquette and the relationship he had with his former NSU student Nibrash Islam. The detectives were suspicious of his movements during the attack.

DHAKA ATTACK AFTERMATH 32 people along with 13 rescued from Holey Artisan Bakery were brought to Detective Branch a day after the attack. After interrogating all the witnesses, all were let go with the exception of 2. Hasnat and Tahmid did not return to their families. Their families confirmed this.

After the Gulshan attack many people posted their opinions on social media about the Hasnat and Tahmid’s militant connection. A number of Facebook users quoted from mass media stated ,Hasnat was sacked from NSU in 2012 for having connections with the banned militant outfit Hijbut Tahrir.Though IS claimed responsibility of the attack and published photos of five militants in social media, police in Bangladesh claimed the militants were home-grown.

Islamic State sympathiser shot dead by Canadian police Toronto An Islamic State supporter was shot dead by police in a township in the Canadian province of Ontario on Wednesday after he set off an improvised explosive device.

Identified as Aaron Daniel Driver, the 24-year-old was attempting to detonate another device when he was killed in the confrontation in

Strathroy, Ontario, according to multiple reports.

In a statement, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said it acted after receiving “credible information of a potential terrorist threat”.

The statement added: “A suspect was identified and the proper course of action has been taken to ensure that there is no danger to the public’s safety.”

from the scope of publishing activity under section 230(c)(1),” added the California District Court judge.

Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act is commonly known as the “Safe Harbor” clause.

The clause protects online services from liability for speech published on their network, like a libelous statement in the comments section of a news article. The user who published the comment can still be held responsible but Section 230 prohibits legal action against the website itself, the report added.

The plaintiffs had argued Twitter was not covered by Section 230, adding that its continued provision of accounts to IS counted as an act of publishing or speech.

A recent report from George Washington University said that the reach of IS on the micro blogging site Twitter has stopped growing and slowly rolling back.

J.M.Berger, a fellow with George Washington University’s Programme on Extremism, and Heather Perez, a law

enforcement analyst, tracked a curated list of pro-IS twitter accounts between August and October 2015.

“We found that Twitter ’s increased willingness to suspend users and make other changes to its terms of service have measurably reduced the size and activity of IS support networks on the platform, including steady reductions in follower counts and tweets per day,” lawfareblog.com quoted Berger as saying. Although the terror group still maintains a significant online presence, there is at least a glimmer of hope that efforts to curtail them were bearing fruit, said the report.

“Individual IS supporters who created multiple accounts and saw them repeatedly suspended suffered a disastrous loss of followers,” Berger said.

The report finds out that the IS has lost significant broadcast capability since its Twitter peak in June 2014.

Still, there were more than 20,000 Twitter accounts supporting the group across multiple languages.

Afghan Taliban free crew of Pak chopper captured after crash

Islamabad Five Pakistanis and a Russian who were captured by the Afghan Taliban after their government helicopter crashed in eastern Afghanistan have been released and returned to Pakistan, the foreign ministry said on Saturday.

The Russian-made transport helicopter belonging to the Punjab provincial government was en-route from Peshawar in northwest Pakistan to Uzbekistan for maintenance on August 4, when it suffered a technical failure and crashlanded in the Taliban-held Logar province in eastern Afghanistan earlier this month.

The crew’s release was arranged through a handover between tribes in the border region, from where they were transferred to Islamabad by helicopter, the ministry said in a statement.

“The six member crew of Punjab government helicopter that went missing in Afghanistan on 4th August 2016 has been recovered and arrived in Islamabad today,” it said.

Whereas Pakistan acknowledges that it wields

some influence with the Afghan Taliban, it denies Afghan and US accusations that it provides support and sanctuary for the Afghan Taliban and its leaders.

Pakistan says it has been a victim of terrorism, much of it from groups based in Afghanistan, for years.

Initial reports after the crash indicated that there were seven passengers but foreign ministry spokesperson Nafees Zakaria said on Saturday that it turned out there were only six on board.

One of the seven people listed on the flight manifest had been unwell and decided not to fly, a ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

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Issue 680 (35)

16 - 22 August 2016

Daredevil Dipa Karmakar targeting gold at 2020 Tokyo Olympics Path-breaking Indian gymnast Dipa Karmakar is not disappointed at missing out on a historic bronze in the vault final of the Rio Olympics here and instead she is aiming for a gold in the next edition of the Summers Games in Tokyo.

