Insanitary Media Behavior

Craigslist drops adult service listings

2010-09-05T09:00:00.002+05:30

After years of mounting public pressure, Craigslist appears to have surrendered a battle over sexual ads on its website that some viewed as a test case for the boundaries of online freedom.

The popular San Francisco classifieds site removed its controversial adult services section late Friday, defiantly replacing the link with the word "censored." The move followed a torrent of legal threats and negative media reports that highlighted ads within the category that promoted prostitution and child trafficking, or led to violence against women.

The harshest critics have called Craigslist an "online pimp" and the "Wal-Mart of online sex trafficking." Last year, an Illinois sheriff filed a lawsuit that accused the site's owners of knowingly promoting and facilitating prostitution, while the South Carolina Attorney General threatened criminal action against the company.

Late last month, attorneys general in 18 states demanded the removal of the site's adult category, saying the company wasn't doing enough to block ads for illicit services. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, set up a House Judiciary Committee hearing for later this month to explore how sites like Craigslist are being used to "facilitate criminal activity."

Speier initially applauded the removal of the adult category in a statement on Saturday.

"Craigslist's decision demonstrates a commitment to seeing these horrific abuses end, and I commend them for taking this step," she said.

About a half hour later, however, her office issued a revised statement with a far different tone. "The site is down but not forgotten," the statement said. "We can't forget the victims, we can't rest easy. Child sex trafficking continues and lawmakers need to fight future machinations of Internet-driven sites that peddle children."

No explanation for move
Craigslist executives didn't immediately respond to inquires Saturday, so it was unclear why they made the decision at this point. For that matter, it's possible the company is attempting to make a point with the "censored" label and plans to flip the section back on.

In an interview with The Chronicle late last month, the company's chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, was steadfast in his stance that removing the adult section wouldn't address the underlying issue.

"Is moving advertising around our best hope for addressing these harms?" he said. "Then the ads fall under personals, and how long before the demand is that we shut down personals? And where do those ads go next? What other sections of our site would they like us to shut down?"

Some outside observers also questioned the wisdom of removing the adult services category, and the legal basis for compelling Craigslist to do so.

Web publishers are generally protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Communications Decency Act from the illegal actions of third parties who use their sites, though there are narrow exceptions in the latter law when it comes to criminal statutes.

"The legal analysis hasn't changed," said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Craigslist isn't legally culpable for these posts, but the public pressure has increased and Craigslist is a small company. My guess is that they may have just decided that the public pressure was too big."

Fear of chilling effect
The broader concern is that making publishers responsible for the behavior of their users, whether through new laws or legal threats, will force them to adopt more conservative standards over what's allowed on their sites. That could have a chilling effect on online expression, said Brian Carver, an attorney and assistant professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.

"If you impose liability on Craigslist, YouTube and Facebook for anything their users do, then they're not going to take chances," he said in an earlier interview. "It would likely result in the takedown of what might otherwise be perfectly legitimate free expression."

Zimmerman added that any migration of ads for illicit services to other parts of Craigslist, like the personals section, would potentially make them that much more difficult to monitor and catch.

The Associated Press reported Saturday that Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, one of the attorneys general who pressed for the change, said he welcomed the removal of the adult section and was trying to verify Craigslist's official policy going forward.

Attempts at screening
Buckmaster said that Craigslist already does far more than other websites and many print publications to monitor and filter out ads for illegal services.

In late 2008, with the attorneys general from more than 40 states demanding changes, Craigslist began requiring posters to provide a working phone number, a small per-ad fee and credit card verification to encourage compliance with the site's guidelines. Since spring 2009, the company has manually screened the images and texts of every ad submitted to its adult section before it is published. Any that indicate the involvement of an underage person are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Buckmaster said.

But suggestive posts have still managed to slip through to the site, like massage ads featuring photos of women in their underwear, providing an opening for continued criticism.

Until the brouhaha over adult ads, Craigslist was mainly known as the small, quirky company that got the best of far bigger rivals by focusing on the needs of its users rather than profits. Buckmaster called the widespread suggestion that the company is profiteering from prostitution ads "galling," and used recent blog entries to hit back at certain critics and journalists in a tone that revealed palpable frustration.

The Rebecca Project for Human Rights of Washington, D.C., has been one of the most vocal critics of the adult services section, placing ads in major newspapers, including The Chronicle, calling for its removal.

Executive Director Malika Saada Saar said she was encouraged that the company listened, but then went on to echo Buckmaster's trepidation about what will happen next.

"I would hope that there is that commitment ... to implement a more comprehensive screening process," she said. "My fear is that the ads will migrate to the 'casual encounters' section and pimps and traffickers can sell children without even having to pay for that ad."

via:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/04/BU841F8URH.DTL

Teammates fixed every game

2010-09-05T08:58:00.001+05:30

akistan Test opener Yasir Hameed has confirmed that his teammates fixed "almost every game" and claimed that he was dropped from the national team for two years because he did not go along with his corrupt colleagues. The British tabloid News of the World, which stirred international related stories

It also published several more details of the spot-fixing saga. The tabloid reported that Hameed provided a "devastating insight into the shady world of betting scams" and added that he refused bribes of up to 150,000 pounds from a corrupt bookmaker to throw matches.

Hameed claimed he lost his place in the team because of this refusal, while his corrupt colleagues reportedly splashed money on plush properties and expensive sports cars. He spoke to the tabloid in a Nottingham hotel, it said. "They've been caught.

Only the ones that get caught are branded crooks. They were doing it (fixing) in almost every match. God knows what they were up to. Scotland Yard was after them for ages. "It makes me angry because I'm playing my best and they are trying to lose. The guys that have got done have got themselves killed.

They're gone - forget about them," Hameed said about the trio of Salman Butt, Mohammad Amer and Mohammad Asif. Hameed reportedly said pacer Mohammad Asif who has played around 50 matches has built four mansions. "Where did they come from? He has just built a house in Italian style in Lahore.

You go there and you will think you are in Italy - that's how good his house is." "It's because of all these wrong things that I was outed, because I wouldn't get involved," the Pakistan opener said. "If you sat here and said, 'I'm a bookie and I want you to fix the match tomorrow' - I've met lots of people like that in the past and I refused. They offered me handsome money." "I could have come to see you in a Ferrari. They give you so much money that you can live out your dreams, buy a flash car. I've been offered huge amounts of money, up to 150,000 pounds," the cricketer said.

via:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Teammates-fixed-every-game-Pak-cricketer-tells-NOTW/Article1-596234.aspx

Anti Aging, Antioxidants From Oxis International

2010-07-09T17:57:00.004+05:30

Not everyone has heard of antioxidants and how they benefit people with their anti aging effects.

It's summer and it’s time to hang out at the pool and beaches. There is no better way to beat the heat except for being soaked in cool water. But, it’s during summer we actually expose our sensitive skin to the sun's ultraviolet and damaging rays. Although sun-screen and sun-tan lotions help protect our skin, what we actually need are some anti-oxidants to relieve the stress and wrinkles.

It is not everybody who have heard about antioxidants and how they benefit people with their anti-aging effects. Some of us may have heard of Glutathione, Resveratrol and Vitamin E, but it is one potent antioxidant that is probably one of the most effective and which is called L-ergothioneine or simply ERGO. In addition to being an antioxidant, ERGO is an anti-aging product that reduces wrinkles. It also fights free radicals that harm the body, and conserves and maintains the level of other antioxidants such as Vitamin E, Vitamin C and Glutathione.

The best place to obtain these anti-oxidants is at http://www.oxis.com. Advancing Oxidative Stress Technology Oxis International, Inc., is the premiere provider for the potent antioxidant, Ergothioneine. Oxis International, Inc., is the premier provider of this product and they develop this product using natural and organic methods through their patented synthetic manufacturing process. Since 1966, Oxis International has been researching and developing ERGO products to share with the public.

The Oxis company is currently under penny stocks (OTCBB: OXIS) and with everyone raving for longevity, good health and organic products, this is the perfect time to invest in Oxis Inc.

You can also follow Oxis on Twitter or follow Oxis on facebook so as to be updated on latest news and developments.

Art - Is it for real or is it all hype?

2010-07-08T19:22:00.000+05:30

Great art does not require hype to thrive.

It is the new artists who are served by such hype. What art requires is a concentrated critical culture. The more noise that art makes, the less it matters.

Artists must first have a vision and with it a plan on how to create that vision on a medium without sacrificing quality. If the artist can do that and produce that as their own work, then that can be classified as art. Of course, there is no compulsion that anyone has to like it, let alone buy it. They also don’t need any brand value or a reputation to give that art its value.

In short, it is just what it is. Actually, art is something that re-creates the soul and the inherent connection with the viewer.

It is the critics and the artists themselves who are responsible for the current hype associated with art. However, to be fair, a large part of this problem is because of the critics who consider themselves as the final say in any form of art. It is these self classified pontificators, who classify a rudimentary finished product into a masterpiece, thus giving the product a brand equity far more than it deserves. It is here where the marketing hype creeps in.

Personally I think that if you are innately driven to create something, re-create something from a different perspective, express yourself, regardless of the medium, the channel of expression (music, dance, painting, etc.), then whatever you create is art. Art and music only sell because someone has an opinion about it that is influenced by emotion, not because it inherently has value.

Some of Picasso’s original works on canvas are just oil on canvas and would be considered junk by someone who doesn’t appreciate art, but just materials. However when a hype was created, the sales of the painting obviously went up. So, the bottom line here is that a true artist is someone who does it because they’re driven to, only because they enjoy it, and for no other reason.

Hence, there is a very small line between what is classified as art and what can be classified as hype. The market is actually art minus all other aspects. The so called aspects that comes with art is what that can be classified as hype.

How To Reduce Unsecured Credit Card Debt

2010-06-30T19:02:00.000+05:30

Credit cards are generally unsecured. In other words, an unsecured credit card provides the user to purchase goods / services up to a specific limit. The user also can pay back this amount within a mutually agreed time frame.

Research shows that a huge number of Americans own credit cards and some even carry more than one card. In fact, the entire financial horizon is filled with hundreds of credit card offers and hence choosing one is rather a difficult choice. Hence, it is recommended that the individual, prior to selecting any credit card, assesses the offers available and selects the one that really benefits them. It is also wise to remember that a credit card should be utilized with care as it gives you a huge amount of financial freedom and this makes it important that the individual has a certain level of self-discipline.

In the US, there is a heavy competition among credit card companies. As a result, this leads to many credit card companies coming up with several attractive offers to its consumers. Most of them offer a low rate of interest with some of them even offering a zero percent interest. However, such an interest rate would be viable only for a small period, say 3 to 6 months. As these credit cards are unsecured, their rate of interest is normally higher than a bank loan. On the other hand, its interest is far less compared to the normal credit card. Nevertheless, these low rates can bring substantial savings for the user.

There is also the option of those free unsecured credit cards. But searching for an unsecured credit card that is free is like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. However, there are a lot many fee free card offers out there and all you have to do is just search around. A lot many credit card companies charge an annual fee on their cards and try to justify this annual fee. Obviously, a card with annual fees comes with certain benefits. All you have to do is to evaluate whether you profit from these benefits prior to paying a fee. The benefits generally include frequent flyer miles and some cash back offers. Now unless you are a frequent flyer or an avid online shopper, these benefits are basically useless. Your best choice for a credit card with no fees is to select one with not many benefits or none at all. If you can do without the frequent flyer miles, discounts at merchant stores and online cash back rebates, then you can definitely find a large amount of free unsecured credit cards.

Summarizing, people incur unnecessary expenses on their credit card and end up in a crisis. It is therefore suggested that you either go in for a short term unsecured credit card or a low cost or a free unsecured credit card with no benefits.

Reasons For Outsourcing

2010-06-13T11:31:00.000+05:30

In most cases I have never asked my PRIMARY clients regarding their clientele.

As in an outsourcing process, it would be unethical of me to contact their clients directly, unless advised. In most cases when I contact clients, it is only for clarification of information provided from the PRIMARY source

As most of you may be aware, outsourcing provides a number of benefits to the PARENT (primary) organization.

Below are just a few of the reasons why a PARENT organization should consider outsourcing. It can maintain control over critical functions, while taking advantage of outsourcing non-critical functions.

Take for example “resume writing” to INDEPENDENT Resume Writers for a Recruitment or a Head Hunter

In the midst of hundreds, if not thousands of resumes, recruiters and employers receive for any given position; your resume needs to stand out from the crowd. You must make the Recruitment or HRD Manager of the identified or targeted company, read your resume more thoroughly than just the rudimentary 10-20 seconds the vast majority of your competition will warrant. The way to do this is by designing an accomplishment driven resume.

As a Manager, you would know that by retaining the services of a freelance writer, you pay only the writer's fee, as they do not require monthly retainers, and can be hired on a project basis. So payroll taxes, benefits costs, and other employee expenses are eliminated.

Besides, a freelance writer works on a per project basis and works to deadlines.

So, the PARENT Company’s projects are completed on time and on budget. In addition, customers need to see new content and how the services are changing with the times. A freelance writer has the skills to handle complex research and fact checking. Besides, a freelance writer can accommodate special needs and schedules, and can provide fresh perspective and expertise, that staff writers may have lost

In short, there is cost containment through reallocation of resources, by freeing up valuable resources to perform other duties, thereby getting a significant cost savings benefit, besides, the time savings benefit. This allows the PARENT company to focus on critical processes.

Moreover, when employees know that writing projects are handled by a freelance writer, they have the time to concentrate on what they do best.

So, give it a shot.

If you face any hurdles, drop me a line should you need to outsource any of your writing projects.

How to Bathe an Older Dog

2010-06-07T08:20:00.000+05:30

A great amount of care and detail needs to be invested into a bathing session for your old or let say, senior dog. A dog who has been with us for a long period of time is no less than like a member of the family. So, the slightest discomfort or harm caused to him or her by our carelessness will feel like an unforgivable thing to ourselves. So be prepared to be wise and well planned than to be sorry later.

Dogs, especially older dogs don't need to be bathed very frequently. Regular brushing and grooming can elongate the intervals between washes. So take care to indulge in a grooming and combing routine regularly. When grooming, also make sure to check the dog's entire body for any malignancies as such things if discovered early can extend your dogs’ life, by years.

So as and when you decide to give your senior dog a bath, first thing to do is pick the time wisely. Decide it according to the daily routine of the dog, specifically the time of the day when the dog is most active. Also take care that you are free during that time, and not in any hurry to leave or take calls so you can give the undivided attention to the task at hand.

Secondly make sure you have all the supplies at hand. Towels, cup for pouring water, enough wash cloth depending upon the size of the dog, dog shampoos and conditioner.
When the dog is getting old its skin and coat have the tendency to dry up and be brittle so pick the shampoos and conditioner which can ease hair and coat, after discussing with your vet. Never use shampoos or conditioners that humans use on the dog as it can be damaging to the dogs’ skin.

Next make sure that the water temperature is just right. Not too hot but lukewarm so as to not burn the dogs’ sensitive skin. Fill the tub or basin you are intending to use with just an inch depth of water. Lead the dog to the area, constantly talking to him, give him a brushing, giving a lot of love in any which way you can so as to make him at ease rather than just plunging him into the water.

Now slowly get your dog into water. Keep talking and stroking his coat when doing this. Older dogs may have arthritic aches and pains in his joints, so be considerate while doing this. If needed, wrap a towel around him and slowly lower him into the tub. If your dog has weak eyesight, it’s better to make him hear the running water. Also splash a little water on him first before getting him into the tub so as to reduce the shock to the minimum. Now add more water to the tub gradually. Use a cup and washcloth carefully to wet the dog all over.

Apply a little shampoo onto his coat and work up a lather. Gently massage all over with lots of suds. The lukewarm water will be soothing for the aches and pains he may be having while your constant talk and contact will make him enjoy the session like a being in a spa. Use the washcloth gently to cleanse around his eyes, the chin and throat.

Rinse the shampoo off with lukewarm water and gently rub on the conditioner. This sure will be a pleasurable experience for you both. Keep talking to the dog while smoothing out his hair allover and then rinse of the conditioner thoroughly with water.

Finally let the dog shake off the water and then use the towel to dry him gently but thoroughly. Use a smooth edged comb to comb out his hair and remove the tangles using a detangling spray if necessary. If a hair dryer is used, keep the heat to the minimum so as not to burn his skin.

There, now you have a clean and happy dog. Give him a little treat now to make him even happier. And you can congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Sir Salman The Clown

2010-05-30T08:17:00.001+05:30

Eight floors above, in the Random House boardroom, Rushdie is sipping takeaway coffee, and looking both professorial and profoundly amused. These days he is, as the receptionist implies, a novelist more talked about than read, a situation he is keen to reverse.

It wasn't always thus. Back in 1981 when he won the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children, an instant classic, he was the hottest young writer of the day. That all changed in 1989 when, following publication of The Satanic Verses, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for its author's death.

Overnight, Rushdie stopped being "just" a novelist and became a weird hybrid – a man in hiding who was also a public figure, a visible symbol of freedom of speech who was, himself, invisible. Rushdie was forced into hiding for 10 years over his book's alleged slight on the prophet Mohammed.

Having said that were it not for the first lot of Moslem nonsense over his book the Satanic Verses, and a certain Iranian getting a fatwa on his arse few people would not really have heard of him. They do say that publicity no matter what type is good, as Oscar Wilde said something on the lines of it was better to be talked about than not talked about all. I am sure Salman is sat back cashing in the cheques and thinking, each death threat means a few more book sales.

What a lot of people don’t know was that he had round-the-clock police protection costing nearly £1 million a year, although that has been downgraded in recent years after Iran indicated the death sentence no longer applied.

I have to remind myself I’m a writer, not just a fighter, and that’s the story of my life, said Rushdie. Living in hiding is worse than death and your detractors will always try to discredit your work.

Now for those who came in late - a quick biography……

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian born novelist and essayist. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 19 June 1947. He went to school in Bombay and at Rugby in England, and read History at King's College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked briefly in television before returning to England, beginning work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975.

He first achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1981, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers' Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award's 25-year history.

Salman Rushdie is Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made Distinguished Fellow in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1995. He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1993 and the Aristeion Literary Prize in 1996, and has received eight honorary doctorates. He was elected to the Board of American PEN in 2002. In the spring of 2007, Rushdie was named Distinguished Writer in Residence in the English Department at Emory University. Phew !

“Midnight's Children” narrates key events in the history of India through the story of pickle-factory worker Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born as India won independence from Britain in 1947.

The critic Malcolm Bradbury acclaimed the novel's achievement in The Modern British Novel (Penguin, 1994) as a new start for the late-twentieth-century novel.

Much of his early fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.

The author's own biography is of a boy born in 1947, educated in an `English public school ethos' school in Bombay, then leaving India as a teenager to complete his education at a major public school in England, and then Cambridge University, before making a career for ten years as an advertising copywriter in London. Lack of deep and broad insight into India and its people, much beyond his own rather narrow background and what one can pick up from books, newspapers, TV docs and acquaintances in England, is perhaps unsurprising. Now I know that I am being a bit over the top here, but aren’t all of from the same mould ?

Nonetheless, anyone who liked Rushdie’s other books is bound to love this one as well. The book certainly has some great moments that will definitely hold your interest.

Unfortunately, whatever people say, I have my views and perhaps that may be to the fact that I am not such a big fan of Salman Rushdie. However, at times, he rocks !

For example, there is the recent row over Muslim women's dress codes reignited today after author Salman Rushdie declared that "veils suck". Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, he added that there's not a single woman that he knows in his family, or in his friends circle who would have accepted wearing the veil. He was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which in fact, they do and he felt that in other words it is way of taking power away from women. No comments, but it takes a lot of guts to speak up.

The fatwa was lifted in 1997, and in more recent years Rushdie's public image has altered to that of literary playboy. The new view is that he spends his time attending parties with Bono, squiring beautiful young women (his marriage to the actress, model and TV presenter Padma Lakshmi ended last year) and hanging out with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, the novelists with whom he supposedly forms a neocon triumvirate. Being a literary playboy is easier than being a fugitive from Islamic vengeance, but the divorce seems to have left a devastating effect on Salman Rushdie

Once reclusive, now apparently a global gadabout with homes in London, New York and his native India. He gets called lots of things – arrogant, smug, and overindulged – but in the final analysis, could Sir Salman be nothing more than a good bloke to whom some bad things have happened?
We start by talking about his new novel, The Enchantress Of Florence, which is set during the 16th century and in which Rushdie forges a connection between the sexual decadence of Medieval Florence and the sensual world of India's Mughal Empire. He has been working on the book for three years, and seems to feel that it proves, after almost a decade of bad reviews, that he remains a world-class novelist. "Sometimes when you finish a book you don't know quite what you've got," he says. "This time I actually felt happy when I finished it. As far as I can tell, this is not bad. The last time I really felt that way was Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, and before that Midnight's Children."

Rushdie, who studied history, did an enormous amount of research for "Enchantress," and there is the odd inclusion, for a novel, of an 83-book bibliography. The purpose, he said, was to acknowledge the work he built upon as well as to ward off any accusations that he copied other sources.

He particularly said that he did not want some smart aleck to go find the facts mentioned in his book and say that he stole it from another source.
He added that it is obvious that he has done extensive research and has taken stuff from all over the place. The only existing record of the Ottoman campaign against Dracula, for instance, is a journal written by a young Serbian janissary named Konstantine, who describes arriving at a town finding 20,000 people impaled on stakes. The image that particularly haunted Rushdie was of a mother with a baby, and he uses this description of 'crows nesting in her hollowed breasts.'

That's his, not mine," said Rushdie, who used it in "Enchantress." "But who can beat that for a description?"

The Enchantress Of Florence is also an important book for Rushdie because writing it helped him recover from his split from Lakshmi, his fourth wife.

After three years of marriage, they had split and for around two months, he was unable to work, but eventually found comfort in flitting imaginatively through the whorehouses and harems of Florence and the Mughal court. In his novels there is a recurring motif of artists literally disappearing into their own work, and he seems to have done something similar here, sinking into his own pages, sighing with pleasure and relief.

The two novels also share a fairytale quality. Rushdie is a great admirer of fairy stories and fables, a habit that he and his sisters were told when they were kids Memories of Ali Baba, Aladdin, Sinbad were the stories that his father told him and which he enjoys watching as movies. This was enormously important to his later development as a magical realist writer, but what it did at the time was bond him to his father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a small businessman in Bombay.

One of the few things that he remembers about his father was that he was a very good storyteller. However, he had a problem with drink and that made him difficult, but he was a very good father of small children – entertaining and amusing and entrancing. He had more difficulties with all of us when we acquired minds of our own, but as a child he was completely enchanted by him.

How did the relationship change? "Well, it got much worse and then it got better again.
There was a long time when he was in his thirties that things got so worse and they were not on talking terms. However, when his cancer was diagnosed he went back to meet him and they became immensely close. There wasn't very long between his diagnosis and his dying, but he says that it was during that time they put away most of their problems.

It then appears that on his 40th birthday (June, 87), his father wrote him a very long letter (which he still retains) in which he had spoken to him about his work. He had never really spoken to him about his work before as he found it hard to do so, but that letter it appears was extraordinary and deeply affecting. In short, towards the end they became very attached

He died in November that year

It isn’t surprising that he is called the literary playboy and the connection he has with women. He was born in Bombay in 1947 and his sisters arrived one, five and 14 years later. He seems to have had many more close women friends than men. Besides, the fact that in his family there was always the presence of such a disproportionate female element.

He grew up surrounded by confident, assertive women. One of his aunts married a general in the Pakistan army and became a high society figure. The other was one of the great intellectuals of her generation and through her he met some of the greatest writers and poets. In short, his knowledge of women was that they were anything but the cliché of mild, self-effacing Indian women. They were extremely confident, forthright and took no ‘shit’

This influence is paramount in his books as well. His friendship with women is evident in many of his books. He has never had any problems in making friends with women, perhaps it was due to the fact that they understood that he was only trying to be their friend and not trying to get them to bed. Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them.

He maintains that the women he befriends are not for any other purpose but with the only purpose of hanging out with them. Perhaps a “seduction” is a bonus (pardon the pun). That said; let's not forget that Rushdie has been married four times. Seduction cannot be a completely foreign art for him. He feels that he has done his share and laughs at the fact of being viewed as a ‘Don Juan’, albeit embarrassing. Four marriages and still he remains an optimistic and romantic idiot !

It does seem to me that even now, aged 60 and with two children of his own, he craves acceptance. This desire to belong, would explain, for instance, why being awarded a knighthood made him so happy, why it meant so much to him that Indian readers took Midnight's Children to their hearts, and the very fact that why it hurts so much that The Satanic Verses was banned in that country.

Last June, when Queen Elizabeth knighted him, many of the issues that have dogged Rushdie over the past 20 years were freshly aroused, not only among Muslims around the world but also among political kin contemptuous that an avowed leftist would accept such an imperial honor, and conservatives who lashed out at him because they believed he was once again endangering Britain's security.

