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Gas Hydrates: fuel trapped in ice

2011-10-26T23:59:00.001+05:30

Unlocking fuel trapped in ice

By Kirsten Korosec | October 25, 2011, 10:04 AM PDT

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Locked
within ice-like cages that are buried in the sediments below thick
Arctic permafrost and beneath the ocean floor, is an immense source of
energy that scientists have studied for more than two decades.

Methane hydrates — gas molecules trapped within a lattice of ice
— could contain more energy than all other known fossil fuels
combined. That is, if folks figure out how to produce volumes of
methane from hydrate beyond a few small-scale field experiments.

Until then, the testing will continue. ConocoPhillips, the Energy Department and Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. are conducting the latest round of field experiments, which will focus on a production method that could create an innovative way of storing carbon dioxide.

During the initial field trial set to begin in January 2012, carbon
dioxide will be injected into the methane hydrate-bearing sandstone
formations, which can be located more than 1,500 feet beneath the ocean
floor. Carbon dioxide molecules will be swapped for methane molecules,
and aims to achieve two goals: release the methane gas and permanently
store the carbon dioxide in the formation. This field experiment will be
an extension of earlier successful tests of the technology conducted by
ConocoPhillips and its partners in a laboratory setting, the DOE said.

The tests will use the “Iġnik Sikumi” (Iñupiaq for
“fire in the ice”) gas hydrate field trial well that was installed in
Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay region by ConocoPhillips and the Office of Fossil
Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory earlier this year.
The team will spend another month evaluating an alternative method of
methane production called depressurization, which was successfully
demonstrated during a one-week test in a different location by Japan and
Canada back in 2008.

Photo: Wikicommons; DOE

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-23T22:33:00.001+05:30

NEW YORK -- One of the richest men in the world took a stroll
among the people of the protest group called Occupy Wall Street who were
encamped like Bedouins in the Lower Broadway park named after him. Not a
soul knew or guessed that John Zuccotti, 74, was that fellow meandering
anonymously along like everyone else.

A young woman in her late twenties with long, wavy brown hair and the
fresh innocence of a Brown University graduate stood on the sidewalk
before a congregation of hundreds of people and as a "facilitator"
helped conduct a three-hour "General Assembly" in a style dubbed
"consensus democracy."

A hand-lettered sign on a corrugated box flap proclaimed:

"There are no leaders here. Don't ask for them. Get used to it!"

Reporters sought in vain for authorized representatives to answer their
questions, and many groused about not finding any. Without leaders, they
grumped, who is there to question? Who presents the group's talking
points and expresses cogent demands?

From the handmade signs bobbing daily in a sea of humanity, interviews with
dozens of protesters and the ongoing public exchanges among the
thousands at Occupy Wall Street emerge the questions that are beginning
to resonate across America:

» Is it fair for a tiny splinter of the population, allegedly just 1
percent, to own and control half or more of a nation's wealth?

» Should corporations be granted the privileges of "personhood," via a Supreme
Court decision on campaign finance, when corporations don't have a
conscience?

» Why have the world's millionaires increased by almost nine percent since 2009?

» Why are bailed-out banks allowed to hoard their cash?

» Why can't America eliminate the corrupting and destructive links between politicians and corporations?

The thirst for answers appears to be gaining momentum. An Associated
Press-GfK poll released Friday says 37 percent of Americans back the
people gathered here. And 58 percent of Americans say they are furious
about America's politicians.
A slender 27-year-old man, who calls himself Kwame, sat on a granite
slab beside a pale, plump, goat-bearded college professor and they mused
about the characteristics of the crowd.

For one thing, roughly 99 percent of everyone within sight, no matter how
they are garbed, carries a smartphone. Except for a bronze statue of a
businessman hunched over his briefcase, neckties are scarce. Almost as
scarce are people of color.

Kwame, who's black, is working on his Ph.D. in music at Stanford University.
The question was raised, "Why is there just one percent black people
among the 99 percenters in the park?"

"Education," he said. "The higher their education level, the more likely anyone is
to be here. Blacks in New York are a shrinking minority and their
schools are not up to high standards. But as this goes on, there'll be
more."

There are just about as many males as females. Many people claim to hold one or
more jobs and about two out of 10 say they can't find one. People who
haven't showered in far too long rub elbows with well-scrubbed travelers
from abroad. There are blue-dyed mohawks, a few hippie-ish longhairs,
tattoos of all colors, labor union workers, anarchists, musicians,
hundreds of blue tarpaulins, pillars of pizza boxes, plastic bottles of
water that cost more per quart than gasoline, and wave after wave of
curious tourists and "media" who invariably ask the question:

"Why are you all here and what do you want?"

The answer is both super-simple and ultra-complicated:

"Money."

The primary issue for almost every soul in the park -- whatever their age,
spiritual faith, political leanings, skin shade, gender, ethnicity,
hierarchical rank, IQ level or social class -- is an inquiry into what
money actually is, how money truly functions, what money is worth, how
money affects the way we are governed, how money is stolen and by whom,
how money affects the law, how to get money and how to spend it.

What so fascinates people about the month-old iCreature called Occupy Wall
Street is that the Occupiers have brilliantly directed the searchlight
of world attention on the global subject of money. Almost everybody
cares about money. As Mark Twain put it, "Some men worship rank, some
worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, & over these
ideals they dispute & cannot unite -- but they all worship money."
n Zuccotti Park, the lefties, the righties, the middlies and the
politically perplexed have quite amazingly gathered to consider in a
unique 21st-century style the true role of money. In a wild and almost
weird collision of coincidences, Occupy has become the hottest ticket in
town.

The word "occupy" is now attached
to more than 1,000 cities (including Wilmington), states, nations and
locations globally. Plans are afoot for a massive, Internet-coordinated
"international" occupation of Central Park on the easy-to-remember date
of Friday, 11/11/11. A permit is required for large gatherings in the
city-owned park.

•°°

The privately owned Zuccotti Park is named for a lively and thoughtful man
whose life story epitomizes the wildest American dreams of avarice.
Before becoming one of the world's wealthiest real estate developers,
Zuccotti checked hats at a super-swanky 54th Street speakeasy with
zebra-striped decor called El Morocco, where his father, Angelo, was the
suave maitre d'.

Zuccotti graduated from Princeton, earned his law degree at Yale and became one
of the 500 richest men in the world according to Forbes Magazine. He
served on both the National Republican Congressional Committee and with
Vice President Joe Biden's 1988 presidential campaign. Zuccotti has paid
incognito visits to the park and friends say he was worried about the
disorder and mess, but he nonetheless smiled while strolling through the
plaza that carries his family name.

Then there is an Estonia-born writer and documentary filmmaker named Kalle
Lasn, 69, the founder and editor of a popular Canadian magazine called
Adbusters, which probes and satirizes the ideas and consequences of
consumerism, an economic philosophy that Adbusters readers regard as
pernicious and fundamentally evil.

This story began one day in a Vancouver supermarket. Lasn became infuriated
when he had to pay a quarter to rent a shopping cart. He jammed the coin
in the slot. It was his first act of vandalism against consumerism,
which he sees as an infernal machine that sucks coins from consumers'
pockets and seldom returns fair value. Adbusters soon became one of
Canada's favorite magazines.
In July 2011, Lasn published an editorial in Adbusters (www.adbusters.org) that called on 20,000 people to "set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months."

With what aim in mind? To investigate and eventually sever unscrupulous
links between politics and money and to force the government "to choose
publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the
corporations."

A few dozen "activists" in New York City took note. On Sept. 17, a
Saturday, they showed up at the little--known, granite-paved Zuccotti
Park, about as big as a football field minus the end zones. It is two
blocks up Broadway from Trinity Church, at the top of Wall Street. It
is three blocks from the New York Stock Exchange and four blocks from
Federal Hall, the first capitol of the United States of America, where
George Washington was sworn in as the first president in 1789. Two
blocks to the west, the steel skeleton and glass skin of One World Trade
Center is built up to its 86th floor and will rise eventually to an
altitude of 1,776 feet above the ground on the spot where the North
Tower of the World Trade Center once stood.

Day by day, that first encampment of vinyl tarps, overstuffed backpacks,
sleeping bags, umbrellas, guitars, drums, a seedy old sofa and
unspeakable mattresses began to grow like the gray matter in a brain
does, neuron by neuron, from person to person, from smartphone to
smartphone, from mind to mind, in a way that the iPeople have come to
call "going viral."

By last Monday, Oct. 17, the first month's anniversary of Occupy Wall
Street's un-immaculate birth, the "Occupus" had sprouted tentacles in
hundreds of cities around the globe and the number increased each day.
Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, San
Francisco and Los Angeles were "occupied" within a week or so. Within a
fortnight, the estimated numbers in marching crowds and occupied places
was greater on the West Coast than in the East, where Occupy began. Then
London, Rome and Barcelona joined in, and so on round the globe.
In the first few weeks, Occupy was paid scant attention by the media,
which is not surprising because New York City is awash in political
protests and this one seemed to many editors no more significant than
most. Then, on Oct. 6, Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner of the Nobel
Memorial Prize for economics and the "Liberal" op-ed columnist for the
New York Times, wrote:

"What can we say about the [Occupy Wall Street] protests? First things first: The
protesters' indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force,
economically and politically, is completely right."

It was the equivalent of a rave theater review. Occupy Wall Street
suddenly gained momentum. A squad of uniformed police was positioned
just outside the park, unthreatened and content on overtime pay. "We're
minding the trust fund babies," is how one policeman put it.

Now the more mainstream media began to show up. Reporters immediately
noticed that there are no bathroom facilities in the park and personal
hygiene for the campers is rough. The McDonald's across Broadway allows
restroom privileges for all (most visitors pay for the kindness by
buying at least a cup of coffee first). So do Trinity Church and an
Episcopal public meeting room called Charlotte's Place that is decorated
with fresh flowers and offers sparkling-clean bathrooms, Wi-Fi and
tables for computers, and a free conference room where Occupy working
groups meet.

Because social communication is what Occupy is actually all about, the biggest
obstacle the Occupiers overcame was the police ban on voice
amplification. To hold General Assembly meetings for hundreds of people
alongside the noisy bustle of Broadway without megaphonic help would
have been impossible without Mike Check! Mike is a superhero of Occupy,
which may be leaderless but is not without heroes.

Mike Check! is the non-electronic human voice amplifier. It works very
simply, and is the primary means of vocal communication among the
participants in the evening plenary sessions, when hundreds of people
form a crescent of participants and onlookers on the Broadway side of
the park. For at least two hours each night, they discuss, decide and
take parliamentary decisions with all words sung full cry in a great
collective voice.
It works this way:

A person shouts: "Mike Check!"

Everyone who can hear the shout yells back, "Mike Check!" and the crowd even
mimics the inflection and accent of the speaker's voice.

The person shouts: "There's a reporter from Coney Island ..."

The crowd yells at the top of its voices: "There's a reporter from Coney Island ..."

The shouter: "who wants to interview somebody from Coney Island."

The crowd: "who wants to interview somebody from Coney Island."

Shouter: "So if ..."

Crowd: "So if ..."

Shouter: "you're from Coney Island ..."

Crowd: "you're from Coney Island ..."

Shouter: "Get over here."

Crowd (laughing): "GET OVER HERE!"

Those who know how to use Mike Check! best cut to the chase and talk in four-
or five-word bites. If a shouter uses overly long words or too-long
phrases, the crowd garbles them, which makes everything take longer.
Long-winded speakers are warned, "We get it ... enough!" by a particular
hand signal from anyone in the crowd (circling hands around each other
like a football referee when he wants to keep the game clock moving).

Occupy etiquette makes clear that no matter what the shouter says, or how
antithetical the words might be to local or personal beliefs, the crowd
is duty bound to echo the words at top volume.

The Mike Check! system was born of adversity and is a concept that
fascinates group dynamics people. Mike Check! actually forces people to
listen carefully to what others say and perhaps apprehend precisely what
they are saying before interrupting with a response.

Another hero of Zuccotti Park is the sanitation volunteer. There is a
cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness attitude among most of the Occupiers
(with a few swinish exceptions), necessary because littering is a
misdemeanor and could give authorities reason to kick everyone out on
public-safety grounds. On Oct. 14, Mayor Michael Bloomberg seemed about
to evict Occupy from the park to have it steam-washed by
"professionals." But John Zuccotti's company, the park's owners, backed
away from asking for a confrontation that might besmirch the name of the
park and the property.
To keep the park clean, the volunteer sanitation squads patrol
incessantly with brooms and trash pans, and warn people to put down
tarps when they paint protest signs because spilling paint on the
granite can get a person arrested.

There are numerous hand-drawn signs that proclaim, "DON'T DO DRUGS" and "NO
ALCOHOL." At a General Assembly, one of the volunteer security detail
men holds up a black plastic sack. He shouts Mike Check! "There are
three bottles ...

The crowd echoes: "There are three bottles ..."

"... of liquor in the bag."

"... of liquor in the bag"

"Alcohol will get us all thrown out!"

"Don't bring it!"

By day 34 on Friday, the Occupiers were revving up for yet another weekend
of chaotic protests and teach-ins. The nightly General Assemblies
carried on under their rules of consensual democracy and the "lack of
leadership" was being criticized by Bloomberg, who prefers to deal with
an organization that has a hierarchy and a chain of command.

Nobody knows yet what Occupy will become. Will it get kicked out of the park?
Will it survive until Thanksgiving? Will it grow into an iCreature that
eats plutocrats for lunch? Will Kalle Lasn come to Manhattan to see what
he hath wrought? Will it end well, or end ugly? Millions worldwide are
tuned in to see.

Artificially Induced Longevity can be Inherited?

2011-10-22T21:41:00.000+05:30

Scientific American article reports
"

Longevity Shown for First Time to Be Inherited via a Non-DNA Mechanism
Experiments with worms show that altering an enzyme can not only lengthen their life spans, but that the longevity effect can be carried across several generations
By Sarah Fecht | October 19, 2011 | 2
Research on nemotode worms is helping to illuminate ways to lengthen their lifetimes. The findings have yet to be replicated in vertebrates, including humans. Image: Wikimedia Commons
In October 2009 Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet was sitting in her office when graduate student Eric Greer came to her with a slightly heretical question. Brunet's lab had recently learned that they could lengthen a worm's lifetime by manipulating levels of an enzyme called SET2. "What if extending a worm's lifetime using SET2 can affect the life span of its descendants, even if the descendants have normal amounts of the enzyme?" he asked.

The question was unorthodox, Brunet says, "because it touches upon the Lamarckian idea that you can inherit acquired traits, which biologists have believed false for years." The biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck theorized in 1809 that the traits exhibited by an organism during its lifetime were augmented in its offspring; a giraffe that regularly stretched its neck to eat would father calves whose necks were longer. The idea was largely discredited by Darwin's theory of evolution, first published in 1859. More recently, scientists have begun to realize that an organism's behavior and environment may indeed influence the genes it passes to its offspring. The heritability of those acquired traits is not based on DNA, but on alterations in the molecular packaging that surrounds a gene. When Greer approached Brunet in 2009 with his question about worms and SET2, such "epigenetic" inheritance had only been discovered for simple traits such as eye color, flower symmetry and coat color.

Brunet and Greer went ahead with the experiment. The results, published October 19 in Nature, provide the first evidence that some aspects of longevity can be passed from parent to offspring, independent of DNA's direct influence. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

"I think this is a fundamentally important finding," says Matt Kaeberlein of the University of Washington in Seattle, who studies molecular mechanisms of aging. "It demonstrates for the first time that aging can be influenced by epigenetic changes that occurred in prior generations."

The study used Caenorhabditis elegans worms with very low levels of SET2. The enzyme normally adds methyl molecules onto DNA's protein packaging material. In doing so, the enzyme opens up the packaging material, allowing the genes to be copied and expressed. Some of those genes appear to be pro-aging genes, Brunet says. Her team knocked out SET2 by removing genes that code for it. This had the effect of significantly lengthening the worms' life spans, presumably because those pro-aging genes were no longer expressed.

Next, the long-lived, enzyme-lacking worms mated with normal ones. The offspring had the regular genes for making SET2, and even expressed normal amounts of the enzyme, but they lived significantly longer than control worms whose parents both had regular life spans. The life-extending effect carried over into the third generation, but returned to normal by the fourth generation (in the great-grandchildren of the original mutant worms). For the first few generations, having a long-lived ancestor increased life expectancy from 20 days to 25, extending a worm's longevity by 25 to 30 percent on average.

Brunet and her team have not yet determined the exact mechanism for the lifetime extension, or which molecules are at work. This is one of the study's imperfections, says David Katz, who researches epigenetic transcriptional memory at Emory University. Regardless, "the effect is clearly epigenetic," he says, "and it's probably one of the most complicated traits that has been linked to epigenetic inheritance."

The knowledge that epigenetics can impact a complex trait like life span has scientists curious to find out what other kinds of traits—such as disease susceptibility, metabolism and developmental patterns—are epigenetically heritable. Because epigenetic effects can be modified by environmental stimuli, Kaeberlein points out, it is possible that some of these traits "could be determined, at least in part, by the environment and lifestyle choices of parents, grandparents or even great-grandparents."

The study’s results are also exciting because the genes that code for the life-lengthening SET2 enzyme exist in other species, including humans. Brunet says she wants see if the results can be replicated in vertebrates, such as fish and mammals. Those questions will not be answered for many years, because it is unknown whether the SET2 complex has the same function in other species, and because those species have longer generational time frames.

"Worms have very short lives," Brunet says. "Will the effect apply to mammals that live thousands of times longer? We are excited to find out."
"

Now this is exciting.

But there could be another reason for the longevity found in certain populations such as the Japanese and Chinese. In these cultures, ancestor worship is common, and importantly, elderly are given much more respect than in other cultures of the world. Being regarded as useful and respected could be a driving factor for the old to live on. In most other cultures world wide, the senior citizens are viewed as a spent force, with little if any possible contributions to society.

