MAN in MANHOLE

Man goes to sleep in manhole

Kolkata: A deranged man on Thursday went down a manhole and slept there before being lured with the promise of bread to come out.


The man, who later gave his name as Keshav, was spotted by people entering the manhole naked at around 3:00 pm.

The police and fire brigade arrived after being alerted, but they could not find him as he had crept into a sewer connecting two manholes and had fallen asleep.

"The manhole, where the man entered, is connected through a sewer with another manhole 30 metres away. The man was sleeping in the sewer and so we could not find him," officer-in-charge, Hastings police station, Ashoke Banerjee said.

Keshav, who first refused to come out, later agreed after being given bread to eat, Banerjee said.

He was immediately rushed to hospital.

He said that he was very ‘annoyed’ with the police for having ‘disturbed’ his sleep.

Tea vendor paid Rs 8 lakh as income tax

JODHPUR: A vendor who sells tea and snacks in Rajasthan's Pali district has paid Rs eight lakh as income tax after officials found his undeclared assets worth Rs 25 lakh.

The vendor, who has his stall at Rohit village on Jodhpur-Pali road, paid the amount on Wednesday after income tax department sleuths found the undeclared assets.

Meanwhile, the IT sleuths recovered Rs one crore cash during raids from a Gutkha manufacturer here.

The raids were conducted at the premises of the businessman located in Jodhpur, Mumbai, Udaipur, Kota, Bikaner and Ajmer

During the raids, jewellery worth several lakh rupees were also found from four lockers owned by the businessman.

Import Indian bridegrooms for Russian brides

New Russian magic mantra to reverse alarming fall in the country’s birth rate
-Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW: Desperate to reverse a steep decline in their numbers, Russians are coming up with some bold ideas on how to overcome Russia’s demographic crisis.

A Russian feminist has proposed a radical solution to the falling birth rate — importing Indian bridegrooms for Russian girls. Maria Arbatova, writer and TV moderator, who married an Indian businessman a few years ago “after 25 years of keeping marrying Russians”, thinks Indian men make ideal husbands.

“They are crazy about their family and children,” she said presenting her new book, ‘Tasting India’, here. “What is more, Indians, like Russians, are Indo-Europeans, and many Sanskrit and Russian words have the same roots.”

Indian bridegrooms can help ward off a Chinese demographic invasion in Russia, says the feminist: “If we do not balance off the Chinese with Indians, Africans or aliens, by 2050 China will annex Russia’s Siberia up to the Ural Mountains.”

Russia has a population of 142 million spread across a territory five times the size of India. Its population is shrinking at one-third of a million a year. Under a federal programme launched this year, women who give birth to a second or subsequent child are given certificates worth $10,000, which can be used for education, mortgage or pensions. Monthly support payments to young mothers have been raised from $28 to $60. Afraid that the Government measures are not enough, the Governor of Ulyanovsk has suggested his own way of getting Russian couples to have more babies.

This Wednesday, Ulyanovsk residents will enjoy an extra day off work that the Governor decreed to give them more time to produce babies. The holiday, officially called “Family Contact Day”, was quickly renamed by locals as “Day of Conception”. That day the people will be invited to join a festival, “I Love You”, while teams of gynaecologists, midwives and psychologists will fan out to all parts of the region to advise women on having babies.

September 12 has been chosen for the new holiday so that babies conceived that day may be born on June 12, Russia’s National Day. Couples who hit the target date win prizes, including refrigerators, TV sets and washing machines. The main prize is an Ulyanovsk-built all-terrain vehicle called Patriot.(The Hindu)

THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE FUTURE: JULES VERNE

The above cover art suggests various predictions of the author Jules Verne. Among these was spaceflight which is suggested by the sketch of the astronaut at the upper left. JOURNEY FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON was published in 1863. Some call it the "first believable novel of the future ever written" because of its attention to scientific accuracy. Consider the following amazing predictions by Verne in his novel which came to pass:

The United States would launch the first vehicle to go to the moon.

The shape and size of the vehicle would closely resemble the Apollo command/service module spacecraft.

The number of men in the crew would be three.

The vehicle would launch from Florida near the present location of Kennedy Space Center.

A competition for the launch site would ensue between Florida and Texas which actually was resolved in Congress in the 1960s with KSC as the Flordia launch site and Houston, Texas as the Mission Control Center.

A telescope would be able to view the progress of the journey. When Apollo 13 exploded, a telescope at Johnson Space Center witnessed the event which happened more than 200,000 miles from Earth.

The Verne spacecraft would use retro-rockets which became a technology assisting Neil Armstrong and his crewmates in their journey to the Moon.

Verne predicted weightlessness although his concept was slightly flawed in thinking it only was experienced at the gravitational midpoint of the journey (when the Moon and Earth gravity balanced).

The first men to journey to the Moon would return to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean just where Apollo 11 splashed down in July of 1969 one hundred and six years after the initial publishing of Jules Verne's FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.