SYDNEY: The police chief of Australia's Victoria state on Tuesday admitted that some of the attacks on Indian students in this country are "racially motivated" - as maintained by the victims of a series of crimes.
The southeastern state' chief commissioner of police Simon Overland told the media in Victoria's capital Melbourne that some of the robbery attacks are "racially motivated" and others are "opportunistic".
"Whatever the motivation, they (the attacks) are not okay. violence is not okay, being robbed is not okay," he said.
He also said that there is no place for racism in the community, according to the transcript of Overland's informal meet and greet with 50 members of Melbourne's multilingual media.
In the past one month, there have been at least 11 attacks on Indian students, leading to an outrage in India. Representatives of about 90,000 Indians studying here took out a protest march in Sydney on Sunday.
Asked if police used excessive force in breaking up a protest by Indian students in Melbourne last weekend, Overland said he watched from the police operations centre and believed that what he saw was entirely appropriate.
He said there was some force used after the students were given the opportunity for the last time to leave the traffic intersection and they refused to do so. He said students were moved on because the intersection needed to be cleared for peak-hour traffic.
Asked why students were asked to "move on", Overland said they had made their point.
Overland said police have been working on the issue of violence for 18 months with Indian students and universities, and are aware that this is a problem.
Police in Victoria are taking various initiatives to strengthen ties with culturally diverse communities, including Indians, he said.
"There is a shared responsibility between police and the media to provide important messages to the public and to have an open dialogue to understand where the other is coming from, and finding suitable solutions to problems," Overland said.
Earlier, Overland wrote in the Herald Sun: "Some of these crimes are racially motivated; however I also believe that many of the robberies and other crimes of violence are simply opportunistic."
He also urged the Indian community to continue to work with police to find an effective and sustainable solution to the series of crimes.
According to Victoria police officials, in 2007-08, there were 36,765 victims of crimes such as robberies and assaults in the state, of which 24,260 were Caucasian victims and 1,447 victims were people of Indian origin.
Police say 30% of assaults in Melbourne's western suburbs are against Indians, and it is a disproportionate figure in a city of nearly four million people.
IAF plane with 12 people goes missing
SHILLONG: A transport plane of Indian Air Force carrying six IAF personnel went missing on Tuesday over the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh and is feared to have crashed, an IAF spokesman said here.
The AN-32 plane had flown from Dibrugarh in Assam to Mechuka in Arunachal from where it took off again with the civilians for Jorhat at around 2 pm, after which the aircraft went missing, said IAF spokesman Wing Commander P Sahu.
He said the plane was feared to have crashed. The six civilians were being ferried as part of the IAF plane's regular sortie.
An aerial search operation over the dense forests and mountains of Arunachal Pradesh bordering Bhutan where the plane might have crashed was carried out but neither the wreckage nor bodies could be located, Sahu said.
The search would resume on Wednesday and army and paramilitary personnel in the area have been put on alert.
Sheetal Mafatlal gets bail in custom duty evasion case
Mumbai:Businesswoman and socialite Sheetal Mafatlal was released from jail after getting bail on certain conditions by a Mumbai court in a case of alleged evasion of duty on jewellery worth Rs 53 lakhs carried by her on return from London.
A magistrate released her on bail on Rs five lakh in cash or surety and asked her to deposit Rs 18 lakhs with the Air Intelligence Unit of Customs.
Sheetal was also asked to report to the Customs twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays and told not to leave the country without the permission of the court. Sheetal was detained at the Mumbai airport on Sunday after she was found to be carrying 61 items of assorted jewellery, two wrist watches and a ladies handbag valued by Customs to the tune of Rs 53.67 lakh.
However, Sheetal contended that the value of jewellery carried by her was Rs 20,000 and these items were gifted to her by her parents and in-laws. She denied the Customs allegation that they were purchased abroad.
Sheetal's husband, Atulya Mafatlal, scion of Mafatlal Industries, said he was happy that his wife has got bail but was miffed at the treatment meted out to her by the authorities.
"Women need to be treated with respect... They should not be harassed," he said outside the court after Sheetal was granted bail.
"I am very happy over the development and will now go to jail to get her released. My first priority is to bring my wife home and I am happy that Sheetal will be back soon," he told reporters.
More Bodies Pulled From Air France Debris
RECIFE, Brazil, June 9, 2009:Four more bodies from Air France Flight 447 were recovered Tuesday, and helicopters began ferrying other remains to shore. Air France rushed to replace instruments suspected of feeding false information to the doomed jet's computers, while Brazil announced it was doing the same on the president's plane.
