Phelps, disbarred as an attorney in 1979 for ethical problems, and his congregation, which consists largely of his relatives
...
Phelps and his extended family of 13 children have lived in Topeka since the 1950s. He opposes school integration and civil rights. Four of his offspring have left and told tales of their father's physical abuse, tax fraud and racial hatred.
...
In recent years, Phelps also has preached that God hates America, including at a memorial service in Littleton for the Columbine victims.

His research was based on interpreting six different versions of the epic, including in Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada and English, besides calculating planet and star positions and eclipses described in the epic using modern IT tools and software for astronomy...

His findings have aroused scientific interest, but sceptics have questioned his methodology.

Britain's industrialisation was secured by destroying the manufacturing capacity of India. In 1699, the British government banned the import of woollen cloth from Ireland, and in 1700 the import of cotton cloth (or calico) from India. Both products were forbidden because they were superior to our own. As the industrial revolution was built on the textiles industry, we could not have achieved our global economic dominance if we had let them in. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, India was forced to supply raw materials to Britain's manufacturers, but forbidden to produce competing finished products. We are rich because the Indians are poor.

Now the jobs we stole 200 years ago are returning to India. Last week the Guardian revealed that the National Rail Enquiries service is likely to move to Bangalore, in south-west India. Two days later, the HSBC bank announced that it was cutting 4,000 customer service jobs in Britain and shifting them to Asia.

- I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully. 9/29/2000 during presidential campaign
- Hydrogen power will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas admissions. 2/6/2003 speaking on energy independence
- Matter of fact, there haven't been a morning that haven't gone by that I haven't saw--seen--or read threat.. 11/12/2002 remarks at DC Police operations center.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

The internet and electronic publishing enable the creation of public libraries of science containing the full text and data of any published research article, available free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Immediate unrestricted access to scientific ideas, methods, results, and conclusions will speed the progress of science and medicine, and will more directly bring the benefits of research to the public.

To: Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, President, Indian National Congress

CC: Respective Editors - The Hindu, The Times of India, The Deccan Herald, The Tribune, The Indian Express, The Economic Times, Business Standard, Business Line, Outlook, India Today, Frontline, Business World

Dear Mrs. Gandhi,

We recently came across a news article in the Times of India titled "Women can't do Business: Dhoot"(September 29, 2003, URL). The article was an interview with Mr. Venugopal Dhoot, Managing Director of Videocon Industries.

We were appalled to know that one of India's leading industrialists still thinks that women belong at home, looking after the family. Mr.Dhoot's views on the "traditional" status of women in India smack of a primitive blend of thinking that almost borders not just on sexism, but active discrimination.

Mr.Dhoot says that "businesses can't be run by women, especially in India." Even though some of us believe that responding to Mr. Dhoot's observations would mean attributing some value to them, yet we cannot also let them remain unanswered.

We wonder if Mr.Dhoot has ever heard of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw of Biocon, Naina Lal Kidwai of HSBC, Anu Aga of Thermax, Shahnaz Husain of Shahnaz Herbals, Amrita Patel of NDDB, Jaswantiben Popat of Lijjat Papad, Sulajja Motwani of Kinetic, and many, many more women in various levels of business, politics, entertainment and every other conceivable sphere of life. The success of each of these women in their own, diverse spheres, in the face of cut-throat competition should serve as a gentle rejoinder for people like Mr.Dhoot.

We are of course, not forgetting the millions of nameless, faceless Indian women who excel in their own chosen areas balancing not just their own lives but that of entire families. Their achievements are no lesser in greatness compared to the women above.

The article also mentioned the fact that Mr. Dhoot was planning to enter the Rajya Sabha on a Congress ticket.

We cannot understand how the Congress Party, itself led by a woman, and with a glorious history of great women leaders like Annie Beasant, Sarojini Naidu, Vijaylakshmi Pandit and Indira Gandhi can allow a person with such antiquated opinions on the role of women in society/business to enter those most august halls of Parliament. It disturbs us when we realize that Mr. Dhoot, if he enters Parliament, will be participating in various discussions and legislations involving critical women's rights and issues when we all know what he thinks of the stature of women. A person who believes that women should only look after their homes cannot, in our opinion, be expected to speak for the rights of the millions of Indian women whom he will be representing, albeit indirectly.