Being fawned upon by the younger generation who look to them for guidance and advice could well be a motivating factor to live on. Of course this assumes that a person can give up on life and that outlook itself shortens her lifespan. But this is a reasonable assumption.

Look around you. Most of the people who are surprisingly fit and perky at a great age are, if you study their habits, people who have some driving force behind them.

Iqbal

ഇത്രേയുള്ളൂ; ഇത്രമാത്രം!

2011-10-10T10:47:00.001+05:30

പുതിയൊരു കുഞ്ഞ്‌ നമ്മിലേക്ക്‌ വരാനിരിക്കുന്നു എന്ന വാര്‍ത്ത എത്ര
സന്തോഷത്തോടെയാണ്‌ നാം ആസ്വദിക്കാറുള്ളത്‌! കുടുംബത്തിലേക്ക്‌ പുതിയൊരാള്‍
വരുന്നു! ആകാംക്ഷയോടെ ആ കുഞ്ഞിന്‌ നല്ലൊരു പേര്‌ കണ്ടുവെച്ച്‌ നാം
കാത്തിരിക്കുന്നു. ഉമ്മയുടെയും ഉപ്പയുടെയും മനസ്സു നിറയെ ആ
കുഞ്ഞായിരിക്കും.

അത്രയും
ആനന്ദവും ആശ്ചര്യവും നിറഞ്ഞ കൈകളിലേക്ക്‌ വന്നുവീണവരാണ്‌
നമ്മളോരോരുത്തരും. ഇനി, അതിലേറെ വേദനയും വിഭ്രാന്തിയും ബാക്കിയാക്കി
അവരില്‍ നിന്നെല്ലാം മടങ്ങിപ്പോകേണ്ടവരുമാണ്‌ ഈ നമ്മള്‍.
ജനിക്കുന്നതിനുമുമ്പ്‌ നമ്മെക്കുറിച്ച ഓര്‍മ കൂടിക്കൂടി വരും; പക്ഷേ
മരിച്ചുകഴിഞ്ഞാല്‍ നമ്മെക്കുറിച്ച ഓര്‍മ്മ കുറഞ്ഞുകുറഞ്ഞുവരും.

                എല്ലാവരും
ജീവിക്കുന്നവരാണെങ്കിലും ജീവിതത്തെക്കുറിച്ച്‌ ചിന്തിക്കുന്നവര്‍
കുറച്ചേയുള്ളൂ. ആനന്ദത്തിന്റെ ആഘോഷം മാത്രമാക്കി ജീവിതത്തെ
പുണരുന്നവര്‍ക്ക്‌ കൊച്ചുകാര്യങ്ങളെപ്പറ്റി ചിന്തിക്കാനേ നേരം കാണൂ.
ഭക്ഷണം, വസ്‌ത്രം, സൗന്ദര്യം, സൗകര്യം അങ്ങനെ വളരെ കുറച്ചുകാര്യങ്ങളുടെ
പിന്നില്‍ അവര്‍ ചുറ്റിത്തിരിയും. ചെറിയ ചെറിയ കാര്യങ്ങളേക്കാള്‍ വലിയ
കാര്യങ്ങള്‍ നിര്‍വഹിക്കാനുള്ള സന്ദര്‍ഭമാണീ ജീവിതമെന്ന്‌ തിരിച്ചറിയാന്‍
സാധിക്കുന്നവര്‍ മഹാഭാഗ്യവാന്മാരാണ്‌.

                 സുഖമൊരു
അനുഭവമല്ല. ദു:ഖമാണ്‌ അനുഭവമെന്ന്‌ ദു:ഖിച്ചവര്‍ക്കൊക്കെ അറിയാം.
രോഗങ്ങളും വേദനകളുമൊന്നുമില്ലെങ്കിലാണ്‌ സത്യത്തില്‍ നമുക്ക്‌ ഭയം
വര്‍ധിക്കേണ്ടത്‌. ഈ ജീവിതത്തിന്റെ നിസ്സാരതയെത്രയെന്ന്‌
തിരിച്ചറിയുമ്പോള്‍ വേദനകളെയും സന്തോഷങ്ങളെയും അതിജീവിക്കാന്‍ നാം
പഠിച്ചുതുടങ്ങും. അലക്കുകല്ലിന്റെ നിയോഗം അടിക്കുക എന്നതല്ല, അടി കൊള്ളുക
എന്നതാണ്‌. ഒരര്‍ഥത്തില്‍ നമ്മുടെയും നിയോഗമതാണ്‌. മരിക്കുന്നതുവരെ
ജീവിച്ചുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുകയും ജീവിക്കുമ്പോഴൊക്കെ
പ്രവര്‍ത്തിച്ചുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുകയുമാണ്‌ നമ്മുടെ ദൗത്യം.

               അസഹ്യമായ
അനുഭവങ്ങള്‍ വരാനിരിക്കുന്ന ജീവിതമാണ്‌ നമ്മുടേത്‌. അനിഷ്‌ടകരമായ
വാര്‍ത്തകള്‍ കേള്‍ക്കാനിരിക്കുന്ന കാതും ഹൃദയം തകരുന്ന അലര്‍ച്ചയോടെ
കരയാനിരിക്കുന്ന കണ്ണുമാണ്‌ നമ്മുടേത്‌. അത്തരം അനുഭവങ്ങള്‍ വരുത്തരുതേ
എന്ന്‌ പ്രാര്‍ഥിക്കുന്നതോടൊപ്പം അങ്ങനെ വല്ലതും സംഭവിച്ചാല്‍
പിടിച്ചുനില്‍ക്കാനുള്ള കെല്‍പ്പു തരണേയെന്നും പ്രാര്‍ഥിക്കുന്നതിലാണ്‌
തിരുനബി(സ)യുടെ മാതൃക.

                യാഥാര്‍ഥ്യബോധത്തോടെ
ജീവിതാനുഭവങ്ങളെ നേരിടുന്നതിലാണ്‌ നമ്മള്‍ വിജയിക്കേണ്ടത്‌. കുഞ്ഞ്‌
മരിച്ചുകിടന്നപ്പോഴും മുഖത്ത്‌ സങ്കടം വിരിയാതെ, ഭര്‍ത്താവിന്‌ അത്താഴവും
ആനന്ദവും പകര്‍ന്ന സ്വഹാബി വനിതയെ കേട്ടിട്ടില്ലേ? ധീരമായ ഭക്തിയാണത്‌.
കണ്ണീരിനെ മുഴുവന്‍ കണ്ണിനു പിന്നില്‍ നിര്‍ത്തിയ അസാധാരണമായ
സത്യവിശ്വാസമാണത്‌.

              സ്വഹാബികളോടൊപ്പം
യാത്ര ചെയ്യുകയായിരുന്ന തിരുനബി(സ) അവിടെയൊരു ആള്‍ക്കൂട്ടം കണ്ടു.
എന്താണവിടെയെന്ന്‌ അന്വേഷിച്ചു. `അവിടെ ഒരു ഖബ്‌ര്‍
കുഴിച്ചുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുകയാണ്‌ റസൂലേ'. ഇത്‌ കേട്ടതോടെ തിരുദൂതര്‍
വിഭ്രാന്തിയുള്ള മുഖത്തോടെ ആ ഖബ്‌റിന്നരികിലേക്ക്‌ ഓടി. അവിടെ
മുട്ടുകുത്തിയിരുന്നു. താഴെയുള്ള മണ്ണ്‌ നനയുന്നത്രയും ശക്തമായി കരഞ്ഞു.
എന്നിട്ടിങ്ങനെ പറഞ്ഞു: ``എന്റെ കൂട്ടുകാരേ, ഇതുപോലൊരു ദിനത്തെ നേരിടാന്‍
നിങ്ങള്‍ ഒരുക്കങ്ങള്‍ നടത്തണേ.'' (ഇബ്‌നുമാജ-സുനന്‍ 4195)

               ജനങ്ങളില്‍
ഏറ്റവും ബുദ്ധിശക്തിയുള്ളവന്‍ ആരാണെന്ന ചോദ്യത്തിന്‌ തിരുനബി(സ)യുടെ
മറുമൊഴി ഇങ്ങനെയായിരുന്നു: ``മരണത്തെ നിരന്തരം ഓര്‍ക്കുന്നവര്‍. അതിനായി
തയ്യാറെടുക്കുന്നവര്‍. ഇവിടെ മാന്യതയും പരലോകത്ത്‌ മഹത്വവും
നേടിയെടുക്കുന്നവരാണവര്‍.'' (ബൈഹഖി-ശുഅബുല്‍ഈമാന്‍ 7993, 10550)

              മരണത്തെ
ഓര്‍ത്ത്‌ തയ്യാറെടുക്കുന്നവര്‍ക്ക്‌ അല്ലാഹു ഹൃദയത്തെ ഉണര്‍ത്തുകയും
മരണസന്ദര്‍ഭം എളുപ്പമാക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുമെന്ന്‌ അവിടുന്ന്‌ പറഞ്ഞു. (ദൈലമി:
മുസ്‌നദുല്‍ ഫിര്‍ദൗസ്‌)

             `ജീവിച്ച
വര്‍ഷങ്ങളല്ല, വര്‍ഷിച്ച ജീവിതമാണ്‌ പ്രധാനം' എന്ന്‌ ഇംഗ്ലീഷിലൊരു
പഴമൊഴിയുണ്ട്‌. ആയുസ്സിന്റെ നീളത്തേക്കാള്‍ ആയുസിലെ കര്‍മങ്ങളിലായിരിക്കണം
നമ്മുടെ ശ്രദ്ധ. നമുക്ക്‌ ഒരു ഏകദേശ ധാരണപോലുമില്ലാത്ത നിമിഷത്തില്‍ ഈ
ജീവിതം അവസാനിക്കും.
ആരോടും
യാത്ര ചോദിക്കാതെ, ആരെയും കാത്തിരിക്കാതെ, എല്ലാവരെയും കരയിച്ച്‌,
പറയാനുള്ളതും ചെയ്യാന്‍ കരുതിയതുമെല്ലാം ബാക്കിവെച്ച്‌ സുനിശ്ചിതമായ ആ
വലിയ സത്യത്തിലേക്ക്‌ നമ്മള്‍ ഉള്‍ചേരുകതന്നെ ചെയ്യും. ഒട്ടം
പരിചിതമല്ലാത്ത മറ്റൊരു ലോകത്തെക്ക്‌ യാത്രയാകും. അതോടെ എല്ലാ രസച്ചരടുകളും
പൊട്ടിച്ചിതറും. ഒന്നിച്ചു കഴിഞ്ഞവര്‍ രണ്ടായി പിരിയും, വാക്കുകളില്‍
കണ്ണീരു കലരും. ഓര്‍മകളൊക്കെയും സങ്കടമാവും. നമ്മെ പുണര്‍ന്നിരിരുന്ന
കൈകള്‍ നമ്മുടെ നേരെ മണ്ണെറിയും; തീര്‍ന്നു!

             ജനിക്കും
മുമ്പ്‌ നമ്മെക്കുറിച്ച ഓര്‍മ കൂടിക്കൂടിവരും. മരണത്തോടെ ആ ഓര്‍മ
കുറഞ്ഞുകുറഞ്ഞുവരും. മരിക്കും വരെ ജീവിക്കുകയും ജീവിക്കുമ്പോഴൊക്കെ
പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുകയുമാണ്‌ നമ്മുടെ നിയോഗം.

ഓര്‍ക്കുക: ഞാന്‍ ചെയ്‌തതിന്റെ
ആകത്തുകയാണ്‌ ഞാന്‍. നിങ്ങളും അങ്ങനെത്തന്നെ.

ബുള്ളഷ് റാവുവിന്റെ അമ്മയോട് നാമെന്ത് പറയും?

2011-10-02T23:02:00.001+05:30

ബുള്ളഷ് റാവുവിന്റെ അമ്മയോട് നാമെന്ത് പറയും?

കഴിഞ്ഞ ചൊവ്വാഴ്ച അത്ര പ്രാധാന്യത്തോടെയല്ലെങ്കിലും മലയാള പത്രങ്ങളില്‍ വന്ന ഒരു വാര്‍ത്തയിതായിരുന്നു. ആലപ്പുഴ ജില്ലയിലെ പട്ടണക്കാടിന് സമീപം ഉഴുവ തറമൂട് റെയില്‍വേ ക്രോസിനടുത്ത ശ്രീകൃഷ്ണവിലാസം ഭജനമഠത്തിന്റെ നടപ്പന്തലിലെ മണിക്കയറില്‍ അര്‍ധരാത്രി ഒരു മുപ്പതുകാരന്‍ പശ്ചിമ ബംഗാളിലെ ജയ്പാല്‍ഗുഡി ജില്ലയില്‍ നിന്നുള്ള ബുള്ളഷ് റാവു തൂങ്ങി മരിച്ചു. ഇദ്ദേഹം ഈ സമയത്ത് എങ്ങനെ ഇവിടെയെത്തി എന്നല്ലേ? വിശദീകരിക്കാം. ചെങ്ങന്നൂരില്‍ നിര്‍മാണത്തൊഴിലില്‍ ഏര്‍പ്പെട്ടിരിക്കുന്ന ബംഗാളി സംഘത്തില്‍ പെട്ടയാളാണ് ബുള്ളഷ്. നാട്ടില്‍നിന്നെത്തിയ രണ്ട് തൊഴിലാളി സുഹൃത്തുക്കളോടൊപ്പം തീവണ്ടിയില്‍ യാത്ര ചെയ്യുകയായിരുന്നു അദ്ദേഹം. ഉഴുവയില്‍ വെച്ച് ആള്‍ തീവണ്ടിയില്‍നിന്ന് പുറത്തേക്ക് തെറിച്ചുവീണ് തലക്ക് മുറിവുപറ്റി. അര്‍ധരാത്രി, തനിച്ച്, രക്തമൊലിക്കുന്ന ശരീരവുമായി ആ യുവാവ് അടുത്തുള്ള വീട്ടില്‍ സഹായത്തിന് കയറി. അവര്‍ സഹായിച്ചില്ലെന്ന് മാത്രമല്ല, ബുള്ളഷിനെ പറഞ്ഞുവിട്ടു. ഭാഷയറിയാതെ, വഴി തിരിയാതെ ആ ചെറുപ്പക്കാരന്‍ വീണ്ടും നിരവധി വീടുകളില്‍ കയറി ദയ യാചിച്ചു നോക്കി. ആരും അര ഗ്ലാസ് പച്ചവെള്ളം പോലും അവന് നേരെ നീട്ടിയില്ല. അര്‍ധരാത്രി രക്തമൊലിപ്പിച്ചു നടക്കുന്ന ബുള്ളഷിന് നേരെ ഒരു പട്ടി കുരച്ച് വന്നപ്പോള്‍ അയാള്‍ അടുത്തുള്ള ഭജനമഠത്തില്‍ കയറി. അവിടെ തൂങ്ങിക്കിടക്കുന്ന മണിക്കയര്‍ അപ്പോഴാണയാള്‍ കാണുന്നത്. ഈ മനുഷ്യര്‍ക്കും പട്ടികള്‍ക്കുമിടയില്‍ ജീവിച്ചിരിക്കുന്നതില്‍ അര്‍ഥമില്ലെന്ന് കണ്ട് ആ ചെറുപ്പക്കാരന്‍ ഭക്തിയുടെ കയറില്‍ തന്റെ ജീവന്‍ അവസാനിപ്പിച്ചു. രംഗം നടക്കുമ്പോള്‍ മഠത്തിന് ചുറ്റും കണ്ടുനില്‍ക്കാന്‍ ആളുകളുണ്ടായിരുന്നു. ആരും 'അരുത്, ഞങ്ങളുണ്ടിവിടെ' എന്നു പറഞ്ഞതേയില്ല.

കായംകുളത്തുനിന്ന് ഞായറാഴ്ച ഒരു റിപ്പോര്‍ട്ടുണ്ടായിരുന്നു. ടിന്‍ഷീറ്റ് ഷെഡില്‍ താമസിക്കുന്ന ബംഗാളി തൊഴിലാളികള്‍ക്കുനേരെ പ്രദേശത്തെ ചില മാന്യന്മാര്‍ മൊബൈല്‍ ഫോണ്‍ മോഷണത്തിന്റെ പേരുപറഞ്ഞ്, നിര്‍മാണ സാമഗ്രികള്‍ ഉപയോഗിച്ച് മൃഗീയമായ ആക്രമണം അഴിച്ചുവിട്ടു. 15നും 30 വയസ്സിനുമിടയിലുള്ള 36 തൊഴിലാളികള്‍ ഇതെഴുതുമ്പോഴും ദേഹം മുഴുക്കെ മുറിവേറ്റ് വിവിധ ആശുപത്രികളില്‍ ചികിത്സയിലാണ്. മൊബൈല്‍ ഫോണല്ല, കരാറുകാര്‍ക്കിടയിലെ കുടിപ്പകയാണ് പാവപ്പെട്ട തൊഴിലാളികള്‍ ആക്രമിക്കപ്പെട്ടതിന്റെ യഥാര്‍ഥ കാരണം. സ്ഥലത്തെ പ്രധാന മാന്യന്മാരാണ് ആക്രമണത്തിന് പിന്നിലെന്നത് കൊണ്ടുതന്നെ പൊലീസ് കാര്യമായ നടപടികള്‍ ഒന്നും ഇതുവരെയും എടുത്തിട്ടില്ല.

