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Bizarre Bazaar: May 08 08
CHANDIGARH, India NEW DELHI, India Aditya Mittal has been rebuffed after he made an offer of nearly $396 million to buy a house on the exclusive London street where his father, Britain’s richest man, lives. Father Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, owner of the world’s biggest steel company ArcelorMittal, bought a house on Kensington Palace Gardens in 2004 — a move that made him a neighbour of the Indian High Commissioner. The Sunday Times reported, 32-year-old Aditya has made an unsolicited offer close to $396 million to buy an eight-bedroom house on the same street but has been turned down by the owner. Aditya Mittal lives in posh Belgravia with his wife Megha, a former Goldman Sachs banker, and their two children. Rights group Amnesty International has appealed to India to declare a "moratorium" on executions as an interim step towards abolishing the death penalty. The appeal comes as President Pratibha Patel has 60 mercy petitions under review for people on death row including the high-profile case of a Muslim man, Afzal Guru, sentenced to hang for plotting a 2001 attack on India’s parliament. The last execution in India was in 2004 when a 41-year-old former security guard, Dhananjoy Chatterjee, was hanged for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl in the eastern city of Kolkata — the first execution since 1995. India’s Supreme Court ruled in 1980 the death penalty was to be imposed only in the "rarest of rare" cases. After Indira Gandhi in India, Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and Chandrika Kumaratunga in Sri Lanka, another daughter has made her debut in South Asia’s political skies: Renu Dahal, daughter of Nepal’s Maoist leader Prachanda. Dahal, 31, joined her father’s party in 1997, a year after the Maoists had begun their "people’s war" demanding the abolition of monarchy. Dahal was nominated to the 601-member constituent assembly under the proportional representation system, which gave the Maoists an additional 100 seats, taking their tally to 220. BHOPAL, India Laughter of every kind could be heard as thousands guffawed their way through the streets of Bhopal on World Laughter Day last Sunday. About 1,500 members from over 25 laughter clubs participated in the three-km rally, which wound its way through various localities. The laughing exercises they performed also included the deep breathing laugh, acidity laugh and dog laugh. The rally aimed at driving home the point that laughter is the best medicine after all. Once unknown in England, the humble coriander — or ‘dhaniya’ as it is known in India — has been named Britain’s best-selling herb. The plant has pushed out basil and parsley to account for a quarter of all fresh herb sales, despite having been grown commercially in Britain only since the 1970s. The British love of coriander stems from its taste. Britons bake the green leaves in breads and simmer it in soups, but most of all, they like it sprinkled on the nation’s favourite dish — the Indian curry. THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India A study by the public works department conducted in 41 jails in the southern state of Kerala says there are 6,557 prisoners lodged despite a capacity for 3,665 only. The main jail in the capital, which has space for 713 inmates, has 1,536 prisoners. India is a signatory to the "Minimum Standards Rules of the Treatment of Prisoners" act adopted by the United Nations in 1956, which specifies that in a jail barrack every inmate has to have a minimum space of 3.72 square metres.
This is one embarrassment the Chandigarh police could well do without: Two of their own police jeeps have been stolen. For a city where auto thefts are more than routine and where police routinely caution people that they can do little if residents do not safeguard their own vehicles, the police have now learned that lesson the hard way.Even more embarrassing for the Chandigarh force, one of the stolen jeeps belongs to the officer who heads the city police's top crime branch. Worse still, his jeep was stolen from inside the guarded police compound.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan
A high school for girls in Pakistan’s north-west Swat district was destroyed after militants set it ablaze. Around 50 rebels entered the school in the conflict-hit Charbagh area and used petrol bombs to destroy the library and nine other rooms in the building, police said. A number of attacks on girls’ schools have been reported in the past and these were believed to be carried out by pro-Taliban fighters commanded by a local radical cleric, Maulana Fazlullah.
NEW DELHI, India
KATHMANDU, Nepal
RANCHI, India
Girls’ hostels in Jharkhand’s capital Ranchi are emerging as potential security threats as these can be a sanctuary for female Maoist rebels. "We have information that some of the girls coming from remote areas of the state to study in Ranchi act as carriers of Maoist documents and explosives," a police official Maoist rebels are active in 18 of the 24 districts of the state.
MUMBAI, India
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