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THE CONTACT WEEKLY NEWSPAPER ISSUE - 669, 31 MAY - 6 JUNE 2016 PH: (905) 671 - 4761

INDIAN GOVT NEEDS TO CHECK CYBER & BORDER SPACE

Digital jihad and cross-border infiltration of terrorists have been the two biggest challenges for the Narendra Modi government in the last two years even though there has been no major strike in the hinterland. But this, security officials feel, is just “good fortune” and no reason to pat each other's back.

However, the government has managed to get a grip on the situation in the Northeast. In a rare act, security forces last year crossed over to Myanmar and carried out an operation against the NSCN (K) soon after the group killed 18 Army personnel in Assam.

SECURITY THREATS In case of the Maoist insurgency, the violence is come down and the Centre along with the states is focussing on getting the rebels to surrender. There have been 400 surrenders already whereas the number for 2015 in the corresponding period was 150.

In the last two years, the ISIS threat is making security officials anxious even though the government has downplayed it. But the security establishment is alarmed at the high rate of online indoctrination.

In fact the government is trying to keep pace with the rapidly changing dynamics of ISIS that is

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making efforts to lure Indian youth.

A recent video featuring Indians who joined the group and focusing on India has worried anti-terror officials.

With no concrete mechanism to tackle this threat of youth getting swayed by terror handlers, who are radicalising them on the cyber space, is giving jitters to the security establishment. The government has put in place a countrywide counter-radicalisation strategy to ensure those brainwashed by ISIS ideology can be brought back to the mainstream. This approach has been successful and allowed intelligence agencies to approach the Muslim clergy and leaders to reach out to the community.

“Knee-jerk arrests have been discouraged those crossing a certain threshold moving from being radicalised to actually planning terror acts are being taken in custody,” said an official.

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Indian Govt needs to check cyber...

Continued from Page 1 While 49 youth have been arrested for alleged ISIS links, there are several who were let off after being intercepted and were

put through several sessions of counselling. The government has been successful in ensuring the return of many ISIS-bound recruits from the UAE using

diplomatic channels. Officials say monitoring the Internet is a tough task and there hasn't been a breakthrough in scaling up the mechanism or the technical

knowledge for it. A 24x7 social media monitoring cell is being planned but the plan is still at a nascent stage. “The Internet has broken geographical barriers and

time has come to use specialists to crack the online terror indoctrination,” said a counterterror official.

PREVENTIVE MEASURES The prime minister has taken personal interest in the strategy and wants a special team to be set up that will work on the challenges of digital jihad. While there have been no major terror attacks but the international border with Pakistan has been vulnerable to suspected infiltrations leading to a series of skirmishes between Pakistan based terrorists and security forces.

The attack on the Pathankot airbase earlier this year is a reminder of the critical gaps in the security along the border. In Jammu and Kashmir too, infiltration has gone up but what is also worrying is the increasing number of locals joining militant groups, especially after Afzal Guru's hanging.

40 Maoists surrender in Bastar

Forty Naxals, including a woman carrying a reward of Rs 8 lakh on her head, surrendered in Maoisthit Bastar after which the district collector gave Rs 10,000 to each of them as a goodwill gesture.

They surrendered in Jagdalpur, the headquarter of Bastar district, on Saturday. There were nine

Everest rescuers abandon recovery of Indian climbers’ bodies

KATHMANDU Nepali rescuers abandoned plans to retrieve the bodies of two Indian climbers missing on Mount Everest on Monday, hoping instead to bring them down next year, an expedition operator said.

The two men - identified as Paresh Nath and Goutam Ghosh - were near the summit of the 8,848-metre (29,029-foot) mountain on 21 May when they lost contact with the rest of their team. Rescuers found Nath’s body last Friday near the South Col, located at an altitude of 8,000 metres and marking the beginning of the “death zone”.

Ghosh’s body was also spotted the same day on the Balcony - a mid-way stop between the South Col and the summit, before strong winds forced back rescuers, Wangchu Sherpa of Trekking Camp Nepal told AFP. With the short window for climbing on the mountain now closing and bad weather setting in, rescuers said they could not recover the corpses. “Rescue workers have called off their operations to bring back the dead bodies of Indian climbers Goutam Ghosh and Paresh Nath because of bad weather,” Sherpa said. “We hope to recover (them)... next season.”

The cause of their deaths has not been established. But the “death zone” is notorious for its difficult terrain and thin air, as low levels of oxygen raise the risk of altitude sickness. The missing climbers were part of a team of four, one of whom - Subhash Pal - died after

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women in the group, Bastar Suprintendent of Police R N Das said. 19 Naxals from Darbha Division Committee (DVC) of Maoists, two from Kanger Veli Area Committee and 19 from East Bastar division and Mardapal Area Committee surrendered before the police, he said.

Subli Kashyap from East Bastar division, who carried a reward of Rs 8 lakh on her head, was among those who surrendered.

The Naxals of this division were accused of stealing ballots and ammunition during the 2013 Assembly polls, police said. Rs 10,000 was given to each of the surrendered Naxals by District Collector Amit Kataria as a goodwill measure, they added.

Everest this season after two consecutive years of deadly disasters that led to almost all attempts being abandoned.

Hundreds fled Everest last year after an earthquake-triggered avalanche at base camp killed 18 people. Only one climber reached the top in 2014 after an avalanche killed 16 Nepali guides that year. Despite the risks and recent disasters, Everest’s allure remains undimmed, with Nepal issuing 289 permits to foreigners for this year’s spring climbing season.

Mountaineering is a major revenue-earner for the impoverished Himalayan nation.

The successful summits this season is expected to boost the industry, which was left reeling after an earthquake last year BEIJING killed almost 9,000 people A Chinese city has banned high nationwide. school students from tearing up textbooks or yelling in hallways to relieve exam pressure, state media said. The ban, issued by the Xiamen Education Bureau, comes 10 days before the cooperation, which did not work,” National College Entrance Adisorn told Reuters. Examination. Almost ten million “International pressure concerning students across China sit for the illegal wildlife trafficking is also notoriously difficult, two-day part of why we’re acting now.” exam every year. High schools Officials from the Department of should instead provide National Parks, Wildlife psychological guidance, the and Plant Conservation China Youth Daily report said. said they planned to An “unconventional measure of confiscate and remove blowing off steam before the more tigers from the exam has prevailed in recent temple on Tuesday and years, with students tearing send them to a state- their textbooks into pieces and owned sanctuary. throwing them off the school Previous attempts to building. inspect the tigers have Some choose to yell in the largely been blocked by school buildings to cheer the temple’s abbots but themselves up as well,” CCTV in January and February said in an online post. Xiamen wildlife officials removed 10 of the officials also encouraged tigers. Thailand has long been a schools to let students relieve hub for the illicit trafficking of stress in a more “healthy way”, wildlife and forest products, the post said, without giving including ivory. Exotic birds, specifics. The exam, called the mammals and reptiles, some of Gaokao, determines if and them endangered species, can where students will go to often be found on sale in markets. university.

China bans students tearing up textbooks

falling ill on Sunday while the fourth member, a woman, was rescued and taken to hospital.

Subhash Pal was the third mountaineer to die on Everest this season after an Australian and a

Dutch climber succumbed to altitude sickness. All three bodies were transported to Kathmandu last week. Some 400 people, including more than 150 foreigners, have summited

KANCHANABURI Wildlife authorities in Thailand on Monday raided a Buddhist temple where tigers are kept, taking away three of the animals and vowing to confiscate scores more in response to global pressure over wildlife trafficking. The Buddhist temple in Kanchanaburi province west of Bangkok has more than 100 tigers and has become a tourist destination where visitors take selfies with tigers and bottle-feed their cubs.

The temple promotes itself as a wildlife sanctuary, but in recent years it has been investigated for suspected links to wildlife trafficking and animal abuse.

Wildlife activists have accused the temple’s monks of illegally breeding tigers, while some visitors have said the animals can appear drugged. The temple

denies the accusations.

Monday’s raid was the latest move by authorities in a tug-ofwar since 2001 to bring the tigers under state control. Adisorn Nuchdamrong, deputy director-

Big cats removed from Thailand’s infamous Tiger Temple

general of the Department of National Parks, said the team had been able to confiscate the tigers thanks to a warrant obtained a few hours before the operation. “We have a court warrant this time, unlike previous times, when we only asked for the temple’s

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“Boond boond taras gye asi putt dreyawa de” Swimming in an ocean with the whales and mermaids suddenly I felt a guitar playing in the sounds of the water waves. I tried to find the guitar and the person who was playing it but in vain.

Swimming along with the beautiful creatures like the mermaid who had long golden hair flowing in the blue water, torso and arms of a woman, and tail of a fish, the huge whales, different types of fish and other aquatic life forms. It all looked so heavenly, I was immersed in the feeling of euphoria.

Suddenly the voice of the guitar started to get loud.

I got up and switched off the alarm on my phone and covered my eyes with the pillow so as to avoid the rays of the sun coming from the window in my room.

I heard my mother calling out for me to come and have breakfast. So I got up to head towards the washroom and found that

there was no water coming from the taps. The first thing that came to my mind was that I would get late for my lecture. I rushed down, hoping that the water would be running there but my expectations, ironically got drowned, without water.

Frustrated, I went to the kitchen and filled some water from the R.O. system and brushed my teeth. While I had breakfast, water was running all over my mind. I needed to take shower and go to the department.

I live in the university campus itself and living in here have its own benefits, one being that you could complain about these things and the concerned person would be at your service in less than ten minutes. The plumber arrived and told us that a water pipe has got punctured and it would require about two hours to repair it. After this, one thing was clear to me that

I was not going to reach the department any soon.

I went upstairs, switched on the television set and started to shuffle channels.

One of the news channel was reporting about drought like situation in the Maharashtra state.

The news about the water shortage got my mind drifted back to a report issued by NASA which stated, “beneath north India’s irrigated fields, the groundwater has been disappearing. It is being pumped out and consumed for human activities, principally to irrigate cropland, faster than the aquifers can be replenished by natural processes such as rainwater.”

Clean drinking water is scarce and there are millions of people across the globe who spend their entire day searching for it.

Yet, people who have access to it, take it for granted and don’t use it wisely. The populace don’t

really care about it much.

The problem in India is that no-one in here has a far sighted vision, the people don’t do long term planning.

They don’t really react to a situation until it becomes a crisis. In fact same is the case with me, I haven’t had thought about it until now.

We waste water at every level, whether while brushing teeth or while bathing. We even waste it while washing clothes or in keeping the cars shining.

It is not that we shouldn’t do all this, but we should mend our ways of doing these things. For instance, we should not brush with running water or should not bath in shower and use mug or bucket for the same purpose. We should wash clothes but only when they really need to get washed and should wash our cars with a bucket of water instead of running water.

The worst scenario being that sometimes we waste water unintentionally, like the RO systems which are

installed in almost everyone’s home, has two openings from one the water comes in for filtration and from another the hard water goes out. For 1 liter safe filtered drinking water in the RO tank, 3 liters go rejected as hard water. So almost 60-70% of the water fed into a RO filter, is wasted, even though it could be used for washing clothes, cleaning kitchen utensils, floor moping, car washing, etc. This is one of the best ways to save water.

The rings have rung now and it’s time we should start thinking about it. Even the states, nowadays have started to fight for water.

Who would have thought that the people of Panj-ab (the land of five rivers) will have to fight for the water issues.

If we did not react now, to save the natural resources which are vital for the existence of the entire mankind, soon that day would come when we will

by Mahi Ahluwalia 9876655553 crave for even a single drop of water.

The irony being that the people residing in Punjab, the land of five rivers will not have water even for drinking, washing or irrigating crops. The water table is declining at an alarming rate. It is high time, the people and the government should do something to preserve water or else we would face the consequences. Like a famous punjabi poet has said, “Dil tutan hawawan de, boond boond taras gaye asi putt dareyawan de”

Rockets, mud and phalluses: Japan rescuers expand forest search for missing boy Parched Laos farmers pray for rain HOUA XEING In central Laos dozens of loud explosions pockmark the sky as men dressed in female clothing wielding large wooden phalluses dance, while others lubricated by the local rice whiskey simply roll in the mud. Welcome to Laos’ famous rocket festival, a raucous celebration and

merit-making ceremony in which huge homemade rockets are launched into the sky in a bid to encourage the

gods to send much needed rain. “My rocket went very high,” said elated San Pommati, a 42-year-old farmer, after his projectile arced across the sky leaving a fluffy smoke trail above the village of Houa Xeing, some 30 kilometres (19 miles) north of Laos’ capital Vientiane.

Eight hands stretch towards the aluminium plate it’s the first meal of rice this Iraqi family who just escaped jihadist rule

with traditional tattoos on her face.

She and her relatives reached the camp in Amriyat al-Fallujah 12

the city’s outlying areas and attempt to reach safety.

The Norwegian Refugee Council, which runs

in the Fallujah area has had in two years.

The tent has just been put up, a sheet of bubble wrap strewn on the gravel as a makeshift rug and the heat is searing but Nasra Najm, her daughter and grandchildren have a smile on their face.

“We had been dreaming of this. I wasn’t sure rice existed anymore, so when we saw this plate, we couldn’t believe it,” said the elderly woman

hours earlier, after walking through much of the night to dodge the surveillance of the Islamic State group.

Iraqi forces a week ago launched a broad operation aimed at retaking the city of Fallujah, one of IS’s most emblematic bastions, in the western province of Anbar.

The progress of progovernment forces has created a window for some civilians to flee from

several camps in Amriyat al-Fallujah, south of Fallujah, is providing shelter and assistance to around 3,000 people who fled over the past week.

Their stories give an insight into the dire conditions endured by the estimated 50,000 people still trapped inside a city which has been largely cut off from the rest of Iraq for months.

In Nasra’s tent, Maher Sabih, a tall middle-aged

TOKYO Japanese rescuers scoured thick forest Monday in search of a seven-year-old boy whose parents left him in mountain woods inhabited by bears as a punishment, in a case that has infuriated the public. The parents originally told police the boy got lost on Saturday while they were hiking to gather

wild vegetables - but later admitted they had left him in the forest to punish him.

The boy, Yamato Tanooka,

went missing in mountains on Japan’s main northern island of Hokkaido, which is inhabited by wild bears. Yamato, his older sister, mother and father came to a park near the forest on Saturday, but the parents became angry when the boy threw stones at cars and people, Japanese police said.

Starving Iraqis are risking all to flee Islamic State’s crumbling rule man explained it this way: “Look I used to weigh 103 kilos (235 pounds), now I’m on 71.”

All the newly-arrived displaced civilians from the Fallujah area have the same stories of being deprived of rice or bread.

“It was an ordeal over there. We had to grind the stones from the dates to make flour,” said Madiha Khudhair, sitting in her empty tent with her two daughters.

“It’s very sour, no one wants to eat that,” said the woman, who had been living in a village under IS rule near Fallujah.

Her sunken eyes, framed by a red scarf wrapped around her head, started watering when she recounted their flight.

“We just left it up to God, picked up our things and left. Actually, we ran. At one point, we spotted one of their (IS) trucks and we all crouched. Eventually, we made it,” she said.

Risk everything Rasmiya Abbas, a black-

cloaked elderly woman cradling her five-day-old grandson, said IS (Daesh) fighters would ration the population and keep the good food for themselves.

“A bag of sugar lately was around 50,000 dinars ($40). For the rice, they sometimes gave a quarter of a kilo, barely enough to

themselves,” she added.

All of the 252 families housed in the Fallujah camp that opened on Saturday arrived over the weekend.

In the sand-coloured tents all tethered in neat lines, exhausted children sleep in the shade to recover from their journey and shelter from the noon

make a meal for the children,” she said.

“We only had that dark barley bread. If you saw it, you wouldn’t eat it.

Daesh kept the rice, the good bread and all the best things for

sun.

Those who are awake fill plastic bottles from a water truck while others queue with their mothers in front of an ambulance handing out basic medicine.

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Cyclist and friend injured by Kangaroo bounding across trail

A woman and her friend were injured when they were jumped upon by a Kangaroo, while cycling in an Australian wine region.

Sharon Heinrich said on Monday she and her friend Helen Salter were cycling side by side along a tourist route in Clare Valley in South Australia on Wednesday, when she saw a large Kangaroo standing on a slight rise. She added that as they passed, the

Kangaroo bounded across the trail, landing with his long hind legs first on Heinrich’s left torso and then on Salter’s back. It knocked both of them off their bikes before hopping off, apparently unharmed.

Heinrich said she broke three ribs and will undergo surgery on Thursday for ruptured breast implants.

She also added that Slater suffered a concussion and whiplash.

White House on lockdown after suspicious package found: Official

Debt-ridden students opting for ‘sugar daddies’ to pay rent, tuition Candice Kashani graduated from law school debt-free this spring, thanks to a modern twist on an age-old arrangement.

During her first year, she faced tuition and expenses that ran nearly $50,000, even after a scholarship. So she decided to check out a dating website that connected women looking for financial help with men willing to provide it, in exchange for companionship and sex — a “sugar daddy” relationship as they are known.

Now, almost three years and several sugar daddies later, Kashani is set to graduate from Villanova University free and clear, while some of her peers are burdened with six-digit debts.

As the cost of tuition and rent rises, so does the apparent popularity of such sites among students. But are they really providing financial relief, or signing women up for something

more exploitative and dangerous than debt?

Kashani believes such sites are a “great resource” for young women, but others say these arrangements smack of prostitution and take advantage of women in a vulnerable situation.

Lynn Comella, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at University of Nevada Las Vegas, said that it is not unusual for students to turn

to sex work such as stripping, prostitution or webcam work to pay for school. But the sugar daddy sites are relatively new, and she says not entirely upfront about what they are really about.

These arrangements are more vague than prostitution— there is an expectation of material benefit but it is not always specified and sex is not guaranteed. Ron Weitzer, a professor of sociology at

George Washington University and criminologist with an expertise in the sex industry describes it as “prostitution light”.

“Sugar Daddy” arrangements have existed for ages, and it’s unclear if they are becoming more common because the phenomenon is not well studied. But experts say at the very least the internet has made these transactions far easier to arrange and negotiate. “It allows you to hone in on what you want,” said Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor of sociology at University of California San Diego, who studies online dating. “You could argue it is just making the market more efficient.”

Kashani says she sifted through many potential suitors before finding one she clicked with. She says she considers her sugar daddy one of her best friends and that they care deeply for each other.

India’s first draft anti-trafficking law goes easy on victims, tough on offenders

The north side of the White House was placed on a security lockdown on Monday because of a suspicious package, a secret service official said.

The partial lockdown on the Memorial Day holiday occurred while President Barack Obama was home.

Reporters were not allowed to leave the White House compound through its northwest gate and flashing lights from emergency

responders could be seen nearby.

The official said hazardous material checks were being made.

Local news radio station WTOP reported that one person was in custody, citing a federal law enforcement official.

Obama had visited Arlington Cemetery earlier in the day as part of the annual commemoration for armed services members.

No Muslim family should engage in birth control says Turkey prez Erdogan

No Muslim family should engage in birth control or family planning, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday, calling again on pious Muslims to have more children.

“We will multiply our descendants. They talk about population planning, birth control. No Muslim family can have such an approach,” he said in a speech in Istanbul

broadcast live on television.

“Nobody can interfere in God’s work. The first duty here belongs to mothers,” he said.

Women’s groups and opposition politicians have criticised Erdogan, a devout Muslim for telling women how many children to have and dismissing the Western idea of gender equality. He has previously equated birth control with treason.

Giving victims a different identity to start life anew, setting up a strong protection protocol for affected persons and forming an anti-trafficking fund are some of the key features proposed in India’s first anti-trafficking law.

Women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi said the draft Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill-2016 seeks to ensure that a trafficked individual forced into prostitution is not treated as an offender. “It’s very nuanced. At present, the law says the trafficked person and the trafficker are both criminals who should go to jail. With this, the

trafficked person will be treated as a victim and spared a prison term. The new law is compassionate towards the victim,” Gandhi said. When asked if the bill will pave the way for the decriminalisation of prostitution, Gandhi said, “There is a grey area that needs to be further discussed. Suppose a girl

has been in prostitution for 15 years… is she still a victim or a part of the trade?

In this case, does the existing Immoral Traffic Prevention Act apply to her or the proposed new law?

That has to be thought about too.”

The draft law has proposed a slew of stringent measures to check

Indian origin Nobel laureate says he did not like studying Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, has revealed that he rebelled against a career in science, which is what his parents encouraged him to pursue.

Ramakrishnan, who was knighted in 2012 for services to molecular biology, told an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales: “I did not like studying”.

Born in Chidambaram,

Tamil Nadu, Ramakrishnan was educated mostly in Baroda. “I read a lot, but not my text books,” confided Venki, who was elected president of the Royal Society in March 2015.

It was only after his mother

and father “gave up on me” that he started working hard and became interested in physics, he said. Ramakrishnan discussed his research at the sell-out event with science journalist Roger Highfield.

One of the most popular literary events, the Hay Festival (26 May to 5 June) is held annually in the Welsh village of Hay-onWye, which is also known for the large number of bookshops.

trafficking. It makes the act of giving hormone shots such as oxytocin to trafficked girls for the purpose of accelerating their sexual maturity and forcing them into prostitution a crime – punishable with 10 years in jail and a fine of Rs 1 lakh.

The draft bill also proposes making registration of placement agencies that recruit or supply domestic helps mandatory. Once it is implemented, failure to register with the respective state authorities will invite a fine of Rs 50,000.

“We will invite suggestions on the draft bill before taking it to the cabinet,” Gandhi said. At present, there is no single law dealing with trafficking. The crime is covered under different laws administered by at least half-a-dozen ministries. Nearly 5,500 cases of human trafficking were reported in India in 2014 – an over 50% jump from 2,848 cases in 2009.

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Hardly a dog’s life! Obama’s pets Bo and Sunny have schedules too It’s hardly a dog’s life of just eating and sleeping for President Barack Obama’s pets, Bo and Sunny.

The pair of Portuguese water dogs Bo with his distinctive white chest and front paws, and the all-black Sunny are canine ambassadors for the White House, very popular and so in demand that they have schedules, like the president.

beginning of the month with a request for their schedules and I have to approve their appearances.”

The dogs have entertained crowds at the annual Easter Egg Roll, and Bo has been at Mrs Obama’s side when she welcomes tourists on the anniversary of the President’s inauguration. The dogs also have cheered wounded service members, as well as the

“Everybody wants to see them and take pictures,” Michelle Obama said. “I get a memo at the

hospitalised children the First Lady visits each year just before Christmas. In a sign of just how

Paris attacker’s brother, 6 others on trial over militant training

Seven people went on trial in Paris on Monday accused of travelling to Syria to train as militant fighters, among them the brother of one of the militants who killed 130 people in the French capital last November.

The seven, aged from 24 to 27, face up to 10 years in jail if found guilty of taking part in an Islamist recruitment network and receiving training in Syria from the Islamic State (IS).

The accused, friends from eastern France, were part of a larger number who in December 2013 travelled to Syria, where two of them died.

All but one returned to France in early 2014. The one who stayed behind was Foued MohamedAggad, who took part in the three-man team that killed 90 people at the Bataclan concert hall during the multiple attacks in Paris.

Two of the three killed themselves by exploding their suicide vests and another was shot dead by police. Foued’s brother,

Karim Mohamed-Aggad, is among the seven accused.

The defendants told investigators they had believed they were going to Syria on a humanitarian mission or to fight Syrian President Bashar alAssad’s forces but not to become Islamist militants.

“I went there with one goal only: to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad,” Karim Mohamed-Aggad told the court.

Mohamed-Aggad urged the court not to confuse him with his brother. “You choose your friends, not your family,” he said. “My brother did what he did, he alone bears responsibility.”

The group’s defence team says the seven were duped and when they realised they had fallen into the hands of a militant network they looked for a way out.

“They were told they could be useful,” said Martin Pradel, lawyer for one of the defendants, told Reuters ahead of the hearing. “Their mistake was to believe the propaganda.”

recognised Bo and Sunny are, authorities in January arrested a North Dakota man who they say came to Washington to kidnap one of the pets.

Bo, now 7, joined the Obama family in April 2009. He was a gift from the late senator Edward M Kennedy, D-Mass., a key supporter of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign who became close to the family. Bo helped Obama keep a promise to daughters Malia and Sasha that they could get a dog after the election. Sunny, nearly 4, came along in August 2013. Bo already had a job as a “helper” to Dale Haney, the head groundskeeper at the White House, which happens to be a national park. “He leaves every morning and he goes down with Dale ... and he’s with all the National Park Service guys. And you’ll

see him, and he’s like walking around with them and looking at the plants,” Mrs. Obama said. “I think he thinks he has a job because he takes it very seriously. So if I go out and see him, he kind of ignores me when he’s with his worker crew people.”

The dogs have a pretty nice life. “They can sit on my lap, they sit on my chair, they cuddle with me,” Mrs Obama said. “I like to lay on the floor with them and blow in their face. I like to

make them run and chase each other. But they’re so cute, I just love to just cuddle them and massage them.” Presidential pets are always popular and many presidents kept dogs as companions. President Harry S Truman famously advised: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

President George HW Bush’s English Springer Spaniel, Millie, “wrote” the best-seller “Millie’s Book”.

President Bill Clinton’s chocolate Labrador

Retriever, Buddy, helped Clinton weather the scandal over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

President George W Bush’s Scottish Terrier, Barney, had an official web page and starred in “Barneycam” videos that were filmed from a camera hung around his neck. Like Mrs Obama, first lady Laura Bush was involved with the video scripts and the taping schedule.

