And actual Outlook cover dated July 30, 2012:
Samrat in India Ink, NYT's India Ink blog:
The girl herself accused the TV crew members of encouraging the attack. Some of the men arrested in the attack backed this version of events. Two blamed the television reporter who filmed the incident for instigating it, saying he started filming the girl and her friends as they emerged from the pub after an altercation inside and asked them why they had been drinking,reports said.
Television channels like the one that filmed the current video often run news clips of mobs enacting what looks like spontaneous "moral policing." Sometimes, though, these mob attacks are timed for occasions when cameras are already somehow present.
...
an activist, Akhil Gogoi, has alleged that the attack was orchestrated by one of the reporters from News Live, Gaurav Jyoti Neog, who recorded the video. Mr. Gogoi has given to the police unedited footage with audio that supports his allegation. This footage is not publicly available. However a bit of it is available online. In the clip, the girl can clearly be heard telling the reporter, "You came and did all this."
Read on at NYT: Moral Policing, India's Ugly New 'Reality TV'
In the Guwahati case, one of the NCW fact finding team first revealed the name of the Guwahati victim. The CM's office then released name and photograph of the victim in what it perceived to be a public relations exercise on Monday evening. The CM called it an unintentional mistake on the part of his office but did not seem to think that it was something worth apologising for -- "Why should I apologise? Is it a great blunder I have done that I should apologise? My office committed a mistake and withdrew the release and expressed regret." It took some goading before he relented and said he was willing to apologise to the victim but not to anyone else.
The News Live channel, incidentally, is owned by Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, wife of Himanta Biswa Sarma, who is a powerful minister in the present day Congress government of Assam.
Umer Farooq reports for the Express Tribune:Pakistan's 'sevadar': DAG issued notice for polishing shoes in India:
PESHAWAR
The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) on Saturday issued a show cause notice to Deputy Attorney General (DAG) of Pakistan Khurshid Khan at the Peshawar High Court, for 'defaming' the country during a recent visit to India.
The notice can only be labeled bizarre, for DAG Khurshid Khan performed a deed which only a handful of politicians would contemplate doing: Polishing shoes, sweeping floors and washing dishes to promote interfaith harmony at the Jamia Masjid in Chandigarh, the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the Birla Temple in New Delhi...
..."What is constituted as defaming the country, Ajmal Kasab's alleged killing of Indians or a Pakistani polishing the shoes of Hindus, Sikhs and Christians outside their places of worship," he [DAG Khurshid] questioned.
Deccan Herald reports that Indira Gandhi's old personal assistant R.K. Dhawan, who went on to become her close confidant and then a cabinet ministe, and had remained a bachelor all these years finally got hitched:
Bachelor Dhawan, 74, has quietly married Achla, who is believed to be about 14 years younger to him.
On July 16, he is hosting dinner for his friends at a five star hotel in Delhi. The invites sent to his friends requesting their presence at the dinner does not say much.
The party circle is abuzz with the gossip of Dhawan tying the knot last November. Some of invited leaders tried to find out about Achla by calling others but in vain.
Mail Today cartoonist R. Prasad is certainly having fun with the brouhaha. First came this:
And, after the controversy over Salman Khurshid's remarks on Rahul Gandhi, his latest:
*Congress Sandesh, for the unitiated, is the Congress party mouthpiece.
Seinfeld's back:
Achintya Rao (who incidentally works at Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment at the LHC) provides a much needed reality check:
Putting the Bose in boson. And my fist in your face-on.
I was waiting for this bullshit to start being published.
Get over yourselves, India. We haven't done a single bit of ground-breaking, earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting science in Galaxy knows how long. So we cling to the zero, and Aryabhatta's calculations, and SN Bose, and latch on to every single Indian-origin scientist abroad who does anything of note (even though they may not identify as Indian).
