31 March 2012
Press Trust of India
HOWRAH, 31 MARCH: Five persons, including two women, were today knocked down and killed by a train when they were crossing the tracks at Santragachi railway station in Howrah district.
The speeding Ranchi-Howrah Intercity Express knocked down the five people when they were crossing the tracks instead of using the overbridge at about 2.30 p.m; South Eastern Railway sources said. All the five died on the spot, they said.
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Encroachers removed |
| A STAFF REPORTER |
| More than 400 people who had encroached on a state government plot in Nonadanga, off the EM Bypass, were evicted on Friday to expedite an infrastructure project. Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) officials arrived at the area, around a kilometre from Ruby hospital, with bulldozers and dumpers around 10am. When the encroachers resisted the drive, police detained at least 50 of them. They were set free in the afternoon after the operation had been completed. By then, little remained of the shanties, tea stalls, stationery shops and an illegal country liquor store at Mazdurpara colony, which had about 135 households. "The encroachment affected the bus-railway transit system and the Garia to airport Metro project. Work will now pick up pace," said a senior CMDA official. "Those evicted had recently settled at Nonadanga. They had been brought to the area by Maoists from Khejuri and Jungle Mahal. We did not evict those who had been living at Nonadanga for more than three years," said state municipal affairs minister and the CMDA chairman, Firhad Hakim. "It would have become impossible to remove the settlers from the urban development department's property. Many of them had been given flats in the area that they rented out and lived in the shanties," he added. "We had met Firhad Hakim on Tuesday after the police announced the eviction drive and he assured us that our homes would not be broken," said Purna Mondal, who claimed to have been living in the area for 16 years. Cops remained in the area till late to ensure that the men did not rebuild their shanties or start a roadblock as they had done last Monday. |
Bomkesh, Bhoot & Bidya trump Vinod | |
| PRIYANKA ROY AND KUSHALI NAG | |
Abar Bomkesh on Saturday evening. Bhooter Bhobishyot on Sunday evening. Kahaani for a second time on Tuesday night. Agent Vinod? Naaah. Made in Calcutta is the big-screen buzzword this season. Even as big Bollywood (Rs 62 crore) in the form of Agent Vinod misfires at the box office, a Tolly-powered small (Rs 8 crore) Bolly film (Kahaani), a traditional Bengali favourite (Abar Bomkesh), and a quirky Tolly tale(Bhooter Bhobishyot) have hit box-office bullseye. In Week 4, the queues keep growing for a peek at a pregnant woman's quest for her missing husband in Kahaani. A band of ghosts continues kicking up a storm in Week 3 of Bhooter Bhobishyot. And a home-grown sleuth nailing a nail-biter in the hills of north Bengal in Abar Bomkesh is calling in the crowds in Week 2. Let's start with the Queen B: Bidya Bagchi! Vidya Balan's Kahaani — shot entirely in Calcutta, with a host of faces from Bengali films and TV — is fast attaining cult status. "This is a rare film that just doesn't seem to slow down. Kahaani will be the first choice for movie goers for at least another week, if not longer," predicted Pritam Jalan of Kushagra Arts, the regional distributors of Kahaani. According to Jalan, the Vidya Balan film (at Rs 5.50 crore nett, and counting) has already crossed the Bengal collections for Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Rs 4.78 crore), Ready(Rs. 4.81 crore) and The Dirty Picture (Rs 3.52 crore). No wonder Kahaani director Sujoy Ghosh — who lived in Bhowanipore till he was 13 and studied at St. James — is one beaming Bong. "The domestic gross earnings have just crossed Rs 50 crore and that is huge for a film like this. Not only am I elated that my film has been accepted so widely, I am also happy that Kahaani's success will now prompt a lot more financiers to back projects like ours," Ghosh told Metro from Mumbai. If Kahaani is the proverbial David, the Goliath crown goes to Agent Vinod. "Contrary to expectations, the footfalls for the Saif Ali Khan-Kareena Kapoor starrer have dwindled significantly within the first week itself," said Subhasis Ganguli, the regional director of INOX. Sriram Raghavan's Agent Vinod is, in fact, proving to be the fourth choice behind Sujoy Ghosh's Kahaani, Anjan Dutt's Abar Bomkesh and Anik Dutta's Bhooter Bhobishyot at the plexes. Abar Bomkesh, based on Chitrachor and starring Abir Chatterjee as Bomkesh, Ushasie as Satyabati and Saswata Chatterjee as Ajit, has got off to a good start. "The box-office collections for the first five days alone have been around Rs 56 lakh. I am happy that people have accepted brand Bomkesh. We will be able to break even in Week 3," said Rana Sarkar, producer of the film that has been made on a budget of Rs 1.45 crore. And then there is the surprise package of Bhooter Bhobishyot. Powered by word-of-mouth publicity and fun feedback, it's drawing the young and not-so-young alike. "I agree with Barun Chanda's review in t2 where he said this is like no other ghost film one has seen