Child sex abusers in Indonesia to face chemical castration Child sex abuse is now punishable by death and chemical castration in Indonesia after President Joko Widodo issued a new law following the brutal gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl.The battered body of the victim was discovered, naked and tied up, in a forest on the island of Sumatra after she was attacked by a group of teenagers in April. Seven offenders have been jailed for 10 years.

NEW LAW “Sexual violence against

said on Wednesday after issuing the new law. “We

children, as I have said, is an extraordinary crime,” President Joko Widodo

hope that this law will be a deterrent for offenders and can suppress sexual

crimes against children,” Widodo said.The law is effective immediately, although Indonesia’s parliament has the power to overturn it or demand revisions.

SAVING CHILDREN “These acts threaten and endanger children, and they destroy the lives and development of children for the future,” the president said.Chemical castration is a legal form of punishment in South Korea, the Czech Republic, as well as in some US and Australian states.

India has the largest population of modern-day ‘slaves’ India has the largest population of modern slaves in the world with more than 18 million people trapped as bonded labourers, forced beggars, sex workers and child soldiers, a global survey report said on Monday.

The Global Slavery Index by human rights organisation Walk Free Foundation said the number was 1.4% of India’s population, the fourth highest among 167 countries with the largest proportion of slaves.

“Existing research suggests all forms of modern slavery continue to exist in India, including inter-generational bonded labour, forced child labour, commercial sexual exploitation, forced begging, forced recruitment

into non-state armed groups and forced marriage,” said Grace Forrest, co-founder of the Australia-based foundation.

The survey said an estimated 45.8 million people are living in modern slavery globally and 58% of them are concentrated in India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.

The Gallup survey was conducted across 15

states and covered nearly 80% of India’s population, the foundation said.

The report coincided with the Centre unveiling a draft bill that envisages punishment for gangs involved in human trafficking and scrutiny of placement agencies, many of which are accused of forcing children into bonded labour and prostitution.

The Cabinet recently

cleared proposals to “address new forms of bondage such as organised begging rings, forced prostitution and child labour”. India abolished bonded labour in 1976 but gangs continue to trap people from poor rural areas with the promise of better jobs. Most of them are sold into domestic work, prostitution, or to brick kilns, textile units and farms.

The foundation requested the Centre to frame a policy for private employers so that they keep a check on bonded labour in their supply chain, an issue repeatedly raised by Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, who runs a campaign called Bachpan Bachao Andolan against child labour.

Issue - 669 (7)

31 May - 6 June 2016

First DNA from ancient Phoenician shows Europe ancestry MIAMI The first DNA analysis of 2,500-year-old remains from one of the great early civilizations of the Middle East, the Phoenicians, has

are known as the creators of the first alphabet, and inhabited the coastal cities, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad, in what is now Lebanon and southern

shown the man had European heritage, researchers have said. The mitochondrial DNA - or genetic information from his mother’s side - came from a man known as “Young Man of Byrsa” or “Ariche,” whose remains were uncovered in the Tunisian city of Carthage. The findings in the journal PLOS ONE suggest his maternal lineage likely came from the north Mediterranean coast, on the Iberian Peninsula, perhaps near what is modern day Spain or Portugal. Phoenicians

Syria. However, since their writings were made on papyrus, little remains except what has been written about them by Greek and Egyptian scholars. According to lead study author Lisa MatisooSmith, a professor in the department of anatomy at New Zealand’s University of Otago, the remains reveal the earliest known evidence in North Africa of a rare European genetic population, or haplogroup, known as U5b2c1. “U5b2c1 is considered to be one of the most ancient

haplogroups in Europe and is associated with huntergatherer populations there,” she said. “It is remarkably rare in modern populations today, found in Europe at levels of less than one percent.” The matriarchal DNA of the man, whose remains were found by gardeners working outside the National Museum of Carthage in 1994, “most closely matches that of the sequence of a particular modern day individual from Portugal,” she added. The discovery sheds some new light on the history of the Phoenicians, who are thought to have originated in Lebanon and spread across the Mediterranean.

Carthage was a prominent Phoenician port and trade center established by colonists from Lebanon.

However, researchers were unable to find any links between the ancient man’s mitochondrial DNA and that of 47 modern Lebanese people who were analyzed for the study. “Hopefully our findings and other continuing research will cast further light on the origins and impact of Phoenician peoples and their culture,” said MatisooSmith.

Child marriage shame: 30% Hindu, Muslim women tie knot before turning 18 New Delhi There is little difference between Hindu and Muslim families when it comes to marrying off their daughters at an early age.

Christian, Buddhist and Jain women fared far better, the census report on the decadal headcount in 2011 said. Only 6% of men were married before 18.

One in three married women from either community tied the knot well before their 18th birthday, making them vulnerable to not just higher maternal mortality rates but also domestic violence.

Official statistics on married Indian women released on Friday show 31.3% Hindu women and 30.6% Muslim women were 17 or younger at the time of their wedding.

Many of them hadn’t even turned 10. The legal age for marriage is 18 for women and 21 for men. Any marriage below the stipulated age is considered child marriage under the law. Sikh,

“It is shocking that decades after having laws prohibiting child marriage, the practice is still so rampant,” said Ranjana Kumari, director of the Delhi-headquartered Centre for Social Research. Data released by the home ministry’s census commissioner revealed 6% of all Hindu women were married before they turned 10. The corresponding figure for Muslim women was 5%.

But the silver lining is that the practice is on the decline. The 2001 census found 43% of women were married before 18 years of age. In 2011, the figure stood at 30%. And the

proportion of women wed before 18 years of age between 2001 and 2011 was 20%. In absolute terms, this still means there were 15 million child marriages in the last decade. Kumari said the decline would have been sharper if the law on child marriage was strictly enforced. In 2014, for instance, police registered only 280 cases across the country under the 2006 Prohibition of Child Marriage Act. Of the 103 cases decided by courts the same year, convictions were secured in only 15 or 14.6% cases. India has long outlawed child marriage but was unable to enforce the law that was first enacted by the British in 1929. The Child Marriage Restraint Act fixed the age of marriage for girls at 14, and boys at 18 years. It was last raised to 18 years for girls in 2006. The Unicef calls child marriage a “death sentence” for young girls as they are more likely to bear children before they are physically ready.

Studies show girls who give birth before turning 15 and the infants of child mothers are at greater risk.

Lincoln anti-slavery documents sell for $4.57m in NY NEW YORK Two documents signed by Abraham Lincoln in his drive to abolish slavery in the 19th century have sold for more than $4.5 million in New York. Limited edition copies of the Emancipation Proclamation delivered on January 1, 1863 and the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery two years later, were issued by the man many still consider the greatest US president.

Sotheby’s, which conducted the sale on Wednesday, said the copy of the 13th amendment sold for $2.4 million, while the proclamation was snapped up by a telephone bidder for $2.17 million.

Both documents are framed. Lincoln signed the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, on February 1, 1865 in the culmination of 70 years of discord over the status of slaves. The copy sold is one of 14 signed by Lincoln, his vice president, the speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax and in this case, by 36 senators.

In the proclamation, Lincoln ordered that all people held

as slaves “henceforward shall be free.” The emancipation immediately set as many as 50,000 men, women and children free, and transformed the mission of the American Civil War from one of restoration of the Union to

amid renewed debate about racism in the United States.

Lincoln’s historical importance and the enormous regard that he commands frequently translate into high prices on the auction block. In 2009,

one of liberation. Signed copies of the proclamation were advertised for $10 each in 1864 and sold to benefit the United States Sanitary Commission, considered a forbearer of both the Red Cross and the United Service Organization, Sotheby’s said. The auction house said prior to the sale that the documents “represent crucial milestones” in American history and remain pertinent today

a manuscript of a Lincoln speech urging the country to unite amid civil war sold in New York for $3.4 million, which Christie’s said was then a record for a US historical document. Last November, the final passage of his second inaugural address, which Lincoln wrote out and signed for a 10-year-old child weeks before he was assassinated in a theater in April 1865, sold in New York for $2.2 million.

Issue - 669 (8)

31 May - 6 June 2016

Indian man removes teeth, gets over 500 tattoos

NEW DELHI An Indian man obsessed with setting Guinness world records got 366 flags tattooed on his body and had all his teeth removed so he could put nearly 500 drinking straws and more than 50 burning candles in his mouth. Har Parkash Rishi, who claims to have set more than 20 records, now calls himself Guinness Rishi. Born in 1942 in a cinema hall in the capital, New Delhi, Rishi first got into the Guinness Book of World Records in 1990 when, with two friends, he rode a scooter for 1,001 hours. The passion to get his name in the record book led him to perform some bizarre acts, including delivering a pizza from New Delhi to San Francisco and gulping a bottle of tomato ketchup in less than four minutes. He even got his family involved - his wife Bimla

holds a 1991 record for writing the world’s shortest will: “All to Son”. While it is the tattoos on his body, more than 500 in all, that brought him fame, Rishi, an auto parts manufacturer by profession, says the toughest one was stuffing the straws in his mouth. “I am the world record holder of 496 straws in my mouth ... For that record, I needed space, I had to remove every tooth so that I could put maximum straws in my mouth,” Rishi told Reuters Television before re-enacting the feat on camera. He is now getting images of global leaders tattooed on his body to add to images of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US President Barack Obama, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence movement.

India abstains from voting on US press freedom group’s plea United Nations India has abstained from voting, while China and Pakistan voted against a bid by a US advocacy group for press freedom, seeking accreditation as an NGO at the United Nations.

The non-governmental organisation (NGO) Committee of the United Nations voted yesterday to deny the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) consultative status with the Economic Social Council (ECOSOC).

India, Iran and Turkey abstained from voting while 10 countries including Azerbaijan, Burundi, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Sudan voted against CPJ’s application.

Greece, Guinea, Israel, Mauritania, Uruguay and the US voted in favor of the group.

CPJ said without the consultative status, it would be unable to access UN bodies and processes, notably the Human Rights Council in Geneva, where accredited NGOs can deliver a counternarrative to states.

The vote came after CPJ’s application, first made in 2012, was deferred seven times.

“It is sad that the UN, which has taken up the issue of press freedom through

Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and through the adoption of the UN Action Plan, has denied accreditation to CPJ, which has deep and useful knowledge that could inform decision making,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon, who answered the committee’s questions on

Tuesday.

“A small group of countries with poor press freedom records are using bureaucratic delaying tactics to sabotage and undermine any efforts that call their own abusive policies into high relief,” CPJ said.

Noting that its application has been deferred for years by persistent, lengthy, and repetitive questioning, the CPJ said during the session, the NGO Committee “hid behind the pretense” of rules and procedures.

Earlier this week, during a session of the NGO committee, India had asked about CPJ’s

activities in the country.

CPJ’s representative described the situation in India as “vibrant” and while expressing concern about incidents against journalists, he noted that the organisation was in dialogue with the Government, sharing perspectives, according to details of the meeting provided by the UN. Speaking before the vote, US representative to the UN Samantha Power drew attention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which underlined the principle that every person had the right to seek information.

Given that journalists and human rights advocates risked their lives to report on issues ranging from corruption to human rights violations, she called upon members to vote in favour.

Power said world leaders had come together and adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015.

It was not possible to achieve such goals without the engagement of a free and independent civil society, she said.

CPJ stressed that it promoted press freedom worldwide, and defended the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.

Muslim women rise against triple talaq New Delhi In April, Shayara Bano grabbed headlines when she went to the Supreme Court seeking a ban on triple talaq (instantaneous unilateral divorce) given by her husband through a letter. The 35year-old from Uttarakhand also challenged the practice of polygamy and nikah halala (where a woman given triple talaq has to marry another man and consummate the marriage if she wants to get back with her divorced husband). The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 allows a man to divorce his wife by uttering divorce or talaq thrice in one sitting. He can also send a letter writing talaq three times. India is one of the few countries that still recognises oral and triple talaq.

In recent years, this has taken an altogether new turn with men giving triple talaq over phone, by SMS, email, on Skype, WhatsApp and Facebook.

A story similar to Shayara Bano’s unfolded in Jaipur last month when Afreen Rehman received a letter from her husband of two years, Ashar Wasi, informing her that he had given her triple talaq.

“I was given no reason,” said the 28-year-old MBA, who moved to Indore after marriage. “I got the letter in January. I was staying with my parents then as my husband had thrown me out after

torturing me for dowry… I was helpless but decided enough was enough.”

Rehman filed a plea in the Supreme Court in May to declare the divorce null and void. “My petition has been accepted. I have also demanded that Muslim personal law be codified to prevent its misinterpretation.”

These aren’t isolated cases. More and more young, educated Muslim women, mostly in their mid-20s and 30s, are defying personal law.

Sheerin Masroor, a research associate in applied chemistry at Aligarh Muslim University, married Tabish Rasheed, an assistant professor in a Gurgaon college, in 2012. When a year later she gave birth to a girl, he left her at her parents’ home. “I was doing my PhD then and he refused to support me and my daughter. In February 2016, he sent a letter saying he had divorced me in front of the qazi (cleric) who had approved it. He sent a cheque of R1.25 lakh saying it was my meher (money paid by the groom to the bride that legally belongs to her),” she said. Masroor returned the cheque and decided to fight him in court. “I am his legally wedded wife. How can he arbitrarily decide to divorce me? What happens to me and my daughter? Don’t we have rights under the

Constitution? I left good job opportunities to look after my home and daughter.”

Then there is Shabana Khatoon (name changed), a government school teacher in Patna, who filed a case against her husband for

way from the time Shah Bano, 62, created a storm in the ‘80s by moving the Supreme Court seeking alimony. “The court gave a judgment in her favour but the then government turned it down fearing political backlash. Now,

traditions.

“For the first time in all these years, women are coming out and saying their fundamental rights are being violated,” said Balaji Srinivasan, Shayara Bano’s lawyer. “Beliefs and customs have to give way to fundamental rights.

There is an urgent need to reform personal laws, on a war footing.”

That’s easier said than done, though. “There is no question of changing personal law. Triple talaq is considered unjust but once said, the process is considered complete and cannot be changed,” said Mufti Aizaz Arshad Kazmi, a member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). Amber countered that Islamic tenets were being misused and accused the AIMPLB of being insincere about the cause of women. “In Islam, women and men have equal rights.

Pre-mature Ejaculation? torturing and divorcing her arbitrarily. Her husband is now in jail and the divorce case is in the civil court. “If I don’t get justice there, I will go to the Supreme Court,” she said.

Muslim women have come a long

these tricks won’t work. The time has come to reform personal law,” said Shaistha Amber, president of the All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board, formed in 2005 to fight for women at the receiving end of such oppressive

416-887-4971

Issue - 669 (9)

31 May - 6 June 2016

‘Golden Baba’: Sadhu wears jewellery worth Rs 3 cr, seeks security

African nationals attacked in Delhi speak up ‘They were shouting, go back to your country’ Kenneth Igbinosa, 29, Nigerian national

He is a sadhu but loves gold, and plenty of it.

They call him the Golden Baba -- he wears jewellery worth more than Rs 3 crore. And on Saturday, the ascetic from the famous Juna Akhada of Haridwar called on Agra’s top police officer, seeking security.

The sadhu was on his way to Bareilly from Simhasth Kumbh, which concluded in Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh on May 21.

He was wearing around 11.5 kg of gold and also had metal idols in his car that needed security, he told SSP Dr Preetinder Singh.

“I provided him security till Agra border and told him that if he wanted security for other districts in Uttar Pradesh, he would have to request higher

authorities,” Singh said.

The baba and his cavalcade created quite a stir when they drove into the Agra collectorate. People swarmed him to take selfies. Even complainants coming into the office joined the queue of eager fans waiting to get clicked with the baba, who had chunky chains around his neck and thick bracelets on both his arms .

An ascetic and the yellow metal make for an odd combination. A sadhu is expected to shun the pulls of the material world, and live an austere life in search of God. “For me, the gold is devta (deity). I am at peace when I wear it so I have been wearing it since 1972,” he said.

His wife Kate, 24, Son Blessed, four-months-old, Living in Delhi for three years, Sings gospel music in church. “I was returning in my car with my wife and child after attending a church meeting in Fatehpur Beri. It was really dark as there were no streetlights in the area. As soon I entered the lane in which my house is located, a group of people blocked the road and started banging their fists on my car. Some of them were carrying sticks and iron rods. One of them hit the windshield with a cricket bat, and it broke. My wife and I were injured… but we had to save our child. I immediately took an Uturn and sped out of the lane.

Once I was out of the area, I called up police,” said Igbinosa.

Vikky, 30, Ugandan national Brother Pierre, 35, Living in Delhi for a year, Runs a cargo business “Pierre was unwell and we were on our way back after visiting a doctor. When the auto-rickshaw stopped outside my house, a group of at least 10 people, most of them residents of the same locality, started shouting at us.

They were saying ‘go back to your country…go back to your country’. When my brother asked them why they were shouting, two

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chinese Uighurs fighting in Syria, There are “many hundreds or thousands” of Chinese Uighurs from the country’s western Xinjiang province involved with the Islamic State (IS) or other groups to wage jihad in Syria, according to a leading Chinese strategic expert who advises the government on its West Asia policy.

The Chinese jihadists, involved “not only with the IS but with other Syrian forces”, posed “a major threat” to China if they returned home, warned Li Shaoxian, a long-term West Asia expert and the Vice President of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a Beijing think-tank with ties to the Ministry of State Security.

“Whether there are Chinese citizens involved in IS, the answer is certainly yes,” he said in an interaction with journalists on Thursday.“I don’t have the specific number but I think there are possibly many hundreds, or thousands, of them. As a researcher I have been following the situation closely. I believe there are quite many Chinese citizens fighting in Syria, not just with the IS but also other forces in Syria, where there are all kinds of groups who have people fighting who are from China.”

China has recently stepped up its diplomatic engagement with Syria, in recent weeks hosting both the Foreign Minister and top officials of the Syrian National

Council representing opposition groups.

Li, who met with representatives from both the Syrian government and the council during their recent Beijing visits, said China was in a “unique” position to play a role in bringing about a political settlement. Referring to the divergent interests of both the United States and Russia, he said China was “the only major country without selfish interests involved” as Beijing “has no specific agenda.”

Li did not say if the issue of Chinese Uighurs - an ethnic Turkic Muslim minority in China’s western Xinjiang region - in Syria figured prominently during the recent talks, but described the matter as a serious concern for Beijing.

“I believe this will be a major source or threat because if these people come back to the country of origin they could constitute a considerable threat to the security of the country of origin.”

China says that Uighurs have been travelling to Turkey through Southeast Asia, and Beijing has accused Turkish missions in Southeast Asia of facilitating travel by issuing documents. In July, more than 100 Uighurs were repatriated from Thailand.

The move was criticised by rights groups who say the Uighurs were no terrorists but merely refugees fleeing persecution in China.

While Beijing labelled them all as separatists who wanted to join

jihad, rights groups have pointed out there were women and children among the group, which was detained on return to China.Uighur exile groups say the majority of hundreds of travellers who are leaving China for Southeast Asia are doing so to escape what they describe as religious persecution from the authorities.Li, however, pointed to a group of Uighurs who carried out a mass knife attack on a railway station in Kunming in south China in March 2014, stabbing 29 people to death.

Chinese authorities said the 8 knife-wielding and apparently trained attackers had tried - and failed - to travel to Southeast Asia and then to West Asia join jihad, before carrying out the attack.

“If you remember the terror attack in Kunming train station, it is very clear these people wanted to travel to another destination via Southeast Asia,” he said. “According to material I have seen, I know that some IS elements are responsible in Southeast Asia to organise these people and bring them to Syria.”Li said media reports of China considering joining Russia in a military role in the conflict were inaccurate, saying China had neither the intention nor capability to play a military role, even if Beijing was stepping up diplomatic engagement.

“First, it is against China’s principle China’s forces overseas are only overseas for

of them attacked him… they punched him and hit him on the head with an iron rod. My brother asked me to run… but I fell down.

One of the attackers started

heard a commotion outside. I found people beating up some African nationals. When we tried to intervene, the attackers started hitting us,” she said.

kicking me on my stomach.

Somehow, both of us managed to get inside my house and locked the door. We were so scared that we didn’t even call our friends. I lost my mobile phone in the attack,” said Vikky.

Shamira, 28, Cameroon national Her friend who did not wish to be named, Living in Delhi for three years, Shamira runs a local shop “I had just shut my shop when I

Leuchy, 29, Nigerian national Living in Delhi for two years, Pursuing BBA from Amity College “I was standing outside my house with my friend when a group of men attacked us with sticks and stones.

I tried to run but one of them grabbed me from behind. Two of them hit me with sticks and one of them hit me on the face with a stone,” said Leuchy.

With less than a year left for UP polls, RSS is learnt to have advised its wing, Hindu Jagran Manch, to revive the ‘love jihad’ campaign. The HJM is scheduled to hold a meeting in this regard in Agra’s Shahganj Sunday, sources said. The meeting will see HJM workers discuss “strategies” to curb cases of alleged ‘love jihad’.

The outfit’s newly appointed UP vice-president Ajju Chauhan will chair the meeting.

Chauhan hit headlines last year when, as an office bearer of Bajrang Dal, he led its ‘anti-love jihad’ campaign, ‘bahu lao-betibachao’.

While Chauhan refused to comment on the development, sources close to him confirmed that top RSS leaders have directed HJM to revive the campaign “quietly and without

inviting any controversy”. “We have been directed not to run the campaign publicly,” an HJM leader said. Another leader, Varun Upadhyay, associated with the meeting’s preparations, said: “Incidents of love jihad are taking place mostly in Agra. A surge in eve-teasing of Hindus girls has also been seen,” he alleged.

Sources said that at the meeting, HJM members would discuss a plan to depute “anti-love jihad agents” in colleges. These “agents” will be told to inform HJM leaders about possible cases of ‘love Jihad’.

“If any incident is reported, we will contact the girl’s family. We will apprise her of the plans of the other (Muslim) community. If she agrees, we will approach police to take action against the youth, in case he denies to end the relationship,” said an HJM leader.

RSS wing to revive ‘love jihad’ campaign

Issue - 669 (10)

Khatri Dhir family seek a suitable match for their son, 1984 born, 5’-7” tall, Canadian Citizen, B.Com (1st year) own business, Friendly, Non-vegetarian, NonManglik, family oriented. The girl should be Khatri, family oriented, beautiful, educated.

Girls on Student Visa/Work permit can also be considered.

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Please Call : 416-624-8279 Or : 905-861-9262 ***669*** Virdi Phull family seek a match for their son, 29 yrs. old, 5’-11” tall, Sardar, Mechanical Engineer, born and raised in Canada. Preference given to Canadian Citizen and willing to consider PR too. Phone or email please: Julyshaadi@gmail.com Or Call : 289-684-3919 ***669*** Seeking qualified match only from USA/Canada for Kashyap Rajput daughter from Nanimo BC, 5'-5" tall, well educated, degree holder, 29 yrs. old.

Traditionally raised with liberal values. The boy should be well educated, no Dastar, above 5’7". No students. Respond only if same caste to: preetymehra101@gmail.com ***669***.

Tonk Kshatriya family seek suitable match for their Son, 31 years old, slim, 5’11" tall, Canadian Citizen and working as Insurance Underwriter, well versed in both cultures. Born in India, been Canada for 9 years.

Girl should be professionally educated,slim, beautiful and family oriented. Please send your bio-data & recent picture to: prabhjeet.s26@gmail.com or call 647-869-0626 or 631-8131000 *** 669*** Jatt Gursikh parents seek a suitable match for their son, 23 yrs. old, 5’-8" tall, B.Sc Medical, on student visa, living in Los Angeles (USA), doing business.

The girl should be USA / Canadian immigrant or citizen.

Parents are American Citizen.

31 May - 6 June 2016

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Please email recent picture and bio-data to: baldishdishi@gmail.com Or Call : 905-796-7532 ***669*** Well settled and reputed Jat Sikh family seeking a suitable match for their son, 27 yrs. old, 6’ tall, B.Sc. Medical, residing at Mohali (Chandigah). The girl should be Canadian/American, Immigrant/Citizen. All family is well settled in Canada only the boy is in India. Please email recent picture and bio-data to: jsingh.nijjar@yahoo.com Or Call : 1-306-881-9117 ***669*** Jat Sikh Shergill parents invite matrimonial alliance for their only son, 29 yrs. old, 5’-10” tall, Canadian Citizen, graduate, working as a Supervisor in a top ranking company of B.C., handsome, non-drinker, nonsmoker and well versed in both

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Please Call : 416-417-2927 Or : 647-281-1639 ***669*** Ramdasia Sikh family seek a suitable match for their daughter, 25 yrs. old, 5’-10” tall, born in USA, well versed in both cultures, Bacheler’s degree in Accountancy. The boy should be 5’-11” or taller, clean shaven, well educated and family oriented.

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Malwa area prefered. Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: msbrar100@gmail.com Or Call : 416-970-7028 ***669*** Jat Sikh Brar parents looking for a suitable match for their daughter, born and raised in Canada, 29 yrs. old, 5’-6” tall, RN and Master’s degree in Nursing, Currently working in GTA. The boy should be well educated, professionally employed, prefered non-drinker, non-smoker, vegetarian with family values.

Malwa area prefered. Please send your bio-data and recent picture to: skbrar100@gmail.com Or Call : 416-970-7028 ***669*** Jat Sikh parents seek a suiable match for their son, 25 yrs. old, 6’ tall, Dentist in India, handsome & family oriented. The girl should be American/Canadian Immigrant or Citizen, well educated, family oriented. Please send your biodata and recent picture to: jat3k@yahoo.com

Or Call : 1-917-250-9355 ***669*** Ravidasia parents invite matrimonial alliance for their daughter, 33 yrs. old, 5’-3” tall, Canadian Citizen, working as a nurse, family oriented. The boy should be highly qualified, professionally employed, Canadian Citizen between 30-35 yrs. old, with family values.