Higgs Boson. Sheldon Cooper's way —which, of course, has existed on YouTube since Jan 19, 2010:
Easily the most lucid explanations that I have seen so far. Please feel free to share the ones that helped you understand the concept:
Original source is here: PhD Comics
An old attempt to simplify the concept, a variant of which was used by Reuters yesterday in their George Clooney analogy
Higgs boson: BBC Q&A - Why the discovery would stand out as one of the great scientific achievements of the 21st Century so far.
Saikat Dutta in the DNA: CIA got Saudis to hand over 26/11 handler
Ansari was first located by the CIA that had received inputs from its sister agency, the NSA. Following these leads, the CIA managed to track down a few men with fake Pakistani passports living in Saudi Arabia since 2008, soon after the 26/11 terror attack...
Prince Muqrin [Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi intelligence chief] held several meetings with CIA officials, who convinced him to cooperate with India. The fact the Americans were keen to build pressure on Islamabad played a major role, according to senior Indian intelligence officials.
The Saudis asked India to substantiate its claim by providing a DNA sample of any member of Ansari's family. Intelligence officers went to his hometown in Beed district, collected a sample from his sister, and sent it to Saudi Arabia. The samples matched and the Saudi authorities were convinced.
On June 21, a team of counter-terrorism officers from the R&AW left for Saudi Arabia to bring back Ansari. He was arrested on arrival.
Mohammed Hanif in the Guardian:
This court is not as much in love with the rule of law as with the sound of its own sermonising voice. It has also mastered the art of selective justice. The same supreme court that has been sitting on an ISI corruption case for 15 years, the same judiciary that can't look a retired general in the eye or force a serving colonel to appear in court, feels it perfectly constitutional to send a unanimously elected prime minister home.
There are not many tears being shed over Gilani. Looking at his record, many would say that he should have stayed home in the first place. But what is the point of clamouring for democracy if we can't elect imperfect people – slightly less competent and way more corrupt than our average traffic cop – to lead us?
The Economist's Banyan blog:
The choice of Mr Ashraf is deeply problematic. He is known to all Pakistan as "Raja Rental", for presiding over a deals which involved the government paying cronies to set up temporary or "rental" power plants, to plug the crippling shortfall in electricity supply, while he was energy minister.
The rental plants were often established with ageing equipment, though the government was charged for new gear, and the blackouts only grew. Rental power was deemed a "total failure" according to a Supreme Court judgment on the issue earlier this year, for producing high cost and insufficient electricity.
That verdict found that officials involved, including Mr Ashraf, had "violated the principle of transparency" and must be investigated by the anti-corruption watchdog, the National Accountability Bureau, to see if they were "getting financial benefits" out of the "scam".
But more than the courts, the people of Pakistan will feel aggrieved at the appointment of a man whose ministry oversaw over a national disaster, pursuing questionable schemes while simply watching the problem grow. Mr Ashraf, 61, became known for continually predicting the imminent end of the electricity shortage, only to have to eat his words before unabashedly issuing a new rosy prediction.
Saeed Naqvi: Mehdi Hasan Filled Different Vacuums in India and Pakistan:
The "dhishum-dhishum" cinema of the 80s, dominated by Amitabh Bachchan, took the lyric out of Bollywood song. The Indian sensibility, reared for centuries on the rural, pastoral lyric, felt an aesthetic vacuum. The prospect of "hum, tum ek kamrey mein band hon" becoming a staple was forbidding. This space was filled up by the Urdu ghazal. The market found the commodity.
In Pakistan music was being muzzled by the votaries of Islamization. Abdul Karim Khan's youngest daughter, Roshanara Begum, migrated to Pakistan and proceeded to fade out in the absence of sponsors or an audience. Her sister Hirabai Barodekar thrived in India.
The bogus conflict created by the clergy between music and shariah in Pakistan, snuffed out pure classical music. This in its turn created the space for the ghazal which Mehdi Hasan cleverly tied to classical music. Singing Urdu ghazal was kosher for the Mullah; music otherwise was not!