'അന്യസംസ്ഥാന തൊഴിലാളികള്‍' എന്നത് നമ്മുടെ ഭാഷയില്‍ അടുത്തിടെ വന്നുചേര്‍ന്ന ഒരു പ്രയോഗമാണ്. നമ്മുടെ ചെറുപ്പക്കാര്‍ നല്ലൊരു ശതമാനം വിദേശത്തുപോവുകയും ഇവിടെയുള്ളവര്‍ ശാരീരികാധ്വാനമുള്ള തൊഴില്‍ ചെയ്യുന്നത് മടിക്കുകയും ചെയ്തപ്പോഴാണ് അന്യസംസ്ഥാന തൊഴിലാളികള്‍ നമ്മുടെ തൊഴില്‍ കമ്പോളത്തിലെ വലിയ സാന്നിധ്യമായത്. നമ്മുടെ നിര്‍മാണമേഖല ഇന്ന് മുന്നോട്ടുപോകുന്നത് പ്രധാനമായും ഇവരുടെ അധ്വാനശേഷിയുടെ ബലത്തിലാണ്. സാമാന്യം തരക്കേടില്ലാത്ത കൂലികിട്ടുന്നതുകൊണ്ട് അവരും സന്തോഷത്തോടെ തൊഴില്‍ ചെയ്യുന്നു. അങ്ങനെ, ഒഡിഷയിലെയും ബംഗാളിലെയും ബിഹാറിലെയും വിദൂര ഗ്രാമങ്ങളിലെ പട്ടിണിപ്പാവങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് കേരളം എന്നത് അവര്‍ കണ്ടെത്തിയ 'ഗള്‍ഫ്' ആയി മാറി. ഒരു കാര്യമുറപ്പ്, നാളെ അവരെല്ലാം തിരിച്ച് വണ്ടി കയറിയാല്‍ കേരളത്തിന്റെ ഉല്‍പാദന, നിര്‍മാണമേഖല സ്തംഭിക്കും.

പക്ഷേ, ആ മനുഷ്യരെ മനുഷ്യരായി കാണാനുള്ള മാന്യത പുരോഗമന കേരളം കാണിക്കുന്നുണ്ടോ? അര്‍ധ മനുഷ്യരോ താഴ്ന്ന മനുഷ്യരോ ആയല്ലേ നാം പലപ്പോഴും അവരെ പരിഗണിക്കുന്നത്? ആസ്‌ട്രേലിയയിലെ ഇന്ത്യന്‍ വിദ്യാര്‍ഥികള്‍ക്കുനേരെയുള്ള വംശീയ വിവേചനത്തിനെതിരെ സായാഹ്ന ധര്‍ണ നടത്തുമ്പോഴും നമ്മുടെ ഉമ്മറത്തെ ബംഗാളിയോട് മാന്യമായി പെരുമാറാന്‍ മലയാളിക്ക് കഴിഞ്ഞില്ല. ഗര്‍വിന്റെയും അഹങ്കാരത്തിന്റെയും വ്യാകരണവും ശരീരഭാഷയുമാണ് നാം അവരോട് കാണിച്ചത്. ഗള്‍ഫിലും മറ്റും ഇതേപോലെ 'അന്യരാജ്യ' തൊഴിലാളികളായി ജീവിക്കുന്ന മലയാളി ചെറുപ്പക്കാര്‍ അയക്കുന്ന കറന്‍സിയുടെ ബലത്തിലാണ് നമ്മളീ അഹന്തകളൊക്കെയും കാണിക്കുന്നതെന്ന് നാം മറന്നുപോയി.

അന്യസംസ്ഥാന തൊഴിലാളികളോടുള്ള അയിത്ത മനോഭാവം മാത്രമല്ല, മറ്റൊരാളുടെയും പ്രശ്‌നത്തില്‍ ഇടപെടാനുള്ള മലയാളിയുടെ സന്നദ്ധതയില്ലായ്മ കൂടിയാണ് ബുള്ളഷിന്റെ മരണം വെളിവാക്കുന്നത്. വാഹനാപകടത്തില്‍ പെട്ട് നടുറോഡില്‍ രക്തമൊലിപ്പിച്ച് പിടയുന്നവനെ കൈപിടിച്ചുയര്‍ത്തുന്നതിനുപകരം, ആ രംഗം മൊബൈല്‍ കാമറയില്‍ ഒപ്പിയെടുക്കാന്‍ വെമ്പുന്ന മനസ്സ് മലയാളിയില്‍ വികൃതമായി വളര്‍ന്നുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുകയാണ്. ഞാന്‍, എന്റെ കാര്യം എന്ന കുടുസ്സു ചിന്തയില്‍ എന്തേ നമ്മള്‍ മലയാളികള്‍ ഇന്ത്യയിലെ ഏറ്റവും വിദ്യാസമ്പന്നരായ പുരോഗമന സമൂഹം പെട്ടുപോയി? ഒരിറക്ക് വെള്ളംപോലും കിട്ടാതെ വേദനകൊണ്ട് പുളഞ്ഞ്, മനോവേദനകൊണ്ട് തകര്‍ന്ന് ജീവിതമവസാനിപ്പിച്ച ബുള്ളഷിന്റെ ആത്മാവ് നമ്മളെക്കുറിച്ച് ഇപ്പോള്‍ എന്തു വിചാരിക്കുന്നുണ്ടാവും? കുടിലിലെ പട്ടിണിമാറ്റാന്‍ ആ ചെറുപ്പക്കാരനെ കണെ്ണത്താ വിദൂരതയിലേക്ക് പറഞ്ഞുവിട്ട ബുള്ളഷിന്റെ അമ്മ നാളെ ഇങ്ങോട്ടുവന്ന് എന്റെ മകനോട് നിങ്ങളെന്തേ ഇങ്ങനെ ചെയ്തുവെന്ന് ചോദിച്ചാല്‍, സത്യം, നമ്മളെന്താണ് മറുപടി പറയുക? വിദൂരദേശങ്ങളില്‍ തീര്‍ത്തും അന്യമായ സാഹചര്യങ്ങളില്‍ നമുക്ക് കഞ്ഞിയെത്തിക്കാന്‍ വേണ്ടി ചോരനീരാക്കി പണിയെടുക്കുന്ന നമ്മുടെ മക്കളോട്/അനുജന്മാരോട് അന്നാട്ടുകാര്‍ ഈ വിധം പെരുമാറിയാല്‍ അവര്‍ക്കുനേരെ വിരല്‍ചൂണ്ടാന്‍ നമുക്കെങ്ങനെ കഴിയും?

ബുള്ളഷിന്റെ മരണം ഒരു ചൂണ്ടാണി മാത്രമാണ്. നാം, മലയാളികള്‍ എവിടെ എത്തിനില്‍ക്കുന്നുവെന്നതിന്റെ ഓര്‍മപ്പെടുത്തല്‍. ഈ അപരാധത്തിന് നാം കൂട്ടമായി മാപ്പുചോദിക്കുക. മുഖ്യമന്ത്രിതന്നെ മുഴുവന്‍ മലയാളികള്‍ക്കും വേണ്ടി ആ ചെറുപ്പക്കാരന്റെ കുടുംബത്തോട് ഖേദപ്രകടനം നടത്തുക. എങ്കില്‍ അതൊരു അനുഭവമായിരിക്കും. ജനങ്ങള്‍ക്കിടയില്‍ പുതിയൊരു അവബോധം സൃഷ്ടിക്കാന്‍ അതുപകരിക്കും. പൊങ്ങച്ചബോധം കുടഞ്ഞു തെറിപ്പിക്കാന്‍, സ്വന്തത്തെയും കടന്ന് അപരനിലേക്ക് നീളാനുള്ള ചിന്ത അവനില്‍ കരുപ്പിടിപ്പിക്കാന്‍ അതുപകരിച്ചേക്കും.

ബുള്ളഷ്, നീ ഞങ്ങളോട് പൊറുക്കുക.

Civil Disobedience: Muslim women flout French ban of veil

2011-09-22T23:48:00.001+05:30

Kenza Drider, wearing an Islamic face veil announces in front of Meaux court house, east of Paris that she will be candidate for the 2012 French presidential elections Thursday Sept. 22, 2011. Drider declared her longshot candidacy Thursday, the same day that a French court fined two women who refuse to remove their veils. All three are among a group of women mounting an attack on the law that has banned the garments from the streets of France since April, and prompted similar moves in other European countries. (AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere)

PARIS—Kenza Drider's posters for the French presidential race are ready to go, months before the official campaign begins. There she is, the "freedom candidate," pictured standing in front of a line of police -- a forbidden veil hiding her face.

Drider declared her longshot candidacy Thursday, the same day that a French court fined two women who refuse to remove their veils. All three are among a group of women mounting an attack on the law that has banned the garments from the streets of France since April, and prompted similar moves in other European countries.

They are bent on proving that the ban contravenes fundamental rights and that women who hide their faces stand for freedom, not submission.

"When a woman wants to maintain her freedom, she must be bold," Drider told The Associated Press in an interview.

President Nicolas Sarkozy strongly disagrees, and says the veil imprisons women. Polls show that most French people support the ban, which authorities estimate affects fewer than 2,000 women who wore the veil before the ban.

Drider declared her candidacy Thursday in Meaux, the city east of Paris run by top conservative lawmaker and Sarkozy ally Jean-Francois Cope, who championed the ban.

"I have the ambition today to serve all women who are the object of stigmatization or social, economic or political discrimination," she said. "It is important that we show that we are here, we are French citizens and that we, as well, can bring solutions to French citizens."

Two other women arrested wearing veils in Meaux -- while trying to deliver a birthday cake to Cope -- were fined in court Thursday, one euro120, the other euro80.

They want to push their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

"We cannot accept that women be punished because they are openly practicing their religious convictions. We are demanding the application of European rights," said one of those convicted, Hind Ahmas.

With Islam the second religion in France and numbers of faithful growing, there are worries that veiled Muslim women could compromise the nation's secular foundations and undermine gender equality and women's dignity. There are also concerns that practices like wearing full veils could open the door to a radical form of Islam. Lawmakers banned Muslim headscarves in classrooms in 2004.

Few Muslim women in France cover their faces. Most who veil themselves wear the "niqab," a filmy cloth attached to the headscarf that covers all but the eyes. The law also affects the burqa, with just a mesh covering over the eyes, worn largely in Afghanistan.

Belgium passed a similar face veil ban that took effect in July, and the Netherlands announced Friday it has drawn up legislation to outlaw Muslim face veils. A draft law has been approved in Italy.

In France, the veil ban was also seen as a political maneuver by the unpopular Sarkozy's conservative UMP party, which Cope chairs, to entice deeply conservative and far-right voters.

Flouting the French measure outlawing face veils in all public places can lead to a fine of euro150 and, in some cases, citizenship classes. However, thus far there have been few legal consequences.

According to the Interior Ministry, 146 women have been given citations by police but only a handful have reportedly been forced to take the next step -- appear before a judge for a possible fine. The Justice Ministry says figures are not yet available.

"I tried to understand this law and what I understood is that this is a law which puts us under house arrest," Drider said, referring to women who choose to stay home rather than remove their face veils, or risk arrest.

What the law has done, she says, is give citizens the right to insult veiled women.

Drider and others say that many women who refuse to remove their veils become shut-ins rather than go outside and risk a citation, or insults. One woman in a long black robe was seen recently in a chic Paris neighborhood wearing a surgical mask on her face -- one of several tricks developed to get around the ban.

Drider, 32, who has worn a face veil for 13 years, hasn't shirked from denouncing the ban in the past. She was the only veiled woman to testify before an information commission of lawmakers studying a potential ban before the law was passed.

With four children, Drider says she goes about the southern city of Avignon, where she lives, facing down insults but left alone by police.

Ahmas, 32, from Aulnay-Sous-Bois, a northeast Paris suburb, looked for trouble when she tried to deliver an almond cake to Cope, the mayor of Meaux, with another veiled woman. The gesture was not without a touch of humor: in French, "almond" sounds like "fine."

The women, while intent on showing the power behind the veil, have a male backer. Rachid Nekkaz, a wealthy businessman revolted by the street ban, has promised to pay fines for women sanctioned for breaking the law. With his association, Don't Touch My Constitution, he heads Drider's support committee for the presidency.

For Nekkaz, the Meaux case will be the first in France in which a conviction for veiled women could stick. He wants to see an appeal eventually go to the highest French court, then on to the European Court of Human Rights and calculates that this could happen in 2014.

Drider has obstacles to overcome, too, like getting 500 mayors to back her candidacy, a requirement for anyone running for the presidential elections in April and May. With more than 36,000 mayors in France, she thinks this is doable -- despite her status as a lawbreaker.

Both women insist that neither Drider's candidacy for the presidential race nor the Meaux court case are a provocation because their aim is to set aright a measure they say has skewed French values and compromised women's rights.

"My candidacy is to say the real problem in France is not us ... The real problem in France is really women's freedom ... whatever their religion," she said. "So let's not focus on what I wear. Let's deal with the real problems. My candidacy is really for that, to say don't stop at what I wear but go much deeper."

Islamic cultural center open in N.Y.

2011-09-22T20:26:00.001+05:30

Islamic cultural center open in N.Y.

Sep 22, 2011 |

An NYPD officer keeps watch during the Wednesday grand opening of the Park51 Islamic cultural center in New York City. It's near Ground Zero, and the project has drawn criticism from opponents who say they don't want a Muslim prayer space near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. / MARIO TAMA/Getty Images

BY KAREN ZRAICK AND VERENA DOBNIK

NEW YORK -- The developer of an Islamic cultural center that opened Wednesday evening near the site of the terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center says the biggest error on the project was not involving the families of 9/11 victims from the start.

People crowded into the center, where a small orchestra played traditional Middle Eastern instruments and a photo exhibit of New York children of different ethnicities lined the walls. The enthusiasm at the opening belied its troubled beginnings.

"We made incredible mistakes," Sharif El-Gamal told the Associated Press in an earlier interview.

The building at 51 Park Place, two blocks from Ground Zero, includes a mosque that has been open for two years. El-Gamal said the cultural center is modeled after the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he lives.

"I wanted my daughter to learn how to swim, so I took her to the JCC," said the Brooklyn-born Muslim. "And when I walked in, I said, 'Wow. This is great.' "

The project has drawn criticism from opponents who say they don't want a Muslim prayer space near the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The center is open to all faiths and will include a 9/11 memorial, El-Gamal said. He called opposition to the center -- which prompted one of the most virulent national discussions about Islam and freedom of speech and religion since Sept. 11 -- part of a "campaign against Muslims."

Last year, street clashes in view of the trade center site pitted supporters against opponents of the center.

When the center was first envisioned, several years ago, activist Daisy Khan and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, played a major, vocal role. But they soon left the project because of differences with the developer.

El-Gamal, 38, confirmed Wednesday that they parted ways because "we had a different vision."

The couple said they had discussed plans for Park51, as the center is known, with relatives of 9/11 victims, first responders and others. But El-Gamal said he wishes victims' families had been involved earlier -- before the center became a point of contention. "The biggest mistake we made was not to include 9/11 families," El-Gamal said, noting that the center's advisory board now includes at least one 9/11 family member.

El-Gamal also noted that the featured photographer in the "NYChildren" exhibit is Danny Goldfield, who is Jewish.

Goldfield said he didn't want to pass judgment on the center's opponents. But he said he'd like them to see the show "more than anyone."

El-Gamal said that fund-raising is under way to complete the 15-story building that also is to include an auditorium, educational programs, a pool, a restaurant and culinary school, child care services, a sports facility, a wellness center and artist studios.

The mosque is needed in lower Manhattan, he said, because thousands of Muslims either work or live in the area.

Athletic, Muslim, Fashionable

2011-08-28T12:08:00.001+05:30

Athletic, Muslim, Fashionable - a Tale of the Sports Hijab

Tala Hadavi | Montreal

Olympic hopeful, 17-year-old Zeinab Hammoud

Female Muslim athletes who observe a strict Islamic dress code sometimes face the question of whether they will be allowed to participate in major competitions -- with their heads and most of their bodies covered. Now, one Iranian-Canadian woman is marketing a product to change that. It complies with the requirements of many major sports, and it’s fashionable, safe and comfortable -- while still meeting Islamic requirements.

An Olympic hopeful faces a small obstacle

Seventeen-year-old Zeinab Hammoud has a brown belt in Taekwondo, and dreams of one day making it to the Olympics. But unlike her sister, Rana, Zeinab chooses to wear the Islamic headscarf, or hijab.

This became a problem four years ago. The team’s hard work, passion and hopes were dashed when the Taekwondo Federation of Quebec expelled them from a tournament in 2007. The reason: their hijabs were considered unsafe. “I was really disappointed because I trained really hard for that tournament. When I found out we were expelled I lost all my motivation to continue,” Hammoud said.

Civil rights supporters and sports enthusiasts around the world were enraged. Elham Seyed Javad was one of them. “In my opinion every individual, no matter their religion, should have the same rights as anyone else in society," he stated. "I mean, sports was made to re-unite people."

Athletic fashion

Javad was an industrial design student at the time, so she decided to take on the problem as one of her school projects. "At the time, in 2008, when I decided to take on this project, the international federation of Taekwondo didn’t allow its athletes to wear anything under the helmet. So my professor didn’t think there was a point of pursuing it. But my point was, the rule is there because nothing has been invented that is appropriate," she explained.

Javad spent countless hours with the Hammoud sisters’ taekwondo team and with pattern maker Latifa Boukenda, to make the best product possible. “This was a very exciting project for me. I’ve worked in fashion for many years but this was special because it was beyond fashion," she said. "It had a more human and social aspect to it. helping young women blossom and follow their athletic dreams."

Ultimately, they hit upon a design that worked, and a fabric that was stretchy, breathable, and dried quickly. Called a “ResportOn,” the garment was an immediate hit.

Even Zeinab’s sister Rana, who chooses not to wear the hijab, was impressed. “I just tried the Resport hijab and the hair was inside so it doesn’t come out and it’s very comfortable so you can play without trying to put your hair inside all the time,” she noted.

