Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/132514931?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, 8 September 2011
India, Bangladesh to help people stuck in enclaves (AP)
DHAKA, Bangladesh ? The village of Votbari is a tiny island of India surrounded by a sea of Bangladesh.
A victim of absurd map drawing during the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, the enclave has been all but abandoned by both nations. It has no paved roads, electricity, hospital or schools. Its destitute residents get no aid from either side. Years of regional tensions have kept it in limbo.
"There is nobody to look after us," resident Jober Ali said. "We have no country ... I do not have any identity. I am nowhere."
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan's Singh's visit to Dhaka starting Tuesday could end the suffering for tens of thousands of people trapped in dozens of such enclaves on both sides of the border.
With India's ties with rival Pakistan to the northwest frozen in enmity, it has turned its attention toward smoothing out its bumpy relationship with its northeastern neighbor.
The two nations are expected to tackle tensions over water resources, trade barriers and transit links. They also plan to resolve disputes over their 4,096-kilometer (2,545-mile) border ? and with it, the enclave conundrum.
There are 111 Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi ones inside India, with a combined population of 51,000, according to a recent survey jointly conducted by the two governments.
The residents of the enclaves have been compared to stateless people, without any of the services offered in either country and no one to take responsibility for them.
"We've lived here for decades. But nobody bothered about us. We are human beings, they do not keep that in mind," Ali said in an interview conducted over a borrowed cell phone from Votbari.
Bangladeshis living in enclaves surrounded by India suffer a similar fate.
Ali, 58, has no land for farming, no education and no hopes of a permanent job. His family of 13 squeezes into a single straw hut because they have no extra land to build another home. He supports them with irregular work as a day laborer.
The village of 3,000 has almost no infrastructure save for a few narrow, muddy roads ? plied by bicycle rickshaws ? that Bangladeshi authorities built for them as a humanitarian gesture.
Officially, Votbari residents are not allowed to leave their village and enter Bangladesh without a visa. But there is no fence and since they have never even been given Indian passports, Bangladeshi authorities look the other way and let them pass.
They do their shopping in Bangladesh, use Bangladeshi currency and rely on Bangladeshi hospitals in case of emergencies.
Asir Uddin, 60, said he often sneaks out of the village to find work as a day laborer.
"We cannot give our identity. We lie to people when someone asks where we're from," he said.
The situation is worse at the border of their own country, India, three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) away.
There, Ali said, Indian guards open fire at them if they try to cross. Human rights groups have accused Indian forces of routinely shooting those trying to enter illegally from Bangladesh.
While there are a smattering of similar enclaves scattered about Europe, central Asia and the Middle East, the Indo-Bangladesh ones are by far the most extensive, and the most convoluted, according to a 2002 paper by Brendan R. Whyte, of the University of Melbourne.
Some have small counter enclaves inside them, Whyte wrote. There is even one tiny Indian enclave inside a Bangladeshi enclave inside an Indian enclave inside Bangladesh.
According to popular legend, the enclaves were created when two chess-playing royals gambled away villages from their kingdoms. But Whyte and other historians say their creation is rooted in 18th Century fighting between the kingdom of Cooch Behar and the Mughal Empire. A treaty set boundaries, but some feudal lords in Mughal territory remained loyal to Cooch Behar and vice versa, leading to the enclaves.
When the subcontinent fell under British rule, this quirk didn't matter much. But when the region was partitioned between India and Pakistan at independence in 1947, the border kingdom of Cooch Behar joined India, leaving thousands of its now-Indian subjects trapped in East Pakistan and thousands of Pakistanis trapped in India.
After India helped Bangladesh secede from Pakistan in the 1971 war, the two nations developed close ties and signed a 1974 treaty that would have resolved the problem. But India never ratified the treaty and independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in a 1975 military coup, torpedoing the plan and ushering in an era of icy relations.
New Delhi complained of millions of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and accused Dhaka of giving sanctuary to myriad insurgent groups leading violent rebellions against Indian rule in its northeastern states. Dhaka complained of its massive trade deficit with India and accused New Delhi of stealing its water.
Singh and Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Rahman's daughter, have been working to fix this over the past two years.
Bangladesh cracked down on the Indian insurgents, a move that forced many of the groups to the negotiating table with India.
India gave Bangladesh a $1 billion loan, raised quotas on textile imports and appears ready to resolve the water dispute.
"The desire on both sides is to bring about a qualitative change in the relationship," said Vishnu Prakash, India's foreign ministry spokesman.
While India still has major border disagreements with Pakistan and China, it is hoping to resolve nearly all its issues with Bangladesh in time for Singh's two-day visit.
The plan entails each country absorbing the enclaves inside its territory and giving citizenship to the residents or allowing them to move to their home country, where they would be provided new homes, Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told Parliament last month.
As Muslims, the villagers in Votbari feel closer to Bangladesh than Hindu-majority India, and many say they will stay right where they are.
