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"Allowing further vertical growth of this city will increase the density of human and vehicle population, thereby increasing congestion at ground level. You cannot improve quality of life by increasing congestion, no matter what clever arguments are used to justify it. The only beneficiaries of your decision, Sir, will...
"Mumbai has one-tenth of the minimum per capita open space that a city should have. Like fresh air and water, open spaces are a key requirement for physical and mental health. Protecting open spaces is a constitutional duty of your government, as it is part of our fundamental right to life and liberty. You cannot barte...
One of the signatories, G V Vora said that the move smacked of the government's lack of will to take stringent action against irregularities committed by builders.
"If the government checks builders who misuse FSI, such decisions would not have been taken," he said. Vora said more activists are expected to join the protest.
The activists claimed that unrestrained development of flyovers, foot over bridges and other facilities hasn't done much to improve the quality of life in Mumbai.
"Although traffic flyovers, foot over bridges and other facilities have been built in recent years, the quality of life is deteriorating alarmingly. Footpaths, shop frontages, usable road margins, recreation grounds and the compounds of private buildings are vanishing under the pressure of increasing numbers of people,...
However, a builder speaking to Sunday MiDDAY, on condition of anonymity, said that more FSI was a necessity. "We need more FSI since this will help us accommodate more people. However, everyone has a right to say whatever they want to. It's up to the government to take a note of them."
The CM remained unreachable for comment.
Who would win the 2012 presidential elections if the vote was decided right now by the popularity of the individual candidates on Twitter and Facebook?
Well, perhaps not all that surprisingly, it would be current President Barack Obama, who has over five times as many Twitter followers as all the Republican candidates combined. But what about the opposition?
This isn’t an entirely sound metric, of course. One, because it’s nonsense – elections don’t work this way (thankfully, otherwise Justin Bieber would be King of the World). And two, Obama is the President and has been active (and prolific) on social media since 2007, so he has something of a head start.
But elections are popularity contests, so the standing of the various Republican presidential nominees on Twitter and Facebook might give us a little insight into the most likely challenger to Obama in 2012.
This infographic from Favo.rs takes a look at how the presidential election would look if it was decided by social media.
Hidden gem located in quiet, unique PARADISE MANOR. Community features: mature trees, secure walking paths, tennis courts, and heated pool and spa. Within minutes to the 101 and 51 freeways, PV mall, Kierland, Desert Ridge, and The Scottsdale Quarter. Home is a must see with brand new 18'' tile throughout, new carpet i...
Yes, Gordon has been here before.
And on the first pitch he saw, Gordon, a three-time All-Star, laced an RBI single to center field to bring the Royals within one run of the Blue Jays.
Gordon, who is in the midst of his worst season at the plate as a big leaguer, eventually scored the winning run from first base on Whit Merrifield’s walk-off double.
“We’ve done this many times as a team, so it’s not like this is an unusual situation for us,” Gordon said. “We have confidence until the game is over that we are going to do everything we can to come back and battle our tails off.
Gordon, who is regularly batting ninth in the lineup for the first time in his career, has just three home runs and 13 RBIs, while posting a .189 batting average.
But Gordon is not worried about where he bats in the order, as long as the team wins games.
With the victory, the Royals are .500 (36-36) for the first time since being 7-7 in April. And Gordon, despite his lackluster average, has played a role in the Royals’ resurgence.
Including Friday’ night’s game-winning run, Gordon has now scored 12 runs in his last 15 games and has seven extra-base hits in his last 16 games.
The dust-up between the Kansas City Royals and Chicago White Sox during Wednesday’s game was viewed much differently by the announcers from the two cities. You can hear what they said in this video.
The United Church of Canada helped finance the founding event of a controversial new Jewish organization that challenges mainstream Jewish groups and supports a boycott of Israel.
The United Church’s national office confirmed to the National Post it had donated $900 to the March 2008 conference that led to the creation of Independent Jewish Voices. The contribution, which paid 10% of the event’s costs, was intended to defray travel expenses for the meeting and should not be considered seed money...
Told of the funding arrangement, the Canadian Jewish Congress said it was “shocking, outrageous, shameful and scandalous” that a Christian church had financially backed an event aimed at forming such an organization.
