Bandra-Worli Sea Link (BWSL)

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Peel - World’s smallest car

Peel is officially the world’s smallest car

Nano might be the world’s cheapest car, but the world’s smallest car - Peel 50 hit the headlines this week. Designed as a "city car" for Ripley's by the London-based Peel Engineering Company, the one-seater Peel Trident weighs about 68 kilograms, is battery-operated, and travels about 64 kilometers per hour. It costs about 25,000 U.S. dollars to produce. The Peel P50 is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest road legal car ever produced. In the picture, the Peel is turned around by two men in front of Ripley's Believe it or Not on the 42nd Street sidewalk near Times Square in New York early last month. The two-seat, battery-powered mini car is said to offer a cure for New York City's congestion and parking woes.

The world’s smallest production car was built by PEC-The Peel Engineering Company, on The Isle Of Man between 1962 and 1965. The Peel Engineering Company were originally the makers of fibre-glass fairings and small boats when they turned their skills into car production. It was called the Peel P50 and first retailed for £150

Jeff Lane demonstrates how he can easily lift the "World's Smallest Car", the Peel P50 in Nashville. Lane and his wife Susan, owners of the Lane Motor Museum, sponsored a micro and mini car drive around Percy Priest Lake in Nashville.

Jeff Lane leads a procession of micro and mini cars around Percy Priest in Nashville, Tenn., with his 1963 Peel Trident vehicle. The Trident gets 60-miles per gallon. The tour started at the Lane Moto Museum in Nashville, which is owned by Jeff and his wife Susan.

IRAN ELECTION PICTURES

Indian among world's top 10 richest women

At number nine, Savitri Jindal, Non-Executive Chairperson of steel and power conglomerate O P Jindal group, is the first and only Indian to feature among world's 20 richest women enlisted by Forbes. Indu Jain of Times of India fell from the ranks after making the cut in previous years.

When Savitri's late husband O P Jindal died in a 2005 helicopter crash, the subsequent transfer of wealth made her India's richest woman. Her net worth today is $6 billion. The group has nearly 50 plants in India and abroad, including South American countries like Chile, Bolivia and Peru. The combined net worth of the twenty women featured in the list is a mammoth $160 billion. They represent industries like manufacturing, finance, real estate and commodities. The two top spots belong to Wal-Mart heiresses Christy Walton and Alice Walton with a net worth of $20 billion and $19.5 billion respectively. Forbes credited Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer for powering through the global recession.

It recorded $400 billion in annual sales last year alone. Last year's number one Liiane Bettencourt who is worth $15 billion is placed at number three this year. Daughter of Eugene Schueller, the founder of L'Oreal, has had a controlling stake of 27 percent in L'Oreal for the last four decades.

Last year she was worth $20 billion.Also in the list are, Susanne Klatten, Birgit Rausing, Jacqueline Mars, Anne Cox Chambers, Abigail Johnson and Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken. Some high profile female billionaires who didn't make it to the list include Oprah Winfrey, J K Rowling and former eBay Chief, Margaret Whitman.

STEVE JOBS CHANGE FROM 2000 - 2009

Oracle buys Sun for $7.4bn

Oracle has announced plans to buy Sun Microsystems in a deal valued at $7.4 billion (£5.07 billion), plunging the enterprise software vendor into the hardware market and making Sun the latest company to be subsumed by the Silicon Valley giant.

The deal comes just weeks after a reported deal by IBM to buy the Java software maker fell apart.
Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash in the deal, which is valued at $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt.
Oracle is no stranger to big acquisitions, and has bought a series of software firms in the last few years including PeopleSoft, BEA and Siebel Systems.

Though there were rumours Oracle might purchase Sun, it has never before had a hardware or server operating system business, a market in which a significant amount of Sun's assets are tied, so the deal seemed unlikely. However, Sun's Solaris long has been a successful platform for Oracle's database business.

The two companies also have areas of common interest in their support for Java software, one of the only areas where the companies' product lines overlap. Sun has an open-source Java application server called Glassfish that Oracle likely will hold onto, although the fate of Sun's other commercial Java software, the Java Enterprise System (JES), is unknown.

Oracle also had overlap in this area when it purchased BEA, but BEA WebLogic had significant installed base, and Oracle kept the product alive. Sun's installed base for JES is smaller, so Oracle may choose not to hold onto it.

Oracle said the Sun deal should bring the company more revenue in the first year than the company planned for its acquisitions of BEA Systems, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined.
"We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year" said Oracle President Safra Catz.

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a statement.
"Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

Sun Chairman Scott McNealy welcomed the deal. "This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event."
For Sun, the deal will bring an end to CEO Jonathan Schwartz's efforts to turn the struggling company around. Sun's sales have been declining since their peak during the dot-com boom, as customers turned away from its pricey Unix servers in favor of x86 systems. Sun's share price has also fallen sharply.

Efforts to attract new customers with open-source software, and Sun's belated decision to enter the x86 market, have not paid off fast enough to give it the boost it needs.
With Sun on board, Oracle now will have to figure out how to navigate the server OS and hardware business. In addition to supporting Solaris for many years, Oracle also supports its software on Linux. Though Sun's hardware does not have the reach that its former suitor IBM's does, the deal gives Oracle a combined hardware/software business model more akin to IBM's, with which it now competes in the database market.

11 Individuals Arrested for Visa and Mail Fraud at New Jersey Corporation

The latest immigration enforcement effort by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has resulted in the arrest of 11 individuals on visa and mail fraud. A New Jersey corporation, Vision Systems Group (VSG), was also indicted on charges of conspiracy and mail fraud along with a Notice of Forfeiture seeking forfeiture of $7.4 million from proceeds derived from the offenses. The government used information from immigration filings and tax filings to combine for a charge of conspiracy. No lawyer or law firm was mentioned in the indictment begging the question of who is VSG’s counsel or if they even had one.

The 28 page indictment alleges that: 1. VSG filed LCA’s (Labor Condition Applications) and applications for permanent employment certification (ETA 9089 and the previous version, ETA 750) containing prevailing wages for a location other than where the employees would actually be employed.2. VSG then tried to conceal it by filing tax wage reports to support the location listed on the immigration filings, rather than the actual work locations.3. The government also used the immigration filings to support a charge for mail fraud. It remains to be seen whether VSG was legitimately placing workers at other locations pursuant to the short-term placement rules under the Department of Labor’s H-1b Regulations or whether the company filed new LCA’s (and amended H-1b petitions) to cover the new worksite.

The government presented evidence to the grand jury that eight VSG’s Applications for permanent residence listed the employer’s address and employee’s residential address in Iowa and contained Notice of Job Opportunity (commonly referred to as “internal posting”) and job advertisements for Iowa whereas the employees worked at other locations. VSG’s best possible defense is if it was adhering to the long-standing Department of Labor “roving employee” interpretation. The roving employee interpretation allows the internal posting and prevailing wage analysis to be done at the company’s corporate headquarters if the employer has “roving employees” who work at different locations.

The Department of Homeland Security pooled the resources of several agencies to investigate this allegation of conspiracy and fraud: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Fraud Detection and National Security Division (FDNS); U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General; U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS); U.S. Department of State; and the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General.

Republic Day Celebrations in India

Security is tight in all the main places in India.

Republic Day Parade Pictures.

Miss USA 2009

Miss Indiana is the Miss USA 2009.

Congratulations Katie Stam.

Air Lifting - US Airways Flight

The American Journey of Barack Obama