It appears that he deeply resented the assaults on him, and couldn’t quite fathom the animosity. Perhaps he should write a book titled “Sir Shalimar The Clown” and quieten his critics

Then, a few weeks later, he announced that Lakshmi was leaving him (she informed him via e-mail). Cheap…….didn’t think she would do that, but what to do, her upbringing is evident. Poor Sir Salman, he still hasn’t quite understood her.

Now if Rushdie happens to be spotted having a drink with an attractive woman, he is soon likely to be greeted with a headline like "Salman Rushdie Is Once Again On The Prowl in Midtown," in some New York magazine (no names here). Not being able to work was one of the terrible byproducts of his breakup with Lakshmi, Rushdie said. He has described the split as a "nuclear bomb dropped in your living room when you're trying to work. What a sentimental idiot – there are more to some guys that never are written.

As Rushdie himself acknowledges, he enjoys going out and socializing. Tell me something new. Perhaps, it might help him relax and get “himself out of the system” after a day of slogging and groom himself for another grueling day

Rushdie now lives in Manhattan but regularly commutes to London to see his family, and keeps a punishing lecture and touring schedule in North America and Europe. A theme that repeatedly surfaces in "Enchantress" is the illusion that one can come home after a long journey and find peace.

And to set the record straight, he recently clarified that all the people that he has been recently associated with “in such reports”, are not true.

He went a step further to add “I'm totally eligible, single and available." Any takers ? You kidding ?

With an old fart ! (with all due apologies)

Wishing him another four more marriages !

Bibliography
• Grimus (1975)
• Midnight's Children (1981)
• Shame (1983)
• The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
• The Satanic Verses (1988)
• Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
• Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981 - 1991 (1992)
• Homeless by Choice (1992, with R. Jhabvala and V. S. Naipaul)
• East, West (1994)
• The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
• The Firebird's Nest (1997)
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
• The Screenplay of Midnight's Children (1999)
• Fury (2001)
• Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992 - 2002 (2002)
• Shalimar the Clown (2005)
• The Enchantress of Florence (2008)
• The Best American Short Stories (2008, as Guest Editor)

Prizes and awards

• 1981 Arts Council Writers' Award
• 1981 Booker Prize for Fiction Midnight's Children
• 1981 English-Speaking Union Award Midnight's Children
• 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (joint winner) Midnight's Children
• 1983 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Shame
• 1984 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (France) Shame
• 1988 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Satanic Verses
• 1988 Whitbread Novel Award The Satanic Verses
• 1989 German Author of the Year The Satanic Verses
• Kurt Tucholsky Prize (Sweden)
• 1992 Writers' Guild Award (Best Children's Book) Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• Austrian State Prize for European Literature
• 1993 Booker of Bookers (special award made to celebrate 25 years of the Booker Prize)
• Prix Colette (Switzerland)
• 1995 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Moor's Last Sigh
• 1995 British Book Awards Author of the Year The Moor's Last Sigh
• 1995 Whitbread Novel Award The Moor's Last Sigh
• Aristeion Literary Prize
• Mantova Literary Prize (Italy)
• Budapest Grand Prize for Literature (Hungary)
• Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
• Freedom of the City, Mexico City (Mexico)
• 2005 Whitbread Novel Award (shortlist) Shalimar The Clown
• 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) Shalimar The Clown
• 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist) Shalimar The Clown
• KBE
• 2007 Man Booker International Prize (shortlist)
• 2008 Best of the Booker Midnight's Children

Publisher (General enquiries) Agent

Jonathan Cape Ltd The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd
Random House UK Ltd 17 Bedford Square
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London WC1B 3JA
London SW1V 2SA England
England Tel: +44 (0)20 7908 5900
Tel: +44 (0)20 7840 8539 Fax: +44 (0)20 7908 5901
Fax: +44 (0)20 7932 0077 E-mail: mail@wylieagency.co.uk
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/

Slum Dog Millionaire – A Review

2010-05-23T08:10:00.002+05:30

Director - Danny Boyle
Co-director (India) - Loveleen Tandan
Writer - Vikas Swarup
Screenplay - Simon Beaufoy
Starring - Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Freida Pinto, Irfan Khan
Music Director - A R Rahman
Running Time - 120 minutes
Awards - Won 4 Golden Globes. Another 23 wins & 24 nominations
Release Date - 23 January 2009 (India) (although released in late Aug 2008 in the USA)

I happened to see ‘Slum Dog Millionaire’ this morning and can certainly say that it is one of the better movies that I have seen

And to say that I am a movie fanatic and have seen a lot of them. But this one is truly fantastic and doesn't shy away from tough subjects that children and citizens of Mumbai (Bombay) are subjected to. A true work of art and hats off to Dan Boyle and his team for making something worth seeing. Finally, something different from the Victorian period (we have had enough of them – we seem to be stuck in early 1900 when it comes to directing English movies in and about India)

The movie, ‘Slum Dog Millionaire', which recently won 4 awards at The Golden Globe is based on a true story, and it's the story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a young man in his late teens who goes on the very popular Hindi version of the TV game show, “Who Wants to be A Millionaire?”. He is from the slums of Mumbai, who has nothing and he's ill educated and he's illiterate. He goes on to wins the show and people can't believe that he has won it

They think he's cheated. They think he's getting signals from embedded chips in his body, or that there are people coughing in the audience, but he won it. Everyone watching and producing the show can not figure out how this impoverished lad could possibly know the answers to the questions he is asked.

Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother Salim, grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika (Freida), the girl he loved and lost. Each chapter of his story reveals the key to the answer to one of the game show's questions. As we learn more about Jamal’s life and experiences we get a better understanding of how knowledge is gained. Told in flashback sequences we see the journey of a young boy who did not allow the hand he was dealt to keep him from finding all he desired.

What's clever about the film is that the structure shows you how he knows the answers. Certain things have happened to him in his life and they happen to ask questions about those things. But the real reason he's on the show is to get in touch with the girl he loves but has lost in the chaos of Mumbai, and all he knows is that she watches the show religiously. So he's not even there to win the money, but that's when you win I suppose, when you're not even trying.

In short, Slum Dog has the right elements, and uses them to its advantage. It is fast, visual, contemplative and humorous.

Danny Boyle has depicted the actual situations that occur in a poverty struck territory (where religious, survival, actual occurrences that happen with children in poverty struck areas... remember this is a true story!

Another issue here is that perhaps from this movie alone - there is more awareness of what occurs in countries - relating to children, relating to human rights. I appreciate Danny Boyle and Rahman and the Indian Actors for showing the actual truth of what happens in poverty and how adults exploit children (relating to abuse, improper shelter, unsafe orphanages)

Most of all growing up in India was mixture of adventure, love, despair and empathy. This film brought back some memories and portrayed truth about the reality about living in poverty. Having visited the slums of Bombay, this movie is so true to what I have seen and experienced. There is hardship and cruelty, and people who live in the slums are sadly treated like dirt by fellow Indians

For many fortunate ones, Slum dog will make you appreciate life, but yet we grind our lives daily to acquire more short term material status and possessions which do nothing other than lead to emptiness.

India might be an emerging economy but sadly imbalances are overwhelming and it hurts the poor the most. Personally, the gap between poor and rich will only narrow by mitigating the class barrier, providing good education and re-distribution of wealth and by giving unconditional opportunity to the poor. Well…. that’s another subject!

Please also note that ‘Slum Dog Millionaire’ is rated R for some violence, disturbing images and language. I think the theme and context would be a little too strong for the younger family members. This movie deals with the harsh realities of the orphans in India and the things they are forced to do. I think those 15 and up could get something from this with the right conversation afterwards. It is a must see for anyone who loves a great story of human achievement and appreciates expert film making.

A true eye opener - the movie is very real and portrays the spirit of every slum child of finding hope and release from the bondage of poverty.

Bravo! The director Danny Boyle successfully transfers the raw realism of economic deprivation to bustling, modern day India. Rich and poor come together in an orgy of excess, bolstered with a love-song whose words most westerners may barely decipher, but whose tune stays with you.

Simon Beaufoy has written the script and Vikas Swarup the book.

Clearly the Golden Globes turned Sunday into Slum-day

Great movie and great script... It should get an Oscar too!

In short, Boyle has been reborn in Mumbai.

Hyundai’s Double Dog Dare

2010-05-16T08:37:00.001+05:30

Hyundai has dared all car buyers to compare Hyundai models with any other car out there.

The new Hyundai Genesis has a stylized emblem, formed by a shield hexagonal black and silver wings and which symbolizes the desire to "fly over the others". As the car slowly develops the Hyundai brand, people will get the feel of the badge. The feeling that I own a Hyundai and I’m proud to be a Hyundai owner and would never consider buying something without a Hyundai badge!

Hyundai wants its new premium sedan Hyundai Genesis to be its brand image. It is certain that the Hyundai Genesis would achieve its goal. With the Genesis, Hyundai has created a design generic that is recognizable and a brand image that is desirable. It has managed to position itself into a unique spot where its brand has started generating attention.

Hyundai Genesis’ new adventure against the world has just begun and it will really be exciting.

To further substantiate that are the results from a recent survey where 44% of Hyundai Genesis owners that have been interviewed have household income of over $100,000.

What does that indicate?

It tells you that these buyers can also afford its competitors, but have instead gone for the Hyundai Genesis. Furthermore, the majority of the demographics have also previously owned other luxury models – so the value theory goes out of the window

What Hyundai offers is a car that is as good as a Lexus GS for around $10,000 less. At http://www.genesisowners.com you’ll find ex-owners of Lexus, BMW and Infiniti vehicles!

Hyundai is now comparing the speed of a Genesis to a Porsche Boxster, the handling and braking to BMW, and the sound system to a Rolls. A Genesis is not a Rolls Royce. It is also not a Porsche. But when you say Porsche, you understand "speed and performance". When you say BMW, you understand that the car must handle well, and when you hear Rolls, you generally understand that the car has luxury features. They also conducted a 0 to 60 mph test with the BMW 750i and Porsche Boxster, with the Genesis finishing ahead. Not everyone is going to make a spreadsheet with performance specifications on it, but most people will understand what you mean when you say that a car is as fast as or faster than a Porsche.

Hyundai has also taken pains to ensure that each item stands apart - whether it is the gear levers, visors, cup holders or seat controls, it appears that they belong to a luxury sedan. Pitting each of these cars against the Hyundai's Genesis in a luxury car challenge has resulted in leaving most of them dazed and shuffling realizing that Hyundai Genesis deserves the full respect that it demands, whether be it safety or luxury.

So, if there is one thing to take from these comparisons, it would be the fact that Hyundai can take on its competitors head-on, without making room for the price factor.

Hyundai is now daring all car buyers to compare Hyundai models with any other car out there.

Visit us and see for yourself

The Arab And The Genie

2010-05-09T08:05:00.000+05:30

An Arab had just spent many days crossing the desert without water.

His camel had died of thirst and he was crawling through the sands, certain that the end was close when all of a sudden he sees a shiny object sticking out of the sand several yards ahead of him.

He crawls to the object, pulls it out of the sand, and discovers what looks to be an ash tray from an old car. He opens it and out pops a genie...

But this apparently is no ordinary genie. He is wearing a polka dot bow tie and a sport coat with a dog-eared little book in the breast pocket with a blue cover and has a pencil tucked behind one ear.

"Well, kid," says the genie. "You know how it works. You have three wishes."

"I'm not falling for this." says the man. "I'm not going to trust a used car salesman!"

"What have you got to lose?”

"You've got no transportation, and it looks like you're a goner anyway!”

The man thinks about this for a minute, and decides that the genie is right.

"OK, I wish I were in a lush oasis with plentiful food and drink." ***POOF*** The man finds himself in the most beautiful oasis he has ever seen. And he is surrounded with jugs of wine and platters of delicacies.

"OK, kid, what's your second wish."

"My second wish is that I was rich beyond my wildest dreams." ***POOF*** The Arab finds himself surrounded by treasure chests filled with rare gold coins and precious gems."

"OK, kid, you have just one more wish. Better make it a good one!"

After thinking for a few minutes, the Arab says: "I wish that no matter where I go, a beautiful woman will want and need me." ***POOF*** He's turned into a tampon.

The moral of the story?

If a used car salesman offers you anything at no cost, there's always going to be a string attached somewhere!

55th Annual Filmfare Awards: 3 Idiots, Amitabh and Vidya shine

2010-05-02T09:34:00.000+05:30

Bollywood Shahenshah Amitabh Bachchan and Vidya Balan won the much coveted titles of best actor and actress respectively at the 55th annual Filmfare awards which was held at Yashraj studios on Saturday, 28th March 2010. Both won it for the same film 'Paa' in which they starred as mother and son.

Other big winner of the night was Aamir Khan's top grossing film ‘3 Idiots’, winning the best film, best director for Raj Kumar Hirani, and also best story, dialogues, screen play and the best actor in a supporting role for its star Boman Irani. The best actress in a supporting role was won by Kalki Koechlin for her role in Dev D.

Musical maestro A. R Rehman won the best music director award for Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's ‘Delhi 6’ which incidentally also won the female and male playback singer awards for its singers Mohit Chauhan for 'Masakali' and Rekha Bharadwaj for 'Genda Phool' respectively. The female Category was shared by Kavita Seth too, for 'Ik Tara' from 'Wake Up Sid'.

Yesteryear actor Shashi Kapoor and Music director Khaiyyam were honoured with Lifetime Achievement awards.

The glittering event was hosted by the irrepressible host duo of Shahrukh khan and Saif Ali Khan and supported by Karan Johar, and actors Siddharth and Shweta for various categories. Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif and Karenna Kapoor were among those who entertained the crowd with their performances while Shahid Kapoor did a memorable dancing tribute to legendary singer Michael Jackson.

Most of the who’s who of Bollywood was present at the ceremony except the Bachchans, who boycotted the event in protest of against a publication associated with Filmfare, which gave false news about Aiswarya Rai's health.

Frieda Pinto Set to Have Two International Releases in 2010

2010-04-26T08:32:00.000+05:30

The dusky beauty from India, Frieda Pinto, who shot to international stardom with last years‘ multiple Oscar winning film ‘The Slum Dog Millionaire’, is embarking on her international career in a big way. She has reportedly finished shooting for two hugely hyped Hollywood films both of which are set to release in September this year.

One is titled ‘Miral’, a love story set in Israel which finished shooting on location in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Frieda plays the title role of Miral, a girl brought up in an orphanage in Jerusalem in a story spanning over many decades. Written by Rula Jebreal who authored the book with the same name, the film is directed by Oscar nominated writer director Julian Schnabel.

Other film of Frieda that’s already in post production stage is the celebrated filmmaker Woody Allen’s next ‘You will meet a tall dark stranger’ which circles around a family, their love stories and their efforts to try to figure out their troubles. She is starring in this romance cum family drama along with an array of huge international names like Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins, Naomi watts, Josh Brolin, Antonio Banderas etc. Woody Allen recently stated that there is lots of substance in Indian actors and called it worthy working along with them. Coming from such an esteemed source that’s high price for one film old Frieda.

Coming up next she will start shooting in April for a Greek mythology based film ‘War of The Gods’ directed by Tarsem Singh. She is also rumored to be cast in “American Empire’ directed by Andy Armstrong.

Mumbaikars Also Should Work Hard - Asha Bhosale

2010-04-19T11:27:00.000+05:30

It seems that after the SRK and Shiv Sena stand off, Bollywood is beginning to find the courage to voice their true opinion regarding the issue of being a Marathi and a Mumbaikar.

‘Mumbai belongs to all’ was the emphatic comment made by the legendary singer and Maharashtra born Asha Bhosale, when asked about the contribution made by migrants coming to Mumbai. The words became all the more significant because the MNS chief Raj Thackeray was sharing the stage with her.

The venue was an event ‘Swar-Asha’ organized in Pune on Sunday by channel Mi Marathi’. Raj Thackeray made a speech before Asha in which he made the claim that even though the songs sung by Asha are accepted by people all around India as their own, it all happened because she is a Marathi.

Later in the show Asha was interviewed by television anchor Sudhir Gadgil, who asked her to comment on the Mumbaikar versus migrant issue. That’s when the singer made the comment and emphasized that nobody is justified to snatch jobs from people who work in Mumbai from morning to evening and instead of such acts, Maharashtrian people should also be ready to work hard. As a singer she worked hard, and that’s why nobody could deny the success and recognition that was due to her, she added.

Raj Thackeray chose not to respond to Ashaji’s words. MNS spokesperson Shirish Parkar also refused to comment when questioned about it. Asha Bhosale is reported to be close to both Raj and his uncle Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray. In such a case, what reaction her words bring about is yet to seen.

Recently, industrialist Mukesh Ambani and cricketing legend Tendulkar faced the wrath of Shiv Sena and MNS for making similar statements.

Do politicians have a sense of humour ?

2010-04-12T20:02:00.000+05:30

This is something that happened quite sometime ago, but worth reading

It is about an enterprising prankster, who wrote to American Senators asking them for their favourite joke. The responses are amusing, illuminating and, in some cases, really rather charming.

Posing as a 10 year old boy doing a "government project" at school, the prankster sent a scrawled note to 100 American Senators. Right off the bat, he discovered that getting a response from a top elected official is not an easy task, even for a ten-year-old boy. Weeks passed, with no response.

The reason for the delay, apparently was due to the fact that all 100 joke letters were screened for traces of chemical residue as per regulations. Federal marshals wearing protective suits held the prank messages up to ultraviolet lights, with long tweezers. Trained dogs sniffed hungrily over the letters, their keen noses able to detect anything except the scent of a practical joke.

Finally, the letters went through, and it pestered the nation's Senators until, finally, the responses started coming in. Senators actually took time from their busy schedules to write a joke, and send it to a lying ten-year-old kid. The results are sure to both amuse and amaze you. You can discover which of the Senators are funny and which are not, you will be moved to such a degree that you might even be tempted to vote [if they are participating during the next election ]

There are letters from such luminaries as John McCain and John Kerry. The jokes they chose reveal much about their personalities. And, against all odds, some of them manage to be quite funny too.

The senators who fell for it are listed at The Senator Prank

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Please note that Insanitary Media Behavior is only a blog, and it is in no way responsible for the content of any external website.

N-Viro International Corporation's Green Technology

2010-04-06T19:31:00.002+05:30

N-Viro International Corporation builds and licenses its technology to private companies and municipalities, where the companies’ patented processes uses lime and / or mineral rich, combustible by-products to pasteurize, treat and convert wastewater sludge and other bio-organic waste into bio-mineral agricultural and soil-enrichment products, which has real market value.

N-viro international affirms a renewable energy future by utilizing patented n-viro fuel. Products from N-Viro can also change the useless material into fuel, and can also overcome the residue depletion of opportunity fuels, except material generated from clean coal.

Today’s climate change has nations scrambling for solutions to minimize this worsening condition. Some companies all over the world have already been practicing ways to transform waste into beneficial reusable products. The production of alternative energy has contributed to alleviate environmental issues such as global warming.

By doing this, products from N-Viro are turning waste products, composed of both organic and inorganic material, into renewable alternative fuel in synergy with the coal combustion industry. N-Viro International Corporation makes clean coal as opportunity fuels. Planet Earth would definitely be proud of this company!

The company has generated sales in excess of $40 million dollars, since its initial public offering in October of 1993.

The company and management expect to develop the N-Viro Fuel technology with other power facilities within the United States and anticipates international acceptance for the N-Viro Fuel technology.

Visit http://www.nviro.com for more details.

Hema Malinis bunglow burgled - Security Guards suspected

2010-03-28T09:30:00.000+05:30

Hindi cinema's original dream girl Hema Malinis bunglow in Mumbai suburb of Dindoshi was burgled last weekend. Money and jewellery worth Rs.80 lakh is reported missing. Police claim that they have enough leads to believe that the two on-duty security guards at the bungalow were behind the crime. One of them is detained by the police for questioning while a team of police is dispatched to find the other who allegedly escaped to his village in Uttar Pradesh together with the stollen goods.

The crime was discovered on Saturday morning by Hema's cousin, who is the caretaker for the posh 2,500 sqft bungalow situated at Yashodhara Hilltop Society in Dindoshi, Goregaon (E) when the actress is away. He noticed a broken window and things kept in the safe in the bedroom missing. Hema Malini who apparently was in Nagpur during the incident, returned immediately upon being informed. They then went to the Dindoshi Police Sation together and reported the incident. "I was away for a dance show when this robbery occurred. No papers were lost, only jewellery and money are gone," said Hema Malini in speaking about the incident. She also claimed to have no suspects in this matter, hoped the police would nab the culprits soon.

According to the Dindoshi Police team who visited the spot, the crime took place on Friday night. The robbers entered the house through a window in the back of the bungalow and forced open the bedroom door to get to the safe where the cash and valuables were kept. Two to three people must have been involved, who were and familiar with the plan of the house in order to carry out the break in without anybody noticing, all the more points towards an inside job, the police said.

Grinding Teeth at Night Can Be Related to Stress

2010-03-14T11:39:00.000+05:30

If you know somebody who is given to grinding teeth during sleep, it can be a telltale sign that the person is suffering from some kind of stress. Well that’s what results of a recent study conducted on persons who grind their teeth at night by Heinrich-Heine-University, Dusseldorf, Germany show. This habit of teeth grinding, called as ‘sleep bruxism’ is quite a common phenomenon but so far no reason could be established as to what caused it.

In this study 69 adults were examined of whom 48 were already known to have bruxism. For this purpose thin plates were attached to the teeth of the subjects overnight to assess the extent of grinding. The same individuals were also made to answer questionnaires to take stock of what’s going on in their life and how much stress they are under in their personal or professional front.

Dr.Maria Giraki who headed the team which conducted the tests says in her report that while factors like age, sex or education didn’t seem to affect bruxing, there was a striking connection with those who claimed to be under stress in day to day life or work. The ones who suffered the most were those who didn’t know how to deal with the stress effectively, she said.

The journal, Head & Face Medicine will carry the details of the study.

Bruxism in the long run can lead to excessive wear and tear to teeth, looseness and sensitivity. It can also cause growth and pain in the muscles responsible for chewing. Now with this study establishing stress as a reason for this habit, maybe a solution is also on the way.

For nore info, visit : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruxism

PayPal Resumes India Bank Withdrawals - Good News For Freelancers

2010-03-07T09:45:00.000+05:30

PayPal is widely known to be an easy way to collect money from affiliate and advertising programs and payment for freelance services. The money collected in PayPal account then can be transferred online, to the users' bank account.

Sometime during early February, PayPal had officially announced that the RBI (Reserve Bank Of India) had intimated them that they required specific approvals to allow personal inward remittances to India, which PayPal did not have. So till the time PayPal obtained these approvals; all personal payments into India remained suspended. However, if the PayPal user from India was an exporter, they would be still be able to use PayPal for payments of goods and services, but PayPal will not provide users with the IEC (Importer Exporter Code) to withdraw payments to their banks accounts. Instead, the users will have to apply for it themselves and the process in itself might take several weeks as getting the IEC is not an easy task.

Now, it appears that PayPal is resuming their services, but with some new features.

According to the new rules specified by RBI (Reserve Bank of India), the PayPal management has included a new field called the “Purpose Code”. Basically, this code allows the banks to identify the nature of the cross border bank transaction. It is also to be noted that this is clearly different from IEC (Importer Exporter Code). The new withdrawals will require users to use a Purpose Code while withdrawing money to their bank accounts. So, if you received payments for your website or blog, you need to use Freelance Journalism as your purpose code.

Besides, you don't have to make any real efforts to get a Purpose Code. PayPal has provided a table in their post to confirm your Purpose Code. You can either choose your code according to your business category or confirm your code from PayPal’s customer support team.

After logging into your PayPal Account and selecting the ‘Withdraw Funds’ option, you would be then asked to fill out a new field titled the Purpose Code. Select the code most appropriate for your nature of business and proceed. More details on purpose codes can be found by clicking here.

Further info on same can also e found here.

Users are advised to choose their purpose code accordingly, so that you do not get into any trouble later. There will also be a limit on the amount that the user can withdraw before which they will be required to produce receipts or invoices and their PAN card. PayPal has also not explicitly stated how much the upper limit would be before the Indian user would require additional documents. However, it is believed that this would more likely be not more than Indian Rupees 50,000, as bank deposits above this limit require users to produce their PAN cards.

Another Godman lands in a Sex Scam

2010-03-03T10:01:00.001+05:30

The whole cult of ‘Godmen’ suffered yet another jolt today with one more from them losing credibility and prestige in the public eye.

Sri Paramahamsa Nithyananda Swamiji of Nithyananda Dhyana Peetha near Bidadi, close to Bangalore, was hit by a sting operation carried out by a Tamil Channel and Magazine. The Swamiji was ‘caught in a compromising position’ in a video aired by the popular Tamil Channel Sun TV on Monday. The video shows him with a female allegedly an actress from Tamil movies. The hidden camera shots taken over two days make it amply clear that the person filmed is indeed the Swamiji.