“That a mainstream Christian faith group would provide funding to create an anti-Zionist, and anti-Jewish group is absolutely astounding,” CEO Bernie Farber said.
The donation was provided to help cover the airfare for up to three international speakers attending the Toronto event, the United Church said.
Diana Ralph, co-chair of the IJV and former co-chair of the Alliance, said she solicited the “generous donation” from the United Church via a letter sent ahead of the event. “That conference led to the founding of the Independent Jewish Voices,” she said.
Anti-occupation Jewish groups, “members of Jewish-Muslim, Jewish-Arab and Jewish-Palestinian groups,” and representatives of “potential allies” were invited to attend the 2008 conference, which took place at a Toronto meeting hall and solicited a suggested donation of $50 per attendee, according to the event registrati...
Rev. Vicki Obedkoff of Toronto’s Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church was a panel member at the event and spoke “as one of the church allies,” said Ms. Ralph.
Rev. Obedkoff has long voiced her support of a boycott of Israel, and was a signatory to a 2007 letter crafted by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel urging the Rolling Stones to cancel its performance in “apartheid” Israel.
Also present at the 2008 conference were representatives from the Canadian Arab Federation and the Canadian Union of Public Employees, according to an event news release.
Neither the United Church’s national office nor individual church branches have made donations to the IJV since that 2008 event, according to Ms. Ralph. “We didn’t request any donations after that,” she said.
The United Church came under criticism again this summer during its General Council meeting in Kelowna, B.C., where it considered contentious resolutions to boycott Israeli academics and cultural institutions. The resolutions were strongly supported by the IJV, but were ultimately not adopted by the United Church.
“The case for anti-Israel resolutions is so weak that the anti-Zionist elements within the United Church of Canada are basically forced to purchase it,” said Mr. Farber.
it had donated $900 to the March 2008 conference that led to the creation of Independent Jewish Voices. The contribution, which paid 10% of the event’s costs, was intended to defray travel expenses for the meeting and should not be considered seed money for the alternative Jewish group, a United Church official said.
One thing about the current generation of conservatives: Getting mugged by reality hasn’t changed the way they look at the world. We’ve just come through a calamitous financial collapse — caused by reckless Wall Street gambling and toothless watchdogs — that triggered a Great Recession and doubled the U.S. national deb...
A recent stop in London revealed that this isn’t just a Tea Party phenomenon. There, the new Tory-dominated coalition led by David Cameron looks and sounds like a sprightlier offshoot of House Speaker John Boehner’s troops. Cameron has set out on a forced march for fiscal retrenchment, imposing deep and immediate spend...
Yet the 2010 fourth-quarter economic numbers revealed that the British economy was declining, not growing. The government went from adding jobs to shedding them. And consumer confidence has collapsed since Cameron and his troops started chanting that the country “was broke.” Cameron dismissed the results, declared “war...
In Washington, Boehner’s caucus exhibits the same zealotry. “The American people want us to cut spending,” the GOP speaker repeats, ignoring the vast majority of polls that show Americans care far more about jobs and the economy. We will “cut and grow,” is the new conservative message. Get government out of the way and...
Yet Goldman Sachs projected this month that the deep cuts in domestic programs in the 2010 budget passed by the House could cut our growth rate in half. John McCain’s former economic adviser, Mark Zandi, projected a loss of 700,000 jobs. If the budget cuts cost federal jobs, said Boehner, sounding like a latter-day Mar...
Remarkably, President Obama has once more been absent without leave. In his State of the Union address, he hailed the recovery and turned to deficit reduction. A few weeks later, he said it was time to “live within our means.” He hasn’t drawn a line against short-term cuts, choosing instead to argue for cutting less.
In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the administration assumed that job growth was picking up (remember “Recovery Summer”). The Election Day “shellacking” stemmed largely from the fact that voters didn’t see the jobs and didn’t think the White House had a clear view on how to create them.
The president and Republicans seem to believe that the “confidence” that comes from immediate spending cuts will offset the jobs lost from those cuts as well as offset declining household disposable income, plummeting housing prices and massive household indebtedness.
