Eideard

Wait till his big brother shows up and saves his butt!

Hundreds of poor Hindu villagers in eastern India have refused to hand over a rare turtle to authorities, saying it is an incarnation of God.

Villagers chanting hymns and carrying garlands, bowls of rice and fruits are pouring in from remote villages to a temple in Kendrapara, a coastal district in eastern Orissa state.

Policemen have struggled to control the gathering and have failed to persuade the villagers to give up the sea turtle…

The turtle is protected in India and anyone found keeping one without permission can be jailed for a year or more and fined.

But adamant villagers have refused to give up the reptile, saying the turtle bears holy symbols on its back and is an incarnation of Lord Jagannath, a popular Hindu deity.

“Lord Jagannath has visited our village in the form of a turtle. We will not allow anybody to take the turtle away,” said Ramesh Mishra, a priest of the temple.

If the sum of their attention finally kills the poor turtle, they’ll swear he’s gone on to a better life.

Child welfare officials are investigating the case of a baby who was reportedly rented out to beggars in the southern Indian city of Bangalore…

The nanny reportedly told the parents she would “rent” the baby for 100 rupees ($2) a day to beggars who attract more sympathy with an infant.

She was found out when the mother came home early to find her child missing…

Ms Nayak added that the parents were worried about the stigma that could be attached to the infant if a case were to be pursued by the authorities…

Police say they will track down the “horror nanny” – as she is being described in the local media – if the parents file a complaint…

But he added that it would be difficult to pursue the case without co-operation from the parents. The nanny has been dismissed from their service.

Unconfirmed reports say the child was sedated and dressed in rags. The practice is said to have gone on for several weeks.

Trust no one and cut the cards – or in this case, check the references.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The IMF has announced it had sold 200 tonnes of gold to the Reserve Bank of India over the past two weeks. Traders reported that the huge sale had intensified interest in gold, which has now risen by almost 23% this year.

India said it was keen to diversify its reserves away from the US dollar, which has weakened in recent months.

Pranab Mukherjee, India’s finance minister, said: “We have money to buy gold. We have enough foreign exchange reserves.”

Erik Nilsson, senior economist at Scotia Capital, said the deal was “certainly indicative that the monetary authorities in India are not overwhelmingly upbeat about the outlook for the US dollar”.

The dollar has lost 6.5% of its value in the last five months, measured against a basket of other currencies. This has helped to push up the price of commodities priced in dollars, including gold and oil…

The IMF declined to say how much India had paid for the gold, saying only that it got “a good price”.

One would hope they did.

The barefoot solar engineers, Talsa Miniaka, Pulka Wadeka, Minakshi Diwan, and Bundei Hidreka, live in Tinginapu, in the Eastern Ghats of Orissa. They now have a contract to build 3000 solar-powered lanterns for schools and other institutions and they are training other people in the community.

Bravo!

India has rejected a demand by the Albanian government for the return of the remains of Nobel laureate Mother Teresa, buried in the city of Calcutta.

“Mother Teresa was an Indian citizen and she is resting in her own country, her own land,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash said.

A spokeswoman for the nun’s Missionaries of Charity described the Albanian request as “absurd”.

Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian, was born in Skopje, now part of Macedonia.

Correspondents say that the row over her resting place could develop into an ugly three-way squabble between India, where she worked most of her life, Albania where her parents came from and Macedonia where she lived the first 18 years of her life.

The row is expected to intensify by August next year – the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s birth – by which time many commentators expect her to have been canonised as a saint.

The ethnic Albanian nun, who was known as the “Saint of the Gutters” for her work among the poor of Calcutta, was given Indian citizenship in 1951….

After her death in September 1997, Mother Teresa was buried at the Calcutta headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity (MoC), which is now a pilgrimage site.

Maybe they could bring her to Memphis to co-star with Elvis?

A BBC investigation has uncovered the deadly practice of British Asians travelling to India to hire contract killers. Family and business associates, who are lured to the sub-continent, are often the targets.

In a country where murder is cheaper and less fraught with risk, the perpetrators of these crimes are rarely brought to justice.

Campaigners in both India and the UK believe this to have claimed the lives of hundreds of victims over several years.

These armchair murder plots are hatched in the living rooms of Britain and executed mainly in the rural Indian state of Punjab…

So how easy is it for British Asians to outsource murder..?

According to Indian journalist, Neelam Raaj, finding a person to carry out the killing is simple.

In India, murder is cheap, with hired assassins paid up to $800. And it appears there are few risks.

RTFA. Details, examples.

Of course, living here in the beautiful American Southwest it’s even cheaper do the deal in Mexico.

The first Swiss satellite in history — extremely small and 100 percent student designed and built — has been successfully launched from the Sriharikota space station in India. Constructed by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, with many institutional partners, the SwissCube has gone into orbit.

