oNcE AGaIn !!!!!!!!!!! " INdiAn StuDEnt ShOT DeAd "

(TRIBUNE)

LONDON: An Indian student was shot dead Monday in Manchester, northern England, by a white man, police said, announcing an investigation.


Anuj Bidve, 23, was murdered in the early hours as he walked with friends from his hotel in Salford, an area to the west of Manchester, towards the city centre.
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) called it an “awful” and “unprovoked” attack and vowed their investigation would “leave no stone unturned”.
“This is a tragic incident and our first thoughts are for the family,” said chief superintendent Kevin Mulligan.
“There is going to be a huge amount of concern in the community and I can reassure the family and the community by telling them we have launched a major investigation and no stone will be left unturned until we find the people who are responsible for this.”
When asked if the murder could have a racial motivation, Mulligan said: “We are investigating every possible aspect.”
Bidve, who was studying a micro-electronics postgraduate qualification at Lancaster University, around 40 miles from Manchester, was enjoying a short break in the city with eight friends.
The group was stopped by a man who spoke to them before shooting Bidve at close range.
Mulligan urged the killer, described as a white man in his 20s, to surrender himself to the police as soon as possible.
Bidve’s family in India has been informed.

BhaGwAd GitA's sALes go uP afTer RuSSia cOntrOversy

 (THE TIMES OF INDIA)


The Bhagwad Gita is a bestseller, controversy or no controversy. The holy book notches up steady sales through the year. In the last financial year, for instance, Gita Press, Gorakhpur, one of the major publishers of the ancient Hindu scripture, sold around six lakh copies of Gita in 13 languages.


Bookshop owners in the city maintain that the Gita sells throughout the year. They have also noticed a small rise in the sales since the controversy erupted late last week. "Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Oriya, Nepali - the book sells steadily in each of the languages we publish. Gita is a manual for life. Those who filed the case against it in Russia probably did not understand it," B B Tripathi, chief account officer in the book sales department, Gita Press, Gorakhpur told TOI over phone.


Mirza Afsar Baig of the Midland bookstore in the city's Aurobindo Marg has been selling books for over two decades.


"The controversies that crop up around books never cease to amaze me. I've sold over 60 copies of Swami Chinmayananda's The Holy Geeta in the last two days alone. There was a similar interest in Salman Rushdie after his Satanic Verses was banned," says Baig. There was also a rise in interest in books on the Prophet Mohammad and Islam after a US pastor threatened to burn copies of the Koran on the 9/11 anniversary last year, he says.


The city's International Society for Krishna Consciousness ( ISKCON) reported no spurt in sales. However, the organization is confident that the controversy will get more people interested in the subject.

In June this year, the state prosecutor's office in the Russian city of Tomsk, Siberia, filed a petition asking for a ban on the Gita, interpreting it as war-mongering, extremist literature.

Anna finds "virtue in political class " !!!!

(HINDUSTAN TIMES)

Let me at the very outset confess that I was impressed by Anna Hazare’s latest show of protest. There was a certain variety to the debate. One didn’t feel being shepherded in the direction chosen by the organizers.

What made the exchange doubly meaningful was the acceptance by Anna and his core team of the supremacy of Parliament and the value of our multi-party democracy. They shed their distrust of the politicos to co-opt the collective Opposition for a full-throated attack on the ruling coalition they charged with prevarication on the Lokpal issue.

From being anti-politician, the Anna campaign has turned anti-Congress, triggering suspicion about its agenda when the government lacks an overwhelming majority in the House. So much so that Mamata Banerjee was urged to break her silence to lend support to the cause the way she helped scuttle FDI in multi-brand retail.

Coming back to Anna’s bid to rope in political parties, Kiran Bedi who incurred the disapproval of many for her Ramlila maidan caricature of the neta biradari, was subdued and discreet. But not Arvind Kejriwal, who launched into his usual act of leading others by the nose. His unilateralism invited rebuff from the CPI’s A B Bardhan and the BJP’s Arun Jaitley—who said the legislation’s fine print be left to Parliament.

