Who or what killed Benazir? Mush has no answers

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s government may have requested the help of Scotland Yard in the enquiry into slain PPP chief Benazir Bhutto's assassination, but skepticism continues in the country over the government's intentions, especially considering their flip-flops over what caused Benazir's death.
With the cloud of mystery over the former prime minister’s death thickening, the pressure on Musharraf also rose which led him to summon the world's most famous detective agency.
“We have decided to summon a team from Scotland Yard in United Kingdom to look into the investigation into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto,” Musharraf said.
In reaching out to the UK to help, Musharraf is hoping that he can satisfy the agitating people of Pakistan. Most Pakistanis are skeptical about the government's investigation into Benazir's assassination so far with many lawyers even openly accusing the President of planning it.
However, Musharraf has squarely blamed jehadi groups for the killing. “Baitullah Mehsud and Fazlullah, who is in the Swat area, are behind the killing of Benazir Bhutto,” he said.
Despite these claims, there are still many questions, which have been left unanswered like where were police officials during the security lapse on Benazir’s last rally. Many are also asking why Benazir was allowed to stand through her car's sunroof despite security warnings.
So, what is behind the government's flip-flop on what killed Benazir – sunroof lever, suicide bomber, a man who shot at point blank range, or a sharp shooting sniper concealed at a height?
Why was no autopsy done even though it is mandatory to clear the air on whether she died of a heart attack, a brain concussion, or did she haemorrhage to death?
In a press conference to counter Musharraf's address, Benazir's husband Asif Ali Zardari also asked, why the government did not apply to international agencies earlier. “We will get international support and get to the bottom of the matter,” Zardari said.
Perhaps the biggest criticism of the government's handling of the situation has been the destruction of evidence. Within hours of Benazir's assassination the entire area was washed of the bloodstains, removing doubts that the investigation will not be easy.

Parody sites start anti-social networking trend

Tired of phony online friends? Make enemies instead.
Riding on the popularity of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, new Web sites are poking fun at online friendships that connect you to the people you like, by turning attention to the ones you don't.
Over the past 18 months, sites such Snubster, Enemybook and Hatebook are appealing to Internet users who get a kick out of the tongue-in-cheek humour of mocking their friends and others who are just plain cynical.
"I didn't understand these fake-friend war chests that people were so busy building online," said Bryant Choung, a technology consultant who started Snubster last year.
"I would get Facebook requests from people I talked to for three minutes at a bar or party, and now this person wants to go online to peruse all of my photos and contacts. I just didn't get it," the 26-year-old added.
Snubster, a Facebook application and a Web site with 16,000 users worldwide, lets users compile people and things they dislike. No one from Facebook, which boasts 59 million active users worldwide, was available to comment about the sites.
When Facebook opened up its network to outside applications earlier this year, some users decided it was an opportunity to poke fun at the phenomenon.
Kevin Matulef, the creator of Enemybook, said the idea for his Facebook application started as a joke last summer when friends at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were asking if someone was a real friend or a Facebook friend. "It started basically as a satire, sort of a parody of some of the superficial aspects of Facebook and the connections that you have, but now it's kind of evolved and it allows people to express themselves via their dislikes," said Matulef, 28.
Enemybook, which has 9,000 users, is similar to Snubster in that it lets you "enemy" so-called friends, public figures and fictitious characters.
"A lot of people like myself use it just to joke around with our good friends," said Matulef. Choung agrees."I hope that most people take it as a joke, on occasion I do get complaints from people about others who take it too seriously."
But Murray Pomerance, a professor of pop culture sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto, said most people take their online relationships very seriously.
"There are a lot of people who do not believe the friends that they have on these sites are phony," he explained. "I know people who have lots and lots of friends on these sites and who say things about themselves on these sites that they would never say to anyone straight up in public or in private."
Pomerance added that any online social networking, whether it's making friends or enemies, could be dangerous.
"Who you liked and who you hated used to be private," he said. "What they're doing is taking human feeling and emotion and making us actually register them through these online services."

ICICI to implement SSL certificates for data protection

India’s largest private sector banks ICICI Bank on Thursday selected NASDAQ-listed Entrust Inc to provide standard SSL certificates.
This would enable protection of customer data when conducting transactions on the institution's website.
As part of the agreement, ICICI Bank standardised on SSL certificates for a five-year contract period, Entrust Inc said in a release.
"ICICI Bank understands the value of providing a trusted environment that helps protect against online fraud schemes," PTI quoted Entrust Chairman Bill Conner.
Implementation of cost-effective SSL certificates would help the bank to address fraud and better serve the needs of their overall security approach, he added.

Based on their current purchase, they have the ability to upgrade to extended validation SSL certificates when the time is right, he added.
Acting as a centrally-managed, self-service system, the Certificate Management Service reduces administrative hassles and lessens the risk of inadvertent certificate expiration by allowing customers to synchronise and control the timing of SSL certificate expiration, it added.
ICICI Bank which has a total assets of $92 billion offers a wide range of banking products and financial services to corporate and retail customers through a variety of delivery channels.
It has a network of about 950 branches and 3,300 ATMs in India and presence in 17 countries.

Cops offer $5k for credible info on LSU murders

US Police have offered a USD 5,000 reward for credible information about the killers of two Indian doctoral students at Louisiana State University, as tips poured in after the release of sketches of two suspects.
Earlier on Thursday, the police had released the sketches of two men wanted for questioning in the murder of two Indian students in the university campus, after meeting the Indian diplomats.
The sketches were made from descriptions given by witnesses who saw two people around the apartment.
They were seen hurriedly leaving the apartment complex in a car with one or two other people, police said, adding the sketches were available for download at http://www.lsu.edu/pa/photos.
According to the police, "All indications so far are that the suspects were looking for someone to rob when they killed the two victims".

One of the men, believed to have been the driver of the car, was a black male estimated to be in his 20's, they said.
"His hair was done in twists in rows. He was wearing a white hooded sweatshirt," police said.
The second man, wearing a white long sleeve shirt with a high collar and dark jeans, is also allegedly a black male in his 20's, possibly even over 30, 5'8"-5'10" tall, with a muscular build and a receding hairline, they said.
They are believed to have left in an older model, light-coloured Oldsmobile Alero.
It is believed that one of the victims was spotted arriving at the apartment complex and was followed to the other victim's apartment, where both men were killed.
Police have not yet released the descriptions of other two men involved in the crime.
The suspects were seen on the complex property at 9:00 pm on the night of December 13th, and may have been in the general area or on property even earlier.
Kiran Kumar Allam (33) and Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma (31), both resident of Andhra Pradesh, were shot dead on Thursday last at the Edward Gay Apartments on the edge of the LSU campus. They were pursuing doctoral degrees at LSU and the apartment belonged to Allam.

India's Hollywood man finds gay role challenging

Actor Irrfan Khan, who is tasting rare success in Hollywood, says playing a homosexual man in his latest film was a challenge.
"For a heterosexual role I need no preparation," Khan, who won a Spirit Award nomination for best supporting actor in The Namesake, told the Times of India in an interview published on Friday. "It's always more challenging to do something untried."
Known to experiment with roles, Khan plays a homosexual in a short film about AIDS by Mira Nair, a character most Bollywood heroes would avoid lest their romantic or macho images suffer.
In Migration, Khan does not portray the homosexual character as effeminate, breaking away from the stereotype in most Indian films.
"That would have been the easy and boring way," said the actor, adding that he was inspired by similar roles played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Khan has been acclaimed for his role in The Namesake as an Indian immigrant in the United States.
He has also starred alongside Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, a film on American journalist Daniel Pearl who was killed in Pakistan.

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.