Apple Overtakes Microsoft As Most Valuable Technology Company

Apple, the creator of iPods, iPhones and iPads, has surpassed the software giant Microsoft on Wednesday and become the most valuable technology company of the world.

According to a New York Times report, in intraday trading in the afternoon session, Apple scrip gained 1.8 per cent, which offered the company a value of $227.1 billion.

On the other hand, shares of Microsoft lost around one per cent, giving the company a market capitalization of 226.3 billion dollars.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in the history of business, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier.

However, the speedily growing value attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift. It seems that consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology. 

Credit:www.topnews.in

Maoists Hit again on Civilians, 150 Dead, 200 Injured

At least twenty passengers were killed and 150 injured when suspected Maoists blasted rail tracks in West Midnapore district early today derailing 13 coaches of a Mumbai-bound express train, five of which were hit by a speeding goods train. 

Twenty of the bodies were extricated from the mangled coaches of the Howrah-Kurla Lokmanya Tilak Gyaneshwari Super Deluxe Express after the 13 coaches derailed with five toppling over an adjacent track, Additional Superintendent of Police, Jhargram, Mukesh Kumar said. 

In New Delhi, Union Home Secretary G K Pillai told PTI that 65 passengers were killed and 200 injured and the toll might go up. 

"We suspect Maoist hand behind the blast," Vivek Sahai, Member (Traffic), Railway Board, said. 

The blast occurred at 1:30 am when the train was running between Khemasoli and Sardiya stations, about 135 km from here, South Eastern Railway officials said. 

SER PRO Soumitra Majumdar said that the express train had in all 24 coaches. After the explosion, 13 including 10 sleeper coaches, derailed of which five were hit by the goods train coming on the opposite track. 

An unreserved coach, the pantry car and luggage van also derailed, he said. 

Railway officials used gas cutter to extricate trapped passengers and bodies from the mangled remains of the affected coaches. Passengers belongings lay strewn scattered on the tracks. 

Angry passengers said the first signs of relief came only around 5 am, three-and-a-half hours after the incident. 

Nine of the coaches which were undamaged took the injured and the other passengers to Kharagpur where they were admitted to hospital. 

Sahai said that railway had were in touch with the Indian air force to airlift passengers who were seriously injured. 

Anti-Maoist forces were at the spot and assisting the police and rescue personnel in extricating the bodies from four badly damaged sleeper coaches S-5, S-6, S-7 and S-8. 

Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee reached the spot. She announced Rs 5 lakh for the next of kin of each of the dead and Rs 1 lakh for the injured. 

Senior railway officials including Railway Board Chairman S S Khurana and DG RPF rushed to the spot. 

A relief train left Kharagpur with a team of 12 doctors and 20 paramedics as also two doctors from the Kalaikunda airbase, the officials said. 

Helplines have been set up at Kharagpur -- (0322) 255751 and 255735, Howrah - (033) 26382217, besides a toll free number 10722. 

Helplines have also been set up at Tatanagar (0657) 2290324, 2290074, 2290382, at Rourkela (0661) 2511155, Chakradharpur (06587) 238072 and Jharsuguda (06445)

Credit: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com 

Image Credit: http://ndtv.com

18 Months Jail after 20 Years Fight

 A sessions court here on Tuesday enhanced the sentence of former Haryana DGP SPS Rathore from six months to one-and-a-half years prison term for molesting 14-year-old Ruchika Girhotra 20 years back, following which the disgraced top policeman was arrested by the CBI.

Pronouncing the verdict in a packed court room, Additional District and Sessions Judge Gurbir Singh dismissed the appeal filed by the 68-year-old Rathore challenging the six months jail term awarded earlier.

The court directed that Rathore be taken to the local Burial Jail immediately following the dismissal of his appeal and enhancement of the sentence after which he was taken into custody by the CBI.

After the sentencing, Rathore looked grim and his smirk missing but put up a brave face telling reporters, "I will keep smiling".

Welcoming the verdict, Ruchika's father SC Girhotra said, "We are satisfied (with the court's verdict) as justice has been delivered."