“I never expected a medal from this Olympics but to have come fourth is very creditable. In boxing, wrestling you get a bronze even when you finish fourth but not for me. It was very close to medal. After four years, my target would be gold,” Dipa said brimming with confidence after her brilliant effort yesterday.

“For me this is my first Olympics. But I don’t need to be disappointed I will give my best in Tokyo 2020,” she said.

“I’m fully satisfied with my performance. This is my

highest score. But the medalists were better than me. Maybe, it was not my day,” a graceful Dipa said.

She said with some luck she could have got a

Whatever I had learnt, I managed to perform.

There’s been no better score than this in the two vaults that I performed,” said the girl from Agartala.

medal. “It’s my bad luck that I missed the bronze medal by a few points. But no problem, I never expected this fourth place finish in my first Olympics.

“I never expected a medal honestly. My first target was to better my scores in the two vaults, and I succeeded in doing that.

The 23-year-old Dipa, who had become the first Indian woman gymnast to have qualified for the Olympics, scored an average of 15.066 points, a mere 0.15 less than the eventual bronze winner Giulia Steingruber (15.216) of Switzerland.

The gold went to American

pre-event favourite Simone Biles (15.966) while reigning vault world champion Maria Paseka of Russia got the silver with an average of 15.253 points.

Dipa could have been in the reckoning for a medal had she not landed on her haunches in her risky ‘Produnova’ vault for which she is now known all over the world. Dipa landed on her feet but then sat down and lost points.

She scored 15.266 from her ‘Produnova’ with 8.266 points for execution for a difficulty level of 7. The average of the two attempts gave her 15.066, a mere 0.15 difference with bronze winner Steingruber.

“This is my highest score in Produnova, I had 15.1 earlier. I am very happy with my vault. I gave my whole effort to bring an Olympic medal for my countrymen.”

Lalita Babar feels she could have bettered her timing after the long distance Indian runner capped her fairy-tale journey in the Rio Olympics with a top-10 finish in the 3000m steeplechase final, here today.

“I’m satisfied with the finish but not with the timing.

qualification as she clocked 9:22.74 in the finals today, nearly three second outside her national record effort of 9:19.76 in the qualification on Saturday. Despite her 10th finish, Lalita’s effort was still the best performance by an Indian in a

with the performance as I feel could have bettered my heat performance,” said Lalita. At one stage she advanced to the fifth position midway into the race but in 25 metres she fell away gradually and was in 11th position before overtaking Courtney Frerichs of the United States to finish 10th. Kenyan-born Ruth Jebeth of Bahrain won the gold in 8:59.75s which is less than a second outside the world record timing of 8:58.81s. She was the preevent favourite. 2015 World Championships gold winner Hyvin Kiyeng Jepkomoi of Kenya took the silver in 9:07.12 while American Emma Coburn won the bronze in 9:07.63.

Lalita, who had clocked 9:19.76 to better her national mark for the fourth time since the Asian Games and make the final cut for the first time in an Olympic track event since PT Usha, revealed that the ‘Payyoli Express’ had wished her luck.

Gold spikes in his right hand, gold ring on his left middle finger, Usain Bolt lifted his arms in the air, the everlasting world’s fastest man. He clapped his hands, making gold tap gold. The adoring Olympic Stadium crowd yelled and chanted his last name. For once, and soon forever, he can move slowly on a track.

It was fitting that Bolt had already taken off his shoes.

In the 100 meters, he has nothing to prove anymore. The retiring champion, who turns 30 next week, became the first sprinter, male or female, to win three straight Olympic gold medals in the shortest and most contested event in the sport.

After he toyed with another outstanding field and crossed the finish line in 9.81 seconds Sunday night, beating Justin Gatlin once again, Bolt took his speed and his longevity to

Rahane enters top-10, Ashwin on top of all-rounders’ list

Indian batsman Ajinkya Rahane jumped three places to enter the top-10 in batsman’s list while Ravichandran Ashwin maintained his pole position among all-rounders in the latest Test rankings released by the International Cricket Council (ICC).