The four bodies found Tuesday morning raises the total recovered to 28, meaning 200 others have yet to be found. Soldiers and medical personnel in surgical gowns carried off the remains in body bags at the island of Fernando de Noronha. They will be taken by plane to the coastal city of Recife, where experts will try to identify them using DNA and photos.
Identifying the bodies - knowing just where they were seated in the plane and studying their injuries - could provide clues to causes of the May 31 disaster, according to Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board.
With the plane's data recorders still apparently deep in the ocean, investigators have been focusing on the possibility that external speed monitors - called Pitot tubes - iced over and gave dangerously false readings to the plane's computers in a thunderstorm.
The L-shaped metal Pitot tubes jut from the wing or fuselage of a plane, and are heated to prevent icing. The pressure of air entering the tubes lets sensors measure the speed and angle of flight. A malfunctioning Pitot tube could mislead computer controlling the plane to accelerate or decelerate in a potentially dangerous fashion.
Air France said it began replacing the Pitot tubes on the Airbus A330 model on April 27 after an improved version became available, and said it will finish the work in the "coming weeks."
The monitors had not yet been replaced on the plane that crashed while on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Brazil's air force, meanwhile, said that was replacing the Pitot tubes on an Airbus A319 used by President Luiz InDacio Lula da Silva because of a recommendation of the jet's manufacturer more than a month before the Air France crash. It did not say when the change was made.
All Air France jets taking off Tuesday will be equipped with at least two of the new Pitot sensors, Eric Derivry, a spokesman for the SNPL union, the main union for Air France pilots, told France-Info radio.
A memo sent to Air France pilots by the smaller Alter union Monday and obtained by The Associated Press urges them to refuse to fly unless at least two of the three Pitot sensors on each planes have been replaced, citing a "strong presumption" among its pilot members that a Pitot problem precipitated the crash.
The memo says the airline should have grounded all A330 and A340 jets pending the replacement, and warns of a "real risk of loss of control" due to Pitot problems.
Two companies manufacture the Pitot monitors for the A330 planes - France's Thales Group and Charlotte, North Carolina-based Goodrich Corp. Air France uses those made by Thales while Qantas uses those by Goodrich for its 28 A330 planes, said David Epstein, a Qantas executive.
Some airline industry officials rallied to defend the Airbus planes. At an industry conference in Kuala Lumpur, Emirates Airlines President Tim Clark said the Dubai-based company's 29 A330-200 planes have been flying since 1998 "and there is absolutely no reason why there should be any question over this plane. It is one of the best flying today."
Brazil's air force said search crews had recovered the vertical stabilizer from the tail section of Flight 447 - which also could provide key clues as to why the airliner went down in the Atlantic and where best to search for the black boxes.
The tail section includes the vertical stabilizer - which keeps the plane's nose from swinging back and forth - and the rudder, which controls the side-to-side motion. The data and voice recorders are also located in the fuselage near the tail.
From images of the recovered tail section, the damage looks like a lateral fracture, said William Waldock, who teaches air crash investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.
"That would reinforce the idea that the plane broke up in flight," Waldock said. "If it hits intact, everything shatters in tiny pieces."
Goelz said the faulty airspeed readings and the fact the vertical stabilizer was sheared from the jet could be related.
The Airbus A330-200 has a "rudder limiter" which constricts how much the rudder can move at high speeds. If it were to move too far while traveling fast, it could shear off and take the vertical stabilizer with it.
"If you had a wrong speed being fed to the computer by the Pitot tube, it might allow the rudder to over travel," Goelz said.
Asked if the rudder or stabilizer being sheared off could have brought the jet down, Goelz said: "Absolutely. You need a rudder. And you need the (rudder) limiter on there to make sure the rudder doesn't get torn off or cause havoc with the plane's aerodynamics."
With the discovery of debris and bodies about 45 miles from where the jet was last heard from, searchers are narrowing their hunt for the cockpit voice and flight data recorders. They must move quickly - acoustic beacons or "pingers" on the black boxes begin to fade 30 days after crashes.
The U.S. Navy is helping out, providing devices capable of picking up the pingers to a depth of 20,000 feet that will be slowly towed in a grid pattern across the search area. The French nuclear attack submarine Emeraude, arriving later this week, also will try to find the acoustic pings, military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said.
France, Brazil and the Pentagon have said there are no signs that terrorism was involved in the crash.
Indian Business News |Business News
German retail giant goes bust, 43,000 jobs at risk
Berlin:German retail and tourism giant Arcandor filed for bankruptcy today, putting around 43,000 jobs at risk after Berlin dismissed the company's request for emergency state aid.
"Arcandor AG today filed with the Essen District Court to open insolvency proceedings," the group said in a statement.
