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Thursday, August 18, 2011
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Chandrika's bombshell
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I want to act with Salman Bhai: Harsh Mayar - Movies News - Bollywood - ibnlive
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/i-want-to-act-with-salman-bhai-harsh-mayar/173756-8-66.html
How to forward e-mails? IMPORTANT READ!!!!! - Dushyant Mishra - NITR
Do you wonder why you get viruses or excessive amounts of junk mail (Spam)? Do you hate it?
Know how to forward e-mails? This was written by a System Administrator for a corporate system. It is an excellent message that ABSOLUTELY applies to ALL of us who send e-mails. Please read the short letter below ...
Do you really know how to forward e-mails? 50% of us do; 50% DO NOT!
Every time you forward an e-mail there is information left over from the people who received the message before you and sent it to you, namely their e-mail addresses and names. As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds. All it takes is for some poor sap to get a virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every e-mail address that has come across their computer. Or, someone can take all of those addresses and send junk mail to them or sell the addresses to spammers in the hope that you will go to the site and they will make five cents for each hit that they sell. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel and because someone included visible e-mail addresses in their Forwarded message!
How do you stop it? Well, there are two easy steps:
(1) When you Forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top). That's right, DELETE them. Highlight them and delete them or backspace them or cut them -- whatever it is that you know how to do. It only takes a second. You MUST click the "Forward" button first though; then you will have full Editing capabilities for the body and headers of the message. If you don't click on "Forward" first, you won't be able to Edit the message at all.
(Incidentally, this is a great time to correct spelling and remove, those pesty "send this to 10 friends and your wish will come true" false promises. If the message is very messy, drop it into Word or Wordpad/Notepad or whatever word processor you use. Editing within a word processing program is much easier than performing editing operations within the body of an e-mail message.)
(2) Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, DO NOT use the To: or Cc: options for adding e-mail addresses. Always use the BCC: (Blind Carbon
Copy) option for listing the e-mail addresses of the folks you want to send the message to. This way the people you send to only see their own e-mail address
and no one else's. If you don't see your BCC: option, click on where it says To: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: and that's it. It's that easy!!!
When you send to BCC: (and leave the To: line blank) your message will automatically say "Undisclosed Recipients" in the "To:" field of the people who receive it, providing extra security and privacy to all the people in your Address Book.
(3) Remove any "FW:" in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even correct spelling.
(4) ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual e-mail you are reading. Ever get those e-mails that you have to open 10 or 15 or 20 FW: pages to read the one page with the information on it? By Forwarding from the actual final page you wish someone to view, prevent their having to open multiple e-mails just to see what you sent. (Many people will not open all those emails for fear of getting a virus; so your message may go unread.)
Have you ever received an email that is a petition? It states a position and asks you to add your name and address and to Forward it to a number of people or your entire Address Book. The email can be Forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses.
FACT: The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained therein. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient(s). Your position may carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry list of names and email address on a petition - and, again, you will protect the privacy of those in your Address Book and provide them additional security against viruses and spammers.
Regarding petitions: Be aware, that the government (Central, state, and local) and most legitimate organizations completely disregard email petitions. In order for a petition to have value and be acted upon, it is necessary to have LIVE, verifiable signatures, usually with the signer's legitimate mailing address. So please, in the future, let's stop the junk mail and the viruses by working together and respecting the privacy and security of one another.
Finally, here's an idea!!!
Let's send this to everyone we know (but PLEASE strip my address out first).This is something that SHOULD be forwarded.
Warm regards,
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
La Morte D'Arthur - Poem "The old order changeth...
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?"
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
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Saturday, July 16, 2011
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Thursday, July 07, 2011
Tehelka - India's Independent Weekly News Magazine
|
BREAKTHROUGH EXPOSÉ
So why is Narendra Modi protecting Amit Shah?
‘The calls made by the minister are not part of official decorum. Their frequency is unnatural and uncommon in nature.’ — Gujarat CID report on Amit Shah’s calls to encounter cops
Rana Ayyub reports from Gujarat
| Call Records from Gujarat Click on image to enlarge |
THE YEAR was 2007. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was beginning what was billed as his most crucial election campaign. He had won the 2002 election on the back of a post-Godhra polarisation but this, they said, was different. Modi had to prove he could make it on the development work he did for Gujarat. His first pitch would set the tone. “Sohrabuddin,” Modi began, using the name as a sort of magic word. “What do you want me and my men to do with a man like Sohrabuddin?” he asked. The Ahmedabad crowd roared, “Kill him.” Sohrabuddin. The name became a word and stuck on, in a state polarised on religion.
Sohrabuddin became Modi’s trump card, a Muslim name. A name that drew hatred on 26 November 2005, when he was gunned down for allegedly being an LeT hit squad member on his way to assassinate Modi. As Modi stepped off the dais, pumped up by the crowd response, I grabbed the opportunity to squeeze in a question. “Can you, Mr Modi, afford to call Sohrabuddin a terrorist when your own cops were in league with him?” I asked. Modi gave me a cold stare. He then walked away.