Please email recent picture and bio-data to: charan1949@yahoo.com ***669*** Jat Sikh parents seeking a match for their Canadian born son, 34 yrs. old, 6’-2” tall, University educated, professionally employed, well paid manager. The girl should be University educated, beautiful with family values. Please email recent picture and bio-data to: tormgr13@gmail.com or 416-7081392 ***669*** Jat Sikh parents seeks a suitable match for their extremely handsome, Canadian born, 32 yrs. old, 6'-2" tall, B.Sc., nondrinker, family oriented son, Working with the government.

The girl should be pretty, tall, educated, having good family values. Please send your biodata & recent picture to: japman01@hotmail.com or call: 1-250-220-4259 *** 669*** Jatt Sikh parents seek a suitable match for their daughter, innocently divorced, 37 yrs. old, 5'- 4" tall, beautiful, Canadian citizen, well versed in both cultures, professionally employed in Toronto. The boy should be family oriented and from a respectable Jatt Sikh family.

Please respond with a recent picture and bio-data to: torontomatrimonial@gmail.com or call 416-509-5012 *** 669*** Punjabi family seeking a suitable match for their US citizen son, born in 1979 with a B.A. degree in Computer Science and Business and working as a Marketing Director, well settled family in California. The girl should be educated and family oriented.

Please send your bio-data & recent picture to: tara.pabla@gmail.com or call: 1-858- 484-8602 *** 669*** Well-settled Jatt-Sikh family from US seeking a suitable match for their beautiful, family-oriented, US-born & raised daughter, 5'-6" tall, 29 yrs. old, Masters in Finance. The boy should be welleducated, Jatt-Sikh & from US. Please send your bio-data & recent picture to: newyorkrishta@gmail.com *** 669***

House-Keeper Wanted In Brampton, Canada (Live-in or out). 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 - 669 (11)

31 May - 6 June 2016

Austria launches action to seize Hitler’s house

Vienna Austria’s government on Friday submitted a law to seize the house where Hitler was born, in a bid to stop the building becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

The large corner house in the quaint northern town of Braunau am Inn near the German border where the Nazi dictator was born in 1889 has been owned by the family of a local woman for more than a century.

In 1972 the government signed a lease with the owner and turned it into a centre for people with disabilities, but the arrangement came to an abrupt end five years ago when she refused to grant permission for renovation works.

The government said on April 9 it decided to seize the property, with the building -- which cannot be demolished because it is in the town’s historic centre

and therefore under heritage protection -- empty since 2011.

“Representatives of the interior ministry have been trying for several years to buy the property, but these attempts failed... Now the only option is to transfer ownership to the Austrian Republic through expropriation,” the interior ministry said on today.

The owner, who is shy of talking to the media, will receive “adequate compensation,” it said in a statement.

The issue has sparked heated debate among Braunau’s 17,000 residents. Some want it to become a refugee centre, others a museum dedicated to Austria’s liberation and others demolition. Outside there is a stone memorial that reads: “For Peace, Freedom and Democracy.

Never Again Fascism, Millions of Dead Warn.”

Canadian PM Trudeau shows romance is not dead

TOKYO Whoever said romance was dead has obviously not met Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The 44-yearold pinup premier said

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Tuesday he would take a day off ahead of G7 talks in Japan to celebrate his wedding anniversary with spouse Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, calling it an essential “worklife balance”. The couple, who arrived in Japan on Monday, are headed to a traditional inn called a ryokan on Wednesday before the two-day meeting of the club of rich nations begins Thursday. The photogenic Trudeau - who has amassed a growing legion of mostly female fans - said the pair would rely on “personal funds” for their 11th wedding celebration.

No handshake exemption for Muslim pupils, Swiss canton rules Geneva Religious belief is no excuse for refusing to shake a teacher’s hand, Swiss regional authorities ruled Wednesday, reversing one school’s controversial decision to grant exemptions for Muslim pupils wary of touching the opposite sex.

Parents or guardians of pupils who refuse to shake a teacher’s hand in the northern Swiss canton of Basel-Country could now face fines of up to 5,000 Swiss francs ($5,000, 4,500 euros), regional education authorities ruled.

“A teacher has the right to demand a handshake,” they said in a statement.

The decision comes after a national uproar over revelations last month that a middle school allowed two brothers, aged 14 and 15 with Syrian nationality, not to shake their teachers’ hands after they complained that doing so was counter to their religious beliefs if the teacher was a woman.

They argued that Islam does not permit physical contact with a person of the opposite sex, with the exception of certain immediate family members.

shaking their teachers’ hands as a sign of respect is deeply entrenched.

Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga, who was among the many senior officials and public figures

To avoid effectively permitting discrimination against female teachers, the school decided to exempt the boys from shaking hands with any of their teachers, regardless of sex. That decision -- made independently by the school in the northwest Therwil municipality without involvement of the canton’s authorities or local officials -- triggered an outcry across Switzerland, where the tradition of students

who weighed in on the matter, insisted on Swiss public television last month that “shaking hands is part of our culture”.

School ‘relieved’ Explaining Wednesday’s ruling, authorities said “the public interest concerning gender equality as well as integration of foreigners far outweighs that concerning the freedom of belief of students.” The school, which amid the uproar had turned to the cantonal

authorities for guidance, said it was “relieved” at Wednesday’s ruling.

“Now there is clarity on how to proceed,” it said in a statement, adding that it would lift the temporary exemption in place since school began last autumn.

“This decision has recently been communicated to the family,” it said.

The cantonal authorities pointed out that if the two students at the heart of the controversy once again refuse to shake hands, “the sanctions called for by law will be applied,” it said.

Switzerland’s population of eight million people includes an estimated 350,000 Muslims.

Previous similar disputes have centred on Muslim parents who demanded that their daughters be exempt from swimming lessons, a case that led to the parents being fined.

Muslim families have however secured victories in court against schools which sought to ban the full face veil.

ISE SHIMA Some Group of Seven leaders travelled in selfdriving cars during a break at the annual leader summit on Thursday.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi were among those to ride in the back of the cars, a service Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wishes to employ by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to ease road regulations.

Matteo Renzi of Italy and Canadian leader Justin Trudeau were bundled into eco-friendly sedans for an achingly slow ride around a carpark that ended with the photogenic pair dropped off for the talks, which are being held southwest of Tokyo.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk also got a very uneventful crash course on the cars, which are powered by hydrogen and emit only water from their exhaust pipe. Juncker emerged from his low-adrenaline ride looking a little underwhelmed and offered what appeared to be a shrug. Japan is a world leader in the technology which is seen as the Holy Grail for an industry increasingly shifting focus to green solutions, including electric vehicles. US president Barack Obama and Germany’s Angela

Merkel were among the other Group of Seven

leaders noticeably absent from the ride along, which

was overseen by Japan’s premier Shinzo Abe.

G7 leaders try out self-driving cars

Issue - 669 (12)

31 May - 6 June 2016

From Easter Island to Stonehenge, climate change threatens iconic tourist sites LONDON Extreme weather is becoming one of the biggest risks to World

Heritage icons like the Polynesian Easter Island or Britain’s Stonehenge, posing a threat to tourism and economies alike, scientists and UN experts said on Thursday.

Developing countries such as Nepal, home to Mount Everest, and Uganda, where tourists travel to see mountain gorillas, may be particularly hard hit as they rely on income from tourism more than developed countries, the experts said in a report. “For them it’s a very important revenue and income.

It’s an economic driver to have a World Heritage site,” Adam

Markham, lead author of the report and deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists

(UCS), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.“If the attributes that attract tourists there in the first place are damaged by climate change, that could be a big blow to the tourism economies,” he said in a phone interview. Tourism is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors, generating 9 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) and providing one in 11 jobs, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the UCS

Sikh woman found dead in Canada, husband held for murder

said.While badly managed tourism itself can be damaging to World Heritage sites, climate change multiplies the risk of the sites loosing attributes that make them attractive tourist destinations, they said.“Some Easter Island statues are at risk of being lost to the sea because of coastal erosion,” Markham said in a statement. “Many of the world’s most important coral reefs, including in the islands of New Caledonia in the western Pacific, have suffered unprecedented coral bleaching linked to climate change this year. Climate change could eventually even cause some World Heritage sites to lose their status. ”The report analysed 31 natural and cultural World Heritage sites in 29 countries, including the Colombian port city of Cartagena, Vietnamese town of Hoi An and the Galapagos Islands, that are under threat from extreme weather events like increasing temperatures, rising seas and droughts.Preserving World Heritage sites was also important because forests and coastal habitats can help store carbon and protect against storms and floods, understand climate change impact and test resilience strategies, the report said.To maintain the World Heritage sites it was essential to achieve a goal of keeping global average temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius, as agreed by world leaders in Paris in December, the experts said.

Britain looking for middle-aged women to become spies for MI6

London The name’s Bond. Jane Bond.

Britain’s MI6 spy agency is wooing middle-aged women to bring more inclusivity to its ranks.

The UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) is even advertising on popular parental website for women called Mumsnet to widen its recruitment network.

The move is part of a drive to recruit more “mid-career women”, which includes offering more flexible hours and support for those returning after having children.British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee had called on the

security services to create a better gender balance among their employees and the latest report released this week looks to address that.“SIS has also begun to recognise and reward officers who demonstrate inclusivity and is publicising this across the organisation,” the report said.Women make up just over 38% of all MI6 staff and 41.6% at MI5, where 46% of new employees were female, a rise of 5%.At the spy listening centre based in Cheltenham, GCHQ, changes to maths recruitment saw the number of applications from women rise to about 40%.

Winnie-the-Pooh turns 90, meets Britain’s queen in new book LONDON Winnie-the-Pooh turns 90 this year and the much-loved children’s character returns for a new adventure in which he meets someone else celebrating the same significant birthday - Britain’s Queen Elizabeth. “Winnie-thePooh and the Royal Birthday” sees the popular bear from A.A. Milne’s children’s stories travel

to London with friends Christopher Robin, Piglet and Eeyore, where they take in the famous sites and arrive at Buckingham Palace. The short illustrated and audio story, which can be downloaded for free, has been released to celebrate both birthdays. Elizabeth turned 90 last month while Milne’s first Winnie-the-Pooh book came out in October 1926.

Indian ‘parking owner’ at Heathrow fined, jailed for freewheeling parked cars Toronto A 38-year-old Sikh woman was found dead at her home in Canada’s Saskatchewan province with police arresting and charging her husband for the murder.

The police was called at the residence of Sandeep Kaur Tehara in Regina on Sunday to check on the well-being of the people inside when they found her body inside the home and subsequently determined that it was a homicide case.

Sandeep’s husband Jagdish Singh Tehara, 39, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, the Regina Leader-Post reported.

The couple has two young children, who are reportedly staying with Jagdish’s brother, Pritpal Tehara.

Jagadish appeared in Regina provincial court on Tuesday, when the court heard he was seeking legal representation. He has been remanded in custody until his next court appearance on May

31.The Sikh community expressed shock after the murder. “(It’s a) shock for our community,” Nirmal Maur, president of the Sikh Society of Regina, was quoted as saying.

Jagdish and Sandeep had been living in Regina for about 10 years, said Surender Grewal, a longtime member of Regina’s Sikh community. “We are all very shocked. Never, ever imagined that this could happen,” Grewal was quoted as saying.

Jim Azcueta, who lives close to the house where the body was found, said he woke up Sunday morning just to see about a half dozen police cars and his neighbour’s house taped off. “The first thing that came to my mind was that something really serious had happened. Probably a crime.

I came out and saw all the police standing right here,” he told CBC News.The police service’s major crimes and forensic identification units are investigating the murder, as is the coroner’s office.

London An Indian-origin man who ran a parking company at Heathrow airport and was found to use customers’ cars for personal use has been sentenced to jail and fined after he pleaded guilty to the scam.

Devinder Singh, 30, pleaded guilty to the three offences of driving while disqualified; driving without insurance; and taking a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent. He was interviewed by the police after one of his customers complained about the use of her car while away on holiday.

When the customer collected the vehicle, she noticed it was

clean, the setting was in the “offroad” position - which was never used - and there was less fuel.

Also the mileage had changed significantly, Scotland Yard said.

A tracking device was fitted to the vehicle which showed the car being parked at various addresses including Singh’s home while the customer was away.

On Thursday, he pleaded guilty to all the offences at Ealing Magistrates’ court and was sentenced to six weeks prison, suspended for a year, a five-year disqualification from driving and ordered to pay £350 costs and an £80 victim

surcharge. Singh had previously been convicted of similar driving offences in relation to his business and has received a number of suspended sentences. Detective Inspector Ian Robinson of Aviation policing said: “This was a betrayal of his customer’s trust by brazenly using their cars while they were away on holiday without their knowledge”. “He would have continued to do this had he not been caught. The travelling public must be careful to use reputable companies when leaving their motor vehicles whilst travelling from Heathrow Airport.”

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31 May - 6 June 2016

Condoms ‘illegal’ in many nations, discourages safe practices: Sex workers London Sex workers around the world face violence, rape, widespread discrimination and extortion, a

global human rights watchdog said on Thursday, with male or transgender sex workers facing further stigma from the police, clients and the community.

Research published by Amnesty International showed that sex workers globally lack protection from “horrific” abuse and violence, even in countries like Norway, which are perceived to have strong human rights laws.

From Papua New Guinea to Argentina, Hong Kong and Norway, researchers consistently found cases of sex workers being physically and sexually abused by clients and the police.

“Sex workers are experiencing horrific levels of violence and abuse throughout the world,” Kate

Schuetze, a policy advisor at Amnesty International, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In many cases police are the

perpetrators of the abuse, making sex workers reluctant to report the crime, especially if prostitution is illegal in their country, Schuetze said.She added that sex workers caught carrying condoms - seen by police as evidence of illegal activity - have been arrested or targeted for extortion, which in turn discourages safer sex practices.Condoms ‘illegal’ in some nations, discourages safe sex: Mona, a sex worker in Papua New Guinea, said she was raped by several police officers after being caught with a client.

“I don’t have any support to come to court and report them. It was so painful to me, but then I let it go,” Mona was quoted by

Amnesty as saying. “If I go to the law, they cannot help me as sex work is against the law in PNG.” SEX WORK VS SEX TRAFFICKING In April, France followed Northern Ireland, Canada, Sweden, Norway and Iceland in introducing legislation to make it an offence to buy sex.

Some activists said shifting the criminal charge from victim to the client would make countries like France less attractive for pimps and traffickers.

But male sex worker Luca Stevenson said conflating sex work with sex trafficking was problematic.

“Calling for an end to sex work to end trafficking for sexual exploitation doesn’t make sense.

It will and it does push sex work underground,” said Stevenson, a coordinator at the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe.

“The reality is - the large majority of sex workers make a decision to sell sex,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Globally, almost 21 million people are trapped in forced labour, of which 4.5 million are victims of sexual exploitation, according to the International Labour Organisation.

“We’re absolutely opposed to things like trafficking, the sexual exploitation of children,” said Schuetze. But overly broad antitrafficking laws can also trample on the rights of people engaging in sex work consensually as adults, she added.

Microsoft to end smartphone manufacturing HELSINKI Microsoft announced Wednesday it would let go up to 1,850 employees and a Finnish union called it the end of the company’s smartphone manufacturing business, bought from Finnish telecom equipment maker Nokia.

“Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced plans to streamline the company’s smartphone hardware business, which will impact up to 1,850 jobs,” it said in a statement, adding 1,350 of those jobs would be eliminated in Finland where its smartphones have been designed. The other 500 jobs will be cut “globally”. Microsoft’s chief shop steward in Finland, Kalle Kiili, told AFP the decision means Microsoft will no longer design or manufacture phones. Microsoft “will not be manufacturing (phone) devices, at least for the time being. It will do software, however,” Kiili said.Microsoft said the move would result in “an impairment and restructuring charge of approximately $950 million” (852.6 million euros) for the company. The decision means Microsoft scraps what was left in Finland of Nokia’s former glory as the world’s former top mobile phone maker.

Nokia was the world’s leading mobile phone maker from 1998 until 2011 when it bet on Microsoft’s Windows mobile platform which proved to be a flop.

The Finnish company sold its unprofitable handset unit in 2014

for some $7.2 billion to Microsoft, which is closing the entire unit.

Nearly 2.4 million Windows Phones were sold in the latest quarter, around 0.7 percent market share overall. That’s a

decrease from the 2.5 percent market share of Windows Phone during the first quarter of 2015, according to the US-based analyst group, Gartner Inc.A week ago Microsoft announced the sale of its feature phone business for $350 million (310.5 million euros) to a new Finnish company HMD Global and its Taiwanese partner, FIH Mobile of FoxConn Technology Group, which will jointly begin manufacturing handsets and tablets under the Nokia brand again.

Microsoft had called up all its employees in Finland to hear the news which Kiili said left the crowd “silent”. “We had rumours that something would happen but not that everything would go,” he described.Employees at Microsoft Oy, a separate Microsoft sales subsidiary based in Espoo, Finland, would not be affected by the job cuts.

Asia hotbed of IT piracy Bees chase 65-year-old’s car for

over 24 hrs to ‘rescue their queen’

SINGAPORE More than 60 percent of all computer software installed in the Asia-Pacific in 2015 was unlicensed, the worst of any region, despite growing economies and anti-piracy efforts, an industry watchdog said Wednesday. The Software Alliance - which includes giants like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Oracle and Adobe - said in a report that the unlicensed software in Asia had a value of $19.1 billion last year.Piracy rates were most rampant in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia at more than 80 percent.

The global piracy average was 39 percent. While the worldwide piracy rate decreased by four percentage points from 2013, Asia saw only a one percentage point decline to 61 percent over the two-year period, said the report, which did not cover mobile devices. The report resulted from a survey of 22,000 computer

users and 2,000 information technology decision-makers and includes business, operating system, gaming and security software. The group’s Asia-Pacific senior director Tarun Sawney called for more action to address the problem of unlicensed software, particularly for key sectors like banking. “Whilst there’s still been improvement from two years ago on the use of unlicensed software, the rate is still too high and certainly in emerging economies, a lot of which are in Asia-Pacific, the problem still persists,” he told a press conference. The report cited a “disconnect” between businesses’ concern about cyber-security and their attitude to unlicensed software. It found that the worldwide rate for what it called “critical” sectors such as banking, insurance and securities industries was 25 percent. No figure was given for Asia in those sectors.

London In an incredible ordeal, a 65-yearold grandmother was followed by a huge swarm of bees for more than 24 hours while driving her car home from a nature reserve in the UK, attempting to rescue their queen.

Carol Howarth was amazed when a swarm of over 20,000 bees flew down onto her vehicle, covering the back end of the car.

The unusual incident happened shortly after she had parked her car in the town centre of Haverfordwest, West Wales, before going shopping at lunchtime last Sunday.

A team of three beekeepers, a national park ranger and members of the public helped to capture and contain the swarm inside a cardboard box.

Howarth told the Telegraph that she had “never seen anything like it.” Pembrokeshire Coast National Park ranger Tom Moses raised the alarm when he spotted the swarm on the car.

Concerned that the insects might be destroyed with pesticide, Moses contacted two members of Pembrokeshire Beekeepers’ Association, who came to help capture the swarm.

“As I drove past I noticed this big brown splodge on the back of a car. I had seen swarms before

queen anywhere so I’ve no idea if that was right. Apparently bees can swarm at this time of the year

settle on things like this but never one as large as this,” Moses said.

After returning to her car, Howarth drove home believing the problem had been resolved, only to discover on Monday morning that the swarm had followed her and were again covering the car.

She was then forced to contact the beekeepers, who finally managed to remove the swarm for good.

“One theory was that the queen was trapped in my car and the swarm were following,” Howarth said. “But they couldn’t find the

and it is a very strong instinct for them to follow the queen,” she said.

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31 May - 6 June 2016

Moose on the loose makes a dash for cash

HELSINKI A bank in central Helsinki was the target of an unusual break-in early Thursday when a confused and agitated moose jumped through a bank window, Finnish police said. “A moose strayed into Helsinki’s centre and jumped through a window into a bank,” Helsinki police inspector Arto Laitinen said, adding that the animal was severely injured in the incident. The one-year-old moose, weighing around 200 kilos (440 pounds), had to be put down by police.

“Cases like this are relatively rare... Sometimes moose can be guided away

from the populated areas, and often they themselves understand to avoid the centres, which are dangerous for them,” Laitinen said.

The moose is believed to have entered the city via Seurasaari island, a wilderness park near the city centre. Moose, or elk as they’re called in Britain, occasionally enter populated areas in the Nordic countries. In 2014, a moose was badly injured and had to be put down after it jumped through a classroom window in a suburb of the southwestern Swedish city of Gothenburg.

‘Inventive’ early Neanderthals built complex structures PARIS Long thought of as thickskulled brutes, Neanderthals were already building complex underground structures by firelight, possibly for rituals, 176,500 years ago, said a study Wednesday that adds to a new, smarter image of our extinct cousins. These ancient people wrenched fragments of stalagmite from the cave floor and stacked them into walls, some forming rough circles, standing up to knee high, according to research published in the journal Nature. Deep inside Bruniquel Cave in southwest France, more than 300 metres (984 feet) from the entrance, they built six such structures, one almost seven metres wide - tens of thousands of years before the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe.

“Neanderthals were inventive, creative, subtle and complex,” study coauthor Jacques Jaubert of France’s Bordeaux University told AFP. “They were not mere brutes focused on chipping away at flint tools or killing bison for food.”

The dating of these structures pushed back by tens of thousands of years the first known cave

App-surdity? Norway readathon takes aim at wordy app terms OSLO What exactly do we agree to when we download a smartphone app? To prove the “absurdity” of lengthy terms and conditions, some Norwegians are reading those of 33 apps,

the texts’ complexity, the agency has asked consumers to read out the terms and conditions live on its site: http:// www.forbrukerradet.no/ vilkar-og-personvernminutt-for-minutt/.

from Tinder to iTunes, in a live two-day readathon.

The user terms and conditions of the 33 applications typically found on a Norwegian smartphone amount to 260,000 words, or 900 pages, according to Norway’s consumer protection agency, making them a lengthier read than the New Testament.

In order to demonstrate

“The aim is to demonstrate that the user terms for internet services, apps or other, are very bad,” head of the agency’s digital services section, Finn Myrstad, told AFP. “They’re too long and unintelligible.”

Users were reading the conditions for Twitter, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Gmail, Skype, Instagram and Angry Birds

among others. By midday at Wednesday, they had been reading for 27 hours, and were expected to continue for a few more hours. “Imagine if all the users in the world who have a smartphone were to spend more than 30 hours (reading). That’s more than four days of work just to read the user terms and conditions on a smartphone,” Myrstad said.

Among the conditions posing the greatest concern were those granting “perpetual” or “irrevocable” licenses to the other party, he said.

“This means, in practice, that the content of your app, whether it’s your photos or your chats, will forever belong to the company. That’s totally unacceptable and violates European and Norwegian law,” Myrstad said. The Norwegian consumer protection agency is a world leader in confidentiality issues. It recently criticised the French online dating service Happn and popular jogging app Runkeeper for collecting and transmitting users’ data even when the apps are inactive or uninstalled.

exploration by members of the broader human family.

And it ranked the French walls among the oldestknown human constructions. According to

wrote - and referred to Neanderthals as “the world’s first spelunkers”.

“Our findings suggest that their society included elements of modernity,

the multi-national research team, Neanderthals broke the stalagmite pillars into about 400 similarly-sized pieces with a total length of 112.4 metres (123 yeards) and a weight of about 2.2 tons (4,400 pounds). This implied they knew how to work as a group.

Among the fragments of stalagmite pillars of mineral deposits growing upward from a cave floor underneath a persistent drip - the researchers found traces of fire and burnt pieces of bone. “Early Neanderthals were the only human population living in Europe during this period,” they

which can now be proven to have emerged earlier than previously thought.”

Neanderthals lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for up to 300,000 years but appear to have vanished some 40,000 years ago.

This coincided more or less with the arrival of homo sapiens out of Africa, where modern humans are believed to have emerged some 200,000 years ago.

Neanderthals and homo sapiens interbred, leaving a small contribution of less than two percent to modern human DNA - except for Africans, as the Neanderthals never lived on

the continent. Several recent studies have found that Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than suggested by the long-standing theory that they disappeared because we outsmarted them.

Reconstructions of Neanderthals often make them out as brawny rather than brainy - even their name is used to insult someone perceived as uncouth. Yet they were recently shown to have been making cave etchings some 40,000 years ago, were likely the first to catch, butcher and cook wild pigeons, ate vegetables, cared for their elderly, buried their dead, and may have been the first jewellers.

The new study contends that “the Neanderthal group responsible for these constructions had a level of social organisation that was more complex than previously thought.”

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Issue 669 (15)

31 May - 6 June 2016

Both Naseeruddin Shah and Kalki Koechlin are good fits for their parts Director: Anu Menon Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Kalki Koechlin, Rajat Kapoor, Arjun Mathur, Suhasini Maniratnam , Ratnabali Bhattacharjee, Rajiv Ravindranathan Rating: 3 Stars Two people, waiting.

This is an apt one-line de-

scription of a film about life, lasting love and impending loss which explores a zone Bollywood doesn’t bother with. Which is itself so refreshing that you want to

champion the attempt, as well some of the outcome, even if it doesn’t hit all the marks, all the way.

Shiv (Naseeruddin Shah) and Tara (Kalki Koechlin) are unlikely companions in one of life’s most difficult journeys, as they count out days and nights in a Kochi hospital. They are waiting for a sign from their

respective comatose spouses : Shiv from his motionless-for-severalmonths wife (Suhasini Maniratnam) and Tara from her recently-critically-in-

jured husband (Arjun Mathur).

