http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23283198

Riots in London

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14449675

India World Cup Cricket Theme

Japan quake death toll passes 18,000

The human and financial cost of the tsunami continues to rise, after police estimates showed more than 18,000 people have died in the disaster and the World Bank said it may cost Japan as much as £145bn to repair the damage.
The figures came as emergency workers were evacuated from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after smoke or steam was seen rising from one of its reactor units.The smoke raised concerns that water in the spent fuel pools at the No 3 unit was running low, but officials said there was no immediate spike in radiation levels.
"We are checking the cause of the smoke," Hidehiko Nishiyama, a nuclear safety agency official, told reporters.
Earlier, engineers finally succeeded in connecting power cables to three of the plant's reactors and said they planned to test the pumps soon.
Engineers hope to connect those power supplies to the No 3 and No 4 units on Tuesday, the public broadcaster NHK said.
The nuclear emergency is far from over, however. On Monday, it was reported that the No 3 reactor had experienced a surge in pressure that may require workers to vent radioactive steam, a tactic that set off hydrogen gas explosions at the facility last week.
The government's chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, conceded that the buildup of pressure was unsettling. "We knew that even if things went smoothly, there would be twists and turns," he told reporters. "At the moment, we are not so optimistic that there will be a breakthrough."
That is causing concern because the reactor is the only one of the six that contains plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel – or MOX – and would release highly toxic plutonium in the event of a meltdown. The fuel in the other reactors is uranium.
The country's self-defence forces resumed work on Monday to cool down the No 4 and No 3 reactors with seawater. Japan's nuclear safety agency said it did not believe much water from the two reactors had seeped underground.
Radiation leaks from stricken reactors continued to spread through the region's food supply, though at levels too low to endanger health.
The agency acknowledged that workers at the site risked inhaling radioactive dust, but said it had so far found no evidence of that happening.
Radiation in excess of government standards was found in canola and chrysanthemum greens grown in the Fukushima area, a day after authorities reported that milk and spinach had been contaminated, as well as tap water in Tokyo, 150 miles away.
The health ministry advised 6,000 villagers in Iitate, 19 miles from the power plant, not to drink tap water after tests revealed it contained abnormal, though not harmful, amounts of iodine-131, a radioactive substance.
"We think we have arrived at the point where we are very close to getting the situation under control," the deputy cabinet secretary, Tetsuro Fukuyama, said.
Graham Andrew, a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: "There have been some positive developments in the last 24 hours but overall the situation remains very serious."
The US energy secretary, Steven Chu, told CNN that he believed the worst of the nuclear crisis was over, but added: "I don't want to make a blanket statement."
Attention is turning to the humanitarian crisis on Japan's north-east coast and the cost of the cleanup and reconstruction operations.
The World Bank said that it could take Japan five years, and cost between £75bn and £145bn – equivalent to 4% of Japan's GDP – to overcome the catastrophe, while private insurers face a combined bill of up to $33bn.
"Damage to housing and infrastructure has been unprecedented," the bank said. "Growth should pick up though in subsequent quarters as reconstruction efforts, which could last five years, accelerate." The bank said damage from the tsunami could also affect trade in the region.
The price of some Japanese-made memory chips have risen 20% because of disruption to production lines, while car plants in Asia face shortages of auto parts. "Disruption to production networks, especially in automotive and electronics industries, could continue to pose problems," the World Bank said. "Japan is a major producer of parts, components and capital goods which supply east Asia's production chains."
While hundreds of workers battle to render the nuclear plant safe, Japan continues to count its dead. Police estimates show more than about 18,400 died – 10,500 in Miyagi prefecture alone. A further 452,000 people are living in shelters. "It is very distressing as we recover more bodies day after day," said police spokesman Hitoshi Sugawara.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/21/japan-earthquake-death-toll-18000/print

India unveils new rupee symbol

Government hopes to signal India's growing strength with globally recognised currency symbol


Matthew Weaver guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010 13.49 BST
 
