Sunday, October 19, 2008

Heroes - Salman Khan's movie releasing soon


After Akshay Kumar who portrays a Sikh in the movie Singh is Kinng, its the turn of Salman Khan to play a Sardar in his upcoming movie Heroes. The are reports that the actor has been growing his beard for his latest movie. The movie directed by Samir Karnik was earlier titled as Mera Bharat Mahan.
The multi starer also has Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol, Preity Zinta, Sohail Khan, Mithun Chakraborty, Riya Sen and Amrita Arora. The film draws its inspiration from the 2004 movie Diarios De Motocicleta or The Motorcycles Diaries based on the journals of Che Guevara, the leader of the Cuban Revolution. The book narrates how Che and his friend crossed the length of South America in a motorcycle.
This much awiated flick is going to release soon perhaps 24th oct.

watch the trailer


Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Aravind Adiga- The Indian Tiger wins Booker for The White Tiger


Brief BIO
Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and raised partly in Australia. He attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times. He lives in Mumbai, India.

The Booker

Aravind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, for “The White Tiger” - his debut novel set against the backdrop of India’s growing wealth gap.Adiga took the 50,000-pound ($87,000-dollar) prize for a book described by the chairman of the judges as revealing “the dark side of India” at a glittering ceremony Tuesday night in London’s Guildhall attended by the literary who’s who of the British capital.
The 33-year-old former journalist said his book - the story of Balram Halwai, a village boy who becomes an entrepreneur through villainous means - aimed to highlight the needs of India’s poor.
“It is a fact that for most of the poor people in India there are only two ways to go up - either through crime or through politics, which can be a variant of crime,” Adiga, the fifth Indian-origin writer to win the prize, told the BBC.
“These people at the bottom have the same aspirations as the middle class - to make it in life, to become businessmen, to create business empires. They need to be given their legitimate needs - the schooling, the education, the health care - to achieve those dreams. If not, as I said, there are only two ways up: crime or politics.”
But Adiga said that although India has “an extreme divide between the rich and the poor” his book wasn’t a social commentary.
“It’s an attempt to dramatise this and get it into literature. It’s meant to be a fun book and to engage its readers,” said Adiga, who beat off competition from five other authors, including fellow Indian Amitav Ghosh, nominated for his “Sea of Poppies”.
Chairman of the judges Michael Portillo said Adiga - only the third debutant to win the award in its 40-year-history - won because judges felt that his book “shocked and entertained in equal measure.”
“The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader’s sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour.”
The other shortlisted authors were Steve Toltz of Australia (”A Fraction of the Whole”), Sebastian Barry of Ireland (”The Secret Scripture”), and British writers Linda Grant and Philip Hensher (”The Clothes on Their Backs” and “The Northern Clemency” respectively).
Chennai-born Adiga is the third debut writer to win the award - after DBC Pierre in 2003 for his “Vernon God Little” and Arundhati Roy in 1997 for “The God of Small Things”.
He is the fifth Indian-origin author to win, joining the ranks of V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.
Adiga, asked about winning the prize in the midst of a financial crisis, said: “India and China have come into their own and the fiction that comes from these countries should reflect the fact.
“What that means is writers from those countries need to be more critical in looking at those countries because they no longer need protection. As they step out into the world stage and potentially rule the world, it is even more important.”
Adiga dedicated the prize to New Delhi, where he has lived for many years.
“It’s a city that I love and a city that’s going to determine India’s future and the future of a large part of the world. It’s a book about Delhi, so I dedicate it to the people that made it happen,” he said.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Paul Krugman, Princeton University professor of economics and international affairs, wins Nobel