Rules reconsidered, changed

Javad’s invention came at an opportune time. A year later, in response to pressure from the taekwondo community, the World Taekwondo Federation changed its rules to allow for head-coverings.

The Montreal Muslim Taekwondo team was able to compete again.

“I was in the stands and got teary-eyed because since the very beginning my goal was to be able to see the girls on the mats again. When it happened it was like someone gave me the world," Javad stated.

Javad thought she was just helping Zeinab and her teammates. But when an investor approached her about marketing the product, things changed dramatically. In January, her sports hijab became available to athletes all over the world. She has been busy ever since. “My days start at 2am when my phone goes off with an email from an athlete from the other side of the world. I turn it on and read the email, get happy and go back to sleep," she said.

While there are other sports hijabs on the market, Javad believes hers has some advantages. Those include a built-in t-shirt that keeps it from pulling loose, and an opening at the back that allows easy access for wearers to adjust their hair.

സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍

2011-08-24T18:11:00.001+05:30

സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍

റമദാന്‍ മാസത്തില്‍ പ്രത്യേകമായി ശ്രദ്ധപതിപ്പിക്കേണ്ട ഒരു സകാത്ത്‌ ഇസ്‌ലാം നിശ്ചയിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ട്‌. അതാണ്‌ വ്രതസമാപന സകാത്ത്‌ അഥവാ സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍.
``മുസ്‌ലിംകളിലെ അടിമകള്‍, സ്വതന്ത്രര്‍, പുരുഷന്മാര്‍, സ്‌ത്രീകള്‍, ചെറിയവര്‍, വലിയവര്‍ (എന്നീ വേര്‍തിരിവുകളില്ലാതെ) എല്ലാവരുടെ പേരിലും ഓരോ സ്വാഅ്‌ കാരക്കയോ ബാര്‍ലിയോ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ സകാത്ത്‌ നല്‍കല്‍ ബാധ്യതയായി അല്ലാഹുവിന്റെ ദൂതര്‍(സ) നിര്‍ബന്ധമായി നിശ്ചയിച്ചിരിക്കുന്നു. പെരുന്നാള്‍ നമസ്‌കാരത്തിന്‌ ആളുകള്‍ പുറപ്പെടുന്നതിനു മുമ്പായി അത്‌ നല്‍കണമെന്നും അദ്ദേഹം കല്‌പിച്ചിരിക്കുന്നു.'' (ബുഖാരി, മുസ്‌ലിം)
റമദാന്‍ അവസാനിക്കുന്നതോടെയാണ്‌ ഈ സകാത്ത്‌ നിര്‍ബന്ധമായിത്തീരുന്നത്‌. ഈദുല്‍ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ (ശവ്വാല്‍ ഒന്ന്‌) നമസ്‌കാരത്തിന്‌ പുറപ്പെടുന്നതോടെ അതിന്റെ സമയം അവസാനിക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു. ഹ്രസ്വമായ സമയപരിധിക്കുള്ളില്‍ അത്‌ പൂര്‍ണമായി നിര്‍വഹിക്കപ്പെടാന്‍ പ്രയാസമാണെങ്കില്‍ വ്രതസമാപനത്തിന്‌ രണ്ടോ മൂന്നോ ദിവസം മുമ്പായി അത്‌ കൊടുക്കുകയും ചെയ്യാം. ഇബ്‌നു ഉമര്‍(റ) പറയുന്നു: ``അവര്‍ (സ്വഹാബികള്‍) ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ സകാത്ത്‌ പെരുന്നാളിന്റെ ഒന്നോ രണ്ടോ ദിവസം മുമ്പ്‌ നല്‍കാറുണ്ടായിരുന്നു.'' (ബുഖാരി)
സമ്പത്ത്‌ എന്ന അല്ലാഹുവിന്റെ അനുഗ്രഹം ലഭിച്ചവര്‍ക്ക്‌ മാത്രം നിര്‍ബന്ധമാണ്‌ സാധാരണ സകാത്ത്‌. അതിന്‌ നിശ്ചിത പരിധിയും കൃത്യമായ തോതും കണക്കുമെല്ലാം നിശ്ചയിക്കപ്പെട്ടിരിക്കുന്നു. എന്നാല്‍ സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ സമ്പത്തിന്റെ മാനദണ്ഡമനുസരിച്ചല്ല നല്‍കേണ്ടത്‌. കണക്കനുസരിച്ച്‌ തന്റെ സമ്പത്തിന്റെ സകാത്ത്‌ കൊടുത്തുതീര്‍ത്തവരും കണക്കനുസരിച്ച്‌ സകാത്ത്‌ കൊടുക്കാന്‍ മാത്രം സമ്പത്തില്ലാത്തവരും സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ കൊടുക്കേണ്ടതുണ്ട്‌. നിത്യവൃത്തിക്ക്‌ വകയില്ലാത്തവര്‍ മാത്രമേ ഇതിന്റെ നിര്‍ബന്ധ കല്‌പനയില്‍ നിന്ന്‌ ഒഴിവാക്കപ്പെടുകയുള്ളൂ.
മനുഷ്യസഹജമായ താല്‌പര്യം അംഗീകരിച്ചുകൊണ്ട്‌ അല്ലാഹു നിശ്ചയിച്ച ആഘോഷം എന്ന നിലയില്‍ പെരുന്നാളിന്റെ ആഹ്ലാദം പങ്കിടുവാന്‍ നിത്യവൃത്തിക്ക്‌ കഷ്‌ടപ്പെടുന്നവര്‍ക്കുപോലും സാധിക്കണമെന്നതാണ്‌ സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ കൊണ്ട്‌ ലക്ഷ്യമാക്കുന്നത്‌. ജീവിതത്തില്‍ സൂക്ഷ്‌മത കൈവരിക്കാനും വന്നുപോയ പാളിച്ചകള്‍ക്ക്‌ പരിഹാരവും പ്രായശ്ചിത്തവുമായിക്കൊണ്ടുമാണ്‌ സത്യവിശ്വാസി വ്രതമനുഷ്‌ഠിക്കുന്നത്‌. നോമ്പുകാരന്‌ വീണ്ടും വിമലീകരണത്തിനുള്ള അവസരം കൂടിയാണ്‌ സകാതുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍. ``അനാവശ്യമായ വാക്കും പ്രവൃത്തിയും മൂലം നോമ്പുകാരന്‌ വന്നുപോയ പിഴവുകളില്‍ നിന്ന്‌ അവനെ ശുദ്ധീകരിക്കാനും പാവങ്ങള്‍ക്ക്‌ ആഹാരത്തിനുമായി റസൂല്‍(സ) സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ നിര്‍ബന്ധമാക്കിയിരിക്കുന്നു.'' (അബൂദാവൂദ്‌, ഇബ്‌നുമാജ)
കാരക്കയും ബാര്‍ലിയും മാത്രമല്ല നാട്ടിലെ പ്രധാന ആഹാര സാധനങ്ങളാണ്‌ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ സകാത്തായി നല്‍കേണ്ടത്‌ എന്നാണ്‌ സ്വഹാബിമാരുടെ പ്രവര്‍ത്തനങ്ങളില്‍ നിന്ന്‌ മനസ്സിലാകുന്നത്‌. അബൂസഈദില്‍ ഖുദ്‌രി(റ) പറയുന്നു: ``ഒരു സ്വാഅ്‌ ഗോതമ്പ്‌, അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ ഒരു സ്വാഅ്‌ ബാര്‍ലി, അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ ഒരു സ്വാഅ്‌ പാല്‍ക്കട്ടി, അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ ഒരു സ്വാഅ്‌ മുന്തിരി എന്നിങ്ങനെയായിരുന്നു ഞങ്ങള്‍ സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ കൊടുത്തുവന്നിരുന്നത്‌.'' (ബുഖാരി)
സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ അരി കൊടുക്കണമെന്ന്‌ വിശുദ്ധ ഖുര്‍ആനിലോ ഹദീസിലോ പറഞ്ഞിട്ടില്ലെങ്കിലും നമ്മുടെ നാട്ടില്‍ അരിയാണ്‌ സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ നല്‍കേണ്ടതെന്ന കാര്യത്തില്‍ മുസ്‌ലിം സമൂഹത്തില്‍ രണ്ടഭിപ്രായമില്ല. അത്‌ മേല്‍പറഞ്ഞ ഹദീസുകളുടെ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തിലാണ്‌.

എങ്കിലും സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍ സമൂഹത്തിനുപകരിക്കുംവിധം സംഘടിതമായി നിര്‍വഹിക്കാന്‍ എല്ലാ മുസ്‌ലിംകളും ഇനിയും തയ്യാറായിട്ടില്ലെന്നത്‌ ഖേദകരമാണ്‌.
സകാത്ത്‌ കൊടുക്കുന്ന വ്യക്തി തനിക്കും തന്റെ കീഴിലുള്ള കുടുംബത്തിനും വേണ്ടി അത്‌ നിര്‍വഹിക്കണം. ശവ്വാല്‍ ഒന്നിന്‌ കാലത്ത്‌ പിറന്ന കുഞ്ഞുള്‍പ്പെടെ ഒരാള്‍ക്ക്‌ ഒരു സ്വാഅ്‌ എന്ന തോതില്‍ ധാന്യം അയാള്‍ സകാത്ത്‌ സമിതിയെ ഏല്‌പിക്കണം. സ്വാഅ്‌ എന്നത്‌ നബി(സ)യുടെ കാലത്തെ അളവാണ്‌. മെട്രിക്‌ തൂക്കമനുസരിച്ച്‌ രണ്ടുകിലോഗ്രാമും ഏതാനും ഗ്രാമും ആണത്‌. ആയതിനാല്‍ ആളൊന്നിന്‌ രണ്ട്‌ കിലോഗ്രാം വീതം അരിയാണ്‌ നല്‍കേണ്ടത്‌. ശേഖരിച്ച സകാത്ത്‌ റമദാനിന്റെ അവസാനത്തെ ദിവസങ്ങളില്‍ തന്നെ അര്‍ഹതപ്പെട്ടവര്‍ക്ക്‌ എത്തിച്ചുകൊടുക്കുക എന്നത്‌ സകാത്ത്‌ സമിതിയുടെ ബധ്യതയാണ്‌. ഒരുതരത്തില്‍ സമുദായത്തിന്റെ നിര്‍ബന്ധിതമായ ഒരു റിലീഫ്‌ കൂടിയാണ്‌ സകാത്തുല്‍ ഫിത്വ്‌ര്‍.

Top 12 healthiest foods on earth

2011-08-24T02:17:00.001+05:30

Healthiest Foods on Earth

Healthiest Foods on Earth
1. Berries
All berries are low in sugar and high in fiber. Blueberries have been shown to increase memory in lab studies, and raspberries and strawberries are loaded with ellagic acid, a powerful antioxidant that seems to have some anti-cancer properties, according to the American Cancer Society.

2. Beans
Beans are extremely high in fiber, which helps to control weight, prevent or manage diabetes and blood sugar, and may help prevent colon cancer and protect against heart disease. The National Institute of Medicine recommends 25-38 grams of fiber a day. The average American gets only 4-11 grams. One cup of beans provides 11-17 grams.

3. Nuts
Some of the largest and most important long-term studies of diet and health have shown that eating nuts several times a week is consistent with a risk of heart attack and heart disease that is 30%-50% lower than the general population. Just one ounce of nuts-almonds, macadamia, Brazil , walnuts, pecans-eaten three to five times a week seems to be the magic number.

4. Wild Salmon
Fish is the ultimate anti-aging food. Cold-water fatty fish like wild salmon, sardines, mackerel and herring contain omega-3 fats that protect the brain and the heart, improve mood, and lower blood pressure and triglycerides.

5. Raw Milk
Raw, organic milk nearly always comes from grass-fed cows and contains high levels of cancer-fighting CLA (conjugated linolenic acid) as well as a rich assortment of vitamins, minerals and beneficial bacteria (like Lactobacillus acidophilus)

6. Grass-Fed Meat
Meat from grass-fed cows has a much different fat profile than ordinary supermarket meat: high in omega-3s, lower in potentially harmful omega-6s and loaded with CLA, a kind of fat known for its anti-cancer activity. A superb source of protein and vitamin B12, it's also missing the antibiotics, steroids and hormones found in the meat that comes from feedlot farms.

7. Eggs
Considered by many to be nature's most perfect food, the egg is high in protein and relatively low in calories. The yolk contains choline, one of the most important nutrients for the brain, as well as lutein and xeazanthin, two critical nutrients for eye health. Brassica Vegetables Cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and kale all contain plant compounds called indoles that help reduce the risk of cancer. In addition to a stunning range of vitamins and minerals, they also contain sulforaphane, an important plant chemical that helps the body detoxify health-damaging chemicals.

8. Apples
Not only do they keep the doctor away, they also appear to do the same for lung cancer, diabetes and asthma. An apple contains five grams of fiber and a rich blend of nutrients including the bone-building vitamin K and the anti-inflammatory nutrient quercetin. And there's no better way to control your appetite than an apple eaten about half an hour before a big meal.

9. Onions and Garlic
In an impressive number of published studies, the consumption of onions and garlic has demonstrated protective effects against stomach, prostate and esophageal cancer. Along with broccoli, tea and apples, onions and garlic are among a select group of foods found to reduce mortality from heart disease by 20%.

10. Pomegranate Juice
Called "a natural Viagra" by researchers at Tel Aviv University , pomegranate juice is loaded with antioxidants. Studies show it can reduce blood pressure and plaque in the arteries. New research indicates it also slows the progression of tumors.. Four to eight ounces a day is highly recommended.

11. Green Tea
Though all teas are great for you, green tea has a unique profile of plant chemicals that have anti-cancer activity. It's now fairly established that green tea may help prevent the following types of cancers in humans: bladder, colon, esophagus, pancreas, rectum and stomach. If that's not enough, it also appears to help with weight control.

12. Honey
It is an antioxidant and antibiotic. Touted as a cure all by many authorities. It is named in Qur'an as a natural medicine.

Top 12 reasons Why Anna Hazare is wrong and Lok Pal a bad idea

2011-08-17T16:26:00.001+05:30

FAQ: Why Anna Hazare is wrong and Lok Pal a bad idea

08.14.2011 · Posted in Public Policy

Don’t fall for the miracle cure that is being offered. Corruption must be fought differently and it’s not easy.

1. Is Lok Pal is necessary to fight corruption?

No, not only is it unnecessary, it will make the problem worse.
Corruption in India arises because of too much government, too many
rules, too much complexity and too much ambiguity. Adding one more,
huge, powerful layer to an already complex system will make the system
even more complicated. Complexity creates the incentives for
corruption–both on the part of the bribe giver and the bribe taker.

1A. Is the government’s version of the Lok Pal bill better?

No. We don’t need a Lok Pal at all. Making existing constitutional
institutions—like CAG, CVC, CBI and the Election Commission—more
independent will serve the purpose equally well. If we have been unable
to prevent the politicisation and undermining of these instutitions why
would we be able to prevent the Lok Pal from being politicised and
undermined? If we can prevent Lok Pal from being politicised and
undermined, why can’t we restore the independence and credibility of
CAG, CVC, CBI and the Election Commission?

2. What’s the alternative to Lok Pal then?

The alternative is to proceed with second-generation reforms, or Reforms 2.0.
Contrary to conventional wisdom reforms have reduced corruption, albeit
by moving it to higher up the government. In 1989 an ordinary person
would have to pay a bribe to get a telephone connection. By 2005, there
was no need to pay a bribe at all and anyone could get a phone in
minutes. Yes, 2010 saw the 2G scam in telecoms, but that was because the
UPA government reversed the reform process.

In fact, data show that perceptions of corruption are lower in some sectors of the economy, usually those that have been liberalised.

If you are interested in exploring real alternatives, you can start
by reading Atanu Dey’s slim, easily readable and inexpensive new book, “Transforming India”.

3. Doesn’t Hong Kong have an Ombudsman and doesn’t it enjoy low corruption?

This is a specious argument. There is little evidence to prove that
Hong Kong has low corruption because it has an Ombudsman. On the
contrary, there is empirical evidence from across the world suggesting that countries with high economic freedom are perceived to suffer from less corruption.

Hong Kong is one of the freest economies of the world,
and therefore, incentives for government officials to be corrupt are
relatively low. The Ombudsman is useful to address the residual
corruption in economic sectors and in sectors like law enforcement that
do not have discretionary powers over economic sectors.

4. How can we have economic reforms if the corrupt politicians don’t allow it?

We have not really demanded them at all, actually. If we did, they are
bound to register in the national political agenda. We should persuade
politicians that their political future is linked to implementing
economic reforms.

5. Easy to say, but how can we do this?

By voting. The constituencies that stand to benefit from economic
reforms—the middle class—needs to vote in larger numbers. In the absence
of the middle class vote base, politicians appease the poor by giving
handouts and entitlements, and cater to the super rich by allowing the
crony sector to exploit the half-reformed economy. It’s not easy, and we
have to be innovative. See for instance, Atanu Dey’s interesting idea
to form middle-class vote banks to induce good governance.

Whatever may be the claims made by the people promoting Lok Pal,
there is no miracle solution. They are peddling miracle weight-loss
pills. Sadly, such pills usually don’t work and can cause severe damage
to your health. If you are cautioned not to take those pills, you can’t
ask “which other miracle weight-loss pill do you recommend”? The answer
is in diet and exercise, which is hard work.

6. In the meantime, what’s wrong with Jan Lok Pal?

This question has already been answered above, but it’s usual
to encounter it again at this stage. The problem with Jan Lok Pal is
that it’ll make the problem worse. Does anyone seriously think we can
hire tens of thousands of absolutely honest officials who will
constitute the Lok Pal? Who will keep watch on them? Maybe we need a
Super Lok Pal, and then a Hyper Lok Pal to watch over the Super Lok Pal
and so on…This isn’t sarcasm, this is the logical extension of the Lok
Pal argument.

