The Religion Of Consumerism

The notion of consumerism as the religion of the United States is nothing new. That said, Warren Pollock did an excellent job explaining just how corrosive this mindset can be to a society. We were particularly taken by the idea that since the vast majority of people define themselves almost entirely by their level of consumption, or by some desired level of future consumption, their consciousness becomes easily controlled and their worldview easily managed and molded.

They simply cannot see life in any other context and so they become trapped within a very sick and twisted form of human existence.

And then there's George...

"...But I'll tell you what they don't want. They DON'T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that, that doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting FUCKED by system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passably accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it..."

Fake Website Warning: RBI Doesn’t Have Online Banking

RBI has warned people about a fake website called “Rbi-in-online.org” which is a phishing site. It only collects information about you, and tries to hack into your bank accounts and steal your money.

DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING ON THIS SITE.

It looks like this:

The RBI says;

The Reserve Bank clarifies that as India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India does not offer services offered by commercial banks, such as, savings bank account, current bank account or credit cards. As such, the question of the Reserve Bank offering online banking services, as is indicated on the fake site, does not arise. The Reserve Bank has cautioned members of public not to fall prey to spurious offers made by the fake website. The Reserve Bank has further cautioned members of public that applying on line on that website could result in compromising one’s own crucial personal information, that may be misused to cause financial and other loss to them.

The only RBI online presence is at www.rbi.org.in and that’s the site you should care about. And they will never ask you for your passwords or such.

If you have loads of money you want to lose anyway, I can suggest donating it to me instead.

Indian Benchmarks end flat; Await Modi’s cabinet declaration

What looked as splendid session in morning deals, turned out to be merely a flat one amid volatility, as investors opted to cash out profits at higher levels ahead of key cabinet portfolio allocation that are likely to be announced post swearing-in ceremony of the new government. After a gap-up opening, benchmarks fervently gained from strength to strength to surpass their crucial 25,000 (Sensex) and 7,500 (Nifty) levels as sentiments remained up-beat on report that foreign institutional investors (FIIs) bought shares worth a net Rs 416.80 crore on May 23, 2014, as per provisional data from the stock exchanges. Sentiments also remained buoyed with a FICCI survey, which has said that 93 percent out of the 76 CEOs covered by it, project a substantial improvement in the near-term economic situation with the Narendra Modi-led new government taking charge at the Centre. Some support also came after an Assocham study indicated that riding on huge expectations from the incoming Modi government, foreign investment inflows are estimated to more than double to $60 billion level this fiscal.

However, immense volatility was witnessed in last leg of trade and markets took U-turn with frontline gauges witnessing sharp selloff due to emergence of profit-booking in realty, power, consumer durables and oil & gas counters. Though, domestic bourses staged smart recovery to end flat after hitting fresh intraday low in dying hour of trade.

Global cues remained supportive with European markets trading higher in early deals as investors awaited a speech by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. Asian shares touched one-year high on Monday, tracking gains from the Wall Street and a decisive win for billionaire Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine's presidential election. Investors were also hoping for easing geopolitical risks after exit polls in Ukraine gave Poroshenko more than 55 per cent of the vote in the presidential election.

Back home, the Indian rupee weakened against the US dollar and was trading at 58.82 to its Friday’s close of Rs 58.52 after equities which retreated from their intra-day highs and dampened sentiment. Select infrastructure companies especially those involved in road-construction were among the top gainers after the National Highways Authority of India, responsible for development, maintenance and management of NHs, recently allowed nine of the stressed 23 road projects to reschedule their premium payments, a development that can revive stalled road works and attract investments. Stocks related to software and technology counters too remained on buyers’ radar on the back of upbeat US home sales data signaling signs of an uptick in the world's largest economy.

The NSE’s 50-share broadly followed index Nifty slipped by around ten points but managed to hold its psychological 7,350 support level, while Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensitive Index -- Sensex rose by over twenty points to end above its crucial 24,700 mark. However, the broader markets, snapping their six days winning streak, ended the session with a cut of over two percent. The market breadth remained in favour of decliners, as there were 1,362 shares on the gaining side against 1,660 shares on the losing side while 108 shares remain unchanged.

Finally, the BSE Sensex gained 23.53 points or 0.10%, to 24716.88, while the CNX Nifty was down by 8.05 points or 0.11%, to 7,359.05.

The BSE Sensex touched a high and a low of 25175.22 and 24433.90, respectively. The BSE Mid cap index was down by 2.11%, while the Small cap index lost 2.24%.

