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Saturday, October 24, 2009

Parlimentary bite


A prominent opposition lawmaker faces expulsion from Malaysia's Parliament after being convicted on Thursday of biting a policeman at a protest. A Kuala Lumpur magistrate's court sentenced Tian Chua, who is head of strategy for the Pakatan Rakyat opposition alliance, to six months' imprisonment and fined him 3,000 ringgit (880 dollars). Under Malaysian law, an MP will lose his or her seat if sentenced to more than one year in jail or a fine exceeding 2,000 ringgit. The policeman had testified that during a scuffle he punched Tian Chua, and that Chua bit him in retaliation.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Man loses money in UK without being there

IF you ignore e-mails from strangers telling you that you have won a lottery and need to send some money to claim it, you are alert. However, don't let your guard down because a mail from a friend in distress, stuck in a foreign land, requiring money to return home, could well be fake too.
When business associates and friends in the contact list of V K Mohanarangan ,a man living in South India, received mails about his plight, most of them started calling his number, while a kind hearted friend even sent money worth $1000 . The mail said Mohanarangan was in trouble, having lost all valuables and passport, and immediately required $1200, which could be wire transferred to the hotel in UK from where he needed to check out.
On getting calls from people inquiring if everything was okay with him and if he needed help, Mohanarangan, who deals in engineering machine accessories and has an official e-mail id, realized something was amiss.
He looked into the matter and realized that the messages had indeed gone from his id, which apparently had been hacked. Using his techie friends, he found out that the e-mail had been sent from Nigeria. He approached the suburban commissioner of police, S R Jangid, and filed a complaint.
Though similar mail traps have been heard of, this is perhaps the first time in the city that someone has complained to the police about his mail being hacked.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Crash-test baby


A 6-month-old baby had a miracle escape after his pram rolled onto the tracks and into the path of an oncoming train at a railway station in Melbourne. Security video footage released on Friday shows the baby's mother looking away for a moment as the pram suddenly rolls off the edge of a station platform and onto the tracks at Ashburton station. The mother looks back and panics as she watches the oncoming train hit the pram, dragging it about 130 feet along the track as the desperate driver tried to stop the train. Miraculously, the baby boy survived with only minor injuries, including a bump to his head.

Monday, October 19, 2009

German fake

A portrait of a young woman thought to be created by a 19th century German artist and sold two years ago for about $19,000 is now being attributed by art experts to Leonardo Da Vinci and valued at more than $150 million.The unsigned chalk, ink and pencil drawing, known as "La Bella Principessa," was matched to Leonardo via a technique more suited to a crime lab than an art studio -- a fingerprint and palm print found on the 13 1/2-inch-by-10-inch work.
Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said the print of an index or middle finger matched a fingerprint found on Leonardo's "St. Jerome" in the Vatican. Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence, including carbon dating, had art ex perts believing as early as last year that they had found another work by the creator of the "Mona Lisa."The discovery of the finger print convinced the work was by Leonardo, whose myth and mystery put him at the centre of best-sellers as "The Da Vin ci Code" and "The Lost - Symbol."
Biro examined multispec tral images of the drawing taken by the Lumiere Tech nology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital , scanner to show successive layers of the work so as to not damage the painting.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Eco-shop


A businessman in Berlin has leapt on the "green" bandwagon by offering discounts to clients who can prove they arrived by public transport or bicycle. "Everyone's a winner," explained Regina Goetz, who runs the business in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, a district in the former East Berlin.
"It's pretty difficult to park around here. So we came up with the idea of an eco discount of five euros (£4.50) to anyone who leaves the car at home," Ms Goetz. "The crisis has slashed our turnover to half in the last year. But the discount has proved a roaring success," she said.