Aishwarya Rai Bachchan's weight in focus again - India

09 aug 2012

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan's weight in focus again

Dr Sanjay Kumar Cardiothoracic Cardiac Heart surgeon India

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is now a working mum. Almost eight months after she gave birth to daughter Aaradhya last year in November, Ash is on her first assignment - a print advertisement for Kalyan Jewellers.

A still from the photoshoot shows Aishwarya, hair tumbling and eyes raised soulfully in a wash of gold, looking significantly thinner than her full faced and figured appearance at the Cannes Film Festival just two months ago. Suspicious, nearly everyone wants to know if the most beautiful woman in the world has been helped out with a little photoshopping.




For the third time this year, Aishwarya's weight has become the focus of conversations about her. "Slimmer Aishwarya back in business," "Aishwarya is thin and back," "Loses weight, looks hot again," - these are just a sample of the headlines Ash has made over the last day or two.

In May, Aishwarya's failure to lose her extra post-pregnancy kilos sparked a public debate after she was photographed leaving a party at the Ambanis' residence looking noticeably heavier than she had in previous pictures. Indignant detractors said she was failing in her job as a superstar. There were also many who jumped to her defence, arguing that superstars were only human and that it was unfair to impose an impossible ideal on Aishwarya.

When the time came for Cannes, all eyes were on Ash. She had clearly not shed the extra pounds. Would she embarrass herself on the red carpet? As it turned out, Aishwarya had the last laugh.




She wore an unforgiving grey Elie Saab on the red carpet with a huge smile and a carefree wave of her hand, unmindful of the fact that the dress clung to every plus size curve. She very obviously couldn't care less. We gave her full marks for sheer attitude and, as she smiled and waved, the message was loud and clear - Aishwarya Rai Bachchan wasn't going to be thin to please anybody else.

Except, perhaps, when she's being paid for it. Photoshop or nor photoshop, Ash must have lost some of the weight to shoot for her new commercial. And the rest of us can talk ourselves blue in the face about whether she's going to lose any more or not - we already know she doesn't care.

Baba Ramdev's second round of indefinite protest to begin today - India

08 aug 2012

Baba Ramdev's second round of indefinite protest to begin today

Dr Sanjay Kumar Cardiothoracic Cardiac Heart surgeon India

New Delhi: Fourteen months after he was bundled out of Ramlila Maidan in a midnight police swoop, yoga guru Baba Ramdev will return to the same venue today for another round of an indefinite protest in his demand of bringing back the black money stashed abroad.

Baba Ramdev's previous protest in Ramlila Maidan in June last year ended in a midnight police crackdown with authorities claiming that he violated the norms agreed upon. He was caught by police while trying to flee from the venue in woman's attire.

The second round of protest will witness an expansion of Baba Ramdev's agenda. Along with bringing back black money, Baba Ramdev will also demand for the anti-graft legislation - the Lokpal Bill, which till now was championed by Anna Hazare and his aides, a team, which was recently dissolved by 75-year-old Anna.

Baba Ramdev has said that he has no political agenda and the second phase of his protest will be announced if the government does not agree to his demands.

"All we are demanding is constitution of a strong Lokpal to end corruption. Lokpal alone cannot eradicate corruption but it is required to punish the corrupt," Baba Ramdev said.

Anna, who had earlier announced that he would join Baba Ramdev at his protest, is unlikely to be present at the venue today with one of his close aides saying that "as of now there are no plans" to come to Delhi; the yoga guru had claimed that Anna has publicly said that he will come.

There have been reports of tension between sections of the erstwhile Team Anna and Baba Ramdev. On June 3, Baba Ramdev and Anna had held a protest in Delhi.

Delhi Metro to get three new branches - India

07 aug 2012

The Delhi Metro is going places, with a union cabinet sub-committee on Tuesday approving three new extension lines, which will cover rural parts of Delhi and Haryana. In spite of financial constraints, an Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) approved proposals by the urban development
ministry to extend the Dwarka line to Najafgarh in west Delhi, Mundka line to Bahadurgarh in Haryana and increase the length of the under-construction Mukundpur-Yamuna Vihar line to Shiv Vihar.

The extensions, which will stretch over 20km, will cost the government Rs. 3,500 crore. After this, there will be no more extensions in Phase-III of Delhi Metro, which was approved in August 2011 and will be completed by 2015. It will cost the government Rs. 35,242 crore, of which Rs. 19,182 crore is being provided as loan by Japan International Development Agency (JICA).
Because of increasing debt, the government had opposed fully government-funded metros in the 12th plan (2012-17). But the ministry felt these extensions would help develop areas where the Metro reached.
The Delhi Metro, which has a network spanning 189 km, is used by 15 lakh people daily.