The top gainers on the Sensex were Mahindra & Mahindra up by 6.23%, SSLT up by 4.24%, Wipro up by 3.81%, Tata Motors up by 2.76% and L&T up by 2.16%. While BHEL down by 4.79%, Tata Power down by 4.11%, Gail India down by 3.64%, Hindalco Inds down by 3.19% and NTPC down by 2.49% were the top losers in the index.

On the BSE Sectoral front, Auto up by 1.47%, IT up by 1.46%, Teck up by 0.81%, Capital Goods up by 0.56% and FMCG up by 0.23% were the top gainers, while Realty down by 5.22%, Power down by 2.94%, Consumer Durables down by 2.00%, Oil & Gas down by 1.55% and PSU down by 1.32% were the top losers in the space.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways may seek greater autonomy in decision making from new government to speed up the implementation of high projects. Ministry is of the view that various inter- ministerial groups should be dissolved as they only delay project implementation.

Over the past few years, road sector is struggling with slowdown and the Road Ministry had blamed the issues like financial stress, land acquisition delays and environmental clearances and enhanced construction risk for the current downturn in the sector. During FY14, the Ministry has managed to award around 2,000 km of road projects as against the set target of 9,000 km, while in FY13 only 1,116 km of projects were awarded against a target of 9,500 km.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has planned to award around 5,000-km highway contracts in FY15. As per the NHAI work plan, about 2,300 km of highway projects with a total project cost of over Rs 15,000 crore will be awarded through cash contracts, or Engineering, Procurement, Construction (EPC) mode and 3,000 km projects with cost of over Rs 35,000 crore to be bid via the public-private partnership (PPP) mode. So far, bidders’ response to PPP mode remained poor and NHAI would convert PPP to the EPC mode if no bids are received. Over the past few months, developers’ interest towards PPP mode projects has declined due to concerns over raising equity for highways PPPs.

The CNX Nifty touched a high and low of 7,504.00 and 7,269.05 respectively.

The top gainers of the Nifty were Mahindra & Mahindra up by 7.37%, SSLT up by 4.34%, HCL Technologies up by 3.93%, Wipro up by 3.89% and Tata Motors up by 2.86%. On the other hand, DLF down by 6.03%, BHEL down by 5.84%, IDFC down by 5.34%, Bank of Baroda down by 4.58% and Tata Power Company down by 3.92% were the top losers.

Most of the European markets were trading in green, France's CAC 40 was up by 0.34% and Germany's DAX was up by 0.94%, while United Kingdom's FTSE 100 was down by 0.07%.

The Asian markets concluded Monday’s trade mixed, with the regional gauge poised for the highest close in almost six months, tracking US markets and after a decisive win for billionaire Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine’s presidential election. Three of the Bank of Japan’s nine board members wanted to separately revise growth and inflation outlooks, including emphasizing downside risks and setting a timeframe for easing, minutes of the April 30 policy meeting showed. Takahide Kiuchi and Takehiro Sato repeated objections to the outlook that inflation will be raised to and anchored around 2% in 2015. According to the Shanghai Statistics Bureau, foreign direct investment in Shanghai expanded 8.3% from a year earlier in April to $1.74 billion. The pace slowed from an increase of 14.2% in March but was better than the national average of a 3.4% rise last month. Singaporean Industrial Production fell to an annual rate of 4.6%, from 12.1% in the preceding month.

Asian Indices	Last Trade	Change in Points	Change in %
Shanghai Composite	2041.48	6.91	0.34
Hang Seng	22963.18	-2.68	-0.01
Jakarta Composite	4963.93	-9.13	-0.18
KLSE Composite	1862.80	-6.42	-0.34
Nikkei 225	14602.52	140.35	0.97
Straits Times	3282.88	4.86	0.15
KOSPI Composite	2010.35	-6.82	-0.34
Taiwan Weighted	9036.12	27.90	0.31

Tsunami warning for Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands after offshore quake

Rattled ... Panguna mine, on Bougainville Island, near the site of the earthquake that struck late on Saturday. Picture: Supplied Source: News Limited

A POWERFUL earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5 has struck off Papua New Guinea, the US Geological Survey says.

A tsunami warning has been issued for Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.

The USGS said the earthquake struck late on Saturday 75 kilometres southwest of the town of Panguna on Bougainville Island.

Warning ...flood waters in a street in the Solomon Islands' capital Honiara earlier this month. A tsunami alert has been issued after an earthquake with a 7.5 magnitude struck off Papua New Guinea. Source: AFP

Japanese police investigating package containing dismembered nurse labelled ‘doll’ parts

Gruesome container ... a 2m-long parcel in Japan has been found to contain the corpse of a young nurse. Source:ThinkStock

MURDER detectives are investigating the case of a young nurse whose corpse was sent by parcel post across Japan in a box that claimed to contain a doll.

