J&K sex scandal: Omar Abdullah Quits
Jul 31, 2009 News & Events
rinagar—Two days after Omar Abdullah tendered his ‘conditional’ resignation and offered to step down as Chief Minister of the state, Governor NN Vohra Thursday rejected his offer and asked him to continue, saying “there is no basis for Abdullah seeking to resign.”
On July 28, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah tendered his resignation to Governor asking him to verify allegations levered by senior PDP leaders about his involvement in the sex scam of 2006 before accepting his resignation.
In furtherance to the allegations levelled against the Chief Minister in the Legislative Assembly and the letter that Omar Abdullah had presented on 28th July, the Governor has had the matter inquired into through the Union Ministry of Home Affairs,” an official spokesman here told Press Bureau of India.
The Governor, N. N. Vohra has advised the Chief Minister that, based on the information supplied to him by the Union Home Ministry, there is no basis for Abdullah seeking to resign,” the statement said, adding, “Accordingly the Governor advised the Chief Minister to most vigorously devote himself to discharge responsibilities of Chief Minister, Jammu and Kashmir.”
Omar Abdullah stayed away from the office for the second consecutive day Thursday, awaiting the orders from the governor.
Supporters continued to throng his residence at Gopkar here to persuade him to reconsider his decision to step down.
Tags: Omar Abdullah
karachi Accident
Jul 31, 2009 News & Events, Pakistan
KARACHI: A 48-year-old man, his doctor wife and their two sons were killed on Thursday when a truck towing a container-mounted trailer overturned and crushed their stationary car near the ICI bridge intersection, witnesses and police said.
The witnesses said that the truck (AP-5369), coming from the Jinnah bridge and moving in its high-speed lane, mounted the traffic island and rammed into an electric pole before it overturned and its empty container landed on the grey Honda City car (AFT-360), killing all its occupants.
The crash also uprooted the electric pole. They said that the fast-moving trailer overturned after its driver lost control of his heavy vehicle in a bid to avoid a pothole on the road and the container fell on the victims’ car, which was halted at the intersection and waiting for the traffic policeman’s signal to move ahead.
Adam Khan Leghari, an MBA from the United States with landholding in Hyderabad, along with his sons, Mohammad Saris Leghari, 12, and Mohammad Ahmed Leghari, 8, was going to drop his wife, Dr Asma Leghari, to her workplace, a government dispensary at Mauripur, when the family met with the fatal accident.
The truck driver, identified as Abdul Shakoor, son of Mohammad Hussain, immediately fled the scene. However, the police arrested him at a nearby place on a tip-off.
A large number of people gathered at the spot as two forklift trucks raised the heavy container and the smashed car was dragged from under it.
Tags: karachi Accident
Pictured: Incredible watercolour paintings by boy aged just SIX
Jul 31, 2009 News & Events
A street scene from the paintbrush of a child usually involves triangle-topped boxes for houses. And often an unnaturally large dog.
But Kieron Williamson’s attempts are so beautifully rendered that artists ten times his age will be filled with envy.
Experts have said that the six-year-old’s atmospheric paintings, which began with harbour scenes and expanded to include rural vistas, animal portraits and landmarks, have perspective, shadow and reflections that demonstrate an ability well beyond his years.
He is even preparing for his first exhibition in a gallery near his home in Holt, Norfolk.
His mother, Michelle, said: ‘Until last year he didn’t draw anything and in fact we had to draw dinosaurs for him to colour in.
The turning point was when we took our first family holiday to Devon and Cornwall last May and he liked the boats and scenery. He asked for some plain paper and started drawing his own stuff.
Tags: 6 year old, paintings
Twitter launches new-look homepage, focused on search and trends
Jul 31, 2009 Technology
![[twitter_home.png]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_E8ZD85Wzu9E/Sm9ld1UZd4I/AAAAAAAAAng/ssaWJsOXFX0/s1600/twitter_home.png)
witter has overnight released its new homepage for Twitter.com, now featuring a prominent search box and a list of all current Twitter trends.