7. Don’t we have the right to protest peacefully? Why do you say that a fast-until-death lacks legitimacy?

Of course we have the right to protest peacefully. But it’s not about
whether we have the right or not. It’s about are we using that right
wisely. (You have the freedom of speech but that doesn’t mean it’s a
good idea to blast Eminem using a loudspeaker at 2am in a residential
district.)

As Ambedkar said while introducing the Constitution in November 1949,
once the Constitution came into force, we should avoid all
non-constitutional methods like protests and satyagraha, for they are the grammar of anarchy.
If two persons go on fasts until death for two opposing reasons, we
cannot decide the issue by allowing one person to die first.

Fast until death is political blackmail. It is a form of theatre
engaged in to coerce the government into doing something that the
agitators want. Whatever may be the cause, a single person cannot be
allowed to dictate laws to the whole nation.

8. Doesn’t Anna Hazare have the right to fast until death?

Anna Hazare has the right to protest peacefully. However to the extent
that his actions amount to an attempt to commit suicide, they are
illegal. The government can legitimately prevent him from killing
himself whatsoever the reason he might have to attempt suicide.

9. You are an armchair intellectual. Shouldn’t we trust activists more?

Pilots don’t design aircraft. Practicing doctors don’t discover new
drugs and treatments. These jobs are usually done by armchair
intellectuals. So being an armchair intellectual is not a
disqualification.

You shouldn’t trust intellectuals or activists because of what they
are. You should examine their arguments and make your own judgement.
Most of the people supporting Lok Pal have not examined what the
proposal is, have not tried to consider opposing arguments and blindly
accept it as a solution because some famous people said so.

11. Aren’t those who oppose Anna Hazare’s agitation supporting the corrupt politicians?

No. It takes an enormous amount of arrogance to claim that Anna Hazare
and his supporters have the exclusive hold on the right way to fight
corruption.

In the real world, it is foolish to expect 100% clean and non-corrupt
politicians. The real world challenge is to achieve good governance
with imperfect constitutions, imperfect institutions, imperfect leaders
and imperfect citizens. This requires us to realise that individuals
respond to incentives. If we remove incentives for taking or giving
bribes, then corruption will be lowered. We can reduce incentives for
corruption by following through with the reforms that started in 1991
but have stalled since 2004.

It is entirely possible to oppose the UPA government’s politics and
policies, while recognising that it is the legitimately constituted
government of the country. Individuals and parties might suffer from a
legitimacy deficit because of flagrant corruption, but the Government of
India as an institution remains the legitimate authority to make policy
decisions for the whole nation.

12. Why is fasting illegitimate when Mahatma Gandhi used it in our struggle for independence from the British?

There is a huge difference in context between 26th January 1950 when the
Constitution of India came into force and the time before it.

Mahatma Gandhi used civil disobedience against laws imposed on India
by the British government. Indians had no say in how the laws were made
and how they were implemented. Indians could not repeal laws we didn’t
want. Civil disobedience was justified in this context.

Gandhi also used it to coerce Indian nationalist leaders too,
including Ambedkar and the Indian National Congress, into accepting his
views. Whatever might be the wisdom of Gandhi’s intentions, this was
undemocratic and created a culture of ‘high command’ that lives on to
this day. Fasting was not justified in this context. This part of Gandhi
receives little attention in the dominant narrative of Indian history.

With the formation of the Republic of India on 26 January 1950,
things changed profoundly. All Indians have a say in how laws are made
and how they are implemented. We can amend or repeal laws that we do not
like. There is, of course, a method to do this, which must be followed.
These are the constitutional methods that Ambedkar referred to in his
grammar of anarchy speech. When constitutional methods are available,
there is no case for non-constitutional methods like satyagraha or
hunger strikes.

There is thus no equivalence between Gandhi’s satyagraha against the
British ruling us and Mr Hazare’s hunger strikes against we ruling
ourselves.

London riots

2011-08-10T13:52:00.001+05:30

August 8,2011

London riots

Two nights of
rioting in London's Tottenham neighborhood erupted following protests
over the shooting death by police of a local man, Mark Duggan. Police
were arresting him when the shooting occurred. Over 170 people were
arrested over the two nights of rioting, and fires gutted several
stores, buildings, and cars. The disorder spread to other neighborhoods
as well, with shops being looted in the chaos. Collected here are
images from the rioting and the aftermath. -- Lane Turner (26 photos total)

Fire
fighters and riot police survey the area as fire rages through a
building in Tottenham, north London on Aug. 7, 2011. A demonstration
against the death of a local man turned violent and cars and shops were
set ablaze. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP)

2
A rioter throws a burning wooden plank at police in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

3
Mounted police officers chase rioters on the streets in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

4
Riot police officers face off with protesters in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

5
A masked protester hurls an object toward riot police officers in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

6
A policeman in riot gear stands guard in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

7
A
double decker bus burns as riot police try to contain a large group of
people on a main road in Tottenham on August 6, 2011. (Leon
Neal/AFP/Getty Images) #

8
Police
officers detain a man in Enfield, north London August 7, 2011. Police
said they were called to Enfield, a few miles north of Tottenham, where
youths had smashed two shop windows and damaged a police car. (Stefan
Wermuth/Reuters) #

9
Fire rages through a building in Tottenham on Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

10
Riot police officers escort an injured man after arresting him in Tottenham on Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

11
A protester faces off with riot police officers on the streets in Tottenham on Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

12
Police officers make their way on the streets in Tottenham on Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

13
Buildings burn on Tottenham High Road in London during protests on August 6, 2011. (Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images) #

14
Protestors face off against riot police lines on Tottenham High Road on August 6, 2011 in London. (Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images) #

15
Police officers detain a man in Tottenham on August 7, 2011. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters) #

16
Police officers in riot gear walk past a burning building in Tottenham on August 7, 2011. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters) #

17
A
shop and police car burn as riot police try to contain a large group of
people on a main road in Tottenham on August 6, 2011. (Leon
Neal/AFP/Getty Images) #

18
A
woman walks through the debris with two children as riot police try to
contain a large group of people on a main road in Tottenham on August 6
2011. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images) #

19
A policeman walks past a damaged jewelery shop in Enfield, north London on August 7, 2011. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters) #

20
A
police officer patrols as firemen continue to dowse buildings set
alight during riots in Tottenham on August 7, 2011. (Luke
MacGregor/Reuters) #

21
Police cordon off an area on August 7, 2011 during unrest in Enfield. (Karel Prinsloo/AP) #

22
Animals are taken from a pet store after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) #

23
Aaron
Biber, 89, assesses the damage to his hairdressing salon after riots on
Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) #

24
Burnt out cars lie in the road after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) #

25
A man stands next to a burnt out van after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011 . (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) #

26
Residents watch as a building burns after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

London riots: in ashes, a firm that survived two world wars

It survived the Depression, two world wars and the deepest recession in a
century.

Image 1 of 3

Firefighters battle the fire that broke out at House of Reeves furniture store in Croydon

By Graeme Paton

7:30AM BST 10 Aug 2011

But House of Reeves, a 144-year-old furniture store in the heart of Croydon,
could do little in the face of 100 or so yobs hell-bent on tearing up this
particular corner of south London.

The shop, a local landmark of such repute that it gave its name to the road on
which it now stands, was razed as youths rampaged through the town’s
streets, smashing doors and windows.

In one of the most searing images of the
London riots, flames tore through the store on Reeves’ Corner on
Monday night, with smoke being seen for miles around. By morning, all that
was left was a charred shell and onlookers were kept well back for fear that
the shattered building could collapse.

It was a crushing blow for a company that was founded in 1867 and has remained
in the Reeves family for five generations. Trevor Reeves, 56, the founder’s
great-great grandson, said: “If we were a computer shop, they would have
just broken in, taken the stock and left. But you can’t very well carry a
three-piece suite through the centre of Croydon can you? It was obvious that
the only thing left for them to do was to set fire to the place.

“It is completely devastating; heartbreaking. The family has been through a
lot; the world wars and the Depression in the 1930s were obviously tough and
the last few years have been particularly difficult, but we have always kept
going.
London riots: Telegraph readers' photos of the rioting and looted areas of the city

Telegraph readers have been sending us their pictures of the rioting and
looted areas of London. If you have photos related to the recent unrest,
email them to mypic@telegraph.co.uk,
supplying a little info on where and how the pictures were taken, and we'll
include the best in this picture gallery.

This amazing picture of a car exploding on Mare Street in Hackney was taken
by Telegraph reader Miks Uzans, who writes: "There were around 30
well-equipped rioters. The police didn't even come close to this; instead
they were blocking the road 200m away."

London riots

2011-08-10T13:45:00.001+05:30

August 8,2011

London riots

Two nights of rioting in London's Tottenham neighborhood erupted following protests over the shooting death by police of a local man, Mark Duggan. Police were arresting him when the shooting occurred. Over 170 people were arrested over the two nights of rioting, and fires gutted several stores, buildings, and cars. The disorder spread to other neighborhoods as well, with shops being looted in the chaos. Collected here are images from the rioting and the aftermath. -- Lane Turner (26 photos total)

Fire fighters and riot police survey the area as fire rages through a building in Tottenham, north London on Aug. 7, 2011. A demonstration against the death of a local man turned violent and cars and shops were set ablaze. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP)

2
A rioter throws a burning wooden plank at police in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

3
Mounted police officers chase rioters on the streets in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

4
Riot police officers face off with protesters in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

5
A masked protester hurls an object toward riot police officers in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

6
A policeman in riot gear stands guard in Tottenham Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

7
A double decker bus burns as riot police try to contain a large group of people on a main road in Tottenham on August 6, 2011. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images) #

8
Police officers detain a man in Enfield, north London August 7, 2011. Police said they were called to Enfield, a few miles north of Tottenham, where youths had smashed two shop windows and damaged a police car. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters) #

9
Fire rages through a building in Tottenham on Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

10
Riot police officers escort an injured man after arresting him in Tottenham on Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

11
A protester faces off with riot police officers on the streets in Tottenham on Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

12
Police officers make their way on the streets in Tottenham on Aug. 7, 2011. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP) #

13
Buildings burn on Tottenham High Road in London during protests on August 6, 2011. (Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images) #

14
Protestors face off against riot police lines on Tottenham High Road on August 6, 2011 in London. (Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images) #

15
Police officers detain a man in Tottenham on August 7, 2011. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters) #

16
Police officers in riot gear walk past a burning building in Tottenham on August 7, 2011. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters) #

17
A shop and police car burn as riot police try to contain a large group of people on a main road in Tottenham on August 6, 2011. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images) #

18
A woman walks through the debris with two children as riot police try to contain a large group of people on a main road in Tottenham on August 6 2011. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images) #

19
A policeman walks past a damaged jewelery shop in Enfield, north London on August 7, 2011. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters) #

20
A police officer patrols as firemen continue to dowse buildings set alight during riots in Tottenham on August 7, 2011. (Luke MacGregor/Reuters) #

21
Police cordon off an area on August 7, 2011 during unrest in Enfield. (Karel Prinsloo/AP) #

22
Animals are taken from a pet store after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) #

23
Aaron Biber, 89, assesses the damage to his hairdressing salon after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) #

24
Burnt out cars lie in the road after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) #

25
A man stands next to a burnt out van after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011 . (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) #

26
Residents watch as a building burns after riots on Tottenham High Road on August 7, 2011. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

London riots: in ashes, a firm that survived two world wars

It survived the Depression, two world wars and the deepest recession in a century.

Image 1 of 3

Firefighters battle the fire that broke out at House of Reeves furniture store in Croydon

By Graeme Paton

7:30AM BST 10 Aug 2011

But House of Reeves, a 144-year-old furniture store in the heart of Croydon, could do little in the face of 100 or so yobs hell-bent on tearing up this particular corner of south London.

The shop, a local landmark of such repute that it gave its name to the road on which it now stands, was razed as youths rampaged through the town’s streets, smashing doors and windows.

In one of the most searing images of the London riots, flames tore through the store on Reeves’ Corner on Monday night, with smoke being seen for miles around. By morning, all that was left was a charred shell and onlookers were kept well back for fear that the shattered building could collapse.

It was a crushing blow for a company that was founded in 1867 and has remained in the Reeves family for five generations. Trevor Reeves, 56, the founder’s great-great grandson, said: “If we were a computer shop, they would have just broken in, taken the stock and left. But you can’t very well carry a three-piece suite through the centre of Croydon can you? It was obvious that the only thing left for them to do was to set fire to the place.

“It is completely devastating; heartbreaking. The family has been through a lot; the world wars and the Depression in the 1930s were obviously tough and the last few years have been particularly difficult, but we have always kept going.
London riots: Telegraph readers' photos of the rioting and looted areas of the city

Telegraph readers have been sending us their pictures of the rioting and looted areas of London. If you have photos related to the recent unrest, email them to mypic@telegraph.co.uk, supplying a little info on where and how the pictures were taken, and we'll include the best in this picture gallery.

This amazing picture of a car exploding on Mare Street in Hackney was taken by Telegraph reader Miks Uzans, who writes: "There were around 30 well-equipped rioters. The police didn't even come close to this; instead they were blocking the road 200m away."

Tata Aria 4x2

2011-08-08T23:10:00.001+05:30

Tata Aria 4x2 in Lavasa
The Tata Aria 4x2 extends the range to new segments and redefines several benchmarks with its design and technologies.
Photography: Clint Thomas, Yahoo! India News

The Aria’s stylish design is inlaid with the
DNA of an SUV, manifested in its stance, power, driveability and safety.

The Aria’s styling is a blend of bold
proportions, uncluttered lines and uncompromising aesthetics.

Its 2.2 litre Direct Injection Common Rail
(DICOR) engine, with variable turbine technology and 32-bit ECU delivers 140 PS
power and 320 Nm torque.

The Aria is equipped with disc brakes on all
four wheels resulting in superior braking effectiveness and better control. The
Antilock Braking System (ABS) with Electronic Breakforce Distribution (EBD)
aids steerability and control in emergency braking situations and on slippery
surfaces.

The Aria’s stylish design is inlaid with the
DNA of an SUV, manifested in its stance, power, driveability and safety.

undefined

The Tata Aria 4x2 is being launched in three
trim levels – the Aria Prestige at the top end, the Aria Pleasure and the Aria
Pure.

The 2-DIN music system and Bluetooth, along with
steering mounted phone and music controls, helps switch between music and
conversation at the touch of a button.

The
twin chrome exhaust tailpipes adds a sporty appearance to the rear,
however, if you look closer, the exhaust pipes can be seen inside the
chrome rings. Bad!

The suspension is designed to achieve an
optimal balance between ride comfort and control and stability, both on normal
roads and in offroading. Its low-roll characteristics and higher soaking
capacity further ensure a sedan-like ride quality and SUV-like offroading
capability.

Wraparound dual barreled headlamps complement
the signature Tata grille. Chrome detailing on the sides accentuates its premium
class.

The Aria’s frame is constructed with advanced
hydroformed members. Hydroforming enhances their rigidity while reducing weight.

All
seats, except the driver's, can be flat-folded, giving you lots of luggage
space - even space to stuff in a Tata Nano.

Roof utility bins, a glove-box chiller and
conveniently placed cup holders helps keep every thing you want within easy
reach.

There are seven roof utility bins
on the Tata Aria, a feature that no other auto maker could ever think
of. Moreover, there are cup holders for every passenger in the car.

The Tata Aria 4x2 is being launched in three
trim levels – the Aria Prestige at the top end, the Aria Pleasure and the Aria
Pure.

The interiors reflect the same richness and
elegance in design, layout, and visual appeal.

Premium leather upholstery enhances richly
textured trims in single or dual tone themes.

There is no need to look back even to park – a
Reverse Guide System helps you with exactitude. The Driver Information System
continuously indicates essential drive data, the Automatic Climate Control,
through roof-mounted AC vents, keeps the cabin temperature ambient.

Somalia crisis one of 'largest in decades'

2011-07-17T14:54:00.001+05:30

Somalia crisis one of 'largest in decades'

US and Germany promise increased aid as East African drought victims continue to flood camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Last Modified: 16 Jul 2011 08:25
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East Africa's hunger crisis has been described by a US official as one of the worst humanitarian crisis in decades amid stepped-up efforts by Western countries to provide relief aid and a decision by Kenya to open a fourth camp for starving refugees.
Tens of thousands of Somali refugees are flooding camps in Ethiopia and Kenya - at a rate of more than 3,000 new arrivals per day - in search of food after several seasons without rain killed livestock and destroyed crops in Somalia.
"There are many seasoned relief professionals who would tell you we haven't seen a crisis this bad in a generation," Reuben Brigety, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for state department assistance to refugees and conflict victims in Africa, said on Saturday.
"We anticipate that this crisis will get worse before it gets better."
The US was studying how much more it would give in addition to $5m promised on Friday to help Somali refugees, on top of a previously budgeted $63m, Reuben said.
For its part, Germany said it is donating an additional 5m euros ($7m) in humanitarian aid.
'Great worry'
Dirk Niebel, the German development minister, said in Berlin on Saturday that "the famine and the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa are a cause of great worry".
He said the emergency aid is in addition to the 3.6m euros ($5m) pledged earlier this year.
Duncan Harvey, the acting country director for Save the Children in Ethiopia, said: "In terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, this is one of the worst droughts the world has seen in a long time."
In Video

Robert McCarthy, a UNICEF emergency adviser in Nairobi, discusses the humanitarian crisis
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday it had sent by air emergency nutrition supplies and water equipment into Somalia.
UNICEF said in an update to the media that the supplies were delivered to Baidoa, a town in the Bay region of south-central Somalia, as part of the agency's life-saving assistance for drought-affected children.
At the same time, a senior UN official also warned on Saturday that the plight of millions of people left hungry was set to worsen, with the next rains expected in October and harvests months away.
"We are possibly seeing a perfect storm in the coming months ... We are going to do everything we can to ameliorate it," Anthony Lake, the UNICEF director, told the AFP news agency on his way to the drought-hit northern Kenya region of Turkana.
"We are scaling up in every way we can ... It is very bad now. There will be no major harvests until some time next year. The next six months are going to be very tough."
Little help in Somalia has reached those in the worst-hit area because an al-Qaeda-linked group, al-Shabab, had banned aid work though it recently said it would lift that ban.
Official's account
Over the last several days, Brigety, the US administration official, has visited camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and talked to mothers and children who walked for days with little food or water.
Levels of malnutrition among refugees arriving at the camps are very high.
The overall mortality rate at the camps in Ethiopia is seven people out of 10,000 per day, when a normal crisis rate is two per day, Brigety said.

At Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, the largest in the world, Brigety spoke to a mother who arrived at the camp with six children, including a 7-year-old who has polio that she carried on her back.

The crisis has swelled Dadaab's numbers to nearly 440,000 people, UNHCR said on Friday.
Against this backdrop, the Kenyan government announced on Friday a fourth camp had been opened in Dadaab in an effort to ease congestion.
Antoine Froidevaux, a field co-ordinator for the Medecins Sans Frontieres humanitarian agency, welcomed the new camp, but said the humanitarian organisation was "still very worried about the situation of the new arrivals that are coming in".
And Tarek Jasarevic, a World Health Organisation spokesman, said at least 462 cases of measles, including 11 deaths, had been confirmed in recent months among Somali refugee children in Dadaab.
The aid group Save the Children said on Friday that it had started feeding malnourished refugee children in pre-registration sites at camps in southern Ethiopia.
Because of the overwhelming numbers, refugees are waiting days or weeks to get into the camps, Save the Children said, making the feeding programmes outside a necessity.

Mass psychosis in America

2011-07-17T14:53:00.001+05:30

Mass psychosis in the US

How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs.
James Ridgeway Last Modified: 12 Jul 2011 06:20
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Drug companies like Pfizer are accused of pressuring doctors into over-prescribing medications to patients in order to increase profits [GALLO/GETTY]
Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.
Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.
It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.
The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.
Not just for psychotics anymore
By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. "Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective," says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry's influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can't give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what's wrong with you. So it's often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it's assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry's influence put it, "the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence." For this reason, they argue, it's particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled "on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence" - and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.
Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: "Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry." Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association's most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.
"The use of psychoactive drugs - including both antidepressants and antipsychotics - has exploded...[yet] 'the tally of those who are disabled...increased nearly two and a half times."
Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine
In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent "raging epidemic of mental illness" among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should "expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising." Instead, "the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children." Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are "simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one." Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, "Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people."
Cost benefit analysis
What's especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old - vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.
Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: "Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003." And according to another study, "one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug."
A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida's juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, "routinely" doling them out "for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators." The numbers are staggering: "In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That's enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day." Further, the paper discovered that "One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications."
In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan "five at five"—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.
In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were "flipping out" over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. "We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand" and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, "I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What's more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same--a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.'"
For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including "a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,''the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement." But Lilly's sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.
Making patients worse

People and Power: Drug Money
As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.
A growing number of health professionals have come to think these drugs are not really as effective as older, less expensive medicines which they have replaced, that they themselves produce side effects that cause other sorts of diseases such as diabetes and plunge the patient deeper into the gloomy world of serious mental disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies.
Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes and only now being exposed."
Bottom line: Stop Big Pharma and the parasitic shrink community from wantonly pushing these pills across the population.

tal disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies.

Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly m
Somalia crisis one of 'largest in decades'
US and Germany promise increased aid as East African drought victims continue to flood camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Last Modified: 16 Jul 2011 08:25
EmailPrintShareSend Feedback

East Africa's hunger crisis has been described by a US official as one of the worst humanitarian crisis in decades amid stepped-up efforts by Western countries to provide relief aid and a decision by Kenya to open a fourth camp for starving refugees.

Tens of thousands of Somali refugees are flooding camps in Ethiopia and Kenya - at a rate of more than 3,000 new arrivals per day - in search of food after several seasons without rain killed livestock and destroyed crops in Somalia.

"There are many seasoned relief professionals who would tell you we haven't seen a crisis this bad in a generation," Reuben Brigety, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for state department assistance to refugees and conflict victims in Africa, said on Saturday.

"We anticipate that this crisis will get worse before it gets better."

The US was studying how much more it would give in addition to $5m promised on Friday to help Somali refugees, on top of a previously budgeted $63m, Reuben said.

For its part, Germany said it is donating an additional 5m euros ($7m) in humanitarian aid.

'Great worry'

Dirk Niebel, the German development minister, said in Berlin on Saturday that "the famine and the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa are a cause of great worry".

He said the emergency aid is in addition to the 3.6m euros ($5m) pledged earlier this year.

Duncan Harvey, the acting country director for Save the Children in Ethiopia, said: "In terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, this is one of the worst droughts the world has seen in a long time."

In Video

Robert McCarthy, a UNICEF emergency adviser in Nairobi, discusses the humanitarian crisis
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday it had sent by air emergency nutrition supplies and water equipment into Somalia.

UNICEF said in an update to the media that the supplies were delivered to Baidoa, a town in the Bay region of south-central Somalia, as part of the agency's life-saving assistance for drought-affected children.

At the same time, a senior UN official also warned on Saturday that the plight of millions of people left hungry was set to worsen, with the next rains expected in October and harvests months away.

"We are possibly seeing a perfect storm in the coming months ... We are going to do everything we can to ameliorate it," Anthony Lake, the UNICEF director, told the AFP news agency on his way to the drought-hit northern Kenya region of Turkana.

"We are scaling up in every way we can ... It is very bad now. There will be no major harvests until some time next year. The next six months are going to be very tough."

Little help in Somalia has reached those in the worst-hit area because an al-Qaeda-linked group, al-Shabab, had banned aid work though it recently said it would lift that ban.

Official's account

Over the last several days, Brigety, the US administration official, has visited camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and talked to mothers and children who walked for days with little food or water.

Levels of malnutrition among refugees arriving at the camps are very high.

The overall mortality rate at the camps in Ethiopia is seven people out of 10,000 per day, when a normal crisis rate is two per day, Brigety said.

At Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, the largest in the world, Brigety spoke to a mother who arrived at the camp with six children, including a 7-year-old who has polio that she carried on her back.

The crisis has swelled Dadaab's numbers to nearly 440,000 people, UNHCR said on Friday.

Against this backdrop, the Kenyan government announced on Friday a fourth camp had been opened in Dadaab in an effort to ease congestion.

Antoine Froidevaux, a field co-ordinator for the Medecins Sans Frontieres humanitarian agency, welcomed the new camp, but said the humanitarian organisation was "still very worried about the situation of the new arrivals that are coming in".

And Tarek Jasarevic, a World Health Organisation spokesman, said at least 462 cases of measles, including 11 deaths, had been confirmed in recent months among Somali refugee children in Dadaab.

The aid group Save the Children said on Friday that it had started feeding malnourished refugee children in pre-registration sites at camps in southern Ethiopia.

Because of the overwhelming numbers, refugees are waiting days or weeks to get into the camps, Save the Children said, making the feeding programmes outside a necessity.
Somalia crisis one of 'largest in decades'
US and Germany promise increased aid as East African drought victims continue to flood camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Last Modified: 16 Jul 2011 08:25
EmailPrintShareSend Feedback

East Africa's hunger crisis has been described by a US official as one of the worst humanitarian crisis in decades amid stepped-up efforts by Western countries to provide relief aid and a decision by Kenya to open a fourth camp for starving refugees.

Tens of thousands of Somali refugees are flooding camps in Ethiopia and Kenya - at a rate of more than 3,000 new arrivals per day - in search of food after several seasons without rain killed livestock and destroyed crops in Somalia.

"There are many seasoned relief professionals who would tell you we haven't seen a crisis this bad in a generation," Reuben Brigety, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for state department assistance to refugees and conflict victims in Africa, said on Saturday.

"We anticipate that this crisis will get worse before it gets better."

The US was studying how much more it would give in addition to $5m promised on Friday to help Somali refugees, on top of a previously budgeted $63m, Reuben said.

For its part, Germany said it is donating an additional 5m euros ($7m) in humanitarian aid.

'Great worry'

Dirk Niebel, the German development minister, said in Berlin on Saturday that "the famine and the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa are a cause of great worry".

He said the emergency aid is in addition to the 3.6m euros ($5m) pledged earlier this year.

Duncan Harvey, the acting country director for Save the Children in Ethiopia, said: "In terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, this is one of the worst droughts the world has seen in a long time."

In Video

Robert McCarthy, a UNICEF emergency adviser in Nairobi, discusses the humanitarian crisis
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday it had sent by air emergency nutrition supplies and water equipment into Somalia.

UNICEF said in an update to the media that the supplies were delivered to Baidoa, a town in the Bay region of south-central Somalia, as part of the agency's life-saving assistance for drought-affected children.

At the same time, a senior UN official also warned on Saturday that the plight of millions of people left hungry was set to worsen, with the next rains expected in October and harvests months away.

"We are possibly seeing a perfect storm in the coming months ... We are going to do everything we can to ameliorate it," Anthony Lake, the UNICEF director, told the AFP news agency on his way to the drought-hit northern Kenya region of Turkana.

"We are scaling up in every way we can ... It is very bad now. There will be no major harvests until some time next year. The next six months are going to be very tough."

Little help in Somalia has reached those in the worst-hit area because an al-Qaeda-linked group, al-Shabab, had banned aid work though it recently said it would lift that ban.

Official's account

Over the last several days, Brigety, the US administration official, has visited camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and talked to mothers and children who walked for days with little food or water.

Levels of malnutrition among refugees arriving at the camps are very high.

The overall mortality rate at the camps in Ethiopia is seven people out of 10,000 per day, when a normal crisis rate is two per day, Brigety said.

At Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, the largest in the world, Brigety spoke to a mother who arrived at the camp with six children, including a 7-year-old who has polio that she carried on her back.

The crisis has swelled Dadaab's numbers to nearly 440,000 people, UNHCR said on Friday.

Against this backdrop, the Kenyan government announced on Friday a fourth camp had been opened in Dadaab in an effort to ease congestion.

Antoine Froidevaux, a field co-ordinator for the Medecins Sans Frontieres humanitarian agency, welcomed the new camp, but said the humanitarian organisation was "still very worried about the situation of the new arrivals that are coming in".

And Tarek Jasarevic, a World Health Organisation spokesman, said at least 462 cases of measles, including 11 deaths, had been confirmed in recent months among Somali refugee children in Dadaab.

The aid group Save the Children said on Friday that it had started feeding malnourished refugee children in pre-registration sites at camps in southern Ethiopia.

Because of the overwhelming numbers, refugees are waiting days or weeks to get into the camps, Save the Children said, making the feeding programmes outside a necessity.

Top 3 Projector Mobile Phones

2011-07-12T13:48:00.000+05:30

Projector Mobile Phones in India [Comparison]

Projector phone still sounds like a dream, but we already have four
phones launched with that capability. There is no dearth of innovation
in the thought to pack things into one single mobile phone. Intex,
TechBerry and Spice have launched their respective projector phones.
Intex was the pioneer in this field closely followed by Techberry.
But it was the late entrant Spice which popularized projector phone with its “Yeh boat nahin”
ad of Spice Popkorn. The timing of the phone launch and the ad is icing
on the cake. Spice Popkorn ad pops up in the middle of a world cup
match. And the ad surely stands out in the middle of bunch of
thoughtless ads.

Intex V.Show

Intex V.Show uses tiny Pico which is the latest in the LED technology to project on to a36 inch screen size for 3 hours. 20,000 hours of play time on the projector is possible. After
which it will cease to be a projector and starts to be a phone-only. It
is a touch screen phone with 3.2 inch screen size. It is a dual SIM
phone (GSM+GSM). As per mainstream media this is a 3G enabled phone. As per blogosphere this is a dual SIM
phone. It has a dual camera – one in the front, one in the back and it
has dual memory card slots which can read up to 8 GB each.

TechBerry ST 200

ST in the phone name stands for Sachin Tendulkar. I am not kidding.
That’s what the press release said. This phone which was launched
immediately after Intex V.show has some amazing double features. In
addition to the projector of course.

It packs in dual-SIM capability, dual memory card capability and dual
camera of 2 megapixel each. ST200 has a 3.2 inch QVGA full touch
screen. ST200 is a GSM phone with Bluetooth on-board.

Spice PopKorn

Spice M-9000 is a dual SIM phone with a in-built projector. It also
comes with a analogous TV which will help you stream free-to-air
channels, you know like the good old Doordarshan. There is a document
viewer, in case you want to project a presentation on the side wall in
the middle of a Christopher Nolan movie. Spice M-9000 aka Popkorn, has a 3.2 megapixel camera, FM with recording, Bluetooth, video player and a 6 cm QVGA screen. All of this comes at a measly price of Rs. 6999.

Intex V.Show Mini

Intex V.Show Mini has a 2.4 inch QVGA screen, dual SIM capability, 2
megapixel camera and an internal memory of 87 MB. Memory can be jacked
up to 16 GB through a SD card. Bluetooth, 3.5 mm audio jack, FM radio
are on-board. Pre-loaded apps like Facebook and Opera Mini should take
care of the browsing needs. V.Show Mini has a document reader which
would make it easy to project the presentations in case you office
projector acts kinky. Price : Rs. 6300

For the price, features and marketing, Spice Popkorn
should be the winner all the way. It packs in impressive features at
affordable price. With its TV on-board feature, it has went past all
other projector phones. Even if the TV is for free to air channels like
Doordarshan. Phone replacing TV isn’t very far.

Top 20 Handpainted wallpapers

2011-07-11T16:44:00.000+05:30

Art Wallpapers

Survey finds 'News channels biased against Islam'

2011-07-06T00:42:00.001+05:30

Survey finds 'News channels biased against Islam'
9:34am Monday 4th July 2011
An independent poll carried out by Consumer PI has found that the
vast majority of British Muslims perceive the three mainstream TV news
channels (BBC, ITV and Sky) to be biased against their
religion when reporting current affairs.
The TV channels’ reporting of terror cases, news pieces on Iraq and
Afghanistan and coverage of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings have been cited
as examples of anti-Muslim bias.
Furthermore, British Muslims believe that other topical issues such as
the Israeli raid on the flotilla, it’s continued occupation of, and
raids into, Palestinian territories, the dropping of
terror cases by the police as well as positive stories about Islam
generally are either not given enough prominence or simply not covered.
The poll also found that British Muslims were offended by some of the
terminology used in news reports.
Terms such as ‘jihadist’ or ‘moderate Muslims’ are often used in the
wrong context or in a generalised manner, indicating there was a severe
lack of understanding of Muslim communities on the part
of news reporters. Many believe this type of reporting does play some
part in fanning the flames of extremism.
Shakir Ahmed, Director of Passion Islam Media said: “The reporting by
the mainstream TV news channels of stories concerning Muslims is at
times unbalanced, ill-informed and sensationalist. I would
expect this type of coverage in the tabloid press, not from respected
news organisations at the BBC, ITV or Sky. However, this is not entirely
surprising since these three news channels employ very
few reporters who follow the Islamic faith and who would truly
understand the Muslim communities and their culture and practices.
Worryingly, the perception by some British Muslims of an unjust Islamophobic
mainstream media may well fuel radicalism.”

Sudan splits!!

2011-07-05T20:33:00.001+05:30

Sudan's south will become an independent country on July 9, but fighting along the ill-defined border has raised tension ahead of the split. North and south have yet to resolve issues such as how to manage the oil industry and divide debt. Here’s a look at the current situation in Sudan through Reuters photographer Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah’s lens.

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

A Sudanese from the south, who stayed in the north for 21 years, stands outside her shelter at Mandela camp, in the outskirts of Khartoum, July 4, 2011.

　

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

A Sudanese from the south who was born in the north, plays near a shelter at Mandela camp in the outskirts of Khartoum July 4, 2011.

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

A Sudanese from the south who was born in the north, plays near a shelter at Mandela camp in the outskirts of Khartoum July 4, 2011.

AP Photo / Pete Muller

Southern Sudanese boys take shelter from afternoon rains that disrupted rehearsal for independence day celebrations in the capital city of Juba on Monday, July 4, 2011.

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

Sudanese children from the south who were born in the north, play near a shelter at Mandela camp in the outskirts of Khartoum July 4, 2011.

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

A Sudanese child from the south, wearing a t-shirt with the picture of U.S. President Barack Obama, stands near a shelter at Mandela camp, in the outskirts of Khartoum, July 4, 2011.

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

Sudanese children from the south play at Mandela camp, in the outskirts of Khartoum, July 4, 2011.

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

Sudanese from the south load belongings onto a truck bound for southern Sudan at Mandela camp, in the outskirts of Khartoum, July 4, 2011.

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

Sudanese from the south load belongings onto a truck bound for southern Sudan at Mandela camp, in the outskirts of Khartoum, July 4, 2011.

REUTERS / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

Sudanese from the south load belongings onto a truck bound for southern Sudan at Mandela camp, in the outskirts of Khartoum, July 4, 2011.

KERINDING CAMP, Sudan (Reuters) - For many in Sudan's war-battered Darfur region, the division of the country on Saturday will not be a cause for celebration.

Southerners see secession as the end of a long march toward freedom, but in Darfur, which borders the South, it means the chance of more fighting between the government and rebels, as well as complications for issues like migration and cross-border animal grazing.