Paul Krugman, whose relentless criticism of the Bush administration includes opposition to the $700 billion financial bailout, won the Nobel prize in economics Monday for his work on international trade patterns.
The Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist is the best-known American economist to win the prize in decades.
The Nobel committee commended Krugman's work on global trade, beginning with a 10-page paper in 1979 that knit together two fields of study, helping foster a better understanding of why countries produce similar products and why people move from the small towns to cities.
Krugman (pronounced KROOG-man) is best known for his unabashedly liberal column in the Times, which he has written since 1999. In it, he has said Republicans are becoming "the party of the stupid" and that the economic meltdown made GOP presidential nominee John McCain "more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago."
But at a news conference, Krugman said he doesn't think he won the prize because of his political views.
"Nobel prizes are given to intellectuals," he said. "A lot of intellectuals are anti-Bush."
Tore Ellingsen, a member of the prize committee, acknowledged that Krugman was an "opinion maker" but said he was honored solely for his research.
"We disregard everything except for the scientific merits," Ellingsen told The Associated Press.Krugman, 55, was the lone winner of the $1.4 million award and the latest in a string of Americans to be honored. It was only the second time since 2000 that a single laureate won the prize, which is typically shared by two or three researchers.
Krugman is the rare academic economist who is also part of pop culture. A YouTube video of Krugman's joint appearance with Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly on "Meet the Press" has been viewed by more than 100,000 people. Besides co-authoring textbooks, he has written two best-sellers, "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century" and "The Conscience of a Liberal," which has jumped into the top 25 on Amazon.com and is currently out of stock.
None of the books by last week's winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, reached that high on Amazon.
Always outspoken, Krugman has compared the current financial doldrums to the Great Depression, saying Monday that he hoped a global effort to address the crisis might work.
"I'm slightly less terrified today than I was on Friday," he said, referring to the weekend talks among European leaders that led to the partial nationalization of British banks and unlimited access to U.S. dollars for banks worldwide.
That said, he hasn't found much to praise about the Bush administration's actions during the crisis. In a Times column Monday, Krugman commended British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling, saying they "went straight to the heart of the problem ... with stunning speed" by demanding ownership stakes in banks in exchange for financial aid, while U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson at first rejected that model
"And whaddya know," Krugman continued, "Mr. Paulson _ after arguably wasting several precious weeks _ has also reversed course, and now plans to buy equity stakes rather than bad mortgage securities."
The Bush administration would not comment Monday on whether Krugman would be invited to the White House, as is custom with American Nobel laureates.
Krugman said he hoped to continue focusing on his research and writing.
"The prize will enhance visibility," he said, "but I hope it does not lead me into going to a lot of purely celebratory events, aside from the Nobel presentation itself.
"I'm a great believer in continuing to do work," he said. "I hope that two weeks from now I'm back to being pretty much the same person I was before."
In awarding Krugman the Nobel, the Swedish academy said his theory helped answer pressing questions and inspired an enormous field of research.
Krugman's work looked at on how economies of scale _ the idea that as the volume of production increases, the cost of making each unit falls _ worked alongside population levels and transportation costs to affect global trade. Krugman's theory was that because consumers want a diversity of products, and because economies of scale make production cheaper, multiple countries can build similar products, such as cars. Sweden builds its own car brands for export and to sell at home, for example, while also importing cars from other countries.
"Trade theory, like much of economics, used to be discussed in the context of perfect competition: thousands of farmers and thousands of customers meeting in a market," with supply and demand governing prices, said Avinash Dixit, a Princeton economist who specializes in trade theory.
The theory changed as economists realized conditions in the market were imperfect, and that only a small number of companies in certain industries, such as autos, had economies of scale.
"Krugman was the main person who brought all the theory together, recognized its importance to the real world, produced a large expansion of international trade theory to make it more applicable to the modern world," Dixit said.
Krugman graduated with a bachelor's degree from Yale in 1974 and received a Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. Besides teaching at Yale and MIT, he also taught at Stanford. He is a native of Bellmore, N.Y., graduating from John F. Kennedy High School.
The last time an economist who was this well-known outside academia won the Nobel was 1976, when Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago professor who starred in a PBS series called "Free to Choose," took the prize.
The award is the last of the six Nobel prizes announced this year and is not one of the original Nobels. It was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel's memory.
The Nobels in medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and economics will be handed out in Stockholm by Sweden's King Carl XVI on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. The Nobel Peace Prize is handed out in Oslo, Norway, on the same date.
At Monday's news conference, Krugman was asked about China's economic future. He said he did not have an answer. "I've spent the last few years trying to save my own damn republic," Krugman said.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Sister Alphonsa to be Cannonised by Pope

A good news for religious types.
Sister Alphonsa from Kerala will become the first nun from our country INDIA to be canonised by the Vatican today. The date was announced after a formal meeting of the Pope and other cardinals in the Vatican on March 1. Her beatification - that is recognition by the Church of a dead person's accession to heaven - was ordered by the then Pope, Pope John Paul II, during his visit to Kerala in 1986. Sister Alphonsa was born at Kudamaloor in Kottayam District in 1910. She joined the Clarist congregation. She died in 1946 after suffering from various illnesses.
Sister Alphonsa was credited to have performed some miracles by the residents. She was beatified and made blessed by Pope John Paul II in 1986. According to residents, a disabled child was miraculously cured of his ailment and his limbs restored due to prayers at the altar of Sister Alphonsa's shrine. Sister Alphonsa is the first person to be conferred sainthood from the Kerala Church, which traces its origins to the visit of St Thomas around 2,000 years ago to preach the gospel in India.
In June 2007, Pope Benedict Fourteenth signed a decree approving the miracles that took place through the intercession of Alphonsa paving the way for canonisation. Her tomb at Palai in Kerala is a famous Christian pilgrimage spot.