However, Girhotra said the battle against Rathore would continue till abetment to suicide charge against him is proved. "We will continue to fight till he is charged under section 306 of IPC," he said.

Reacting to the verdict Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily said laws related to molestation cases need to be toughened.

"It is a lesson to those who are in high places that they can't get away. The present law needs to be toughened and new law will speed up cases and give tough punishment. I reassure everyone that justice will be done to all," said Moily.

Union Women and Child develpment Minister Krishna Tirath underlined the need for fast track courts to expedite trials in crimes against women.

"We need fast track court to expedite trials on crimes against women. A panel has already been set up by Home Ministry," said Tirath.

Rathore was sentenced to six months' rigorous imprisonment on December 21 last year by CBI Judge J S Sidhu for molesting Ruchika in Panchkula on August 12, 1990. Three years after the incident, Ruchika committed suicide by consuming poison.

The quantum of sentence had sparked an outrage in the country.

Rathore had sought setting aside the trial court verdict against him while Ruchika's family and the CBI had pleaded for enhancement of punishment to the maximum of two years provided in the law.

The court directed the jail superintendent to provide proper medical care to Rathore, if required, following an application by his lawyer-wife Abha that he was a heart patient and required care.

The court allowed Rathore's plea for getting himself examined at the cardiac care department of the Post Graduate & Medical Education.

Air India Aircraft Overshoots Runway, 159 Feared Dead

An Air India flight from Dubai carrying 166 people crashed into a heavily wooded valley moments after landing at an airport in southern India on Saturday morning, killing almost everyone on board.

Firefighters performed rescue operations as people crowd around an Air India plane that crashed in Mangalore on Saturday.

Indian firefighters carried a child, reportedly a survivor, out of the debris of an Air India plane that crashed in Mangalore on Saturday.
The plane overshot the hilltop runway where it was landing in one of India’s trickiest airports, in the city of Mangalore, which sits in the Western Ghats, or hills, on India’s southwestern coast.
Aviation officials said that the pilot of the Boeing 737 missed the landing threshold, a critical portion of the runway at airports where runways are shorter because of hilly terrain, by as much as 2,000 feet. The plane veered off the runway and struck a concrete navigational aid called a localizer, according to Praful Patel, India’s aviation minister.


“The wing fell of and the aircraft plunged into the valley,” Mr. Patel told reporters at a news conference.
Seven people survived the crash, according to the financially troubled airline, which is owned and operated by the Indian government.
“As soon as we landed, the tire burst,” one of the survivors told a local television crew from his hospital bed. “Within three seconds there was a fire blast. The inside was filled with smoke.”
He said he escaped through a crack in the fuselage.

Aviation officials said that the weather was clear, with six kilometers of visibility, and no rain. The plane’s pilot had landed the same aircraft on the Mangalore runway 19 times before. And while the runway is shorter than others in major Indian airports, it was more than adequate for landing a Boeing 737, aviation safety experts said.
The flight is popular with migrants from southern India, millions of whom work as laborers in construction sites in the Persian Gulf.


Rescue workers scrambled over the smoldering crash site, looking for more survivors among the charred remains, but there was little hope of finding anyone else alive.
The crash, at an airport with a short runway built on a plateau and surrounded by cliffs, is likely to renew debate about safety standards in India’s rapidly expanding aviation sector. Some Indian aviation safety experts have expressed increasing concern in the last couple of years about the country’s airlines, airports and regulations. Last year, there were three near-miss collisions between planes at the airport in Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital.
Air India, in particular, has been in the news for a number of embarrassing incidents, including a midair scuffle between pilots and flight attendants during which the plane was reportedly unmanned for a few minutes. In September, an Air India flight to Toronto was delayed 11 hours while staff searched for rats that had climbed aboard the plane.