"We don't know what will happen next. There are dangers at every turn," Hussein Joma, 42, a community leader in the Kerinding camp near the Chadian border, said as women in bright shawls and men in dust-stained shirts and trousers filled plastic cans from a water pump.

"If there is war with the secession, it could affect the living conditions here, the economy -- the country as a whole. War increases prices and divisions between people."

War broke out in Darfur in 2003 when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against Khartoum, complaining the central government had left them out of the economic and political power structure and was favouring local Arab tribes.

Eight years later, hundreds of thousands of people who fled the fighting still live in vast, dusty camps like Kerinding, many in stick and mud huts reinforced with canvas from food aid delivery bags.

The persistent volatility of the situation is evident. An Ethiopian peacekeeping soldier was shot dead on the road between the nearby town of El Geneina and the airport a day after a rare visit by foreign journalists last week.

Though down from its peak, violence has surged since December, forcing tens of thousands more to flee. Qatar-brokered peace talks have meant little on the ground as Darfur's main rebel groups pulled out or refused to participate.

The war has claimed 300,000 lives, the United Nations says, and complicated Khartoum's foreign ties after the International Criminal Court indicted President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on charges of crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Khartoum puts the death toll at 10,000, and refuses to recognise the court.

"I don't think that Doha is going to bring a lasting peace, so the grievances of Darfur are going to persist," Fouad Hikmat of the International Crisis Group said. "The problems of Darfur are actually the problems of Sudan manifested in Darfur".

EMBOLDENED REBELS

The war in Darfur -- a region of seasonal waterways, jutting cliffs and long stretches of desert dotted with trees -- is testament to the diversity and complexity of Sudan's many, often overlapping conflicts.

The country's rebels span an array of ethnic and tribal loyalties and territories, but are united in their opposition to a central government they say has concentrated wealth and power in the hands of an exclusive class in the north.

Echoing those complaints, the south fought a long and bloody civil war with the north, ending with the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Southerners voted overwhelmingly to secede in a January referendum promised in that pact.

But no deal has so far succeeded in putting an end to the war in Darfur, where rebels say their demands have not been addressed and the government has gradually reasserted control over major towns and other formerly rebel-held areas.

Some analysts say the secession could now harden anti-government fighters' resolve as they see southerners attain their goal of independence and as Khartoum is economically weakened by the loss of the south's oil fields.

"In Darfur we may be seeing the reconsolidation of opposition movements which would mirror the reconsolidation of southern opposition groups before the CPA," Roger Middleton, a researcher at the Chatham House think tank, said.

Other analysts say the newly independent south could be tempted to back a continued insurgency in Darfur, with which they have shared some ideological and political links.

The northern government says it will not allow other regions to separate. In El Geneina, capital of West Darfur state, deputy governor Abou el-Qassim Baraka rejected suggestions the south's separation could inflame further conflict in Darfur.

"In Darfur, we are tired of war. There is no going back to war, that is the opinion of the entire community," he said.

LONG-RUNNING CONFLICT

A move by Khartoum to split the region into five states outraged rebels this year who said it was an effort to dilute their influence, echoing the region's division into three states in the early 1990s that stoked tensions with Khartoum.

Darfur was an independent sultanate for hundreds of years.

But for now analysts say government troops have the upper hand over insurgents, cutting off some of their previous supply routes and pushing them from several central areas.

As the fighting drags on, the camps that started as temporary shelter for people who fled are becoming increasingly more like permanent settlements. Some aid workers say they may soon come to resemble towns.

"I'm old and I'm not well. I need to stay here," one elderly man at Kerinding said as donkeys wandered down the red dirt path behind him and peacekeepers stood watch over the area.

Joma, the tribal sheikh, said the fear of bandits and local Arab tribes still kept many in Kerinding too afraid to attempt a return home.

"If there was peace, if their villages were secure, people would return, of course," he said. "But maybe a kilometre outside of here, the troubles start."

Kerala Govt offers full support to interest-free Islamic banking

2011-07-05T05:32:00.002+05:30
Kerala Govt offers full support to interest-free Islamic banking | TwoCircles.net

Submitted by admin4 on 4 July 2011 - 5:38pm

Indian Muslim

By TCN News,

Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala government will extend full support and cooperation to the interest-free banking system so that it may be used for the development of the state, said Chief Minister Oommen Chandy. The state will try to attain the central government’s approval for it. He was inaugurating the national seminar ‘Interest-free Institutional Mechanism for Banking, Finance and Insurance’ held in Thiruvananthapuram today.

The CM said that Islamic banking was not a dangerous suggestion. The government would clarify doubts and go forward. The services of the ‘Al Baraka Financial Services’ (the interest-free institution formed during the tenure of the last LDF government aiming at attracting investments from expatriates) would be utilized as one of the ways to increase investments. The government will go forward with the good moves taken by the last government and the Al Baraka was one such move. Some feel discomfort with the term ‘Islamic banking’, but instead of just a name we should see if it will be useful for the society. Large sums of money of expatriate Malayalis are in banks now. It has been a thought for quite a long time as to how to utilize this money creatively for development, he added.

Interest is a main problem that several projects face in the state, said Industries Minister PK Kunjalikkutty, while delivering the presidential address. The arrival of interest-free investment can help find capital for such projects. Kerala has showed several new models to the country and interest-free investment can be yet another one. The ‘Al Baraka’ is a good venture. A system based on interest does not consider the gain and loss in the venture. But in interest-free system, both gain and loss will be shared. While Europe is successfully utilizing Islamic banking, opinion has come in the higher levels itself that India too should utilize this prospect, he added.

Former Finance Minister Dr TM Thomas Isaac, former member of Planning Board CP John, Additional Chief Secretary T Balakrishnan (IAS), Al Baraka Financial Services chairman
Dr P Muhammedali, Alternative Investments and Credits Limited director T Arifali, chief of Sign Human Resources Centre Munawarali Shihab Thangal, and Rabitha Educational Committee regional coordinator Dr Husain Madavoor also spoke.

The seminar was organised as a joint venture of the Department of Islamic Studies in the University of Kerala, the Thiruvananthapuram Chamber of Commerce, the Indian Centre for Islamic Finance, the Indian Association for Islamic Economics, the Al Barakah Financial Services Limited, the Sequra Investment and Management India Private Ltd, the Ecotech Builders and the Alternative Investments and Credits Ltd.

Top 12 ways to speed up Windows 7

2011-07-03T17:39:00.000+05:30

Speed Up Windows 7 – Ultimate Guide To Make Windows 7 Blazing Fast!!!
Windows
7 is Engineered for speed. Special attention has been given by the
Windows 7 team for making Windows 7 faster than the previous operating
systems. Windows 7 is much faster than Windows Vista, but even then most
of us don’t get satisfied with it. There are many who still have their
old PC. Installing Windows 7 on them wont be as soothing as they work
with with XP and Even with latest hardware’s installed some users still
long for more performance. At least if we don’t make it lightning fast
we can optimize Windows 7 to the maximum possible extent and enjoy the
maximum performance we could squeeze out from it. So for all the extra
performance lovers, let me present you wit this Ultimate Guide To Speed Up Windows 7.

I
guarantee that after following this guide and implementing the
recommendations on your PC, you will really get the performance gain.
The bare Minimum Requirements You need To Run Windows 7
1) 1GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
2) 1GB of main memory
3) 16GB of available disk space
4) Support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface)
5) A DVD – R/W drive
Even if you don’t have the DX 9 graphics card
there is no problem because our target is performance and not the ”
Eyecandy ” . Of course if you need the aero experience you need a
powerful graphics card for sure.
So lets start The Ultimate Guide to Speed up Windows 7
Disabling the Search Indexing Feature in Windows 7
Right Click the “Computer” Icon in the desktop and select “Manage”.
Click “Services and Applications” in the “Computer Management” window.
Click on “Services”.
You can see a lot of services listed there. Look for “Windows Search” in that.
Right Click on “Windows Search” from the list and choose “Properties”.
The “Windows Search Properties Window” will open up. From “Startup type” click on the drop down menu and choose “Disabled”.
Click “Apply” then “OK” and that’s it. The Windows 7 Search Indexing Feature is now disabled.
Most
of the Windows 7 users do less searches in there system. The Search
Indexing service in Windows 7 will index keeps track of the files so
that they can be found quickly when asked at some other time. This
feature is useful only if you perform frequent searches on your system.

For occasional file searchers the Search Indexing service in Windows 7
is a total resource hog. It unknowingly eats up your system resources.
What you need from windows 7 is maximum performance from it then i
would certainly recommend you to disable this resource hogging Windows 7
Search Indexing Feature.
To Disable the Search Indexing Feature in Windows 7
If
you want to completely disable the search indexing feature in Windows 7
you can set the Search Indexing Service to Manual (See the above
method about disabling unwanted services).
Disable the Aero Theme on Windows 7
Right Click on your Desktop and select ” Personalize ” click the Window Color Tab.
Uncheck the Box saying ” Enable Transparency ” and then click on ” Open classic appearance properties for more color options”.
Then a window will open up. Apply a Standard or Basic theme from it. The Standard Windows 7 theme is more preferred.
The
aero user interface certainly adds some ” Eyecandy ” to Windows 7 but
certainly is a resource hog especially when, what you expect from
windows 7 is more performance juice. Aero user interface squeezes your
graphics or video card to its maximum. So why dont we just avoid the
Windows 7 aero? if we care more about speed and performance in Windows
7. So Disabling the Aero in Windows 7 certainly adds an extra speed boost to it.
Disabling
the aero theme alone in Windows 7 will really speed things up. You can
know this by looking into the memory consumption when aero is turned on
and off.
Disabling the Unwanted Visual Effects in Windows 7 to Speed Up more
For this right click on ” Computer” and select “Properties” from the right click menu.
Click on ” Advanced System Settings ” from the left pane to open up the ” System Properties ” window.
Select the “Advanced” tab from it. Then Under ” Performance ” click ” Settings “. Choose ” Custom: ” Options From it.
Now
un tick all the options and select only the last four options (actually
three only needed; you can un tick the second option from the last
four). See the screen shot if you have any doubt.
Now just logoff your system and turn logon.
Even
though we have tuned off the aero effects in Windows 7 still there are
many unwanted visual effects that can be safely disabled to speed up
windows 7 even more.
You will now notice the speed difference now.
Disabling the Unwanted Services to Speed up Windows 7
There
are many services in windows 7 that we dont require for our daily use.
There are some exceptional cases though. Services such as “print
spooler” is only needed when we use a printer. If we use a printer only
occasionally we can safely turn off that service in Windows 7 and turn
it on only when we need to take a print.
I have previously prepared a List of services in Windows 7 that can be safely set to manual / disabled.
Disabling the unneeded services in Windows 7 can really speed up the system boot time.
Disable the User account control (UAC) Feature in Windows 7
From the Control Panel open the ” User Accounts and Family Safety ” > User Account.
Click the User Account Control settings link.
Now just Drag the Slider towards “Never Notify”.
Click “OK” and Reboot your system.
The
User account control (UAC) feature in Windows 7 is very annoying though
it says it can protect your computer from harmful virus activity etc.
But if you are a daily user of your computer this windows 7 feature will
be a total nuisance to you.
To Disable and Turnoff UAC in Windows 7
Disabling UAC is for advanced users only its not recommend doing it if not.
SetUp the Windows 7 Ready Boost Service for an Extra Speed Boost
To
configure the Ready Boost Feature in Windows 7 you need to have a High
Speed Flash/USB or Pendrive with you which is ready boost compatible.
After
plugging you pendrive, open “Computer” > Right-click the on USB
Drive/Pendrive > select “Ready Boost” tab > tick the “Use this
device” checkbox.
You can configure how much space on your USB drive/ Pendrive to be used as Ram.
The
ready boost feature in Windows 7 will help you to use your flash drive
or pendrive or USB drive as Ram there by improving the performance and
speed of windows 7 greatly. You can certainly experience it when
launching bulky applications such as Adobe Photoshop etc.
Turn off Unused Windows 7 Features
Open up ” Programs and Features ” from Control Panel.
Click the ” Turn Windows features on or off ” from the left pane.
Now uncheck all the Feature that you don’t use in Windows 7 and restart the system for the changes to take effect.
There
are many feature in windows 7 that we often don]t use. Disabling these
unused features in Windows 7 will really help in speeding things up.
Disable the Windows 7 Sidebar (Actually the Gadgets)
Right click on the sidebar and select ” Properties “.
On the properties windows untick the check box showing ” Start sidebar when Windows Starts “
From now on windows sidebar won’t start when windows 7 start up.
Disabling
the window 7 sidebar is definitely help you to to gain a few seconds
during start up time. There are many useful utilities such as the
RocketDock etc. which are good application launchers.
To Disable the Sidebar in Windows 7,
Disable the Aero Peek and Aero Snap features in Windows 7
Open the Windows 7 ” Control Panel ” and double-click on ” Ease of Access Center ” icon.
Now click on the ” Make it easier to focus on tasks ” seen at the bottom in there
Now untick the check box saying ” Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen ” .
Right click on the Windows 7 taskbar and select ” Properties “.
Now untick the ” Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop ” option from there.
Aero Snap will help you to maximize, minimize and resize the windows just by dragging and dropping it into the screen corners.
To disable Aero Snap Feature in Windows 7,
That will now disable the Aero Snap in Windows 7.
Now To Disable the Aero Peek feature in Windows 7
The
Aero Peek feature in Windows 7 helps you to peek through all open
windows by hiding all other windows and showing only the outlines of all
windows. Aero Peek is similar to the ” Show Desktop ” Feature in XP and
Vista.
If you have followed step 3 then Aero Peek will be automatically disabled. If not,
The aero peek feature will now be disabled in windows 7.
Change the Power Plan To Maximum Performance
Double click the ” Power Options ” in the Control panel.
Click the down arrow showing ” Show Additional Plans ” to see the ” High Performance ” power plan
.
Now just activate the ” High Performance ” plan and that’s it.
You may go for the advanced settings for further tweaking if you want.
The
Power settings in Windows 7 is not automatically set for maximum
performance. By default the power plan in Windows 7 is set for a
balanced performance with energy consumption on hardware. So you may not
get the optimal performance from windows 7 if this is the case. So we
need to change the power plan to High Performance Mode.
Disable the Thumbnail Preview Feature to speed up File browsing in Windows 7
Double Click on ” Computer ” >click on the “Organize” drop-down menu and select the “Folder and Search options”

Under ‘Files and Folders’ section, go to the “View” tab and tick the
check box showing “Always show icons, never thumbnails” checkbox.
The
thumbnail preview feature in Windows 7 will show the small thumbnails
of the contents of a folder instead of showing it’s icon. But this
feature really do take up some system resources. So by disabling the
Thumbnail Preview feature in Windows 7 the file browsing in Windows 7
explorer can be speed up.
For disabling thumbnails in Windows 7,
Most Essential Softwares To Speed Up Windows 7
Wise Registry Cleaner
CCleaner
TCP Optimizer
TeraCopy
Startup Delayer
In
order to maintain your Windows 7 Performance and keep it up in Top
Shape there are some very essential software’s that can help us to Speed
Windows 7. I will list some of them here. You can download these
utilities. But i remind you that you need to run these utilities at
least once in a week. Only if you do it regularly your Windows 7 will be
in top shape every day.

Top 12 ways to speed up Windows 7

2011-07-03T17:34:00.001+05:30

Speed Up Windows 7 – Ultimate Guide To Make Windows 7 Blazing Fast!!!
Windows 7 is Engineered for speed. Special attention has been given by the Windows 7 team for making Windows 7 faster than the previous operating systems. Windows 7 is much faster than Windows Vista, but even then most of us don’t get satisfied with it. There are many who still have their old PC. Installing Windows 7 on them wont be as soothing as they work with with XP and Even with latest hardware’s installed some users still long for more performance. At least if we don’t make it lightning fast we can optimize Windows 7 to the maximum possible extent and enjoy the maximum performance we could squeeze out from it. So for all the extra performance lovers, let me present you wit this Ultimate Guide To Speed Up Windows 7.