Rahane, who was 11th in

the last list, is currently 8th and the only Indian in the top-10 led by Australian skipper Steve Smith.

India’s Test captain Virat Kohli dropped three places from 13th to 16th place.

In the bowlers’ list, Ashwin and Jadeja were static at 2nd and 6th position respectively with Jimmy Anderson on top of the list.

a place that exaggeration can’t eclipse. For the fleetfooted, dominance is supposed to be fleeting. The world’s fastest man (woman, too) is a hot-potato title. It’s as if these sprinters get passed during their victory lap.

times under 10 seconds.

“That puts him among the legends,” said fellow Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake, who finished fourth. “You’re talking about Muhammad Ali and all those other guys. It’s not easy to do what he did over years.

Four years and four years and four years, it’s not easy.” Entering the race, Bolt had joined Carl Lewis as the only men to win 100-meter gold in back-to-back Games since the event debuted at the first modern Olympics in 1896.

When Lewis became the first in 1988, he actually crossed the finish line second, but the winner, Ben Johnson, was disqualified for doping.

The women’s 100 meters became an Olympic sport in 1928. Three women have gone back to back: Wyomia Tyus, Gail Devers and Shelly-Ann FraserPryce.

I could have bettered my Usain Bolt Goes Fast, Goes Long timing, says Lalita Babar And Goes Right Into History

Overall, I’m happy with a top-10 finish but could have bettered my timing. The target was to go below nine minutes 15 seconds,” Lalita said after her event.

Lalita failed to repeat her creditable display in the

track event after after PT Usha’s fourth-place finish in the 400m hurdles in 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

“I was trying to hold the lead pack but conceded the lead. I am not happy

But Bolt is different. He always has been, ever since the 6-foot-5 phenomenon ran a 9.69 in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, declaring his greatness with chest-pounding exuberance the final 20 meters of the race.

Two Olympics later, he still owns the 100, seemingly fewer than 10 strides to post

Issue 680 (36)

16 - 22 August 2016

CBI files fresh FIR against Mallya

New Delhi The CBI has filed an FIR under sections of criminal conspiracy and cheating for not honouring his commitment to repay a Rs 6,027 crore loan Mallya-owned Kingfisher Airlines took during 2005-10 from a consortium of banks. The complaint was filed by the State Bank of India on behalf of the consortium. This case is the second filed by the CBI after registering an FIR on the default of loan given by the IDBI Bank. The Enforcement Directorate is also probing Mallya, who left India on March 2 and is now residing in the United Kingdom, on charges of money laundering. Besides Mallya, King-

fisher Airlines and United Breweries Holdings Limited (UBHL) have been named as accused in the FIR. The State Bank of India and others had advanced various credit facilities to Kingfisher Airlines during 2005 and 2010, but Kingfisher Airlines failed to honour the commitments in 2009-10.

According to the FIR, Kingfisher Airlines did not keep its account with the consortium banks and it became a Non-Performing asset (NPA), the FIR said. The consortium then recalled credit facilities and also invoked corporate guarantee of UBHL and personal guarantee of Mallya.

Pokemon No: Can a place declare the game off-limits?

PARIS The global Pokemon Go craze has prompted a slew of complaints, from memorial sites arguing it’s disrespectful to play there to whole countries imposing a ban on the smartphone game. But is it really possible to declare a place a nogo zone for people hunting the cartoon monsters? Which places have declared war on Pokemon?

Sites that have expressed irritation at Pokemon Go players include private properties, government buildings, historic monuments and memorial sites. The museum at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and Japan’s Hiroshima memorial have all complained about visitors bent over their mobiles trying to catch Pikachus instead of contemplating the weight of history. Iran and Saudi Arabia have also declared blanket bans on the game.

The Iranian ban came days after its release last month, with officials saying it could be used for spying because the app

leads users to real-life locations - though youngsters are playing regardless, using VPN connections to mask their location. In Saudi Arabia, the

because a much-coveted Pokemon may be lurking nearby. Much of the game’s appeal lies in the way the Pokemon - little cartoon monsters in the

top clerical body has meanwhile re-issued a 15year-old fatwa banning Pokemon in response to the new smartphone version, saying it is too much like gambling and appears to be based on the theory of evolution, which is rejected by Islam. With other sites, there is a warning that playing could actually be life-threatening. In Bosnia, people have been warned not to risk entering areas littered with mines from the 1990s war just

shape of everything from goldfish to dragons - pop up around you, overlaid on your phone’s camera images. The game also encourages players to explore the world around them by making them visit landmarks designated as “Pokestops” and “Gyms”.