Recession is also beneficial.

By Alice Thomson
The bankers are fleeing. I got a message from a friend this week. “We've decided to downscale and go to Venice for a bit. We're in a flat on the Grand Canal, the children are learning Italian, the weather is wonderful and it feels like we can finally relax after ten years of madness.”
That's fine then. The City folk are taking what remains of their money and fleeing to sunnier climes to recuperate and recharge, to return when the crisis is over. Everyone else in Britain will have to sit it out. Scotland, the North, graduates, the retired, everyone will feel the effects of the recession. The Home Office has given warning in a leaked memo of more crime, racism and extremism.
But recessions don't bring unmitigated woe. During the past ten years of boom, a small, rather Eeyorish, group of American economists and psychologists has been trying to work out whether people really are better off in what Gordon Brown once called “the Golden Years” and now refers to as the “Age of Irresponsibility”.
Their answer is that recessions (rather than booms or depressions) might actually be a blessing. People tend to drink less, smoke fewer cigarettes and lose weight. They enrol in higher education, the air is cleaner, the roads are less crowdedWhen times are good, research by Stanford University and the University of North Carolina shows that people of all classes tend not to take care of themselves and their families. The better off may have gym membership but all classes drink too much (especially before driving), they eat more fat-laden food - either pre-packaged from supermarkets or in restaurants - and are more likely to neglect their families. In downturns, people have more time to visit their elderly relatives and are more likely to look after their children themselves rather than booking them into expensive after-school activities or crèches.
Grant Miller, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, says that in a boom people work longer, harder hours to take advantage of the conditions and are more stressed and less likely to do things that are good for them: “Cooking at home and exercising are seen as a waste of time.”
But when wages drop, and jobs are scarce, the young feel that it makes more economic sense to prolong their education, and the elderly will retire earlier because there is less incentive to keep earning.
This research backs up a paper, published in 2000, entitled Are Recessions Good for your Health? by Christopher Ruhm, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina. Professor Ruhm analysed death rates from 1972 to 1991, comparing them to economic shifts. He found that for every 1 per cent increase in unemployment rates, there was a 0.5 per cent decline in the death rate.
The number of suicides rose by an average of 2per cent during recessions in this period and cancer deaths by 23 per cent, but this was easily outweighed by the decrease in deaths from heart disease and car crashes. People not only eat more healthily in recessions but they tend to drive less, either as an economy measure or because they are no longer commuting to their jobs. When unemployment rates rise by a point, the number of fatal car crashes decreases by 2.4 per cent.
In another paper, Healthy Living in Hard Times, Professor Ruhm suggests that in America during the recession in the 1990s, smoking, particularly among heavy users, declined by 5 per cent.
Ralph Catalano, professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that it is an oversimplification to say that recessions are good for people, but he thinks that they do encourage healthier lifestyles. “People who are worried about losing their jobs do things that keep them from getting laid off - they drink less and take fewer risks.”
Environmentalists may also find their work easier during a recession. Only two years ago consumers were throwing away one apple in four, people bought a new television set on average every two years and redecorated their kitchens every time they moved house.
But those who have refused to be thrifty for green reasons have now to start rationalising their lives for economic ends. In the past six months councils have reported increased use of libraries and a fall in the quantity of household rubbish.
There are other benefits to this downturn. Prices for necessities are dropping. Food prices are beginning to level out as supermarkets compete with £1 pizzas. Petrol prices have gone down. House prices have fallen by 10.9 per cent, mortgage rates are dropping. More people are turning to eBay and even here prices are falling. The average selling price of a home entertainment system has dropped to £62.49 from £99.58 three months ago.
Shops on the high street have increased the number of bargains - even toothbrushes are now discounted. “This is the deepest and biggest discounting in years,” Richard Dodd of the British Retail Consortium said.
But at least the boom made people happy? That's not entirely true either. According to the Office for National Statistics, levels of contentment have remained the same, at around 87 per cent, for the past ten years and are lower than during the recession in the 1970s. No amount of espresso machines or mini-breaks seemed to satisfy people.
So while there is no such thing as a good recession, it doesn't have to cause unmitigated gloom and despondency.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Johnny Depp in Pirates 4 with bag ful of $75million