In Britain and the United States, it is bizarre to hear the same cruel conservative ideas and arguments defining policy while both countries are still struggling to recover from the human catastrophe they caused. And in both, economic reality doesn’t interfere with conservative faith.
In the United States, 25 million people are in need of full-time employment. Housing prices are headed back down; trade deficits are going back up. State and local governments have largely exhausted rainy-day funds and are laying off workers. Businesses are sitting on trillions in cash while waiting for consumer demand...
For the unemployed, time isn’t measured in hours or months. It is measured by savings exhausted, homes lost, dreams crushed, children uneducated, marriages broken. Eight years is a calamity. But the White House and Republicans are arguing only about how much and what to cut, assuming that business needs only confidence...
You have to admire conservative gall. Financial collapse and global economic calamity changes not a word of their mantras. At the depth of the crisis, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, the Ayn Rand devotee and toothless watchdog whose willful lassitude did as much as anyone to allow Wall Street to blow up...
Greenspan didn’t mention that the pre-crisis decade featured declining wages and benefits for most American families, Gilded Age inequality, the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs, unsustainable trade deficits and ruinous financial speculation. But neither Greenspan nor conservatives, nor, tragically, Obama, are about ...
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.
MARVIN IS A 27-year-old accountant. His life and that of his family were turned upside down last week, when members of the Islamic State (Isis) turned up at their home in Mosul, northern Iraq.
This article was originally published on Open Democracy. Donatella Rovera is Senior Crisis Response Adviser at Amnesty International.
Email “Opinion: 'Our children wake up crying in the night... Isis has stolen our lives'”.
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RIVERSIDE (INT) - A study led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside has found that utility-scale solar energy development can have a detrimental impact on the environment.
The team found that big solar is far from transmission and demand loads, too close to protected areas, and is a driver of land-use and loan-cover change in California (the study focused on California).
Almost 30 percent of all installations were in croplands and pastures, the study reports.
We are seeing landowners, particularly in the Central Valley, shift from harvesting crops to harvesting the sun, says Rebecca Hernandez, the lead researcher.
Pity the poor shiny gadgets, with their elegant curves and perky little icons.
Designed to be the epitome of elegance, they emerge from their packaging in a state of gleaming perfection, full of marvellous potential.
Sadly it's all downhill from there, from the first moment grubby fingers paw at them, leaving greasy fingerprints on their hitherto pristine surfaces.
The best a mobile phone can hope for is to be shoved in a pocket and scratched with keys and coins, while laptops must resign themselves to being slowly filled with crumbs as their unthinking users munch unpleasantly-odoured snack foods while tapping away at the keyboard.
But for some, alas, a greater indignity is in store. In a survey out this week, one in three people admit to making a 'stall-call' - that is, using their mobile phone on the toilet. Apparently such behaviour is now so common it is just about acceptable these days - after all, sometimes when nature calls, so does the bo...
To top it off, one in 20 of those quizzed say they have taken their laptop into the smallest room to surf the web, presumably while searching the internet for 'laxatives'. Considering that some people are somewhat reluctant to confess to their own dirty habits when asked about them, expect the number of loo surfers to ...
A mind-boggling eight per cent also admitted to cleaning their teeth while on the loo, and the same percentage said they ate or drank there too.
Yuck. The Round-Up wants to go and wash its hands just for typing that sentence (unlike the one in 10 in the survey who also said they 'sometimes', 'occasionally' or 'never' washed their hands after visiting the loo). Yuck again.
John Nuttall, managing director of the Co-operative Pharmacy, which conducted the survey, warned that the new trend of using smartphones in addition to laptops on the toilet "is inadvertently raising the risk of the spread of infections, which affect hundreds of thousands of people".
The Round-Up has often seen people heading to the loo, newspaper in hand (nearly half of the people surveyed admitted to this) but has never seen anyone heading to the conveniences with their laptop tucked nonchalantly under their arm, nor heard a giveaway tap-tap-tap coming from any of the stalls.
Then again, silicon.com has written before about broadband companies laying cables in the sewers, so perhaps there's plenty of bandwidth to be had in toilet cubicles these days.
Just in case the preceding item hadn't already proved this, we're turning into a nation of multitaskers.