The BJP leader dittoed Bardhan, who had earlier chided Anna’s supporters for their wholesale derision of the political class while claiming to be the “sole repository of wisdom and honesty.” Perceived by many as autocratic and intolerant, Kejriwal heard them without demur. It didn’t make sense from his standpoint to lock horns with the Opposition lineup that supported broadly the Jan Lokpal version to make the PM, the CBI and the lower bureaucracy accountable to the proposed Ombudsman. There was no unanimity on the judiciary and the MPs’ conduct in the House. A measure of Anna’s success was the presence on the stage of the initially skeptical JD (U) chief Sharad Yadav. The attraction was two-way; Anna needing political support in the last lap in Parliament and Opposition parties eyeing electoral gains by associating with the anti-corruption movement.

It would be interesting to watch whether their support for the legislation is rooted in political expediency or principled commitment? In this limited sense, the civil society, if its agenda solely is to have a strong Lokpal, will need to guard against any deliberate Opposition ploy to embarrass the UPA for electoral gains in the impending polls through non-passage of the Bill.

The way Kejriwal sought to embarrass Aruna Roy’s representative Nikhil Dey — who argued that police be strengthened rather than excluded from the anti-graft architecture —- showed his reluctance to share popular space with other civil society groups. Similarly dismissed by him were concerns over putting together an army of 35,000 honest Lokpal staff.

Such conduct on Kejriwal’s part indicated double-standards. He played the Anna group’s big boss after attacking the ‘high command culture’ that denied individual freedom of action in political parties to even elected representatives.

Be that as it may, the dialogue, as it were, threw up arguments for and against Anna’s demands and tactics. The CPI-M’s Brinda Karat raised issues the anti-graft campaigners were a shade shy of raising: Corporate-instigated corruption and the fears of weaker sections that the Lokpal could become another stick in the hands of socially and economically empowered sections.

Amid the rhetoric, it was left to the CPI’s D Raja to draw attention to parliamentary procedure. He pointed out that the government was expected to come up with a new draft bill (in place of the one brought earlier and rejected by Anna’s team and the Opposition) on receipt of the parliamentary standing committee’s report, very much part of which are dissenting notes by 17 of the 28 members. Like many others, he urged Anna to show flexibility and not insist that his draft on the proposed institution was unalterable.

The battle now has shifted to Parliament, the only forum with powers to legislate. The occasion will simultaneous be the Congress’s last opportunity to come clean in the fight against corruption.

AsHiSh's WorLd: Discovery of Earth-like planet "thrilling"

AsHiSh's WorLd: Discovery of Earth-like planet "thrilling": (CBS News) Scientists looking for life on other planets like to talk about the "Goldilocks Zone" -- not too hot, not too cold, but just r...

Discovery of Earth-like planet "thrilling"

(CBS News)  Scientists looking for life on other planets like to talk about the "Goldilocks Zone" -- not too hot, not too cold, but just right.
Now, researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., have found a planet -- Kepler-22b -- that's right in that zone.


NASA finding feeds talk of a new Earth


But don't pack your bags just yet. If you traveled at the speed of light, it would take 600 years to get there.


However the news is still exciting stuff for experts such as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History.
The discovery, Tyson said on "The Early Show," is thrilling because of the potential for life on the planet. He explained, "In the catalogs of planets that we now have, this is the first time we've had an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone with a star. ... We're kind of biased: We're looking for life as we know it. You can imagine, I suppose, that there is life on something other than water, but that's kind of -- we don't know how to get a handle on that. We do have a handle on life -- every place there's water on Earth, there's life -- even the Dead Sea. They called it the Dead Sea because they didn't see fish. But you pull out your microscope and there's microbes everywhere on Earth."


However, it isn't likely humans are going to be guests on Kepler-22b anytime soon, particularly because our current technology has its limitations. "It's not close," Tyson said. "(With) our fastest spacecraft today, it would take something like 300,000 years to get there. ... Probably even longer."


What's the next realistic step for researchers, now that the planet's been found?


"You build the catalog of these planets that could have life," Tyson said. "Now you have a second round of observations to try to see the atmosphere, to see if the atmosphere has bio-markers for thriving life on its surface. Then you say, 'Well, if you ever have the chance to go somewhere or to target telescopes to listen for intelligent life, those will be at the top of the list."'