Reports are starting to emerge that Johnny Depp decided to reprise his role as captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates Of The Caribbean 4 (something that is looking fairly likely and quite interesting),then Disney would be willing to pay him 32 million pounds (roughly $75 million) upfront for the performance. This would be the largest up front payment an actor has ever received for anything ever. Offcourse Pirates series is quite successfu, but still it is amazing price.

TATA's Nano car Set to drive from Gujarat

Finally wait is over, Nano plant will now relocate to Gujarat.
Tatas have decided to roll out the Nano car from Gujarat, according to TV reports.
It is a huge gift for Narendra Modi as he completes seven years in office as Gujarat chief minister. The loss of W Benagal is gain of Gujarat.
The air was thick with anticipation as top Tata Motors honchos flew down from Mumbai late on Monday evening to take one final look at the site near Sanand, 25 kms from the western fringes of Ahmedabad, which has been identified for relocation of the Nano plant. Sources said the decks have been cleared for transfer of 1,000 acres of land to the Tatas. Modi's council of ministers will meet at 10 am before the Tata team arrives. The land which the Tatas have to finally select is located within a 2200-acre campus owned by the Anand Agriculture University which serves as a cattle and seed farm. The university has already transferred 1,000 acres back to the government which went into an overdrive to woo Tata Motors ever since the situation started worsening at Singur in West Bengal. Government officials were hopeful that the deal will be clinched on Tuesday, after a final round of negotiations on the concessions Tata Motors will be seeking. While Modi has been personally averse to giving concessions to industry, on the ground that such concessions given in the past had led to a huge loss of revenue to the exchequer, there is willingness to make an exception in the case of the Nano project. "We had to relax our rigid stand considering the fact that other state governments were going all out to roll the red carpet for the Nano plant. Losses due to concessions would be offset by the immense positivity created around the investment climate in Gujarat," a senior official of the industries department said, while admitting that there could be a tough last round of negotiations. While Tata Motors' scouts were scouring sites in Karnataka, AP and Maharashtra over the last two days(there was stiffness among farmers), there was an air of tentativeness in the Sachivalaya at Gandhinagar, even as officials went about clearing all the documents to transfer 1,000 acres in one go. "Our biggest advantage is that we can hand over the land to Tata Motors on Tuesday itself," a source said.

Monday, October 6, 2008

From Where first Nano car will rollout

Following its exit from West Bengal, the Tata Nano car project apparently has no dearth of governments willing to woo it to their respective states, with top officials from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat making no secret of their enthusiasm as they carried out site inspections on Sunday.
The Tata Motors team led by its managing director G Ravikant and accompanied by Karnataka Industry Minister Murugesh Nirani visited three places in and around the twin cities of Hubli-Dharwad in Karnataka — the Belur Industrial area, Mummiatti and another site in the vicinity of the airport near Hubli.
The team also met Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa to discuss the offer made by the state to the company to shift the Nano project to Karnataka. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Yeddyurappa said: “I have made an offer and assured them of all facilities, including land, water and power. Now it is for them (the Tatas) to communicate.”
He added that he would also hold talks with Tata chairman Ratan Tata. It is the fourth round of discussions that Karnataka had with the company after it pulled out of Singur.
But in Andhra Pradesh there was protest from farmers fearing forced land deals.
Gujarat chief minister going gaga over drawing TATA to Gujarat, Narendra Modi also roped NRI Swaraj Paul led group CAPARO for supplying raw material for Nano plant.
Wait and watch from whare first Nano will rollout.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Paul Newman, star with a twist of pain