We appeal to you, as Indians who truly believe in our constitution when it guarantees us equality regardless of "religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth", to reconsider the decision to grant a Rajya Sabha ticket to Mr. Venugopal Dhoot. As a woman yourself, you would understand the difficulties that women have to face in India growing up, studying, working, and even managing their families. People like Mr.Dhoot not only perpetuate inequal treatment of women, but they also advocate the same, sometimes directly as in the article, and sometimes by their thoughts and actions.

If you, the reader, the 'common man', the nameless Indian, the silent majority believe in what we are trying to bring out, then please sign this petition. It will be forwarded to the people mentioned so that they know that Indians will not put up with such blatant discrimination and stereotyping any longer. If we are to become a globally recognized and respected country, let's start somewhere closer to home.

When Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, was kidnapped to Troy, Menelaus called upon his fellow chieftains to help him recover his wife. One of them was the great warrior Achilles. Achilles's mother, the immortal sea-nymph Thetis, knowing that her son's fate was to perish at Troy if he went, dispatched him to the court of King Lycomedes. There, at her urging, he disguised himself as a maiden and joined the king's daughters. Odysseus, learning that Achilles was at the palace, appeared before the women as a merchant, offering items for sale, including weaponry. While the daughters naturally gravitated towards the feminine objects, Achilles, as this mosaic depicts, couldn't resist the arms. Thereby unmasked, Achilles quickly agreed to accompany Odysseus to Troy, where Achilles was eventually killed by a poisoned arrow that struck him in the heel. It was his one weak spot: When he was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him in the River Styx, which made him invulnerable except where she held him at the heel.

When King Minos of Crete decided to keep alive a magnificent bull that Poseidon had given him for sacrifice, the sea god punished him by having Minos's wife Pasiphae (seated at left in the mosaic) fall in love with the bull. To satisfy her desire, the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus (second from right and far right, respectively) built her a hollow cow in which she could hide and mate with the bull. Their coupling produced the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, which was shut away in the maze-like Labyrinth (upper right). Later, when Minos had Daedalus and Icarus shut up in the Labyrinth, they escaped using wings fixed to their bodies with wax. Daedalus safely reached Sicily, but Icarus, exulting in his new-found abilities, flew too close to the sun; the wax melted and he fell to his death in the sea.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that requiring the blood samples amounts to an illegal invasion of privacy because they are taken without legal suspicion that the convicts were involved in other crimes.

The San Francisco-based court, the first federal appeals court to address the federal DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act, said that is a violation of inmates' Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches.

The Los Angeles Times reported that three of the women said Mr. Schwarzenegger had grabbed their breasts. Another said he reached under her skirt. A fifth said he tried to strip off her bikini in a hotel elevator. The sixth said Mr. Schwarzenegger pulled her to his lap and asked if she was experienced in a particular sexual act. The accusations covered a 25-year period, ending in 2000.
...
"Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets," the actor and former bodybuilder said, "and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful. But now I recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry about that and I apologize because this is not what I'm trying to do."

Geoff Sutton, MSN general manager for Europe, said it had become clear that unmoderated chat wasn't safe.
"The two big issues we have been dealing with have been adults 'grooming' children in chat rooms and spam getting in that is pornographic in some way," he said.
"So we have come to consider that this is not a good experience for our users and we have tried to do the right thing by showing our responsible leadership position."

In the Sept. 12 Science, Stossel and his colleagues report how chilled platelets are recognized and removed from circulation by hungry immune cells in the livers of mice. They also demonstrate how this clearance mechanism can be blocked by adding a dash of the proper sugar to the chilled platelets.
The added sugar acts like an invisibility cloak, allowing the platelets to evade detection by immune cells and circulate for the normal seven-day life span of platelets, said cardiologist Karin Hoffmeister, first author of the paper and HMS instructor in medicine at the Brigham. In mice, the sugar treatment doubled the useful storage period of platelets to 12 days.