Pune blasts: 5-6 people involved, suspects police - India

06 aug 2012

Pune blasts: 5-6 people involved, suspects police

Pune:  A splinter group of the Indian Mujahiddeen is emerging as the prime suspect, but investigators are also probing other angles. Sketches of two of the suspects have been reportedly made by the police. However, they won't release these to the public for now. The investigating agencies have also approached mobile companies to trace any suspicious calls made before or after the blasts in Pune on August 1.

1. Sushil Kumar Shinde will visit the sites affected in Wednesday's blasts and review the security situation in the city. Four low-intensity explosions took place on the busy Jangli Maharaj Road in Pune on August 1. Mr Shinde, who took charge as the home minister on the same day, was supposed to visit the city that evening, but the trip was cancelled.
2. The only person injured in blasts on Jangli Maharaj Road has been cleared by the police, and allowed to leave hospital. Dayanand Patil, a tailor, was interrogated on Thursday - the bag he picked up outside an auditorium blew up. His wife was also questioned. Intelligence sources say he is not a suspect.
3. Apart from the four bombs that exploded, two were defused. The Anti-Terror Squad in Maharashtra believes five or six people were involved in the conspiracy, and two or three people planted the bombs.
4. The bombs, which were triggered using wristwatches, created low-intensity explosions, because they were loosely-assembled. 
5. Intelligence officials suspect banned terror group Indian Mujahideen (IM) played a role in the blasts. The group was headquartered in Pune.
6. Three of the six bombs planted on the Jangli Maharaj Road were placed in the baskets of cycles bought from a shop nearby. The police has identified the shop, questioned its owner, and used his information to create sketches of two men who bought the cycles.
7. The sketches will not be released to the public for now; copies have been circulated among the police and other investigators.
8. "We have approached mobile companies seeking the details of new numbers or suspicious numbers their towers have captured before and after the blasts. There will be lakhs of calls a tower catches in a few minutes. In this mammoth task, we have to go through all these numbers and zero in on the numbers used by suspects," said an unnamed police official to the Press Trust of India (PTI).
9. The bombs exploded between 7.37 and 8.15 pm on August 1 during rush hour in the heart of Pune on a road crowded with restaurants, shops and the large Sambhaji Park, popular for family outings in the evening.
10. Investigators have been deprived of assistance from security cameras placed at some of the locations where the blasts took place. The CCTV at a branch of Dena Bank was not working; at a McDonald's outlet where another blast took place, one camera was not working, the other filmed the interior of the restaurant and not the street outside.

Curiosity rover lands safely on Mars - India

06 aug 2012

Curiosity rover lands safely on Mars

Pasadena, California: The Curiosity has landed.

With pride, relief and exhilaration, NASA engineers and officials erupted in cheers and hugs early Monday morning with confirmation that the Curiosity, a car-sized, plutonium-powered robotic rover, had landed safely on the surface of Mars.

"Touchdown confirmed," Allen Chen, the engineer in the control room providing commentary, said at 1:32 a.m. Eastern time.

A couple of minutes later, the first image popped onto the video screen - a grainy, 64-pixel-by-64-pixel black-and-white image showing one of the rover's wheels and the Martian horizon.

Three minutes later, a higher-resolution version of the same image appeared, and then came another image from the other side of the rover.

"This is amazing," said Robert Manning, the chief engineer for the project. "That's the shadow of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars."

The Curiosity, far larger and more capable than the earlier generation of rovers, will open a new era of exploration, looking for signs that early Mars had the ingredients and environment that could have come together to form life.

The success validates a $2.5 billion bet that NASA took in embarking on this ambitious mission. While the spacecraft has performed flawlessly since its launching last November, that is only after NASA overcame technical problems, delayed launching by more than two years and poured in hundreds of millions of dollars as the price tag rose from $1.6 billion.

The landing, involving a seemingly impossible sequence of complex maneuvers, proceeded like clockwork: the capsule containing Curiosity entered the Martian atmosphere, the parachute deployed, the rocket engines fired, the rover was lowered and, finally, the Curiosity was on the ground.

Over the first week, Curiosity is to deploy its main antenna, raise a mast containing cameras, a rock-vaporizing laser and other instruments, and take its first panoramic shot of its surroundings.

NASA will spend the first month checking out Curiosity. The first drive could occur early next month. The rover would not scoop its first sample of Martian soil until mid-September at the earliest, and the first drilling into rock would occur in October or November.

Because Curiosity is powered by electricity generated from the heat of a chunk of plutonium, it could continue operating for years, perhaps decades, in exploring the 96-mile-wide crater where it has landed.