The Indian launcher Polar Space Launch Vehicle took off at 8:22 a.m. Swiss time. Twenty minutes later, the SwissCube was ejected from the nose cone of the rocket at an altitude of around 720 kilometers. At 9:37 a.m. the first ever signals sent from a Swiss satellite in space were picked up from Stanford (California).

Students and professors have been working very hard during the last three and a half years in order to send the concentrated cube of high technology into space. The SwissCube satellite is only 10 cubic centimeters in size and weighs a light 820 grams. It is equipped with a telescope to fulfill its mission of observing airglow. Airglow is a luminescent phenomenon in the planetary atmosphere caused by cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere and chemiluminescence caused mainly by oxygen and nitrogen reacting with hydroxyl ions at heights of a few hundred kilometers. The satellite should allow students and researchers to better understand the phenomenon, especially during day and night cycles.

But the real goal of the SwissCube project is more pedagogic than atmospheric. Almost 200 students working closely with experienced researchers from the EPFL and several other technical schools and departments have collaborated on the project. From the conception, through the design, and finally the fabrication of the Swiss spatial sparkler—these young engineers have had the unique opportunity of participating in a space project from the first brainstorming sessions to the data collection once in orbit. This educational model focuses on cross-platform collaboration from A-Z, and apart from ensuring an exceptional finished product, prepares students for the work world in a way that sets it apart from similar attempts at other technical universities that often buy a prefabricated CubeSat kit.

Bravo! I can only imagine what it’s like to be a student, today. Setting forth to experiment with projects I only knew within the realm of science fiction when I was of a similar age.

India has launched seven satellites from a single rocket, demonstrating its growing skills in multi-satellite launches. The success comes nearly a month after India had to end its inaugural Moon mission early.

Within a space of 20 minutes, an Indian rocket placed one big satellite and six small ones into space from the Sriharikota space center in eastern India.

The big remote-sensing satellite will map fishing zones around India, measure ocean surfaces and wind speeds and track monsoons and cyclones.

The six small satellites belong to other countries – four to Germany, one to Switzerland and one to Turkey…

In the past decade, India’s 46-year space program has focused on developing rocket-launching capabilities to gain a slice of the multi-billion-dollar space-launch market. It has put an Italian satellite and an Israeli spy satellite into orbit. But India is still a relative newcomer in a field dominated by big players such as the United States, Russia and the European Space Agency…

In recent years, India has scaled up its ambitions to explore space, not wanting to be left behind by countries like China. It hopes to send a manned mission into space, in four years time.

India’s space program functions on a relatively modest budget of about $1 billion a year.

I’m trying to recall if the U.S. has done anything on a modest budget ever since management of our government became a function of the military-industrial complex.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

A swarm of men and women, mostly women, fills the bed of a dried-out reservoir. They’re armed with shovels and crowbars and pickaxes. They chop at the wild grass and dig at the hardened clay that have choked the reservoir…

The residents of this agricultural village are working under the auspices of the government’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or NREGA. The act, passed in 2005, guarantees a hundred days of employment to all rural households that volunteer to work at the minimum wage (at least 60 rupees, or $1.23, a day, but higher in many states).

It’s an ambitious public works program that has provided jobs to almost 30 million households. Across the country, impoverished villagers have built dams, improved roads, strengthened irrigation, and restored ancient water bodies — the act sponsors work in eight areas deemed to be important for rural development…

Of course NREGA is hardly the government’s first attempt — or promise — to ease poverty. At independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, proclaimed that building the “noble mansion of free India” meant “the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity…”

Something feels different this time, however. NREGA is but one of a slew of programs and laws passed by the Congress-led coalition since its surprise return to power in 2004, and its re-election earlier this year.

In 2005, Parliament passed a Right to Information Act that has greatly increased transparency in the administration of development programs. The government has also passed a Right to Education Act, waived loans for indebted farmers and discussed a Food Security Act that would ensure that every household receives a basic level of nutrition.

Yes, we could offer pages of why this didn’t work in the past – why it is beginning to work, now – what are the problems carrying forward? Folks in India ain’t bad at figuring that out, themselves.

Maybe that had something to do with the lack of progress in the past?

One of India’s leading environmental crusaders is planning to launch the country’s first Green party.

After his success in forcing old and polluting vehicles off the streets of the eastern city of Calcutta, Subhas Dutta says the time has come to set up a political party to protect the country’s environment.

“Many like me who fight for environment protection have realised we need a full fledged party in India. Our movements are localised and it is not enough to operate as pressure groups or just fight legal battles,” Mr Dutta says.

He is due to visit the United Kingdom next month to meet the leaders of the Green Party there.

“We are also in touch with the Green Party of Germany, we want to understand how the Green parties operate in Europe before we launch a Green Party of India…

Mr Dutta says he was also in touch with leading environmentalists in India. “This networking takes some time so that we have a truly national party, but we are more or less through with this,” he said.

The task of building a truly national movement in India has to be a daunting task regardless of the issue or issues. The land is so large and diverse, the divisions within any sector or region are divided by enormous measures of education and income, culture and history.

I wish him well.