As investigators rushed to the smoldering wreckage, experts said the unusual configuration of the runway made landing there complicated.
Kapil Kaul, the chief executive of India and the Middle East at the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, a research group, said pilot error was a likely cause. The pilot had 7,500 hours of flying experience, 3,500 of which were on this type of plane, Mr. Kaul said. But he may have missed the landing threshold, which is the very first part of a runway usable for landing, he said. That kind of error doesn’t always result in a crash, but did at the Mangalore Airport because it is on a plateau.
The plane, a Boeing 737-800, was relatively new, having made its first flight in December 2007, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
The 737-800 has been involved in five fatal accidents since entering service in 1998. The most recent was in January, an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Addis Ababa that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea in stormy weather shortly after takeoff from Beirut, killing 90 people. The cause of that accident remains under investigation.


In February 2009, nine people died when a Boeing 737-800 operated by Turkish Airlines crashed on approach near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Dutch investigators identified a faulty altimeter, which caused the plane to slow down too abruptly and stall at an altitude of around 2,000 feet.
Sanat Kaul, a former aviation ministry official and a former member of Air India’s board of directors, said the runway at Mangalore airport sits on a plateau and was extended to 8,000 feet, from 5,500 feet in 2006 to better accommodate bigger planes like the 737.
“Mangalore is a difficult field because it is on a plateau,” he said. “From all accounts the visibility was all right. One can’t make any conclusions. The runway was extended to 8,000 feet in 2006. That is all right for landing” a 737.
The airline said 160 passengers were on board, four of them infants, along with six crewmembers.
Air India, which is owned and run by the Indian government, has been struggling since a 2007 merger with another state carrier, and lost $1.2 billion in the last fiscal year. Competition from new private airlines like Kingfisher and Jet Airways is luring away customers, and the company is focusing on cutting costs by trimming staff and routes.


Many safety consultants blame the government for weak policies and spotty enforcement.
“Aviation safety is a potent subject in America while it is an impotent one in India,” A. Ranganathan, a former pilot and safety consultant, wrote in The Hindu newspaper late last year. “We are impotent because we have an ineffective hierarchy — ministry, legislators and regulator — controlling aviation.”
If most of the passengers have been killed, as is feared, this would be the worst airline disaster in India since 1996, when an Air Kazakhstan flight collided with a Saudi Arabia Airlines flight in midair above Delhi airport, killing 312 people.
The last major airline accident in India was in 2000, when an Alliance Air Boeing 737 plane crashed into a neighborhood while trying to land at an airport in Patna, killing about 60 people.


Credit: NY Times

Announcing Google TV: TV meets web. Web meets TV.

 Google is ready to introduce Google TV. Sounding amazing, check it out what Google wrote in their blog.


" If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.

So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience? Imagine turning on the TV and getting all the channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day — including your favorite video, music and photo sites. We’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that.

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.

Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do. In our announcement today at Google I/O, we challenged web developers to start coming up with the next great web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV today. Soon after launch, we’ll release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV so that developers can build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market. We've already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies — like Jinni.com and Rovi — at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology. Jinni.com is a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content available to the user. Rovi is one of the world's leading guide applications. We’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways developers will use this new platform.

We’re working together with Sony and Logitech to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available atBest Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.

This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We're excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too."

Sachin on Twitter and his Crusade Against Cancer

Twitter is now the largest micro-blogging website with a huge number of daily unique visitors. Many biggies have account in this site. As per the Indian celebrities they use this platform to talk against each other. We already saw  that happened between Lalit Modi & Sashi Tharoor. That was a bad thing. They are using this platform for their own vested interest. 





Little Master the great Sachin Tendulkar joined twitter in a little late. But he has won the fans heart. He is not using this platform for his own interest like Indian "Great" politicians. He has done a really good job for mankind.

http://twitter.com/sachin_rt
http://twitter.com/Sachins_Crusade




Some of his tweets on this matter:


"I m involved with 'Sachin's crusade against cancer', helping Dr Jagannath raise funds for children with cancer. Hope we get a good response"


"Tryin 2 raise money for a corpus,so kids with cancer who can't afford treatment can b helped by giving them medicines,paying for surgery etc"


"Thanks for great response. Donate for children with cancer & help us in fund raising. http://bit.ly/sachins_crusade"


"Join hands with me to give a new lease of life and hope to children afflicted from cancer. http://bit.ly/sachins_crusade"


