"India sets age limit for Krishna birthday pyramids" AP August 15, 2014
NEW DELHI — India’s top court said Thursday that children as young as 12 can climb atop towering human pyramids in a popular Hindu celebration that has seen deaths and injuries in past years.
Devotees celebrate the birthday of the child-god Krishna each August by forming a pyramid with the last climber, usually a child, clambering to the top to break the ‘‘dahi handi,’’ an earthen pot filled with curd. It honors Krishna’s effort to steal butter.
Hundreds of thousands of cheering people join the ceremony every year, but several children are killed, injured, or disabled in falls from as high as 40 feet.
A court in Mumbai last week set the country’s first age limit for participants at 18 after two young males, 14 and 19, died in falls. But opponents of the age limit brought the case to the Supreme Court.
The court put that ruling on hold Thursday and said children who’ve reached their 12th birthday can participate. It will give its final verdict after hearing arguments of the petitioners, rights activists, and the government.
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Just don't breathe to deeply, kids:
"Asbestos pushed in Asia as product for the poor" by Katy Daigle | Associated Press August 13, 2014
VAISHALI, India — The executives mingled over tea and cookies, and the chatter was upbeat. Their industry, they said at a conference in the Indian capital, saves lives and brings roofs, walls, and pipes to some of the world’s poorest people.
Their product? Asbestos. Outlawed in much of the developed world, it’s going strong in the developing one. In India alone, the world’s biggest asbestos importer, it’s a $2 billion industry providing 300,000 jobs.
The International Labor Organization, the World Health Organization, medical researchers, and more than 50 countries say the mineral should be banned; asbestos fibers lodge in the lungs and cause disease. The International Labor Organization estimates 100,000 people die from workplace exposure every year.
That will open up a few more positions then.
But the industry executives at the asbestos conference, held in New Delhi, said the risks are overblown. They described their business as a form of social welfare for impoverished Indians.
Who cares if it kills you or gives you cancers?
‘‘We’re here not only to run our businesses, but to also serve the nation,’’ said Abhaya Shankar, a director of India’s Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association.
Some poor Indians are trying to keep asbestos out of their communities, though. In the farming village of Vaishali, in the state of Bihar, residents were outraged by the construction of an asbestos factory. They had learned about the dangers of asbestos from a schoolboy’s textbooks, and worried asbestos fibers would blow into their tiny thatch homes. Their children, they said, could contract lung diseases most Indian doctors would never test for.
Stoo-pid farmers.
They petitioned for the factory to be halted. But in December 2012, its permit was renewed, inciting thousands to rally on a main road for 11 hours. Amid the chaos, a few dozen villagers demolished the partially built factory.
‘‘It was a moment of desperation,’’ a teacher said. ‘‘There was no other way for us to express our outrage.’’ The company later filed lawsuits, still pending, accusing several villagers of vandalism and theft.
Durable and heat-resistant, asbestos was long a favorite insulation material. But inhaling any form of asbestos can lead to deadly diseases 20 to 40 years later, including lung cancer, mesothelioma, and asbestosis, or scarring of the lungs.
At least you got a paycheck.
Dozens of countries, including Japan, Argentina, and all European Union nations, have banned asbestos. The United States severely curtailed its use.
The asbestos lobby says the mineral has been maligned by nations that used it irresponsibly. It says one of the six forms of asbestos is safe: chrysotile, or white asbestos, which accounts for more than 95 percent of asbestos used since 1900.
Medical experts reject this.
‘‘All types of asbestos fiber are causally implicated in the development of various diseases and premature death,’’ the Societies of Epidemiology said in a 2012 position statement.
Russia now provides most of the asbestos on the market.
Those damn bastards! First the Ukraine, now this!!
American businesses have paid out at least $1.3 billion in the largest collection of personal injury lawsuits in US legal history. Billions have been spent stripping asbestos from buildings in the West.
Damn Russians!
The Indian lobby’s website refers to 1998 WHO guidelines for controlled use of chrysotile, but skips updated WHO advice from 2007 suggesting all asbestos be banned. Its executive director, John Nicodemus, dismissed the WHO update as ‘‘scaremongering.’’