I guarantee that after following this guide and implementing the recommendations on your PC, you will really get the performance gain.
The bare Minimum Requirements You need To Run Windows 7
1) 1GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
2) 1GB of main memory
3) 16GB of available disk space
4) Support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface)
5) A DVD – R/W drive
Even if you don’t have the DX 9 graphics card there is no problem because our target is performance and not the ” Eyecandy ” . Of course if you need the aero experience you need a powerful graphics card for sure.
So lets start The Ultimate Guide to Speed up Windows 7
Disabling the Search Indexing Feature in Windows 7
Right Click the “Computer” Icon in the desktop and select “Manage”.
Click “Services and Applications” in the “Computer Management” window.
Click on “Services”.
You can see a lot of services listed there. Look for “Windows Search” in that.
Right Click on “Windows Search” from the list and choose “Properties”.
The “Windows Search Properties Window” will open up. From “Startup type” click on the drop down menu and choose “Disabled”.
Click “Apply” then “OK” and that’s it. The Windows 7 Search Indexing Feature is now disabled.
Most of the Windows 7 users do less searches in there system. The Search Indexing service in Windows 7 will index keeps track of the files so that they can be found quickly when asked at some other time. This feature is useful only if you perform frequent searches on your system.
For occasional file searchers the Search Indexing service in Windows 7 is a total resource hog. It unknowingly eats up your system resources. What you need from windows 7 is maximum performance from it then i would certainly recommend you to disable this resource hogging Windows 7 Search Indexing Feature.
To Disable the Search Indexing Feature in Windows 7
If you want to completely disable the search indexing feature in Windows 7 you can set the Search Indexing Service to Manual (See the above method about disabling unwanted services).
Disable the Aero Theme on Windows 7
Right Click on your Desktop and select ” Personalize ” click the Window Color Tab.
Uncheck the Box saying ” Enable Transparency ” and then click on ” Open classic appearance properties for more color options”.
Then a window will open up. Apply a Standard or Basic theme from it. The Standard Windows 7 theme is more preferred.
The aero user interface certainly adds some ” Eyecandy ” to Windows 7 but certainly is a resource hog especially when, what you expect from windows 7 is more performance juice. Aero user interface squeezes your graphics or video card to its maximum. So why dont we just avoid the Windows 7 aero? if we care more about speed and performance in Windows 7. So Disabling the Aero in Windows 7 certainly adds an extra speed boost to it.
Disabling the aero theme alone in Windows 7 will really speed things up. You can know this by looking into the memory consumption when aero is turned on and off.
Disabling the Unwanted Visual Effects in Windows 7 to Speed Up more
For this right click on ” Computer” and select “Properties” from the right click menu.
Click on ” Advanced System Settings ” from the left pane to open up the ” System Properties ” window.
Select the “Advanced” tab from it. Then Under ” Performance ” click ” Settings “. Choose ” Custom: ” Options From it.
Now un tick all the options and select only the last four options (actually three only needed; you can un tick the second option from the last four). See the screen shot if you have any doubt.
Now just logoff your system and turn logon.
Even though we have tuned off the aero effects in Windows 7 still there are many unwanted visual effects that can be safely disabled to speed up windows 7 even more.
You will now notice the speed difference now.
Disabling the Unwanted Services to Speed up Windows 7
There are many services in windows 7 that we dont require for our daily use. There are some exceptional cases though. Services such as “print spooler” is only needed when we use a printer. If we use a printer only occasionally we can safely turn off that service in Windows 7 and turn it on only when we need to take a print.
I have previously prepared a List of services in Windows 7 that can be safely set to manual / disabled.
Disabling the unneeded services in Windows 7 can really speed up the system boot time.
Disable the User account control (UAC) Feature in Windows 7
From the Control Panel open the ” User Accounts and Family Safety ” > User Account.
Click the User Account Control settings link.
Now just Drag the Slider towards “Never Notify”.
Click “OK” and Reboot your system.
The User account control (UAC) feature in Windows 7 is very annoying though it says it can protect your computer from harmful virus activity etc. But if you are a daily user of your computer this windows 7 feature will be a total nuisance to you.
To Disable and Turnoff UAC in Windows 7
Disabling UAC is for advanced users only its not recommend doing it if not.
SetUp the Windows 7 Ready Boost Service for an Extra Speed Boost
To configure the Ready Boost Feature in Windows 7 you need to have a High Speed Flash/USB or Pendrive with you which is ready boost compatible.
After plugging you pendrive, open “Computer” > Right-click the on USB Drive/Pendrive > select “Ready Boost” tab > tick the “Use this device” checkbox.
You can configure how much space on your USB drive/ Pendrive to be used as Ram.
The ready boost feature in Windows 7 will help you to use your flash drive or pendrive or USB drive as Ram there by improving the performance and speed of windows 7 greatly. You can certainly experience it when launching bulky applications such as Adobe Photoshop etc.
Turn off Unused Windows 7 Features
Open up ” Programs and Features ” from Control Panel.
Click the ” Turn Windows features on or off ” from the left pane.
Now uncheck all the Feature that you don’t use in Windows 7 and restart the system for the changes to take effect.
There are many feature in windows 7 that we often don]t use. Disabling these unused features in Windows 7 will really help in speeding things up.
Disable the Windows 7 Sidebar (Actually the Gadgets)
Right click on the sidebar and select ” Properties “.
On the properties windows untick the check box showing ” Start sidebar when Windows Starts “
From now on windows sidebar won’t start when windows 7 start up.
Disabling the window 7 sidebar is definitely help you to to gain a few seconds during start up time. There are many useful utilities such as the RocketDock etc. which are good application launchers.
To Disable the Sidebar in Windows 7,
Disable the Aero Peek and Aero Snap features in Windows 7
Open the Windows 7 ” Control Panel ” and double-click on ” Ease of Access Center ” icon.
Now click on the ” Make it easier to focus on tasks ” seen at the bottom in there
Now untick the check box saying ” Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen ” .
Right click on the Windows 7 taskbar and select ” Properties “.
Now untick the ” Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop ” option from there.
Aero Snap will help you to maximize, minimize and resize the windows just by dragging and dropping it into the screen corners.
To disable Aero Snap Feature in Windows 7,
That will now disable the Aero Snap in Windows 7.
Now To Disable the Aero Peek feature in Windows 7
The Aero Peek feature in Windows 7 helps you to peek through all open windows by hiding all other windows and showing only the outlines of all windows. Aero Peek is similar to the ” Show Desktop ” Feature in XP and Vista.
If you have followed step 3 then Aero Peek will be automatically disabled. If not,
The aero peek feature will now be disabled in windows 7.
Change the Power Plan To Maximum Performance
Double click the ” Power Options ” in the Control panel.
Click the down arrow showing ” Show Additional Plans ” to see the ” High Performance ” power plan
.
Now just activate the ” High Performance ” plan and that’s it.
You may go for the advanced settings for further tweaking if you want.
The Power settings in Windows 7 is not automatically set for maximum performance. By default the power plan in Windows 7 is set for a balanced performance with energy consumption on hardware. So you may not get the optimal performance from windows 7 if this is the case. So we need to change the power plan to High Performance Mode.
Disable the Thumbnail Preview Feature to speed up File browsing in Windows 7
Double Click on ” Computer ” >click on the “Organize” drop-down menu and select the “Folder and Search options”
Under ‘Files and Folders’ section, go to the “View” tab and tick the check box showing “Always show icons, never thumbnails” checkbox.
The thumbnail preview feature in Windows 7 will show the small thumbnails of the contents of a folder instead of showing it’s icon. But this feature really do take up some system resources. So by disabling the Thumbnail Preview feature in Windows 7 the file browsing in Windows 7 explorer can be speed up.
For disabling thumbnails in Windows 7,
Most Essential Softwares To Speed Up Windows 7
Wise Registry Cleaner
CCleaner
TCP Optimizer
TeraCopy
Startup Delayer
In order to maintain your Windows 7 Performance and keep it up in Top Shape there are some very essential software’s that can help us to Speed Windows 7. I will list some of them here. You can download these utilities. But i remind you that you need to run these utilities at least once in a week. Only if you do it regularly your Windows 7 will be in top shape every day.

Mike Tyson and Wife Renew Wedding Vows in Muslim Ceremony

2011-07-03T13:23:00.003+05:30

Mike Tyson and Wife Renew Wedding Vows in Muslim Ceremony

June 28, 2011 07:31:15 GMT

The former Heavyweight boxing
champion and wife Lakiha Spicer invited hundreds of friends to a joint
birthday party in Las Vegas only to surprise them with a wedding
ceremony.

Two years after tying the knot, Mike Tyson
and wife Lakiha Spicer have said their "I Do's" once again. The former
Heavyweight boxing champion and the mother of his two children renewed
their wedding vows in a traditional Muslim ceremony at the M Resort in
Las Vegas over the weekend, TMZ reported.

The retired boxer, who made a cameo on "The Hangover",
and his wife allegedly invited hundreds of friends to a joint birthday
party. After the guests arrived, the two disappeared. They then
re-emerged in wedding outfits behind a massive curtain and proceeded
with the vow renewal ceremony. Mike later took to Twitter to share a
photo of him and Lakiha in the wedding outfits.

TMZ dished on that guests dined on a steak or chicken entree, while ET
claimed that the reception included a candy bar that featured gummy
bears, Sour Patch Kids, cherry rock candy, gumballs, chocolate-dipped
cherries and more. The latter also reported that each guest went home
with a goodie bag of Sugar Factory's special sweets.

Words are, Mike and Lakiha decided to throw the party because they were
the only ones attending their wedding at a small Vegas chapel back in 2009.
They got married just two weeks after his 4-year-old daughter, Exodus,
died tragically in a treadmill accident.

Ultimate Guide To Make Sites Super Fast

2011-07-03T13:23:00.001+05:30

Speed Up WordPress –
Ultimate Guide To Make Sites Super Fast

A good website should never compromise on the visitor’s experience. A Serious web
publisher invests some time and resources to learn everything possible
about optimizing his website for speed. Who likes to browse through a
sluggish slow loading site? Most of the normal visitors leave the site,
unless the visitor is extremely interested in the content and related
things. More over google started considering the sites speed as a factor
in their search engine ranking logarithm. This guide will help you in reducing your sites server load, making your site faster.
Remember speeding up and optimizing your wordpress site
is not an easy process, it take a bit of time to make the changes
properly and safely. But its worth if you can spend the time. The time
taken will depend on your expertise in wordpress. Before making the
following changes my sites were taking around 11 – 15 seconds to load.
After implementing these changes the site takes less than 5 seconds to
load.
Before starting with any thing, first take a complete back up of your theme files and your wordpress database. Now go to http://tools.pingdom.com
and enter your site url and do a speed test to see how long does it
take for your website to load (You do speed test at last, after
implementing the changes in this guide to know the speed gain you have
obtained). Our aim is to reduce the load time and server load to a much
lesser value.
So lets start the Ultimate Guide To Make Your Site Super Fast
1) Remove Unnecessary PHP Queries and Database Access
Almost
all wordpress themes are made in such a way that there is minimal user
effort in configuring them. These themes comes with some generic php
codes, which can be easily replaced after we install it in our blog.
Removing these avoidable php queries will lessen your server load and
also make your site faster.
For this first open the header.php files located in your current themes folder. You can do this by two ways, either by going to Appearence > Editor from wp dashboard or by accessing the file directly using a FTP client and opening in Notepad or Notepad++.
You’ll some thing like this in the header file.
<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> <?php bloginfo(‘description’);?></title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); ?>“/>
<link rel=”shorcut icon” type=”image/png” href=”&lt?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/favicon.jpg” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss_url’); ?>” />
The
bolded items in this code is the php code. These five php commands are
executed each time, when your site gets loaded in the browser. Since we
dont want the theme to be portable anymore, we can replace these php
queries by corresponding html code. That’s about 20 Times Faster Speed.
To do this open your site in any browser for eg in chrome and press Ctrl + U or select View Source From the menu. With reference to the above example, you will see the source code of the site as
<title>Computing Unleashed</title>
<link
rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen”
href=”http://iqsoft.co.in/wp-content/themes/amalroy/style.css”/>
<link
rel=”shortcut icon”
href=”http://iqsoft.co.in/wordpress/wp-content/themes/amalroy/favicon.png”
type=”image/png” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS Feed” href=”iqsoft.co.in/feed/rss/” />
Now you might have got an idea about this. Now just copy these codes and replace it in header.php file and save the file and you are done. You can now check for similar queries in footer.php, sidebar.php etc. and replace them.
2) Remove Inactive Plugins
Most
of us are curious to try out new wordpress plugins.We deactivate them
if we are not happy with the results. There is a tendency for us to
leave those deactivated plugins in the plugin directory. Its better to
remove all those inactive plugins that you dont use. Also check for any
plugins that you have activated but not using, these can eat up
resources simply. So make the plugin directory clean and tidy. If you
feel that you might want to use those deactivated plugin later on, then
make a text document in the plugin directory with the list of plugins
you need later and you can safely delete those plugins which are not
needed now.
3) Using a FREE CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A content delivery network is used by almost all popular websites like google, twitter, mashable etc. A content delivery
network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across
multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The
user’s proximity to your web server has an impact on response times.
Deploying your content across multiple, geographically dispersed servers will make your pages load faster from the user’s perspective.
Using
a CDN network will improve your sites response time to a great extend.
But normal users find it difficult to afford a CDN service. But there
is a free alternative.
CoralCDN allows us to take full advantage
of a powerful CDN without spending a dime. How to use it? Well,
basically, just append `.nyud.net` to the hostname of any URL, and that
URL will be handled by Coral.
With the Free CDN
this job can be done easily. All you need to do is just install the
plugin and activate it. It will rewrite the JavaScripts, CSS, images
etc. for you. PLus it also has option to exclude or include the files
your specify. It can be JavaScript’s, CSS or specific pages.
4) Keep Your WordPress Version Up To Date
With the release of new versions, wordpress keeps on improving on the whole. On each update wordpress developers
put their effort in making wordpress faster and safer. So its very
necessary that you need to upgrade to the latest wordpress version to
get the performance improvements and new features.
5) Compress the CSS Code
Compressing
your CSS Code will make it’s size small and your browser can render it
faster and that results in faster page load times. Compressing the CSS
can be done in two ways. Either by doing it manually by using the
service CSS Drive. You have to manually copy-paste your css code from the style.css file in their website and you will get the compressed version of it which you can paste back on the style.css file.
But if you make changes to your css code at times, then its better to use the WP CSS
plugin. Wp css plugin will automatically remove the white spaces and
compress your css files. Plus you will also have other options to set
expiry time for the files.
6) Optimize the WordPress Database
Just like the hard disks the wordpress database also gets fragmented. So optimizing the wordpress database too can speed up your site.
For optimizing the wordpress database of your site, visit the cpanel of your hosting provider.
Use phpMyAdmin to optimize your database: Log in to phpMyAdmin, select all the tables, and then repair and optimize.
7) Compress & Combine Javascript Files
Like the CSS files the javascripts in your template is also a major reason for speed loss.
Try to reduce the javascripts as much as possible.
Javascript Compression Services
Javascript Compressor
JS Compressor
8 ) Reduce Image Sizes
Posts
become lively when images are added. But using high resolution images
on your site will put a high load on the server and this is one of the
reasons why some sites go down when a digg front page is reached.
The images can be compressed to a level without much loss in quality.
You can use the WP Smush.it plugin for wordpress to compress the images. It will compress the images to a good extend and your site will load faster now.
9) Disable Hot Linking
Stealing
our websites bandwidth can be referred to as Hot linking. This happens
when others link your sites images in their articles and this puts load
on your server. This not a big issue if one or two sites directly link
your images, but if multiple sites uses this then it might create a
headache.
We can easily prevent the hotlinking by implementing a small code in the .htaccess file.
#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?iqsoft.co.in [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/iqsoft[NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
Copy-paste the above code in your .htaccess file in the wordpress root directory and then save it. !Important – Replace my sites url and feed with yours.
10) The WordPress Super Cache Plugin
The
super cache plugin is a must have plugin that cache’s the mostly
visited pages on your site and make it available the next visitor
immediately. The plugin generates html files which are served without
ever invoking a single line of PHP.
Download WordPress Super Cache Plugin
But
if you have good experience with plugins and wordpress then I’d
recommend the w3 Total Cache Plugin which tops any of the cache plugin
and is my personal favorite. If you could properly configure the w3
total cache plugin then its the best. It has much better compressions
and caching options than the super cache plugin and definitely save your
websites bandwidth and improve your sites speed. Whats more it has even
got cdn support. This will help you avoid other plugins if you’ve got
a cdn account or an amazon s3 account. This plugin also has separate
caching options for shared hosting and (vps, dedicated hostings). This makes it so special.
Download W3Total Cache Plugin
11) Combining Javascripts and CSS Files with PHP Speedy
As said earlier, minimizing the HTTP requests can speed up the site greatly and the php speedy plugin
will help you further by combining all the javascripts into one single
file and all css files into a single one. Therefore in total the there
will only be two files that are being requested.
The results after using the php speedy plugin.
Download PHP Speedy Plugin For WordPress
12) Preloading the Page Contents
This
is some thing that doesn’t improve the performance much but it enhances
the page load by loading the page progressively. The problem with
putting style sheets near the bottom of the document is that it
prohibits progressive rendering in many browsers, including Internet
Explorer. These browsers block rendering to avoid having to redraw
elements of the page if their styles change. The user is stuck viewing a
blank white page.
So here’s what you have to do. Move the Style Sheets to the header file.
<title>Computing Unleashed</title>
<link
rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen”
href=”http://iqsoft.co.in/wordpress/wp-content/themes/amalroy/style.css”/>
Move the css file link near the title in the header.php file.
13) Flushing the buffer
When
users request a page in your site, it can takes around 200 – 500
milliseconds for the backend server to put together the HTML page.
During this time the browser remains idle. The flush() function in php
help you in loading the partially ready html response to the browser and
it can start fetching the components, while the backend server is busy with the rest of the contents.
To inset the flush() function in your wordpress site, Open up the header.php file and find the </head> tag and insert the <?php flush(); ?> function right after it. You may see the eg below.
</head>
<?php flush(); ?>
<body>
14) Using CSS Sprites Technique
It
simply means combining all the images in the site into a single big
image containing all of them and the browser loads the single big image
and display the different images by using background-position.
If
you are using a lot of static images in your site then it is definitely
worth to try the css sprites technique. It not only speed up your site,
but also reduce the http requests. Here you can know about the complete
CSS Sprites and its implementation in here.
15) Add Header Expire To Static Contents
Adding
an expiry time to static images can reduce further HTTP requests when
loading other pages in the site. Adding an expiry time to the images in
the site help in loading the pages faster.
Copy and Paste the Following Code in your .htaccess file.
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A28800
ExpiresByType image/png A28800
ExpiresByType image/jpg A28800
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A28800
16) DB Cache Reloaded Plugin
The
DB cache plugin works differently from the super cache plugin by
optimizing your database alone. It caches WordPress’s MySQL queries to a
file. This results in less space being used for caching and faster
performance from the WordPress blog.
Download DB Cache Reloaded Plugin For WordPress
Apart
from all these criteria, the websites speed also depend upon other
factors such as type of hosting you have chosen, the number of
javascripts and css you use etc. VPS hosting will have more speed
compared to the normal shared hosting that many of the wordpress blogs
use.
I am sure that if you can implement these steps properly it will definitely speed up your wordpress blog by a great amount.
There may be many more ways to speed up your wordpress site. I have shared some of my knowledge here to speed up your site.