The body of Rika Okada was found in a storage lockup in Tokyo. Investigators also found the 2-metre box in which it had been transported from the southern city of Osaka, reports said.

The delivery service that ferried the package — marked with the Japanese word for “doll” — 400 kilometres to the capital had been paid in Okada’s own name.

The bill for the lockup’s short-term rental had been settled using her credit card.

The body of the 29-year-old, who had been missing since late March, had more than a dozen stab wounds, local media reported, but no defensive injuries on her hands or arms.

Police in Osaka refused to confirm details, but reports said a woman who had been at primary school with Okada had flown out of Tokyo earlier this month using the dead woman’s passport.

The schoolmate, who was not named, is believed to have lived just a few hundred yards from the lockup with a Chinese woman of about the same age.

Both women flew from Tokyo’s Haneda airport on the same flight, bound for Shanghai.

Just before she went missing, Okada wrote on her Facebook page that she was going to meet up with an old friend whom she had not seen for a decade.

How Americans Spend Their Time Online

We have good news for budding entrepreneurs considering launching yet another online method of stalking the object of their affection: exhibitionism and sharing photos of your dinner, pardon social networking, remains as popular as ever on the internet.

According to an online survey by GfK and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, people said they spent about an average of 37 minutes a day on social networks like Facebook and Twitter in 2013. That internet staple, emailing, clocked in at a 29 minutes, while watching online video was 23 minutes.

However, in a troubling trend for the YouTubes of the world, the WSJ notes that while people doubled the amount of time they spent watching online video over the past four years, the overall percentage of their online time spent watching video slipped to 12% in 2013 from 13% the year before.

But the worst news is for that biggest loser of all in the New Online Normal: legacy media, whose paper publications are an endangered anachronism in a day and age when everyone reads (if only the headlines) on their mobile device, is also getting hammered when it comes to its online incarnation, with the average American spending just 5 minutes reading online newspapers, less than even blogs.

Of course, when the day comes that the final investigative reporter and journalist loses their job, suddenly the question will arise what will all those 20-some year old "journalism" majors whose only skill is to copy and paste, do?

For now nobody cares to even contemplate this issue: they are too busy updating their NSA Facebook profiles.

Rupee up 10 paise against US dollar; hits fresh 11-month high

MUMBAI: Extending yesterday's gain, the rupee today rose by another 10 paise to trade at a fresh 11-month high of 58.37 against the US dollar in early trade on increased selling of the American currency by exporters.

Increased selling of the dollar by banks and exporters amid sustained foreign capital inflows supported the rupee, dealers said.

Besides, a higher opening in the domestic equity market also helped the rupee, but dollar's gain against other currencies overseas limited the rise, they added.

The rupee rose 30 paise, its biggest single-day gain in a week, to close at over 11-month peak of 58.47 against the dollar yesterday. 

Meanwhile, the benchmark BSE Sensex rose 121.05 points, or 0.50 per cent, to trade at 24,495.45 in early trade. 

"Our Industry Is Absolutely Crazy": The Subprime Wolf Of Wall Street In 125% Interest Clothing

The last time we wrote about the number 125% it was in the context of the return of that old Subprime 1.0 staple home loans that cover more than the purchase price of the home (because one must always have some leftover cash for improvements), i.e. 125% loan-to-value mortgages. Today 125% comes back and again it is in the context of subprime, only this time it is about the second coming of the credit bubble when, as Bloomberg writes, a certain group of distinguished individuals is now offering loans to troubled Americans at the whopping annual interest rate of 125%.

Which group of distinguished individuals? The same group that helped make The Wolf of Wall Street into a cult classic: the people who were trained by that born again scammer par excellence Jordan Belfort.

From an office near New York’s Times Square, people trained by a veteran of Jordan Belfort’s boiler room call truckers, contractors and florists across the country pitching loans with annual interest rates as high as 125 percent, according to more than two dozen former employees and clients. When borrowers can’t pay, Naidus’s World Business Lenders LLC seizes their vehicles and assets, sometimes sending them into bankruptcy.

If the phrase predatory lending comes to mind it is because this is precisely what it is:

"This is the new predatory lending,” said Mark Pinsky, president of Opportunity Finance Network, a group of lenders that help the poor. “And the predators, just as they did in the mortgage market, have gotten increasingly aggressive.”

Subprime business lending -- the industry prefers to be called “alternative” -- has swelled to more than $3 billion a year, estimates Marc Glazer, who has researched his competitors as head of Business Financial Services Inc., a lender in Coral Springs, Florida. That’s twice the volume of small loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration.