We are spending almost half of our waking hours watching TV, using mobiles and updating Facebook and Twitter. No wonder we have to update blogs from the bog - it's the only way to cram all that media consumption in.
We're sending four times as many texts per day than in 2004, spending almost a quarter of our time on the internet on social networking sites and spending three hours and 45 minutes per day watching TV.
And as for that multitasking, we're doing the impossible and cramming eight hours and 48 minutes of consumption into just over seven hours during the average day, according to figures from Ofcom.
Inevitably it's the kids that are leading the way. Among 16 to 24 year olds, almost a third of their media activity is simultaneous - that is, tweeting while Facebooking, listening to Spotify and fragging buddies on Xbox live.
That's compared to just over one eighth for people aged over 55 who manage simultaneous media consumption (and for whom most of the previous sentence was largely incomprehensible anyway).
Surfing the internet via mobile phones is the fastest growing mobile media activity, with Facebook the most popular mobile internet site. And of course at this juncture the Round-Up feels obliged to point out that silicon.com is of course on Twitter, Facebook, and (for the suits) LinkedIn. None of which will be updated...
And finally this week - do you know what bugs you are spreading? The Round-Up is not referring here to the 10 per cent mentioned above who don't bother washing their hands, but to the lazy PC owners that don't bother to install basic antivirus on their devices. Although, quite possibly, they're the same people.
silicon.com's editor has whipped up a storm by arguing against zombie PCs and their zombie owners: PCs enslaved by botnets and the owners too lazy to fix the problem.
The argument goes - just as nasty diseases lead to public inoculation programmes, we've now reached the point where antivirus and basic firewalls should be mandatory on all PCs connected to the internet in order to stop the constant flow of virus infections. That seems like a sensible idea (although if you disagree fee...
But the Round-Up - never one to choose the sensible option if given another choice - would like to suggest it's a problem of terminology, not technology. Giving all these internet nasties menacing names like 'virus' and 'botnet' is giving the virus-writing industry a veneer of cool which it doesn't deserve. An 'interwe...
If you think of new names describing what viruses, botnets and all the rest do, but at the same time render them ridiculous, let us know.
In other news this week: whether you love it or hate it, Internet Explorer has been with us 15 years. Take a nostalgic (or rage-filled) journey down memory lane with the photo story here.
And find out how the Naked CIO is facing up to the ghosts of disastrous IT projects past in order to build a rosy future for the tech department.
And as ever, check out the excellent links below - enough entertainment to keep you going until 5.30pm at least.
Rob Kent missed out on the mayoralty, but was re-elected to the Rotorua Lakes Council.
Accusations of election sabotage have been rubbished by re-elected Rotorua district councillor and mayoral candidate Rob Kent.
Mr Kent was third in the race for the Rotorua mayoralty behind mayor Steve Chadwick and Rotorua District Residents and Ratepayers group candidate Dr Reynold Macpherson, but was re-elected to the Rotorua Lakes Council.
He said this would be his last term on council and he would not be running for mayor or council again.
Before the election Mr Kent also stated he could not work with Mrs Chadwick as mayor and would step down if she won the election.
Dr Macpherson said his mayoral challenge was "sabotaged" by Mr Kent after the ratepayer group selected him to be its candidate for the election.
Mr Kent promptly left the group and announced he would run as an independent candidate.
Dr Macpherson said Mr Kent would have been deputy mayor if he had won the mayoral race.
"It was outright sabotage," Dr Macpherson said.
"Steve Chadwick retained the mayoralty with 7880 votes - I polled 5652 votes, slashing her majority from 6841 to 2228.
"Rob Kent only attracted 3006 votes, and Mark Gould 1618, but enough to split the anti-Chadwick vote and hand her another three years in office.
"Had Kent honoured his agreement with RDRR members over endorsement, he would now be facing deputy mayor," Dr Macpherson said.
But, Mr Kent said Dr Macpherson was making assumptions that his 3006 votes would have gone to him if he had not stood for mayor.
"But, sorry 3000 people said they didn't want to vote for him or for Steve, that's just statistical nonsense.
"The sad thing is Reynold didn't take advice and didn't run for council as well and I think he would have got onto council, would have been a good councillor and may have tipped the balance, but it's all conjecture.

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