The new page, which is less cluttered and has more of a web 2.0 feel to it than the previous version, was launched overnight with Biz Stone, Twitter’s CEO, saying that the new look will hopefully make it easier for new people to the service to experience the power of the site.
Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved.
Many believe the new style is hinting to Google and other search engines the real power behind Twitter and real-time updates, with a new search box dominating the centre of the screen. Trends now also are highlighted on the main page, allowing you to see the most popular topics right now, over the day and over the past week.
The open and timely exchange of information will have a positive impact on the world and Twitter has a role to play.
Tags: Twitter
Karachi Underpass Snatching
Jul 31, 2009 News & Events
Tags: Crime, karachi, karachi crime, karachin underpass, underpass snatching karachi
How big is the internet?
Jul 30, 2009 Technology
If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep.
NEWS.com.au July 300-2009
THE internet has permeated everything from buying to banking to bonking.
But just how big is it?
Microsoft’s Bing team puts the amount of web pages at “over 1 trillion“.
And Google has already indexed more than one trillion discreet web addresses.
There are more addresses than there are people on Earth. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion.
That means there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world.
Translated: If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep
Bing was more generous with its estimate for those who take more time to read.
“An average person would need six hundred thousand decades of nonstop reading to read through the information,” it said.
Number of users
Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.
“Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet which represents a solid 16 per cent increase from the previous year’s estimate (1.26 billion in 2007),” he told news.com.au.
The largest internet population belongs to China, which claimed this week to have more users online – 338 million – than there were people in the US.
However InternetWorldStats.com (IWS), a website that combines multiple data sources, claims China’s online population is more like 298 million, just a few million shy of overtaking the US population.
“With the rates of India and China still quite low, there is ample room for growth in the coming decade,” Mr Higginson said.
Measuring the online population can be tricky. There are servers, users, per capita numbers, and penetration percentages to evaluate. It’s an epic-scale guessing game using a series of sources to get just one number.
IWS combines data from the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau.
Its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108.
That’s just 23.8 per cent of the estimated 6,0706,993,152 people in the world.
But it changes every day.
“In terms of the future, we anticipate mobile to contribute significantly to internet usage,” Mr Higginson said.
“In the US, the number of people accessing the internet through mobile devices grew 74 per cent between February 2007 and February 2009.”
Wife and mother of terror suspects says FBI tricked her
Jul 30, 2009 News & Events
RALEIGH, North Carolina (CNN) — A woman whose husband and two sons are accused of plotting “violent jihad” overseas said federal authorities tricked her into leaving her home so they could search it.
Sabrina Boyd said Tuesday that she rushed out to a hospital earlier this week after being told her loved ones had been in a serious car accident.
The FBI declined to comment on the allegation.
Boyd’s claims came the day before an eighth suspect in this North Carolina group of alleged terrorism supporters was identified as Jude Kenan Mohammad, a knowledgeable source told CNN Wednesday.
Authorities had said Tuesday that they were seeking an eighth suspect in the case, although they would not identify the person, who is described as a U.S. citizen and North Carolina resident in an indictment.
Seven men already arrested in the case face charges of supporting terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder abroad. They are scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday.
Officials identified three of the men as U.S. native Daniel Patrick Boyd, 39, — who according to the indictment had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan — and Boyd’s sons, Dylan Boyd, 22, also known as “Mohammed,” and Zakariya Boyd, 20.
The four others are: Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan, also a U.S.-born citizen; Hysen Sherifi, identified as a native of Kosovo who is a legal permanent resident of the United States; and Hiyad Yaghi and Anes Subasic, both naturalized U.S. citizens.
Sabrina Boyd, the wife of Daniel Patrick Boyd and the mother of the two younger Boyds, said the allegations against her family are false.
“I know that my husband and my sons are free of guilt,” she told CNN Tuesday. “I’m hopeful that the truth will come to light.”
She said she had not spoken to her husband or to her son Dylan, but had spoken to Zakariya.
“He seemed OK,” she said. “He said, ‘They’re innocent, the truth will come out.’”