Naturally, since these are the kinds of loans that ordinary Americans who don't have defaults and a horrible credit rating would never touch, the probability of repayment is virtually nil. Which means that the probability of default on the new subprime loans is assured, and as such all that is happening is yet another case of credit money assisted wealth transfer: from the very poor to the very aggressive, and increasingly wealthy. In other words, what the Fed has done for Wall Street, subprime 2.0 is doing for its far shadier, and criminal some would say, subsector.

The name of the company that makes the loans is almost too cheese to fit into its own ironic meme:

Naidus, 48, chief executive officer of World Business Lenders, declined to be interviewed. Marcia Horowitz, a spokeswoman at public relations firm Rubenstein Associates Inc., said the company explains loan terms in plain English and takes steps to ensure that borrowers understand.

“World Business Lenders’ sales and marketing techniques, as well as the interest rates it charges and the default rates it experiences, are generally consistent with those throughout the industry,” Andy Occhino, general counsel for the company, wrote in a May 21 letter. “In serving the underserved small-business community along Main Street USA, World Business Lenders complies with all applicable laws and endeavors to ensure a positive experience for its customers.”

To be sure World Business Leaders (or WBL in short) are just that, and much more - you see they are pure humanitarians by nature:

Horowitz, the spokeswoman for World Business Lenders, said the company works with borrowers to avoid defaults.

“If the default cannot be cured, World Business Lenders enforces its rights under the loan documents, including the recovery of the pledged collateral,” she said.

The good news is that at least someone has collateral, unlike all those countries in Europe where the loan itself is the collateral repledged back with the central bank (several times).

Sadly, the only reason why WBL exists is simple: they supply a product that is in great demand...

“While I am not real thrilled about some of the prices being charged, in some cases businesses need to get something done in a hurry and it makes sense,” said William Dennis, who directs the research foundation at the National Federation of Independent Business. “It may not be the world’s best choice, but at least it’s your choice.”

Brokers are popping up around the country to originate loans on behalf of lenders including OnDeck and World Business Lenders. The companies pay fees to the brokers of about $6,000 for finding people willing to take a $50,000 loan, according to current and former brokers, most of whom asked not to be identified to preserve their job prospects.

... a demand that would not exist if the economy was truly, as some of the more humorous economists out there allege, recovering.

As for what the insiders think of their business model, it is the same as what the outsides would have to say:

“Our industry is absolutely crazy,” said Steven Delgado, who left World Business Lenders last year to become an independent loan broker. “There’s lots of people who’ve been banned from brokerage. There’s no license you need to file for. It’s pretty much unregulated.”

David Glass, 39, was still on probation for insider trading when he co-founded Yellowstone Capital LLC, a New York-based brokerage and lender that originated $200 million in loans last year, including for OnDeck.

He said he learned to sell in the 1990s at Sterling Foster & Co., a Long Island firm where he got his friend a job interview that inspired “Boiler Room,” a movie that portrayed a college dropout’s foray into high-pressure stock sales. Glass said he coached actor Vin Diesel on cold-calling for the film. “A natural,” Glass said.

How will all of this end?

World Business Lenders put up job listings seeking former brokers, and they came. A February orientation schedule provided by a former employee shows that training is run by Bryan Herman, who got his start under Stratton Oakmont Inc.’s Belfort, the con man portrayed in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Herman later ran his own boiler room in the 1990s and avoided jail by informing on other brokers when he was charged with fraud in 1998, court records show. Another salesman was released from prison in 2010 after serving about a year for penny-stock fraud

Herman has paid for his crimes, according to his lawyer, Marty Kaplan.

“It’s really like saying Bill Clinton smoked dope in college,” Kaplan said. “Who cares?”

Indeed: who cares. Certainly not the Fed, for whose erudite members this too will be a perfectly normal occurrence and hardly a signal that something is horribly wrong with its centrally-planned, Frankenstein economy.

This Is Why Hewlett Packard Just Announced Another 16,000 Job Cuts

The biggest scandal in today's release of Hewlett Packard Q2 earnings was not that it hit 30 minutes prematurely, catching algos unaware and unable to BTFD when the stock tumbled on what was a revenue miss and 1% decline from last year, nor that the company guided below estimate, pushing its stock some 3% lower in the last minutes of trading.

The biggest scandal was this disclosure in the second quarter results press release: "As HP continues to reengineer the workforce to be more competitive and meet its objectives, the previously estimated number of eliminated positions will increase by between 11,000 to 16,000." This is in addition to the 34,000 layoffs already noted previously, meaning HP will fire a total of 50,000 in the near future.