These could be anything from the local school to a major tourist attraction like India’s Taj Mahal.

At Pokestops players can collect the tools they need to catch the critters, while

at Gyms they can fight them against each other.

In both cases, the locations are designated by the game’s California-based designer Niantic.

The company used data from an earlier game called Ingress in which players could walk around the streets capturing locations on a GPS map. Niantic grew its original list of landmarks with extra suggestions from players.

A Pokemon can appear on your smartphone screen at any time, in any place.

The game’s algorithm places the monsters more or less at random - although you are more likely to find different types of Pokemon in different locations.

Fish-type Pokemons, for example, can often be found near lakes or rivers.

There’s no need to be right on top of a Pokemon to catch it - the system allows for a capture within a several-metre radius, meaning you shouldn’t have to drive to a screeching halt in the middle of the road just to add it to your collection.

4 starstruck kids run away from Russian artist gives his Havel prize home to meet Shah Rukh Khan, to group accused of killing police end up in rescue home in Gaya Gaya The dream to meet Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan in Mumbai went terribly wrong for four kids belonging to West Bengal, who now find themselves in a rescue home in Gaya, Bihar.

These four kids from Bengal’s Asansol district were found at the Gaya railway station early Saturday morning by the Government Railway Police (GRP). Later, they were handed over to Childline, an organization which deals with children and such cases related to them.

Sameer Ansari (5), Kaishil Awaad (9), Aakir Ansari (4)

CAUGHT

DRUNK DRIVING? CALL VICKY SINGH AT:

416-992-5489

and Arman (5) ran away from their home in Asansol on Friday evening and boarded a Mumbai bound train. When the train reached Gaya railway sta-

tion early Saturday morning, these kids got out of the train and were found roaming on the platform.

That is when the GRP found them and questioned them.

CRAZY FANDOM During questioning, they said that they were fans of Shah Rukh Khan and were going to meet him in Mumbai. The runaway kids, when further questioned about why they were going to meet Shah Rukh Khan, responded with an SRK dialogue, a dance step, a song from his film

and his unique style of laughing. One of the kids said that after recently watching Shah Rukh Khan’s Dilwale on television, they were fascinated by him and went crazy to meet the star personally.

We are crazy for Shah Rukh Khan and were going to Mumbai to meet him but at the railway station we have been caught by the police, said Sameer Ansari, one of the runaway kids.

PRESENT SITUATION These kids are now at the rescue home of Childline and arrangements are being made to send them to their homes in Asansol, Bengal. These kids say that are Shah Rukhâ fans and were going to meet him. The police contacted us and now we are taking them to our rescue home.

Arrangements are being made to get in touch with their parents and send them back, said Riya Kumar, coordinator at Childline.

PRAGUE A Russian performance artist on Monday gave his Vaclav Havel Prize to a businessman who promised to fund a Russian group whose members have been convicted of killing policemen.

Peter Pavlensky was awarded the Havel Prize for Creative Dissent by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation in May, for a performance in which he set fire to the main entrance to the headquarters of Russia’s FSB security service, successor to the Soviet-era KGB. The prize, named after the late president of the Czech Republic, “celebrates those who, with bravery and ingenuity, unmask the lie of dictatorship by living in truth,” according to the foundation’s website.

But the foundation later rescinded the prize and refused to pay out the accompanying $42,000, when the artist pledged to donate the money to attorneys of the group called Primorsky Partisans.

The group says it fights against police corruption and lawlessness. But

some of its members have been convicted of killing several policemen, who they said were Russia’s real criminals.

cluding the murder of two other police officers.

Pavlensky’s earlier performances include sewing his lips together to protest

Pavlensky said on Sunday he considered the Partizans worthy of the prize because they were opposing oppressive rule in Russia. “I can give the award to people who I think deserve it, those who are struggling with police terror,” he told Reuters.

