Sunday, September 25, 2005

Apex court stays criminal case against Lapierre / Indian girl's one-rupee suicide / Money power dictated Delhi power privatisation'

Apex court stays criminal case against Lapierre

Legal Correspondent

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday stayed the criminal proceedings
initiated against Dominique Lapierre, French author of a book on the Bhopal
gas disaster, and his publisher Shekar Malhotra by Madhya Pradesh
Director-General of Police Swaraj Puri. A Bench, comprising Justice K. G.
Balakrishnan and Justice P. P. Naolekar, issued notice to Mr. Puri and
Javier Moro, France-based publisher of It was Five Past Midnight in Bhopal,
on a petition from Mr. Lapierre and Mr. Malhotra seeking transfer of the
complaint outside Madhya Pradesh.

They said Mr. Puri was holding a powerful position and could influence
witnesses.

On his criminal complaint against Mr. Lapierre and Mr. Malhotra, a Jabalpur
court issued summons to the publisher to appear before it on September 26.

The complaint said the writer had not portrayed the incident properly as
well as the police role in the right perspective.

Civil suit

Mr. Puri also filed a civil complaint seeking a $20-million compensation and
to restrain the publishers from printing, selling and circulating the book.
The Jabalpur court issued notices to the author and the publisher on this
petition also

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Indian girl's one-rupee suicide

Half of India's children are malnourished, a UN report says
A 12-year-old Indian girl committed suicide after her mother told her she
could not afford one rupee - two US cents - for a school meal.
Sania Khatun lived with her mother in a village north of Calcutta under a
tarpaulin sheet provided by the state.
Sania normally ate nothing at school but on Friday saw classmates eating
rice and asked for one rupee.
Her mother scolded her and when she returned from work found her daughter
hanged from the ceiling with a sari.
"She wanted just one rupee... but her mother could not give her the money
due to poverty," government official Nakul Chandran Mahato told the Reuters
agency.
'Snapped'
The mother, Jainab Bewar, is a widow who works as a maid in the village of
Paraspur, 200km (125 miles) north of Calcutta.
She normally fed her daughter with food she could get from the houses she
worked in.
India's Telegraph newspaper said Sania was tempted by the sight of
classmates eating puffed rice and oil cakes.

---

Money power dictated Delhi power privatisation'

DAMAGING INDICTMENT: Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit at her residence on
Wednesday. - PHOTO: PTI

NEW DELHI: In a severe indictment of the Delhi Government led by Chief
Minister Sheila Dikshit over the whole process of privatisation of the power
distribution network in the Capital, the Public Accounts Committee of the
Delhi Legislative Assembly has accused the powers that be of bending all
rules and colluding with business houses to "accrue monetary benefits'' to
them.

It has alleged possible involvement of one or more members of the Core
Committee set up by the Delhi Government for power privatisation in
favouring the conditional bidders for "monetary consideration'' by effecting
major modifications in the transfer scheme.

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Wednesday, September 07, 2005

06 Sept 1965: Indian Army invades W Pakistan / C-DIT releases free Malayalam software / America's shame: the aftermath of Katrina

ON THIS DAY
1965: Indian Army invades W Pakistan

Indian troops have invaded West Pakistan, crossing the border at three
points in an attack which appears to be aimed mainly at the city of Lahore.
Authorities in Delhi say their action was intended to prevent a direct
attack by Pakistani forces against India.
On 25 August, Pakistani soldiers launched a covert operation across the
ceasefire line, established in 1949 after the first Indo-Pakistani war, into
Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.

---

C-DIT releases free Malayalam software

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT)
has released the free software version of the official Malayalam language
software it had developed for the Department of Official Language.
The software, which works on Linux platform, consists of six Malayalam fonts
in Unicode and a special editor. It can be downloaded free of charge from
the Web site, www.clickeralam.org.
A Windows version of the software is also available.
The software was developed under the joint auspices of the State Information
Technology Mission and the Centre for Linguistic Computing Kerala - a joint
venture of the C-DIT.
Free software can be used, copied, studied, modified and distributed. The
free software movement is initiative by programmers collaborating across
cyberspace.

---

America's shame: the aftermath of Katrina

Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

A tale of systematic neglect, administrative incompetence, market-driven
environmental destruction, and desperate poverty is unfolding in Louisiana.

"AMERICA'S DIRTY secret." That is what a British TV news reporter, speaking
live from Louisiana, called the underclass of America's poor. A tale of
systematic neglect, administrative incompetence, market-driven environmental
destruction, and desperate poverty is unfolding in Louisiana. It is exposing
squalor that would shame a third-world country, as well as racial and
political divisions reminiscent of apartheid South Africa.

The facts themselves are grim enough. As if the rain brought by Hurricane
Katrina did not do enough, the dykes and levees built to keep the sea out of
the city of New Orleans collapsed for lengths of hundreds of metres. The
resultant flooding caused what may well amount to thousands of deaths,
untold billions of dollars worth of damage, and rendered the city
uninhabitable for what is now estimated to be another two years.

Minimal aid, in the form of basic food and water, is finally reaching those
who have survived. It is simply not known how many are still stranded in the
upper floors of their homes and apartment blocks, nor how many have
perished. Some experts have said the forensic task of identifying the dead
will be far harder than that which followed the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, as the bodies in Louisiana are decomposing very quickly
in temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius. State officials say there is no
system for collecting and storing the bodies.

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Monday, September 05, 2005

A reminder program / A tutorial site / On-line office suite / Mother Teresa dies / us supreme court on public property


1997 Sept 05
Mother Teresa dies
Mother Teresa¸ the Nobel Peace Prize winner who devoted her life to helping
the sick and the poor¸ dies at the age of 87.
Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/5/newsid_2499000/2499693.stm

---

A reminder program

As we get completely engrossed in our work on a computer, we may forget
important appointments, events and so on. A program that works in the
background and reminds us of important events at specified times will help
us a lot. The software, SwizzTool (http://www.specop.se/) is one such
product. Apart from helping you set-up reminder alerts, this program lets
you do such tasks as assigning hotkeys to programs, invoking a Google search
on the string stored on clipboard and so on.

A tutorial site

Numerous discussion forums and tutorials on a wide array of subjects that
help you become better at what you do are available on-line.

The programmingtutorials.com (http://www.pro grammingtutorials.com/), the
web portal with links to over three hundred programming language tutorials,
is an excellent service worth a visit

On-line office suite

To exploit the Net's `access from anywhere anytime' paradigm, several
desktop applications are migrating towards it. The availability of
high-speed links accelerates this trend. The on-line office-suite
application, gOffice, developed for helping netizens create/store documents
on-line with a browser, is the latest one in this genre.

gOffice (http://goffice.com/) features a web based word processor with
several tools we generally find in popular word processing packages like
MS-Word. It supports features such as spell check, editor with graphical
interface and so on. The document created with the application can be saved
as a PDF file on your local machine or can be sent to anyone as an e-mail
attachment. As the document can also be saved on the gOffice's server, you
can open/edit it from any place on the Net. Currently, on this web-based
office suite, which is free for personal use, only the word processing
component is implemented. Soon modules such as Worksheet and Presentations
will be made available.

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