before. The gallery of ghosts, the racy dialogues, and the great performances make it a rollicking ride," said Nisha Sengupta, 22. "It's a very wacky film and people are loving the fresh subject and the fun dialogues. Even non-Bengalis are watching Bhooter Bhobishyot," said director Anik Dutta. That's a fact confirmed by the plexes. "Abar Bomkesh and Bhooter Bhobishyot have both reinforced the trend that Tolly films are now being watched even by non-Bengalis. Both films are doing well in cinemas across the city," said a plex official, adding that this comes on the heels of Rituparna Sengupta's Charulataa 2011 enjoying a good run. "Almost every Tolly release nowadays does decent to good business and often Tollywood is the first choice for cinegoers," revealed a spokesperson for Fame Cinemas, which is notching up house-full shows for both Bhooter Bhobishyot and Abar Bomkesh. So Saifu, the next time you want to make it large at the box-office why don't you just make a small film in Calcutta? |
Einstein proved right on view of universe | ||
March 30: Albert Einstein has been proved correct in his view of how the universe is expanding, according to a scientific study released today. The new test of Einstein's view of the universe has proved him right with "incredible accuracy" and is helping scientists to understand the mysterious acceleration of the universe. A team of cosmologists have announced at the National Astronomy Meeting, being held at the University of Manchester, the most accurate measurement ever made about when the expansion of the universe began to accelerate. It means that the phenomenon can be explained using just Einstein's general theory of relativity and the cosmological constant — the simplest theoretical explanation for the acceleration of the universe. The results will be used to understand what is causing the acceleration and why, and will shed new light on dark energy — the name adopted for the fundamental agent driving the acceleration about which little is known. The cosmologists from the University of Portsmouth and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have examined the period between five and six billion years ago when the universe was almost half its present age and made measurements of extraordinary accuracy — within 1.7 per cent. The findings support Einstein's general theory of relativity which predicts how fast galaxies, separated by large distances, should be moving towards one another and at what rate the structure of the universe should be growing. The conclusions are consistent with the concordance model of a universe that bloomed from the big bang 13.7 million years ago. Team member Rita Tojeiro said: "The results are the best measurement of an intergalactic distance ever made, which means cosmologists are closer than ever to understanding why the universe's expansion is accelerating. "'One of the great things about Einstein's general theory of relativity is that it is testable. Our results support the theory and are fully consistent with the notion that constant vacuum energy — empty space creating a repulsive force — is driving the acceleration of the universe. "These are profound statements that describe the physics of our universe at the most fundamental level. "Critically, the results find no evidence that dark energy is simply an illusion stemming from our poor understanding of the laws of gravity — Einstein's theory has passed its most stringent test yet at extra-galactic scales." The experiment was designed to follow up on an observation made in 1998, when scientists studied the brightness of mighty stellar explosions to deduce that the universe's expansion is, against all odds and against our understanding of fundamental physics, becoming increasingly fast. The new discoveries are based on work by a collaboration of astronomers from across the globe representing the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, part of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey. | ||
| THE DAILY TELEGRAPH |
Wife reveals Osama's life on the run | ||
| DECLAN WALSH | ||
Islamabad, March 30: Osama bin Laden spent nine years on the run in Pakistan after the September 11 attacks, during which time he shuttered between five safe houses and fathered four children, at least two of whom were born in a government hospital, his youngest wife has told Pakistani investigators. The testimony of Amal Ahmad Abdul Fateh, Osama's 30-year-old wife, offers the most detailed account yet of life on the run for the Osama family in the years preceding the American commando raid in May 2011 that killed the leader of al Qaida at the age of 54. Her account is contained in a police report dated January 19 that, as an account of that frantic period, contains manifest flaws: Fateh's words are paraphrased by a police officer, and there is noticeably little detail about the Pakistanis who helped her husband evade his American pursuers. Nevertheless, it raises more questions about how the world's most wanted man managed to shunt his family between cities that span the breadth of Pakistan, apparently undetected and unmolested by the otherwise formidable security services. Osama's three widows are of great interest because they hold the answers to some of the questions