Radio Free Europe reported last month that a Vladivostok court acquitted five members of the Partisans who have been in jail since 2010, accused of killing police officers.

But three of the five remain in jail for other crimes, in-

against the jailing of antiKremlin punk band Pussy Riot in 2012. He also nailed his scrotum to Red Square in 2013, a gesture he described as a metaphor for the political apathy of Russian society. Yevgeni Chichvarkin, a Russian millionaire currently living in a self-imposed exile in London, pledged to donate $42,000 for legal aid for the Partisans after Pavlensky handed him the prize, a statue of a woman holding a torch, at a brief ceremony on Prague’s Wenceslas Square on Monday.

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16 - 22 August 2016

Health Cutting down on alcohol Treating metabolic deficiencies content in beer can save lives may cut depression Identifying and treating metabolic deficiencies in individuals suffering from depression can help improve symptoms and also lead to remission in cases where antidepressant medications and therapy does not work, says a study.

Depression is a mood disorder causing a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. It is also one of the most common mental disorders.

“Unfortunately, at least 15 per cent of patients don’t find relief from conventional treatments such as antidepressant medications and psychotherapy,” said lead researcher Lisa Pan, Professor at University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, US. Depression is also the cause of more than twothirds of suicides that occur annually. In some patients, medications do not work because of metabolic abnormalities interfering with brain function, the researchers said.

The results indicate that there may be physiological mechanisms underly-

ing depression that can be used to improve the quality of life in patients with this disabling illness.

The study was inspired by a teenage boy with a history of suicide attempts

and long-standing depression.

“Over a period of years, we tried every treatment available to help this patient, and yet he still found no relief from his depression symptoms,” Pan explained.

The team discovered that the patient had a cerebrospinal fluid deficiency in biopterin -- a protein involved in the synthesis of several brain signalling chemicals called neurotransmitters.

After receiving an analogue of biopterin to correct the

deficiency, the patient’s depression symptoms largely disappeared.

In the new study, the team looked for metabolic abnormalities in 33 adolescents and young adults with treatment-resistant depression and 16 healthy individuals.

Although the specific metabolites effect differed among patients, the researchers found that 64 per cent of the patients had a deficiency in neurotransmitter metabolism as compared to none in the healthy individuals.

In almost all of these patients, treating the underlying deficiency improved their depression symptoms, and some patients even experienced complete remission.

“It’s really exciting that we now have another avenue to pursue for patients for whom our currently available treatments have failed. This is a potentially transformative finding for certain groups of people with depression,” Pan said, in the paper published online in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Beer is the world’s most widely consumed alcoholic beverage, however, its negative effects on health is something we’re sure everyone’s aware of. Obesity, heart disease risks and high blood pressure are some of the problems that

Among those aged 20-39, nearly one-quarter of deaths can be attributed to alcohol.

“The idea is that a small reduction in alcohol -- such as beer with four per cent ethanol content versus six per cent -- would reduce

related chronic diseases that develop over time, such as liver cirrhosis or cancer. A key concern, however, is that drinkers would notice the difference in alcohol content, and consume more to compensate or switch to other

drinkers and/or beer lovers might face if they over-indulge in the alcoholic beverage, since the alcohol content is high. Long term effects can also prove fatal. Now, a new study has found that reducing the alcohol content in beer as well as other alcoholic beverages to an extent can decrease its harmful effects. As per the World Health Organisation (WHO), alcohol accounts for significant death and disability worldwide.

alcohol intake per drinker even if the same overall amount of beverage is consumed,” said lead author Jurgen Rehm from Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Canada.

A decrease in ethanol, the most harmful ingredient in alcoholic beverages, would be expected to lead to lower blood alcohol levels in drinkers. And this could reduce immediate harms such as injuries or accidents, as well as alcohol-

beverages with more alcohol. So the researchers searched for studies and reviews on all of these points.

The researchers found that such concerns around drinkers’ behaviours were not warranted. “We know from experiments that consumers can’t distinguish between beers of different strengths,” Rehm said.

The review was published in the journal Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology.

Mother’s gestational diabetes may cause obesity in pre-teens Mothers who suffer from gestational diabetes during pregnancy may lead to an increased risk of obesity in pre-teens, according to a study.