The channel hasn’t revealed the whereabouts of where the video was shot or the identity of the actresses involved. Rumor says there are two of them, identified as Ragasudha and Rajitha, two popular actresses from Kolliwood. Ragasudha who starred in films like Dhinamum Ennai Gavani, Iyer IPS, Mullil Roja, has been involved in a sex scandal before this as well.

The news created ripples all over Tamil Nadu and there were sporadic protests and violence. At Coimbatore, angry followers vandalized property, while at Thiruvannamalai the Ashram run by the Swami faced a march in protest by a few locals. Subsequently the Ashram was provided police protection and the situation remains calm.

A spokesperson of the Nithyananda, Sachidanandaswamy claimed that it was nothing but a combination of rumors, conspiracy and graphics and wished to reassure the thousands of devotees whose minds were hurt by the rumors. They were contemplating taking legal action, he said.

First Trial Over for Indian Made H1N1 Vaccine

2010-02-25T07:50:00.002+05:30

Ahmedabad: Zydus Cadila announced completion of the first phase of the H1N1 vaccine trial on Thursday. The Ahmedabad-based drug maker will now commence the phase II and phase III clinical trials in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jaipur and Pune.

An Indian made H1N1 vaccine is on the way. The Ahmedabad based drug company Zydus Cedilla who is making the vaccine in India and has announced the completion of the first phase trial on Thursday. The vaccine has to go through the second and third trial in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jaipur and Pune now which will take six more months.

The company’s press release said “Multi-centric trials extending for a period of six weeks are currently underway. On successful completion of the trials, the group will submit the results to the Drug Controller General of India (DGCI) for marketing approval.” The vaccine has been developed by a team of experts using conventional technology at the company’s Vaccine Technology Centre here, the statement said.

The Indian made vaccine will be available in market by April 2010. The company is proposing to produce six million doses initially. The H1N1 vaccine is in huge demand in India to the extent of 50 to 60 million dosages initially.

At the same time the vaccinations against H1N1 in India will begin from next week itself, using the 1.5 million doses of vaccine imported from the French drug manufacturer, Sanofi Pasteur that has passed the safety test. The clinical bridge study results conducted on 100 adult subjects in Delhi and Pune were submitted to the Drug Controller General of India on Wednesday by the company. The trials were completed on February 21. The results were then checked thoroughly in Lyon before being submitted to DCGI.

DCGI Dr Surinder Singh told TOI, "The trials of the vaccine have proven its safety profile. By Friday, we will vet the results and give its clearance for use on humans in India. By next week, the vaccination should begin."

Sheryl Sandberg ideals are driving a dizzying expansion of facebook

2009-08-21T10:13:00.003+05:30

Sheryl Sandberg turns 40 this summer and has more reason than most to feel conscious of the milestone. Her colleagues at Facebook, where she is chief operating officer, are all bright young techies, and her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, is only 25.

"I remember before the internet…," Sandberg says on a visit to the firm's modest London office in Soho Square. "When you say that in our headquarters, everyone kinda looks at you like, 'Did they have cars?'"

Not that Sandberg has lost any of the fire of youth: bright and vivacious, the former Google executive bubbles with the kind of evangelical enthusiasm you might expect from someone running what has become the world's leading social networking site, pulling away from rivals such as MySpace, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and the AOL-owned Bebo.

And while she plays down any suggestions of triumphalism, she does not hold back when it comes to the Californian company's global ambitions. "I think we think we're trying to change the world and having some success with that," she says. "We have really big aspirations around making the world a more open and transparent place. We define our aspirations more in terms of that mission than in terms of the company aspirations."

The way Facebook is doing that may not be apparent to its British devotees, who generally use the site to upload photos and share news and banter with their friends and acquaintances.

But outside the narcissistic west, Facebook claims to be a 21st-century torchbearer for democratic values. Like its upstart rival Twitter, it played a role in giving vent to political dissent in Iran after June's disputed elections, and has faced intermittent jamming as a result.

Sandberg also points to examples closer to home of Facebook's power to connect people. She herself was contacted through the site by a long-lost college "little sister", who had no idea her former mentor was its chief operating officer. "Finding my 'little sister' to me was profound. That's the stuff we are really ambitious about."

Rise of Twitter

But Facebook is a business, not a philanthropic exercise, and it has been growing with dizzying speed since Zuckerberg launched it from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

The site hit 200 million registered users in April, of whom 18 million are in Britain. When Sandberg arrived from Google in March 2008, it was half that and still behind MySpace. The latter has been faltering of late and has had to cut jobs as a result, while Bebo is struggling too, and Friends Reunited – sold by ITV this month for £25m – is practically moribund.

It all looks very encouraging for Facebook, and Sandberg is keen to point out that half of users come back to the site every day. "On consumer internet I have never seen or heard of anything like it."

But the world of social networking is still in its infancy and users can be fickle. The rise of Twitter, the sector's phenomenon of the moment, has posed a challenge. Rumour has it that Facebook tried to buy the upstart for $500m; whether or not that was the case, it last week succeeded in snapping up another potential rival when it paid $50m (£30m) for FriendFeed, a tiny Silicon Valley start-up. And who knows what might come along next year?

"We understand that we are not going to be the only property doing these things, and to the extent that there are properties like Twitter who are showing the world how important this is, we are happy to see that," Sandberg says. "What Twitter is doing is a very specific thing, which is short updates in real time, and so that's obviously very important, much as our status updates are very important to us."

Sandberg is unconvinced by the idea that social networking will conform to the "winner takes all" pattern that has seen Google, Amazon, YouTube and Wikipedia end up as dominant players in their respective areas.

"We think our growth is based on the fact that we provide the best product," she explains. "What you'll see from us is a real commitment to being a technology-led company.

"[We're] trying to put out the very best technology in the world, which enables people to share with all the privacy controls they want – I think we are by far the leader in that area worldwide – and as efficiently as possible. That doesn't mean there isn't room for other players and we won't see others, but we're happy that we think we have executed pretty well and we want to continue to do better."

She dismisses the idea that Facebook might be undercut by a similar product run, Wikipedia-style, on a not-for-profit basis. "Wikipedia is very inexpensive for two reasons. One, the technology's not doing the algorithmic stuff; you do a search and it's given you that search. And the second is that it's edited for free by the world ... The technology underlying Facebook is very expensive and more similar to Google-like technology than it is to Wikipedia."

Which brings the conversation to the thorny question of whether Facebook is able to convert its undeniably huge reach into sustainable profitability. Sandberg says the company has been profitable for six quarters before interest and tax, and is close to being cashflow profitable in 2010. Zuckerberg has also said that revenues will grow 70% this year – but no one outside the company knows the numbers. Some suggest revenues of $500m this year.

The recent investment of $200m by the Russian company Digital Sky Technologies – giving it a 2% stake and implying a total valuation of $10bn – should not be taken as a sign that Facebook needed any cash, Sandberg says. "You raise money when you can, not when you need it," she says, invoking a mantra she learned at Harvard Business School. "This just gives us a little bit more flexibility." Nor are there plans to go public "any time soon".

Microsoft also owns a 1.6% stake, for which it paid $240m in October 2007, but Facebook has resisted all moves to buy it out.

The company's business model is straightforward, says Sandberg: it's advertising. Although it is working on other revenue streams, such as allowing transactions involving the third-party applications on the site, advertising is sufficient to build revenues, she says. And to work, the ads have to be subtle. "This is not a property where we let advertisers walk up to users. This is a property where we invite advertisers to invite users to interact with them."

Article Courtesy : http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/20/facebook-ceo-sheryl-sandberg-interview

Back again after a break

2009-08-21T10:12:00.000+05:30

Ahh... It feels good to be back again after a while..

From Chunk To Hunk.

2009-02-19T21:11:00.005+05:30

Former overweight, fat guy David Smith has gone from chunk to hunk.

After losing a whopping 29 stone (403 pounds) and having more than 30lbs of excess skin removed.

The 31-year-old used to tip the scales at 45 stone - the same as a brown bear or a young bison - and was dangerously close to eating himself to death. He said that he used to weigh 630 pounds and that he was so fat that he had to be weighed at a local garage on scales normally used for cars and trucks’

David, from Phoenix, Arizona, befriended local radio DJ and fitness instructor Chris Powell in 2003, in the nick of time who coached him through a grueling two year long exercise regime. He has now started dating and is waiting for the right girl to come forward

Chris says that in June of 2003, he was contacted by a ‘Good Morning Arizona’ viewer asking for help. His name was David Smith. He weighed 630 pounds and was given only about 4 more years left to live. At first, Chris just wanted to sit down and talk to him. Chris knew that he could change his body, but he needed to see if David was ready to make the change in his lifestyle. Within 10 minutes of talking to David, Chris knew that he would devote the next couple years of his life to changing David.

Basically Chris came to understand that David was never given a chance in life and had no one to teach him or no one to believe in him. So he drove out to his house every other day for a year and a half to work with him.

For the first month they focused on nutrition…because once you understand nutrition, you understand how to control the body. Chris taught him food combinations, meal timing, and how to portion foods to maximize results. To make sure that his program was successful, it had to be enjoyable and easy, Chris gave him cheat days every other day to look forward to, and began the phases of The Carb Cycle Solution - first resetting his metabolism, then moving through the phases to maximize weight loss. Whenever his weight loss plateaued, they would simply reset his metabolism and cycle him through the phases again, until he reached his goal weight.

As David lost weight, he began to turn his life around. No sooner he could fit into a car, he got his driver’s license, received his GED, and got his first job. He began working at a gym and studying to become a personal trainer to ‘pay it forward’ to help others in need. As he began spending more time at work, Chris needed to find a way to help him control his nutrition outside of the house. So he made a containerized system for him to carry, portion, and time his meals at work – and so the concept of the STAX Nutrition System was born.

Determined David managed to slim down to a healthy 16 stone thanks to the tough training but was left with unsightly flabby skin. That meant he had to endure four separate operations in just 12 months to remove all his previous bulk.

He also needed laser surgery on his eyes and some dental work to fix his teeth, which had destroyed by too much sweets and fizzy drinks.

Now the fatty turned fitty has got rid of his double chins, man boobs, and bursting gut and replaced them with bulging biceps, toned pecs and a flat stomach.

As a result, he has now become a FITNESS COACH himself and bagged himself his first girlfriend.

David says that he was written off by everyone, even myself, but all of a sudden he woke up from deep despair and realized that feeling sorry about his life wasn’t going to solve his problems. So, he decided to change his existence and started exercising.

Now he is a completely different person, not just physically but mentally too.

David Today

He has now lost 401 pounds in 26 months and all of that naturally.

The first few months were really hard, and the training was really tough. He had struggled to walk five feet without becoming out of breath. He slowly got better until the flab was literally falling off me. But then after working so hard to lose weight, he was left with all this excess skin which made me look ridiculous. He had to undergo four operations in a year to get rid of it all. It's not the nicest thing going under the knife but it was something that had to be done. Then, his teeth began to rot because of all the sugar from sweets and the fizzy drinks I consumed and so he had to have his teeth capped at the dentists.

He has been called a lot of things lately, but it has all been positive for the first time in his life. He has even actually overheard girls say that he is kind of cute a couple of times. His skin is now gone and he feels like his life is finally ready to begin. Now since he has started dating for the first time, people take his photo because they think that he is hot rather than comically obese.

He says that he might be the oldest person in the world to be a virgin, or never been on a date, or never had a first kiss. He knows his perfect woman is out there somewhere and he has done all this for her and for their children, and their children's children.

Fitness guru Chris Powell, who has appeared in the magazine Cosmo said that David was basically dead inside but now he is really living life and inspiring millions of people - it is indescribable. You will see what an incredibly wonderful person he is, how he overcame his obstacles…and why he is my best friend.

Chris is like a brother to me. He never gave up on me. He has not only saved my life, he has taught me a lot about this new world. We go out on the weekends, see movies, and get a bite to eat, or just hang out. Our friendship has blossomed out of something so barren, that it is incredible how it has happened. We are two unlikely best friends - its so funny how life works. He made me feel like a human even when the outside world thought not.

Not only has my life changed, but I’ve inspired others as well…and hopefully many more to follow. It has been amazing watching the events of a path in the road that I would have never chosen. Chris always says that David has changed his life more than he changed mine. Either way, we are going to be best friends forever.

Throughout the process, we became the best of friends. It is now our vision to educate, motivate, and inspire anyone and everyone that the human body is an amazing machine that can be transformed through nutrition and exercise.

Now he hopes to inspire children and adults in Britain that there is a way back from obesity.

Perspective on the Bailouts

2008-11-29T23:15:00.002+05:30

So far, the bailouts are going to cost American taxpayers $ 4.6 trillion dollars. to put that number in perspective, here are the dollar amounts involved in a few other past expenditures:

Marshall Plan:
Cost: $12.7 billion,
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion

Louisiana Purchase:
Cost: $15 million,
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion

Race to the Moon:
Cost: $36.4 billion,
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion

S&L Crisis:
Cost: $153 billion,
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion

Korean War:
Cost: $54 billion,
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion

The New Deal:
Cost: $32 billion (Est),
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)

Invasion of Iraq:
Cost: $551 billion,
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion

Vietnam War:
Cost: $111 billion,
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion

NASA:
Cost: $416.7 billion,
Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

Yep--$ 4.6 trillion is a lot of money.

Did Abramovich steal a £1.2 bn stake in oilfield?

2008-11-09T08:30:00.002+05:30

Chelsea's surprise defeat in Rome on Tuesday night may have disappointed Roman Abramovich but it may not preoccupy him for long. He has a match of a quite different kind on his mind. Lawyers in London are expected to decide this week whether to pursue a case against him on behalf of investors who have made a startling allegation. Abramovich, they say, effectively stole their £1.2 billion oilfield. The Russian billionaire has strenuously denied the allegation and many will find it an outlandish proposition.

At 42, Abramovich is one of the world's richest men with a fortune estimated at £15 billion and although there have been dark murmurings about how he managed to rise from street trading in Moscow to controlling one of Russia's biggest oil concerns, no one has ever proved he acted improperly. Now a long-running argument over ownership of a fabulously rich Siberian oilfield is reaching its endgame here in London. Abramovich has just won an important round in this fiercely-fought legal battle in the High Court but the Evening Standard has learned an appeal is being discussed.

If it goes ahead, it would plunge the Chelsea owner back into a legal maelstrom that has swirled around him for more than three years. At its heart is a claim that he and his company, Millhouse Capital, swindled investors - including more than 4,000 British shareholders - in a deal over a Russian oilfield described by one expert as "the pearl of western Siberia".

The Priobskoye field sits on a vast bog and can be worked only in winter when the ground freezes. It is more than 1,500 miles from Moscow and is one of the most hostile places on earth but in its southern part, wells are producing 150,000 barrels of oil a day. Half of these riches were owned by a British-based company, Sibir Energy, but according to its chief executive, Henry Cameron, they were stolen in what he described in a letter to shareholders as "barefaced corporate robbery".

Cameron is an Aberdeen lawyer who was dealing with the Russians when the Soviet fishing fleets came to Scotland in the Eighties. He switched to oil and, backed by British investors, headed a company that became Sibir. Part of its holding was a licence to drill for oil in Priobskoye. Sibir, through another company called Yugraneft, joined forces with Abramovich's oil giant, Sibneft, to exploit the Priobskoye field.

In his office in Mayfair, Cameron revealed how a venture he believed could make his investors rich turned into one of the oil industry's most bitter disputes. He speaks coolly, with all the detail of a complicated case at his command. But there is no disguising his anger.

Last week Mr Justice Christopher Clarke concluded in the High Court that the English courts were not the right place to decide the allegations against Abramovich. The billionaire was neither resident nor domiciled here, he said, adding that the case was about "the conduct of Russians, in Russia under Russian law". He dismissed Yugraneft's claims and said they were "an abuse of process".

Cameron is unrepentant. His team of lawyers is looking at grounds for an appeal and a decision is likely within the next few days. It will be watched closely by British companies who deal with Russia.

Some may wonder why, after this High Court setback, Cameron would seek to carry on fighting. The reason, he says, is that he believes a wrong was committed and he wants justice.

In his ruling, Mr Justice Christopher Clarke noted the Cameron camp's contention that "what has happened is nothing less than fraud on a grand scale". Cameron says trouble started soon after his company, Sibir, and Abramovich's Sibneft agreed their deal to exploit the Priobskoye field.

At first, Cameron says, everything seemed to go well. Then Sibir started talks to buy into Moscow's huge oil refinery, the only one in the city and considered one of the Russian oil industry's great prizes. Also bidding for the Moscow refinery was Abramovich's Sibneft, which had long sought control of this strategic asset.

This is the point in the story at which personalities appear to play a part. Sibir's biggest shareholder is Chalva Tchigirinsky, a construction tycoon who counted the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, among his friends. The mayor controlled the oil refinery through the large stake held by the City of Moscow.

Mr Luzhkov was no friend of Abramovich. Luzhkov once noted the hundreds of millions of pounds Abramovich was sinking into Chelsea Football Club and said: "He is spitting on Russia." His words stung Abramovich. He has invested heavily in Russian football. Charities in the country, especially those for Jewish causes, have benefited greatly from his wealth. He judged Luzhkov's rebuke unwarranted and unfair. Injury was added to this insult, it seemed, when Luzhkov teamed up with his friend Tchigirinsky to stop Abramovich's march on the Moscow refinery.

Mr Justice Clarke noted in his High Court judgment: "In April 2004 Mr Abramovich is said to have told Mr Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, that the reason he had diluted Yugraneft's interest in Sibneft-Yugra was to repay Mr Tchigirinsky for his having blocked attempts by Sibneft in 2001 and 2002 to take over the Moscow oil refinery."

The reference to "diluted interest" is at the centre of the alleged scam. In September 2002, an extraordinary meeting of representatives in the partnership to drill for oil in the Priobskoye field took place in Moscow. Abramovich's Sibneft representative met an executive who had been given power of attorney to act for Yugraneft, David Davidovich. Davidovich was an adviser to Eugene Schvidler, Abramovich's closest aide. At the meeting it was decided to increase the shares in the Priobskoye partnership by bringing in three new companies, all registered offshore.

The effect of the new share distribution was to cut Yugraneft's holding from 50 per cent to five per cent. Another meeting was held a few months later. Again, Davidovich had power of attorney to act for Yugraneft. And again, Yugraneft's share of the Priobskoye venture was cut, this time to one per cent.

"We knew absolutely nothing about it," Cameron said. "People have said: 'How can something like that happen without your knowing?' Well, if you're not expecting it, why would you check? You don't check the deeds to your house to make sure you still own it."

Mr Justice Christopher Clarke disclosed in his judgement precisely how Cameron and his colleagues found out the half-share they thought they had in one of Russia's richest oilfield's was actually worth a mere one per cent.

"In December 2003," the judge said, "an employee of Ernst and Young, who were Sibneft's auditors, hinted to Mr Betsky of Sibir that the dilutions may have occurred and followed that up with an email of 6 December which suggested that he should check the ownership status of Sibneft-Yugra."

Sibir did check. What Cameron and his associates found led them to believe the company had been the victim of fraud. Sibir brought a case in the Russian courts but without success.

Cameron's people discovered their shareholding had ended up with companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. They took their argument there but again it failed. The courts decided they had no jurisdiction.

So where were the shares? Cameron says it is impossible to put a precise value on the holding without an extensive valuation but an estimate is around $2 billion, or £1.2 billion. That amount of stock cannot simply disappear. Nor did it. As the High Court case revealed, in its accounts issued in 2004, Abramovich's company, Sibneft, carried this note: "In December 2003 the company increased its share in Sibneft-Yugra up to 99 per cent for the nominal consideration." The offshore companies had been absorbed into Abramovich's oil empire.

The following year, 2005, Abramovich sold out to Gazprom, the state-backed Russian energy giant. He is believed to have received £5.5 billion for his assets, which, by then, included virtually all the Priobskoye shares. As Cameron says, his company's half-share of the oilfield is now owned by Gazprom and there is little hope of recovering it.

But if his lawyers can find a way to prove Abramovich took it improperly, he says, there may yet be a chance of claiming the value back from him. Certainly, Abramovich could afford it. One of the effects of the recent litigation was to prompt an inquiry into his wealth. It revealed that many of his companies are registered offshore, with ownership of Chelsea Football Club held by Chelsea Ltd, which is owned by Isherwood Investments, a Cypriot company, which in turn is owned by Taverham Holdings, registered in the British Virgin Islands.

The complex network of companies controlled by Abramovich holds most of his assets. The High Court case laid bare, for the first time, his vast fortune. The judge noted that his £30 million house in Knightsbridge represented just 0.5 per cent of his net worth. He has houses and property in Britain, France, Sardinia, the United States and St Barts in the Caribbean. He also has two ski chalets in Colorado, a French château and three homes in Russia. He uses two executive jets and chooses from a fleet of helicopters and cars. He also has "several yachts on which he spends a great deal of time", the High Court documents record.

But Abramovich does not spend much time in Britain. The judge said the Chelsea owner spent only 57 days here last year on visits mostly connected to football matches. This fact has proved a major stumbling block for Cameron's lawyers.

The ruling that Abramovich is not domiciled in Britain leaves them searching for a way to bring the Priobskoye oilfield case before a British court. So far, they haven't found one, but Henry Cameron is determined not to give up. "We are not done yet," he said.

Abramovich's spokesman, John Mann, declined to comment. "We'll let this ruling, and previous rulings on this case, speak for themselves," he said.

Article Courtesy:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23583545-details/Did+Abramovich+steal+a+£1.2+bn+stake+in+oilfield/article.do

Fiscally Vulnerable Countries - World Bank Report

2008-10-11T12:29:00.002+05:30

A new World Bank report on Thursday named 28 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East facing financial strains due to high food and fuel costs and now from a cascading credit crisis.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the world should not forget the "human rescue" needed in developing countries as it focused on the spreading market crisis.

Among the "fiscally vulnerable" countries are Jordan, Cambodia, Lebanon, Jamaica, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Tajikistan, Madagascar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Malawi, Ivory Coast, Eritrea, Fiji, Haiti, Seychelles and Mauritania.

The Report, published ahead of weekend International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings of finance and development ministers, said many of these countries had little or no room to take on new debt to afford the higher prices.

"Currently these countries, on average, are set to receive no increase in project and program aid," Zoellick said.

The Report on financially-strained countries said policy actions to deal with higher food and energy prices were causing the fiscal pressures.As prices climbed, governments have tried to shield the poor by imposing fuel and food tax rate cuts, increasing subsidies and underpricing electricity from oil and gas.

Zoellick also noted that it was important that the world's industrial countries did not forget their promises of aid to the poorest countries.

Zoellick said the G7 industrial countries were "far behind" on the promises they made at a 2005 summit of world leaders at Gleneagles, Scotland, where they pledged to double aid to Africa by 2010.

"The poorest cannot be asked to pay the biggest price," Zoellick said. "For the poor, the costs of crisis can be life-long," he added.

Number seeking arrears advice soars

2008-10-10T11:40:00.000+05:30

The number of people seeking help after falling behind with their mortgage has soared by more than 50% during the past year, figures have showed.

Charity Citizens Advice said it had seen a 51% surge in people contacting it because they were in arrears on their mortgage or a secured loan during the three months to the end of September, compared with the same period last year.

There was also a 10% jump in people contacting it because they were unable to keep up with payments on their fuel bills.

Overall during the past 12 months, staff in bureaux in England and Wales have seen a 35% rise in people with mortgage and secured loan arrears problems, receiving 77,324 new enquiries since October last year.

But the charity said there had been a small reduction in the number of people contacting it because they were struggling with unsecured debts, such as credit, store and charge cards and unsecured loans

More details at :
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23570873-details/Number+seeking+arrears+advice+soars/article.do

London tycoons lose billions in meltdown

2008-10-10T09:11:00.002+05:30

The financial meltdown has cost London's tycoons billions.

Their losses will have a massive impact on the city's economy, forcing hundreds of shops, bars, hotels and restaurants to close.

Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal was the biggest single loser after seeing £20 billion wiped off the fortune that made him Britain's richest man.

UK property tycoon Robert Tchenguiz is facing losses of up to £1 billion after borrowing heavily from Icelandic bank Kaupthing. Dozens of wealthy Russian and east European oligarchs with properties in London have also suffered huge falls in their fortunes......

However, these are just paper losses for most, they have money to reinvest and the market will recover and they will be quids in again. Its a financial loss if anyone is forced to cash in now...and now is the time to buy...(I hope!)

More details at :
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23569740-details/Bonfire+of+the+billionaires+will+hurt+London/article.do

Chef Ramsay took KS&F out of the mix

2008-10-10T08:58:00.002+05:30

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay was alongside the local councils and thousands of individuals who put their cash into an Icelandic bank account.

Gordon Ramsay Holdings, which runs the restaurant at Claridge's, Sloane Street, a string of gastropubs and Murano, has confirmed that until recently it banked with Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander [KSF], the UK offshoot of the Icelandic bank.