Will they be able to breathe on their own, walk out of the antiseptic rooms they are incarcerated in, surrounded by sterile machines and white-coated doctors wreathed in smiles which doesn’t reach their eyes?

Those are the questions Shiv and Tara wrestle with, the former with the stoic fortitude which comes from a long wait ; the latter, impatient, hurting, wanting to solve everything now, now, now. Shiv’s marriage has lasted for forty long years ; Tara’s for a few weeks. She’s amazed at the potentially long shelf life of a relationship she’s just got into; he smiles at her gently.

Both Naseer and Kalki are good fits for their parts in a film which segues easily between English, Hindi and a smattering of Malayalam : the nursing staff in the hospital is Malayali, as it is in

most hospitals in the country, and it is a nice to see characters using a line or two in a language not their own to make a point.

And that’s also, paradoxically, the problem with the film. Not the occasional Malayali line, but the profusion of lines themselves.

It is too explanatory, too talky : you want the characters to stop describing what they are feeling; you want some quiet so you can see them feeling, and feel right alongside.

Some of the most effective moments in the film occur when the two leads are allowed to fall silent, to just

be in that moment, to loosen up. That’s when you really see them, sharing what it is like to be on the opposite ends of the age spectrum, yet bound by that hardest question : will he/she live?

A couple of the supporting acts are solid. As the good friend who arrives to hold Kalki’s anguished hand, Ratnabali Bhattacharjee stands out, as does Rajiv Rajendranath as the sincere, helpful colleague of the injured husband.

Kalki is a persuasive performer, making us watch, even if she comes off

abrupt and forced in bits but that’s more to do with the way the part has been written. That’s something we can say for the plotting overall, which feels simultaneously underdeveloped and overwritten.

Naseer comes off best, and that figures because he has the most life experience. He brings a quiet dignity and heartbreaking resilience to a man who has walked alongside his companion – theirs has been a marriage of companionship and abiding affection– for a long time, and who doesn’t want to let her go.

mesticated world where females get lessons on how to carry eggs, men do housework, the eggs get their own learning classes before they hatch, and an

anger-management class ripples with zen, namaste and some transcendental music.

That remains a one-note idea, like the rest of the

film, even as Red somehow acquires two friends (Gad, McBride) while illogically going after the pigs, at least at first.

Penn merely gets to grunt

as the heaviest, mostthreatening bird around.

Depending on where you are standing — bird side, pig side or his side — that’s not a bad thing.

Angry Birds Directed by Clay Kaytis, Fergal Reilly Voices of Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Matilda, Peter Dinklage, Sean Penn Rating: 1 Star There was a time when birds and pigs would hardly come up in the same conversation together unless one talked swine flu. It happens to be also true that swine flu affects pigs but not birds. None of which helped the pigs escape the fate of being the enemy in

the most successful video game of all time.

Here, the pigs remain hogs, that is they only want the eggs. And the birds don’t get angry enough.

The sight of those helpless, flightless, harmless animals bursting and brimming with angry chuckles — wasn’t that what made Angry Birds work? Here it’s only Red (Sudeikis) who has anger issues, but with his outbursts grounded in very normal causes.

The other birds have settled into a mellow do-

Issue 669 (16)

31 May - 6 June 2016

Was petrified of kissing If not for Salman Khan, Zareen Khan wouldn’t scene in ‘Do Lafzon Ki have become an actor Kahani’ says Kajal Aggarwal Kajal Aggarwal says she was petrified to do a kissing scene in her upcoming film ‘Do Lafzon Ki Kahani’ and feels it should not be blown out of proportion.

‘Do Lafzon Ki Kahani’, directed by Deepak Tijori, has Randeep Hooda and Kajal Aggarwal in the lead roles, and their liplock is making news as there were reports that she was not aware of it in advance. “I was petrified but Randeep made it very easy and comfortable for me. He ensured I was comfortable. We spoke a lot and I let my inhibitions down,” Kajal told PTI. “I had my reservations about it as I have not done it in South. Then I understood the importance of it and that it was part of the script. I don’t know how this thing came up.

Who does things like this... We are professionals and everything we do on screen is predecided,” she said.

According to the ‘Special 26’ actress, ‘Do Lafzon Ki Kahani’ is a very sensitive and beautiful love story. “This is a love story. It is very intense and passionate. With passionate I don’t mean

that the film shows sex or intimacy or anything like that. There is intimacy in the film but it is negligible.”

In ‘Do Lafzon Ki Kahani’, Kajal plays a blind girl, while Randeep is an MMA fighter. “We both worked hard for this film.

Both our characters are diametrically opposite each other. I am a very active, positive, radiant, happy-go-lucky, innocent girl, while Randeep is an MMA fighter. He is intense, deep and has a dark past. So they are very opposite people and how they fall in love with each other,” she said.

In ‘Singham’, the 30year-old actress was paired opposite Ajay Devgn, for ‘Special 26’ she starred along with Akshay Kumar, and now for “Do Lafzon...” she is romancing Hooda.

“Randeep is a power house of talent. He is a brilliant actor without the frills and fancies of a superstar. It was great working with him,” Kajal said. The movie is based on the 2011 Korean movie “Always”.

Produced by Dhaval Jayantilal Gada under the banner Pen India Limited, it is scheduled to release on June 10.

Salman Khan is responsible for providing the much-needed first big break to several actors in Bollywood. From Katrina Kaif to Zareen Khan, several people are indebted to the actor for their Bollywood career.

Salman’s 2010 film Veer marked Zareen’s entry in the Hindi film industry.

And Zareen, on her part, has attributed her Bollywood career to Salman. Zareen played Princess Yashodhara in the 2010 Veer. Just a year later, she made a special appearance in the

romantic comedy Ready alongisde the 50-year-old star and Asin. Asked if she credits her break in Bollywood to Salman, Zareen told IANS, “Of course I do (credit him for my break in the industry)!

If it wasn’t for him, I don’t even think I would have ever thought of becoming an actress.” The 29-yearold, who was last seen in the erotic thriller Hate Story 3, says she would want to share screen space with Salman again. “I would love to (share screen space with him again)!” Zareen said.

Sunny Leone very excited about film with Arbaaz Khan Sunny Leone will soon be seen on the silver screen with Arbaaz Khan. The actors have been roped in for an upcoming musical drama Tera Intezaar.

This is the first time that Sunny and Arbaaz are working together in a film. The Ek Paheli Leela actor will shoot for the film alongside Arbaaz in the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat in August this year.

Confirming the news, Sunny told IANS, “I’m very excited about working with Arbaaz Khan.” The film, which marks the directorial debut of Raajeev Walia, will also have an

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international shoot apart from the 25-day Kutch schedule.

According to a source, Sunny and Arbaaz will meet for their first recording together on Tuesday (May 31).

“Arbaaz had already been locked for the film.

When Sunny heard the first narration, she signed on the dotted line immediately. This is the first time that she will be seen in a film of this genre,” the source added. Sunny, who entered Bollywood with the 2012 erotic thriller Jism 2, has done films like Ragini MMS 2, Ek Paheli Leela, Mastizaade and One Night Stand in the last few years. On his part, Arbaaz has been in the news for his separation with wife Malaika Arora after 17 years of marriage. Following that, there were reports that Malaika was supposedly moving back in with Arbaaz, but nothing is known for sure yet.

Issue 669 (17)

31 May - 6 June 2016

Kendall Jenner eying Hollywood career Supermodel Kendall Jenner is reportedly planning to start her career in Hollywood.

The 20-year-old was spotted with personalities from the film world at the Cannes Film Festival last week in part of her bid to follow in the footsteps of her friend and supermodelactress Cara Delevingne and make a transition to acting, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

“Kendall has wanted to follow in Cara’s footsteps for some time and her ‘momager’ Kris Jenner was keen to ensure she made the most of her trip to Cannes,” Britain’s Grazia magazine quoted a source as saying.

And the trip is said to have been successful for Kendall, who is taking classes from Hollywood acting teacher Howard Fine, as she met with director Jim Jarmusch and casting director Kerry Barden, and also secured a reading for upcoming movie “Wonderstruck” alongside Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams.

“Kendall doesn’t want to give up modelling but she’s desperate to branch out and try something new,” the source said.

Nicole Scherzinger signs huge deal for ‘The X Factor’ return

Singer Nicole Scherzinger has reportedly signed a million-pound deal

Fame forced me to grow up, Emilia Clarke relied on vodka to says X-Men star Sophie Turner go naked for ‘Game of Thrones’

ACTRESS Sophie Turner says fame has forced her to ‘grow up faster’. “I definitely felt I had to grow up faster than I would have done. I’m very driven in terms of work, but I’m almost more playful and silly than my friends. I cling onto childhood,” she said. Turner, who rose to fame through her role of

Sansa Stark in the popular series, Game of Thrones, told a magazine, “Having a cynical perspective is best.

In this industry, there’s just a lot of rejection. We all have that mentality, where we know we’re expendable. We all just think, this is a job.

Try not to get fired,” she added.

Emilia Clarke says she needed “vodka and some flattering lighting” to film nude scenes in the popular TV series ‘Game of Thrones’. The 29-year-old, who stars as Daenerys Targaryen in the show, says she needed a little help and encouragement before she agreed to strip off for ‘Game of Thrones’, reports dailymail.co.uk. “All I needed was vodka and some flattering lighting and I was ready,” Clarke told The Sun newspaper. Clarke, who had previously signed a no-nudity clause, said she found one particular nude scene to be “empowering”, when her onscreen character Daenerys walked through an inferno to emerge naked. “It was just a wonderful, strong moment I wanted to own, a real empowering, girl-power wow scene. “I was so thrilled with it. It’s not a sexy scene, she’s not naked for no reason, it’s not gratuitous. She’s naked because she’s just destroyed her enemies in this almighty blaze after they underestimated her,” she said.

confirming her return to the popular British show ‘The X Factor’.

According to a source, Scherzinger quit the Broadway run of “Cats” to make her talent show comeback, reports mirror.co.uk.

“Simon (Cowell) thinks Nicole is a great asset to the show and is delighted he was able to sign her up, despite the commitments she previously had elsewhere,” The Sun newspaper quoted the source as saying.

“He wants this year’s show to go back to its best and she is very much part of that plan,” the source added.

Scherzinger first appeared as a guest judge on the show in 2010. In 2012, she appeared on the panel alongside Gary Barlow, Tulisa, and Louis Walsh.

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Issue 669 (18)

31 May - 6 June 2016

Missing Japan boy was left in mountains as punishment

TOKYO The parents of a sevenyear-old Japanese boy missing in the mountains confessed on Sunday they had left him as a punishment and he did not get lost during a hike as first claimed, police said. More than 150 rescuers and police officers were searching for a second day in mountains on the northern main island of Hokkaido after Yamato Tanooka went missing on Saturday, a police spokesman said.

His parents originally told

police Yamato got lost while the family were out walking in the area, a habitat of bears, to pick wild vegetables.

But the parents later admitted they had lied, he said. “The parents left the boy in the mountains as a punishment,” the spokesman said.

“They said they went back to the site immediately but the boy was no longer there.” The father told a TV Asahi reporter he did not dare admit the truth while requesting a search.

Wildlife biologist from Mumbai creates new record mapping 1,128 bird species A remarkable feat has been achieved in the history of Indian ornithology with a Mumbaikar having travelled almost the entire country, 80,000 km, to record 1,128 bird species. This includes rarest ones like the Himalayan Forest Thrush, Tibetan Lark, Nicobar Jungle Flycatcher and Chinese Francolin.

Thirty-two-year-old wildlife biologist, Shashank Dalvi, was on a project called the ‘Big Year.’ Under this challenge, promoted by United State’s Cornell University, birders take up a geographical location, often an entire country, to record its bird diversity in one year. Dalvi has become the first Indian to map the country’s almost entire coastline, rainforests, sanctuaries and deserts to record bird species.

BIRD SPECIES The much-awarded photographer says such exercises are important in view of the shrinking wild habitats and climate

change. “With temperatures rising, a few years down the line, these avian species may be lost forever. Also, the data collated through such efforts can inform us of their changing migration and dis-

the history of bird-sighting in India. Dalvi undertook this feat from 1 January-31 December 2015. The alumnus of WCSNCBS programme says he spent four months in India’s Northeast alone. “This belt

tribution patterns through seasons,” he says.

India is among the 12 ‘mega-bird diversity countries of the world’ with an estimated 1,314 species.

Over 13 per cent of the world’s birds are found in India, as per Asad R Rahmani, former Director, Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). Of the 1,314 species, 150 are considered ‘vagrant’ or seen only once or twice in

is the richest. It houses close to two-thirds of India’s bird diversity.”

He spotted several species here like Lord Derby’s Parakeet and Gould’s Shortwing in eastern most parts of Arunachal; Burmese Shrike in Nagaland and Chinese Francolin in Manipur. Other border areas of the country threw up beautiful surprises. In Kargil, Dalvi spotted the Longbilled Bush Warbler

which has not been seen in a breeding ground in India since 1977. He saw the Tibetan Lark in Hanle village (Ladakh) and the Rufousvented Prinia at Harike Lake of Punjab near the border.

ANDAMAN NICOBAR ISLANDS The other largest bird reserve Dalvi found was in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Among his catches were: the Nicobar Jungle Flycatcher, Central Nicobar Serpent Eagle, Nicobar Megapode, Arctic Warbler etc. A certain category of birds called ‘Pelagic’ or ‘offshore’ birds needed him to travel beyond the beaches of Kerala and Karnataka.

Here he sighted Storm Petrels, Skuas and Shearwaters. He says, “I made it to the Desert National Park, Rajasthan, just in time (September) to spot seven-odd species of migratory birds.

These include the Spotted Flycatcher, Rufous-tailed Scrub Robin, Red-backed Shrike, Red-tailed Shrike, European Nightjar and the Great White Throat.”

Issue 669 (19)

31 May - 6 June 2016

Delhi cabbie beaten up by African nationals for refusing extra passengers New Delhi A cab driver was allegedly assaulted overnight by a group of African nationals in Delhi, police said on Monday, potentially escalating a row over a string of racist attacks that left a Congolese teacher dead in the national capital.

The 51-year-old cab driver,

identified only by his first name Nuruddin, was allegedly thrashed by six people including two women following an altercation in the wee hours of Monday near Mehrauli, police said.

Police said the victim with multiple cuts and bruises on his face was taken to AIIMS where he received six stitches.

“Since six people, four men and two women of African origin, wanted to board the car, the cab driver objected, citing restrictions on carrying more than four passengers. The group then allegedly thrashed him,” a senior Delhi Police of-

ficer told Hindustan Times.

One of the attackers, a woman from Rwanda, was left behind though the others managed to escape after the incident.

“We have registered a case and are interrogating the Rwandan woman to identify the others who were with her at the time of crime,” said Ishwar Singh,

deputy commissioner of police, south. Police said they were scanning CCTV footage from the area to ascertain the sequence of events.

Spate of racist attacks The incident comes in the backdrop of a series of attacks in Delhi on people from separate African countries, leading to a diplomatic row.

On Sunday, police said they arrested five people accused of assaulting Africans, after African diplomats urged the Indian government to ensure the safety of their nationals living in the country.

The arrests came after a Con-

golese was bludgeoned to death one week ago allegedly by three men after an argument over hiring an auto-rickshaw.

In a rare statement issued after the attack, a group of African ambassadors said African nationals were living in a “pervading climate of fear and insecurity” in Delhi. The diplomats also warned that they may recommend to their governments not to send students to India until safety conditions improve, following a string of what they said were unpunished racial attacks. Police have arrested two of the three suspected of the killing.

While external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj promised swift action against those involved in the incidents as well as a “sensitisation campaign”, Union minister VK Singh accused the media of overreacting to “minor” incidents.

Thousands of people from African countries study and work in India but several incidents have raised concerns of racist violence and discrimination.

In 2013, a Nigerian national was killed by a mob in the tourist state of Goa, with a state minister later calling Nigerians a “cancer”. Delhi’s former law minister Somnath Bharti was accused in 2014 of harassing African women after he led a vigilante mob through an area of the capital, accusing them of being prostitutes.

MP govt digs up IAS officer’s anti-Modi Facebook post to justify transfer Bhopal The state government is crawling through the Facebook profile of IAS officer Ajay Singh Gangwar as a section of officers questioned its decision to transfer him.

The transfer orders came after Gangwar posted proNehru comments on the social networking site, while an earlier post allegedly criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also being used to justify the government’s actions.

Gangwar was removed as Barwani’s collector on the evening of May 26 after his comments praised former prime minister and Congressman, late Jawaharlal Nehru, defended the Gandhi family and attacked the saffron brigade.

However, the transfer order by the chief secretary Anthony deSa didn’t mention the Facebook (FB) post. It only stated he had been transferred to Mantralaya as a deputy secretary.

The offending post which allegedly led to his removal reads: “Pls let me know the mistakes Nehru should not

have committed…It was his mistake if he didn’t allow you to become a Hindu Talibani Rashtra in 1947. It was his mistake that he brought IIT, ISRO, BARAC, IISB, IIM, BHEL STEEL PLANT, DAMS, THERMAL POWER (sic).”

Official sources cited some of Gangwar’s earlier FB activity in which he spoke against the Prime Minister.

On January 23, 2015, the former collector reportedly ‘liked’ an anti-Modi post, and further commented: “Modi ke khilaph jankranti honi chaia (There should be a people’s movement against Modi)”.

Gangwar’s actions were in violation of the All India Service (conduct) Rules, 1968, the sources said, adding that

the notice will mention the FB post too.

Despite efforts, Gangwar could not be reached for a comment.

Speaking to HT earlier after his transfer orders came, Gangwar said the FB posts were his personal opinion “meant for a discussion exclusively among Facebook friends and is a kind of satire”.

“Some may agree and some may not. I don’t think expressing opinion on a subject in such a manner amounts to making a political comments and violates Central Civil Services (conduct) Rules,” he said.

Within a couple of days of his transfer, some IAS officers came out in Gangwar’s support.

Additional commissioner, commercial tax, Rajesh Bahuguna wrote in his Facebook post, “Very few dare to stand (against the system) with truth and rationale to safeguard the basic values of democracy and humanity. I salute you, my friend,” allegedly in support of Gangwar.

29-year-old woman delivers baby boy in Delhi Police PCR van

New Delhi A 29-year-old woman on Sunday delivered a boy in a Delhi Police PCR van while she was being rushed to a hospital.

The woman, Arti, was travelling in a train from Gwalior to Samalkha in Panipat when she felt labour pain. Her in-laws, who were accompanying her, got down at Sabji Mandi railway station early in the morning and sought help.

A railway employee called the police control room.

PCR van (sugar 46) of the Delhi Police received a call about the woman being in pain.

The PCR staff immediately rushed to the spot and was on its way to Hindu Rao Hospital, when Aarti gave birth to the baby..

As the woman was being taken to hospital, she delivered a baby in the PCR van, said R K Singh, Deputy Commissioner of Police

(PCR). The woman and her child have been admitted to Bara Hindurao Hospital, said the officer.

This is another example of good work done by Delhi Police’s PCR staff in the last few days, he said.

Former Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi termed it as the growth of the PCR unit in Delhi.

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Issue 669 (20)

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By BAISHALI ADAK On the night of January 15, 2014, former Delhi law minister and AAP leader Somnath Bharti raided the house of some Ugandan women in Malviya Nagar in order to bust a â&#x20AC;&#x153;drug and prostitution ring.â&#x20AC;?

That is when the national Capital made global headlines and earned widespread infamy for being â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;racist.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; In the past week that title has come back to haunt Delhi, with people of African origin seething in pain and anguish over the recent turn of events.

The brutal murder of a young Congolese man, Masonda Ketada Olivier, in Vasant Kunj on May 20 and subsequent attacks on Africans have jolted the otherwise shy and inhibited community.

However, the MEA has promised the family of the Congolese national a speedy trial in the case and the prosecution of all those responsible for the crime.

This was conveyed by a senior official of the External Affairs Ministry (MEA), who met Olivierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family members at the airport on their arrival.

He also informed them that the government of India will bear all expenses related to transporting Olivierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mortal remains, MEA spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

He said that the bereaved family have thanked the Indian government for its assistance.

They were told that External Affairs Minister Sushma

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Swaraj has ordered a speedy trial in the case.

As of now, Swaraj and her office are busy trying to soothe the African embassies.

But there is no consoling the Africans living in Delhi, who are facing daily harassment on the streets.

Ingim Dozie, a 30-year-old saloon owner in Mehrauli, has been living in Delhi since 2013. The Nigerian moved to get treatment for his grandmother, who is a severe diabetic. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I still havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been able to adjust myself to the whistles, hoots and racial slurs, which are hurled on us time and again,â&#x20AC;? he says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Only a few days back, I was walking towards my shop, which is in a dark alleyway. Some men began laughing and calling me, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;habshi.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I was later told itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the Hindi word for monkey.â&#x20AC;?

One of his customers, Jave from Cameroon, faced a similar harrowing experience. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was on my way to Hauz Khas. A woman and her child were approaching the road from the other side.

Both looked at me with fearful eyes. Then the lady stooped and said something in her sonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ear, after which he started running away from me. I have no idea what she told him.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am sad to see children being fed with lies and rumours about us. We are human beings. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t eat babies or kidnap them. Why do you have to poison their minds?â&#x20AC;? said the anguished 20-year-old.

Another recurrent problem is being friends with Indian women. Gotham from Tanzania says: â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was beaten up for just smiling and saying hello to a local woman. We have known each other as neighbours for some time and she had no objections. Nobody even asked her if she had a complaint. I was just punched in my face.â&#x20AC;? He

External Affairs Ministry flies family of murdered Congolese man to India to collect his body, as Sushma Swaraj orders a fast-track trial added: â&#x20AC;&#x153;African people are an open society.

We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t segregate our women as another race. I am not sure why Indian men behave like this.â&#x20AC;?

In Khirki Village and Extension, south Delhi, where AAPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ex-law minister conducted his midnight raid, most Africans have left.

A storeowner, Ajay Saini, said: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Earlier, they were all over.

There was a street named Nigerian Gali, because of their dominating presence.

Now, 90 per cent of them have left. They have all dispersed to Sangam Vihar, Neb Sarai, and other areas.â&#x20AC;? But not everyone agrees the African fraternity are victims.

Local businessman Ajay Gautam heartily praises Bhartiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s actions, and condemns

the media for portraying the incident in a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;biasedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; manner. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We were the victims here,â&#x20AC;? he insists. â&#x20AC;&#x153;They would party all night and play loud music. We have seen them carrying packets of white powder, most certainly drugs; their women would be out in skimpy clothes at 2am.

There is a vast difference in their culture and ours. How do you expect us to tolerate this?â&#x20AC;? The few remaining African women have a different story, however.

Rose Dungham said: â&#x20AC;&#x153;I have changed my dressing habits. I understand sensitivities.

But I suppose the taunts donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t depend on the clothes I wear. They are mostly because of my black skin colour.â&#x20AC;?

(With PTI inputs)

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SYDNEY A woman is feared dead after being seized by a crocodile during a night-time swim with a friend at a beach in northern Australia, with reports that she yelled â&#x20AC;&#x153;A crocâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s got me!â&#x20AC;? before disappearing. The women went for a stroll on Thornton Beach on Sunday evening in the far north of Queensland state before making a fateful decision to take a dip in an area known to be infested with the reptiles.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The woman was swimming with a female friend, also in her 40s, at 10.30pm when the incident occurred,â&#x20AC;? police said in a statement.

Nine News cited witnesses as hearing the woman yell â&#x20AC;&#x153;A crocâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s got me, a crocâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s got me!â&#x20AC;? Senior Constable Russell Parker said the women - Australians visiting the area - were in the water when one of them was grabbed, with her friend desperately trying to drag her to safety.

(21)

31 May - 6 June 2016

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by Astha Saxena After running from pillar to post for six months, Leki Nyangsal finally managed to get a rented accommodation near Ashram in south Delhi. Documents were ready, so was cash and he was ready to move in.

However, he was in for a rude shock when he went to make the final payment and the owner suddenly refused to give him the house on rent. “He asked me if I belong to the North-east. When I told him about my native place, Meghalaya, he refused to give me the house. His entire body language and behaviour changed towards me.

The broker was equally at fault for giving out partial information to the owner. He wanted to fool me,” Nyangsal told Mail Today.

He is now residing at a rented accommodation in Kamla Nagar near Delhi University. “The behaviour of landlords in Delhi is very different towards us. Most of them don’t want to give their houses on rent to people coming from North-eastern states. In some of the cases, the owners have even asked people to vacate the house in the middle of the night,” added Nyangsal.

Delhi racist?

Delhi houses a large number of people from the North-eastern part of the country. From students to working professionals, every part of the national Capital houses a good number of North-eastern Indians.

Racial discrimination, stereotyped behaviour, sexual harassment and feeling of being an outsider have

always haunted these people.

S Valentina, a student of Delhi University has become used to facing uncomfortable glares all the time. “The auto-wallahs always try to charge more from us. They never agree to go by the metre,” said Valentina. Cyo Na,

another resident from Khirki extension recalls being called a ‘Chinki’ when he went to get his mobile phone fixed at Nehru Place.

“The shopkeeper did not repair my phone properly. When I asked him, he abused me and called me ‘Chinki,’“ said Na, who is working in a MNC in Gurgaon. “Recently, many people from Noida and Gurgaon were not given the due salaries and asked to leave.

Northeasterns are duped on the pretext of job openings,” Chumbemo M Patton, a social activist from Nagaland, working in Delhi, said.