As the heartfelt obituaries and tributes have been reminding us, Paul Newman never forgot that he was an actor before he was a movie star. His training at the Actors Studio during its 1950s heyday taught him to search out the self-lacerating contradictions and double-take complexities of his characters. His irresistible good looks suggested more of a romantic hero than an unregenerate rogue, but he had a way of incorporating into his seductive appeal (those oceanic eyes, those killer abs!) a startling barbed-wire-like menace.
Newman, however, didn't leave it there. Even his most fiendishly unapologetic cads are shown to be fighting more for their psychological survival than for their selfish advancement. To put it another way, something desperate is driving them to be baser than they really are. Whether or not they're fugitives of the law, they're almost always on the lam from secrets too shattering to share.
For some, he'll always be Butch Cassidy to Robert Redford's Sundance Kid. But it's three early film roles that drew out of Newman what only a playing opposite a woman could expose: a softness too vulnerable to be masculinely withstood.
Not surprisingly, two of the characters come courtesy of Tennessee Williams: Brick, the sexually repressed alcoholic locked in a marital stalemate with Elizabeth Taylor's Maggie in "Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof" and Chance Wayne, the Hollywood hustler he originated on Broadway in 1959 opposite Geraldine Page's man-devouring diva Alexandra Del Lago, and later sensationally reprised alongside her for the 1962 film. The third role is the title character of "Hud," a rowdy, unscrupulous rancher whose estrangement from his deepest feelings is painfully glimpsed when Patricia Neal hops on a bus to escape his sadistic clutches.
"Sweet Bird of Youth" magnificently showcases the many lessons Newman picked up from his theatrical travels: Never play one emotion, when the truth is a barrage; don't give up on your character, even if he seems, morally speaking, to be a lost cause; and finally, don't worry about audience approval when the anguish you're exposing, ugly though it may be, is genuine.
I was only lucky enough to see Newman onstage once. It was in the 2002 Broadway revival of "Our Town," in which he played the Stage Manager, crisply establishing the Grover's Corners universe of Thornton Wilder's classic.
But I have another theatrical memory of Newman that radiates just as brightly. It comes from having sat behind him off-Broadway in 1999 at Playwrights Horizons, where Christopher Durang's "Betty's Summer Vacation" was galloping riotously. My companion and I were laughing in a way that was becoming dangerously out of control; I was afraid an usher might be forced to ask us to leave. But there was no need for embarrassment, as Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward were laughing just as uproariously as we were.
On Friday night, the lights on Broadway will dim in his honor