The year is 2010. Sohrabuddin’s name still has political value. But Modi is now handicapped by how events unraveled after Sohrabuddin’s killing. Sohrabuddin was shot dead in a fake encounter in November 2005. Tulsiram Prajapati, an extortionist, was the only witness to Sohrabuddin’s killing. Apparently he was travelling with Sohrabuddin but it hasn’t proven beyond doubt. Later, Prajapati was also killed in a fake encounter in December 2006.
TWO WEEKS ago, TEHELKA published details of phone calls between Gujarat Minister of State for Home Amit Shah and the policemen involved in the Prajapati killing. It was the first time such a link, between an important minister in the Modi government and the encounter policemen, has been established. The revelations set off a flurry of activity in Gandhinagar. Shah rushed to meet Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) veteran LK Advani, who was in Gujarat then. Shah was made to wait an hour before he was allowed into a meeting of the BJP leadership. Shah, persons in the know said, wanted protection. He didn’t get a commitment on that.
| Shah made 20 calls to the killer cops on a day when a petition against the fake encounter was filed in the Supreme Court. He made 73 calls in January 2007, when a CID inquiry began |
TEHELKA had published the details of the call records between Shah and the policemen, DIG Vanzara, SP Rajkumar Pandyan, Dinesh MN, and Vipul Agarwal, in December 2006, at the time of the Prajapati killing. On July 3, a day after the TEHELKA issue hit the stands, the Gujarat CID sought custody of the three police officers from the CBI, which was investigating the Sohrabuddin killing. The CID already had the call records with them. So, the CID’s delayed move to seek custody looked specious. Finally, on July 7, the CID took custody of Vanzara and Dinesh in the Prajapati case.
There was worse for Shah. Modi is understood to have told the state BJP seniors that Shah was not to be seen with him at any public event. There was an irony in this because Modi is a pariah in parts of India outside Gujarat, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in particular not wanting to be seen with Modi in public.
| Trigger happy SP Rajkumar Pandyan being produced in court aer being arrested in the fake encounter killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh |
There is a reason why Modi is seeking to distance himself from Shah. TEHELKA now has more details of Shah’s calls, which are pointing to things worse than may have been imagined. Call records between September 2006 and January 2007 show that Shah was in constant touch with the three officers, making 155 phone calls to them. This implies that Shah was not merely talking with the policemen during the week of Prajapati’s killing, but he was doing it each time there were developments in the case.
For instance, Shah made 20 calls on 7 September 2006, when the first petition was filed in the Supreme Court. He made a staggering 73 calls to the police officers in January 2007, up from 28 in September and 42 in December of 2006. The raw data of 400 calls shows that the frequency of conversations also shot up in June and December 2006. This is the time former IGP, CID, Geeta Johri started inquiring into the Sohrabuddin encounter of November 2005. Since Prajapati was the only witness to Sohrabuddin’s killing, there may have been an urgency to do away with Prajapati.
In contrast, there were barely four to nine calls a month in July and August 2006, when there were no developments in the Sohrabuddin case. This is not all. There were 277 calls between Shah and SP Rajkumar Pandyan in five months between October 7, 2004 and March 7, 2005.
This was the time when Sohrabuddin and Prajapati fired shots at the office of Popular Builders to scare them and extort money. This incident put them in the spotlight and drew attention to the link between Sohrabuddin and DCP Abhay Chudasama. Chudasama was arrested and his alleged links with Shah were exposed.
The talk time between Shah and Pandyan, a man whose role has more or less been established as a key conspirator in the Sohrabuddin and Prajapati cases, is 331 minutes. Calls were made from Shah’s landline and cell phone, 9824010090, 9825049392, and 079-26404230. The calls were monitored in a case under the Official Secrets Act, 2005, being investigated by the Gujarat CID’s ND Solanki and Commissioner of Police PC Pande.
So astonishing were Shah’s call records that the case diary in the investigation says: “There have been phone calls exchanged between MoS Amit bhai Shah and SP Rajkumar Pandyan whose frequency is unnatural and uncommon in nature. The calls made by the MoS are not a part of official decorum.” Oddly, this case too was closed in 2009 without investigation. TEHELKA has accessed a copy of the case diary.
ALL OFFICERS who dared raise a voice against Shah or indicate the involvement of people close to him have been summarily transferred. Rajnish Rai, the officer in charge of the Sohrabuddin case before it was handed over to Geeta Johri, was transferred after he arrested Pandyan, Vanzara and Agarwal in an unexpected move in 2007. This, when he was brought into the case in the hope that he would save them.