3ROLVK JUDQGSD KHDGV IURP 1< WR 3RUWXJDO LQ D ND\DN NEW YORK A Polish grandfather left New York Sunday on his third solo trans-Atlantic crossing in a kayak, aiming to arrive in Portugal in time to celebrate his 70th birthday on firm ground in September. Aleksander Doba paddled off from the tip of Manhattan after doing interviews and posing for selfies with a crowd of some 100 onlookers. A star at home, Doba gained global attention when he was named a National Geographic adventurer of the year in 2015. At that point, he already had two solo Atlantic kayak crossings under his belt. The first, between October 2010 and February 2011, took him across one of the narrowest points of the ocean from the Senegalese capital Dakar to the Brazilian city of Acarau. “During the expedition bandits attacked me twice and I was robbed of almost everything,” he said on his website.

The second saw him set off from Lisbon in October 2013 and arrive in Florida in April the following year, navigating ocean swells and tempestuous weather. On Sunday, he embarked on what he has called his “hardest” journey yet, a 3,700-mile (6,000kilometer) crossing through storm zones in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. “I know that this will be the toughest of the three,” he said Sunday through a translator.

“The water is cold. There are a lot more currents and storms predicted - this will be interesting. “I believe now I’m only dealing with nature. I know how to deal with nature and what to expect.” Regardless of the obstacles, Doba - also an avid rock-climber, parachutist, glider pilot, sailor and yacht skipper - is determined to make it to the Portuguese capital in time to celebrate his

70th birthday on September 9. “I planned, from the beginning, to make a circle,” Doba said, recalling how he planned his adventure from Europe or Africa to South America, from South America to the United States and from there to Europe. “My dream is to finish this.”

sports a long white beard. “I feel young and I don’t want to pretend that I’m old.” And Doba was dismissive about risks of the journey. “When people ask me about the dangers of this, I will ask them: Where did you get up from? The bed? Did you know

Doba’s 21-foot (over six metre) white and yellow kayak, which he calls “Olo,” was in large part designed by him. He will be paddling between eight and 12 hours each day - not exactly anyone’s notion of grandpa napping in a rocking chair.

And Doba won’t let his age get in the way of his dream. “I feel good. I don’t want to think about being old,” said the grandfather who

that 95 percent of people will die in bed? So why do you go to bed?” “What happens after?

Let’s see,” he said smiling. He is in the kayak “mostly for myself but really, if that gives happiness and encouragement to others, why not?” Doba’s extreme hobbies haven’t always made things easy for his family, acknowledges his supportive wife Gabriela through a translator. A Polish

grandfather left New York Sunday on his third solo trans-Atlantic crossing in a kayak, aiming to arrive in Portugal in time to celebrate his 70th birthday on firm ground in September.

Aleksander Doba paddled off from the tip of Manhattan after doing interviews and posing for selfies with a crowd of some 100 onlookers. A star at home, Doba gained global attention when he was named a National Geographic adventurer of the year in 2015.

At that point, he already had two solo Atlantic kayak crossings under his belt.

The first, between October 2010 and February 2011, took him across one of the narrowest points of the ocean from the Senegalese capital Dakar to the Brazilian city of Acarau.

“During the expedition bandits attacked me twice and I was robbed of almost everything,” he said on his website. The second saw him set off from Lisbon in October 2013 and arrive in Florida in April the following year, navigating ocean swells and tempestuous weather. On Sunday, he embarked on what he has called his “hardest” journey yet, a 3,700-mile (6,000-kilometer) crossing through storm zones in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. “I know that this will be the toughest of the three,” he said Sunday through a translator. “The water is cold. There are a lot more currents and storms predicted this will be interesting.

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Italian man allowed to pay US town near Las Vegas up alimony with pizza, calzone for sale for $ 8 million!

London An Italian court has ruled in favour of a divorced 50year-old man who paid his monthly child support

years all parties followed accords.

In 2008, Italy was hit by a deep economic crisis and Toso, who had remarried

in the form of pizzas worth 400 Euros.

Nicola Toso, a pizza baker, was acquitted on criminal charges of failing to pay child support after a judge ruled that he had done his best during difficult times to provide 400 Euros worth of pizzas, calzone and other goods from the take-out pizza place he was managing.

Toso and his ex-wife Nicoletta Zuin divorced in 2002 and for several

and had three more children, began struggling to pay child support, ‘The Telegraph’ reported.

From 2008 to 2010 he offered Zuin free food instead of the 400 Euros stipulated in their divorce agreement.

“In lieu of money, the defendant offered his ex-wife the same amount of compensation in the form of take-away pizzas from his workplace, an offer promptly rejected as “beggar’s change,” Judge Chiara Bitozzi wrote in her

hearing.

Zuin then filed a criminal complaint. In Toso’s defence, his attorney argued the pizza baker had fallen on hard times and big debts. He was even forced to close his business in 2010 after being unable to pay vendors and employees.

The attorney also noted that he had held up all his other custody obligations, such as not missing visits and helping his daughter develop cordial relations with his new partner and three step-siblings.

In 2011, Toso’s daughter decided to move in with him. A civil court ruled that it was the ex-wife who was obliged to pay the father 300 Euros a month in child support.

Judge Bitozzi, therefore, wrote that there was no evidence that the pizza baker had committed a crime.

Los Angeles A town near the happening US city of Las Vegas - complete with a 10-unit hotel, a casino, a community centre and a fire station -- is up for sale at a price of 8 million dollar.

The town Cal-Nev-Ari, about 130 km south of Las Vegas, has been put on sale by Nancy Kidwell.

She and her first husband, Slim, named the town for the three states that intersect nearby (California, Nevada and Arizona).

About 375 people live in the town that sports a 10unit hotel with, a general store, a laundromat and community centre. There is even a fire station, the CBS News reported.

Among the residents is 12-year-old Trace Madsen. Talking about the town, he said, “it may look bland and boring, but it’s pretty cool.”

Kidwell and her first husband got 640 acres and a World War II dirt airstrip from the federal government at no charge in the

1960s.

The only residents then were the tumbleweeds.

There was neither water nor power. The couple worked hard to bring basic facilities to the town.

Kidwell does everything in Cal-Nev-Ari, from ordering the beef patties for the cafe,

the system.”

But now at 78-years of age with no children or surviving spouse, Kidwell grudgingly admitted time has the upper hand.

“I’m selling it because I’m not getting any younger,” Kidwell was quoted as saying. “I haven’t found the

to opening up the post office, and hiring the bartenders for the 24-hour saloon.

For 51 years, Kidwell has ruled the roost in the town.

“Go up and check the water tank every day, make sure it’s full, before I come to the casino,” she said.

Asked why she does not have people for that, Kidwell said, “I wouldn’t trust them. I have to see it for myself because I know

fountain of youth, and there’s no one to take my place, so I have to start providing for the future of the community,” she said.

Fred Marik, who is handling the sale, said more than three-quarters of the town is undeveloped -- a real jackpot in a state where the feds own 80% of the land. And so far there are three interested buyers.

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Gorilla shot dead in US zoo after boy falls into enclosure WASHINGTON Workers at the Cincinnati Zoo in the US state of Ohio shot and killed a gorilla on Saturday after a three-yearold boy fell into its enclosure, officials said.The boy crawled through a barrier into the enclosure and fell into a moat around 4 pm (1600 GMT), zoo director Thane Maynard told reporters. The gorilla, a 17-yearold male named Harambe weighing more than 400 pounds (180 kilograms), “went down and got him,” he said.Witnesses said the gorilla dragged the screaming boy around the habitat, local media reported. The zoo’s dangerous animal response team shot and killed the gorilla around 10 minutes after the boy first entered it. He was hospitalized with injuries that were not lifethreatening, media quoted the police as saying.The zoo’s response team decided to shoot the gorilla

rather than tranquilize him because a tranquilizer would not have taken effect immediately, Maynard said. “It seemed by our own dangerous animals response team to be a life-threatening situation,” he said. “They saved that little boy’s life.”

The zoo houses 11 gorillas, according to its website. “We’ve never had a situation like this,” Maynard said.DM adds: Zoo officials said at the time boy fell in the moat, three gorillas were in the enclosure but the two female gorillas were called out immediately. However, a third gorilla, Harambe, remained in the yard with the child.Video footage emerged on Saturday revealing some of the chilling moments of the time the boy was inside the moat, as a panicked crowd looking on can be heard

screaming as the ordeal unfolded.During the chaotic scenes, people can be heard shouting ‘No, no!’ and for someone to call

was taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center with serious injuries following the incident, which was reported

911.At one point a woman appearing to be the child’s mother yells down, ‘mommy’s right here,’ ‘mommy loves you,’ and then says ‘Isaiah be calm,’ as the boy can be heard crying.The graphic portions of the ordeal which apparently showed the gorilla dragging the boy through the water, were removed from the footage, according to by WLWT.The child

around 4pm. The boy was alert when he was taken to hospital, according to officials.Hospital officials said they could not release any information on the child, whose name has not been released.Director Thane Maynard said the zoo’s dangerous animal response team, which practices for such incidents, decided the boy was in ‘a life-threatening

situation’ and that they needed to put down the gorilla.’They made a tough choice and they made the right choice because they saved that little boy’s life,’ Maynard said. ‘It could have been very bad.’Maynard said the gorilla did not appear to be attacking the child, but he said it was ‘an extremely strong’ animal in an agitated situation.A Cincinnati fire department incident report stated that the gorilla was ‘violently dragging and throwing the child,’ according to WLWT. Maynard explained that tranquilizing the gorilla would not have knocked it out immediately, leaving the boy in danger. He also noted it was the first time that the team had killed a zoo animal in such an emergency situation, and he called it ‘a very sad day’ at the zoo. Harambe came to Cincinnati in 2015 from

the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas. According to the zoo’s website, it houses 11 gorillas.The area around the gorilla exhibit was closed off on Saturday afternoon as zoo visitors reported hearing screaming.

The zoo is to be open as usual on Sunday but Gorilla World will be closed until further notice.In March, two curious polar bears at the zoo wandered into a behind-the-scenes service hallway through an open den door, but never left a secondary containment area.The zoo said the 17year-old female Berit and the 26-year-old male Little One, entered an ‘inappropriate’ area but remained contained and were never loose or a threat to the public. During that incident, zoo officials said staff followed protocols and safely returned the bears to their main holding area within two hours.

some of the women are fast approaching 50, he said. “They have a very low chance to get pregnant so they are in a hurry. They really want to have a child as soon as possible,” he said.

Chen Yun is 39 and was in the hospital waiting to have the procedure for the first time. She and her husband

- take care of the child.

They give the only child too much attention.” If her son has a younger brother or sister to look out for, he may not “think too much about himself like a little emperor,” Chen said.

Over the past two decades, IVF technology has developed rapidly in China, where about 10 % of

already have a 7-year-old son and their families are encouraging them to have a second child.

“We are coming to the end of our childbearing years.

It may be difficult for me to get pregnant naturally because my husband’s sperm may have a problem, so we want to resolve this problem through IVF,” she said.

Chen said she hoped having a brother or sister would make their son happier, more responsible and less self-absorbed.

“We had siblings when we were children. I had a younger sister and we felt very happy when playing together,” she said. “Now that every couple has one child, two generations parents and grandparents

couples are estimated to need the procedure to conceive. In 2014, 700,000 women had IVF treatments, according to the health commission’s Women’s and Children’s Department, which said in a statement that demand for all types of fertility treatment had risen following the policy relaxation, including the use of traditional Chinese medicine.

“Currently, fertility centres at renowned medical organisations in Beijing and Shanghai and others are under increased pressure for treatments,” the department said.

Previously, China limited most urban couples to one child and rural couples to two if their first was a girl.

Older Chinese parents turn to Nepalese runner wins IVF as govt allows 2nd child world’s highest marathon

KATHMANDU Gasping for breath and clad in trekking boots, more than 150 local and foreign runners took part Sunday in the world’s highest marathon in the snow-covered foothills of Mount Everest. The annual Tenzing-Hillary Everest Marathon, which began in 2003, is meant to mark the anniversary of the first summit of the peak by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary on May 29, 1953. Runners kicked off the race at 07:00 am local time, with the trail taking them from Everest base camp at a height of 5,364 metres (17,598 feet) to the finishing line about 2,000 metres below in the town of Namche Bazaar.

About 130 foreign runners, including from Britain, United States, China and Australia, joined an-

other 30 from Nepal. Local soldier Bed Bahadur Sunuwar took first place, completing the 42kilometre run in four hours and 10 seconds.

“The route is very challenging but amazing too. I feel proud to be the winner,” the 29-year-old said. The air at base camp contains only half as much oxygen as at sea level, leaving many runners gasping for breath on even the slightest incline along the narrow, rocky mountain paths. “It is a difficult and exciting to race at this altitude. My muscles will hurt once the adrenaline wears off,” said Poland’s Robert Celinski, 43, taking part in his fourth race. “The Nepali runners are very good. But next year, I hope to win,” he said. Organisers hailed the large number of participants as a further sign of the recovery of Nepal’s

mountaineering industry after two years of tragedy on the 8,848-metre (29,029-foot) peak. “The earthquake dampened the race last year, but we have seen a significant increase in the number of participants this year,” said organiser Bikram Pandey. Only 55 took part last year and it was postponed until October after a massive earthquake hit the Himalayan nation in April, killing nearly 9,000 people and triggering a deadly avalanche on Everest base camp. An avalanche on Everest in 2014 also claimed the lives of 16 Nepali guides and forced a shutdown of the mountain. But hundreds of mountaineers have reached the summit in recent weeks, as this year’s spring climbing season drew to a close.

Beijing China’s decision to allow all married couples to have two children is driving a surge in demand for fertility treatment among older women, putting heavy pressure on clinics and breaking down past sensitivities, and even shame, about the issue.

The rise in In vitro fertilization points to the lost dreams of many parents who long wanted a second child, but were prevented by a strict population control policy in place for more than 30 years.

That, in turn, is shifting prevailing attitudes in China regarding fertility treatments - formerly a matter of such sensitivity that couples were reluctant to tell even their parents or other family members that they were having trouble conceiving.

“More and more women are coming to ask to have their second child,” said Dr. Liu Jiaen, who runs a private hospital in Beijing treating infertility through IVF, in which an egg and sperm are combined in a laboratory dish and the resulting embryo transferred to a woman’s uterus.

Liu estimated that the numbers of women coming to him for IVF had risen by 20% since the relaxation of the policy, which came into effect at the start of the year. Before, the average age of his patients was about 35. Now most of them are older than 40 and

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31 May - 6 June 2016

You may notice the tension developing as the week gathers pace, particularly as there’s a Solar Eclipse in your work and lifestyle sector on Sunday. You may be pushed by events to make one or two key changes to your routines, plans and goals, and perhaps job. However, it also offers the chance for a fresh new start, which could take you into new and exciting territory.

An intuitive hunch could see you taking swift action concerning a home or related family matter.

Fresh insights could provide you with a new perspective that enables you to efficiently resolve a tricky issue. There’s also a lot going on in your zone of creativity, romance, and fun. This week’s Solar Eclipse could encourage a budding romance to become more passionate.

Home affairs take the lead, with plenty of opportunities for expansion, entertaining, and making family life exactly what you want it to be. Even so, this week’s Solar Eclipse could coincide with a big decision. If it’s something you’ve been considering for a while, this Eclipse might push you to take action sooner rather than later.

There’s a chance of a small windfall early this week, which could put a smile on your face. Or an opportunity to increase your income could give you a pleasant boost. A lively Solar Eclipse may also encourage you to become more efficient with such things as time management and everyday administrative tasks.

Money matters look buoyant and can remain so if you’re willing to plan for your success.

Toward that end, the Solar Eclipse that’s building this week can encourage you to venture outside your comfort zone. You don’t have to do so all at once - baby steps are fine! You might even discover that someone will pay you for a skill that you haven’t really appreciated.

Mark this week down as a potential game changer, as the developing Solar Eclipse might encourage you to make a key decision. You may find information that puts a new spin on things, and you might want to take advantage of an associated opportunity.

This could be an exciting time when you'll venture into new territory.

Your social life sparkles, and this week is no exception. With Mars continuing its lively pace, this is the perfect time to explore new venues, date, join clubs, and network.

There’s also a Solar Eclipse in your spiritual sector that might encourage you to take up certain spiritual disciplines. If you’ve been busy and feeling somewhat stressed, you may find that doing so brings you greater.

Social trends look particularly buoyant, with opportunities to mix with people who can expand your social horizons. This week you might take a big step forward as the Solar Eclipse in Virgo pushes you to be more adventurous. There’s also the chance of an encounter that sets you thinking of new possibilities you hadn’t considered before.

If you’ve been hoping for some kind of a breakthrough, this week could start the process. Maybe it’s an inspiration or someone you meet that sets you thinking, or perhaps you spot an opportunity that seems too good to be true. Whatever shows up will certainly be worth investigating. Watch out for coincidences that seem to point in a particular direction.

Keep an open mind this week and don’t limit yourself to the tried and trusted. Where your job and career are concerned, a conversation could reveal options that may seem outlandish. However, if this person can also provide proof, then you might be persuaded. The Solar Eclipse on Sunday encourages you to actively study and acquire knowledge in key areas.

Shared finances and business affairs are looking a whole lot livelier since Jupiter entered Virgo. This week there could be even more positive changes afoot as the Solar Eclipse sets you wondering about the future and tantalizing thoughts of success. Toward that end, you may be motivated to look around for opportunities that could be big earners.

This can be an exciting week in which a conversation or encounter has a profound effect on you. A positive alignment in your relationship sector suggests that the people you connect with have the potential to change your life in one way or another.

This week’s Solar Eclipse hints that someone could take you under their wing or may even want to date you.

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31 May - 6 June 2016

Technology Posting babies’ photos on Facebook put moms at depression risk Educated and working mothers, please take serious note! If you frequently post photos of your newborn babies on Facebook and fail to get enough posi-

tive posts, depression is out their to catch you.

If a mother is posting on Facebook to get affirmation that she’s doing a good job and doesn’t get all the ‘likes’ and positive comments she expects, that could be a problem and she may end up feeling worse, the authors noted.

The study looked at a specific group of moms -highly educated, mostly married Midwestern women who had full-time jobs.

It found that those who felt societal pressure to be perfect moms and who identified most strongly with their motherhood role posted more frequently than others to Facebook.

These same mothers who

posted most frequently also reported stronger emotional reactions to comments on the photos they posted of their new baby -- such as feeling bad if they didn’t get

enough positive comments.

“While many new mothers are active on Facebook, these results suggest some seem to be more drawn to the site than others and may use it in less-than-healthy ways,” said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University.

In fact, those mothers who posted more on Facebook tended to report more depressive symptoms after nine months of parenthood than other moms.

The message is not that Facebook is necessarily harmful.

“Using Facebook may not be an effective platform for women to seek and gain external validation that they’re good moms,” added

These free web apps can help multi-task effectively!

A team of researchers has listed some web apps that help people work collaboratively and complete shared tasks online, often over long distances.

The results noted the evaluation of 20 popular apps for usability, including Google Drive, Skype, Doodle Poll, Gmail, Windows Hotmail, CoSketch and DropBox. Lauren E. Marguileux and team from Georgia Institute of Technology selected only free apps with the highest web presence. They assessed the functions of each app, learned how to use them and evaluated each sepa-

rately for usability. The team found that Cisco WebEx was best for synchronous text communication and “was in a dead heat with Google Hangouts for audiovisual communication”.

Google Calendar for calendaring, Doodle for event scheduling and Zoho Docs for writing and editing were chosen best among the others. The raters measured each app against 10 usability measures, among them visibility and feedback, user control and freedom, error prevention, flexibility and efficiency and aesthetics.

Jill Yavorsky, co-author and doctoral student in sociology in a paper appeared in the journal Sex Roles.

The researchers used

data from the New Parents Project, a long-term study co-led by SchoppeSullivan. In all, 127 mothers from Ohio participated in this study.

“Because this sample includes mostly highly educated women from dualcareer couples, the results may not hold for all new mothers, especially those who don’t work outside the home,” SchoppeSullivan noted.

Nine months after the baby was born, the researchers measured how much the women in the study identified with their role as a mother.

The researchers also measured the frequency of their Facebook activity since their child was born.

The study showed that the new moms in the study nearly universally used Facebook to share about their child and 98 percent said they had uploaded photos of their infant.

The average new mom reported a slight increase in Facebook use since her baby was born.

One of the key findings was how mothers who thought society expected them to be perfect and who identified strongly with their motherhood role reacted to Facebook posts.

These mothers paid close attention to the comments they got when they posted pictures of their baby.

“They felt validated when they got a lot of likes and comments, but they were also more likely to feel bad and disappointed when the reaction wasn’t what they had hoped,” Yavorsky pointed out.

“These are not stay-athome moms in our study.

They have jobs outside the home that can also provide validation, which makes our results even more interesting. They have other successes to point to for validation,” SchoppeSullivan commented.

LinkedIn notifies data breach, alerts 400 mn members to stay safe

Hit by a massive data breach that put nearly 167 million users’ passwords and personal information in the hands of hackers four years back, the popular career-oriented platform LinkedIn has finally came out with an explanation and steps it has taken to protect users. In an email sent out to all its members, LinkedIn admitted that the massive data breach in 2012 may result in millions of passwords being leaked to the internet.

LinkedIn currently has 400 million users. “On May 17, 2016, we became aware that data stolen from LinkedIn in 2012 was being made available online. This was not a new security breach or hack. We took immediate steps to invalidate the passwords of all LinkedIn accounts that we believed might be at risk,” LinkedIn said. “These were accounts created prior to the 2012 breach that had not reset

their passwords since that breach,” the email read. The data breach involved member email addresses, hashed passwords, and LinkedIn member IDs (an internal identifier LinkedIn assigns to each member profile) from 2012. “We invalidated passwords of all LinkedIn accounts created prior to the 2012 breach that had not reset their passwords since that breach,” the company informed its users. “In addition, we are using automated tools to attempt to identify and block any suspicious activity that might occur on LinkedIn accounts. We are also actively engaging with law enforcement authorities,” the company added. According to the business-oriented social networking service, it has several dedicated teams working diligently to ensure that the information members entrust to LinkedIn remains secure.

Facebook most preferred among US citizens to get news Nearly 62 percent Americans get news from various social media platforms like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter and social networking giant Facebook is leading the pack, according to a new survey. Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67 percent of US adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44 percent of the general population, said the survey from the Pew Research Centre, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. YouTube has the next greatest reach in terms of general usage, at

48 percent of US adults.

But only about a fifth of its users get news there, which amounts to 10 per-

characteristics of social media news consumers across nine social networking sites. They found that

cent of the adult population. That puts it on par with Twitter, which has a smaller user base (16 percent of U.S. adults) but a larger portion getting news there.

The Pew Research Centre analysed the scope and

Reddit, Facebook and Twitter users most likely to get news on each site. Twothirds of Facebook users (66 percent) get news on the site, nearly six-in-10 Twitter users (59 percent) get news on Twitter, and

seven-in-10 Reddit users get news on that platform.

On Tumblr, the figure sits at 31 percent while for the other five social networking sites, it is true of only about one-fifth or less of their user bases. Differences also emerge in how active or passive each group of news users is in their online news habits more generally.

“YouTube, Facebook and Instagram news users are more likely to get their news online mostly by chance, when they are online doing other things. Alternatively, the portion of Reddit, Twitter and LinkedIn news users who seek out news online is roughly similar to the portion that happen upon it,” the survey said.

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31 May - 6 June 2016

Woman fails to save friend in Un-bear-lievable!

Australian crocodile attack Brisbane A woman struggled in vain to drag her friend from the jaws of a crocodile, off a northeast Australian beach, police said on Monday. The pair were in shal-

low water at Thornton Beach in the World Heritage-listed Daintree National Park in Queensland state when the 46-year-old woman was taken by the crocodile late on Sunday, police senior constable Russell Parker said.

“Her 47-year-old friend tried to grab her and drag her to safety but she just wasn’t able to do that,” Parker said.

Police said the women were swimming in waistdeep water, while paramedics reported they were wading in knee-deep water when the crocodile struck.

A rescue helicopter fitted with thermal imaging equipment failed to find any trace of the missing woman Sunday night, Parker said, with the search resuming Monday with a helicopter, boat and land-based search teams.

The missing woman is from Lithgow in New South Wales state.

The survivor from Cairns, 93 kilometers (58 miles)

south of Thornton Beach, was taken to a hospital in Mossman suffering from shock and a graze to her arm inflicted as the crocodile brushed against her, Queensland Ambulance

Service spokesman Neil Noble said.

“The report that we have from the surviving woman is that they felt a nudge and her partner started to scream and then was dragged into the water,” Noble told ABC. The two women might not have been aware that the area was well known as a crocodile habitat, Parker said.

But Warren Enstch, who represents the area in the Australian Parliament, said the beach was beside a creek where tourism operators run crocodile-spotting tours. Enstch said the two tourists had to have seen plentiful crocodile warning signs in the region.

“You can’t legislate against human stupidity,” Entsch said. “If you go in swimming at 10 o’clock at night, you’re going to get consumed.”

The attack occurred near where a 5-year-old boy was taken and killed by a 4.3-meter (14-foot) crocodile from a swamp in 2009 and a 43-year-old woman was killed by a 5-meter (16foot) crocodile while swimming in a creek in 1985.

Darwin-based crocodile expert Grahame Webb said while most crocodiles were found in rivers, swamps and other protected waterways, open beaches in northern Australia were not safe.

“There have been quite a lot of attacks off beaches and off coral reefs where people are snorkeling,” Webb said.

Moscow The idea of sitting down for dinner with a 300lb bear is enough to put most people off their food. But for one family from Russia this wild idea is actually a way of life that extends far beyond sharing the odd meal at the dinner table. On the surface Svetlana and Yuriy Panteleenko appear like any other ordinary couple, but for their 23-year-old bear named Stepan. Standing at more than seven foot, the large mammal is so domesticated the family often sit down together in the evenings to watch television. And the bear has even been known to help out around the house - or at least in the garden by watering the plants.

