Free Republic

Window Swap is an easy and ingenious way to travel all around the world, from the comfort of your own home. All you have to do is visit the Window Swap website and click on the “Open a new window somewhere in the world” button to instantly be transported in a stranger’s home in cities like London, Bangalore or Jakarta from the windows of whom you can admire the views they wake up to every day. According to a description on its official website, Window Swap “is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us...

Cape Town is in the unenviable situation of being the first major city in the modern era to face the threat of running out of drinking water. However, the plight of the drought-hit South African city is just one extreme example of a problem that experts have long been warning about - water scarcity. Despite covering about 70% of the Earth's surface, water, especially drinking water, is not as plentiful as one might think. Only 3% of it is fresh. Over one billion people lack access to water and another 2.7 billion find it scarce for at least one month...

Rajesh Rao is among a handful of Indian entrepreneurs who may prevent the country's software industry from getting "Bangalored". The 41-year-old self-confessed geek runs Dhruva, a firm that sells content and services to global online game companies from a bungalow in a crowded suburb of a city that has come to embody outsourcing and the transfer of jobs from the West. But plain vanilla outsourcing - help desks and back office operations - is finding cheaper locations abroad. India's software industry has discovered it needs to move up the value chain or enter niche areas like gaming to continue growing....

Obama amputates our nuclear arms By: Charles Krauthammer ...snippet...Under President Obama’s new policy, however, if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is “in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” explained Gates, then “the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.” Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker...

SNIPPET: "BANGALORE: A day after two low-intensity blasts in the city, an explosive device weighing 2kgs was found wrapped in a yellow bag near Mahatma Gandhi statue on MG road." SNIPPET: "As stands filled on Saturday for the Mumbai Indians vs Royal Challengers IPL match, two bombs went off at the Chinnaswamy Stadium wounding 12 people and triggering panic. Roughly 20,000 people had packed into the stadium and hundreds more were streaming in when a loud explosion at Gate 12 rocked the arena and rattled nearby buildings. Six policemen were injured when the grill near the wall collapsed on them....

"Crude bomb found on Kingfisher flight" TIMES NEWS NETWORK & AGENCIES, Mar 21, 2010, 10.49am IST SNIPPET: "THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In what could raise security concerns, a low intensity explosive was on Sunday found in a cargo compartment of Kingfisher flight IT-4731 that arrived from Bangalore." SNIPPET: "According to the police, the crude bomb or high power hand cracker was found wrapped in a newspaper at the cargo section..." SNIPPET: "Reports suggested that investigations are on to ascertain how this object landed in the cargo of the plane, which also hints a security lapse on the part of the Bangalore airport authorities....

"UP cops nab IM terrorist planning aerial strike" Pervez Iqbal Siddiqui, TNN, 2 February 2010, 01:48am IST SNIPPET: "LUCKNOW/NEW DELHI: The arrest of Shehzad alias Pappu — one of the key accused in the September 2008 serial blasts in Delhi and the Batla House encounter — by the anti-terrorism squad (ATS) of UP Police from Azamgarh on Monday evening is being seen as a major breakthrough in exposing a module that was planning to unleash air strikes. Shehzad, intelligence agencies had recently discovered, had undergone a training to fly planes from an institute in Bangalore and had surfaced as a...

Blue Coat Systems (BCSI) this morning said it will cut about 10% of its staff under a new restructuring plan. The company currently has a little under 1,500 employees. The company also said it will acquire S7 Software Solutions, a software R&D firm based in Bangalore, India, for about $5.25 million in cash. Blue Coat said it will shift some engineering positions from Sunnyvale (which is where the company is based) and Austin, Texas to Bangalore and other locations. It is closing offices in Riga, Latvia; South Plainfield, New Jersey; and Zoetermeer, the Netherland.

Boulder, CO, USA -- A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at...

India: Church Damaged in Attack On Sept. 9, St. Francis De Sales Church in Bangalore, India was attacked by more than 15 Hindu extremists, according to The Voice of the Martyrs contacts. Extremists armed with weapons broke into the church, damaged window panes and statues inside the church. A house behind the church was damaged. The church has about 3,000 members who attend services performed in different languages such as Tamil, Malayalam and English. Following the attack, the church priests, Father Aloysius and Father Selvaraj filed a complaint with the police. The Voice of the Martyrs supports and assists persecuted...

(Reuters) – A leading Democrat in the House of Representatives who has rebuffed Republican efforts to subpoena records of a mortgage program for favored borrowers at Countrywide Financial Corp got home loans from that lender, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Representative Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, obtained two loans from Countrywide, which was bought last year by Bank of America, the newspaper said, citing information from the lawmaker's mortgage documents. Towns has turned down calls from the committee's ranking Republican, Darrell Issa, for the panel to subpoena mortgage records showing who received...

