Eideard

An Indian government ‘peon’, on £50 a month, has been arrested on suspicion of corruption after police found he was a millionaire with a property empire and had a home laden with gold and jewels.

To the outside world, Narendra Deshmukh was a lowly ‘peon’ or local government messenger boy. For more than 30 years he was posted outside the office doors of more senior officials in Ujjain, Central India, where his job was to run errands and bring in the business cards of visiting callers.

Detectives said in 31 years of working for the Ujjain Municipal Corporation, where he had started on a salary of less than £2 a month, he had earned a total of just under £19,000.

They believe only corruption can explain the fortune they uncovered in their dawn raid this week: evidence of properties worth around £500,000, a fleet of cars and motorbikes, including an SUV, a Chevrolet Avio, a truck, two motorbikes and a scooter.

They discovered a commercial property empire, including a five hectare chicken farm, butcher’s shop, and a £200,000 chicken processing business, deposit receipts for £30,000, thousands of pounds worth of consumer electronics, jewellery worth £3,000 and twenty bank accounts they have yet to open…

Detectives now believe that while he was officially working as a peon, he had in fact been given executive duties by senior officials they suspect were involved in a wider corruption scandal.

Corruption is endemic in Indian government and it is common for even low level employees to share in the spoils from bribes paid for licences, permissions and ‘no objection certificates.’ What has surprised detectives however is the size of fortune Mr Deshmukh acquired from such a lowly position…

“He was in a position in the department with no responsibility, yet he was disbursing power and acting as an executive. We have seized many official tender processing documents during the raid.

“Without the help of many officials in the department, it would not have been possible for him to amass the sum. We have seized more than 15 fixed deposit certificates in the name of the Commissioner of Ujjain municipality, which is being probed separately,” Police Superintendent Arun Misra added.

Not an unusual tale in many bureaucracies. What stands out is the size of the wealth he accumulated. Some of this may have grown from what he acquired over time – but, no investment accounts were found. Just lots of goodies.

Mordechai Nagari, one of the signatories of the letter

A letter signed by 50 state-appointed rabbis telling Jews not to rent or sell property to non-Jews prompted widespread condemnation Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and human rights groups. The letter warned that those who defied the religious ruling should be “ostracized.”

“In answer to many questions, we reply that it is prohibited by the Torah to sell a house or field in Israel to a gentile,” the letter reads.

The letter is to be published in religious newspapers and distributed in synagogues across the country later this week, according to the Israeli news website Ynet.

It contends that “those who sell or rent out in an area which Jews live cause great damage to his neighbors. … For their way of life is different to Jews.

A spokeswoman for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel expressed…harsh words to CNN over the letter, saying the group is horrified by the level of racism expressed.

“We are particularly troubled by the fact that most of the people who signed the letter are civil servants who work for the state as rabbis,” spokeswoman Ronit Sela said. “And we think that as civil servants they have an obligation to be servants of the entire population of Israel, which includes Arabs who live in the city.”

Nearly 1.5 million Arab residents live inside Israel, making up 23% of the population.

And, many of those Arabs are denied the right to vote in this “democratic” state.

A three-storey building in China could possibly be the world’s thinnest. At one end it measures only 0.4 metres wide, while it is three metres wide at the other.

The building in Haikou, Hainan Island was built three years ago. The government appropriated most of the land the property is built on from its owner, leaving him with only 20 square metres. The owner then built the skinny building on his remaining land as a way of protesting.

Local residents are now worried that the thin building may be blown over as Hainan Island is famous for its frequent typhoons.

Har! I hope he has it insured.

When the Vatican announced last week that it would welcome groups of traditionalist Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church, leaders of one Episcopal parish celebrated as if a ship had arrived to rescue them from a drifting ice floe.

“We’d been praying for this daily for two years,” said Bishop David L. Moyer, who leads the Church of the Good Shepherd, a parish in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia that is battling to keep its historic property. “When I heard the news I was speechless, then the joy came and the tears.”

This parish could be one of the first in the United States to convert en masse after the Vatican completes plans for a new structure to allow Anglicans to become Catholic while retaining many of their spiritual traditions, like the Book of Common Prayer and married priests.