"Join hands with me to give a new lease of life & hope to children afflicted from cancer.http://bit.ly/sachins_crusadeThnk u for ur support"


"Every rupee counts.Thanx a lot to every donor for all your support.I really appreciate it.http://bit.ly/sachins_crusade"








On his own word: 

"Anjali and I are committed to help children suffering with cancer in their treatment. We have joined hands with Dr. Jagannath for a fund raising effort to create a corpus for ‘Sachin’s Crusade against Cancer in Children’. 
We need your support for this noble cause. We invite you to an exclusive charity dinner on 27th May at Mumbai and have an opportunity to meet us personally. "

Call it an outpouring of faith or a measure of star-struck fans. But a single Tweet from Indian willow star Sachin Tendulkar could actually change the lives of many cancer-afflicted children. Twitter fans of the cricketer from across the country and the world — from Malad to Manhattan and from Fort to Florida — reached out to help children after he tweeted on Thursday. 

In less than 24 hours since the cricketer tweeted on the social networking site for support, the kitty of the Sachin's Crusade Against Cancer in Children showed almost Rs 67 lakh. Several corporate houses and individuals ha signed up to dine with the Tendulkars on May 27 even as around a hundred individuals had electronically sent in sums ranging from Rs 100 to Rs 5,000 for the cause. "It is all about changing goodwill into support for a good cause," says Dr P Jagannath, the cancer surgeon whose website indiacancer.org has roped in Tendulkar for the charity drive. 

The campaign's aim is to raise Rs 1 crore as the initial corpus. This would help the group raise Rs 10 lakh each year to help treatment of about 20 cancer-afflicted children. Cancer care is extremely expensive as it involves recurring costs for medicines, tests and surgery. Costs for some childhood cancers run into lakhs. "This campaign seeks to raise funds for children afflicted by cancer anywhere in India and under treatment in any good hospital," says the doctor. 
In Mumbai in particular, it is a well-known fact that charity helps parents\patients get treatment. Be it public hospitals such as KEM, Sion or Nair Hospitals or private trust hospitals such as Hinduja, Jaslok or Lilavati, donations into the poor box funds help many pateints from humble backgrounds. Temple trusts and community funding are other known funding agencies. 

Tweeting about his new drive on Thursday afternoon, Tendulkar exhorted his 2.85 lakh followers in Twitter-dom to "Join hands with me to give a new lease of life and hope to children afflicted from cancer". Fans can either chip in sums ranging rom Rs 2,000 to Rs 25,000 for the cause and get personally signed mementoes or meet the star to make higher contributions. On May 27, Tendulkar is hosting an exclusive charity dinner in the city for the cause. 

Dinner for one would mean shelling out Rs 50,000 while a family outing with the Tendulkars would work out to Rs 1 lakh.

New Twist in Rizwanur Rahman Case Before Municipal Vote

The death of computer graphics teacher Rizwanur Rahman, which rocked West Bengal in 2007, took a new turn on Tuesday with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) being directed to conduct fresh investigations treating it as a murder case under Section 302.

A Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court said on Tuesday that the CBI should treat the complaint by Rukbanur Rahman, brother of Rizwanur, as a first information report (FIR) and proceed with its investigation and submit a report within four months. The earlier Single Bench order had asked the Central agency to investigate the cause of death.

Rizwanur, who was married to Priyanka Todi, daughter of Ashok Todi, promoter of a city-based hosiery business, was found dead on a railway track, a month after the marriage.

The family led by Mr. Rukbanur cried foul and filed complaints that Rizwanur was hounded by the Todi family as well as senior officials of the State police for marrying Ms. Priyanka. Rizwanur's mother Kishwar Jahan named the then City Police Commissioner as well as two District Commissioners as having a key role in the harassment which, she said, ended in the death of her son.

Following a huge furore over the death, all the three key police officers were transferred out. The matter reached the courts and a CBI investigation was ordered in October 2007.

Hailing the court direction, Mr. Rukbanur said: “We are satisfied that our stand has been vindicated — we had said in our FIR that it should be treated as murder.”