The new research published in the journal Diabetologia suggested that prenatal, perinatal and postnatal environmental factors impact childhood obesity and intrauterine exposure to maternal gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) places offspring at an increased risk of long-term adverse outcomes.

The study is based on a multinational cross-sectional research conducted at urban and suburban sites in 12 countries

which included 4,740 children. The authors considered various factors like maternal age at delivery, education, infant feeding mode, gestational age, number of younger siblings, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, sleeping time, sex and birth-weight while doing the study.

While the prevalence of reported maternal GDM was 4.3 per cent, the overall prevalence of childhood obesity, central obesity and high body fat was 12.3 per cent, 9.9 per cent and 8.1 per cent, respectively.

The increased risk for children of GDM mothers

compared with non-GDM mothers was 53 per cent

for obesity, 73 per cent for central obesity, and 42 per cent for high body fat.

“The mechanisms by which exposure to diabetes in the womb increases the risk of offspring obesity are not fully understood. Exposure to maternal diabetes is associated with excess foetal growth in utero, possibly mainly due to an increase in foetal fat mass and alterations in foetal hormone levels,” said Gang Hu, Researcher at the Pennington Biomedi-

cal Research Center at Los Angeles in the US. In addition, exposure to maternal diabetes results in higher levels of blood sugar, insulin and leptin in offspring. Maternal prenatal GDM may also influence foetal genetics, thereby influencing the expression of genes that direct the accumulation of body fat or related metabolism, the study suggested.

“We found that maternal GDM was associated with an increased risk of childhood obesity among children aged 9-11 years from 12 countries, but this association was not fully independent of maternal BMI,” added Hu.

Issue 680 (38)

16 - 22 August 2016

Excess ‘good cholesterol’ may shorten your life Too much of a good thing may not always be better for your health. Researchers have shown that high levels of high-density lipo-

protein (HDL) cholesterol commonly touted as “good cholesterol” for helping to reduce risk of stroke and heart attack - may increase a person’s risk of premature death as much

as its low levels.

The research suggests that intermediate levels of HDL cholesterol may increase longevity.

“The findings surprised us,” said the study’s senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, Assistant Professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

“Previously it was thought that raised levels of the good cholesterol were beneficial. The relationship between increased levels of

HDL cholesterol and early death is unexpected,” AlAly said.

Cholesterol is a fatty substance found in blood that can narrow and block heart vessels, causing cardio-

Exercise may improve working memory in schizophrenia patients

Aerobic exercise can significantly help individuals improve the ‘cognitive deficits,’ especially loss of working memory linked with schizophrenia, finds a study. Schizophrenia is a long-term mental health condition and its acute phase is typified by hallucinations and delusions, which are usually treatable with medication.

However, current medications for schizophrenia do not treat the cognitive deficits including poor memory, impaired information processing and loss of concentration linked with schizophrenia.

“Cognitive deficits are one aspect of schizophrenia which is particularly problematic. They hinder recovery and impact negatively upon people’s ability to

function in work and social situations,” said Joseph Firth from the University of Manchester in Britain.

The findings showed that nearly 12 weeks of aerobic exercise training can significantly improve patients’ ability to understand social situations, their attention spans and their ‘working memory’ - or how much information they can hold in mind at one time.

Patients who are treated with aerobic exercise programmes, such as treadmills and exercise bikes, in combination with their medication, will improve their overall brain functioning more than those treated with medications alone.

Further, the study also found evidence that programmes which used

greater amount of exercise, and those which were most successful for improving fitness, had the greatest effects on cognitive functioning, the researchers said.

“The study presents the first large-scale evidence supporting the use of physical exercise to treat the neurocognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia,” Firth added.

“Using exercise from the earliest stages of the illness could reduce the likelihood of long-term disability, and facilitate full, functional recovery for patients,” Firth said.

For the study, published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, the team combined data from 10 independent clinical trials with a total of 385 patients with schizophrenia.

vascular disease and stroke.

For years, HDL cholesterol has been credited with helping to remove plaquebuilding “bad cholesterol” from arteries.

For this study, researchers studied kidney function and HDL cholesterol levels in more than 1.7 million male veterans from October 2003 through September 2004. Researchers then followed participants until September 2013. In the study, published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, the researchers showed that both high and low HDL cholesterol levels were associated with an increased risk of dying among study participants with all levels of kidney function.