that frustrated western intelligence in the years after 2001. They are currently under house arrest in Islamabad, and their lawyer says he expects them and two adult children — Osama's daughters Maryam, 21, and Sumaya, 20 — to be charged on Monday with breaking Pakistani immigration laws, which carries a possible five-year jail sentence. The wives have cooperated with the authorities to varying degrees. Investigators say the older women, named in court documents as Kharia Hussain Sabir and Siham Sharif, both citizens of Saudi Arabia, have largely refused to cooperate with investigators. However, Fateh, who was wounded in the raid that killed her husband, has spoken out. The report, by a joint investigative panel made up of civilian and military officials, was first noted by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn yesterday; The New York Times later obtained a copy of the filing. In Washington, US officials said that while they could not confirm every detail of the report, it appeared generally consistent with what is known and believed about Osama's movements. In the report's account, Fateh said she agreed to marry Osama in 2000 because "she had a desire of marrying a mujahid". She flew into Karachi in July that year and, months later, crossed into Afghanistan to join Osama and two other wives at his base on a farm outside Kandahar. The September 11 attacks caused the Osama family to "scatter", the report said. She returned to Karachi with her newborn daughter, Safia, where they stayed for about nine months. They changed houses up to seven times under arrangements brokered by "some Pakistani family" and Osama's elder son, Saad. Other senior Qaida figures were also in Karachi, a sprawling city of up to 18 million people. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the September 11 attacks, claims to have personally killed the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl there during this period; he was captured at a house in Rawalpindi in March 2003. Fateh said she left Karachi in the second half of 2002 for Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where she was reunited with her husband. The American pursuit of Osama was running high: Qaida operatives had attacked an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya and nightclubs in Indonesia, and with CIA intelligence resources not yet diverted to Iraq, the search was firmly focused on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area. Osama, according to his wife, took his family deep into rural mountain areas of northwest Pakistan — but not, notably, into the tribal belt where much western attention was focused. First they stayed in the Shangla district in Swat, a picturesque area about 128km northwest of the capital, Islamabad, where they stayed in two different houses for eight to nine months. | ||
| NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE |
Better homes, no power, toilet | |
| OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | |
Guwahati, March 30: The overall condition of Assam's households has improved according to the census data on housing, household amenities and Assets Census, 2011 released here today but the state still has a lot of catching up to do on the power and sanitation fronts. The data collected from February 9 to 28 last year with a revision round during March 1 to 5 reveals that Assam has done well in comparison to 1991-2001 census figures but it needs to focus more on parameters such as power and sanitation. There has been an increase in households with electricity by 12 per cent since 2001, but the overall figure of households covered is still dismal: 37 per cent. Consumption of kerosene stands at 62 per cent. Similarly, bathing facility has improved by 28 per cent over 2001 figures, but 58 per cent of the households are still without this basic facility. Around 1.3 per cent of the total households use water from untreated source. Households in lower Assam, north bank and middle Assam face a lot of problems accessing clean drinking water. "There are a lot of positives, like our sex ratio as well as literacy rate. It would look even better if we could provide electricity and basic amenities to more households — bathing facility, proper drainage, LPG, electricity are basic amenities," an official said, underlining the need for the Tarun Gogoi government to take appropriate steps to improve the delivery mechanism. The decade under review has seen a Congress-government at the helm of affairs at Dispur. Gogoi assumed power in 2001 and is into his third term. Director of census operation, Assam, R.K. Das, formally released the report which had been collected based on demographic data including religion, caste, language, economic activity, migration and fertility, with the help of 65,277 supervisors and enumerators. The provisional population of 2011 represented a decadal growth of 16.93 per cent during 2001-2011, against 17.64 per cent in the country, whereas the decade of 1991-2001 saw a growth of 18.92 per cent. Similarly, the sex ratio has improved. The number of females per thousand males was 935 in 2001, which rose to 954 in 2011, against 940 in the country. The effective literacy rate of Assam according to the 2011 census is 73.18 per cent against