Sunita Williams takes off on second space mission - India

15 july 2012

Sunita Williams takes off on second space mission

Dr Sanjay Kumar Cardiac Cardiothoracic Heart Surgeon India

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Baikonur, Kazakhstan: A Russian Soyuz craft launched into the morning skies over Kazakhstan on Sunday, carrying three astronauts on their way to the International Space Station, where they will quickly start preparing for a frenzy of incoming traffic.

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko and Japan's Akihito Hoshide are set to travel two days before reaching their three colleagues already at the permanent space outpost.

Families and colleagues watched the launch from an observation platform in the Russian-leased cosmodrome in the dry southern steppes of this sprawling Central Asian nation.

Liftoff took place at the exact scheduled time of 08:40 a.m. local time (0240 GMT), sending a deafening roar as the craft gained height.

Despite withstanding intense G-force pressure, the three astronauts looked relaxed in televised footage as they performed a series of routine operations.

The Soyuz jettisoned three rocket booster stages as it was propelled into orbit, which takes just over nine minutes.

At that stage, a doll given to Malenchenko as a mascot by his daughter and suspended over the three astronauts floated out of view on television footage, indicating the craft had escaped the earth's gravitational pull.

The shell that surrounds the capsule during the launch phase also peeled away, soaking the astronauts in bright yellow sunshine pouring through the viewing hatches.

The solar arrays that deployed on the Soyuz after orbital entry will provide the craft with the power it needs during its two-day trip.

Williams, tightly squeezed into the cramped craft, gave a thumbs-up sign and waved to onboard cameras as Russian space agency chief Vladimir Popovkin congratulated the crew over radio control.

Malenchenko, who is piloting the Soyuz, is one of Russia's most experienced astronauts and is making his fifth voyage into space.

Williams, who was born in Euclid, Ohio, and raised in Massachusetts, is on her second mission and will further extend the record for the longest sojourn in space for a female astronaut. The 46-year -old astronaut, who is of Indian-American heritage, spent 195 days at the space station in 2006-2007.

Sunday's launch took place on the 37th anniversary of the landmark Apollo-Soyuz mission during which crafts from the United States and the Soviet Union docked in space, setting a precedent for scientific cooperation between the Cold War foes.

Williams said in a press conference ahead of the launch that the test mission laid the ground for a long-standing friendship and collaboration in the space program.

The Soyuz is schedule to dock on Tuesday with the space station at 08:52 a.m. Moscow time (0452 GMT).

Russians Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and U.S. astronaut Joseph Acaba, who make up the crew of Expedition 32, have been working at the space station since mid-May.

The space station, which orbits up to 410 kilometers (255 miles) above the earth, is braced to handle an unprecedented level of traffic.

Japan's HTV3 cargo ship will dock with the space station next week and will be the first of nine craft making contact with the orbiting satellite over a 17-day span.

Expeditions 32 and the incoming Expedition 33 have 33 experiments planned for their stay at the orbiting laboratory.

LeT more dangerous than Qaeda; has ISI links: Fmr CIA official - India

10 july 2012

LeT more dangerous than Qaeda; has ISI links: Fmr CIA official

 

With al-Qaeda on the backfoot, Hafeez Saeed founded Lashker-e-Toiba (LeT) has emerged as the world's most dangerous terror group and has connections with Pakistan's ISI and army, a former senior CIA officer has said.
The November 2008 attack by ten LeT terrorists on multiple targets in Mumbai was the most significant and innovative terrorist attack since 9/11, Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution, a Washington based think tank, wrote in The Daily Beast.
He however noted that more than three years after the attack, LeT has paid no serious price.
"It (Mumbai attacks) marked the maturation of LeT from a Punjabi-based Pakistani terror group targeting India exclusively to a member of the global Islamic jihad targeting the enemies of al Qaeda: the Crusader West, Zionist Israel, and Hindu India," he said.
He also referred to the arrest of LeT terrorist Abu Jundal and noted it was a major breakthrough. He said Saudi role in capturing Jundal is also "significant".
"Riyadh is Islamabad's closest ally and the ISI has very strong links with its Saudi counterparts. The Pakistani community in the Kingdom and the Gulf states has long been a major source of the LeT's finances," he said.
If the Kingdom is now ready to act against LeT then the group will face some financial trouble, Ridel said.
"But not yet trouble at home. More than three years after the attack LeT has been sanctioned by the UN and the US but has paid no serious price for its attack in Mumbai. It operates freely in Pakistan and has continuing connections with the Pakistani intelligence service and army," he said.