The firm said last night: "Gordon Ramsay Holdings would like to clarify that the company moved all of its corporate banking from Kaupthing Singer Friedlander [sic] to The Royal Bank of Scotland 10 weeks ago."

How the Bailout Is Like a Hedge Fund.

2008-10-03T12:16:00.003+05:30

its funny, but The Wall Street bailout is alive again.

In an effort to make the $700 billion bailout palatable, the architects of the law have larded it up with all sorts of goodies, such as increasing the levels of deposit insurance, sparing some taxpayers the ravages of the Alternative Minimum Tax, and extending tax breaks for alternative energy. Henry Paulson's three-page sprig has sprouted into a 451-page Christmas tree. (The current version of the bill, in all its lengthy glory, can be seen here.)

What's most interesting about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 is just how much it reads like a prospectus for a hedge fund. In the past, hedge funds—secretive pools of capital—were open only to qualified (read: rich) investors. But with the stroke of a pen, President Bush will soon make all American citizens investors in the world's biggest fund—and a democratic one at that. Taxpayers won't just be the investors. We'll own the management company, too. Best of all? For at least a few months, we'll have the former CEO of Goldman Sachs run our investment for a very small fee. Call it the "Universal Hedge Fund."

Hedge funds use leverage: That is, they borrow money to amplify their returns. The Universal Hedge Fund will use massive leverage, borrowing up to $750 billion, which it will use to buy up distressed assets. The Universal Fund might best be described as a multi-multistrategy fund. Its stated goals are to maximize returns to its investors while promoting general market stability and bolstering the crippled housing market.

The fund's bylaws give the manager (the treasury secretary) significant discretion. He can buy troubled mortgage-related instruments from finance companies (Section 3[9][a], Page 5). But he can also invest in "any other financial instrument that the Secretary, after consultation with the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, determines the purchase of which is necessary to promote financial market stability" (Section 3[9]B, Page 6). The manager then has the authority to manage the assets as he sees fit (Section 106[B], Page 22), collecting revenue streams, holding bonds to maturity, or flipping them for a quick profit (Section 106[c], Page 22). Like many of today's sharpest hedge funds, the Universal Fund will also have the ability to drive a harder bargain by demanding equity stakes, or new debt securities, from the institutions it is helping (Section 113[d], Page 35). It can also do what many of the big hedge funds, and so-called "funds of funds," do: bring in outside managers to run the investment (101[C][3], Page 8).

There are some important differences between the Universal Fund and its private sector peers. Hedge funds thrive on secrecy. The Universal Fund will operate with maximum transparency, disclosing all new sales and purchases on the Web within two days (Section 114[A], Page 39). Rather than send in all our money upfront, we hedge-fund investors will give the manager $250 billion to start with (Section 115[A][1], Page 40). And the proceeds won't be distributed via dividends or end-of-year partnership distributions. Rather, revenues and profits "shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for reduction of the public debt" (Section 106[d], Page 22).

The Bush administration's desire to turn all Americans into participants in the capital markets through the privatization of Social Security never got off the ground. But in the last months of its second term, it has managed to pull off something of a coup. Soon enough, we'll all collectively own various securities issued by lots of big companies. Too bad the Ownership Society is happening only because we became a Bad Debt Society.

Article Courtesy : http://www.slate.com/id/2201340

Rose relief as M&S is down but not out

2008-10-03T09:53:00.003+05:30

Sir Stuart Rose earned some breathing space today, with a trading statement that suggests Marks & Spencer may be weathering the worst of the economic storm.

Although sales in the 13 weeks to 27 September fell 6.1%, this was slightly better than the City expected.

Sir Stuart said he is dealing with "unprecedented" conditions.

"Consumer confidence is fragile and the retail environment unpredictable."

Food sales are down 5.9% while general merchandise fell 6.4%. Full-year profits will tumble from the £1 billion recorded this year, perhaps by half, but Sir Stuart insists today's statement did not amount to a profits warning.

More details at :

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23562885-details/Rose+relief+as+M+S+is+down+but+not+out/article.do

Sir Ian Blair quits the Met

2008-10-03T09:41:00.002+05:30

Boris Johnson has forced out Sir Ian Blair as head of the Met.

Britain's most senior police officer resigned tonight after a crisis meeting with the Mayor yesterday afternoon.

The Standard has learned that Mr Johnson, who took control of the Metropolitan Police Authority yesterday, told him he had reached "the end of the line" and should consider his options.

Events unfolded with dramatic speed today. Sir Ian told Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse this morning before informing Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. Sir Ian told her he had to go, because the Mayor had effectively said he could no longer work with him.

The Met Commissioner offered to walk out immediately - but Ms Smith asked him to stay for a few months. They agreed he would leave in early December, more than a year earlier than the expiry of his contract in February 2010.

Sir Ian, 55, is understood to have negotiated a big severance payment, and is entitled to a gold-plated pension after more than three decades of service as a police officer. He was on a salary of £240,813.

More details at :
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23562960-details/EXCLUSIVE%3A+Sir+Ian+Blair+quits+the+Met/article.do

Ireland includes UK banks in its £315bn deposit guarantee

2008-10-03T09:39:00.002+05:30

The Irish government today changed the law to allow the offshoots of UK banks Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS in Ireland into its €400 billion (£315.5 billion) deposit-guarantee scheme.

The scheme, which guarantees 100% of savings and deposits held in six Irish banks and building societies, was signed into law by President Mary McAleese today.

But it is receiving growing criticism from European politicians, who say Ireland has acted unilaterally.

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said during the late-night debate on the bill that the scheme may no longer be limited just to the six Irish institutions.

This followed two calls from UK Chancellor Alastair Darling yesterday and intense lobbying in Dublin and Brussels from other banks which have sizeable branch networks in Ireland.

The largest is Ulster Bank, a subsidiary of NatWest owner Royal Bank of Scotland. It has 132 branches in Ireland and is said to account for 20% of retail savings there.

National Irish Bank, owned by Danske Bank, has 59 branches in Ireland. Halifax Ireland was set up two years ago as a rebranding of Bank of Scotland's 25 branches in the Republic of Ireland.

A spokeswoman for RBS said: "We will be admitted into the scheme as soon as practicable."

The bill was altered this morning to allow other banks to be included by a simple ministerial order. HBOS and RBS had asked to be included in the guarantee.

It was not immediately clear if HBOS had been invited to join the guarantee scheme.

Mark Duffy, head of HBOS operations in Ireland, said: "It is important that there continues to be a level playing field so that customers enjoy equal choice from all Irish banks."

Financial advisers have reported a surge in interest from UK savers in the past two days, wanting to know if they should shift deposits to Irish banks.

But their enthusiasm has been tempered by a revelation that the Irish government's move was prompted by the potential collapse of at least one, if not two, Irish banks.

Rowling banks £170m in year: Forbes

2008-10-03T09:35:00.002+05:30

JK Rowling is the world's best paid author, banking more than £170 million in the last year, the US business magazine Forbes has said.

Rowling, who wrote the first of her best-selling books about boy wizard Harry Potter while an impoverished single mother, earned 300 million US dollars (£170m) over the past year.

The 43-year-old billionaire author's income was six times that of second-placed James Patterson, who wrote Along Came a Spider.

Last month, Rowling donated £1 million to the Labour Party ahead of its annual conference, indicating that her gift was motivated by Labour's record on child poverty and Tory leader David Cameron's offer of tax breaks to married couples.

A Forbes spokesman said: "It was wizardry that transformed JK Rowling from a destitute single mother on welfare into a bestselling billionaire."

The magazine described her work as "a children's literary sensation" and a "publishing hit".

It went on: "Once a single mother on welfare, Rowling can now claim best-selling billionaire status thanks to her Harry Potter franchise.

"Over on the big screen, her Potter franchise has already generated 4.5 billion dollars (£2.6bn) at the worldwide box office - and she still has three more flicks to come."

Last month, she won a New York legal battle and succeeded in blocking publication of a Potter encyclopaedia which she described as "wholesale theft" of her work.

She also said it had forced her to stop work on a new novel because the lawsuit had "decimated my creative work".

Bond film to hit Indian theatres before it reaches US

2008-10-03T09:27:00.001+05:30

Breaking away from tradition, the new film on the charming and suave secret service agent James Bond -- "Quantum of Solace" -- will hit the silver screens in India a week ahead of the trip it makes to the US.

The film will be released in India on November 7, a week before it premiers in US. It will hit the UK theaters on October 31. A sequel to the last Bond flick "Casino Royale", "Quantum of Solace", will see Daniel Craig returning to his latest mission and picking up threads from his last adventure to begin a new journey as the elusive British Agent 007.

The film will also be released India in three other languages -- Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. "James Bond has a huge equity in this country and Bond films have always been a hit here. November 7 will see the biggest roll out for any Hollywood film in India as we would like to give our audiences the thrill of seeing 'Quantum of Solace' even before US does.

More details at :
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/009200810030381.htm

Indian food: new crush of Japanese

2008-10-03T09:25:00.000+05:30

Tokyo (PTI): In Japan, India is virtually synonymous with 'curry'. Indian food has now got the Japanese hooked and is gradually replacing Chinese and Thai, their other favourites, with hundreds of restaurants mushrooming across its islands and an unprecedented rise in food imports from the country.

In fact, the Japanese are so fascinated with the 'Indian' food that even restaurants owned by Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans display the Indian tricolour and add the prefix 'Indian' to the names of the eateries.

So you have restaurant chains like the Siddique's 'Indian Pakistani', which has over 20 outlets and 'Indian Sri Lankan'.

"The Japanese identify 'Indian' with good and delicious food. If a restaurant serving any South Asian fare does not have the Indian tag, the Japanese will not go to it," says Mohammad Sageer, a chef working for Potahar who came from Islamabad Pakistan eight years ago.

There are others like the Maharaja which has 25 restaurants, Khana (3), Sapla (1), Great India, Bombay, Ali Baba, Jantar Mantar and Agra.

There is also a restaurant named 'Gandhi' in Washington Hotel in Shinzuku that was set up 25 years ago by a Japanese.

Potahar, in Shinzuku, Tokyo, is owned by a Pakistani but the Indian flag hangs outside.

A small eatery with hardly a sitting place for a dozen people, it caters to over 100 people, mostly Japanese, who queue up for "curry and nan" in just two hours during lunch time.

Dell's customers snubbing green initiative

2008-10-03T09:24:00.000+05:30

Dell is still finding it an uphill struggle to persuade its customers to take part in its "Plant a Tree for Me" scheme. Under this plan, customers can choose to spend an extra $2 per notebook or $6 per desktop to offset its estimated carbon emissions for the next three years.

Only 300,000 customers opted to pay the levy during Dell's last financial year, which ended in February, said Tod Arbogast, the company's director of sustainable business. Though he declined to enumerate it, that amounts to between $300,000 and $900,000 of voluntary spending by customers - compared to Dell's revenues of $61.1bn and net profits of $2.97bn. As a percentage of customers, it remains well below the 1% mark.

More details at :
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/008200810030381.htm

Hookah, chillum smoking more toxic than cigarette: Study

2008-10-03T09:22:00.001+05:30

Traditional hookah and chillum are more injurious to health than cigarette, a study has said.

The study underlines that the old mode of smoking is much more harmful than cigarette smoke as carbon monoxide (CO) level is higher in it, the study conducted by a group of pulmonary doctors of the SMS Hospital Medical College and the Asthma Bhawan here said.

More details -
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/099200810030381.htm

Quovadis ?

2008-09-30T09:52:00.003+05:30

It appears that the voters voted against the bailout

Now where to go ?

"There's a real sense of frustration. People see their tax dollars spent bailing out financial institutions, and they themselves are not doing well,"

There were also a lot of eyes rolling on this bailout. We're heard this kind of thing before"

Senior members blasted Bush's economic policies and lashed out at "a right wing ideology of anything goes, no supervision, no discipline, no regulation."

Personally, I believe the engine of this whole change is the market and all of the major investment banks have large positions in fossil fuels - in fact, Forbes recently claimed that if those banks were forced to liquidate their positions in fossil fuels, prices would drop to as low as $50-$75 a barrel - and that's what the current bailout is intended to avoid.

Goldman Sachs also has huge holdings in fossil fuels, and the recent $5 billion Buffet injection should be viewed in the light of Buffet's extensive energy investments - PetroChina, ConocoPhillips, and Mid-American and Constellation Energy.

In other words, if only energy could be harnessed to take the place of oil . . .

If the US can come to an agreement with Saudi Arabia or a middle eastern consortium, who can easily fund a part of the bail-out with a guarantee that they would maintain the price-level [so that it doesn't fall], in addition to a commitment to purchasing oil for the next ten years

Of course a part of the oil costs can be offloaded to the "taxpayer"

Obviously there's more to it

Speaking as an Indian - The US can just get used to the Third World conditions - In other words the IMF proposes an austerity package for the U.S. as a precondition on a World Bank loan rescue package. Obviously their first demand would be that the US privatize Social Security and halt about 70% funding for public education. How is that for change?

That said, I used to work in a financial company that got influenced by the 'green committee' - trying to change the way we do business in an environmentally intelligent way. Infact the people involved who are mostly middle class people have basically no urgency or real understanding of what the hell is going on. They treat it like an irritating fad, and easily take 'no' as an answer when trying to change the way the company operates, or more so as they operate.

It is apparent how interconnected we have become. In other words, the pollution in India's Ganges River could have a direct impact on the quality of life in New York. Every coal factory that China builds, competes for resources with an Indonesian child. And to top it all, every time a woman in Southern California switched on her air conditioner, its effect travels to the Brazilian slums.

In short there is no way we can regulate our way out of this problem, but only innovate. This in turn requires legislation and rules.

But are we prepared for that ?

Foreign Nations Pledge Support, but Not Financing

2008-09-30T09:47:00.003+05:30

The United States, having expanded its proposed rescue of the financial sector to include foreign banks, has not yet found any other country willing to join the landmark bailout.

The Treasury Department still hopes to marshal a worldwide effort to cleanse the balance sheets of banks. But Europe and Japan have signaled that they are not ready to mount a rescue of the kind being debated here.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. continues to solicit support from foreign governments. His department plans to prod them by giving preference to banks from countries that show a willingness to help the American effort, a senior administration official said Monday.

“We expect other countries to do their part, but we’re not insisting their programs be exactly like ours,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We’re certainly not prepared to put ourselves in a position where there’s a free-rider problem.”

Given that the mortgage collapse began here and that most of the distressed debt is held by American banks, specialists said it was not clear that the United States had much leverage in forcing others to take part.

“There’s a view in Europe that this is a U.S.-made problem, and that it should be solved in the U.S.,” said Charles H. Dallara, the managing director of the Institute for International Finance, a group of more than 300 global banks.

Several banks raised concerns after a draft of the rescue plan limited eligibility for selling mortgage-related loans to the Treasury to banks with headquarters in the United States. The language was changed a day later to include foreign banks with significant American operations.

The change did not reflect lobbying pressure, officials said, but Mr. Paulson’s judgment that helping all banks with contacts to American consumers would better stabilize financial markets.

It did not, however, build support for a bailout in Europe, a day after finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 7 industrialized countries discussed the proposal in a conference call.

While the group pledged in a statement to “enhance international cooperation,” it affirmed that the countries were free to go their own way in responding to the crisis. “None of the other six G-7 members will adopt a similar program to the U.S.,” the German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, said.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, criticized the United States and Britain for opposing German attempts to put greater regulation, or at least reviews, of the financial sector on the international agenda last year, when she was leading the Group of 7.

“Everyone who produces a real product knows what it looks like and what standards it is up to,” Mrs. Merkel said, while traveling in Austria. “One also needs to know with a financial product what’s involved. Otherwise, these sorts of things happen that we then all have to pay for.”

In fact, Germany and Britain have already bailed out some banks that got into trouble because of deteriorating mortgage-related loans, though on a scale much smaller than the proposed American plan.

British officials made clear that they would not create a government fund to buy bad assets, although Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer, did promise new rules.

“We are putting in place both here in the U.K. and internationally the tougher financial regulation no one can doubt we need,” Mr. Darling told the governing Labor Party’s annual conference in Manchester. “I will continue to do whatever it takes to maintain financial stability.”

Some economists said Europeans would be forced to take more sweeping action. “Germany has more toxic exposure than any other country,” said Adam S. Posen, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “The only one that may stay out of this is France.”

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who holds the rotating European Union presidency, has on many occasions complained about the structure of global economic regulation.

On Monday, Christian de Boissieu, chairman of the French prime minister’s council of economic analysis, said: “The U.S. must take charge of the budgetary costs of the crisis. I’m all for trans-Atlantic solidarity, but this doesn’t include financing the bailout.”

The Japanese finance minister, Bunmei Ibuki, said after the Group of 7 statement that he saw no need for Japan to set up an American-style rescue scheme to help its own banks rid themselves of bad assets, Reuters reported.

Apart from a lack of sympathy for a crisis they view as made in America, European governments are also constrained by rules within the 27-nation European Union that limit budget deficits and public debt.

“Europe won’t do anything because they haven’t got the room for maneuver,” said Jeremy Batstone-Carr, an equity strategist with Charles Stanley in London. “They ran themselves into a cul-de-sac.”

A study by the Federal Reserve in August concluded that losses of foreigners holding mortgage-backed securities could be as low as $75 billion, though paper losses would be higher before the market stabilizes.

The Association of German Banks hinted that it would oppose the bailout plan if it gave American rivals a sudden advantage.

“We need to assure that disadvantages for foreign institutions do not arise from the U.S. program,” Manfred Weber, the general manager of the association, said. “It was, after all, American products that created the crisis and that created the contagion effects.”

A spokesman for the association, Heiner Herkenhoff, said the group was still studying the details of the plan, such as they were available, but that it should define eligibility through the nationality of the product. If the mortgage-linked security in question was from the United States, he said, it should be eligible to be purchased, no matter which bank held it.

That appears to conflict with the plan to limit eligibility to foreign banks with significant American operations. Such a rule would include major banks like Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, but many of Germany’s smaller banks did not meet that criterion, Mr. Herkenhoff said.

Article Courtesy - NYTimes - Mark Landler, Carter Dougherty and Matthew Saltmarsh
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/23global.html?ref=todayspaper

Bank offers £40bn funds to ease the pain

2008-09-29T09:18:00.000+05:30

The Bank of England waded back into the money markets today, offering banks £40 billion of longer-term funds to try to ease the lending crisis.

Banks have all but stopped lending to each other because of their fears about each other's solvency. The stalemate over US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's $700 billion bailout has worsened an already appalling situation for banks attempting to borrow.

As funding levels have dried up, the interest rates the banks are charging each other have skyrocketed in a trend that will eventually lead to more expensive mortgages and other loans.

The Bank pumped the extra £40 billion into the market for repayment on 15 January, and said it would accept a wider range of assets, including mortgage securities, as collateral. A second auction will be held on 7 October, maturing on 22 January.

The Bank has recently been lending on a short-term basis, but this has proved inadequate for banks attempting to rebuild their lending volumes. Investec economist Philip Shaw said: “This is a huge step forward and reflects the fact that credit markets have almost totally seized up over the last week and a half.”

An HSBC spokesman said: “It is what the market was looking for. It shows the Bank of England is willing to listen.”

But others said the move did not address the fundamental issue — banks' reluctance to lend to each other. Only a successful outcome to the bailout negotiations in Washington could solve that, they added. While the cost of borrowing in dollars for three months today stayed near its highest since January, the London interbank offered rate, Libor, fell half a basis point to 3.76% after the Bank's action.

The Bank of England's announcement came as central banks again launched co-ordinated actions to offer dollars on a one-week basis to help break the lending deadlock. The European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of England pumped in $74 billion of money maturing in one week. That followed intervention by Japan, Australia and South Korea.

Analysts said the logjam in the money markets was particularly intense as the calendar quarter came to a close. Share prices gyrated tonight as the stress grew,. The FTSE 100 index fell 96.95 to 5100.07 and the Dow 60.8 at 10,961.3.

Warren Buffett and the only banker he trusts

2008-09-29T08:58:00.000+05:30

AT midday on Tuesday this week, Byron Trott, a banker in Chicago, picked up the phone and speed-dialled a number in Nebraska. A flurry of other calls followed. Within hours, Trott's employer, Goldman Sachs, announced it had secured a $5 billion injection from Warren Buffett, America's richest man.

In the deal, Buffett also received the right to buy $5 billion worth of Goldman shares at $115 per share. Last night, they closed at $133, giving him a paper profit of $900 million.

But against the indecision over the rescue plan to bail out the banks, raging turmoil in the markets, shortage of credit and collapse of Lehman, Goldman's one-time rival, the securing of the support of Buffett, the legendary stock-picker from Omaha, worth an estimated $62 billion, is a spectacular coup.

Wall Street and the City are agog at the move. Other banks have struggled to find partners. They have had to extend begging bowls to sovereign wealth funds and other potential investors. Some have failed completely. But Goldman, super cool Goldman, got Buffett.

That's one way of looking at it. The other is that Goldman was desperate, fearful it didn't have the scale to survive on its own, worried its long-cherished independence was going to disappear. It had already been forced to ask the US government to treat it as a bank taking people's deposits rather than as a pure securities firm, thus giving it federal protection if needed.

The ending of that 139-year special status was a bitter pill but it wasn't enough: the once all-powerful Goldman was humbled. It needed help.
Buffett, who loves to play up his folksy image, says he had his feet up on his desk and was drinking Cherry Coke and eating mixed nuts when he got the emergency call. The truth is, he probably was.

He was told to name his price, to say what he would like to invest in Goldman and the bank would see what it could do. Buffett had received other such pleas in the past few hectic weeks but this was the one he wanted. He had been waiting nearly all his life for this moment.

Now 78, Buffett has built his entire reputation on being the hometown champion of Main Street USA, railing against the slick excesses of Wall Street, worshipped by his shareholders, many of whom followed him in the early days and have become multi-millionaires on the back of his success. But as Berkshire Hathaway, his holding company, has grown into a $200 billion empire, it has not done so on the back on banks.

Buffett, to put it mildly, can't stand them. In 1987, he became the biggest investor in Salomon Brothers, then a hot-shot investment bank, famous for its aggressive bond-trading. When it ran into trouble, he had to step in and run the whole show — something he hated. He couldn't believe what he found, couldn't understand how the bank could be so lax with other people's money: “Rather strange, frankly, to me, to think of having a business that employs close to $4 billion of equity capital and not knowing exactly who is using what.”

He railed against its bonus culture. He cut $100 million from the bank's bonus pool. In the end, he gave up, handing over control to Bob Denham, a lawyer who subsequently sold the business. Buffett's verdict? “Far from fun.”

Yet the man who pays himself $100,000 a year, named his corporate jet The Indefensible because he has attacked other bosses for indulging in private planes and still lives in the same house in Omaha he bought for $31,500 in 1958 is coming to the aid of the bank with the biggest name on Wall Street, which pays colossal bonuses: Goldman Sachs.

Not surprisingly, the bank's chief executive Lloyd Blankfein is hailing his arrival as a triumph, boasting that “arguably the world's most admired and successful investor” has chosen their company.

Buffett's presence, said a spokesman, will add to the bank's “fire power and flexibility”. He said it was an “insurance policy for if conditions get very bleak”. At the same time, he stressed, it enabled Goldman to pick off bargains, if it chooses, from the package being constructed by US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson (himself a former head of Goldman). “The Paulson plan presents major opportunities for us,” he said. “We will be interested in seeing what distressed assets are available.”

In Omaha, Buffett's thoughts could go back to his childhood and the person he adored more than anyone, the man he called his “best friend”, his late father, Howard, a stockbroker.

The biggest event in the early lives of the Buffett children came when they reached the age of 10. Then Buffett Senior would take them from the east from the Plains to show them the majesty and power of New York. In 1940, father and son boarded the night train from Omaha. Leila, Warren's mother, waved them off. He was holding a stamp album and one of the places he wanted to see was the Scott Stamp and Coin Company in Manhattan. They were to go to a baseball game and a toy train display. The youngster (aged just 10, don't forget) was also keen to visit the New York Stock Exchange.

Howard also took the opportunity to do some serious networking. He went to see Goldman Sachs. “That's when I met Sidney Weinberg, who was the most famous man on Wall Street,” Buffett tells Alice Schroder in his forthcoming authorised biography, The Snowball.

“My dad had never met him. He had this little tiny firm out here in Omaha. But Mr Weinberg let us in, maybe because a little kid was along or something. We talked for about 30 minutes.”

As the senior partner of Goldman, Weinberg had a grand office that left the boy from the Mid-West speechless. As they left, Weinberg asked him: “What stock do you like, Warren?” Recalls Buffett. “He'd forgotten it all the next day but I remembered it for ever.” What particularly impressed him, said Buffett, was that “he talked to me as if I was a grown-up”.

Fifteen years later, and Buffett was back on Wall Street, as a young stockbroker with the firm of Graham-Newman. “Gus Levy (who later ran Goldman in the 1970s) was a good friend of mine when I worked in Wall Street. In 1955, we only had four wires to Wall Street firms and one of them was to Goldman Sachs and Gus was on the other end of the phone.”