While Stepan gets through more than a bowl of por-

ridge a day his favourite dish is a can of condensed milk thanks to a sweet tooth.He also stocks up on a hefty 25kg of fish, vegetables and eggs - meaning dinner time at the Panteleenko’s is never a breeze. But fortunately for Stepan, he’s also a football fanatic so works off the gut-busting amount of food his parents serve him every day. Svetlana and Yuriy adopted Stepan when he was aged just three months.The couple say that because they have known the bear so long his temperament is extremely gentle and he can often be found cuddling up to them on the sofa.Svetlana said: ‘Stepan likes nothing more than to cuddle up with us on the sofa at night while we’re watching television.

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31 May - 6 June 2016

H-1B, L-1 visa fee hikes go into effect, US nuke force still Indian IT giants with US ops unhappy using floppy disks Washington The US citizenship and immigration services (USCIS) has notified higher application fee for heavy users of H-1B and L-1 visas, that would include a large number of Indian information technology firms.

US employers of more than 50 people, half of whom are on H1B or similar immigrant visas, will be charged an additional $4,000 each, over and above the basic processing fee, USCIS said in the notification issued on Thursday.

For L-1 visas, required for a foreign national transferring to a US firm from subsidiaries or units abroad, the additional fee is $4,500 each, also over the basic fee. These charges are effective retrospectively from December 18, 2015, when a legislation passed by Congress was signed into law. And it will stay in effect until 2025.

The additional charges are aimed at discouraging American employers from hiring foreign workers, who eventually displace locals, it is argued, by making it prohibitively expensive.

According to NASSCOM, the trade body representing the Indian IT industry, the impact of the hike could range between $100 million and $499 million annually for Indian companies.

India has called the hikes discriminatory, arguing they

specifically target Indian IT firms with large US operations such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys and Satyam Mahindra.

Finance minister Arun Jaitely raised the issue in his meeting with his American counterparts during his March visit to the US for the annual World Bank group

spring meetings.

US biochemist wins award for rewriting DNA to mimic evolution US biochemical engineer Frances Arnold on Tuesday won a million-euro technology prize in Finland for her work on “directed evolution”, a method of rewriting DNA to improve medicines and develop green fuels.“Frances Arnold receives the 2016 Millennium Technology Prize in recognition of her discoveries that launched the field of ‘directed evolution’, which mimics natural evolution to create new and better proteins in the laboratory,” the Technology Academy Finland, which awards the prize at two-year intervals, said in a statement. Arnold, 59,

Two FBI agents shot while serving warrant outside of Chicago

Chicago Two FBI agents were shot and wounded in a Chicago suburb on Tuesday as they tried to arrest an alleged gang member wanted for dealing drugs, and the suspect was killed, the FBI and

Impotence?

416-992-5489

local media said.

The agents suffered non-lifethreatening gunshot wounds, said Garrett Croon, spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Chicago. The man they were trying to arrest was found dead in the Park Forest, Illinois, home where an arrest warrant was being served, Croon said.

He said it was not known who shot and killed the suspect in the suburb about 30 miles (50km)south of downtown Chicago.

The Chicago Tribune, citing a federal law enforcement source, said FBI agents had gone to the home to arrest the man, who was a high-ranking member of the Black P Stone Nation street gang, on charges of narcotics trafficking. The attempted arrest was part of a sweep involving several other ranking members of the gang. The man was charged with selling heroin to an FBI informant, the newspaper reported. Park Forest-Chicago Heights School District 163 had asked children to stay home because of law enforcement activity in the area, local media reported. But the district said on its website later that the incident had been resolved and school was back in session.

who is a professor of chemical engineering at California Institute of Technology, said her work made it possible to “solve human problems”, such as replacing toxic chemicals like fossil fuels.Her method of creating new proteins with desired properties is being used to convert renewable resources like sugar cane into biofuels and to improve everyday products such as laundry and dishwashing detergents to enhance their performance in cold temperatures.“The microbes convert plants to fuels so the sugar that’s in the plant is the feedstock. Instead of pumping oil out of the ground for making gasoline, now we can use sunlight stored in plants,” she explained to AFP ahead of the ceremony.Other practical applications include creams, fragrances and industrial solvents or improving the drug industry’s previously wasteful chemical processes to make medication such as Januvia, used by millions of people to treat diabetes. The prize - worth one million euros ($1.12m) was handed to Arnold by Finnish President Sauli Niinisto at the University of Helsinki. “This is a fabulous recognition and I’m very grateful for it,” she said. Arnold, who has survived breast cancer and is also a single mother to three sons, said she would spend part of the prize money on her kids’ university education.

WASHINGTON America’s nuclear force still uses floppy disks designed in the 1970s to coordinate some of its functions, according to a watchdog report has released Wednesday. The report by the Government Accountability Office points to a number of worryingly outdated “legacy systems” still in use across the US government that are in desperate need of upgrading.

A Pentagon command and control system that “coordinates the operational functions of the United States’ nuclear forces, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers, and tanker support aircrafts,” runs on an IBM Series/1 computer and uses 8-inch floppy disks, the report says. That type of computer debuted in 1976, when Gerald Ford was in the White House. “This system remains in use because, in short, it still works,” Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Valerie Henderson told AFP. “However, to address obsolescence concerns, the floppy drives are scheduled to be replaced with Secure Digital

devices by the end of 2017,” she added. “Modernization across the entire Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) enterprise remains ongoing.” According to the GAO report, the Pentagon is planning to fully replace the system by the end of 2020. The GAO said the federal government is spending a lot more on “operations and maintenance” of its computer systems than it is on “development, modernization and enhancement.” Last year, for instance, the government spent $61.2 billion on operations and maintenance, compared to $19.2 billion in the other category.

The report also found that the Treasury Department uses “assembly language code,” which was initially designed in the 1950s. The Office of Management and Budget has started an initiative to replace the legacy IT systems, “but until this policy is finalized and fully executed, the government runs the risk of maintaining systems that have outlived their effectiveness,” the report states.

Kim Jong-Un’s aunt lives anonymously in US, runs dry-cleaning business Washington The aunt of North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-Un lives anonymously in the United States, where she runs a drycleaning business after having defected in 1998, a media report has said. Ko Yong-Suk – who lives with her husband Ri Gang and their three children under assumed names – was the sister of Ko Yong-Hui, one of former North Korean leader Kim JongIl’s wives and mother of Kim Jong-Un. Close to North Korea’s communist regime, the couple was sent to Switzerland to look after members of the ruling family studying there, including the reclusive state’s current leader.

“He wasn’t a troublemaker but he was short-tempered and had a lack of tolerance,” Ko said of Kim in an interview with the Washington Post in New York City and at her home, which was identified only as “several hours’ drive away”. “When his mother tried to tell him off for playing with these things too much and not studying enough, he wouldn’t talk back but he would protest in other ways, like going on a

hunger strike.” Ko said Kim was born in 1984 not in 1982 or 1983 as previously believed – meaning he was just 27 when he took over from his father Kim Jong-Il in 2011. Ko’s own son was born the same year and the two boys would play together. “He and my

son were playmates from birth,” she told the Post. “I changed both of their diapers.” Kim’s main interest was basketball, Ko said.

“He started playing basketball, and he became obsessed with it,” she said, adding that he even slept with a basketball. Kim is reported to have been a Michael Jordan fan and as leader he has hosted former basketball star Dennis Rodman several times in Pyongyang. Kim knew from 1992 that he would become North Korea’s leader, Ko said. The signal came on his eighth

birthday when he received a general’s uniform and the country’s military top brass began bowing to him. It remains unclear why Ko defected to the US, where she arrived with her husband after showing up at the US Embassy in the Swiss capital Bern. However, Ko’s sister had terminal breast cancer and the couple believed they might lose their privileged status after the children they were charged with looking after in Switzerland grew up, the Post reported. Analysts suggested that they may have also been concerned about their position if Ko’s sister – their link to the regime- died. After months of questioning, the family was eventually resettled in the US a few hours drive from New York City where they started new lives under assumed names not revealed by The Washington Post. They brought a house with financial help from the CIA. “My friends here tell me I’m so lucky, that I have everything,” she said.

Ko’s three children went to college and found jobs in the US, the Post reported.

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Donald Trump’s xenophobia worsening climate of fear: Sikh-American New York A Sikh-American councilman, who was called a “terrorist” on Twitter by a Donald Trump supporter, has said the Republican presidential candidate’s “xenophobic political rhetoric” has worsened the

“climate of fear” against minority communities across the US. Ravinder Bhalla, councilman-atlarge of the City of Hoboken, New Jersey, in an opinion piece on NJ.com said that fear-mongering and divisiveness had never worked to solve people’s differences and “no public official, locally or nationally, should ever be telling you otherwise.”

“As Donald Trump and others continue to inject charged xenophobic political rhetoric into our public discourse, the climate of fear directed towards minority communities across our nation

has worsened dramatically,” Bhalla said.

He underscored that diversity and unity is what makes the United States great. “We are a nation of immigrants, where each new wave has strengthened and reinvigorated our nation,” he

said.

Bhalla was called a terrorist last week by Robert Dubenezic, an open supporter of Trump after the Sikh-American had tweeted about new bike lanes in his city.

Dubenezic replied to his tweet, saying “How the hell did Hoboken allow the guys to be councilman? Shouldn’t even be allowed in the US #terrorist.”

Bhalla was quick to answer, exclaiming, “Sir, I am born and raised in America. You clearly don’t know what it means to be an American #ignorant.” Bhalla, who is also a partner at a law

Two Indian-Americans are co-winners of US Spelling Bee 2016

firm, said innocent people across America get called “terrorist” or some other epithet just because of the way they look and now “it was my turn to be falsely labelled based on my Sikh appearance.”

Such offensive remarks raise the question that what should be the proper response of Americans to the rising tide of hate speech and violence in the US in 2016, not only against Sikh-Americans but other minorities like Muslims and Latinos, he said. “It is important at a time when loud, bigoted and divisive voices are crowding the public square that we remind the public of this basic fact and celebrate a nation founded on the unifying idea that we are all created equal,” Bhalla said.

“We must continue to call out bigotry and hatred when we see it, but in a manner that does not lower ourselves to the level of those that spew hate speech,” he said.

Citing data by civil rights organisation Sikh Coalition, Bhalla said Sikh-Americans had seen an increase in cases of profiling, backlash and hate crimes over the past six months.

“Racists in our own country have desecrated Sikh gurdwaras (houses of worship) and brutally assaulted innocent Sikh Americans. Other minority communities, including the Latino and Muslim communities have also experienced a step up in racially charged incidents,” he said.

Bhalla asserted that his turban and beard represent his commitment to equality, justice and diversity. “These values are not only Sikh, they are also distinctly American,” he said.

Bill Cosby must stand trial on sexual assault charges, rules US judge

Norristown A Pennsylvania judge on Tuesday ordered entertainer Bill Cosby to stand trial on sexual assault charges over allegations that he drugged and assaulted a woman in 2004.The ruling came after a preliminary hearing that Cosby, 78, attended in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in which witnesses testified about statements that Cosby and his accuser, Andrea Constand, gave to police in 2005.In court, Cosby responded with “thank you” when Judge Elizabeth McHugh announced her decision. She wished him luck.Constand, a former basketball coach at Cosby’s Temple University alma mater, is the only woman whose accusations of sexual assault have resulted in criminal charges against Cosby.Once one of the most beloved U.S. entertainers, Cosby has been hit by a wave of sexual assault allegations from more than 50 women, although most of the cases are too old to be prosecuted. He has denied ever assaulting anyone.

Constand told police she was attacked as she lay on a sofa “paralyzed” by drugs the entertainer had given her, said a former detective reading from a

transcript of Constand’s police interview.

Cosby told her the pills would help her relax and “take the edge off.” So Constand swallowed the pills, added a sip of wine and told the comedian that she trusted him, the former detective said.

Less than an hour later, according to Constand, Cosby sexually assaulted her as she lay incapacitated by the drugs she had taken, the former detective said.Cosby’s own 2005 interview with police in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, where the purported 2004 assault took place, also was introduced as evidence.Cosby admitted giving Constand 1-1/2 pills of the antihistamine Benadryl to relax her, Cheltenham Police Chief John Norris testified.

Cosby said Constand never told him to stop and was fully conscious during what he called the “petting” encounter, which he said involved fondling of genitals, Norris testified.

The hearing followed Sunday’s Associated Press report of new revelations about Cosby from his 2005 and 2006 sworn depositions, including his admission that he gave drugs to a 19-year-old woman before having sex.

inquiry of this nature, our investigation could not exclude the possibility of isolated improper actions or unintentional bias in the implementation of our guidelines or policies,” Stretch

websites and news outlets to assess the importance of topics in stories. “We want people to be confident that our community welcomes all viewpoints,” Stretch said in the letter. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said last week that conservatives are an important part of the social network after a meeting aimed at defusing concerns it is politically biased. “We’ve built Facebook to be a platform for all ideas,” Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page after a meeting at the company’s California headquarters to discuss the allegations about anti-conservative bias. “It doesn’t make sense for our mission or our business to suppress political content or prevent anyone from seeing what matters most to them.”

Zuckerberg called the meeting after technology news outlet Gizmodo a week earlier reported allegations that Facebook was deliberately omitting articles with conservative viewpoints from the sidebar that lists popular stories.

Facebook makes changes to avoid political bias

New York Nihar Janga, a fifth-grader from Austin, Texas, and Jairam Hathwar, a seventh-grader from Painted Post, New York, were declared co-champions of the U.S. Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday. The finals of the 89th Spelling Bee took place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, and was broadcast live on ESPN. Seven Indian American spellers reached the final round, reported Americanbazaaronline.com.

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The winning pair battled head to head for 25 rounds in the finals.

They ended co-winners when Jairam, 13, correctly spelled ‘feldenkrais’, a method of education, and Nihar, 11, aced ‘gesellschaft’, a type of social relationship.The two are good friends and were rooting for each other. Incidentally, Jairam’s brother Sriram was a co-winner in 2014.

Jairam said the best advice he got from his brother was not to get too agitated if he was given a word he didn’t know. The teenager plans on saving his winnings to pay for college. The younger winner, Nihar, thanked his mother and said, “I can’t say anything. I’m just in fifth grade.”

According to Stargazette.com, both Jairam and Nihar said they’re going to play video games now that the bee is over.The tie is the third in a row in the Bee, a US institution since 1925, and comes despite the contest introducing tougher rules this year to avoid another deadlock. Jairam and Nihar will each receive a $40,000 cash prize.

SAN FRANCISCO Facebook has said it was making changes aimed at keeping political bias out of its “trending” stories list even though an internal investigation revealed no evidence it was happening. “Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature,” Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch said in a letter responding to a query from Republican US Senator John Thune, who chairs the commerce committee. “In fact, our analysis indicated that the rates of approval of conservative and liberal topics are virtually identical in Trending Topics.” Facebook was unable to substantiate any specific accusations of bias made in media reports, which relied on anonymous sources, Stretch said in the letter, a copy of which was made available by the leading social network. “At the same time, as you would expect with an

said. “As part of our commitment to continually improve our products and to minimize risks where human judgment is involved, we are making a number of changes.” Facebook updated terminology in its guidelines to be clearer and gave reviewers refresher training that emphasized content decisions may not be based on politics or ideology, the letter said. The review team will be subject to more oversight and controls, and Facebook will no longer rely on lists of external

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Temporary space station habitat fails to inflate MIAMI A temporary habitat at the International Space Station failed to inflate Thursday and work was halted after the US space agency ran into problems expanding the module to full

size. The new room, known as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), is part of an experiment to test expandable habitats that astronauts might use on the Moon or Mars in the coming decades. NASA astronaut Jeff Williams took charge of the inflation early Thursday, in cooperation with mission control in Houston.

However, the module made little progress despite several hours of effort. “Flight controllers informed NASA astronaut Jeff Williams that BEAM had only expanded a few inches in both length and diameter at the time

the operation ceased for the day,” the US space agency said in a statement. The module, when fully expanded, should reach a size of 13 feet long (four meters) by 10.5 feet (3.23 meters) wide. NASA canceled

a press conference that had been scheduled for 1400 GMT to discuss the effort, but said another attempt could come as early as Friday morning. “NASA and Bigelow Aerospace are working closely to understand why the module did not fully expand today as planned,” a NASA spokeswoman said.

“Engineers are meeting at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to discuss a path forward.” She added that the press conference “has been postponed until we have more information available to share.”

The oblong habitat, developed

by Bigelow Aerospace under an $18 million contract with NASA, is being tested for the first time in space. Astronauts were scheduled to enter it for the first time on June 2, according to the initial timeline. The plan was for the crew onboard the space station to venture into the module several times a year to collect data from interior sensors - particularly to see how well it protects people against radiation in space.

Experts have said the inflation process may be better described as “unfolding,” since it takes very little air to bring the pod to full size. The space station crew was to expand BEAM by introducing a small amount of air from the orbiting lab via a small manual valve on the BEAM bulkhead. Only about 0.4 pounds per square inch (psi) was supposed to be needed to expand BEAM to its full shape.

Eight air tanks inside of BEAM, once activated, were meant to bring the pod to full pressure, requiring about 42 pounds of air to fully pressurize BEAM’s internal volume of 565 cubic feet (16 cubic meters).

The benefit of expandable habitats lies in how little space they take up in the cargo hold of a spacecraft, yet allow for greater living and working space once inflated. But key questions that remain to be answered include how well the pod would protect people against solar radiation, space debris and the temperature extremes of space.

Bidders fail to reach minimums for two rare US coins NEW YORK Two legendary US coins, one of them more than 200 years old, that were on the auction block in New York City did not sell after bidders failed to reach minimum reserved prices, according to

fourth coin auction series of the D. Brent Pogue Collection, which is working in collaboration with the auction house and Stack’s Bowers Galleries. Some 61 coins from the Pogue Collection, which in recent years has

Sotheby’s. A bid of $10,575,000, the most ever offered for a coin, was placed by phone for an 1804 Draped Bust Silver Dollar, but it failed to reach the consignor’s reserve price, Sotheby’s auction house said in a statement. A phone bid of $7,285,000 was placed on an extremely rare 1822 half eagle, but it also failed to reach the consignor’s reserve price, Sotheby’s said. The pieces were highlights of the

become the most valuable auction series in history, were sold for more than $16.7 million during the auction at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York.

The collection focused on nonmachine manufactured currency made from 1793 to the 1830s, said David Tripp, Sotheby’s worldwide senior numismatic consultant. “All the coins in the Pogue collection were struck and produced in these early years

when things were really handmade and so there are all sorts of peculiarities,” Tripp told Reuters TV. The 1804 Silver Dollar, originally owned by the Sultan of Muscat in 1835 and then by the Childs Family Collection for more than 50 years, was purchased by D. Brent Pogue in 1999 for $4 million. One of the five most valuable coins in the world, the silver dollar features blue and gold tones and a portrait of America’s Lady Liberty staring skyward, with stars bordering the coin’s edges.

It is in such good condition that it has been given a Proof-68 grade by the Professional Coin Grading Service. That is one of the highest standards on the PCGS grading scale. The Pogue Collection acquired the 1822 Half Eagle coin in 1982 from the Eliasberg Collection. Before that, the coin was unobtainable for decades. Tuesday’s auction marked only the second time in over a century that collectors have a chance to compete for the rare amber-colored coin, which also features Lady Liberty, this time donning a cape with “LIBERTY” printed on its side.

Intelligence exposes Dawood Ibrahim’s link to trans-continental drug lords

NEW YORK A recent arrest of five cocaine traffickers in Kathmandu has exposed underworld don Dawood Ibrahim’s links to a cartel of trans-continental drug lords, highly-placed Indian and Nepali intelligence sources disclosed to India Today.

SMUGGLERS FROM PAKISTAN? On a tip off by Indian agencies, Nepal’s anti-narcotics sleuths captured the smugglers of varying nationalities on Wednesday.

Initial investigations revealed they were part of an international drug mafia involved in the supply of the contraband to Europe via Asia, the sources said.

The arrested traffickers were found to have Pakistani masters based in Hong Kong, top intelligence officials said.

BIG BOSSES IN HONG KONG Their Hong Kong bosses were identified as Wahid Khan, Abdul

Razzak alias Chacha and his brother. The suspect Pakistani drug lords, further investigations showed, were connected to Dawood Ibrahim, the man wanted in India for the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings, according to official sources. Nepali police seized more than two kilos of cocaine, valued at around $495,000 (Rs 3.3 crore), from the possession of smugglers, sources said. Khan, Chacha and their other Pakistani accomplice have their rings in Hong Kong, Dubai and Malaysia, officials say.

GANGMATES Among those arrested on Wednesday in Kathmandu was a Venezuelan woman, Ymeris Caemen, and a Chinese woman, Qin Dong Dong. The gang of different nationalities used a baffling travel plan, spanning various countries from Latin America to the Middle East to South Asia, to supply drugs.

116-year-old Italian woman seen as last living person born in 1800s Verbania Surrounded by relatives and friends, Italy’s Emma Morano greeted with a smile the news that she, at 116, is now the oldest person in the world.

Not only that, but Morano is believed to be the last surviving person in the world born in the 1800s, with a birth date of November 29, 1899. That’s just 4 ½ months afterSusannah Mushatt Jones , who died Thursday in New York, also at 116.

Journalists on Friday descended upon Morano’s home in Verbania, a northern Italian mountain town overlooking Lake Major, to document her achievement, but had to wait until she finished a nap to greet her.

Morano lives in a neat one-room apartment, which she no longer leaves, and is kept company by a caregiver and two elderly nieces.

“I am doing fine 116!” she told well-wishers from her bed Friday.

“I finished school and I went to work. I used to sing. I had a beautiful voice,” she added, summing up her life in a frail voice.

Her physician of 23 years, Dr Carlo Bava, delivered the news earlier that she was officially the world’s oldest person.

“She was very, very happy” and sitting up in a chair, he told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “She was all proud and contented.”

For the occasion, he brought flowers as well seven Easter cakes called Colomba, an Italian specialty that he managed to procure out of season to satisfy her sweet tooth until Christmas, when Panettone is available.

The doctor said Morano has never had a very balanced diet, relying mostly on animal protein, the occasional banana and grapes in season. Her diet now includes two raw eggs and 100 grams of raw steak a day, which Bava prescribed after she had a bout of anemia some years back. Her nieces also make her apple sauce.

Italy is known for its centenarians many of whom live on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia and gerontologists at the University of Milan are studying Morano, along with a handful of Italians over 105, to try to figure out why they live so long.

Bava, who visits her every Friday, is convinced there’s a genetic component to Morano’s longevity in addition to her positive attitude. One of her sisters lived to be over 100 and another to nearly 100.

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Drugs and dung a bad mix for climate Chinese firm behind racist PARIS Scientists have discovered a potential threat to Earth’s climate lurking in a dark and smelly place: the dung of cattle treated with antibiotics, a study said Wednesday. Lab studies

revealed that dung pats from animals given a common antibiotic gave off more than double the methane, a potent greenhouse gas, than those of non-treated cows, a team wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.This highlights another danger of routinely using antibiotics on livestock, a practice which has already created a wave of drug resistance in humans.

“Antibiotics are extensively used in agriculture to promote growth and to treat or prevent livestock disease, yet they may have major consequences for human and environmental health,” wrote the study authors. “We provide the

first demonstration that antibiotics can increase dung emissions of methane.” The team collected dung from 10 cows - five given a three-day course of a common broad-spectrum antibiotic called tetracycline, and five given none.

In decidedly unglamorous work, they divided the dung into smaller pats, which they placed in open buckets in the field along with a few empty ones, to measure and

Thai man fights off python after it latches onto his penis in toilet

Bangkok A Thai man is recovering from a bloody encounter with a 3meter (10-foot) python that slithered through the plumbing of his home and latched its jaws onto his penis as he was using a squat toilet.Attaporn Boonmakchuay was smiling as Thai television stations interviewed him in his hospital bed about the intimate intrusion, and doctors said he would recover. But photos of his blood-splattered bathroom in Chachoengsao province, east of Bangkok, were testimony to his ordeal.The 38-year-old told Thai TV Channel 7 that he struggled to remove the snake for 30 minutes Wednesday before he managed to free himself with help from his wife and a neighbor. After his wife tied a rope around the snake, Attaporn pried open its jaws

before passing out. Emergency workers dismantled the Asianstyle squat toilet, with the python still twined through it.

The snake was taken away to be released back into the wild, according to an emergency responder cited by the newspaper Thai Rath. Doctors said Attaporn, bloodied but unbowed, will recover. “He has a really good attitude... even though his own wife and children were in shock. He’s been smiling and giving interviews all day from his bed.” hospital director Dr. Chutima Pincharoen said.

compare flows of gases like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Antibiotic treatment “consistently increased methane emissions,” the authors found - by as much as 1.8-fold. Agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Methane, which is about 20 times more efficient at trapping solar heat than the most prevalent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, accounts for 40 percent of farming emissions. It comes largely from belching cattle and rice cultivation.

The researchers speculated that antibiotics may change microbial activity within the cow gut. This suggested it may also be increasing methane emissions from belching, already known to be much higher than from dung.

Further studies were needed to quantify the contribution of agricultural antibiotic use to global warming, the team suggested. The routine use of antibiotics in farmed animals in countries like the United States is blamed for contributing to the spread of drug resistance in humans - turning easilytreatable diseases into potential killers.Bacteria which make humans and animals ill can develop resistance when medicines are administered unnecessarily, for too short a period or in too small a dose.

ad tells critics to lighten up

BEIJING A Chinese detergent commercial showing a black man stuffed into a washing machine and transformed into a fair-skinned Asian provoked outrage this week, but the company behind the clip says it is foreign critics who need to lighten up. The commercial for the “Qiaobi” brand - which has gone viral in the West - shows a black man whistling and winking at a young Chinese woman, who calls him over, puts a detergent packet into his mouth, and forces him headfirst into a washing machine. She sits on the lid while the man shrieks.

