Overseas Pakistani Friends

N M Sampathkumar Iyangar

Eleven years after assisting Prime Minister Vajpayee in 1998 to divert public attention from the mess his government had created, India’s top science bureaucrats are issuing shrill denials of the startling revelations by senior scientist K Santhanam, who was coordinating director of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) for Pokhran II, the mission for conducting a second series of nuclear blasts. His admission undermined the credence of India’s claims to have perfected the technology. The thermonuclear devices were the only “technology advancement” over the detonation of a crude device in 1974 at Pokhran. India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) projected Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as Durga, the Hindu goddess of power to gullible Indians. Flouting solemn international agreements not to develop weapons in return for technology led to India’s isolation. The then chief of DAE, Raja Ramanna, is hailed as the “father of the Indian N-Bomb” for hijacking the nuclear programme from its original power-production orientation. The absence of scrutiny turned the DAE into a den of nepotism and corruption. The termination of the self-imposed 24-year “moratorium” on testing with Pokhran-II prompted Pakistan to let A Q Khan go ahead with its own tests. Continue reading »

* Shahbaz’s title changed back to chief minister in appeals and advertisements

LAHORE: The media managers of the Punjab government have changed the nomenclature of the post of the province’s political head from ‘khadim-e-aala’ to chief minister (CM) in official advertisements.

Since the day of his swearing-in, CM Shahbaz Sharif officially directed the provincial media managers to write his designation as ‘khadim-e-aala’ in all official advertisements, to create the impression that he was really a public servant. The director general public relations (DGPR) started calling Shahbaz ‘khadim-e-aala Punjab’ in all official advertisements in newspapers. The CM’s picture was not published in such appeals and promotional advertisements.
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HELSINKI: The world’s top cellphone maker Nokia said on Monday it would start to make laptops, entering a fiercely competitive, but fast-growing market. Nokia has seen its profit margins drop over the last quarters as handset demand has slumped, and analysts have worried that entering the PC industry, where margins are traditionally razor-thin, could hurt Nokia’s profits further. “We are fully aware what has the margin level been in the PC world. We have gone into this with our eyes wide open,” Kai Oistamo, the head of Nokia’s key phone unit, told Reuters. Its first netbook, the Nokia Booklet 3G, will use Microsoft’s Windows software and Intel’s Atom processor — offering up to 12 hours of battery life, and weighing 1.25 kilograms. Netbooks are low-cost laptops optimized for surfing the Internet and performing other basic applications. Continue reading »