While Buffett remained friendly with Goldman, he maintained a deep disdain of bankers, preferring to remain in Omaha as he grew Berkshire Hathaway and rely upon his own team of advisers. He likes to choose his own deals and hates having to go through bankers and paying their fees. When he did spend time inside a bank, at Salomon, his cynicism was reinforced.

It took a banker not unlike him in many respects to break down his resistance. Now 49, Byron Trott was also born in the small-town Mid-West, near St Louis, Missouri. “There was no local place for kids to buy clothes other than Wrangler jeans or overalls,” said Trott. So as a teenager he persuaded his father to sign for a $30,000 loan to launch his own clothing shop for teenagers (in his teens, Buffett and a friend bought a used pinball machine that they rented to a barber's shop and they expanded to six more).

He captained his school's football, baseball and basketball teams and went to the University of Chicago. There, he started another business, selling sportswear to the students. After graduating, he became a broker, working for Goldman in St Louis and then as an investment banker in Chicago.

He was made partner in 1994 and was one of those lucky enough to be a partner at the time of the bank's flotation in 1999, when the average payout was $64 million each and some partners received in excess of $100 million. In 2002, he used some of his money to buy a three-acre site in the Chicago lakeside suburb of Winnetka where he built a 27,596 square feet compound, complete with main house, coach house, boathouse and pool house.

Since 1996, Trott has headed the bank's 13-state Mid-Western division, handling takeovers and fund-raisings for corporate clients such as agriculture giant Monsanto, Hallmark greeting cards, FTD floral deliveries and NuVox telecommunications. A workaholic, he puts in 18-20 hour days and is usually flitting between boardrooms across the vast region. “I'd rather have him as my investment banker than my spouse,” said one client, “he works too hard.”

Another said: “Byron is not your typical investment banker. He is a facilitator of good ideas, whereas most investment bankers are just out to motivate you, to get you excited about a product that they are going to market where the investment banker gets a huge fee.”

Trott made it his business to go after Berkshire Hathaway and its redoubtable leader. Buffett came round to Trott's drive and energy and allowed him to advise him. Three acquisitions followed: kitchenware company The Pampered Chef, child clothing retailer Garan and groceries distributor McLane.

This last, from supermarket group Wal-Mart, earned high and, given Trott's job, extremely rare, praise from Buffett. In his letter to shareholders in 2003, he singled out the banker for special mention: “He understands Berkshire far better than any investment banker with whom we have talked and — it hurts me to say this — earns his fee. I'm looking forward to deal number four (as I'm sure is he).”

That, from Buffett, was the ultimate accolade. In 2007, he delivered Buffett the $4.5 billion purchase of Marmon Holdings from Chicago's super-wealthy Pritzker family. He's been described as “the only banker Buffett likes” and has even been tipped as his possible successor at Berkshire Hathaway. In his 2008 newsletter, Buffett says: “Byron Trott of Goldman Sachs — whose praises I sang in the 2003 report — facilitated the Marmon transaction. Byron is the rare investment banker who puts himself in his client's shoes.” He adds: “Charlie and I trust him completely,” a reference to Berkshire vice chairman Charlie Munger.

This week's buy reflects Buffett's regard for Trott and his bank. But Buffett isn't in this for charity. “He's effectively lending $5 billion to them which is nothing to him at 10 per cent,” said one ex-Goldman banker. “His money is safe, unless they go bust, which they won't. In addition, he's got an option over another $5 billion which makes him $50 million every time the stock goes up $1. He's f *****g them. It's brilliant.

“It's the same as you lending me $100 at 10 per cent interest on the loan and me giving you options over $100 worth of shares at a discount to the current market price. It's a fantastic piece of business for Buffett.”

There are two sides to every transaction of course. Goldman can claim, rightly, it has managed in the middle of a financial maelstrom to attract the best investor of his generation, one of the greatest ever, on board. Buffett can say that just this once, he is pitching into a bank because it was too good an opportunity to miss.
They're both right. His “best friend”, his father Howard, would be thrilled.

JJB dives into red as retailers go reeling

2008-09-28T09:42:00.000+05:30

JJB Sports has tumbled to a dramatic loss amid what it described as the worst retail recession it has ever seen.

The sports gear and health clubs group today said it made a loss of £8.4 million in the last six months against a profit of £8.7 million a year ago.

It scrapped the interim dividend, and offered a gloomy outlook for the future.

The shares crashed 32p to 72p as investors digested the news.

The numbers will raise deep concerns in the City about how JJB's nearest rival, Mike Ashley's Sports Direct empire, is faring. Sports Direct shares fell 5p to 581/2p.

Sales at JJB were down 5.6% in the 26 weeks to 27 July, partly because England football fans bought fewer shirts in light of the team's failure to qualify for this summer's Euro Championships.

Losses at two recent acquisitions — the Original Shoe Company and Qube — were the main reason for the slide.

Chairman Roger Lane-Smith said: “My board colleague David Jones, formerly chairman and chief executive of Next, has described the current climate as the worst retail recession I have ever known'.

David's statement is borne out by our trading results.

“Looking ahead, we remain very cautious about the outlook for retail given the background of a weakening consumer economy.”

Chief executive Chris Ronnie has faced talk he intends to lead a buyout of the company, taking it off the stock market. He had no comment on this today.

JJB shut 72 lossmaking stores earlier this year at a cost of 800 jobs.

Sales at the fitness clubs arm grew 7.5% to £35.6 million as it expanded from 43 clubs to 50. JJB claims further growth will come from this arm.

Dresdner Kleinwort said in a note to clients that it finds it hard to push the shares, adding: “The shares are not cheap, but we wait to see how Chris Ronnie's strategy has advanced before we change our neutral view.”

JJB said it cut the interim divi, 3p last year, to retain the “financial flexibility” it needs to support development plans.

The Dumbest Bank ?

2008-09-21T21:44:00.000+05:30

The German government has reacted with fury to an admission by federal bank KfW that it passed €300 million (£237 million) to Lehman Brothers only hours before it went under.

A KfW spokesman said the money was part of a swap arrangement, and there had been a “technical” error. German papers are describing KfW as “Germany's dumbest bank”. Two senior managers were today suspended over the fiasco.

Critics said a prudent bank would have held on to the money, knowing from news reports that Lehman was broke. Swaps are often programmed in advance into computers so they happen without human intervention.

The finance ministry in Berlin said the remittance was “infuriating”.

Set up in 1948, KfW is the federal government's in-house bank, lending to homeowners and industry. It is already reeling after a subsidiary, IKB, lost billions of euros last year and had to be bailed out.

Courtesy :
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23557626-details/Dumbest+bank+in+Lehman+deal/article.do

Market uncertainty adds to bid — BHP

2008-09-21T21:33:00.001+05:30

Marius Kloppers, the chief executive of mining giant BHP Billiton, says his hostile $111 billion (£60.93 billion) bid for Rio Tinto is more attractive amid the current “uncertainty” in global financial markets.

“We view this transaction, if anything, as more attractive under these slightly more uncertain circumstances,” Kloppers said in Australia.
“It's a deal for all seasons. In difficult times like this, people value cost savings, synergies and cashflow benefits.”

Rio's shares this week traded at a record discount to BHP's takeover bid, signalling concern among investors that the world's largest mining acquisition may fail. It already faces formidable regulatory hurdles, with Brussels taking a closer look at the deal.

“The way the Rio Tinto share has traded compared to ours underscores our point quite well,” Kloppers said.

“We find it very difficult to see, at that 45% premium uplift we have offered Rio Tinto shareholders, that they can do that on a standalone basis.”

Kloppers said global demand for BHP resources was still “very, very robust”.

Article Courtesy :
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23557637-details/Market+uncertainty+adds+to+bid+BHP/article.do

Spielberg, Anil Ambani sign $1.5b deal

2008-09-21T08:13:00.003+05:30

It's the biggest marriage of Bollywood and Hollywood in the history of cinema. Anil Ambani's Reliance Big Entertainment and Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG have inked a $1.5 billion deal to set up the new DreamWorks. ( Watch )

"The new age studio will be based in Los Angeles and produce six films per year for the next six years. The rights for all these films across platforms — theatres, DTH, television, DVDs — will remain with Reliance for the territory of India," a top official in the Reliance ADA Group said.

"Serious negotiations began a few months ago but the deal was finally signed in Los Angeles on Friday [2008/09/19]. The deal is in part equity and part debt. The debt will be syndicated by JP Morgan Chase. But we can't talk about the exact debt-equity ratio now," he said.

According to the deal, DreamWorks will become a 50:50 joint venture of Spielberg, current DreamWorks chief executive Stacey Snider and Anil Ambani's Reliance Big Entertainment. Snider has also worked as chairman of Universal Pictures.

David Geffen, one of the co-founders of DreamWorks and its current principal, will exit. Spielberg retains the rights to the name DreamWorks and is expected to affix it to the new entity, a news agency report said.

Spielberg is Hollywood's most successful director of all times. Some of his well-known films are Raiders of the Lost Ark , ET and Jurassic Park . In May at the Cannes Film Festival, Reliance Big Entertainment had announced production deals with some of the biggest names in Hollywood such as Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey and Nicholas Cage.

Earlier this year, the company bought over 230 cinemas in USA and another 50 in Malaysia. Some theatres were also taken over in Mauritius and Nepal.

"The company is looking for other opportunities in the movie exhibition sector around the world," the company official said. At present, Reliance Big Entertainment is producing about 70 films in nine languages across India.

"The deal gives DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks Chief Executive Stacey Snider the financial support they need to leave Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and start a new venture. Dreamworks was sold to Viacom in 2006," the Wall Street Journal website reported on Friday.

"The marriage between some of Hollywood’s biggest names and an Indian conglomerate is less surprising than it seems. The new deal comes in the wake of a financial drought in Hollywood, with the industry looking to foreign investors to replace some of billions of dollars that Wall Street poured into film financing in recent years but has since evaporated with the crumbling credit markets," the newspaper said.

Article Courtesy :
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/DreamWorks_completes_deal_with_Reliance_ADAG/articleshow/3504738.cms

World watching on how to tackle crisis

2008-09-21T06:27:00.001+05:30

Today's ban on short-selling by the FSA is described as part of a co-ordinated global strategy to help financial markets recover.

That's fine on the face of it, but when it comes down to the details today's actions look far from co-ordinated.

In London, the FSA has come out with a list of just 29 shares where short-selling has become illegal. The list covers banks and insurance companies. It does not include fund managers like F&C, hedge fund managers like Man and RAB capital and it omits stockbrokers. On the list is Resolution, the closed life funds company, taken over in May.

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued its list of banned shorting stocks early this morning. It includes banks, insurers and securities firms and runs to no fewer than 799 companies.

It also has a few anomalies; among the list are Lehman Brothers, which collapsed at the start of the week, Silver State Bancorp, which was shut down earlier this month, and Nigeria Aviation Holdings.

The SEC said its action “calls a time out to aggressive short-selling in financial institution stocks, because of the essential link between their stock price and confidence in the institution”.

The FSA says its rules will run for the next 120 days until 16 January. The SEC plans to enforce its ban on short-selling for only the next 10 days. Three of America's biggest institutional investors said they would stop lending shares to be used for short-selling.

Elsewhere, the Irish regulator has banned short-selling in only four stocks: Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Banks, Irish Life and Permanent and Anglo Irish Bank. Its ban runs until further notice.

In Russia, President Medvedev said that short-selling would be banned at the close of business today after the stock markets re-opened after a day and a half's suspension of trading.

Australian authorities banned “naked” short-selling, when investors sell shares short without borrowing the underlying stock. But French regulators said they had no plans to ban short-selling.

Article Courtesy :
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23557632-details/World+s+watchdogs+divided+on+how+to+tackle+the+crisis/article.do

'Rich' farmers opt for drought relief in Australia

2008-09-20T20:02:00.001+05:30

THOUSANDS of farmers are receiving taxpayer-funded drought relief despite having access to $2.8 billion in savings they squirrelled away during economic good times.

And the federal Government's National Rural Advisory Council has revealed the nation's Exceptional Circumstances drought relief scheme is encouraging farmers to live on handouts instead of adapting to make their farms viable, creating a new rural welfare dependency.

The claims from the NRAC, made in a submission to a Rudd Government review on relief arrangements, were underlined by southwestern Queensland farmer Rod Back who, while living in a drought-affected region, doesn't get EC funding because he and his wife earn more than $20,000 a year from jobs outside the farm.

Mr Back, 50, works as a truck driver in Roma and his wife, Margaret, works as a nurse.

So while the Backs work, other farmers in the area sit idle on EC payments - which are equivalent to the dole.

Sources confirmed yesterday that the Government is concerned that one of the key flaws in the EC scheme was that taxpayer-funded relief was being collected by farmers who had saved money in Farm Management Deposit accounts.

The accounts, introduced by the Howard government in 1999, give farmers tax breaks if they put money aside in good times tosupplement their income in bad times.

According to figures obtained by The Weekend Australian yesterday, $2.8 billion was parked in FMDs as at June 30.

The figures show that many of the 41,355 farmers who hold the accounts live in drought-declared areas and are claiming EC assistance, including interest subsidies.

Since March, with the nation in the grip of the worst drought in its history, $555 million has been added to the FMDs.

Farmers in the electorate of Maranoa, where Mr Back lives and works, have invested $129million in FMDs, while two EC areas within the seat have received $51 million in EC drought funding.

In the western NSW federal electorate of Farrer, $86 million had been invested in FMDs as at June 30. But in the past six years, taxpayers have pumped $38 million into drought-declared properties in the area.

Farmers in the western Victorian seat of Wannon have $139million in FMDs, while the area has received $35 million in EC funding in the past 18 months.

While the figures do not show that individual account holders are receiving EC payments, government sources confirmed the practice was widespread.

The Government wanted to "frontload" EC payments to encourage farmers in drought-prone areas to change their practices to insulate themselves against dry spells expected to become more common because of climate change.

In its submission to the inquiry into the social impacts of drought on rural communities, the NRAC argues the EC scheme provides no incentive to farmers to improve their viability, as well as penalising innovators.

"NRAC has encountered examples of welfare and business assistance impeding adjustment," says NRAC chairman Keith Perrett. "Assistance can lessen self-reliance in that it can encourage communities to consider EC support as a first option for responding to drought-related farm finance pressures.

"In supporting farms that do not take steps to adjust their enterprises, and by not supporting the operators who respond well to change, government may be discouraging farmers from learning about and adopting the innovative strategies used by successful operators."

The submission says some farmers had warned that income assistance had kept unviable farms in business, creating "long-term welfare dependencies".

The NRAC says about 2000 farmers had been reliant on EC payments for more than four years, with 7000 receiving it for two years.

"While paid at the same rate as Newstart, income support has more generous income and assets tests and there is no mutual obligation requirement," Mr Perrett says.

Agriculture Minister Tony Burke declined to comment while the inquiry was under way.

The Queensland Farmers Federation's submission says existing EC frameworks "discriminate against those who successfully plan and manage for drought by ruling them ineligible because of that success".

"To meet the wider community's interest in sustaining agricultural systems even in exceptional periods of drought then we need an array of public and private activities that can deliver better climate management tools," it says.

The National Farmers Federation's submission says drought assistance programs should include help for rural families to determine whether remaining on their farm was the best option.

"This should take into account financial and non-financial considerations," says the NFF submission, which also pointed to increasing stress on families struggling against drought.

Growcom, the peak representative body for the fruit and vegetable industry, calls for a reallocation of government funding. "It is essential that individual enterprises incorporate strategies and risk-management practices that ensure their future viability without relying on government support payments or 'handouts"," itsays.

As well as missing out on EC funding, Mr Back has applied several times for an interest subsidy but was deemed ineligible.

"If people in the urban areas think all drought-affected farmers are receiving assistance, that's not true because we aren't," he said yesterday.

"We're just getting on with life without it. We have no choice."

The Backs were saving the Government money by working.

"You could sit back and draw the drought relief but you'll go backwards doing that," he said.

"We'd all much rather be at home and doing what we do, but we have to go to work because we have to go to work."

Galaxy writes down licence by HK$8.2b as earnings dive

2008-09-20T19:57:00.000+05:30

Macau casino operator Galaxy Entertainment Group wrote down the value of its gaming licence by HK$8.16 billion yesterday, as first-half pre-tax earnings plunged 51.6 per cent, while rival SJM Holdings surprised with a 27 per cent increase in pre-tax earnings....

A new bailout entity

2008-09-20T08:45:00.000+05:30

After a series of ad hoc, multibillion-dollar rescues — from mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to global insurance giant AIG — the panic in the credit markets has not subsided.

On Friday the Bush administration, which is now working with Congress on a more long-term solution, unveiled four new measures aimed at restoring order to financial markets:

A new bailout entity
On Friday, Treasury Secretary Paulson announced plans to form a separate entity to buy up bad mortgage-related debts, reminiscent of the Resolution Trust Corp. that cleaned up the widespread failure of savings and loans in the late 1980s. The new entity, which would require congressional approval, would buy up bad debts at a deep discount from struggling financial institutions. By providing a market for the troubled securities, the plan would allow banks and brokerages to remove the assets from their balance sheets and provide a final value on losses.

In theory, the Treasury has unlimited capital to buy up bad debts. No one knows how much money will ultimately be needed; Paulson said that “we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Details are still sketchy. Treasury and Fed officials were expected to meet with congressional leaders over the weekend to work out specifics.

One likely point of contention: Democrats want any master plan to include relief for homeowners struggling to keep up with unaffordable mortgages. One proposal, which Democrats had tried unsuccessfully to include in this summer’s housing relief bill, would let bankruptcy courts modify loans terms. So far, such modifications have been voluntary on the part of lenders.

Protection for money market funds
The Treasury announced it will guarantee money market mutual fund deposits with $50 billion tapped from the Exchange Stabilization Fund, a Depression-era agency intended to stop panics in foreign exchange markets.

Money market funds are usually among the safest of investments, with holdings in Treasury securities and other debt that is considered ultrasafe, like loans to well-financed companies. But the panic has battered the value of debt issued by even the most creditworthy borrowers.

But this week the nation's oldest money-market fund announced investors will lose money because of a bad investment in Lehman Bros. The value of shares in the Reserve Primary Fund was reduced to 97 cents for every $1 invested.

It was only the second time since money market funds were first set up in the 1970s that a money market fund "broke the buck" the pledge to keep shares steady at $1 a share.

As of Wednesday, money market mutual funds held some $3.4 trillion in deposits — down $169 billion in the last week.

Ban on short selling
The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a temporary ban on short selling of nearly 800 financial stocks. The ban is in effect for two weeks and could be extended another two weeks.

Short selling is the practice of trying to profit from an expected drop in share prices by selling borrowed shares and then buying them back after the price has fallen.

Problems at many major financial institutions have been aggravated by the drop in their stock prices. And there’s ample evidence that part of the reason for the slide in these stock prices is the heavy selling by short-sellers.

In times of panic, selling pressure feeds on itself. Some officials have accused short sellers of spreading rumors that accelerated pressure on financial stocks in the past few weeks.

Critics of the SEC say the agency has not done enough to stem the damage of short selling by strictly enforcing rules designed minimize its impact.

By temporarily banning short selling, the hope is that the stock prices of battered financial firms can recover and their capital base can be rebuilt.

Increased Fannie, Freddie portfolios
The Treasury is authorizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase the size of their loan portfolios, allowing them to buy more mortgages. The hope is that as Freddie and Fannie buy more mortgages, new cash will be freed up to lend to new home buyers. This is intended to help revive the struggling housing market

The Treasury has the authority to make this change because it took control of the mortgage giants Sept. 7 in a bailout that could cost up to $200 billion, by some estimates.

On Friday, the Treasury said it would buy $10 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities, upping the $5 billion it pledged to buy when it took over Fannie and Freddie.

It is unclear whether the latest move will help the ailing housing market. The Federal Reserve has already slashed interest rates and flooded the financial system with cash. The concern is that mortgage lending will remain sluggish as long as lenders remain nervous about extending a loan backed by a house that’s falling in value.

Shifting more troubled loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will also increase the strain on the finances of these government-owned companies, increasing the risk that taxpayers will lose more money if more loans go bad.

And they say the US Exported More !

2008-09-20T08:09:00.001+05:30

The U.S. trade deficit rose to the highest level in three months, with record oil prices and a flood of toys and other imports from China swamping a solid gain in American exports.

The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that the deficit for October increased to $57.8 billion, the highest level since July and 1.2 percent above the September imbalance.

The widening deficit was slightly worse than expected and occurred even though U.S. exports of goods and services rose for an eighth consecutive month, climbing 0.9 percent to an all-time high of $141.7 billion. This gain was offset by a 1 percent rise in imports to $199.5 billion, also a record, as a surge in global oil prices sent America’s oil bill soaring.

The deficit with China jumped 9.1 percent to $25.9 billion, a record for a single month.

The rise reflected record imports from China, led by large gains in shipments of toys and games and televisions as retailers stocked their shelves for Christmas. The demand for Chinese imports is still surging despite a string of high-profile recalls of Chinese products from toys with lead paint to defective tires and tainted toothpaste.

So far this year, the trade imbalance with China is running at an annual rate of $256 billion, putting it on track to surpass last year’s $233 billion deficit, which had been the highest deficit ever recorded with a single country.

Those record deficits have triggered a backlash in Congress, with dozens of bills introduced seeking to penalize China for what critics see as unfair trade practices contributing to the loss of 3 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since 2000.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other members of President Bush’s Cabinet were meeting with their counterparts in China this week for the third round of talks aimed at defusing trade tensions. While minor agreements were expected, there was likely to be no breakthrough on the biggest point of contention, China’s undervalued currency. The currency disparity makes Chinese products cheaper in America and U.S. goods more expensive in China.

Some of the legislation in Congress seeks to impose penalty tariffs on Chinese products unless China allows its currency to rise in value against the dollar at a faster rate. But Vice Premier Wu Yi, the leader of the Chinese delegation, delivered a blunt threat of Chinese retaliation should the United States impose economic penalties on China.

“I need to be quite candid about this: If these bills are adopted, they will severely undermine U.S. business ties with China,” Wu said at the opening of the talks with Paulson on Wednesday.

The gain in exports was led by increased shipments of civilian aircraft, industrial equipment and telecommunications products. U.S. manufacturers have been benefiting from a fall in the value of the dollar against many other currencies including the European euro. The weaker dollar makes U.S. goods cheaper on overseas markets while making foreign products more expensive for U.S. consumers.

So far this year, the U.S. trade deficit is running at an annual rate of $704 billion, down by 7.1 percent from last year’s $758.5 billion, putting the country on track to see the first narrowing of the deficit after five consecutive years of record imbalances.

The import gain was led by an 8.3 percent jump in the foreign oil bill with petroleum imports setting an all-time high of $29.6 billion in October. The average price of a barrel of imported crude also set a record at $72.49 per barrel. The oil bill is expected to rise even more in coming months, reflecting the fact that prices jumped to near $100 per barrel at their peak this fall.

[Updated from Dec, 2007]

World Bank gives USD.5.5bn to fight poverty in South Asia

2008-09-19T21:35:00.000+05:30

The World Bank Group extended loans, credits, grants, equity investments, and guarantees totalling over $5.5 billion to South Asia in fiscal year 2008.

The funding supports 79 new projects designed to overcome poverty and boost growth through practical plans enhancing the business and investment environment and empowering poor people, says a statement of the bank.

Contributing to this strong support was $1.491 billion from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which provides financing, risk management products and other financial services; $2.756 billion from the International Development Association (IDA), $1.26 billion from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and $36.6 million from the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Investment Agency (MIGA), the group’s political risk insurance agency.

“Last year posed profound economic, political and social challenges for countries in South Asia and the world,” said Isabel M. Guerrero, World Bank vice-president for South Asia.

“The increase in world fuel and food prices, especially for rice and wheat, the two main staples in South Asia, has had a dramatic impact on poor people. Globally, the World Bank group committed $38.2 billion in fiscal year 2008, up 11 per cent from fiscal year 2007. An important contribution during the fiscal year was the bank group’s response to the food price crisis. It created a $1.2 billion rapid financing facility with the first grants approved in FY08.

More funds have subsequently been approved in the current financial year, including a $8 million grant for Afghanistan, which supports the rehabilitation of around 500 small, traditional irrigation schemes, which are critical to the recovery of the country’s agriculture sector.

“In a year that saw rising food and fuel prices become the harsh new reality, the $38.2 billion provided by the World Bank group to developing countries helps create development solutions so people can have the opportunity and means to improve their lives,” said World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick.

India was the largest borrower from IBRD and IDA, accounting for $2.154 billion, or nearly 10 per cent of total lending from these two institutions. Within South Asia, Bangladesh was the second largest borrower with $753 million, followed by Pakistan at $545 million, and Nepal at $380 million.