Want to know why HPQ is forced to fire so many well-paying jobs it once again makes a mockery of anyone who claims there is some economic recovery going on?

The chart below, which compares the company's quarterly CapEx, declining (so no, not increasing as some clueless sellside analyst hacks claim) by 16% from last quarter and down 4.5% from a year ago to $840 million and thus leading to less growth opportunities for the company and resulting in tens of thousands of pink slips, and the soaring amount of stock buybacks, which rose by nearly 50% in Q2 from Q1 to $831 million and by 27,600% (!) from a year ago, the most since 2011, should provide all the answers.

So dear soon to be laid off Hewlett Packard employees, if you want to direct your anger somewhere, please direct it at the company's "activist" shareholders who have forced management to invest not in growth for the future, and thus you, but to reward its shareholders immediately, right now with what otherwise would have been your future salary.

Devastating Nigeria attacks show twisted ambition of Boko Haram

(CNN) -- A large part of northern and central Nigeria is now at the mercy of intensified attacks by Boko Haram, and the group seems to be embarking on a new phase of its campaign against the Nigerian state -- piling further pressure on the government of President Goodluck Jonathan.

The last four days have seen devastating bomb attacks in Jos, in central Nigeria, as well as a suicide bombing in Kano - the largest city in the north. Two more villages in the state of Borno, Boko Haram's stronghold in the northeast, came under attack, with at least 30 civilians killed. There have also been two bomb attacks in the federal capital, Abuja, in the last five weeks.

What alarms analysts is the way Boko Haram and its supporters are able to carry out multiple attacks on targets far apart, all within days of each other. Jos and Kano are more than 300 miles from Borno.

The double car-bomb attack against a market in Jos on Tuesday, which killed 118 people, according to the National Emergency Management Agency, is typical of its strategy beyond Borno: to strike soft targets in places where sectarian tensions are already high, with massive force. The use of two bombs some 30 minutes apart copied an al Qaeda tactic.

Jacob Zenn, a long-time observer of Boko Haram, says its aim is likely to stretch Nigeria's beleaguered security forces, possibly by combining with another Islamic militant group: Ansaru.

"In 2012, one of Boko Haram's goals was to launch attacks in the Middle Belt and southern Nigeria via the Ansaru networks - in order to spread Nigerian forces thin in Borno," Zenn told CNN. "We may be seeing a similar tactic employed now."

 Photos: Nigerians protest over kidnapped girls Photos: Nigerians protest over kidnapped girls

 Terror rules in northeastern Nigeria U.S. troops join missing girls search

Zenn says Ansaru networks carried out more than 15 bombings in Jos, Kaduna and Abuja between 2010 and 2012, even though the attacks were attributed to Boko Haram. Those networks, he believes, have now been reactivated.

Zenn, an analyst at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, says Boko Haram recruits who have trained in Borno - disaffected young Muslims from across the Middle Belt region - may be returning home to "carry out attacks against their enemies -- whether rival Christians or the government."

John Campbell, a former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria and now a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that Ansaru seems to be reappearing but adds that little is known about the group and its leadership.

What is known is that Boko Haram and Ansaru have plenty of money to recruit and finance operatives -- through bank robberies and kidnappings.

Campbell says Boko Haram has become adept at bank robberies and stealing weapons from government armories.

Zenn believes Ansaru's connections to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) have helped fill its coffers. In 2012 it kidnapped a French engineer, Francis Collomp. AQIM also held four French hostages - who were freed in late 2013 - reportedly for a ransom payment of $27 million. A few weeks later Collomp escaped, or perhaps was allowed to escape, provoking speculation that Ansaru had been in on the deal and shared the ransom money. Last year, Zenn says, Ansaru received part of a $3 million ransom paid to secure the release of a French family kidnapped by Boko Haram in northern Cameroon.

The challenge for the Nigerian security forces grows by the day. According to locals quoted in the Nigerian media, Boko Haram fighters were able to spend several hours unchallenged looting and killing in the village of Alagano early Wednesday. The village is only a few miles from the school where the girls were abducted in April, and supposedly in an area where there is a heightened military presence.

One option to squeeze Boko Haram would be better military coordination with neighboring states, where the group takes refuge and resupplies itself. On Tuesday, President Jonathan announced plans to bolster a Joint Task Force - with a battalion each from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon. But Zenn says that "thus far all initiatives of this sort have absolutely flunked. It's supposed to exist already in the Multinational Joint Task Force but, because of language issues, mistrust and lack of funding, doesn't really work."