Many of the speakers are regulars at asbestos conferences in the developing world.
Toxicologist David Bernstein said that while chrysotile could cause disease if inhaled in large quantities or for prolonged periods, so could any tiny particle.
‘‘We have defense mechanisms. Our lungs are remarkable,’’ Bernstein said.
Cough.
Other studies indicate that chrysotile collects on the membrane lining the lungs, where the rare malignancy mesothelioma develops and chews through the chest wall.
A retired US assistant surgeon general, Dr. Richard Lemen, advocated a chrysotile ban in 1976. Bernstein’s presentation, he said, “is pretty slick, and when he puts it on animation mode, people think: Wow, he must know what he’s talking about.’’
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I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for any more India coverage.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
Sticking with the theme.
"Modi Promises Bank Accounts for All Families in India" by Ellen Barry | New York Times August 16, 2014
NEW DELHI — In a speech meant to set a national agenda for his new government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday announced plans to make bank accounts available to every Indian family, a complex goal that, if successful, could allow the government to eventually convert subsidies for food, fuel, and fertilizer into cash transfers.
Modi’s Independence Day speech came about two months after a landslide victory in parliamentary elections and amid daunting expectations that his Bharatiya Janata Party would return India to the path of economic growth and create jobs for the millions of young people who enter the labor market every year.
Modi, 63, departed from the formal style of his predecessors, speaking mostly without notes and describing himself as a newcomer to the capital, “untouchable to the elite class of Delhi.”
A former outreach worker for a right-wing Hindu organization, he used his Independence Day speech to entreat Indians to act in the interest of the nation, saying he had been struck by the degree of infighting and self-interest he had encountered within the federal government.
Wasn't he part of the problem when he was just a governor of a province?
“The time has come to think seriously about whether we have a national character or not,” he said. “Today, unfortunately, the atmosphere is that if you go to anybody for work, that person will immediately ask, ‘What is in this for me?’ When he learns that there is nothing for him, he will say, ‘Why should I?’ We have to break out of this cycle of ‘what is in this for me’ and ‘why should I.’ We need to shine our national character.”
When leadership does it I will be glad to.... wait a minute, I don't think that way to begin with. Just the crap political cla$$ here does. Speech looks like a variation of "Ask not," doesn't it?
With food inflation unabated since the election, Modi has been under pressure from supporters to flesh out his campaign promises with bold economic changes. The first budget suggested Modi’s government would tinker with, not dispose of, the economic policies it inherited, despite his relentless criticism during the campaign.
Aaaaaah! Politics the same all around the world, and so much for change in India.
Modi’s promise to provide the poor with bank accounts may address some of that impatience, pointing to a long-term goal of converting distribution systems to cash payments, which would greatly reduce corruption and increase consumer spending. Account holders would be provided with a debit card and an insurance policy of up to $1,600.
Skeptics question whether access to banking — currently, 40 percent of Indian households lack it — can help in the absence of good jobs and higher wages; many bank accounts that have been created for poor Indians in recent years have gone unused, said Sujan Hajra, chief economist at AnandRathi Financial Services.
Okay, the call centers went to India, we are told India is an economic example and rising powerhouse, and now we find out those jobs have gone somewhere else? WTF?
But expanding banking infrastructure has long been a central goal for Raghuram Rajan, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, who has said it could “break a link between poor public service, patronage, and corruption that is growing more worrisome.”
Aaaaaaah! The FEDERAL RESERVE of INDIA wants it!
I knew I didn't like this sounds-great article from my agenda-pushing piece of sh....
In a lecture earlier this week, Rajan described a gradual shift to cash benefits, noting that money could be delivered to the women of a family to prevent misspending on alcohol and other nonessentials.
But it is NOT CASH, it is going to be an electronic debit card that can be tracked!
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I'm always amazed at how the world's poor are such a corrupt cla$$ of fraudulent $hits. If they could only be $parkingly clean like the banker there looking out for them.
You know, if this world were only full of bankers we would have a paradi$e.