It may look like a melted British Rail sign but it's hoped that a new symbol for the Indian rupee will signal India's growing economic strength ‑ and it will be coming soon to a keyboard near you.
The winning design was selected by the Indian cabinet yesterday from a shortlist of five following a national competition.
Measures are already afoot to have the rupee sign declared a computer standard, meaning it could join currencies such as the pound, dollar, euro and yen on keyboards within two years.
"The distinct symbol denotes the robustness of the Indian economy," India's information minister, Ambika Soni, said.
References to sums in rupees currently involve spelling out the word (as is the case in the Guardian's style guide) or giving it the abbreviation Rs or INRs to distinguish it from other Asian countries that use rupees or variations thereof.
"Once accepted, it will stand clear from the clutter of currencies that call themselves rupee or the rupiah," India's Telegraph reported.
The winning symbol was the work of Udaya Kumar, a lecture in design at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. Speaking to the Indian news website Rediff.com he said: "My design is based on the tricolour, with two lines at the top and white space in between. I wanted the symbol for the rupee to represent the Indian flag. It is a perfect blend of Indian and Roman letters: a capital 'R' and Devanagari 'ra' which represents rupiya, to appeal to international audiences and Indian audiences."
Michael Johnson, a director at the award-winning London-based design consultancy johnson banks, said the new symbol fitted with other currency signs but lacked imagination.
"I think it's a B or B plus. Most currency symbols follow an established route now ‑ E for euro, Y for yen, now R for rupee. You could argue that a dynamic emerging economy could have gone for something more unusual and got away with it ‑ I think in the end conservative voices prevailed."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/16/india-rupee-symbol

My Own Private India - Joel Stein 5th July 2010

I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.
My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime. (See pictures of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park.)
I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn't want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?
I called James W. Hughes, policy-school dean at Rutgers University, who explained that Lyndon Johnson's 1965 immigration law raised immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going over to Asia to kill them.
After the law passed, when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to AT&T, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.
Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians "dot heads." One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to "go home to India." In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose. (See TIME's special report "The Making of America: Thomas Edison.")
Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants, friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who didn't card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.
To figure out why it bothered me so much, I talked to a friend of mine from high school, Jun Choi, who just finished a term as mayor of Edison. Choi said that part of what I don't like about the new Edison is the reduction of wealth, which probably would have been worse without the arrival of so many Indians, many of whom, fittingly for a town called Edison, are inventors and engineers. And no place is immune to change. In the 11 years I lived in Manhattan's Chelsea district, that area transformed from a place with gangs and hookers to a place with gays and transvestite hookers to a place with artists and no hookers to a place with rich families and, I'm guessing, mistresses who live a lot like hookers. As Choi pointed out, I was a participant in at least one of those changes. We left it at that.
Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who couldn't fly home or Skype with relatives, Edison's first Indian generation didn't quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you'll see that, while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully American that if the Statue of Liberty could shed a tear, she would. Because of the amount of cologne they wear.Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html#ixzz0tf271g45

The House of Bilquis Bibi

The House of Bilquis Bibi
by Sudha Bhuchar adapted from Lorca's The House of Bernarda AlbaA Tamasha and Harrogate Theatre production
22 July - 14 August
Bilquis Bibi rules over her household with a rod of iron and a stifling love which cages her five daughters. Like butterflies forever cocooned, they long to shimmer and show their true colours. When her second husband dies suddenly, Bilquis agrees for eldest girl Abida to become engaged to her nephew Pappo. He brings with him the hope of love and the American dream.Bilquis turns a blind eye to the illicit nightly visits Pappo pays to his fiancée's balcony. But what will happen when she realises that more than one daughter is staying awake for him?Tamasha celebrates its 21st year with a passionate new interpretation of Federico García Lorca's masterpiece, The House of Bernarda Alba. Set in Pakistan's fertile Punjab region, it tells a personal yet subtly political story of small town lives with global ties.
Ila Arun plays the domineeting matriarch Bilquis, leading an all-female cast of nine. A singer and an actress, Ila recently starred in Bollywood blockbuster Jodhaa Akbar and hot TV show Fame Gurukul, and will soon appear as Mrs Khan No.1 in West is West, BBC Films' forthcoming sequel to East is East.

Directed by Kristine Landon-SmithDesigned by Sue MayesLighting design by Natasha ChiversSound design by Mike Furness
22 July - 14 August Hampstead Theatre Eton avenue, Swiss Cottage, London NW3 £10 tickets for under 26s020 7722 9301 Book online >