There is also a larger question looming in a country that has had military rule for more than half its life as an independent state. Nigeria has had civilian rule since 1999, but Zenn says there is now a risk that "the still less than 20-year old democracy experiment in Nigeria may be coming to an end, since there are increasing reports of military defections and mutinies."

"With the potential for instability ahead of the elections [due in February next year], the military may step in in one way or another," he adds.

Campbell says the surprise is that the military hasn't moved before now, given the deteriorating situation. But he says it is a much smaller and weaker organization than 10 or 15 years ago; the top brass has been thoroughly politicized and is close to the Presidency. The nightmare scenario, he says, is a mutiny by junior officers. But Campbell cautions that the Nigerian military is little understood by outsiders, which incidentally makes foreign assistance to improve its performance more difficult to deliver.

There is another larger danger for Nigeria stoked by the Boko Haram campaign: a version of ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Christians have already fled areas like Gwoza in Borno, and Campbell says that sectarian divisions and violence have divided the city of Jos into predominantly Muslim and Christian districts. After Tuesday's bombings, which were likely calculated to inflame religious tension, Christian youths began setting up roadblocks around their neighborhoods. The Kano attack was also in a Christian neighborhood.

In another sign that sectarian tensions are spreading, some Christian groups have demanded that the next Governor of Lagos - the country's commercial capital and the city least prone to religious conflict - be a Christian.

For now, Campbell says, Boko Haram has the wind in its sails, after a series of devastating attacks in recent months that have humiliated the government and military. The abduction of the schoolgirls has brought it international notoriety and attention.

Far from seizing the opportunity to outline demands for greater autonomy and resources for northern Nigeria, Boko Haram seems set on two goals: the destruction of the Nigerian state and what it -- and it alone -- sees as creating God's Kingdom on Earth.

Search for Missing Malaysia Airlines Plane Resumes

SYDNEY, Australia — The deep-sea underwater search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 resumed overnight with a remote-controlled submersible scouring the seabed in an area where searchers still believe they detected acoustic signals from the jet’s flight data recorders.

The Chinese survey ship Zhu Kezhen will also begin mapping the ocean floor ahead of commercial operators that will use towed side-scan sonar equipment when they join the search to try to locate debris from the missing jet.

The Boeing 777 veered off course on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8 with 239 people onboard. No trace of the jet has been found, despite a surface search that lasted almost two months before the authorities changed course, reviewing all their data and beginning a more arduous search of the seafloor in an area more than 500 miles off the northwest coast of Australia.

The search coordinator, Angus Houston, said he was confident the best information on the whereabouts of the plane remained the seven pings, or electronic handshakes, transmitted before the jet disappeared from radar screens. The global satellite communications company Inmarsat said it would soon publish a full record of the communications received from the plane the day it disappeared.

“The work that has been done by the satellite subgroup, the analysis of the pings, the manual handshakes between aircraft and satellite and ground station, I think all of that is very relevant to finding the right areas to be searching in,” Mr. Houston said in a televised interview. He said he was absolutely certain “that the aircraft turned left out of the Malacca Strait and that we are looking in the right broad area — the area defined by the arc created from the seventh ping.”

The remote-controlled submersible, the Bluefin-21, had searched what was believed to be the likely crash zone, covering about 150 square miles of the ocean floor at depths of close to 14,800 feet, when searchers were forced to bring it to the surface because of equipment failure. That search centered around an area where the Australian naval vessel Ocean Shield had detected two sets of acoustic pings, on April 5 and 8, thought to have come from the aircraft’s black boxes before the batteries in the data recorders expired.

“Over the next week, Bluefin-21 will search the remaining areas in the vicinity of the acoustic signals detected in early April by the towed pinger locator deployed from Ocean Shield that are within its depth operating limits,” the agency said in a statement. “This continues the process that will ultimately enable the search team to discount or confirm the area of the acoustic signals as the final resting place” of the flight.

The agency said Australia’s defense force and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau were working with Chinese units to conduct the deepwater survey. The Chinese ship Haixun 01 would return to the search zone to transport survey data back to port at Fremantle, in the state of Western Australia, where it would be processed.

Mr. Houston said it was imperative that Australia “be involved to the maximum extent possible to try and find the aircraft,” adding later that there would be “some sharing of the burden associated with those costs.”

“But the focus must be on continuing the search and doing the oceanographic survey, the bathymetric survey, to enable the deepwater search along the defined search area,” he said. “There is still a long way to go in the search.”

Reported By :- NYTimes

Online Retailer Flipkart Acquires Myntra

BANGALORE -- India's largest online retailer, Flipkart Internet Pvt., agreed to acquire online clothing seller Myntra Designs Pvt. for an undisclosed amount, in a deal that would give Flipkart control of roughly half of India's e-commerce market by sales.