Many of the bank’s projects in the last fiscal year supported existing programmes that are delivering results. The bank extended additional financing of $75 million to the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, which has touched the lives of more than 2.5 million people in about 5,000 villages.

Looking ahead in South Asia, the bank will focus on cross-cutting reforms such as governance and fiscal management, and continue addressing deficiencies in the region’s investment climate, such as weak infrastructure, red tape, and corruption. It will also deepen its engagement in states where poverty is increasingly concentrated, such as Orissa and Bihar in India and Sindh in Pakistan. IBRD lending in the past year focused on helping South Asia close its infrastructure gap, often cited as the greatest constraint to foreign investment.

IFC’s investment commitments in the South Asia region were $1.26 billion for 37 projects in FY08, and it mobilised an additional $28 million through structured and secure ties products. This year IFC enhanced its portfolio in the infrastructure sector, from 22 per cent to 30 per cent for South Asia as a whole.

Price war forces petrol prices down

2008-09-19T21:24:00.002+05:30

Petrol prices fell across the UK today as a price war brought a hint of relief to motorists struggling to fill their cars.

Supermarkets led the way last night as they followed Morrisons in announcing cuts in fuel prices – and today BP and Shell say they have followed suit reducing their prices on the forecourt.

The price drop will give Morrisons customers a national average of 107.7p for unleaded and 119.2p for diesel, but no overall national figures will be available to test the price cuts until Tuesday.

The AA says that last night a national fall of just a fifth of a penny had been measured. On this day last year the average price for a litre of petrol was 95.22p. Nonetheless customers at supermarkets with aggressive price policies were surprised and delighted to see petrol back below 110p per litre today.

John Black, 25, from South Milford, North Yorkshire, said: “They’re going back down, that’s all right really. It’s still expensive but it’s better than it was.

“Because of the high prices, I haven’t been putting as much petrol in my car recently and I’ve tried not to drive as much.”

Dan Howard, 25, a traffic management operative, was buying fuel from Morrisons, in Knottingley, West Yorkshire, where the price of unleaded had fallen to 108.9p a litre.

Mr Howard, from North Yorkshire, said: “It’s better for motorists obviously. I think they’re still too expensive, they should be about 70p a litre but that’s just wishful thinking.

“Everyone will be happy. It’s got to be a good start at least.”

Mr Howard said it was not always possible to find the cheapest petrol station. “I just stop wherever I am. If you’re running out of fuel you’ve got to put it in,” he said.

The uneven nature of fuel pricing will be highlighted once again by the supermarket’s price cuts said an AA spokesman.

Any town with an Asda, Morrison’s or Tesco petrol station will see prices falling on all forecourts in the area, Shell and Esso garages in areas with less competition, however, will keep their prices relatively high.

Supermarket chain Morrisons sparked the latest price war yesterday by announcing it was cutting the price of fuel by 3p a litre across its 285 stations.

Darren Blackhurst, trading director at Asda, called on rivals to match its move in the price war.

“We are calling on other retailers to follow our lead and give drivers a fair deal at the pumps, not just those that live near an Asda,” he said.

A fall to 107.7p would bring prices back to the March level when a new high was recorded in the wake of oil pushing through the $100 per barrel barrier. The highest national petrol average price this year and indeed of all time was 119.7p recorded on July 17.

An AA spokesman predicted that prices would continue to fall in the coming months but that to see a return to last year’s figures would require a significant spike in the value of the dollar or a global recession which would force down demand.

Earlier this month, the AA said petrol prices were still too high and the drop in the price of oil was not being passed on to motorists.

AA president Edmund King said prices were 2p higher than they should be and that oil companies had been “too slow” in passing the drop in the oil price on to customers.

The price of crude oil fell below 100 US dollars a barrel earlier this week for the first time since April - down around a third from the July peak of 147 US dollars - but the Petrol Retailers’ Association (PRA) insisted this was not the only factor contributing to prices at the pump.

Ray Holloway, director of the PRA, said: “The price of fuel at the pump is influenced by a range of factors beyond just the price of a barrel of oil, but despite this, forecourt retailers have still managed to reduce the cost of fuel to the motorist at the expense of their own profit margin during recent weeks.

“Prices for crude oil and forecourt fuel are obviously linked but they do not move in tandem. Therefore they do not automatically move up or down at the same time.”

Mr Holloway said that while the price of crude oil had fallen, the wholesale price that retailers pay for petrol had remained the same.

Article Courtesy : http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4787491.ece

Govt needs $100b to revive infrastructure, says ambassador

2008-09-19T21:17:00.000+05:30

THE Ambassador of Nigeria to Germany, Mr. Abdul Bin Rimdap, has said that Nigeria needs about $100 billion investment in infrastructure development.

He said there was the great need to develop infrastructure to aid industrialisation, trade and commerce.

In a paper he presented at the fifth Trade Development Forum, organised by the Nigerian German Business Group in collaboration with Cashcraft Asset Management Limited recently in Germany, and obtained by The Guardian in Lagos, Rimdap called for the export diversification of the economy from oil and gas production, adding that the economy has the largest gas reserve in Africa.

He said with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $166.8 billion in 2007, the economy has great investment prospect in such areas as telecommunication, infrastructure development, construction and agro-industries.

The envoy said the economy is the largest domestic market in Africa, the second biggest economy in sub-Saharan Africa, and economically, most important country in West Africa to German.

Speaking at the event, the Regional Director for West Africa at the German Federal Agency for Foreign Trade, Mr. Dieter Grau, adjudged Nigeria as Germany's second largest trading partner in Africa after South Africa.

Gau stated that Nigeria was the second biggest economy in sub-Saharan Africa and economically, most important country in West Africa to German.

He said that Nigeria has the largest domestic market in Africa with about 145 million inhabitants and economy dominated by oil and gas oil production.

He listed German export to Nigeria to include machineries, vehicles and parts, electrical goods, plastic, iron and steel, metal hardware, paper, measurement and control technology.

Speaking on the repellent sides of the economy, he explained that the country depend heavily on hydrocarbons.

He added: "The structure of Nigeria's foreign trade has been dominated by petroleum since the early 1970s, since then oil has generally accounted for around 95 per cent of total exports. Gas became second largest export commodity after rise in LNG shipments since October 1999. Nigeria's main export products are petroleum and related products, as well as cocoa, rubber, machinery, chemical, transport equipment, manufactured goods, food and live animals."

In his remark also at the event, the President of the Nigerian-German Business Group, Mr. Joe Femi-Dagunro, advised the German businessmen to support the growth of Nigeria business by involving themselves only in genuine and transparent businesses.

He said the report of Transparency International showed that some foreign companies have taken Nigerians for granted as a habitat for corruption and advised the Nigerian business community to create a better business attitude, encourage the development of their youths and promote grassroots political development for an accelerated and sustained business growth.

Speaking on the opportunities in the Nigerian capital market, Dagunro stated: "The outcome of the investment in the stock market in the past one year is however a mixed bag because of the market melt-down experienced by the Nigerian stock market between March and August this year. The market capitalisation, which peaked at N15.265 trillion in March dropped to N10.920 trillion in June and reached an all time low of N8.8 trillion in the last six months before the government intervened in the market in August, in line with global practices because of the linkage of the financial markets.

"By the time the government intervened, the market had dropped close to 50 per cent. I wish to assure you that the prolonged correction in the market is not unusual. Volatility is a main feature of investments in the capital market. Other emerging markets, like India and Pakistan, which witnessed such corrections recently are on the path of growth agai, just like the Nigerian stock market, which started to recover with government intervention late August."

He therefore assured that the Nigeria economy was getting stronger, as corporate performance was now improving and that government at various levels were addressing the issue of decadent infrastructure

Managing Your Money...

2008-09-07T12:40:00.000+05:30

In Michigan, an advertisement offers this come-on to those 60 and older...
Come learn from the IRA Technician" at a seminar that more than 10,000 seniors have attended. Top sirloin steak will be served — along with tips on "how to guarantee your IRA will never run out, regardless of market fluctuations."

Just don't bring your financial adviser. Agents and brokers are not invited, the ad says.

As the first of 79 million baby boomers turn 60 this year, free-this and free-that financial seminars are thriving. Community centers and hotels have become a backdrop for what regulators see as aggressive sales pitches geared to seniors. (Chart: What to know about senior financial adviser designations)

While people 60 and older make up 15% of the U.S. population, they account for about 30% of fraud victims, estimates Consumer Action, a consumer-advocacy group.

As this gargantuan generation of boomers starts to retire, "You're going to see more of these seminars and more of these sales pitches," says James Nelson, assistant secretary of state in Mississippi. "Wherever retirees are congregated, you're going to have these people preying on them."

Older people have long been a lucrative market for the financial-services industry because of the assets they've accumulated. But the sheer number of baby boomers approaching retirement and seeking a place to park their assets is causing a frenzy of aggressive sales tactics.

Boomers have more than $8.5 trillion in investable assets. Over the next 40 years, they stand to inherit at least $7 trillion from their parents, research firm Cerulli Associates estimates

As baby boomers swell the retiree population, regulators worry not just about estate-planning seminars for seniors but also about sales of promissory notes, unregistered securities and lottery scams.

"It's the topic of the next few decades: senior investments and senior fraud," says Patricia Struck, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, or NASAA.

"There are marketing seminars that are being held nightly and in every city," says Bryan Lantagne of the Massachusetts Securities Division. "They get you to come in and do a financial plan. Their goal is to put you in one of these products."

Senior estate-planning seminars aren't new. But they're drawing more regulatory scrutiny because they're ramping up in areas with large elderly populations. Typically, the people who attend them need advice about leaving assets to their children, managing income or minimizing taxes in retirement.

Beverly Buhs, 81, of Millbrae, Calif., attended one of these financial seminars with her husband, Art, in 1997. They bought a living trust on the spot, she says. They were told it would let them avoid probate court, the sometimes expensive process by which your assets are allocated after you die.

They also bought an equity-index annuity. That's a high-cost insurance product with returns based partly on the stock market.

After her husband died, Buhs found the trust didn't fully protect their assets from probate. And she couldn't access the money in the annuity without paying big penalties. Her complaints are part of a class-action lawsuit against the financial agents and companies involved in the seminar.

A 'major problem'

These seminars are a "major problem" in Texas, where many boomers retire, says Denise Voigt Crawford, the state securities commissioner.

North Dakota Securities Commissioner Karen Tyler calls these seminars a bait-and-switch tactic. The free seminar is the bait; the switch comes when the agents urge investors to liquidate the portfolio and put the money into other products, Tyler says.

Dan Danbom of the Society of Certified Senior Advisors — which helps train insurance agents, brokers and others to conduct senior seminars — says there's nothing "inherently dishonest about seminars, any more than there's anything inherently dishonest about advertising or direct mail."

And some agents argue that their financial seminars fill seniors' very real need for education. Theresa Bischoff, an insurance agent in Palatine, Ill., says she holds seminars because, "Baby boomers are starving for information on retirement and estate planning."

But regulators worry that seminars often serve as tools for unscrupulous salespeople. NASAA issued an alert in December cautioning investors that such seminars were sometimes being used by "bogus" senior specialists. The specialists may take only a few courses to earn their titles, then use these designations to create a "false level of comfort" about their expertise, according to NASAA.

In a typical scenario, financial agents will find out, at the seminar and in follow-up meetings, what assets seniors have, NASAA says. Then they'll recommend these assets be liquidated and put into equity-index or variable annuities. (State regulators say these recommendations could be considered investment advice, and anyone not registered as an investment adviser could face enforcement action.)

Variable and equity-index annuities are complex insurance products whose returns vary with market performance. Variable annuities' returns are tied to the stock market. Equity-index annuities' returns fluctuate with the market but also provide a minimum guarantee.

Both can be appropriate for people who want tax-advantaged savings or an income stream in retirement. But they're generally ill-suited for people in their 60s, 70s or 80s who'll need access to their money over the next decade. These costly products usually have stiff penalties for withdrawing money before the end of a surrender period that can last up to 15 years.

Louise Renne, a former San Francisco city attorney, says financial seminars often "are really fronts for (insurance) agents who want to sell annuities to seniors." Renne represents Buhs and others in three lawsuits against financial pros who conducted the seminars and companies that supplied the products.

Michael DeGeorge, general counsel for the National Association for Variable Annuities, says, "The vast majority of annuity recommendations are done appropriately."

Emotional pain

Whether scams involve inappropriate product sales or telemarketing fraud, they can be emotionally and financially devastating for victims of all ages.

Seniors, though, are particularly hard hit. Scams can wipe out an entire lifetime of savings. Unlike younger investors, seniors have few or no working years to recapture their losses.

The emotional pain of being scammed can also be magnified for seniors who keep silent about losing money. Many of them don't report suspected fraud out of shame and "fear that if the family realizes they've been ripped off, they'll be placed in an institution," seen as unfit to manage their finances and lives, says Jenefer Duane, chief executive of the Elder Financial Protection Network.

Thus, complaints about senior financial fraud are probably lower than they should be, Duane says. In 2005, consumers 50 and older filed 151,000 fraud and identity-theft-related complaints with the Federal Trade Commission. That total represented nearly one-third of total fraud and one-fifth of all identity-theft complaints among those who reported their age.

Online and telemarketing scams rank among the top complaints filed by older consumers.

Seniors who've been scammed often have to work longer than they'd planned — and harder. Take Neal Dukes, 71, of Grand Ledge, Mich. Dukes lost $250,000 a few years ago after a financial adviser persuaded him and 17 other people, mostly seniors, to put money into what the adviser said were high-interest-earning annuities.

The adviser, Daniel Neuenschwander, pleaded guilty, admitting he didn't invest the money in annuities but instead lost much of it in the commodities market or used it to support his family.

A Michigan circuit judge sentenced Neuenschwander in 2002 to up to 10 years in prison and ordered him to pay $2.2 million back to the seniors.

"It's tragic. Mr. Neuenschwander is very remorseful," says John Maurer, Neuenschwander's attorney.

Dukes says he hasn't gotten a dime back and isn't hopeful he will. He's been working eight to 10 hours a few days a week at his insecticide-spraying business to earn money.

'No golden years left'

"When you're 71 years old, you should be able to enjoy your life and your golden years," Dukes says. "But when you've been taken like this, there are no golden years left."

Financial recovery in senior scams is rare but not hopeless. Shlimoon Youkhana, 80, was one of the lucky ones. He got his money back after what had seemed to be a promising investment turned sour, draining his money with it.

A few years ago, he and his children invested $15,000 in the stock of a company that was supposed to file for an initial public offering. But the company never gave them their stock certificates. It eventually merged with another entity and changed its name.

Youkhana, of Rosemont, Ill., spent more than two years and hundreds of hours researching the company and documenting his experience, reporting his findings along the way to the Illinois Securities Department. The department did its own investigation and recovered investors' money.

Now, Youkhana offers to help other seniors in his community do research before they invest. "I'm not a Don Quixote or anything," he says. He just doesn't want others to be victims, he says.

The easiest way to avoid scams? Beware of any opportunity that sounds too good to be true. Seniors who are pressured to make a financial decision on the spot should run — not walk — away.

Robert Inman, 69, was wary about the living trust and annuity being pitched during a December free-lunch seminar he attended in Jackson, Mich.

He didn't feel the presenters adequately answered his questions — such as, what happens if the company that created the trust goes under? And he was bothered that they wanted people to sign up on the spot.

Also, a salesman called him multiple times after the seminar, stopping only after being invited to the house. "We thought that maybe this is the way to get rid of him," Inman says.

He consulted an attorney and decided to forgo the products. Inman's advice to seniors? "Don't jump into anything hastily. Take some time to do some checking."

Consumer groups act

Consumer groups are also stepping up efforts to alert seniors to potential scams. In Michigan, AARP, the advocacy group for those 50 and over, has found a way to counter "free lunch" seminars: It holds its own "free lunch" seminars.

No products are sold at the sessions. Still, "They're wildly popular," AARP's Sally Hurme says of the educational seminars, which feature such names as "What You Should Know About Living Trusts" and "How to Tell the Difference Between An Estate Plan and a Sales Pitch."

Says Anita Salustro, who leads the seminars for AARP in Michigan: "People want some consumer protection. They've been to these free lunches and want some balanced information from someone who's not selling a product."

Shlimoon Youkhana was able to get back $15,000 he and his children lost in a bad investment.

Article Courtesy : By Kathy Chu, USA TODAY

Jest a while................

Sun to add Microsoft Windows to servers

2008-07-15T09:31:00.003+05:30

This should benefit both of them in the long run . With a security deposit of pocketed $1.95 billion in their pockets, Sun shouldn't find this difficult

Sun Microsystems Inc. will begin building servers with onetime foe Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system installed directly in them, instead of forcing customers to install the ubiquitous software on their own or defect to a competitor for one-stop shopping.

The agreement announced Wednesday is the latest twist in a truce the companies, once bitter rivals, hammered out in 2004, when Sun pocketed $1.95 billion in a settlement payout from Microsoft over antitrust and patent allegations, and both companies vowed to make their products work better together.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun will begin incorporating Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 software into its so-called x64 servers, which are corporate computers that run on 64-bit microprocessors from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Servers are the computers in corporate data centers that process large amounts of data such as Internet traffic or financial calculations.

Although Sun customers have been able to run Microsoft’s operating system on Sun servers for several years, Sun would not install it in the factory. That left customers who wanted Windows in the lurch unless they wanted to install it on their own or already had licensing contracts with Microsoft, in which case Sun would install it.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, stands to gain from the agreement because of Sun’s reach in the server world. Sun is the world’s No. 3 server seller with 13% of the worldwide market, behind IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., according to the latest data from market researcher IDC.

Denmark happiest country in the in the world

2008-07-06T09:15:00.000+05:30

Denmark, with its democracy, social equality and peaceful atmosphere, is said to be the happiest country in the world, researchers said. Zimbabwe, torn by political and social strife, is the least happy, while the world's richest nation, the United States, ranks 16th.

Overall, the world is getting happier, according to the US government-funded World Values Survey, done regularly by a global network of social scientists. It found increased happiness from 1981 to 2007 in 45 of 52 countries analysed.

Venus Williams wins Fifth Wimbledon title

2008-07-06T09:00:00.003+05:30

Venus Williams beat younger sister Serena to claim her fifth Wimbledon crown on Saturday.

The defending champion recovered from a whirlwind start to land her seventh Grand Slam title courtesy of a 7-5, 6-4 win. Venus paid tribute to the performance of Serena, who had looked as if she might blast her big sister off court in the opening games.

She said that she couldn't believe it was five, mainly because she was in the final against and five seemed so far away.

She also admitted that she never found it easy to take on Serena, who comfortably won their previous Wimbledon finals, in 2002 and 2003.

Serena, who had won five of her previous six Grand Slam finals against her sister, admitted things had not gone as she expected.

Serena said that she was happy that at least one of them could win and that they were glad to be in the final.

Nestor and Zimonjic win Wimbledon doubles title

2008-07-06T08:59:00.000+05:30

Second seeds Daniel Nestor and Nenad Zimonjic defeated Jonas Bjorkman and Kevin Ullyett 7-6, 6-7, 6-3, 6-3 to win their first Wimbledon doubles title on Saturday.

Bjorkman's hopes of lifting a fourth Wimbledon doubles title before retiring at the end of the season fizzled out in the third set, Nestor and Zimonjic getting a break of serve in the fourth game, rescuing a break point in the process.

Serbia's Zimonjic celebrates winning his first grand slam title having lost in the final at Wimbledon in 2004 and 2006, and the French Open earlier this year.

Kakkar is regional head of Unilever

2008-07-06T08:10:00.000+05:30

Hindustan Unilever executive director (sales & customer development) Sanjiv Kakkar has been appointed Chairman, Unilever Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (RUB), with effect from the month of September 1, 2008.

Kakkar will be replaced by Hemant Bakshi, who returns to HUL from South Asia Unilever, where he is currently regional category vice president, skin. Bakshi, who joined the company in June 1989 and has worked in various sales and marketing assignments spanning personal products and home care categories, will be part of HUL's management committee.

Sanjiv Kakkar, who joined HUL in 1984 and has worked in sales and marketing assignments, was appointed as exexecutive director (sales and customer development) in May 2007.

Iran indicates that EU sanctions could hurt nuclear diplomacy

2008-06-26T08:41:00.000+05:30

Iran said on Tuesday that new sanctions imposed on it by the European Union could hurt diplomatic efforts to resolve a long-running row over Tehran’s disputed nuclear ambitions.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini condemned the latest sanctions, agreed by the 27-nation bloc on Monday, as illegal and suggested they would only serve to strengthen Iran’s determination to pursue nuclear technology.

Search on for Philippine ferry survivors

2008-06-26T08:37:00.001+05:30

Philippine officials refused to give up hope of rescuing some of the 800 odd people missing after a ferry capsized during Typhoon Fengshen, even as the still-roiling seas hampered efforts to get inside the vessel on Monday.

Divers heard no response when they hammered on the tip of the 23,824-tonne ship that was jutting from the water, off Sibuyan Island in central Philippines.

The Coast Guard are still not ruling out that somebody there could be still alive

More details at http://www.hindu.com/2008/06/24/stories/2008062455011300.htm

Federer begins his quest for his sixth title

2008-06-25T08:32:00.000+05:30

Federer's 60th straight victory on grass, and the first in his quest for a record sixth Wimbledon title in a row, came against the old Slovakian warhorse — and Federer’s good friend and practice partner from his early days in the game — Dominik Hrbaty and the 6-3, 6-2, 6-2 success required the champion’s presence on the centre court for a mere 79 minutes.

At no time in the past five years has the Swiss maestro had to fend off so many questions concerning his form and championship mettle as he has had to in recent months.

Courtesy : Nirmal Shekar

For more details

Spain finally conquers the penalty shoot out phobia

2008-06-24T08:29:00.001+05:30

Vienna: Spain overcame a dreadful history and a phobia. Its dread of shoot-outs was conquered and so, too, was Italy, opponent it had not beaten in competitive football for 88 years.

The decisive penalty was taken by the substitute Cesc Fábregas, who displayed all the calm so associated with Arsenal as he slipped the ball past the left-hand of Gigi Buffon.

Previously, Daneiele de Rossi and Alessandro Di Natale had failed for Italy, while Daniel Guiza, of Italy, also had his effort saved.

Despite the eventual drama of the penalty shoot-out, the Eurocup tournament had not been afflicted with a game of this sort since the opening set of fixtures in which Romania and France held one another to a turgid 0-0 draw.

More details at

http://www.hindu.com/2008/06/24/stories/2008062460891800.htm

Tyra to replace Oprah ?

2008-06-21T11:38:00.001+05:30

No...never

But with a mentor like that who wouldn't be happy to see her win the Daytime Emmy Friday for Outstanding Informative Talk Show recently

To top it all Tyra Banks graciously thanked Oprah Winfrey in her acceptance speech.

What more do you want ?

Police give chase to a UFO

2008-06-20T20:08:00.002+05:30

No not again !

well this time the UFO was close to a military base. and apparently zoomed in to a chopper

The chopper pilot had to swerve sharply to avoid a crash and then decided to pursue it

As expected, no fuel and the chase was called off

Shucks, another one lost

For more details ;
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1315843.ece

Perspectives - The Balancing Act

2008-06-16T20:35:00.001+05:30

There’s too much mental telepathy at work these days.

Imagine how much easier it would be if everyone simply stated what they wanted. Rather than making grand assumptions about other people’s motives, we might actually start getting our needs met.

Lies seem to be the in thing. It has no origin, and has lost its actual source and flavor. Nowadays, a lie is so obvious, something to be made mockery of. It sucks.

I didn't say that, although it appeared like a soliloquy, but I feel your anger.

It is amazing that people wait for something to be over, that they have waited all along, not realizing what is over. It's like having a ball with your credit card, under the assumption that you have a balance, no it's not worth discussing it, realization is what matters. I guess, opportunities are easier to realize, when they leave rather than when they knock, which they do rarely. Those few moments are to be cherished rather than assuming that a load has been taken off your back.

Financially - it appears that mutual funds are making a comeback. Bankruptcies are yet to raise its head. Appears embezzlements are out of fashion. Fudging the books is slowly poking its head up, and laundering is still a baby.

Where have the good old Cambodians gone. Perhaps we ought to come up with a grant so as to support this ailing industry. Apparently, the only things, which still rule, are the dumbbells.

If we don't something quickly, we wouldn't have countries to buy depleted weapons, as a result we might have to increase taxes again. Well, if this continues, it appears politicians eventually have to fund themselves, apart from an occasional handout.

I am, at 40, no longer in any demographic that matters. Other than the not mattering part, which stings a little, 38 is a fine age. There are even occasions when 38 can seem young, as if the numbers 3 and 8 were some sort of clerical error. You remind yourself of all the great professional athletes who are 38. Then you put on an old album by a great defunct band and rock out in the living room until your nephew walks in and tells you to stop acting "stupid."

I envy 20-somethings, but it's not their youth or their freedom or their little hardbodies that I envy. The place from which my rancor pours, the true source of my bile, is their timing.