Learning about the arrest of her husband and sons had been particularly distressing because of the manner in which she found out, she said.
She said federal authorities sent a person the family knew to her door this week to tell her that her husband and three sons had been sideswiped by a tractor-trailer.
The person was wearing a shirt that appeared to be covered in blood, she said, and told her “it was grave and they were bleeding, and I needed to be rushed immediately to Duke Hospital,” she said.
For Sabrina Boyd, the news was all too familiar: In 2007, her 16-year-old son, Luqman, was killed in a car crash.
“I had already been through this two years prior,” she said.
Tags: FBI, terror suspect
UK poll: Afghan war is ‘unwinnable’
Jul 30, 2009 News & Events, war on terror
AlJazeera
Most Britons believe the war in Afghanistan is “unwinnable” and want troops pulled out, according to a newspaper opinion poll.
Fifty-eight per cent see the offensive against the Taliban as a lost cause, while 52 per cent want the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan, the poll commissioned by the Independent indicated.
The ComRes telephone poll of 1,008 Britons, which was conducted between July 24 and 26, came as the bodies of four British soldiers were flown home to a UK airbase on Tuesday.
The troops were among 22 UK soldiers killed in Afghanistan this month, bringing the total number of service personnel to have died in the conflict since 2001 to 191.
Lacking equipment
About 75 per cent believe British troops lack the equipment they need to perform their role in Afghanistan safely, compared to 16 per cent who think they have adequate resources, the poll said.
However, 60 per cent of those polled do not think more troops and resources should be sent to the front line.
Britain announced on Monday the end of a major offensive against the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan entitled operation “Panther’s Claw”.
Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, who has been forced to defend the country’s Afghan policies as troop casualties soar, said the operation had been a success.
Troops are now beginning the second stage of the operation, attempting to hold the ground gained over recent weeks, ahead of presidential elections in the country next month.
‘Original injuries’
Meanwhile, a debate over injury compensation for British soldiers continued on Tuesday.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has launched a legal appeal against a compensation scheme for the armed forces, a move which could effectively slash awards to two injured soldiers and limit future payments to combat victims.
One of the soldiers, who was shot in Iraq, was paid $75,000, and the other, who was injured in training, received $47,000.
The payouts had been increased after complications but the MoD is arguing that compensation should only be for “original injuries”.
Major David Bradley, a soldier who sustained serious injuries in Iraq, said the compensation awards “are not generous in the first place”.
“To try and claim that any subsequent worsening of their injury is not liable to the MoD is illogical, it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Tags: afghan war, taliban, war on terror
CNG buses in Karachi
Jul 30, 2009 News & Events, Pakistan
Dawn 29 July 2009
Karachi’s transport woes may not end soon but Monday’s introduction of a fleet of new CNG buses is clearly a step in the right direction. Fifty CNG buses will ply the roads in the first phase of the scheme, which the City District Government Karachi has not only financed but will also run, and budgetary provisions have reportedly been made for another 100 vehicles. Several positives can be taken from this development. First there is the additional means of transport which commuters sorely need in a mega city where distances are vast and public transport is wholly inadequate.
Then there is the environmental factor. Overall emissions from CNG vehicles are significantly lower than what their diesel and petrol counterparts produce, and in a city as polluted as Karachi the authorities should consider forcing all public transporters to switch to CNG. That is what happened in New Delhi where pollution levels have fallen dramatically since the law came into effect in 2003. Given honesty of purpose, there is no reason why similar measures cannot be implemented here. A changeover period will be required of course but the cut-off date must be final.
It is also heartening to see the public sector playing a role again in Karachi’s transport system. Many believe that the transporters’ lobby has conspired over the years to keep government-run buses off the roads in Karachi, reducing options for commuters and leaving them at the mercy of private operators. The city government’s CNG venture may be relatively small in size but it marks a healthy change that ought to be encouraged. Now that it has been launched, every effort must be made to ensure the scheme’s long-term success. Much will depend on vehicle maintenance and it is in this area of operations that the CDGK should be particularly vigilant.