The companies didn't disclose the terms of the deal.

Flipkart said Myntra's chief executive, Mukesh Bansal, will head the combined company's fashion division and have a seat on the company's board

Moto E review: The best gateway to Android for beginners

It’s easy to see why the Motorola Moto E is creating such a frenzy in the smartphone world. Finally, a tier-I brand has managed to offer uncompromised specifications that don’t ruin the Android experience. Moreover, you also get the latest version of Android and the promise of good after sales support. Motorola has done what Samsung, HTC, LG and Sony couldn’t – make Android likable for a beginner.

Design and Build

Although the Moto E bears a striking resemblance to the Moto G, the differences are noticeable once you start using it. The E feels extremely sturdy and well put together. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it the best built phone in its price bracket. The rubber-clad back cover offers nice grip and gives the phone a premium look.

Sturdy build and very good finish

You can swap out the back panel on your phone for other colours, should you choose to customise it. The cover is a bit of a pain to remove though. Underneath, you’ll find the two SIM slots and microSD card slot.

The battery is non removable

The 4.3-inch qHD display offers very good colours and viewing angles, making it ideal for gaming or catching up on a movie while travelling. The panel is not so good under direct sunlight however as it tends to wash out and the grid of touch spots is clearly visible. You even get a water resistant coating for the entire body and Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3.

The bundle of the Moto E

The chrome strip at the bottom is the mouthpiece and the loudspeaker. The bundle includes a headset, charger and some reading material. There’s no USB data cable strangely, just like the Moto G.

Features

What makes the Moto E so appealing is that it runs on stock Android KitKat 4.4.2 with some minor touches from Motorola’s end. The interface is smooth with barely any visible lag in the animations and multi-tasking. You get the usual suite of Motorola apps like Moto Assist and Migrate along with a new app called Alert. The latter lets you send out an emergency message to designated contacts in time or peril. You can also share your location with said contacts so your friends and family know where you are.

The new Alert app comes in pretty handy

The snappy performance is all thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 dual-core SoC onboard and the 1GB of RAM. The latter makes all the difference as it allows more free memory for apps and also guarantees easily migration to future versions of Android.

Some benchmark performance

We tried a bunch of graphically intensive games like Rayman: Jungle Run and Riptide GP and they all ran flawlessly, without any skip in framerate.

The loud speaker offers high volume levels

You’ll be happy to know that the Moto E also supports 64GB cards just fine. We tried this with a Sandisk Extreme SDXC card and it worked just fine. For audio, you get the same enhancements we’ve seen in the G and the X. The loudspeaker is surprisingly loud for a mono speaker and offers pretty good clarity too.

64GB cards works just fine

The phone might not support Full HD video recording but 1080p MP4 files playback just fine.

Connectivity

The Motorola Moto E is a quad-band GSM and 3G handset. You also get Wi-Fi ‘n’, Bluetooth v4.0, USB 2.0, GSP and GLONASS. USB OTG is not present however which means you cannot plug in a pen drive to transfer files on the move. The phone does support Miracast though, which lets you mirror your phones content onto a compatible TV.

Camera

The 5MP snapper is probably the only real let down on the Moto E. We guess Motorola couldn’t have added auto-focus as that would have made the Moto E seem like a much better prospect than the Moto G. As long as you’re not too close to the subject, the pictures are passable and more than adequate for social media sharing. The good thing is that the sensor manages to capture almost accurate colours. The sensor is actually a lot better than most 8MP snapper from local brands in this segment. Video recording is also good even though it maxes out at 480p.

Captures colours pretty well

Another example of good colour capture

Battery life

The 1980mAh battery will easily give you a full day’s worth of usage. This is with a mix of calls, music, gaming and surfing the web over Wi-Fi. The standby time is pretty amazing as well since the battery barely drops even after hours of inactivity.

Verdict and Price in India

At a crazy price of under Rs 7,000, you can see why the Moto E has been a mega hit. Apart from being a handset from a reputed OEM, with extensive after sales support, you don’t feel short-changed when it comes to the features and performance. If you’re going to diss the Moto E because of its sub-par camera and the fact that it doesn’t have a front-facing one, then you’re missing the point.

The Moto E was designed to be beginner’s smartphone and for that, it does its job brilliantly. If you want a better camera or faster CPU, then you have the Moto G for that. Motorola has cleverly chalked out the specifications for the Moto E so it doesn’t eat into the sales of the Moto G, thereby justifying the price gap.