Because, by some inexplicable (and unjust) force of dumb chance or intergalactic intelligence, this generation has landed in its 20s at an especially opportune moment in human history.

Reckon Mr. Greenspan was right in requesting the students to make mistakes, so as to reduce the level of perfection and so that we mortals can perform.

We are the generation that bought investment banking as an exciting and sexy profession.

We are the generation that said, "Just do it".

Bill Gates or Bin Gatees

2008-06-12T11:36:00.000+05:30

Well... came across this again, today, and though it is a bit old.... it is definitely worth a read...

Blog courtesy ... http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/04/year-in-umma.html

Today, Bill Gates — who now prefers to go by the name of Abu Mai’saf al-Windaaz — gave up the life he had known to become a Muslim. The wealthy entrepreneur and über-geek left behind the power breakfasts and business suits, moved to Saudi Arabia, and put on a burnoose.

He also answers to the name of Bin Gatees... so as to maintain Business Protocol.

We spoke to the software magnate in his villa, Beta Ri-Lis, on the Red Sea coast not far from Jeddah. We sat on a low couch next to an intricately carved table on a cool terrazzo floor while a ceiling fan turned silently overhead. As we spoke, we drank sweet tea and nibbled on dates and nuts presented by unobtrusive servants.

Q. Tell us about your conversion to Islam. Was it a momentous experience?

A. It certainly was. I was at a conference with some of our software partners in the UAE, and, during the meeting, I noticed the Arab men across the table pointing at my face and whispering.

It turned out that the freckles on my face miraculously formed the words “Allahu Akhbar” in Arabic calligraphy. They showed me in a mirror, and it was true! Then they started telling me about the Qu’ran and the Prophet (peace be upon him), and it all came together in a giant convergence — Allah, my freckles, and me! And now, here I am.

Q. Amazing! What are some of the benefits you have found in your new faith?

A. Well, I guess one of the main things is the prescriptions about women. I’ve always had trouble with… you know, meeting girls, talking to them and so on. But Islam makes it easier, since the women have to cover up and all.

In fact, most of the time you don’t even see them.

Q. And do you find a way to make your faith fit into your business operations?

A. Oh, yes. We’re working with our Dubai partners on the release of a new Islamic software suite called Microsoft Islam 2007. It will have five separate packages, Microsoft Dawa, Microsoft Jihad, Microsoft Hajj, and so on. We’ve got a ways to go yet — we’re working on Virtual Hajj, so that pilgrims won’t have to physically go to Makkah to meet the Hajj specifications. I’m consulting with the Mufti of Makkah to get the application declared halal, so it can aid people in places like Bangladesh.

But not all the bugs have been worked out — we still haven’t perfected the virtual stoning of the devil, for example.

Q. And jihad?

A. Well, I like to think of jihad as the process of getting the bugs out of the spiritual system, both on a personal and umma-wide level.

It’s kind of like optimizing a network — setting the system parameters and protocols, registering the users (in this case, the faithful), establishing permissions, and enforcing restrictions. Think of Allah as the Network Administrator of Islam, with Mohammed (peace be upon him) as his Chief Implementation Engineer.

Q. Is there anything you miss about your old life?

A. Bacon. That’s about it. Wait; there’s also pulled pork barbecue. Oh, and then there’s scrapple. And prosciutto…

Recently the wunderkind of Microsoft has become disenchanted with Islam, and is said to be no longer a follower of the Prophet.

The software magnate is said to be at his new home on the tiny Caribbean island of Santa Melinda, just to the northwest of Aruba. Mr. Gates owns the entire island, and has a sunny villa built on the slopes of Mount Vista, surrounded by lush tropical greenery with a view of the breaking surf below.

Q: Why did you decide to leave Islam?

A: There were several reasons. After I’d been there for a while, I started noticing subtle things I didn’t like. Besides, it was virtually impossible to get a decent broadband connection in Saudi Arabia.

Now a small note to reality-challenged people - Just remember, today is April 1st.

And with due apologies to all Muslims.....this is in no way to hurt anybody's feelings but just to have a good laugh...

Courtesy :

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/04/bill-gates-apostate.html

Let sleeping dogs lie

2008-06-01T11:40:00.000+05:30

What are dreams? Do they have a purpose, and do they have a significant meaning?

Existing theories are the Freudian theory that attributes disguised meanings to dream content, and the Hobsonian theory that reduces them to experiences of disordered brain activity. The Freudian theory gives dreams hidden meanings, and the Hobsonian theory denies that they have any significant meaning at all. Y

Yet our immediate intuition about dreams is that they are little movies that we experience and take part in. If dreams are movies, do they have producers and script-writers and directors and all the other personnel required to make one?

Dreams are normally non-lucid. Dreams are often bizarre and incoherent. And finally, most of them are completely fforgotten bt the time we awake.

We can compare those characteristics to those of a cinematic movie. The creation of a cinematic movie is a purposeful activity. We can ascertain an overall purpose, which is something like: to give the movie-goer an exciting, emotional, disturbing or satisfying experience.

Can we ascribe a similar purpose to dreams?

The possibility that dreams are purposefully constructed by a dream-maker suggests an alternative interpretation of non-lucidity: dreams are non-lucid because this intensifies the experience.

One specific phenomenon that is given an interesting interpretation by this theory is that of realizing that you are dreaming and then dreaming that you are awake…. Dreaming that you wake up is the same thing as no longer realising that you are dreaming.

If there is a dream-maker, who or what is it ? If we are not to believe in supernatural beings accompanying us in our sleep, the dream-maker must reside in some part of our own brains. Presumably it is found in some or all of those regions specially active during dreaming.

What is the overall purpose of the dream-maker's dreams? I have given some reasons why we can believe that dream-making is a purposeful activity, and whatever the purpose is, it is one that requires dreams to be experienced as if they were real. Unfortunately I can only speculate as to what this purpose actually is. It may for example be some sort of testing or rehearsal

Careful study of dream content may shed more light on this question. Better understanding of the mechanisms that hold the dream-maker accountable for the success of its dream-making may also give some clues.

But all of us need dreams and the need to dream. They are the first stage to satisfying our innate hopes and desires. Desires, which one may be embarassed to express in front of others…

As indicated earlier….if there was a dreammaker, things would have been very convinient. But since we still have yet to identify one, what does one do.

We watch movies, cinemas, serials, and identify the themes, the stories the actors and actresses enact with our unsatisfied desires, thus being able to fill that void

Now there is an advantage for this as well….. it also fills that void for those real-life dramas, one is unable to enact with the reel-life ones, and which can be filed and enacted at any stage with a definite result. There is satisfaction for both sides, hopefully, we never know….. but at least they are being paid for it…..

We might have some disagreement here, but every cinematic or a serial plot has some link to some real-life drama who knows where…… but it’s better that neither the script writer nor the innocent role-players who enact that drama are unaware about it….. mainly because, it is the connection that the viewer makes during the movie, that make the movie more exciting, and that leaves a sense of déjà vu behind…….

Basically, it keeps the wheels of the society churning…. In other that separates a good scriipt writer from a bad one….

Fortunately, by the time a script is written, edited and made into a movie, the drama process for the role player would have changed considerably…otherwise it could have devastating efffects

He dreams about his hereoine, his perfect woman and likewise the woman, her perfect charmer and the process goes on…..

If not for them, where would we be……

The proverbial masturbators

Recently, stole this from a blog which I took a fancy to…..

The last day I was goin through the articles and news reports on violence in Bangalore at Rajkumar's death. Due to a quirk of fate, Salman Khan got released from jail on the same day too. The reactions of common people to these 2 news got me quite uncomfortable - people were willing to risk their lives and security for some person they see in a cinema hall.

But thinking a bit more in detail about the issue made me realize that its not the hero they are willing to sacrifice their lives for, its the character he plays and the dreams he helps the audience to dream.

Entertainment is all about a willing suspension of disbelief, of helping the audience to be what they could not be in real life. So when Rajni, an auto driver becomes a crorepati one day in a movie, the audience laps it up with full fervour. We do not see Mohanlal as a person, we see Dasan, we see Induchoodan and we see Mangalasery Neelakantan. This is also true with Amitabh Bachan in north India.

But how ethical is this dream weaving? I started thinking along these lines because a couple of weeks down the line, i will be doin the same thing for a living. Use a deo and patao a girl; use a cream and u can make a career; use a soap and u can be like a movie star.....

All these ads might seem like useless to the educated audience like us [hopefully]... But think about a farmer or a daily wage labourer.. who uses these products and spends that much extra money which he could have spent for his kids or family... Are these companies doing the right thing by creating these "emotional and experiential attributes" for products and selling them at a premium?

However this issue has an other side too... It is definitely true that the customer has the right to choose. More importantly the issue is that products like these and films like that of Rajkumar or Rajnikant help the poor farmer to become a crorepati or an Aiswarya Rai by spending 5 bucks or 10 bucks.

Every individual has a right to dream irrespective of the living standards he is in.. and as society moves towards a materialistic one, products and services like these help the poor to satisfy their dreams within their limitations... Something worth discussion??

No let sleeping dogs lie……

LINDSAY Lohan is about to get very Ugly

2008-05-20T19:59:00.000+05:30

The wayward actress is set to guest star in Ugly Betty’s third season finale on May 22.

According to US sources, Ugly Betty bigwigs are currently in talks with LiLo about bringing her back for EIGHT episodes.

Lindsay Lohan’s character is still being finalised, but the original idea was to have her play a hapless fast food worker that Betty befriends.

For More details : NADIA BROOKS, The Sun

Madonna wows with sexy show

2008-05-15T20:03:00.001+05:30

Recently, madonna held one of her gigs at the Roseland Ballroom - It was right up there as one of Madonna's best gigs ever.

For more details :

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/article1114795.ece

Join the technorati train and increase your ranking

2008-05-11T20:01:00.000+05:30

The technorati train was created to give bloggers higher technorati rankings.

How do you participate?

Simply copy the list below onto your blog, and favourite as many blogs as you wish from them. You can also download the html for the list - HERE

After downloading, just utilize the source facility in your Browser and copy the contents between the [body] to [/body] sections and paste it in your blog. A little bit of technical know would be of great help.

This blog piece is courtesy of Marketing Affiliater - Fave the Site

His other blogs include....

Insanitary Media Behavior - Fave the Site

Pay Me To Blog For You - Fave the Site

Nothing Much But All Okay - Fave the Site

Myspace Blog - Fave the Site

Make Money Blogging - Fave the Site

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Net Business Blog - Fave the Site

Career Ramblings - Fave the Site

Ramblings from the Marginalized - Fave the Site

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Everyday Weekender - Fave the Site

612 to apocalypse - Fave the Site

Bobs [ReformatThis] - Fave the Site

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Professional Shopping Cart Software

2008-05-06T12:38:00.002+05:30

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Myanmar Death Toll Reported at Nearly 4,000

2008-05-05T19:29:00.003+05:30

News-Clip Courtesy : SETH MYDANS

The death toll from the devastating cyclone in Myanmar over the weekend escalated to nearly 4,000 people on Monday, with thousands of others still missing and at least one entire village wiped out, state television and radio reported.

If the reports are accurate, the death toll would be the biggest from a natural disaster in Asia since the tsunami of December 2004, which devastated parts of Indonesia, Thailand and other parts of south Asia.

More details At : http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/world/asia/06myanmar.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

After Deal Dies, Yahoo Weighs Its Next Move

2008-05-05T09:55:00.000+05:30

News Clip by MIGUEL HELFT

How low will Yahoo’s stock go on Monday? And how long will it stay there?

Some shareholders question the loyalties of Jerry Yang, left, who founded Yahoo with David Filo.

These questions are high in the minds of Yahoo shareholders, and probably its management, as the company considers its options after Microsoft’s decision to withdraw its offer to buy Yahoo for $33 a share, or approximately $47.5 billion.

For More details CLICK HERE

DNA results prove Fritzl fathered all imprisoned daughter's children

2008-04-30T09:19:00.002+05:30

DNA results prove Fritzl fathered all imprisoned daughter's children

Austrian police said yesterday DNA tests proved "without a doubt" that the 73-year-old man who imprisoned his daughter for almost a quarter of a century was the biological father of her six children.

As the family underwent intensive therapy at a psychiatric clinic, authorities said they were looking at the possibility of assisting 42-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl and her children, three of whom do not have birth certificates, to change their identities.

For more details, please visit the Guardian.....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/30/austria.ukcrime

News-clip courtesy : Kate Connolly in Amstetten The Guardian

What Yahoo's board did wrong

2008-04-29T17:34:00.000+05:30

Posted by Steve Tobak

I'm neither a Yahoo fan nor a Microsoft foe.

But I still mourn the loss of a unique business entity that, but for the lack of a few brave people, might have survived this ordeal. After all, survival is what life is all about, isn't it?

In my opinion, at a crucial moment in the company's history, Yahoo's board stuck its head in the sand and made believe things weren't as problematic as they were. If the members felt any concern or fear at all, they ignored it. Not only isn't that what boards are supposed to do, it isn't the brave thing to do, either.

For more details, please visit

http://www.cnet.com/8301-13555_1-9928578-34.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

PS...

This news-blog is written by Steve Tobak and it would just be considered sp*m if I put in my two bits now.

I have my reservations in the whole issue and shall write them out in a couple of weeks - until then I'm neither a Yahoo fan nor a Microsoft foe and neither is Fear an human emotion !

Mars Offers $23 Billion Cash for Wrigley

2008-04-29T08:02:00.000+05:30

Against all odds, the chewing-gum aisle at the grocery store became a hotbed of creativity in recent years, as companies battled to find new ways to sell an immutable product, often by trying new combinations of coatings, fillings and packaging.

On Monday, Mars, the privately held maker of Snickers and M&Ms, said that it would buy Wrigley, the famous chewing-gum company, for $23 billion. Analysts expect the companies to become a potent new marketing force as they try to appeal to a rapidly growing consumer market in countries like China, India and Russia.

More details at - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/business/29wrigley.html?ref=business
News Clip By ANDREW MARTIN

Save Akram Mahdavi - By reason of Insanity

2008-04-27T06:13:00.006+05:30

Nazanin Boniadi, the stunning, raven haired co-star of the summer blockbuster film "Iron Man" wore a dress on the red carpet before auctioning it off.

The auction is going until April 30, 2008. Why? Because Akram Mahdavi needs donations to help save her life.

Now who in the world is Akram Mahdavi ?

Akram is a 24 year old woman married to a 74 year old man with multiple wives. She filed for a divorce twice and was denied both times. After an ordeal with another man, she killed the husband. Akram is now awaiting execution.

Now who is Nazanin Boniadi ?

Nazanin Boniadi (born May 22, 1980) is an Iranian-born American actress who got her start on the ABC soap opera, General Hospital and its SOAPnet spin-off series, General Hospital: Night Shift as Nurse Leyla Mir.

Akram's story unravels much earlier though; at 13 years old, she was married to her first husband. After the husband married with another woman, she filed for and got a separation but with a 5 year old child in tow. Her first husband was also an addict (not sure to what drug). After the divorce, her father married her off to this older man. By that time, with another child in tow, she had no idea that he had other wives.

In the end, she met a man she calls "Behnam" who after getting close to her encouraged her to do something about the older man. She resisted, but under threats by Behnam she committed the act. In the persian text it claims that Behnam threatened to kill her daughter if she didn’t kill the old man.

Now this scenario leads me to the recent novel by Randy Singer - "By Reason of Insanity" . It is by far the most complex and captivating legal thrillers.

Newspaper reported Catherine O'Rourke covers the compelling courtroom trial of Annie Newburg Hofstetter, accused of murdering her husband in premeditated and cold blood. Defending her is hotshot attorney Quinn Newberg, a lawyer who specializes in the insanity defense. Covering the trial raises some powerful emotion for Catherine, and it is reflected in her articles. When a series of seemingly connected kidnappings and murders take place in Virginia Beach, Catherine goes to jail to protect her anonymous source. While in jail, she begins to have disturbing visions of these crimes.

And that is when things begin to go horribly wrong for her. Suddenly she isn't reporting the news...she IS the news. After confiding in her confidential source, she finds herself accused of one of these heinous crimes.
Read on........

For more info on Akram Mahdavi....
http://greasy.com/bumpedoff/dress_save_akram_mahdawi.html
http://www.stophonourkillings.com/?name=Blogs&file=display&id=15
http://www.savedelara.com/Akram+Mahdavi.html

You’ve Got Mail

2008-04-27T05:31:00.003+05:30

Unlisted: Oscar winner Matt Damon is known for his philanthropy work in Africa with Ocean's castmates George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle, but the Massachusetts native has another cause he’s passionate about; the environment. Damon sits on the board of GreenDimes, a company committed to reducing the amount of junk mail Americans receive each year and saving trees in the process.
More details..... http://www.hollywood.com/feature/Green_Hollywood/5222049
Photo: WENN

Back into Blogging

2008-04-24T14:56:00.000+05:30

Sometime back, I got into this blogging thingy, but unlike others, the difference was I had very little choice but get into it big time as my investor was sitting on my shoulder. All he needed was me and he was least interested in others…..he was just interested in me and my connections !

Phew… Little did others realize my situation…….. as I had very little, or infact no choice at all but get into it full heartedly.

I had some idea about blogging, blogs and knew who were the Patrick Gavins, Chris Garretts, Richard Jalichandra, Troy Irelands, Jarrod Hunt, Ted Murphy, Karen Allen etc…etc..

My problem was, that I was afraid they knew me or that they had the same if not better contacts I had.. However, I had an advantage……I could ask for anything and get away with it being a newbie !

My investor was sending me “aids” from all sides just to set up similar, if not identical sites and run it for him….. it was then I thought better stick with blogging rather than breaking up established companies. In other words, you get a fab piece of inside “aid” and breaking that company down systematically.

I decided to go against it and go into blogging and not into anything else and devote a week for each of these guys as the “aid” I received….and then go fulltime later [perhaps a year or so later] in to starting a paid review company

Okay, it was time to do some serous thinking……. Gimme a week and let’s see how the first scapegoat develops !

The question being asked at that time was why you getting into blogging and that too not to seriously, when you could start a paid review service at that time with ease. As not only I had access to all these companies, but there was very little competition.

But, then again I just couldn’t get myself to do it. ……I decided to play simple….NO I was not going against those in the same jig !

Aww….frigg it…. After all these guys are doing the same thing as you do, and it wouldn’t be fair to play dirty….. What is the use…… some new company…. Rewarding raves ……. My a*se !

Better to be recognized as a straight player…..

Cold feet, perhaps ?

No, cold feet wouldn’t be right….. It just was conscience…

Conscience ??

What does conscience have to do when you have guys by their b*lls [with due apologies]

Opportunity doesn’t come always and who cares about ethics when you have things going for you. In other words, when they don’t have things going for them, but neither they nor the market realizes that.

Funnily, now I regret of not taking that offer….would have had at least two Companies up and running with two execs looking after the day-to-day affairs……

What do I have now……basically nothing and even worse being criticized by the same lot whom you stuck up for!

Now that my blogging relationship are at a distance, I don’t know who these guys are, ie., the Patrick Gavins, Chris Garretts, Richard Jalichandra, Troy Irelands, Jarrod Hunt, Ted Murphy, Karen Allen……….

Worst, I now am being rejected by just about every blogging source……and for no bl**dy reason….. Tried to find out why….and it ended up that your guess is as good as mine.

My blogs are being labeled fake, with no traffic and lack of links [which to an extent is true, as I can’t juggle 10 blogs at one time !]

The worst is that most of the blog content is being labeled spam…….now that’s icing on the cake…..

My friend Pam laughs it off ……ofcourse she can afford it….. with an initial of S…..Pams’ name keeps appearing as S.Pam……wish I had that name…..that would solve me a lot of problems.

Hope something solves this issue so that I can have my regular blogging income returned or else this is driving me from a striving writer to a starving writer !

One thing I have learnt is that there is so many darn sources out there….. and nobody really cares…. Take up any opportunity as they come…….forget the source, ethics and scruples…..there is no such thing as playing dirty…….just only playing the right card at the right time !

If and when I start my paid review company, one thing I am gonna avoid for sure is these approvals…firstly, they are so stuck up….secondly you pay bloggers the desired amount, there are so many guys out there willing to write for ya…….Its a buyers market out there…so better keep quiet and pay up, otherwise, somebody else would do it for ya at a cheaper price!

That’s about it for now….. shall vent out any balance frustrations later…

Guys, gimme a break will ya !

Toodles

Wipro gets a duo to replace Paul

2008-04-21T07:53:00.004+05:30

News Blog BANGALORE:

Wipro ended weeks of speculation by finally announcing it was appointing Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe as joint CEOs of the company’s $4.3-billion IT business. The company also appointed its CFO Suresh Senapaty along with Mr Vaswani and Mr Paranjpe to the board of Wipro Ltd. ET had first reported on 15th April that Wipro was planning a management rejig and would make important changes to its top tier of leadership.

'The timing is right. The previous structure was great in bringing us till here but we now need to think about what will take us forward. We are facing a US slowdown and we need to re-think how to grow the business,' Mr Paranjpe said in an exclusive chat with ET. 'Wipro is a large and complex business with many challenges and opportunities. We have to combine and strategise for the future,' added Mr Vaswani.

According to corporate VP, HR, Pratik Kumar, Wipro had been discussing these leadership changes for the last six months. He also said that there was nothing unusual in two people sharing the CEO’s position. 'We debated whether it would be one versus two. In Suresh and Girish we have two individuals who are very complementary in the way they work. We feel that two engines can pull faster than one,' said Mr Kumar. “We want to double the size of the IT business in 3 years and two people can do it much better” said Mr Paranjpe.

Wipro has not had a CEO and vice-chairman ever since Vivek Paul left the organisation in 2005. Mr Premji had hand-picked Mr Paul from GE to lead the IT business. Before that, the position belonged to Mr Arun Thiagarajan who was the MD and country manager of ABB prior to joining Wipro. This time Mr Premji has decided to choose the leaders from within the company.

After Mr Paul left Mr Premji assumed the CEO’s role, running the company with the help of independent business unit heads. Till last year he had 13 people reporting to him. With the new CEOs coming in the number of people reporting to Mr Premji will now go down to six. Apart from the two new CEOs, it includes Mr Kumar, Mr Senapaty, Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting president Vineet Agarwal and Wipro Infrastructure MD Anurag Behar. The new structure leaves Mr Premji free to focus on “employees, key customer engagements and investors”, says Kumar.

How the business and responsibility will be split between the two CEOs will be communicated to employees early next week, said the company. Among the many options being discussed is for one CEO to relocate to US. Kumar also said that the unusual decision to have two CEOs was not done to accommodate senior managers.

'It wasn’t decided from the interest of any individual but what was best for the business' he says adding that 'Too many engines can derail a train'. When asked why Mr Sudip Banerjee had moved out, Mr Kumar said, “Sudip could have happily continued in the structure, but he wanted a change. But he continues to be close to Mr Premji in his new role'.

From the first quarter of this financial year, Wipro will merge the operations of Wipro Technologies—its global services business—and Wipro Infotech—its India, M East and Asia Pacific business—into one business unit. Instead of looking at the business in terms of different geographies, henceforth there will be just one single IT business unit with two different revenue streams—global services and global products.

One reason is that India and emerging markets are now growing very fast and several Indian customers have now become as sophisticated as the rest of the world. Plus many of its global customers like Cisco and Microsoft now have big plans for India and emerging markets.

Bottomline :

If Paul was the highest paid Indian executive during that time, drawing around Rs 1.9 crore in salaries and Rs 4.9 crore in commission and incentives [apart from stock options for his colleagues ], Wipro must have save helluvalot during these 2 years

Besides, Azim Premji also proved that they don't need a top man at the helm. On the other hand, Paul had done a good job, that he didn't need a successor for sometime as the company would run on itself for sometime

So the bottomline is that Azim saved Rs.14 crores apart from incentives [which must have been quite a bit, so much so that Azim has enough stored up to hire a new guy !

Good management !
.

Boeing says unaware of Dreamliner delay after story

2008-04-21T06:47:00.000+05:30

News Blog FRANKFURT:

Boeing said on Sunday the Federal Aviation Administration has not informed the company of a certification delay of its Dreamliner jet after a report in German magazine Focus that the project could be pushed back by another three to six months.

Focus, which said it obtained the information from within the regulatory body, reported that the first orders will now be delivered at the end of 2009 or the start of 2010.

The German magazine said the reason for the delay was a delay in certification by the FAA. In response, Boeing spokeswoman Yvonne Leach said, "The FAA has been overseeing our certification effort every step of the way and this is not our understanding."

Earlier this month, Boeing delayed its 787 Dreamliner for the third time, pushing the program about 15 months behind schedule, as it makes slow progress on assembling the revolutionary carbon-composite plane and continues to grapple with underperforming suppliers.

When it announced the delay earlier this month, Boeing said the first 787 delivery, to Japan's All Nippon Airways Co would now take place in the third quarter of 2009. Its previous target was early 2009. The first 787 delivery was originally planned for May 2008.