"We are all united in wanting to be part of Bangladesh," Ali said. "We are Muslims. They are also Muslims. So they have feelings for us. They are like our brothers."
Nurul Amin, 26, who was forced to start driving a bicycle rickshaw at the age of 12 to support his family, hopes the deal will bring a brighter future for his two daughters, aged 5 and 3.
"I want to educate my two children. I don't want them to live a life like me," he said.
___
Nessman reported from New Delhi.
___
Follow Ravi Nessman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ravinessman
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Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Jerry Chautin: It's Construction, Stupid! It's Home Building, Stupid!
In Thursday's address to Congress, I want President Barack Obama to emphasize that fixing the home-building and construction industries is necessary to jump-start our lame economy. That is because, in my recollection, home building and construction have led us out of every recession since the 1960s, when I financed land acquisition, development and construction of tract homes.
"It's the economy, stupid." That was Senator Bill Clinton's mantra in 1992, when he was vying for the presidency. His opponent, the incumbent George H. W. Bush, danced around the edges of our country's economic woes and lost the election. More recently, Clinton offered his suggestions to fix the economy. But resolving the loss of construction and home-building jobs was not front and center.
Unless Obama gets specific and tells the American people that he knows how to fix the foundering construction and home-building industries, he will also lose -- and so will we.
"The history is that housing has led the country out of recessions until this one," said John Wieland, the award-winning founder of John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods, a major Southeastern residential developer, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "It didn't happen this time because of the air coming out of the housing bubble."
He continues: "We have this tremendous amount of resale homes, short sales, that just flooded the market."
So the sooner we solve the housing problem and get the building trades back to work, the sooner our economy will be off life supports. Wieland told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the lack of new "housing has kept us in this recession."
Obama has to tell Congress how to resolve the shadow inventory of homes being dumped on the market. He needs to address the two-year backlog of houses in the foreclosure process and the groundswell of litigation against lenders.
In a March presentation to Congress, David Crowe, chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders, said, "Without access to credit, the residential construction industry will lose more small businesses and experience more job losses, with these impacts being widely spread across the nation."
That is because housing represents a huge part of the nation's Gross Domestic Product. "When you consider the enormity of the total number of jobs attached to housing, a sector that accounts for 15 percent of our nation's GDP," Crowe says, "now is hardly the time to step back from our nation's long-standing commitment to homeownership."
Although Congress is not stepping back from its commitment to homeownership, there is serious talk going on about reducing or eliminating the homeowner interest deduction. "A rollback of the mortgage interest deduction as proposed by the commission would have a devastating impact on both present and future homeowners in this country," said Michael Berman, chairman emeritus of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America. "It would immediately stop in its tracks any stabilization we are seeing in the housing market and would effectively increase the cost of homeownership for millions upon millions of people."
Furthermore, if implemented at this time, provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act could exacerbate the tight credit markets, as well. Even though the legislation was intended to prevent future real estate debacles and financial abuses by the lending industry, the same financial institutions that got us into this mess can help get us out of it.
More specifically, Berman says that the requirement for mortgage-backed securities issuers to retain a five-percent stake against potential losses to investors will keep private capital on the sidelines -- just when we need it most. He is also concerned that Dodd-Frank will cause borrowers to flock to the Federal Housing Administration's low down-payment loans because they will not be able to cough up 20 percent for the conventional alternatives. The Mortgage Bankers Association "is concerned that the FHA programs will be over-utilized," he says.
Advanced reports of Obama's Thursday speech suggest that he will tinker around the edges by asking Congress to increase spending on infrastructure projects, extend unemployment benefits and provide tax incentives for businesses to hire more employees. "The executive branch has certain things it can do," White House spokesman Jay Carney says without being specific. "I don't want to ruin the surprise."
But unless the surprise includes stimulating the home-building and construction industries, the unemployment rate will remain untenably high for an extended time.
Jerry Chautin is a volunteer SCORE business counselor, business columnist and SBA's 2006 national "Journalist of the Year" award winner. He is a former entrepreneur, commercial mortgage banker, commercial real estate dealmaker and business lender. You can follow him on Twitter @JerryChautin.
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Follow Jerry Chautin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JerryChautin
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-chautin/its-construction-stupid-i_b_949257.html
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Tuesday, 6 September 2011
A most unlikely question ? Lamentations on Chemistry
Posted: September 4, 2011 by gaussling in Arts & Entertainment, CounterCurrent, Humor, Movies
Saw Apollo 18 at the cineplex last night. It is filmed in a rough?documentary style with ?recovered? footage. My recommendation? It?s worth seeing on a big screen. Probably not a good date flick, though. ?But that depends on your date.