Moments later an Asian man emerges in clean clothes, and the woman grins. “We meant nothing but to promote the product, and we had never thought about the issue of racism,” a spokesman for the Leishang cosmetics

company, which produces the detergent, told China’s Global Times. “The foreign media might be too sensitive about the ad,” he added.

The spokesman said a shorter version was broadcast in China, which did not feature the black actor, and he had no idea how the full-length clip ended up online.

The advertisement has provoked an uproar on US news websites, which cited it as an example of racist attitudes towards black people in China.

“This ad is blatantly racist... it’s also a reminder that attitudes over race and skin colour in China can be very bad,” said Vox.com But it has attracted little attention in its home country, with few comments on social media, and fewer than 2,000 views of the same ad on popular video-sharing site Youku.

around 15 in the country by 2020. “We want to ensure that Disney will not be able to make a profit in this (theme park) sector in China for between 10 and 20 years,” he said. “A tiger cannot

class, in a country where it has been generating an increasing share of its box office revenue.

But Wanda is not entirely new to entertainment, having bought US cinema chain AMC

take on a pack of wolves,” he said during the same interview, in which he also accused Disney of “cloning past accomplishments without innovating”. But experts claim Wanda’s goals are ambitious, pointing to the group’s lack of experience in the market.

Meanwhile Disney’s project in Shanghai - a 5.5-billion-dollar investment - will be its sixth theme park and its fourth outside the United States after Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. The American giant is hoping its popular franchises will appeal to a booming Chinese middle

Entertainment Holdings in 2012 and has also been branching out into film production, print media and art investment.

China declares war on Disney with giant theme park BEIJING The Chinese conglomerate Wanda on Saturday opened its first theme park, with its billionaire boss declaring war on Disney weeks before the American entertainment giant launches a similar attraction in Shanghai. “Wanda City”, in southeastern Nanchang, comprises a giant mall set over two square kilometres, as well as an 80-hectare theme park boasting “the highest and longest roller coaster and the highest drop tower in China”, according to a statement by the group.The project represents an investment of 22 billion yuan ($3.4 billion), the statement said. “We want to be a model... and highlight Chinese influence in the cultural domain,” Wanda founder Wang Jianlin said during an opening ceremony at the park as he referenced an “invasion” of foreign cultures, according to state television channel CCTV. A week before, Wang - China’s richest man, according to Forbes magazine - said he was setting his sights on Disney, which in June will open its first theme park on the mainland.

“This craze for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck is over, the period when we would blindly follow where Disney led has been gone for years,” he said during a long interview with CCTV. After the site in Nanchang, Wanda plans to open six more theme parks in China within three years and plans to have

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Gang-rape internet video shocks Brazil, social networks erupted with outrage Rio de Janeiro Brazilian police on Friday were investigating the gang-rape of a 16-year-old girl whose attackers boasted about it by posting an online video of her that has horrified the country.Online social networks erupted with outrage over the video posted on Wednesday featuring the girl naked on a bed and the apparent rapists bragging that she had

suspected of taking a “direct or indirect” part in the rape or the posting of the video, he added.

Brazil’s acting president Michel Temer and other senior figures reacted with outrage.

“I condemn most forcefully the rape of the teenager in Rio de Janeiro,” he wrote on Twitter.

“It is absurd that in the 21st century we should have to live with barbaric crimes such as

been raped by more than 30 men.They are suspected of assaulting her on May 21 in Rio de Janeiro, a city stricken by violent crime that will host the Olympic Games in August.

“There are strong indications that the young woman was raped,” Rio police chief Fernando Veloso told a news conference.

“We cannot say whether there were 30 attackers, 33 or 36. The investigations will determine that,” he said.Police have identified four of the men

this.”The authorities are working “to find those responsible and rigorously punish the authors of this rape and the publishing of this criminal act on social networks,” he said.

Brazil’s ‘culture of rape’ The United Nations women’s rights agency condemned the case along with another recent alleged gang-rape of a 17-yearold girl in the northeastern state of Piaui.“Apart from the fact that these are young women, these barbaric cases are similar in that

the teenagers were lured by their attackers in premeditated plots,” UN Women in Brazil spokeswoman Nadine Gasman said on Thursday.“They were violently attacked in a context of illegal drug use.”Brazilian police recorded a sexual assault in the country every 11 minutes in 2014, the Brazilian nongovernmental organisation Public Safety Forum said in a study, estimating that half a million such assaults take place overall each year.“This case is not unusual,” said Luise Bello, spokeswoman for women’s rights group Think Olga, of the Rio gang-rape.“The culture of rape is very strong in Brazil. It is part of our daily life, although people deny it.”Top officials were meeting to discuss new measures to stop violence against women, Temer said.He took over as interim president earlier this month from suspended leftist leader Dilma Rousseff, who faces an impeachment trial for allegedly fiddling government accounts.

Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, also expressed outrage over the Rio case.

“Once more I reiterate my condemnation of violence against women,” she wrote on Facebook.Countless messages of condemnation on social networks have included calls for a street demonstration in Rio on Friday evening.

Trump golf course wants to build climate change wall

DUBLIN An Irish golf course owned by Donald Trump, a climate change denier, has put in a planning application for a sea wall to protect against coastal erosion, citing changing weather as the reason. The US Republican presidential hopeful’s Irish holding company TIGL Ireland Enterprises submitted the application earlier this month to build a £7.6 million (10.0 million euro, $11.2 million) rock barrier saying that storms had swept away sand dunes. “The evidence for increased storm activity associated with climate change suggests that the erosion will accelerate,” read the application

by Doonbeg golf course in

western Ireland, obtained by AFP on Wednesday. The billionaire New York property tycoon bought the venue on the Atlantic coast in 2013 - one of a string of golf courses he owns in Britain and Ireland.The proposed sea barrier would be 2.8 kilometres (1.7 miles) long and three to four metres high. A decision on the application is expected by July 6.

Trump has made no secret of his views, telling CNN last year: “I’m not a believer in climate change.”

He added in the interview: “It’s always weather. And frankly, it’s been that way for so long, and honestly, weather changes. “You have storms and you have rain and you have beautiful days.”

Muslims in Turkey demand right to pray at Hagia Sophia

Indonesian birds face extinction due to pet trade JAKARTA Thirteen species of Indonesian birds, including the country’s symbolic Javan Hawk-eagle, are at serious risk of extinction mainly due to the pet trade, a wildlife watchdog warned

“This is a multi-million-dollar industry, there’s a huge criminal element and many people are profiting illegally from this business,” Chris Shepherd, TRAFFIC’s director for

Wednesday. The vast Indonesian archipelago is home to a dizzying array of birds and keeping them as pets has long been part of the national culture, with birdcages a common sight outside homes and shops across the country. However increasing demand for some species as pets has led to dramatic population declines, wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC warned in a new study.

Southeast Asia and a co-author of the study, told AFP. Huge demand for songbirds in Indonesia has also put bird species in other countries such as Malaysia and Thailand in danger, Shepherd said. The Javan Hawk-eagle is Indonesia’s national bird and the inspiration for the Garuda, the mythical winged creature that adorns the country’s coat of arms. Other species at risk of extinction

include the Silvery Woodpigeon, Yellow-crested Cockatoo, Scarlet-breasted Lorikeet, Javan Green Magpie, Black-winged Myna, Bali Myna, Straw-headed Bulbul, Javan White-eye, Rufous-fronted Laughingthrush, Sumatran Laughingthrush and Java Sparrow. The Helmeted Hornbill is also at risk but unlike the others, is not kept as a pet.

Thousands are being illegally killed and traded for their unique “casques” - a solid lump of fibrous protein that runs along the top of the bill and onto the skull.It is used as a substitute for elephant ivory, to meet demand in China, according to TRAFFIC. It is illegal to hunt birds in the wild in Indonesia and sell them as pets but critics say the law is often flouted, and major bird markets in cities still operate freely. Shepherd said that government efforts to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade too often focused on endangered species such as orangutans, tigers and elephants, and did not do enough to protect birds. The TRAFFIC report called for a range of solutions to tackle the problem, including better law enforcement and public awareness campaigns.

ISTANBUL Thousands of Muslim worshippers descended Saturday on Istanbul’s world famous Hagia Sophia, the towering former Byzantine church that is now a museum, to demand the right to pray there, Turkish media reported. An imam led a prayer in front of the vast building that was once a Greek Orthodox basilica, then a mosque and now a museum before crowds called for it to be restored as a Muslim place of worship. “Let the chains break, open Hagia Sophia,” chanted the crowds who gathered on the plaza in front of the museum, according to Turkey’s Dogan news agency. “In the name of thousands of our brothers we demand to be allowed to pray inside the Hagia Sophia mosque,” said Salih Turhan, the president of the Anatolia Youth Association which organised the demonstration coinciding with celebrations for the anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of

Constantinople. Built in the sixth century, Hagia Sophia, which means Holy Wisdom in Greek, was converted to a mosque in 1453 when the Ottomans conquered what was then called Constantinople. After the Ottoman Empire crumbled and modern secular Turkey was founded on its ruins, the mosque was transformed into a museum in 1935. The edifice, a masterpiece of Byzantine architecture, features an immense dome supported by huge pillars, its walls sheathed with marble and decorated with mosaics. After the city fell to the armies of Sultan Mehmet II The Conqueror, four minarets were added to the structure and the interior was decorated with Islamic art. Since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, advocates of Turkish secularism have feared that the Hagia Sophia could be transformed back into a mosque.

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Thai forager who found $6m pill stash ‘gave them away’ to pals

BANGKOK A Thai man who says he found 700,000 methamphetamine pills - with a street value of nearly $6 million - in a bush, drove the local price of the drug down after handing them out to his friends for free, police said Wednesday.

Prachaub Kanpecth, who normally collects rubbish and forest honey, was charged Tuesday with possession and intent to supply after police caught him with 500,000 meth tablets, known as yaba or “crazy drug”, at his home in central Ayutthaya province. The 41-yearold told officers he found the tablets after watching a group of men in a pick-up truck leave a large package in some shrubbery along the road, district police said.

Police opened an investigation after a glut of tablets flooded the local market - going

for an unusually cheap $3. Yaba pills normally cost around $8 each.

But by the time he was arrested on Tuesday, Prahuab had already given away 200,000 tablets, said police, who are still investigating the case.

“He claimed he has been giving [the pills] to his friends who needed money or who wanted to money to pay back debts,” Suriya Yoopeat, a police commander in Uthai district, told AFP. “As of now we don’t have any other evidence or witnesses to contradict his testimony,” the officer said. Seizures of meth have surged across the AsiaPacific region in recent years.

Much of the regional drug manufacturing takes place in the Golden Triangle, a remote border region where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet.

Diagnosis app scoops Africa health prize

Pakistanis hit back as clerics say men can ‘lightly beat’ wives Islamabad Pakistani media and activists poured scorn Friday on a suggestion from an Islamic religious body that men should be allowed to “lightly beat” their wives, made in their draft of a women’s protection bill.

The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) released a draft of the bill on Thursday, their response to progressive legislation giving women greater rights and protection in the province of Punjab.

Local media quoted the draft as saying: “A husband should be allowed to lightly beat his wife if she defies his commands and refuses to dress up as per his desires; turns down demand of intercourse without any religious excuse or does not take bath after intercourse or menstrual periods.”

The proposal was met with a wave of mockery in the media and online Friday.

The country’s biggest and most influential newspaper, the English-language daily Dawn, published a satirical article with a list of things people could beat other than their wives -- including eggs, the bottom of ketchup bottles, and the Michael Jackson hit Beat It. The article was a rare example of the media mocking those claiming to speak in the name of religion in conservative Muslim Pakistan.

- Council of ‘zealots’ The draft was also slammed by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), which condemned its

recommendations as “ridiculous” and called for the council of “zealots” to be disbanded.

“It is difficult to comprehend why anyone in his right mind would

protection centres and residential shelters under a phased programme.

It also allows courts to order a GPS tracker installed to monitor

think that any further encouragement or justification is needed to invite violence upon women in Pakistan,” the HRCP stated.

Online in Pakistan, the bill was met with derision.

“This body should be dissolved, preferably in acid,” wrote one Twitter user, as others expressed bafflement and anger.

Women in conservative Pakistan have fought for their rights for decades, in a country where socalled honour killings and acid attacks remain commonplace.

But the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Bill redefines “violence” to include “any offence committed against a woman” including things like domestic or emotional abuse, stalking or cybercrimes.

The bill, which was passed in February, also provides for a universal toll free help line for the women, and establishes district

a defendant’s movements.

The CII, formed in 1962 to advise parliament on the compatibility of laws with Sharia, has previously spoken out against the bill.

The council’s recommendations are non-binding, and it has drawn widespread criticism in the past for other rulings including in 2013, when it suggested making DNA inadmissible evidence in rape cases, instead calling for the revival of an Islamic law that makes it mandatory for a survivor to provide four witnesses to back their claims.

CII chairman Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani emphasised to AFP that the bill is still being drafted.

“Islam does not allow violence against women,” he said.

“There may be a dispute between husband and wife but that is something separate from torturing wives.”

Rape case: Swedish court upholds Assange’s arrest warrant

DAKAR An app that allows rural doctors to seek advice remotely from experts have won Africa’s first prize recognising new technology that boosts health on the continent. The award’s main sponsor, French international public radio station RFI, said the 15,000-euro ($16,700) grant had been awarded in Dakar to Cheick

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Oumar Bagayoko, “a young Malian doctor and computer engineer”.

Bagayoko’s app Bogou beat more than 650 other candidates from francophone African countries for a prize that has also won support from tech giants such as Microsoft, Facebook and Orange. The winning app is a “tele-expertise tool available via a computer connected to the Internet”, RFI said in a statement. “Bougou allows doctors working in remote areas to ask for advice from specialists from a distance.” Doctors can post details of a patient’s problem to specialists logged into the secure app. RFI said the prize was designed to “support the development of innovative digital services that facilitate access to information and health services in Africa”.

Stockholm A Swedish lower court upheld on Wednesday the arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, saying the stay at Ecuador’s London embassy did not equal detention.

Assange, 44, is wanted by Swedish authorities for questioning over allegations, which he denies, that he committed rape in 2010.

A computer hacker who enraged US authorities by publishing hundreds of thousands of secret US diplomatic cables, he has been holed up in the embassy since June 2012 to avoid the rape investigation in Sweden.

He says he fears further extradition to the United States, where there has been a criminal investigation into the activities of Wikileaks.“The district court finds that there is still probable cause for the suspicion against JA (Julian Assange) for rape, less serious incident, and that there is still a risk that he will depart or in some other way evade prosecution or penalty,” the court said in a statement.

Last year, Sweden’s Supreme

Court rejected a previous appeal

by Assange to revoke a detention order.

Following a statement by a U.N.

be appealed.

“As far as I understand it, the court has not addressed the main issue in the case, whether

panel that his stay in the embassy amounts to arbitrary detention, Assange’s lawyers again in February asked the Stockholm District Court to overturn the warrant for his arrest.

“Unlike the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention the district court does not consider JA’s stay at the Embassy of Ecuador in London a form of detention,” the court said.

One of Assange’s Swedish lawyers, Thomas Olsson, said the decision will in all likelihood

the delay in the investigation is due to the inaction of the prosecutor, which we mean is a reason to overturn this (the arrest warrant),” Olsson told Reuters.

In 2010, Wikileaks released more than 90,000 secret documents on the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan, followed by almost 400,000 U.S. military reports detailing operations in Iraq. Those disclosures were followed by release of millions of diplomatic cables dating back to 1973.

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Pro-IS Facebook post ‘sarcastic’ Indian-origin worker to Australia court Melbourne An Indian-origin aviation worker in Australia who was sacked last year for posting pro-Islamic State messages on Facebook has told a court that his comments were “sarcastic”.

Nirmal Singh was facing the ‘Fair Work Commission’ to argue that his dismissal was ‘unfair’ by his previous employer Aerocare and was seeking $7,000 in lost wages.

The Commission heard Singh had written “We All Support ISIS” above a shared post from HT (Hizb ut-Tahrir) Australia about the shooting of police account Curtis Cheng by Islamic youth Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar in Sydney.

There were five posts in total that concerned Aerocare, two of which included pictures of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Under cross-examination by solicitor Stephen Hughes for Aerocare, Singh said he made

the posts on Facebook under a different name and believed he was conversing with a “secret group”.

However, two Aerocare employees who were Facebook friends with Singh, independently raised concerns about the posts with a manager.

Australian Federal Police, Perth Airport and the “client airline” of Aerocare were also made aware of the posts, and the airline requested Singh no longer be

Pakistan bans contraceptive advertisements on TV, radio

Islamabad Pakistan has banned airing advertisements of contraceptives on television and radio after complaints that such “undesired” commercials make children inquisitive about the use of the family planning products.

Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) imposed the ban last week after it received complaints from parents against commercials of contraceptive, birth control and family planning products on electronic media.

“General public is very much concerned on the exposure of such products to the innocent children, which get inquisitive on features and use of the products,” Pemra said in a notification.

Parents have “shown apathy” on

“undesired” advertisements of such products and demanded a ban on their airing, it further said.

The regulatory body warned of legal actions against media organisations failing to follow the directives on such ads.

Pemra last year banned an advertisement by a condom brand, calling it “immoral” and contrary to religious norms.

Pakistan is a highly conservative society where discussion of topics even remotely connected to sex is considered as taboo.

The ban came despite a government initiative to encourage birth control in Pakistan.

The country’s population is growing by around 1.8 per cent a year and is estimated to peak 240 million in year 2030.

allowed to work around its planes.

After three meetings held over four days last October, Singh was told that Aerocare was terminating his employment for breach of their social media policy, and demanded he return his airside security pass to Perth Airport for cancellation.

At the Fair Work Commission hearing, Singh argued the posts were “sarcastic” in nature and he did not support Islamic State.

He said he deleted the posts and his Facebook “alias” profile after meeting with his manager.

“There were concerns I understood and I addressed those concerns by offering to delete the posts and the profile but how they breached the social media policy, I don’t understand,” Singh told the Brisbane hearing, from a video link in Perth.

Hughes asked if Singh was aware Australia was on high alert for a terrorist attack which was currently rated “probable”.

“Absolutely and I support that,” Singh replied.

Commissioner Jennifer Hunt wanted to review transcripts and receive some further written submissions before making her decision in writing.

Singh maintained he did nothing wrong by posting “We All Support ISIS” on Facebook and said he was in fact a member of a secret group against religious extremism.

New Afghan Taliban chief Haibatullah not on terrorist list: US

Lahore The United States has said the new Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, is not on its list of designated terrorists.

The surprise move came hours after Akhundzada rejected peace talks as a viable solution to bring an end to the insurgency and vowed to continue fighting.

“No, he’s not. You asked if he was on the designated terrorist (list), he’s not,” US state department deputy spokesperson Mark Toner told a news briefing.

Last week, a US drone killed Haibatullah’s predecessor, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, in a remote area of Pakistan’s Balochistan region. On Monday, the Taliban elected their new chief. “We would hope that he would seize the opportunity. He does have an opportunity in front of him to choose peace and to work towards a negotiated solution. We hope that he makes that choice now,” Toner said. US President Barack Obama said in a statement that Mullah Mansour was killed because he had rejected efforts to seriously engage in peace talks and end the violence that took the lives of countless

Afghan men, women and children.

Obama said Mullah Mansour’s death had created an opportunity for peace and the Taliban should seize the opportunity to pursue the only real path for ending this long conflict joining the Afghan government in a reconciliation process that leads to lasting peace and stability.

When asked if another drone attack is in store for the new Taliban chief if he rejects the peace process, Toner said: “I’m not going to predict who we might target in the national security interests of the United States.” Reports say that Akhundzada never assumed a combat role during the Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Akhundzada, a religious scholar, was a senior judge who had issued many of Taliban harsh verdicts.

Akhundzada went on to become the group’s “chief justice” before a US-led invasion toppled the Taliban government in 2001. He was a close ally of Mansour and was one of his two deputies.He is said to have issued many of the group’s rulings on how Muslims should comply with the Taliban’s extreme interpretation of Islam.

Pak can target New Delhi from Kahuta in 5 minutes: Abdul Qadeer Khan Islamabad The father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan has claimed that Pakistan had the ability and had planned to conduct a nuclear test in 1984 but the then President General Zia Haq “opposed the move”.

Khan also asserted that Pakistan has the ability to target Indian capital New Delhi from Kahuta near Rawalpindi in five minutes.

“We were able and we had a plan to launch nuclear test in 1984 but then President General Zia had opposed the move,” Pakistani newspaper Dawn quoted the Pakistani scientist as saying.General Zia was of the opinion that the world would stop military aid if Pakistan opted for the nuclear test, Khan added.

“Without my services Pakistan would never have been the first Muslim nuclear nation. We were able to achieve the capability under very tough circumstances, but we did it,” said Khan while addressing a gathering on the occasion of Youm-i-Takbeer on Saturday (the day Pakistan became a nuclear power state).

Pakistan conducted nuclear test on May 28, 1998.Referring to the treatment meted out to him during Musharraf’s rule, Khan said nuclear scientists in the

material. Shortly after Musharraf’s announcement, a recorded confession by Khan was aired in which he took sole responsibility for all the nuclear proliferation that

country have not been given the respect that they deserve.“We are facing the worst against our services to the country’s nuclear programme,” he added.Abdul Qadeer Khan was at the centre of a massive global nuclear proliferation scandal in 2004.In a series of dramatic developments, he was accused by then army chief and president Pervez Musharraf of running a rogue proliferation network for nuclear

had been revealed.Dr Khan’s family was recently named in the Panama Papers leak that mentioned four of his relatives as owners of an offshore company in the Bahamas.Khan’s brother Abdul Quyuim Khan, wife Hendrina, and two daughters Dina and Ayesha were all shown as owners of Wahdat Ltd, a company registered in the Bahamas, according to the Dawn newspaper.

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Islamic IslamicState Stateclaims claimskilling killingof ofBangladeshi Bangladeshi Hindu Hindutrader: trader:SITE SITEmonitor monitorgroup group

Dhaka The Islamic State (IS) has claimed responsibility for stabbing an elderly Hindu trader to death in Bangladesh, monitoring service SITE said on Wednesday, in what would be the second killing by the militant group in the country in less than a week.The Muslim-majority South Asian nation has witnessed a surge in Islamist violence in the past year in which members of religious minorities, liberal activists, academics and foreign aid workers have been killed.

Debesh Chandra Pramanik, 68, a shoe trader, was found murdered in his shop on Wednesday in the northwestern rural district of Gaibandha, police said.Police found his body lying in pool of blood, police official Mozammel Haque said.

“The attackers slashed his throat with sharp weapons leaving him dead on the spot,” he said, adding that one person had been picked up for questioning.

Islamic State claimed the killing of a village doctor on Friday.

The government has denied that Islamic State or al Qaeda groups have a presence in the country of 160 million and says home-grown Islamists are responsible for the wave of attacks.

State minister for foreign affairs Shahriar Alam told Reuters in an interview published earlier on Wednesday that Islamic State was trying to ride a wave of religious radicalisation by falsely claiming killings, adding there was enough evidence implicating domestic militant groups.Since February last

year, at least 27 people, including five secular bloggers, a publisher and two gay right campaigners, have died in attacks linked to militant

groups.Islamic State has claimed 18 of the attacks since its first claim in September last year and Al Qaeda most of the rest, according to SITE.

19-year-old French commits suicide live on Periscope PARIS A 19-year-old French woman committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a suburban train in Paris and streamed the act live on Periscope, a judicial source said Wednesday.

The unnamed woman “spoke of a rape and named the aggressor” during the filming, the judicial source said, adding that the claims were being treated with caution at this stage.

The actual death, which took place at a station in Egly to the south of Paris, was removed by Periscope but some of the video leading up to the suicide was still available on YouTube.

At one point the victim is seen on a couch, saying the video is “not designed to create a buzz. but to make people react, to open their minds, and nothing else”.

The video then cuts to a black screen, and what appear to be the voices of emergency personnel can be faintly heard.

US tells Pakistan to go after terrorists, especially Taliban leadership

Pope prays to ‘convert hearts’ of IS jihadists

Vatican City Pope Francis on Wednesday asked God to “convert the hearts of those who sow death and destruction” following a series of deadly attacks by the Islamic State group (IS) in Syria.

During his weekly audience in St. Peter’s Square, the pontiff prayed for “eternal rest to the victims” and “consolation to their relatives” after suicide attacks in the regime’s coastal heartland that killed more than 150 people on Monday.Francis said almost

all the victims of the seven explosions targeting bus stations, hospitals and other civilian sites in the seaside cities of Jableh and Tartus were “unarmed civilians”. Eight of them were children.

More than 300 people were wounded in the attacks on strongholds of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. IS claimed the blasts in a statement, saying they were in retaliation for Syrian regime and Russian air strikes against jihadists.

The US has asked Pakistan to go after terrorists especially the Taliban leadership, days after an American drone killed Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour in the country’s troubled Balochistan province.

“We continue to cooperate closely with Afghanistan, but also urge Pakistan to go after terrorists, especially Taliban leadership, and that cooperation continues,” State Department Deputy Spokesman Mark Toner told reporters.

Meanwhile, a former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, James B Cunningham, said the drone strike that killed Taliban

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leader Mullah Mansour inside Pakistan should send a signal that the United States will not tolerate terrorist safe havens.

“I hope that this is the beginning of a message that we will not tolerate any more the strategic challenge that is posed by the leadership of the Taliban being in Pakistan and having a safe haven there. I hope that this is the beginning of a new phase in the effort to bring the Taliban into a political discussion,” he told the Atlantic Council.

