Al-Qaida email threatens terror at Delhi HC, Taj

The Delhi High Court on Thursday said it received a threatening email from terrorist outfit al-Qaida a few days after the serial blasts in Uttar Pradesh district courts last month.
According to court sources, the email was forwarded to the Home Ministry following which the security in the High Court was beefed up.
Delhi Police, which has taken the threat seriously and intensified security, has launched an investigation to trace the culprits and check the authenticity of the email.
According to court sources, the Delhi High Court's security department received the email about 10 days ago.
Refusing to disclose the contents of the email, the sources said it had issued threats to the High Court, Parliament and the Taj Mahal in Agra.

Denying the receipt of any fresh threat mail, they said a meeting of the Delhi Police officers as well as court officials has been convened on Thursday.
Delhi Joint Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Karnal Singh and senior police officials reviewed security arrangements at both the courts.
Staff in the court complexes was asked to remain in uniform and wear identity cards. Directions were issued to allow nobody inside the premises without the necessary passes and a mandatory security check-up. Metal detectors were also put in place.
"We have taken unprecedented security measures and are fully prepared. Bomb disposal squads and dog squads have been put on high alert. Additional police personnel have been deployed around the Supreme Court and high court premises," a police official told IANS on the condition of anonymity.

Spice girls sizzle in London after 9 years

Still on their much-hyped world tour, the Spice Girls have made their UK comeback in London.
This was their first appearance as a group on their home turf, in nine years.
It was huge crowd that welcomed the pop stars, many of whom dressed up as the Spice Girls.
The all-girl group made it big in the late 1990s. The Spice Girls kicked off the reunion tour in Vancouver, Canada earlier this month.

Diwali in jail was saddest moment of my life: Dutt

Sanjay Dutt, in his first one-to-one interview after being released from Pune's Yerwada Jail has spoken out candidly about his experience in jail. Spending Diwali in jail, he says, was one of the saddest moments of his life.
“Diwali was a really sad moment of my life, that I couldn't be with the family and I was locked up and I could see crackers bursting. I prayed and I meditated. I thought of Dad and I thought of Mom,” Dutt recounted.
“Freedom is something everyone takes for granted. But it’s something which you can't buy, as much of money as you may have. So it’s great to be free,” he said.
On being in jail, he said it’s not a good place to be in, but if one looks at the positive side, that’s the only connection with God that is direct.
“When I first went there, you know you don’t feel hungry and they sat there and said 'You got to eat', and I said 'Is it because I am an actor?' They said, 'No, we do it with all the prisoners, everybody is the same here.' It really made me feel good,” he said.
“There is a good part and there is a bad part. The bad part is that you have to be locked up at a certain hour, so I mean you are locked up at 6 whether it is Diwali or Independence day - that time you are locked up at 3 in the afternoon till the next day. I mean I used to wonder 'It’s Independence Day, why have you locked us up, I'm an Indian you know’,” Dutt said.

Revealed: Why beer bellies make men bend over

Pregnant women may stand out a mile away with their characteristic backward-leaning stance, but that clumsy-looking position is a unique adaptation that evolved over millennia, anthropologists said on Wednesday.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for men with large beer bellies!
Pregnant pre-humans appeared to have stood the same way. And it may save women from even more back pain than they already have, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
The bodies of women do two things when they are pregnant -- they adjust their stance to move the center of gravity to accommodate the growing fetus, and the lower vertebrae have evolved a distinct shape to allow this shifting to take place without damaging the spine, Katherine Whitcome of Harvard University and colleagues found.
"It was one of these things like, 'Oh my god, no one's ever thought of this,' and it looks so obvious," Liza Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin, who helped supervise the work, said in a telephone interview.
Whitcome and Shapiro followed 19 women through their pregnancy, using digital cameras and motional analysis equipment to map the changes in stance and movement as the months passed.
"What women do when their pregnancy reaches about half of the expected mass ... they shift backwards," Shapiro said.
"If you didn't have any of those mechanisms, the only way to offset a load in front of you is to contract your back muscles. The more you have to use your muscles, the more discomfort you would have. It would be worse otherwise, and there would be more potential damage to the vertebrae."
Without this change in shape, the vertebrae could be subject to shearing forces, with one sliding over another, damaging the fluid-filled discs in between or pulling on ligaments and muscles.
"The shape of the vertebrae allows her to rotate the upper body," Shapiro said.
When she moved to Harvard, Whitcome continued the study and looked at the fossils of pre-humans known as australopithecines, as well as at the bone structure of our nearest living relatives, the chimpanzees.
"These differences are absent in the chimpanzee. So there is something unique about humans," Whitcome said. "We also see some evidence for these adaptations in early australopithecines."
Men do not have this adaptation, either, Shapiro said.
"We can only conclude that men can't resist the forces of their big bellies as well as women. They are at a disadvantage," she said.
"They probably lean back the same way to try and balance that load, but they are kind of putting their vertebrae more at risk. I am sure there has got to be a correlation between having a big beer gut and having back pain," Shapiro laughed.

Big B, SRK better role models than historical figures: Study

Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai serve as more influential role models for youngsters than any of the famous figures from history, a new study from the University of Leicester suggests.
The research in the University of Leicester Department of Media and Communication examines interest in celebrities and gossip about them. It was carried out by Charlotte De Backer who sought in her study to explain interest in celebrity culture.
"Life is about learning, gaining experience and in that process we have a tendency to observe and mimic the actions of others. Ideally we mimic what makes others successful and avoid unsuccessful actions others have trialed (and paid for),” De Backer said.
"In reality, humans seem to have the tendency to mimic the overall behaviour pattern of higher status or more successful others. This explains why celebrities act as role models for broad ranges of behaviour they display – good or bad,” she added.
De Backer also examined another theory for interest in celebrity, known as the Parasocial Hypothesis.
In this case, the bonds are parasocial or one-way because the celebrity reveals private information (often involuntary), and the audience members respond emotionally to this, but there is no feedback of the private life of the audience going to the celebrity (or hardly ever), and nor do celebrities display emotions towards their audience.
Her study of 800 respondents and over 100 interviews confirmed that younger participants showed greater interest in celebrity gossip, even if it was about celebrities who were a lot older than them and even when they did not know the celebrities. They showed greatest interest in internationally known celebrities, because they considered those as more prestigious.
De Backer study also found that older people were interested in celebrity gossip not because they wanted to learn about the celebrities, but because it helped them to form social networks with other people.
"We did find in the interviews that older people do not gossip about celebrities as much because they want to learn from them or feel befriended with them, but they use celebrity gossip to bond with real life friends and acquaintances,” De Backer said.
"Living in scattered societies, we often don't know who to talk about with the many people we know, and celebrities can act as our mutual friends and acquaintances,” she added.
De Backer’s research was published in the journal Human Nature.