country's literacy rate of 74.04 per cent. Of 73.18 per cent, male literacy constitutes 78.81 per cent, while female literacy constitutes 67.27 per cent in 2011. "As far as housing is concerned, a decline has been observed in proportion of households using grass/thatch /bamboo/wood/mud/tiles/burnt bricks as material of roof and wall; whereas, an increase observed in proportion of households using GI/metal/asbestos sheets and concrete as material of roof and burnt brick and stone as material for walls," said Das. About vehicles used in the state, four per cent households have four-wheelers; 10 per cent households have two-wheelers (scooter/motorcycle/moped); and 55 per cent households have bicycles," said Das. Though the census officials did not make any observation, the data released ends with Article 25 of the Universal Declaration Of human Rights 1948. It reads: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control." |
Enter, an enigma called entry tax |
| OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT |
| Calcutta, March 30: A strange apparition named entry tax but resembling other levies and armed with a written rate as well as an uttered one has been sprung on Bengal. Finance minister Amit Mitra today tabled in the Assembly a bill that proposes to levy an entry tax not exceeding 5 per cent on all products barring those consumed daily and farm products but later clarified that the rate would not exceed 1 per cent. According to the bill, "the state government may, by notification, specify the rate of tax levied under this act which shall not exceed 5 per centrum when such tax is levied…" When the Opposition raised a furore over the rate, Mitra stood up and said: "I am informing the House that the rate will be one per cent flat." Mitra had proposed levying an entry tax in his budget speech last Friday but had not listed the specifics of the levy that was greeted with dismay by trade and industry. The Left government had abolished a similar tax in 1995 as it was found to be choking check posts and feeding corruption. The new government today introduced the bill — the West Bengal Tax on Entry of Goods into Local Areas Bill, 2012 — in an attempt to clear the air. But many questions still appear to have been left unanswered. Although the mop-up from the entry tax will form a key component of Mitra's proposed additional revenue mobilisation of Rs 200 crore, the finance minister did not mention the amount he was expecting to collect through the new tax. Mitra's predecessor Asim Dasgupta and leader of the Opposition Surjya Kanta Mishra had asked for a break-up of the additional revenue mobilisation target. After Mitra proposed the entry tax in his budget, several economists and representatives of trade bodies had dubbed the measure "regressive" because of its inflationary potential. Today, Mitra sought to address that concern. Echoing what chief minister Mamata Banerjee had said on the day of the budget, Mitra iterated that the tax would not inconvenience common people. "It would not add any burden to the common people as items like paddy, rice, sugar, pulses, vegetables, egg, meat, fish, LPG, fertiliser, pesticide, cotton, milk, fishing net, books, periodicals etc would be exempt. The tax would be collected in the same mechanism used to collect VAT and sales tax," said Mitra. But several doubts persisted. At the centre of the opacity over the proposal is its nomenclature. If the tax is going to be levied the same way as VAT, it means the collection will be on consumption of the products and will be imposed at the end of the retailer. In principle, entry tax is applicable to a particular region, for example the Calcutta Metropolitan Area. But the bill is silent on what the finance minister meant by local area. "Then why is it being called an entry tax? Which are the local areas?" asked an economist. Opposition leader Mishra also raised the same point on the floor of the House. "It is still not clear whether it is a separate tax. The bill does not specify what will be the rate of tax on different items. Will it vary from area to area?" Mishra wondered whether it was another VAT on VAT — the answer to which can raise legal questions. "I apprehend it might be challenged in the court of law. If the state imposes a tax on tax, the bill will be in question," he said. Mishra suggested that the government could have increased the applicable VAT rates on various products — an unpalatable and risky option for Mitra who is part of a government whose aversion to any form of hike is well known. Mishra's sentiment was echoed by business circles. "He should have increased VAT. What is the point of introducing a new tax? It will only add paperwork and further confusion. We are not sure about the mechanism either," said D.P. Nag, the secretary of Bengal National Chamber of Commerce and Industries. A senior official of the MCC Chamber of Commerce, which recently urged the finance minister to withdraw the entry tax, expressed disappointment over today's notification. "It will certainly add to inflation and may lead to more corruption. When the world is going towards removing barriers for trade, we are creating them anew," the MCC official said. |
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