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

A Shake-Up in Pakistan's Powerful Spy Agency

According to TIME-- Pakistan may currently enjoy what seems to be a healthy if noisy democracy, but the office of army chief remains the most powerful one in the country - certainly exceeding the effective control of any politician or civilian bureaucrat. And now Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, is showing that he is truly in charge of the military - and hence the most powerfulman in Pakistan.
Just before midnight on Sept. 29, Kayani replaced the head of Pakistan's premier intelligence agency and elevated a slew of handpicked generals to key positions in a major shake-up of the military leadership. The most striking appointment is the promotion of Lieut. General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha to head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), one of the world's most powerful spy agencies - routinely described, and decried, as a "state within a state." Pasha, who had headed military operations in the tribal areas, replaces Lieut. General Nadeem Taj, an appointee and relative of recently departed President and ex–army chief Pervez Musharraf, who was infamous for intertwining military and political affairs.
The reshuffling comes at a sensitive time for Pakistan's half-million-strong and nuclear-armed military. In the Bajaur tribal agency along the Afghan border and in the Swat Valley, it is locked in fierce and enervating operations against the Pakistan Taliban. At the same time, the army's relations with its sponsors in Washington have sunk to a fresh low after the ISI was accused of aiding Taliban militants, and the ensuing breakdown in communication between the U.S. and Pakistan saw a flurry of unauthorized American air strikes that targeted militants in the tribal areas. U.S. special operations forces also mounted their first known ground assault within Pakistani territory this month.
Some observers in Pakistan criticized the personnel shake-up as a response to U.S. pressure. The changes came just weeks after Richard Boucher, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, publicly demanded that reform of the ISI be carried out. They also followed last weekend's secret meeting between Pakistan's recently elected President, Asif Ali Zardari, and CIA head Michael Hayden about what the U.S. intelligence agency called the "double game played by Pakistan's spy agency." While in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, Zardari told Roger Cohen of the New York Times, "The ISI will be handled; that is our problem. We don't hunt with the hound and run with the hare, which is what [former president Pervez] Musharraf was doing."
However, others argue against the notion that the U.S. forced the reforms on Islamabad. The timing of the promotions was not extraordinary and the changes were made "on the basis of merit," says Talat Masood, a retired general turned military analyst. "These postings were in the normal course of events, with many of the officers due for rotation or retirement," he says. "General Kayani used this opportunity to bring in new people according to his [priorities]."
Yet one of Kayani's priorities, analysts say, is restoring relations with Washington, the source of more than $6 billion in military aid since 2001. "There has been a strain in relations between the Pakistan army and the Pentagon," says Hasan Askari-Rizvi, a military analyst, referring to the recent U.S. unilateral actions that sparked sharp condemnation from Kayani as well as public outrage. "The army wants to deal with this through talks and negotiations. Now, with these promotions, you have a team at the top that is in line with General Kayani's thinking on terrorism and militancy in the tribal areas. There was a lot of skepticism about General Nadeem Taj's commitment to fighting militants." By appointing Pasha, who has been leading the military's campaign in the tribal areas and has been noted for speaking out against Islamabad's previous policy of supporting the Taliban, "General Kayani has an ISI chief who is behind in policy, and the American complaint has been answered," adds Askari-Rizvi.
In the wake of the July 7 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, the ISI was accused of being involved with and helping the Jalaluddin Haqqani network, which was blamed for the attack. Indeed, the dispute between Islamabad and Washington appears to center on the activities of the Haqqani network and other militants blamed for mounting cross-border attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan, which have led to a spike in violence in its eastern provinces this year. According to Pakistan military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas, this may be because "the priorities are mismatching." While the U.S. is focused on Afghanistan, the Pakistan army sees the battle currently raging in Bajaur as its priority, he said. "We cannot risk opening up another front while we don't have the resources."
While the Pakistan army strenuously denies the charge of coddling the re-energized Taliban, its chief military spokesman concedes that the army maintains "indirect" contact with an assortment of militant groups it once cultivated. "Which agency in the world would break its last contact with them?" asked Abbas in an interview before the promotions were announced. However, critics contend that the Pakistan army is not yet prepared to sever its links with its former clients in the militant underworld, perhaps as a way of ensuring some kind of influence over Afghanistan, where radical Islamists are once again threatening the stability of the pro-U.S. regime.
Nevertheless, the change at the top of the ISI is likely to be welcomed by Washington and may even relax tensions with Islamabad, analysts say. While the shake-up helps Kayani advance a more coherent response to the challenge of rising militancy, it also underscores the army's enduring clout. The ISI nominally falls under the purview of the Prime Minister, but on this occasion the civilian government merely gave formal approval to a decision by the military leadership. Two months ago, the civilian government attempted to bring the ISI formally under its control. The move was vetoed by the armed forces, proving again where power truly lies in Pakistan.

Book ban ends Arab-Israeli cultural exchange really sad

For 15 years Israeli Saleh Abbasi has traded books between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors, fostering a rare cultural link.
But in August Israeli authorities suddenly refused to renew his trading license because he was trading with "enemy" states Lebanon and Syria, frustrating both Abbasi's business and the Arab and Israeli readers he has helped interest in each other's literary traditions.
"How can the People of the Book be against books?" Abbasi asked, evoking the Jewish Bible as the first monotheistic holy text. "Books are a bridge to peace between cultures."
An Israeli Trade Ministry spokeswoman declined to explain the timing of the ban. But she cited a recent legal opinion that forbade importing goods from four countries Israel views as enemies -- Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Israel has no diplomatic ties with Beirut or Damascus, so 57-year-old Abbasi uses Jordan and Egypt, the only Arab nations to sign peace deals with the Jewish state, as conduits.
Abbasi's original aim was to cater for Israel's 1.2 million minority Arab citizens, many of whom feel the perpetual absence of relations between Israel and its neighbors denies them cultural and ethnic ties to the Arab world.
But he branched out, and over the past 10 years has sold over half a million copies of some 16 Hebrew titles to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Arab countries, where the translated books reach Arab readers mainly through public libraries and universities.

Tests find melamine in 31 Chinese milk brands

An official news organization is reporting that the industrial chemical melamine has been found in another 31 brands of Chinese milk powder.
The results indicate an expansion in the scandal that has sparked product recalls in China and a host of other countries that received Chinese food exports from infant formula to chocolate.
Results of earlier tests had showed widespread melamine contamination among infant formula, later spreading to fresh milk and other types of dried milk and milk products.
The contamination is blamed for the deaths of four children and kidney ailments among 54,000 others.
The State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine tested samples from 265 brands produced before Sept. 14, the Xinhua News Agency said