They will share the ideology they have in common: misogyny, homophobia, fear of science and reality, no divorce, oppose birth control, choice…

The arrangement is tailor-made for an “Anglo-Catholic” parish like this one, which has strenuously opposed the Episcopal Church over decisions like allowing women and gay people to become priests and bishops. Mass here is celebrated in the “high church” style reminiscent of traditional Catholic churches, with incense, elaborate vestments and a choir that may sing in Latin…

The Church of the Good Shepherd has long been at loggerheads with the Episcopal Church, the American branch in the global Anglican Communion. This year, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania sued to take over the church’s building, a magnificent stone replica of a 14th-century English country parish that was built in 1894. The church’s property is estimated by its accounting warden to be worth $7 million…

Bishop Moyer acknowledged that some of his parish’s 400 members would choose to leave rather than become Catholic. Some are former Catholics who may not want to go back. Others feel loyalty to the Episcopal Church, despite the conflict…

Bishop Moyer lives in a rectory on the church’s property. He said he hopes to resolve the church’s “legal quagmire” over the building before they decide to jump to the Catholic Church.

But, then, if you decide to waste a certain portion of your life studying Catholic history, you’ll learn priests used to be married – as were Popes – and the core of the conflicts that split apart the Catholic Church was property. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

That’s the NeoPlan StarLiner on the left – the A9 Coach copy on the right

The First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing has ordered three Chinese automakers to pay $2.92 million compensation and $169,000 in legal costs to Germany auto company Neoplan which had successfully sued them for patent infringement.

The court said the A9 coach produced by Zhongwei Passenger Bus Company and Zhongda Industrial Group China has essentially the same design as the Neoplan Starliner. The companies have been ordered to stop producing the A9 and Beijing Zhongtong Xinghua Auto Sales Company has been ordered to halt sales of the vehicles.

The Neoplan Starliner was developed in 2005 by well known German coachmaker Neoplan Bus GmbH and was covered by patents. The company discovered in 2006 that the A9 coach produced by the Zhongwei Passenger Bus Company was almost identical with the Starliner…

Neoplan Starliner coaches are produced both in Germany and in southeast China’s Zhejiang Province by the Youngman Coach Company. The selling price in China is around $292,000. Youngman said that the appearance of the A9 coach on the market had not affected sales of the Starliner.

Step by step, the longest march, shall be won. Singly none.

Brings new meaning to the term “church services.”

That’s because parts of your brain are actually asleep, according to a new theoretical paper by sleep scientists at Washington State University.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the researchers say, there’s no control center in your brain that dictates when it’s time for you to drift off to dreamland. Instead, sleep creeps up on you as independent groups of brain cells become fatigued and switch into a sleep state even while you are still (mostly) awake. Eventually, a threshold number of groups switch and you doze off.

Lead author James Krueger said the view of sleep as an “emergent property” explains familiar experiences that the top-down model doesn’t, such as sleepwalking, in which a person is able to navigate around objects while being unconscious, and sleep inertia, the sluggishness we feel upon waking up in the morning.

“If you explain it in terms of bits and pieces of the brain, instead of a top-down phenomenon, all of a sudden you can make sense of these things,” said Krueger. “The old paradigm doesn’t even address these things.”

Interesting stuff. Let’s face it – sleep plays such an important role in our lives. Screwed-up sleep is one more hindrance to get past for a life providing rewards up to your potential.

U.S. senators have floated a bill boosting copyright and trademark protection, legislation that would allow the attorney general to prosecute civil cases of infringement and one that allows for the forfeiture of hardware used to infringe.

OK. That’s the nice guy, jive newspaper description of crap legislation.

Most important, the measure, like the House version, creates an executive-level Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, which would require Senate confirmation. The executive and its office would be charged with creating a nationwide plan to combat piracy and “report directly to the president and Congress regarding domestic international intellectual property enforcement programs.”

The bill encourages federal-state anti-piracy task forces, the training of other countries about IP enforcement and, among other things, institutes an FBI piracy unit…

Someone send me a penny postcard when our elected hacks begin to care as much for individual rights, Fair Use, the opportunity for ordinary folks to use recorded material they bought – as they see fit. The owners of intellectual property – which rarely includes the creative artists – don’t have any natural right to be commercial barons.