We’ve had great fun reviewing the Moto E, which is saying a lot considering it’s a no-frills smartphone. If we have to nit-pick, then we would say that the buttons couldn’t have used slightly better tactile feedback and perhaps a 3MP auto-focus camera would have been better than the 5MP fixed-focus.

If you are a first time smartphone user or wish to introduce someone to the world of Android, then the Moto E should be your only choice under Rs 10,000.

Top 10 Economic Challenges for Modi's New Government

Narendra Modi is all set to be the next prime minister of India and the BJP is headed for the country's most resounding victory in 30 years. Mr Modi has promised to unblock stalled investments in power, road and rail projects to revive economic growth that has fallen to a decade low of below 5 per cent.

Here are 10 economic challenges that Mr Modi faces:

• Goods and Services Tax (GST): India's most ambitious indirect tax reform would replace existing state and central levies with a uniform tax, boosting revenue collection while cutting business transaction costs. GST, which could boost India's economy by up to two percentage points, has so far faced resistance from various states, including those governed by the BJP who fear a loss of their fiscal powers. The BJP aims to address state concerns and implement GST in an "appropriate timeframe". The Congress party would back the reform in opposition, a senior party member told Reuters earlier this month. The reform needs broad backing because it requires a change in the constitution.
• Central bank policies: A Reserve Bank of India panel in January proposed key changes including targeting consumer price inflation and making a committee responsible for monetary policy, and not the RBI Governor alone. This would require changes to the RBI Act. The BJP top brass has not spoken widely on the issue, but it will likely be a tough sell for RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan. He has the backing of some global agencies like the International Monetary Fund. Mr Modi's government may also look to eventually separate the debt management function from the RBI, on the grounds that debt management sometimes conflicts with the central bank's monetary policy stance.
• Privatisation: The new government is likely to focus on selling its holdings in state-run firms that could raise much-needed revenues to trim India's ballooning fiscal deficit and boost economic growth. The rising stock market helped New Delhi raise more than $3 billion (Rs. 18,000 crore at 60 rupees per dollar) via stake sales in the fiscal year to March 31 - but that was only a third of the government's original target. The outgoing government announced plans to raise Rs. 56,900 crore through asset sales in 2014-15. This could help achieve a lower fiscal deficit target of 4.1 per cent of GDP. These estimates may be revised by the next government.
• Subsidies: Mr Modi's government needs to examine how it subsidises basic commodities if it is to contain the fiscal deficit and avoid a ratings downgrade. Subsidies cost an estimated 2.2 per cent of India's GDP in 2013-14. The BJP in its manifesto said it will seek greater fiscal discipline without compromising on the availability of funds for development.
• Labour: The BJP wants to reform labour laws to boost job-intensive manufacturing and create as many as 1 crore jobs a year for young Indians entering the workforce. Changing the law would be politically tricky, though, and Mr Modi may seek to encourage competition between India's states to boost job creation.
• Defence: More foreign investment in defence would help India reduce imports, modernise weapons systems and speed up deliveries of hardware it needs for operations and training. India, the world's biggest arms importer, now allows 26 per cent foreign ownership in defence, and proposals to exceed that limit are considered only for state-of-the-art technology. The BJP has said it would allow some greater foreign investment in defence industries.
• Insurance: Attempts to raise the cap on foreign investment in India's $45 billion (Rs. 2.70 lakh crore) insurance sector, to 49 per cent from 26 per cent, have met resistance from employees at state-controlled insurers and their political backers. A BJP leader said in March the party had held talks with Congress to break the deadlock.
• Banking: The next government will need to help state-run lenders battling rising bad loans caused by the slowing economy, rising interest rates and project delays. Stressed loans in India - either bad or restructured - total $100 billion (Rs. 6 lakh crore), or about 10 per cent of all loans. Fitch Ratings expects that ratio to reach 14 per cent by March 2015. Rising bad loans threaten to choke the gradual recovery in Asia's third-largest economy, according to the OECD. The interim budget in February set aside Rs. 11,200 crore to help the sector meet key capital ratios, but analysts say more money is needed.
• Power: A BJP-led government may implement the so-called Gujarat model of distributing electricity that has been widely praised for delivering reliable 24-hour power supplies in the state. Mr Modi provided different power feeds to farmers, households, and companies instead of a uniform feed in his home state.
• Gas pricing: In January, India notified the new gas pricing formula that could double the prices of locally produced gas from April 1, but the poll regulator stopped the government from raising the prices until the elections are over. Reliance Industries and its partners BP and Niko Resources last week issued a notice of arbitration to the government seeking implementation of higher gas prices. The BJP-led government may review the formula on the lines suggested by a senior party leader last year and announce the date of implementation of new prices.