While at a brew pub in Denver Friday night, I was summoned to a table of 20-something?ladies who were obviously celebrating a girls-night-out before a wedding. ?The bride-to-be, decorated with a pink faux veil, gestured for me to come answer a question. I walked over and bent down to hear her. It was then that she looked me in the eye and asked a question that most fellows rarely ever?hear: ?Can I pat your booty?? she said.? I looked at the table of a dozen well coiffed lovelies watching?me for some sign of a reaction.? The guest of honor had a list of items in her hand that she needed to check off.? Seeing this, and noting the urgency with which she needed to complete the task, I grinned and??relented?.? At least she asked first. So I stood up, turned around and bent over a few degrees in supplication, and received the pat. With my brief role completed, I turned back around and bid them a?farewell. Moments later I found my dinner party and sat down with them, satisfied that I had just participated in an important cultural rite of passage.? Hours later the wife unit assured me that this happened only because?I appeared harmless. So it goes.
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Source: http://gaussling.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/a-most-unlikely-question/
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motorcycle spark plug function | automotive motorcyles
What distinguishes the diesel engine is the diesel engine combustion occurs due to compression so that the burning of fuel due to the fuel-air mixture is compressed resulting in increased temperatures and an explosion. While the gasoline engine, yes when the compression stroke, the spark plug acts as a source of fire and burn the fuel air mixture, causing an explosion.
Often a motorcycle suddenly problematic sulking because the spark plugs. In addition, try to always use a spark plug / plug the original sport because the market is very much in circulation counterfeit brands. Of its kind, the spark plugs on the market can be divided into two, namely the cold spark plugs and spark plug heat.
Cold plugs are plugs that are used for long-distance vehicles, while for vehicles operating in the selected city hot plugs. Brand spark plugs on the market numerous and not necessarily a particular brand of superior of the other brands.
One brand of spark plugs would not necessarily be used for all motorcycles. Busi has its own series, could have been a series of brand X is superior, while for a particular series of brand Y is more stubborn and resilient. The use of spark plugs should be tailored to the specifications of the motorcycle concerned. From the experiments performed, the use of plugs that do not fit the specifications will be bad.
Several possibilities, among others, the first piston head plugs easily damaged because the charred and secondly, the power generated is reduced motorcycle. Sparks produced by the spark plug is very influential in the combustion process that occurs in the combustion chambers of gasoline engines. The more complete the combustion, the engine power balk issued and dump gas is also more environmentally friendly.
The result, in addition to longer life spark plugs, engine capacity increases. Modern spark plugs are made to be more resistant to changes in the distance (gap) electrode. The longer the spark plug electrode tip will be more wear due to
sparks and heat during the combustion process in engines. The more tenuous electrode distance, jumps on the spark plug fires will decrease and will lower the quality of combustion.
To improve the quality of combustion, there is a new system being developed and it is being implemented, namely the use of two spark plugs in the combustion chamber, such as the Bajaj Pulsar DTSi motorcycle. Use of your spark plugs will be perfect because the source of the fire burning more and more making trips to burn the fuel air mixture in the combustion chamber is shorter and more complete burn.
To select the appropriate spark plugs, which need to be considered is the specification and form electrode. Brand, the user experience of the brand, and price can also be taken into consideration. Shape and electrode spark plugs are of two kinds, namely electrode V and U. Both are clearly different, which looks at the direction and amount of core sparks.
The more the core, will increasingly balk combustion generated. V electrode is suitable for all types of machines.
According to the experiments performed, although in general the spark plug manufacturers have a maximum performance to 20,000 miles but is efficient only 10,000 miles. After that distance, then the ability will decrease. You could consider whether it still uses the spark plug, but his ability has been decreased so that its performance decreases or replace new spark plugs so that its performance can be optimized.
Source: http://www.bragabooks.com/motorcycle-spark-plug-function/
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Monday, 5 September 2011
Quick steps to tackle strong yen needed: Japanese econ ministers (Reuters)
TOKYO (Reuters) ? Economics Minister Motohisa Furukawa said on Sunday he and three other economy-related ministers in Japan agreed that measures to respond to a firmer yen need to be compiled quickly to alleviate the negative effect of the currency's appreciation on the domestic economy.
The agreement follows Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's comment on Friday that Japan is facing an unprecedented crisis where industry is hollowing out because of a strong yen.
The three other members of the newly formed Noda's cabinet were Finance Minister Jun Azumi, Trade and Energy Minister Yoshio Hachiro, and Tatsuo Hirano, who is in charge of reconstruction following a massive quake and tsunami in March.
In the first meeting of the Noda government's economy-related ministers, no concrete steps were discussed, Furukawa said.
Azumi said earlier on Sunday he will keep an eye on speculative moves in the currency market and take a decisive step if necessary, in a sign he will follow the footsteps of his predecessor Noda, who as finance minister, led currency intervention three times to curb the yen's rise.
(Reporting by Shinji Kitamura, writing by Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Ed Lane)
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Wedding Dresses ? Blog Archive ? [WATCH]: Wedding Dresses by ...
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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 4th, 2011 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Wedding Dresses Articles, Wedding Dresses Books, Wedding Dresses Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.Source: http://weddingdress.yooboda.com/2011/09/04/watch-wedding-dresses-by-ladyprimroseweddings-com-26/
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