Some members of 'Anti-American Imperialism Forum', protesting against US President Barack Obama's "Bangalore to Buffalo" remark were arrested when they tried to forcibly enter Bank Of America, on M G road here on Wednesday. About 25 protestors of the city-based outfit, carrying placards and shouting slogans - "Down, Down Big Brother Obama", "Buffalo has buffaloes, Bangalore has brains" "Osama terrorised innocent, Obama terrorises BPO workers" - were arrested when they tried to forcibly enter Bank Of America, deputy commissioner of Police (Central Division), G Ramesh said. The agitators took out a protest march from Mahatma Gandhi statue to the Bank...

BANGALORE: Researchers have achieved a breakthrough, identifying a protein pathway that triggers cancer in the human body owing to its erratic behaviour. Researchers at Bangalore’s National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) led by Satyajit Mayor and Neha Vyas have identified what is known as the Hedgehog pathway and the ways in which it forms and leads to cancer. The researchers, who have published their work in the journal, Cell, say this pathway is formed when the proteins (called hedgehog), which are separate, get drawn to each other by electrostatic interactions between amino acids present around the proteins. A small cluster...

BANGALORE: An employee of a company here who reportedly lauded the Iraqi journalist for hurling his shoes at President George Bush, landed in trouble as he is being questioned by police. Jameel, working in Motor Industry Corporation now taken over by BOSCH, was taken in for questioning yesterday after his colleagues complained that his comments supporting the journalist, Muntazer al-Zaidi, raised suspicion. "He has not been taken into custody. We are asking him some questions," said Gopal Hosur, Joint Commissioner, Crime. "There are no charges against him as of now. We are interrogating him to remove possibility of any doubt,"...

The national highway passing Kolar, 70km from Bangalore, has seen a lot of red on its surface for years now. The colour-coated stretch is the result of tomatoes dumped by farmers protesting a price crash. This week, too, the disgruntled lot threw their crop on the highway after the prices fell from Rs 80 per kilogram to Rs 15-25 a kg. An appeal had earlier been made to the government to pay a compensation of Rs 50,000 per acre to tomato growers. The farmers’ action blocked the highway for hours this week. After their unique protest ended, the crushed tomatoes...

Seven bombs hit Ahmedabad, two killed Enlarge Photo By Rupam Jain Nair AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) - At least seven small bombs exploded in Ahmedabad on Saturday, killing at least two people and wounding 55, just a day after another set of blasts in the country's southern IT hub, officials said. On Friday, eight bombs exploded in quick succession in Bangalore, killing at least one person and wounding six others. Saturday's blasts were in the Ahmedabad's crowded old city dominated by its Muslim community. One was left in a metal tiffin box, used to carry food, another apparently left on a...

Bombs rock ‘India’s Silicon Valley’ By Amy Kazmin in New Delhi Published: July 25 2008 15:49 | Last updated: July 25 2008 15:49 India’s information technology capital, the southern city of Bangalore, was rocked on Friday afternoon by a series of eight small bomb blasts that killed at least one person and injured nearly a dozen others. The blasts happened in quick succession at about 1.30pm local time and caused temporary traffic chaos in the city, which is the hub of India’s global software outsourcing business. Known as India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore is home to 1,500 companies such as India’s...

Al-Qaeda Draws New Recruits Via Internet Al-Qaeda is using the Internet to recruit vulnerable young people to its terrorist network, according to a programme aired on Saudi Arabian TV late on Tuesday. Umm Osama, the founder of al-Qaeda's first women-only website, al-Khansa, joined several others on the programme to discuss how they renounced jihadist ideology. Among those who sought a response to this question was an imam from the Medina mosque, Saleh Ibn Awad al-Mudamsi, and the father of a young al-Qaeda suspect held in an Iraqi prison. Read More Qaeda Targets U.S. Oil Interests in North Africa U.S....

Just breaking 6 or 7 bombs went off in Banagalore - my home town. A prayer for the city with the liveliest and friendliest of people

US slump to prop up India as next offshoring hotspot 14 May, 2008, 0750 hrs IST,Chiranjoy Sen, TNN BANGALORE: Belt-tightening by global technology giants—a fallout of US economic slowdown—is likely to reinforce India as the most preferred offshoring destination. Top technology firms are actively moving part of their workforce from the US, UK and European markets to lower-cost destinations. They cite availability of local talent, better delivery and conducive enviroment as key offshoring reasons. While they may not admit it, firms would be looking at stepping the gas on offshoring to curb bloating costs and to lift margins. Networking and...