"This will affect a total of around 43,000 employees of the Arcandor group in Germany. Employee salaries are secure for the months of June, July and August," the statement said.
The group, which employs 70,000 people in Europe, two-thirds of whom work in Germany, said its department store chain Karstadt, as well as mail-order company Quelle, would also be affected by the insolvency.
Travel agency Thomas Cook, in which Arcandor holds a 52-percent stake, "will remain unaffected by the insolvency proceedings," the statement added.
Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters that Arcandor now had a chance to merge with another retail firm and named Metro, Germany's largest retailer, as a possible partner.
Metro, which employs 300,000 people in 32 countries across Europe, Asia and Africa quickly expressed an interest in taking over its stricken rival.
"We remain, as before, committed to our proposal of taking over some 60 Karstadt sites and thereby saving the majority of jobs," Metro said in a statement.
"The door for talks and negotiations is open," it added.
Satyam has Rs 373 crore bank balance
MUMBAI: India's fraud-hit IT giant Satyam Computer Services on Tuesday said it had a bank balance of Rs.373 crore (about $75 million) at the end of March 2009, but at the same time, it also had a Rs.460-crore loan outstanding.
At the beginning of the year, the IT giant's outstanding loan stood at Rs.200 crore. The company later repaid Rs.100 crore before raising Rs.369 crore in fresh loans in the first quarter, Satyam said in a regulatory statement.
"The company's total bank balances as on March 31, 2009, were Rs.373 crore. Out of the sanctioned loan limit, as on March 31, 2009, the company had availed loans worth Rs.469 crore ($93.8 million)," the filing said.
The company registered a profit after tax (PAT) of Rs.181 crore in the quarter ended Dec 31, 2008, the IT bellwether said.
Satyam had earlier furnished the details on a non-disclosure agreement to its bidders.
"Such information was provided to select bidders subject to the execution of a non-disclosure and non-solicitation agreement," the company said.
Satyam's export turnover during the quarter was Rs.2,194 crore, while domestic earnings were reported at Rs.100 crore.
During January, when the gross discrepancies in the balance sheet came into light, the IT exporter reported a minuscule PAT of Rs.5 crore.
In February, its profit soared to Rs.52 crore though revenues dropped to Rs.676 crore, the statement said.
This is the first publicly disclosed earnings estimates from Satyam since the disgraced former chairman Ramalinga Raju confessed inflating the company's balance sheet and assets by Rs.7,800 crore or more than $1.6 billion.
IBM, EDS, Infosys win A$1.2 bn deal
SYDNEY: International Business Machines Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co’s Electronic Data Systems and India’s Infosys Technologies Ltd won orders worth Australian $1.2 billion ($949 million) over five years from Australia's Telstra Corp.
IBM received a renewed five-year contract worth Australian $750 million to manage the infrastructure at Australia’s biggest phone company, Melbourne-based Telstra said in an e-mailed statement today.
EDS and Infosys won orders worth Australian $450 million over five years for so-called application development and maintenance services, Telstra said.
Telstra said the contracts will allow the phone company to boost efficiency by working with fewer technology-services vendors.
SBI to hire 13,000 staff during current fiscal
New Delhi:The country's largest lender, State Bank of India, plans to recruit 13,000 persons at various levels during the current fiscal.
"During 2008-09, the bank absorbed 33,703 new employees and this year we have plans to induct 13,000 into the SBI system," a top official of the bank.
The new recruits will be deployed across various businesses with objective to drive productivity, he said.
There is also need to groom leaders for the future at all levels, the official added.
It is to be noted the bank last fiscal recruited 20,000 clerks across the country.
SBI is currently in the process of recruiting officers, marketing and recovery (Rural), and technical officers (farm sector).
Both the jobs, though contractual in nature, will provide employment opportunity to about 481 persons.
According to an initial estimate public sector banks are set to hire 30,000 personnel during 2009-10.
"As per the preliminary estimates, public sector banks are expected to hire over 30,000 people during 2009-10," Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS) Director M Balachandran said.
Thus, SBI alone would hire close of 50 per cent of the total estimated number.
Indian Cricket News|Indian Sports News | T20 World cup News
Afridi sends Dutch spinning to defeat
LONDON: Shahid Afridi starred for Pakistan with the ball as the Test side ensured the end of the Netherlands's fairytale performance at the World Twenty20 at Lord's on Tuesday.
Leg-spinner Afridi took four wickets for just 11 runs in his four overs - the fourth best return in all Twenty20 internationals - as 2007 finalists Pakistan won by 82 runs to book their place in the second phase Super Eights.