“Too low and too high are both associated with higher risk of death,” Al-Aly said.

Whether maintaining intermediate HDL cholesterol levels may increase longevity will need to be explored in future studies, AlAly said.

Want a healthy brain?

Avoid these things!

We need to take special care of our brain as it is one of the most delicate organs of your body. One should eat the right food as it is very necessary for physical as well as mental health. But there are some foods that can kill our brain cells.

Avoid smoking as it can kill your brain cells as cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide. It is a potentially lethal gas as it attaches to the heme part of our blood and also does not allow it to carry oxygen to other organs including our brain.

Alcohol Studies have found that

moderate to binge drinking can also damages our brain and also reduces the production of brain cells by about 40%. So, one should avoid or stop drinking alcohol.

Air pollution Air pollution can also damage our brain cell as it can cause persistent inflammation of your airways leading to the death of our brain cells due to lack of oxygen reaching the brain cells.

Pesticides Nowadays, the fruits and vegetables we buy and eat are laced with large amounts of pesticides and it has been known to affect our brain cells.

feet.

numbness and a tingling or burning sensation in the feet and hands.

Chronic kidney disease One of the symptoms of chronic kidney disease and patients undergoing dialysis also suffer from is burning feet.

Know the common causes of burning feet!

If you are feeling a burning sensation in your feet then you might be suffering from neuropathy which is usually caused by a nerve damage. Besides the burning sensation, some people also complain about feelings of numbness and a tingling sensation in their feet. And this condition is more common with people above 50 years old.

Here are some common causes of burning feet: Diabetes One of the most common cause of neuropathy in older people is diabetets.

A diabetics person can complain about an intense burning sensation in their

Alcoholism Even alcoholism is also a common cause of neuropathy as alcohol can damage nerve tissues.

People who are alcoholics are said to suffer from alcoholic neuropathy that could last for long periods if they doesn’t cut down on their alcohol intake.

Lyme disease Burning feet is one of the symptoms of Lyme disease. The disease is caused by insect bites, coming in direct contact with an infected animal or even from your pet’s saliva.

Vitamin B12 deficiency Lack of vitamin B12 in our body can also cause

Impotence?

416-992-5489

Issue 680 (39)

16 - 22 August 2016

WILD RICE WITH DRIED CHERRIES Ingredients: 2 cups wild rice blend, rinsed until water runs clear and drained 4 tbsp. unsalted butter 5 inner stalks celery, cut into 1/4" pieces, plus 1/4 cup leaves, for garnish, 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 small red onion, cut into 1/4" pieces 1/3 cup chicken stock 1/3 cup dried cherries, roughly chopped 1/2 cup roughly chopped parsley, plus 1/4 cup leaves, for garnish 2 tbsp. minced thyme Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste, 1 lemon Instructions: Bring 12 cups water to a boil in a 6-qt. saucepan. Stir in rice and return to a boil; cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes.

WILD MUSHROOM BREAD PUDDING

Strain rice in a fine-mesh sieve; let drain for 10 seconds, and then return to pan.

Cover pan and let rice steam, off the heat, for 10 minutes. Transfer rice to a bowl and fluff with a fork; cover with plastic wrap and set aside. Wipe saucepan clean and add butter; melt over medium-high. Add chopped celery, garlic, and onion; cook until golden, 10–12 minutes. Add stock and cherries; simmer until liquid is evaporated, 2–3 minutes. Stir in reserved rice, the chopped parsley, thyme, salt, and pepper, and transfer to a serving platter.

Grate lemon zest over the top; garnish with celery and parsley leaves.