Similarly, Kuldip Sharma, then CID chief, was transferred to the Goat and Sheep Department after he filed a case of corruption against Shah in 2005, the first of its kind against a minister in Gujarat. Given this history of victimising honest officers, it was not surprising that after Johri submitted an interim report on the Sohrabuddin killing, Shah told her and other officers in a meeting that they were making things difficult for him.
Shah complained because Vanzara called him to ask why the Sohrabuddin case was being investigated. Vanzara was alerted by his men who saw a CID team heading to the farmhouse where Sohrabuddin and his wife Kauserbi were kept before they were killed.
CONSEQUENTLY, THE CID went cold on the case and did not send its officers to question Prajapati who was in an Udaipur jail. The call records corroborate every link in this chain of events. This glaring evidence should make it easy for Modi to act against Shah. But that isn’t happening yet.
So what does the state fear? Investigating officers have reason to believe that there is a far deeper conspiracy in the Sohrabuddin and Prajapati encounters, which was kept hidden. “The larger political games in the two encounters have been ignored. There is no reason to kill Sohrabuddin merely because he was causing trouble for the marble lobby. Sohrabuddin and Prajapati knew something that could have been damning for the minister,” says an investigating officer.
Why then is the CBI not arresting Shah? Could it be that they are claiming they don’t have the call records? Or is it the bungling of the investigation, as an officer says who was involved with the case in the past? “Where is the CBI’s own investigation? Why did the CBI not search Chudasama’s house the day he was arrested? It does not have to rely on the Prajapati records to arrest Shah. There is enough in the Sohrabuddin case itself on the basis of which Shah can be arrested”.
Some are asking deeper questions. Why should Modi, who holds the Home portfolio, and who sanctioned the transfer of Vanzara to the Border Range in December 2006, not be arraigned? This was the posting that facilitated Vanzara’s participation in the Prajapati encounter. If indeed Pandyan’s involvement as prime mover of the encounters has been proved by the Gujarat Police, then why should Shah, with whom he was in constant touch for two years, be left free and not even questioned? Would Modi’s answer again be a cold stare?
WRITER’S EMAIL: RANA@TEHELKA.COM
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Medicare Saves Money - NYTimes.com
Published: June 12, 2011"
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Medicare Saves Money
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 12, 2011
Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that’s so bad, so wrongheaded, that you’re almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Related
Times Topic: Medicare
Readers' Comments
And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman’s proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.
Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn’t actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn’t be to “save Medicare,” whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.
And here’s what you need to know: Medicare actually saves money — a lot of money — compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs.
The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn’t Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009.
But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it’s true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we’ll be forcing them to get private insurance — if they can — that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.
By the way, we have direct evidence about the higher costs of private insurance via the Medicare Advantage program, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their coverage through the private sector. This was supposed to save money; in fact, the program costs taxpayers substantially more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.
And then there’s the international evidence. The United States has the most privatized health care system in the advanced world; it also has, by far, the most expensive care, without gaining any clear advantage in quality for all that spending. Health is one area in which the public sector consistently does a better job than the private sector at controlling costs.
Indeed, as the economist (and former Reagan adviser) Bruce Bartlett points out, high U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden. So where’s the gain from pushing seniors out of an admittedly expensive system, Medicare, into even more expensive private health insurance?
Wait, it gets worse. Not every 65- or 66-year-old denied Medicare would be able to get private coverage — in fact, many would find themselves uninsured. So what would these seniors do?
Well, as the health economists Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll document, right now Americans in their early 60s without health insurance routinely delay needed care, only to become very expensive Medicare recipients once they reach 65. This pattern would be even stronger and more destructive if Medicare eligibility were delayed. As a result, Mr. Frakt and Mr. Carroll suggest, Medicare spending might actually go up, not down, under Mr. Lieberman’s proposal.
O.K., the obvious question: If Medicare is so much better than private insurance, why didn’t the Affordable Care Act simply extend Medicare to cover everyone? The answer, of course, was interest-group politics: realistically, given the insurance industry’s power, Medicare for all wasn’t going to pass, so advocates of universal coverage, myself included, were willing to settle for half a loaf. But the fact that it seemed politically necessary to accept a second-best solution for younger Americans is no reason to start dismantling the superior system we already have for those 65 and over.
Now, none of what I have said should be taken as a reason to be complacent about rising health care costs. Both Medicare and private insurance will be unsustainable unless there are major cost-control efforts — the kinds of efforts that are actually in the Affordable Care Act, and which Republicans demagogued with cries of “death panels.”
The point, however, is that privatizing health insurance for seniors, which is what Mr. Lieberman is in effect proposing — and which is the essence of the G.O.P. plan — hurts rather than helps the cause of cost control. If we really want to hold down costs, we should be seeking to offer Medicare-type programs to as many Americans as possible.
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About Me
- Sandip K. Dasverma
- Arise Awake Stop not till the goal is reached. - Swami Vivekananda Swami ji is my inspiration, not as a monk but as a social reformer and for his universal-ism.