The Dutch, shock four-wicket winners over England at Lord's in Friday's tournament opener and with a better run-rate at the start, needed to make 151 to get through and so deny Pakistan the minium 25-run margin of victory they required.
But Afridi, well supported by fellow spinner Saeed Ajmal (three for 20), sparked a collapse that saw the Dutch decline from 42 for one to 93 all out.
Victory saw Pakistan, beaten by 48 runs by England at the Oval on Sunday, join the hosts in the second phase after they had made 175 for five with wicket-keeper Kamran Akmal, who later made four stumpings, top-score with 41.
By contrast, no Dutch batsman made more than Alexei Kervezee's 21.
"Afridi was outstanding and we struggled on this wicket," said Dutch skipper Jeroen Smits.
"We talked about Afridi and that we had to play him straight, but we didn't do it.
"However, it's still been a privilege to be here even if we didn't make it to the Super Eights."
Pakistan captain Younus Khan was relieved that his team had avoided suffering the fate of Australia who lost both their matches and were eliminated.
"We were much better today and the partnerships were important," said Younus. "Our spinners bowled very well."
The Dutch chase started briskly with Darron Reekers striking fours off left-arm quicks Sohail Tanvir and Mohammad Aamir.
But Afridi struck with his first ball when he bowled former Sussex batsman Bas Zuiderent for 13.
That left the Dutch 42 for two in the eighth over.
It was the start of a collapse from which they never recovered.
Tom de Grooth, who made 49 against England, could not repeat his heroics this time and was bowled by Afridi, better known as a hard-hitting batsman, who took three wickets in the space of 10 balls.
Shoulder injury rules Sehwag out of T20 World Cup
Indian opening batsman Virender Sehwag will not feature in ICC Twenty20 World Cup here, as he has a shoulder injury that requires surgery, sources said. Sehwag skipped the opening match against Bangladesh including all the practice matches. Indian skipper Dhoni has had to gamble with Rohit Sharma as Gautam Gambhir''s opening partner. Sharma is now likely to open for India. Further details are awaited.
Real Madrid sign Kaka from AC Milan
MADRID: Real Madrid have signed Brazilian midfielder Kaka from AC Milan, the Primera Liga club said on their website on Tuesday.
The 27-year-old international has agreed to a six-year contract to become the first player to join Real since Florentino Perez returned to the presidency this month.
Reports said the transfer fee was around 68 million euros ($94.05 million) which would make it the second biggest ever after Zinedine Zidane joined Real from Juventus for around 73 million euros in 2001.
Kaka completed a routine medical earlier on Monday in Recife, where Brazil face Paraguay at home in a World Cup qualifier on Wednesday.
Kaka said he was leaving the Italians on good terms.
"Everything I've always done for Milan has been by mutual agreement, from the moment I arrived until my departure today," he said. "I'm leaving by the front door."
"I've won everything that I wanted as a player and this is a new motivation for me."
"I'm sure Real Madrid will build a competitive team which can start winning titles again."
The official unveiling in Madrid is likely to take place at the end of the month, after the Confederations Cup in South Africa.
"We are working on building a good team, an important team, and this has only just begun," Perez told radio station Onda Cero.
Milan thanked Kaka for his contribution.
"AC Milan thanks the man Kaka and the champion Kaka for his decisive contributions to so many victories obtained in the last six years," the Serie A club said in a statement.
"His loss on the field, though serious, can be filled. It will, however, be very difficult to fill the void left by Kaka the man."
Kaka has long been a target for Real Madrid since former president Ramon Calderon promised to sign him in his election campaign in 2006 but failed to deliver.
Calderon resigned in January paving the way for Perez to come back three years after he stood down, and he was returned unopposed to the post.
Perez has promised to deliver a "spectacular sporting project" built around the world's greatest players, and local media have spoken of a 300 million euro war chest which will be used to finance a second 'Galactico era' at the Bernabeu.
Having lured the likes of Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham to Real earlier in the decade, Perez's flagship first signing on his return was Kaka, a move seen as both a declaration of intent and a dig at his predecessor.
He has also spoken of interest in Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo, Bayern Munich's Franck Ribery, Liverpool's Xabi Alonso and Valencia duo David Villa and David Silva.
New coach Manuel Pellegrini is the man tasked with blending these talents into a team capable of challenging treble-winners Barcelona.
Kaka will not face much competition in midfield which was one of Real's weakest areas last season as they lacked flair players capable of opening up sides in big games.
His arrival will also cheer Real fans clamouring for a more entertaining brand of football, and who had often chanted "Where is Kaka?" at player presentations under Calderon over the last couple of years.
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