My Technorati Profile

2008-04-20T09:01:00.001+05:30

Technorati Profile

Recently started to use the services of technocrati as one of my friends suggested me to have a Technorati Profile.

Technorati Profile as its a good website for bloggers. It gives all information on blogging and lets you to publish content and get famous amongst millions of other technocrati users. So watch my Technorati Profile and help me be famous too.

Thanks

Wait till it gets bigger !

2008-04-16T07:21:00.000+05:30

It is always a source for curiosity....

Your First Time

2008-04-14T09:28:00.000+05:30

It's your first time.

As you lie back your muscles tighten.

You put him off for a while searching for an excuse, but he refuses to be swayed as he approaches you.

He asks if you're afraid and you shake your head bravely.

He has had more experience, but it's the first time his finger has found the right place.

He probes deeply and you shiver; your body tenses; but he's gentle like he promised he'd be.

He looks deeply within your eyes and tells you to trust him - he's done this many times before.

His cool smile relaxes you and you open wider to give him more room for an easy entrance.

You begin to plead and beg him to hurry, but he slowly takes his time, wanting to cause you as little pain as possible.

As he presses closer, going deeper, you feel the tissue give way; pain surges throughout your body and you feel the slight trickle of blood as he continues.

He looks at you concerned and asks you if it's too painful.

Your eyes are filled with tears but you shake your head and nod for him to go on.

He begins going in and out with skill but you are now too numb to feel him within you.

After a few moments, you feel something bursting within you and he pulls it out of you, you lay panting, glad to have it over.

He looks at you and smiling warmly, tells you, with a chuckle; that you have been his most stubborn yet most rewarding experience.

You smile and thank your dentist.

After all, it was your first time to have a tooth pulled out .......

For those of you who had ''sex and orgasm'' in their minds - shame on you !!

Don't worry, your time will come !

The two nuns

2008-04-10T09:27:00.001+05:30

There were two nuns.

One of them is known as Sister Mathematical (SM) and the other one is known as Sister Logical (SL).

It was getting dark and they are still far away from the convent.

SM: Have you noticed that a man has been following us for the past thirty-eight and a half minutes? I wonder what he wants.

SL: It’s logical. He wants to rape us.

SM: Oh, no! At this rate he will reach us in 15 minutes at the most. What can we do?

SL: The only logical thing to do of course is to walk faster.

SM: It’s not working!

SL: Of course it’s not working. The man did the only logical thing. He started to walk faster too.

SM: So, what shall we do? At this rate he will reach us in one minute.

SL: The only logical thing we can do is split. You go that way and I’ll go this way. He cannot follow us both.

So the man decided to follow Sister Logical. Sister Mathematical arrives at the convent and is worried what has happened to Sister Logical. Then Sister Logical arrives.

SM: Sister Logical! Thank the lord you are here! Tell me what happened!

SL: The only logical thing happened. The man couldn’t follow us both, so he followed me.

SM: Yes, yes! But what happened then?

SL: The only logical thing happened. I started to run as fast as I could and he started to run as fast as he could.

SM: And?

SL: The only logical thing happened. He reached me....

SM: What did you do?

SL: The only logical thing to do. I lifted my dress up....

SM: Oh, Sister! What did the man do?

SL: The only logical thing to do. He pulled down his pants....

SM: Oh, no! What happened then?

SL: Isn’t it logical, Sister? A nun with her dress up can run faster than a man with his pants down........

And those of you who thought it would be dirty, Pray for forgiveness.

Sonimagfoto Camera Commercial

2008-04-07T09:25:00.000+05:30

Sonimagfoto - rises to any occassion

Great Commercial. But apparently it appears to be banned.

A Not-So-Rosie View

2008-04-04T19:41:00.001+05:30

AMD rolls out Phenom chips

2008-03-30T18:29:00.001+05:30

AMD on Wednesday unveiled new microprocessors for the desktop PC market, in a move that could sharpen its competitive edge against rival Intel.

Among the chips in AMD's Phenom family of processors is one that has three cores, compared with the two or four most generally available. AMD said that its Phenom X3 has as much as a 30 percent performance improvement in some instances over a dual-core chip operating at the same frequency.

AMD first disclosed plans to make the Phenom X3 in 2007, saying then that it was able to build a three-core chip because the cores are on the same piece of silicon, rather than two or four cores on different pieces of silicon joined together.

The company had a difficult 2007 as its full-year loss swelled to $3.38bn (£1.68bn) from a net loss of $166m in 2006. Partly to blame was a design problem with its Barcelona server chip, which AMD said was key to regaining its competitive edge against Intel.

The processors announced on Wednesday are aimed principally at the mainstream PC market, but also include a high-end Phenom Black Edition chip that video gamers can easily speed up themselves, a process known as overclocking, an analyst said.

"AMD is increasingly focused on the mainstream PC market and I think they will be quite competitive there," said analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group.

AMD has improved its execution so far in 2008, said Patrick Moorhead, a marketing vice president at AMD, pointing to new graphics chips from ATI, a chipmaker it bought, and a new chipset that he said was receiving strong reviews.

"I think we're on a little bit of a roll here," Moorhead said. "2008 is a much better year for us."

He said the new processors from AMD are particularly well suited to applications like editing and watching high-definition video, multimedia and gaming.

PCs using the processors will be available later this week or next week, Moorhead said, and will be available online by late Wednesday.

Semel gives up Yahoo CEO title to Jerry Yang

2008-03-30T18:14:00.001+05:30

Terry Semel ended his six-year run as Yahoo's CEO on Monday, and the company's co-founder Jerry Yang will take over from him, the company said.

Semel has been the focus of intense criticism in the past two years due to Yahoo's inability to capitalize as much as expected on the fast-growing market for search engine advertising. By contrast, Google has enjoyed eye-popping revenue growth and enviable profits almost exclusively from the search advertising market.

By moving Yang into Semel's position, Yahoo gets a CEO of the caliber of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who can match Google's triumvirate of engineers, said Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst, referring to Google's CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders and presidents Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

"I always felt that the best CEO for Yahoo already worked there: Jerry Yang," Weiner said. "He is far and away the best choice they could have made."

Last week, at Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting, Semel fielded stinging criticism from shareholders in attendance, leading to tense exchanges at times.

Semel resigned from his position as CEO and chairman and will become the role of non-executive chairman and serve as advisor to the management team.

Semel became chairman and CEO in May 2001.

Previously, Semel spent 24 years at Warner Bros., where he was chairman and co-CEO. Prior to his Warner Bros. stint, he led Walt Disney's Theatrical Distribution division and CBS' Theatrical Distribution division.

Semel was brought in primarily to create a bridge between the Hollywood entertainment industry and Yahoo, which never happened as originally envisioned, Weiner said. "That strategy didn't work," he said.

Because Yang is an engineer who fully understands the Internet market and Yahoo's business, Weiner predicts the company troops will rally behind him. "This is a seminal event in the history of Yahoo," Weiner said.

The board of directors appointed Yang, who cofounded the company 12 years ago, as CEO, and Susan Decker, former executive vice president and head of Advertiser and Publisher Group, as the company's president.

This change is something that the market obviously wanted, according to industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence. When he joined Yahoo, Semel helped bring the company back from the brink, but recently he seemed to have lost the magic touch he had earlier.

"If Yahoo had another lackluster quarter, the chorus of calls for Semel's resignation would have gotten louder. This might be seen as a preemptive move by Semel," Sterling said. The question that remains is whether this executive change will have the desired effects, he said.

In a webcast, Semel said he had told the board that he wanted to step back from his executive role "sooner rather than later" and that he and the board agreed this would be a good time for him to step down as CEO.

"I've long been talking to the board about the importance of ensuring a smooth succession to Yahoo's senior leadership," Semel said.

Semel expressed full confidence that Yang and Decker are the right people to carry Yahoo "through its multiyear transformation" while acknowledging that the past year has been a difficult one for Yahoo and that no one in Yahoo's management has been satisfied with the company's performance.

Decker and Yang both said during the webcast that they are confident Yahoo will meet its current revenue forecasts, issued in April, and attain long-term success.

The company's new search advertising platform, Panama, is yielding financial results above expectations and as such offsetting a slowdown in display advertising, they said.

"I believe Yahoo has all the assets it takes to win, and we're well positioned to do that," Yang said.

A major structural reorganization of the company launched in December under Semel's watch has had the expected results so far, Decker said. It's now easier to make major business decisions, she said, citing as examples the recent closure of Yahoo's underperforming U.S. online auction business and the streamlining of the photo business under the Flickr service and the forthcoming closure of Yahoo Photos.

Another reorganization result is the creation of a business unit for the team in charge of Yahoo's home page, which she said has given that team more independence and yielded a better product.

Likewise, the video efforts are being unified and given common objectives, leading to a better user experience and more effective advertising efforts, she said.

Decker, who was the company's CFO for seven years, said she and Yang are confident that Yahoo will be able to address the deceleration in the display advertising business with its acquisition of Right Media, announced in April.

While Yahoo has traditionally been strong in sales of premium display and graphical ads, Right Media will boost its ability to sell non-premium ad inventory via a real-time marketplace that brings together advertisers and publishers, she said.

Article Courtesy : Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service, Jun 19, 2007

Microsoft helps nab piracy ring

2008-03-27T18:35:00.001+05:30

SEATTLE -

Microsoft is telling the tale of a major software piracy investigation that weaved through 22 countries, hoping would-be pirates will think twice if they know how far the company will go to protect its computer code worth billions in revenue each quarter.

Near-perfect knockoffs of 21 different Microsoft programs began surfacing around the world just over a decade ago. Soon, PCs in more than a dozen countries were running illegal copies of Windows and Office, turning unwitting consumers into criminals and, Microsoft says, exposing them to increased risk of malicious viruses and spyware.
The case began to turn in 2001 when U.S. Customs officers seized a shipping container in Los Angeles filled with $100 million in fake software, including 31,000 copies of the Windows operating system.

From there, Microsoft pushed the investigation through 22 countries. Local law enforcement officials seized software, equipment and records, and made arrests. A court in Taiwan handed down the last of the major sentences in December. Microsoft estimates the retail value of the software the operation generated at $900 million.

"That is a tremendous accomplishment," said James Spertus, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who later led anti-piracy efforts for the Motion Picture Association of America. "There are only going to be a few cases like this a decade."

Now Microsoft is eager to talk about the experience because taking down that operation — responsible for about 90 percent of the fake software the company found between 1999 and 2004, more than 470,000 disks — didn't actually stop piracy. It just left room for more counterfeiters to rise. Microsoft hopes would-be pirates will think twice if they know how far it will go to protect the computer code worth billions in revenue each quarter.

The pirates mimicked complex holograms stamped directly onto disks and packaging materials embedded with the kind of tiny safety threads used in making money. In some cases, it took experts with microscopes to notice that disks printed with codes used by legitimate software factories lacked certain minuscule, unique smudges.

"The copies were so good, we went to tremendous forensic and scientific lengths to establish that the counterfeits were, in fact, counterfeits," said David Finn, an associate general counsel at Microsoft.

Without a solid lead on the source, Microsoft continued to gather string. Members of its 80-person worldwide anti-piracy team made test buys to see if retailers were selling fake disks, knowingly or unwittingly, and worked leads back up the black-market supply chain.

The seizure of the container in Los Angeles led to Taiwan, where the Ministry of Justice raided Chungtek Hightech, recovering an estimated $100 million more in software and equipment. Months later, Taipei city police and the criminal investigations branch of the national police hit Cinway Technology, a related manufacturer in the same industrial complex, seizing another $126 million in phony software. Records found there led to a packing, storage and shipping center in China's Guangdong province, and back to distributor Maximus Technology in Taiwan.

Finally, in 2007, the owner and operator of Chungtek and Cinway, Chen Bi-ching, was sentenced in Taiwan to four years in prison, while her two co-defendants received jail terms of three years and one year. And the distribution outfit's owner, Huang Jer-sheng, was sentenced to four years in prison. In China, the Public Security Bureau raided the packing and shipping company, Zhang Sheng Electronics, and Li Jian, the manager, was sentenced to three years in 2004.

Matching the Taiwanese counterfeits to copies found around the world, Microsoft gave law enforcement agencies ammunition for raids and criminal cases in the U.S., the U.K., Italy, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Australia, Paraguay and Poland. Dozens of big distributors, middlemen and retailers were convicted, including 35 people in the U.S.

One was Lisa Chen, who according to a Customs press release arrived at the scene of the 2001 shipping container bust with additional counterfeit software in her vehicle. Chen was prosecuted by the Los Angeles district attorney's office as a major U.S. distributor of the Taiwan fakes and received a nine-year prison term in November 2002. She
has since been released, according to her lawyer at the time.

Microsoft would not say how much it spent on the investigation or how many counterfeit copies of Windows, Office and other programs were found in use on consumer or business PCs.

Spertus, the former federal prosecutor, said the burden is often on the company holding the brand to travel the world collecting evidence, doing undercover work and coordinating with law enforcement agencies.

Few companies are willing to devote serious resources to anti-piracy enforcement, especially because the return is hard to prove. People who buy counterfeit software aren't likely to have paid retail prices anyway, Spertus said. But a big bust adds significant weight to lobbying efforts for stricter international intellectual property laws.

After the Taiwan raids, the number of high-end Microsoft counterfeits dropped — but only for a while. A Chinese operation that stepped in to meet the worldwide demand for cut-rate software cranked out an estimated $2 billion in copies before it was brought down in July after a six-year investigation by the FBI and China's Public Security Bureau.

Today, sophisticated copies of Windows Vista and other programs continue to appear. "I don't for a minute think that the final chapters have been written," Finn said

BSNL repays Rs 3,000-cr Govt loan

2008-03-23T13:07:00.000+05:30

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has paid Rs 3,000 crore to the Government as repayment of notional loan of Rs 7,500 crore.

This notional Government loan was transferred to BSNL as a part of capital structure without any additional cash inflow from the Government at the time of corporatisation of erstwhile Department of Telecom Services.

BSNL has already paid a sum of Rs 2,000 crore and Rs 2,500 crore as repayment of loan in the year 2005-06 and 2006-07, respectively. BSNL has also paid an interim dividend of Rs 300 crore in the current financial year to the Government.

“BSNL is one of the largest contributors to Government exchequer in 2006-07 by contributing more than Rs 12,800 crore in the form of dividend, licence fee, corporate tax, service tax, repayment of loan and so on. In the current financial year 2007-08, BSNL is estimated to contribute more than Rs 13,000 crore to the Government exchequer.

“In the last five years, BSNL has contributed more than Rs 50,000 crore in the form of various levies, duties, taxes despite carrying out various social obligations such as provision of telephones to rural, tribal and remotely located inaccessible areas,” said a press release.

The company is proposing to make investment of more than Rs 10,000 crore for expansion of telecom network in the current financial year.

Holey Moly

2008-03-21T22:06:00.000+05:30

There is a girl walking up the stairs in a church one day. As the priest is walking by, he looks up and notices that this girl is not wearing any panties.

The Priest calls the girl and gives her $20 and says, "Little girl, take this money and buy yourself some panties. It's not proper to walk around without any panties on."

The girl goes home and gives the money to her mother and asks her mother to buy panties for her. When the mother asks where the girl got the money, the girl explained what happened.

Upon hearing how the girl got the money, the mother rushes to her room, whips off her panties, and puts on one of her shortest dresses and runs out to the church.

As soon as the mother sees the priest coming, she begins to walk up the stairs. The priest then notices the lady and calls her down.

The woman not wanting to show that she is expecting anything, walks back to the priest very calmly.

The priest hands the lady $1 and says... "Lady, take this money and for God's sake, go buy yourself a razor!"

Smart City accorded SEZ status

2008-03-21T08:04:00.001+05:30

KOCHI: The Smart City project received a shot in the arm on Thursday with the Board of Approval for Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of the Union government awarding SEZ status to it.

A meeting of the Board in New Delhi, chaired by Union Commerce Secretary G.K. Pillai, accorded SEZ status to 136 acres of the 236 acres earmarked for the project. The promoters will have to make a fresh application for SEZ status for the remaining 100 acres.

The Board took the decision partially because the entire 236 acres could not be treated as a single entity since the 100 acres acquired from the Kerala State Electricity Board is separated from the rest of the land by a water body. The decision also allays fears regarding waiver of registration fee (Rs.2 crore) and stamp duty (Rs.10 crore) for the project. The State government might no longer have any problem in waiving these fees paving the way for the registration of the lease agreement. The registration had been in limbo over the indecision regarding waiver of duties.

“Now there are no legal hurdles in waiving off registration and stamp duties,” S. Sarma, Fisheries and Registration Minister, who is also the Chairman of Smart City Kochi, told The Hindu.

Apprehensions that the promoters of the project would have to pay a hefty penalty for registration since the mandatory four-month period within which the agreement was supposed to be registered had expired on March 15 had also been laid to rest.

Big boost

This is a vital decision and would give the project a big boost, Ajay Kumar, State Information Secretary, who was in Delhi to attend the meeting, told The Hindu over the telephone. Three complaints regarding acquisition of land for the project came up before the meeting. The Board, however, was satisfied with the explanation that all stipulated procedures were followed in the acquisition process, Mr. Kumar said.

The last meeting of the Board set aside the application for SEZ status to the project for want of clarification from the State government over a complaint of forceful land acquisition.

This time, the officials made sure that no such scenario was repeated.

Once the minutes of the meeting are drafted, the Development Commissioner of Kochi SEZ would inspect the land which had been granted SEZ status and submit a report to the Union government. On receipt of the report, the Centre would issue necessary notification proclaiming the SEZ status. The promoters could go ahead with the initial constructions, like setting up an office, as soon as the notification is issued.

"Network of opportunities" – reads a signboard put up on the way leading to the site of the Smart City project.

That pretty much sums up the excitement surrounding the project.

Gold Falls After Fed Rate Cut

2008-03-21T07:30:00.000+05:30

Gold futures plunged Tuesday, retreating from $1,000 territory despite an aggressive U.S. interest rate cut that boosted other commodities.

Other futures rose broadly, with crude oil, copper and agriculture futures all trading higher.

The Federal Reserve slashed a key interest rate by three-fourths of a percentage point in a bid to free up locked credit markets and kick-start the U.S. economy. The move lowered the federal funds rate to 2.25 percent, the lowest level since in more than three years. Still, many investors had predicted a full point cut.

Gold for April delivery rose $1.70 to settle at $1,004.30 on the New York Mercantile Exchange but pulled back nearly $25 after the Fed’s decision. The metal fetched $978.20 an ounce in aftermarket trading, down $24.40.

Gold investors are “taking some money off the table,” George Gero, vice president of RBC Capital Markets Global Futures in New York, said in a note. “But with the energy rally and weaker dollar, we have to assume setbacks in gold are still buying opportunities at the moment.”

Though some analysts warn gold is due for a correction, others say it could still move higher first due to economic worries, record high crude prices and a tumbling dollar. Gold is traditionally viewed as safe-haven investment during times of economic uncertainty and rising inflation.

The dollar strengthened slightly after the Fed’s move, further prompting investors to sell gold. The euro traded at $1.5640 in Tuesday afternoon trading, down from a record-high reached earlier in the day of $1.5831.

The greenback’s decline versus the 15-nation euro has been a major driver of gold, which gained 31 percent last year and 18 percent so far this year. A falling dollar encourages buying of gold because the metal is known for holding its value. A weaker greenback also makes dollar-denominated commodities like gold cheaper for overseas buyers.

Other precious metals traded mixed Tuesday. Silver for May delivery fell 34 cents to settle at $19.96 an ounce on the Nymex, while May copper added 6.15 cents to settle at $3.7465 a pound.

In energy markets, oil prices rose as investors bought futures after the Fed’s rate cut.

Light, sweet crude for April delivery rose $3.74 to settle at $109.42 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Monday, oil prices fell by $4.53 a barrel on fears the buyout of failing investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. signaled a widening of economic woes.

Other energy futures also rose. April heating oil futures rose 6.95 cents to settle at $3.1379 a gallon while April gasoline futures rose 15.58 cents to settle at $2.66 a gallon.

In agriculture markets, wheat and corn futures rebounded a day after falling the maximum-allowed limit on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Wheat for May delivery rose 32.5 cents to settle at $11.64 a bushel on the CBOT, while May corn climbed 8 cents to settle at $5.4725 a bushel. Soybeans, meanwhile rose 4.25 cents to settle at $13.07 a bushel.

Obama’s Song

2008-03-17T08:41:00.002+05:30

Since he appears to be the Messiahnic [hope there is such a word] candidate of 2008, Barack Hussein Obama deserves his own song. Hope this stolen one suffices

I am Barack Obama,
a man of mystery.
I want to be your President;
you can rely on me.
-
I promise to raise taxes,
but only on the rich.
Don’t worry that I’ll change my mind;
it’s not a bait and switch! (wink)
-
I’ll make the war in Iraq be over.
The terrorists will win.
That’s nothing for you to fret about;
I know Osama is our friend.
-
I’m going to fix our economy,
even though it isn’t broke.
Relax, the Government can do it all.
Capitalism is a joke.
-
I’m a clean well spoken black man,
with nothing much to say.
Ain’t it grand that the liberal press
don’t get in my way?
-
I’ll be a fabulous leader.
I’m handsome and quite tall.
While I have no talent for decisions,
the UN can make them all.
-
So blindly buy my speeches,
fall under my spell.
Let me run the Country,
and I’ll lead us straight to Hell!

With due apologies to OB ....... hope he takes it in the right sense and he should at least make a diversion to paradise.....

With best wishes....

Sri Lanka arrests five journalists

2008-03-12T13:35:00.000+05:30

Authorities in Sri Lanka have detained five mostly ethnic minority Tamil journalists, a media activist group said yesterday, days after Colombo came in for intense criticism over its rights record. Five journalists, all linked to a liberal news site, outreachsl.com, were taken in for questioning over the weekend while some have been detained under tough emergency laws, the Free Media Movement (FMM) said.

"We hope that due process will be followed regarding the arrested writers and journalists, " the FMM said, expressing its concern over the latest government crackdown against journalists.

FMM official Sunanda Deshapriya said his group's spokesman, Tamil journalist S. Sivakumar, had also been detained for 12 hours and later freed by the police Terrorist Investigation Division.

International media rights activists have described Sri Lanka as one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists due to a worsening climate of violence and unofficial censorship.

Killings and attacks against journalists remained unsolved leading to fears that media freedom is being deliberately and violently suppressed through threats, abductions and attacks, a team of media activists said last year. Since August 2005, 11 media workers have been killed in Sri Lanka.

Ten of them were killed in government-controlled areas and no one has been brought to justice in connection with the deaths. Sri Lanka is pressing for a military victory over Tamil Tiger rebels and a series of tit-for-tat clashes have left heavy casualties on both
sides.

On Thursday the New York-based pressure group Human Rights Watch accused the island's government of being "one of the world's worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances, " and called for tough United Nations monitoring. The same day a team of top legal luminaries also announced they were pulling out of the war-torn nation because Colombo had failed to seriously investigate a string of high-profile rights cases, including the massacre of 17 local employees of a French charity.

Bits And Pieces

2008-03-08T14:19:00.000+05:30

Kevin Landers has a retrospective of his photo work since 1990 at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in Chelsea, in conjunction with a his solo show at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (to which my wife and I have lent one of his best pictures, Man with a Shopping Cart).

What is it about the random delights of Kevin Landers that I have always found so appealing? He is an archeologist of the living Lower East Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood that continues to defy, albeit less and less successfully, cookie-cutter gentrification. To Kevin, the bodega is a museum: The arrangements of foodstuffs passing through for sale amuse him profoundly. He sees poetry in a broom sweeping sludge or a crushed dirty coffee cup, reading "I Love New York." Reminiscent of Cartier-Bresson in the Paris of the ‘30s, Landers’ camera emits rays of love, while his hand gathers junk to be transformed into toys of art.

In the past, Kevin has manufactured boom boxes from cardboard and racks of potato chips from Styrofoam. His photography is in a continuum with this conceptual fabrication. I am particularly drawn to the fragile dignity of his old men, emerging from the street like so many crabs on the shoreline. His fruits and vegetables also look like rare jewels.

His erotic snaps, meant to titillate like the prostitutes in Brassai, seem less necessary to me, for Landers’ purpose is one of conservation and memory, a traveler in small places that are always ignored by the high and mighty. He is a tickler, not a masturbator.

I am always surprised when others love Landers’ pieces as much as I do, at a time when artists are taking the weight of the world on their shoulders and often turning it into heavy bricks of doom. The critic Bridget Goodbody strongly endorsed Kevin’s show at a panel we did the other night, a pleasant surprise.

For, in rummaging through what is familiar in old low Manhattan, Kevin Landers unveils the light of the world.

Kevin Landers, "Photographs 1990-2007," Apr. 6-May 7, 2007, at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, 545 W. 20th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011

CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).