Ingredients: Unsalted butter, for greasing 12 oz. thick-cut bacon, cut into 1/4" slices, 1 1/2 lb. mixed mushrooms, such as cremini, oyster, and porcini, sliced 1/4" thick, 2 1/2 cups whole milk 1 1/2 cups heavy cream 1/2 cup grated parmesan 1/3 cup roughly chopped parsley 2 tsp. minced thyme 6 eggs, Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste 1 (1-lb.) loaf country bread, torn into 1" pieces (6 cups), lightly toasted 1 cup shredded Gruyère Instructions: Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 3-qt. oval baking dish with butter. Heat bacon and 1 tbsp. oil in a 12" skillet over medium-

WATERMELON-BASIL COCKTAIL

PINEAPPLE AND PORK TERIYAKI SKEWERS

Ingredients: 1/2 oz. fresh lime juice 1/2 oz. simple syrup 4 (1-inch) cubes yellow watermelon flesh 4 fresh basil leaves 2 oz. tequila 1/2 oz. yellow Chartreuse Instructions: In a cocktail shaker, combine the lime juice and zest with the syrup, watermelon, and 3 basil leaves. Using a muddler, crush the ingredients and then add the tequila, yellow chartreuse, and ice. Cover and shake vigorously for 15 seconds, and then strain into a collins glass filled with ice. Garnish the cocktail with the remaining basil leaf before serving.

Ingredients: 7 tbsp. dark soy sauce 7 tbsp. mirin 7 tbsp. sake 1 tbsp. sugar 1 1/2 lb. pork tenderloin, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces 1/2 pineapple (about 12 oz.), peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes 1/2 small red onion, cut into 1-inch pieces 2 tbsp. olive oil Thinly sliced scallions, to garnish Instructions: In a small saucepan, combine the soy sauce with the mirin, sake, and sugar.

Bring to a boil over medium heat and cook until the sugar dissolves, about 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and let the teriyaki sauce cool completely. In

Manicotti Italian Casserole

Veggie Pizza

Ingredients: 1 pound rigatoni pasta 1 pound ground beef 1 pound Italian sausage 1 (8 ounce) can mushrooms, drained 2 (32 ounce) jars spaghetti sauce 1 1/2 pounds shredded mozzarella cheese thinly sliced pepperoni Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to boil. Pour in rigatoni, and cook until al dente, about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain, and set pasta aside.

Meanwhile, brown ground beef and italian sausage in a large skillet over medium heat. With a slotted spoon, remove beef and sausage to a baking

dish. Stir mushrooms, spaghetti sauce, and cooked pasta into the baking dish.

Sprinkle cheese and pepperoni over the top.

Bake in preheated oven until the cheese is brown and bubbly, about 20 minutes.

Ingredients: 2 (8 ounce) packages refrigerated crescent rolls 1 cup sour cream 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened 1 teaspoon dried dill weed 1/4 teaspoon garlic salt 1 (1 ounce) package ranch dressing mix 1 small onion, finely chopped 1 stalk celery, thinly sliced 1/2 cup halved and thinly-sliced radishes 1 red bell pepper, chopped 1 1/2 cups fresh broccoli, chopped 1 carrot, grated Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Spray a jellyroll pan with non-stick cooking spray.

high; cook until bacon is slightly crisp, 6– 8 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer bacon to a bowl. Add leek to skillet and cook until soft, 3–4 minutes; add to bowl with bacon. Working in two batches, cook mushrooms in remaining oil until golden, 6–8 minutes; add to bowl with bacon. Whisk milk, cream, parmesan, 1/ 4 cup parsley, the thyme, eggs, salt, and pepper in a bowl. Stir in bacon mixture and bread; let sit 15 minutes. Transfer to prepared baking dish and sprinkle with Gruyère; bake until golden brown and set, about 45 minutes. Garnish with remaining parsley.

a medium bowl, toss the pork with 1 cup of the teriyaki sauce and then refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

Light a grill. Thread pieces of pork with pieces of pineapple and onion onto wooden skewers, and then brush all the skewers with the olive oil. Grill the skewers, turning as needed and basting with remaining teriyaki sauce, until cooked through, 12 to 15 minutes. Transfer the skewers to a serving platter and let rest for 5 to 10 minutes. Sprinkle the skewers with scallions before serving.

Pat crescent roll dough into a jellyroll pan.

Let stand 5 minutes. Pierce with fork.

Bake for 10 minutes, let cool.

In a medium-sized mixing bowl, combine sour cream, cream cheese, dill weed, garlic salt and ranch dip mix. Spread this mixture on top of the cooled crust. Arrange the onion, carrot, celery, broccoli, radish, bell pepper and broccoli on top of the creamed mixture. Cover and let chill. Once chilled, cut it into squares and serve.

Issue 680 (40)

16 - 22 August 2016

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