“It is rumored that senior parts of the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) may have been involved in setting Mansour up. The official account is that we informed Pakistan of the strike after it took place. In places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, conspiracy rumors will circulate for some time,” he said.

Cunningham hoped that this would force Pakistan to rethink the wisdom of providing safe heavens to terrorists. “I would hope so. I have seen some commentary from some Pakistani observers that this

may encourage a rethinking of the policy that the ISI has been pursuing. That is what is necessary. That’s what we, the US, have been arguing for years; that’s what we need to find a way to accomplish,” he said. “We have a core strategic objective here, which is to bring the conflict to an end. In order to do that we need to make clear to the Taliban leaders that they will not prevail by terror and by military means. And we, the international community, need to make clear to the ISI that we are no longer going to tolerate the kind of policy that they have been pursuing,” the former top American diplomat said.

Cunningham argued that to really get to a peace discussion, the Taliban have to come to the conclusion that the option of military force and terror will not get them back to the establishment of the emirate, which is what they want. “In order for that to happen, the status quo needs to be disrupted and that means we need to find a way to impact the safe havens in

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Sunrisers a cut above RCB, lift IPL 2016 trophy What a shocking turnaround tonight by Sunrisers Hyderabad, to win by 8 runs after Chris Gayle unleashed month sworth of pentup fury to give Royal Challengers Bangalore an unreal start with a 38ball 76. Gayle and his captain Virat Kohli shared a 114run opening partnership, and you’d have thought I certainly did that the game was done and dusted. Or at any rate, RCB’s to lose. But Ben Cutting, who had a night he will tell his great grand kids about, with the bat (a games natching cameo of 39 off 15 balls) and the ball (2 for 35), cut into the RCB juggernaut with Gayle’s wicket. Then the decline that followed was almost insidious, as Kohli played on, AB de Villiers holed out, KL Rahul had his stumps scissored, and Shane Watson played a shot he could look most aggrieved about. And thanks to the drastic turnarounds engi-

neered by Cutting in both innings Sunrisers were able to put one over RCB led by a driven Kohli in their own den.

In the end, a team that revels in chasing down any total with the swashbucklers in its batting lineup was unable to match up to the towering target of 209 an intimidating edifice set up by the Sunrisers, courtesy an outrageously inform David Warner, a flourishing Yuvraj Singh and a cutting cameo that sprouted 52 unassailable runs in the final 3 overs.

In case I haven’t been clear today, Ben Cutting was my Man of the Match.

And so he is, for the adjudicators too. He actually gives the Chinna swamy stadium credit for the sixes he hit. Twisted logic, but it’s the modesty that counts. And a pretty sad end of the road for RCB. They won 7 of 8 matches going into this Final game.

And now their record

Alastair Cook becomes youngest to score 10,000 Test runs

Factbox on England captain Alastair Cook, who became the first English batsman to score 10,000 runs in test matches in the second test against Sri Lanka on Monday. *Born Dec. 25, 1984 in Gloucester, England. *Scored an unbeaten 104

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on test debut against India at Nagpur in 2006, and made his oneday international debut against Sri Lanka in the same year. *Scored 766 runs in seven innings during the 20102011 Ashes tour, to help England to their first series win in Australia for 24 years. *Scored 294 against India in 2011, his highest test score to date, and was named as International Cricket Council’s Test Cricketer of the Year in 2011. *Was appointed MBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list. *Succeeded Andrew Strauss as ODI skipper in 2011 and as permanent test captain in 2012.

stands at 7 wins out of 9 games. Which is still pretty awesome, although it was the clincher that they ended up relinquishing.

Bhuvaneshwar Kumar with the final over of IPL 2016.

Begins with a full toss, which is as good as the yorker he just missed. Jor-

dan gets a taste of his own medicine, as he ekes it out to Long on for a single. 17 needed off 5 balls. Baby gets another low full toss, scooped over Short Fineleg for 2 runs. 15 needed off 4 balls. Now, Bhuvi gets his yorker right. Just outside off, and Jordan can’t get any bat

on it. But he sets off on a suicidal run. And he is gone run out by miles as Ojha breaks the stumps. More importantly, dot ball. 15 STILL needed from 3 balls.

Iqbal Abdulla can only pad the full toss away as Warner lets out a furious whoop.

And they run through for a

leg bye. This is tough, for RCB, now. Tough to digest, that is. Near impossible to win. 14 needed from 2 balls.

Another full delivery from Bhuvi. Baby gets a run down to Short Thirdman, and Warner is now red as a tomato and jubilant as a winning captain.

Former Team Director of the Indian cricket team Ravi Shastri on Monday made it clear that had he been the chairman of selectors, he would have thought about making “ Virat Kohli the captain in all three formats” and let Mahendra Singh Dhoni “enjoy his game”. Asked if he feels that Kohli is ready for leading across all formats, Shastri said: “If I am the chairman of selectors, I would be thinking in that fashion, absolutely. It is it time to start thinking. You have to see India has no major event in three years

till 2019 World Cup. This is your best chance to

of imagination, you are taking anything away from

think and build.” Shastri also made it clear that Dhoni can still contribute as a player. “By no stretch

MS. He can still contribute massively as a player.

Time has come to allow him to enjoy himself, en-

joy the game. It also depends on how much hungry MS is, how passionate he is, whether the juices are still flowing. It’s a Catch22 situation but you have to take hard decisions.” Shastri reminded that one needs to think that they have groomed Kohli as a leader over a period of time. “A time has come where you have a guy you have groomed over a period of time, who is ready.

In the next 18 months, India hardly play any ODIs, the gaps between Tests and ODIs are massive. So its time to look ahead.”

room.

Even though he has won everything there is to win

in football, Zidane is not arrogant and he does not use his press conferences to talk himself up.

Instead, the Frenchman smiles and answers questions with good humour.

The positive atmosphere he has brought to the dressing room, and the respect he has earned from the players as a result, has turned Real Madrid’s nightmare season into a glorious one.

Virat Kohli is ready to captain in all formats, feels Ravi Shastri

Real Madrid lift the Champions League with a soft touch Real Madrid won an 11th Champions League and they did so with a calm, relaxed and, some would even say, shy coach. The profile of Zinedine Zidane is very similar to that of the previous Real coaches to win Europe’s premier competition.

While there may have been tactical differences, each coach has been similarly calm human beings, ones who get on

well with the players and who haven’t caused much tension in the dressing

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$100 for shaving, $25 for tight cloaks: IS strategy to boost revenue Washington With its territories reduced, cash-strapped Islamic State has imposed new taxes and fines like a $100 penalty for shaving a beard and women being charged $25 for wearing cloaks deemed too tight, according to a research.

In response to their worsening financial situation, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is continuing to increase taxes and fines throughout its territory and in some cases introducing new ones, according new analysis released by IHS Inc based on its monitoring of local news reports.

“In the past six months, the Islamic State has introduced a range of new taxes and fines as a means of generating additional revenue from the population to compensate for the loss of oil revenue and from its shrinking territory. Since September, we have seen taxes rise

across the caliphate,” Ludovico Carlino, senior analyst at IHS, said.

Among the fines now imposed are $100 for shaving a beard and $50 for trimming a beard. Men are

fined $5 for not properly wearing the traditional izar (a long garment), while women are charged $25 for wearing cloaks deemed too tight and $10, or 1 gramme of 24 carat gold, for revealing their eyes.

A woman not wearing socks or gloves can be fined $30, the research said. If found in posses-

sion of a packet of cigarettes can lead to a $46 fine for a man and a $23 fine for a woman, it said.

Trucks crossing check points now have to pay between $600 and $700

while last summer the fee was $300.

The ISIS also requires nonSunni Muslims, former members of the security forces or former civil servants working for the Iraqi or Syrian government living in its territory to buy from it a ‘repentance’ certificate. Repentance used to be paid on an annual ba-

sis, now it is charged monthly. This is on top of the required payment of the jizyah, a tax historically levied on non-Muslims permanently residing in Muslim lands under Islamic law.

“Taxation makes up about 50% of the Islamic State’s monthly revenue sources and encompasses almost every aspect of the population’s life,” Carlino said. “Taxes are imposed by a central government body and flexibility is allowed for regional governors. But, revenue from taxation has decreased by 23%?due to the group’s failure to hold onto territory,” he said.

Between December 2015 and March 2016, the Islamic State lost about 22% of its territory, according to IHS. Another very interesting trend, the IHS said was that ISIS is now also accepting money in exchange for corporal punishment.

Iran orders social media sites to store data inside country

Dubai Iran has given foreign messaging apps a year to move data they hold about Iranian users onto servers inside the country, prompting privacy and security concerns on social media. Iran has some of the strictest controls on internet access in the world and blocks access to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, although many users are able to access them through widely available software. “Foreign messaging companies active in the country are required to transfer all data and activity linked to Iranian citizens into the country in order to ensure their continued activity,” Iran’s Supreme Council of

Cyberspace said in new regulations carried by state news agency IRNA on Sunday. The council, whose members are selected by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave social media companies a year to comply, IRNA said, adding that the measures were based on the “guidelines and concerns of the supreme leader”.

The new requirements could affect messaging app Telegram in particular. The cloud-based instant messaging service has gained popularity because of its high level of security and is estimated to have about 20 million users in Iran, which has a total population of about 80 million.

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31 May - 6 June 2016

Health Alcohol kills an Indian every 96 minutes As the debate over an alcohol bans grows across India, 15 people die every day - or one every 96 minutes - from the effects of drinking alcohol, reveals an IndiaSpendanalysis of 2013 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, the latest available.

The per capita consumption of alcohol in India increased 38 percent, from 1.6 litres in 2003-05 to 2.2 litres in 2010-12, according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) report, which also revealed that more than 11 percent of Indians were binge drinkers, against the global average of 16 percent.

The data explain the wide political support for crackdowns on alcohol, although experts point out that alcohol is a health problem not a moral one.

In Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa shut down 500 liquor stores on May 23, the first day of her fourth term as chief minis-

ter. In April, Bihar imposed prohibition - a ban on the sale, production and consumption of alcohol. In August 2014, Kerala re-

percent of men and women in Kerala and 52 percent in Tamil Nadu, the Indian Express reported. The leading reason for the ban,

were the only Indian states with prohibition.

Maharashtra tops alcohol-related deaths Maharashtra reported the

stricted the sale of liquor to five-star hotels.

Pre-poll surveys in Kerala and Tamil Nadu found wide support for prohibition, 47

respondents said, was alcohol-fuelled domestic violence. Before the latest crackdowns on alcohol, Gujarat and Nagaland

most alcohol-related deaths, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, according to the NCRB data, with experts

Beware! Grilled food not good for health!

Do you love to gorge on grilled food like barbecued chicken? If yes, then stop doing hogging it as it is considered not good for health.

A new research warns that eating food cooked on grills cleaned with wire-bristle brushes can prove to be dangerous to health.

The loose bristles can fall off the brush during cleaning and end up in the grilled food. Such food when consumed can lead to injuries in the mouth, throat and tonsils.

Oral cavities, throats and tonsils are most common injuries were found in patients. And some injuries might even require surgery.

“If the bristle passes through those regions without lodging itself, it could get stuck further downstream in places like the esophagus, stomach or the intestine. It can get

“Wire-bristle brush injuries are a potential consumer safety issue, so it is important that people, manufacturers and health providers be aware of the problem,” Chang added.

stuck in the wall of the intestine, causing further internal damage,” said David Chang, associate professor of otolaryngology at the University of Missouri in the US. Individuals need to inspect their food carefully after grilling or consider alternative grill-cleaning methods such as nylon-bristle brushes or balls of tin foil, the researchers suggested in the paper published in the journal OtolaryngologyHead and Neck Surgery.

The team identified more than 1,698 injuries from wire-bristle grill brushes reported in emergency rooms in the US between 2002 and 2014.

Individuals need to be cautious when cleaning grills with wire-bristle brushes, examining brushes before each use and discarding if bristles are loose.

Also, one needs to inspect the grilled food carefully after cooking to make sure bristles are not stuck to the food, the authors noted.

saying high rates of alcoholism correlate with high crime rates.

“Major crimes and accidents are fuelled by alcohol, which also leads to sexual harassment of women and robberies,” S. Raju, of Tamil Nadu’s Makkal Adhikaram (People’s Power) told the BBC. “Alcohol abuse is also the reason why Tamil Nadu has the largest number of widows under 30 years of age.”

A quarter of all hospital admissions and 69 percent of all crimes in Kerala are due in part to intoxication, according to the Alcohol and Drug Information Centre, an NGO, quoted in The Economist.

Five people died every day in 2014 after drinking spurious liquor In 2015, consumption of illegally brewed liquor claimed more than 100 lives in Malwani, Mumbai, triggering widespread outrage. As many as 1,699

people died in 2014 after consuming spurious/illicit liquor, an increase of 339 percent from 387 in 2013.

However, prohibition may not reduce addiction and deaths, Vikram Patel, a leading public health expert with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, argued in an Indian Express column. “Prohibition of substances which give pleasure to people does not work,” he wrote. “Addiction is a health problem, not a moral one, and there are many proven strategies which can reduce its burden. The desire to address the serious social problems caused by a minority of those who consume alcohol by prohibition is a travesty of the experience of history and public health science. Prohibition is rejected by most public health scientists who know this field; even the World Health Organisation does not recommend it.”

younger, so stay away from heavy calorie dairy.

Gluten is also hard to digest, go for easy digesting grains like jowar, quinoa, and ragi as they also don’t spike insulin like rice and wheat. Sugar is hard to metabolize as people grow

tenance plan is needed.

Muscle goes away as people age, it’s important to train and work on muscles with some weights. You can hire a trainer to see what works for you and always consult your doctor first.

older. So say no to a lot of sugar instead try consuming natural sugar like dates and figs.

• Balance hormones: It is important to balance your hormones with nutritious nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, protein whether it’s plant or animal based.

• Exercise: Long term sus-

• Supplements: Get the right supplements for your age. Having calcium and vitamin D, fish oil in right proportions is important.

Don’t ignore magnesium supplements as well.

• Good company: Seek company of your friends.

You need peers to support you mentally.

Five brilliant tips on age management!

Nobody wants to grow old.

But the fact is that ageing is a natural process and you can’t stop it. There are some people who looks older and others younger than their actual age. This could be due the lifestyle choices that an individual makes.

While ageing is a biological mechanism, there are ways that can help delay or slow down the process.

Making healthy lifestyle choices such as eating right to balance hormones, exercise and regular health check-ups can help start feeling and looking younger.

Anjali Hooda Sangwan, consultant - obesity, metabolic medicine and clinical nutrition, gives some amazing tios on age management: • Dietary advice: As age advances, people are not able to process dairy and gluten as well as they could when they were

Issue 669 (38)

31 May - 6 June 2016

7 hot tips to stay fit and healthy!

Who on earth doesn’t want to stay healthy and have that hot, sultry figure? Unfortunately, most of us either fail or tend to ignore the essential criterias for a long, healthy life.

The secrets to living a long and healthy life include making wise lifestyle choices such as good sleep, regular exercise, eating right and choosing nutrient-rich foods.

Saurabh Aggarwal, expert from fitness startup FITSO, suggests some brilliant tips to stay fit and health: • Maintain a proper sleeping schedule, which for most people means seven to eight hours each night is important for fitness. Working out three to four times per week is a great way to start. Once you have your

routine with you, stick to it and you will see the benefits. Three to four sessions of 20 to 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercises (run/ jog/ride/walk) weekly is

quite helpful to overall health.

• A healthy and balanced diet has ample vitamins, nutrients, and colour. And the easiest way to achieve

Scientists discover new way to kill cancer cells In a finding that could lead to new drugs to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases, researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have discovered a new way of triggering cell death.

Programmed cell death, also called apoptosis, is a natural process that removes unwanted cells from the body. Failure of apoptosis can allow cancer cells to grow unchecked or immune cells to inappropriately attack the body.

The protein known as Bak is central to apoptosis. In healthy cells Bak sits in an

inert state but when a cell receives a signal to die, Bak transforms into a killer protein that destroys the cell.

In this study, researcher Sweta Iyer from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of

Medical Research, Victoria, and colleagues discovered a novel way of directly activating Bak to trigger cell death.

The researchers discovered that an antibody they had produced to study Bak actually bound to the Bak protein and triggered its activation.

“We were excited when we realised we had found an

Chilean engineer develops early cancer detection system

A Chilean engineer has developed an early cancer detection system based on a simple blood test.

The technology is based on a diagnostic test to detect micro RNA, small molecules of genetic material which function as a biomarker for various types of pathologies, Xinhua news agency reported citing local daily La Tercera.

“We are now focusing on the development of this

tool for stomach cancer.

However, the idea is that in the future, this technology could be applied to other types of cancer and different conditions,” engineer Alejandro Tocigl said at a press conference in Santiago on Tuesday.

Stomach cancer deaths are the highest in Chile.

“Early detection and timely treatment increases survival chances over five years to around 90 percent,” said Tocigl.

entirely new way of activating Bak,” said Ruth Kluck who is also from Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Australia.

The researchers hope to use this discovery to develop drugs that promote cell death.

“There is great interest in developing drugs that trigger Bak activation to treat diseases such as cancer where apoptosis has gone awry,” she said.

“This discovery gives us a new starting point for developing therapies that directly activate Bak and cause cell death,” Kluck pointed out.

The researchers used information about Bak’s three-dimensional structure to find out precisely how the antibody activated Bak.

this in your diet is through piling on the fruits and vegetables. In case of carbohydrate rich food items, include lean meat or white meat (without skin) in your

meals. Prefer low-fat dairy products and avoid cheese, butter, heavy cream and yogurt. Use the suitable kind of oil like olive, and avoid frying or battering your food and making it spicy or too salty.

• Regular innovation in the fitness routine is also important in every four to six weeks to prevent a workout plateau. Also, seeking advice from health and fitness professionals can open doors you never knew existed.

• improve cardiovascular fitness, as well as decrease the risk of coronary heart disease. These activities also help in building strong bones, as it is a weight bearing exercise. Considered as best exercises to burn calories, these activi-

ties also help in relaxation and strengthening of the immune system.

• Prefer cardio interval training to lose extra weight fast.

This will improve your metabolic process, burn extra fat, and take less time than other cardio workouts. Remember to warm up initially, and additionally cool down when you finish the exercise.

• Drinking ample amount of water regulates your metabolism and helps in losing weight. Further, warm or hot water can surprisingly help you lose extra kilos. It is also strictly advised to drink water only an hour after having your meals.

• If possible, walk/ride to your office at least once in a week and try using stairs wherever possible.

of Alberta in Canada The team examined data from 688 children and controlled for factors that

having one more serving of fruit per day in a mother’s diet provides her baby with the same benefit as being

would normally affect a child’s learning and development such as family income, paternal and maternal education and the gestational age of the child.

The mothers who consumed more fruit during pregnancy gave birth to children who performed better on developmental testing at age one.

“We know that the longer a child is in the womb, the further they develop -- and

born a whole week later,” Mandhane stated in the paper published in the journal EbioMedicine.

To further build on the findings, Mandhane teamed with co-author Francois Bolduc who researches the genetic basis of cognition in humans and fruit flies. “Flies are very different from humans but, surprisingly, they have 85 percent of the genes involved in human brain function, making them a great model to study the genetics of memory,” Bolduc stated.

The findings indicated that flies born after being fed increased prenatal fruit juice had significantly better memory ability, similar to the results shown by Mandhane with one-yearold infants.

Consume lots of fruits during pregnancy to have smart kids!

This is definitely a good health tip which all wouldbe-mothers should follow.

A new study reveals that women should eat lots of fruits during pregnancy as it helps to have a smart kids.

They should consume more fruits as doing so the IQ levels of the kids would be higher.

If pregnant mothers eat six or seven servings of fruit or fruit juice a day on average then their infants placed six or seven points higher on the IQ scale at one year of age, the study showed.

“We found that one of the biggest predictors of cognitive development was how much fruit moms consumed during pregnancy.

The more fruit moms had, the higher their child’s cognitive development,” said lead study author Piush Mandhane from University

Depressison lowers chances of pregnancy in women!

Women take note! If you are someone trying to conceive, you need to stay positive as severe depressive symptoms can decrease your chances of becoming pregnant, says a study.

The study found a 38 percent decrease in the average probability of conception in a given menstrual cycle among women who reported severe depressive symptoms, compared to those with no or low symptoms.

The results were similar,

regardless of whether the women were on psychotropic medications.

Despite associations in prior studies between infertility and the use of antidepressants, antipsychotics

or mood stabilisers among already infertile women, “current use of psychotropic medications did not appear to harm the probability of conception,” said lead author Yael Nillni, an assistant professor at Boston University Schools of Public Health and Medicine in the US. “Our findings suggest that moderate to severe depressive symptoms, regardless of current psychotropic medication treatment, may delay conception,” Nillni said.

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Issue 669 (39)

31 May - 6 June 2016

Basil Shrimp

Penne Pasta with sPinach and Bacon Ingredients: 1 (12 ounce) package penne pasta 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided 6 slices bacon, chopped 2 tablespoons minced garlic 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes 1 bunch fresh spinach, rinsed and torn into bite-size pieces Directions: Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add the penne pasta, and cook until tender, 8 to 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Place bacon in the skillet, and cook until browned and crisp. Add garlic, and cook for about 1 minute. Stir in the

tomatoes, and cook until heated through.

Place the spinach into a colander, and drain the hot pasta over it so it is wilted.

Transfer to a large serving bowl, and toss with the remaining olive oil, and the bacon and tomato mixture.

ALMOND GRANITA Ingredients: 1 1/4 cups whole milk 1/2 cup slivered, blanched almonds, toasted 1/3 cup sugar 1/4 cup canned almond paste 1/2 tsp. almond extract Pomegranate seeds and toasted sliced almonds, to garnish Instructions: In a blender, combine the milk with the slivered almonds, sugar, almond paste, and almond extract and purée until smooth. Pour the almond milk into a 9by-13-inch baking dish, cover the dish with plastic wrap, and place in the freezer.

Using the tines of a fork, stir the mixture every 30 minutes, scraping edges and breaking up any ice chunks as the mixture freezes, until the granita is

shrimp from marinade, and thread onto skewers. Discard marinade.

Lightly oil grill grate, and arrange skewers on preheated grill. Cook for 4 minutes, turning once, or until opaque.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

slushy and frozen, about 3 hours. Scoop the granite into chilled serving glasses and garnish with pomegranate seeds and sliced almonds.

Ingredients: 4 1/4 cups flour 2 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. kosher salt 1 1/2 cups unsalted butter, softened 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar 1 1/4 cups packed light brown sugar 3 eggs 2 tsp. vanilla extract 2 (12-ounce) bags semi-sweet chocolate chips Instructions: Whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt in a bowl; set aside.

In a large bowl, beat butter and sugars on medium speed of a hand mixer until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addi-

tion until smooth; beat in vanilla. Add dry ingredients, and beat until just combined; stir in chocolate chips. Roll cookies into about 20 4-ounce balls and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet about 4-inches apart. Refrigerate for 2 hours.

Heat oven to 350°. Bake cookies, rotating pans halfway through, about 15 minutes. Cool before serving.

MOZZARELLA STICKS

PineaPPLe saLsa hot doG Ingredients: 6 oz. pineapple (about 1/4), peeled and cut into 1/4-inch pieces 1 avocado, peeled, pitted, and cut into 1/4-inch pieces 1 small shallot, finely chopped Zest and juice of 1 lime 7 oz. red cabbage (about 1/4), cored and thinly sliced 3 tbsp. white vinegar Cilantro leaves, for serving Grilled hot dogs, for serving Grilled hot dog buns, for serving Instructions: Toss pineapple, avocado, shallot, zest, and juice in a large bowl.

Toss cabbage and vinegar in a bowl and let sit for 10-15 minutes.

Top hot dog in a bun with pineapple

Ingredients: 2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil 1/4 cup butter, melted 1 1/2 lemons, juiced 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard (such as Grey Poupon Country Mustard™) 1/2 cup minced fresh basil leaves 3 cloves garlic, minced salt to taste white pepper 3 pounds fresh shrimp, peeled and deveined skewers Directions: In a shallow, non-porous dish or bowl, mix together olive oil and melted butter. Stir in lemon juice, mustard, basil, and garlic, and season with salt and white pepper. Add shrimp, and toss to coat. Cover, and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Preheat grill to high heat. Remove

salsa, cabbage, and cilantro leaves.

Ingredients: 1 lb. block mozzarella cheese, cut into 3-inch by 1/2-inch sticks 3/4 cup flour 4 eggs, lightly beaten 2 cups Italian bread crumbs 2 tbsp. olive oil 1 tbsp. unsalted butter 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped 1 tbsp. tomato paste 1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand 1 tbsp. sugar 1 tsp. chile flakes Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, canola oil, for frying Instructions: Place the flour, eggs, and bread crumbs in separate shallow dishes. Working with 1 piece of mozzarella at a time,

dredge in flour, dip in eggs, and coat in breadcrumbs; repeat this process one more time. Lay on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and refrigerate until ready to use. Heat olive oil and butter in a 4-quart saucepan over medium-high; add garlic and onion and cook until soft, about 6 minutes.

Add tomato paste and cook 2 minutes more, then add tomatoes, sugar, chile flakes, salt, and pepper; cook until thick, 15-18 minutes. Keep marinara sauce warm.

Heat 2” canola oil in a 6-quart saucepan until a deep-fry thermometer reads 350°; working in batches, fry mozzarella until golden and crisp, about 1 1/2 minutes.

Transfer mozzarella sticks to paper towels to drain; serve hot and with marinara sauce.

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31 May - 6 June 2016