The offer was for the post of India’s finance minister and came from no less than the prime minister himself.
Convalescing from a heart bypass surgery and advised not to take up any strenuous job, he was given just 12 hours to make up his mind.
The candidate was Manmohan Singh and the offer came from then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao.
Abu Dhabi, March 23: Food lovers in Dubai are up in arms after reports that dishes such as coq au vin and rum-laced tiramisu could be banned from hotels.
Authorities plan to step up the enforcement of a 2003 law prohibiting restaurants from using alcohol in food preparation, according to local media reports.
Inspectors are said to be hunting for illegal alcohol inside sauces, soups and desserts.
The Dubai Municipality sent out a circular to hotel managers “strictly enforcing the ban on use of alcohol in food items and their sale,” an official told The Khaleej Times.
London, March 22: Was earlier handed a suspended prison sentence after she was caught breaching a four-year Asbo, banning her from having loud sex sessions
Nightmare neighbour, Caroline Cartwright, who was given a sex Asbo to prevent noisy sessions has been arrested after failing to keep the lid on her love-making.
Cartwright avoided jail in January when a judge at Newcastle Crown Court handed her a suspended prison sentence after she was caught breaching a four-year Asbo, banning her from having loud sex sessions.
Mumbai,March 20:What would be only a dream for some 29 year olds, all over the world, has become a part of real life in actress Kareena Kapoor’s life. This actress has been declared the highest tax payers in the bollywood list of actresses, for the year 2009-2010!
The fact that Kareena has been endorsing products ranging from household items to clothing to electronic items to paints, to God knows what, has finally shown what her true worth is.
Patna ,March 20:TRUST Lalu Prasad to turn any situation to his advantage. The Rashtriya Janata Dal president had no qualms in making the most of a dais meant for his political rival, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, on Thursday.
Lalu grabbed the stage — and attention — that had actually been set for Nitish to address a congregation of Muslims in Muzaffarpur district.
Accompanied by his trusted lieutenants, Lalu arrived unannounced at the dargah of the famous Sufi saint Hazrat Teg Ali Quadari. The occasion was the annual urs in the sleepy hamlet of Sherkahisharief.
London, March 20: In a gory incident, a Chinese man has allegedly killed an 11-year-old boy and ate his brain to cure his epilepsy, a media report said.
Wang Chaoxu of Qixian village in Yunnan, south west China, killed the boy, Li Xuetang, who was found buried three miles away in a grain field in a neighbouring village, with the top of his head peeled back and part of his brain removed, the Sun quoted police as saying.
Wang, who was arrested following an eyewitness account, told cops he believed an old wives’ tale that eating the brain with earthworms and ants would cure his fits.
New Delhi, March 18: Like most six-year-olds, she demands her daily dose of cartoon time on television and loves the capers of Mr. Bean, but what sets her apart from kids of her age is her determination to help others.
Six-year-old Sarjana, a class I student, has been raising money for those left homeless by Aila, the cyclone that hit West Bengal in May 2009.
Disturbed by images of devastation caused by the cyclone and eager to help, Sarjana has been singing and dancing on railway platforms to collect money from passers-by.
New York, March 18: US cable giant Time Warner was left red faced after accidentally airing pornography on two television channels meant for children.
The company’s officials had to apologize for the blunder which they attributed to “equipment failure” after airing Playboy Channel previews on the Kids on Demand and Kids Pre-School on Demand channels, reported New York Daily News.
New Delhi, March 18: Is he an alcoholic? Is she a party animal? Was she dating anyone before? These questions typically bother the parents of prospective Indian brides and grooms, especially those who use matrimonial websites. And for answers they tap detective agencies.
“We have been offering investigation services for prospective spouses for 10 years, but there has been a considerable spurt in the number of applications over the years,” says Jitendra Satpute, deputy general manager, TRIPL (TOPSGRUP Risk Intelligence Private Limited).
London, March 18: Though humans wouldn’t miss a chance to swim with dolphins, the aquatic mammals don’t return the sentiment.
British experts have found that dolphins suffer at the hands of tourists eager to dive in alongside them, reports.
A study of the bottlenose species living off the coast of Zanzibar found the animals were experiencing “incredible” stress from packed pleasure boats.
Bangalore,March 17 :A guard at ISRO’s Indian Deep Space Network facility in Byalalu near Bangalore claimed on Tuesday that two gunmen opened fire at him, fuelling fears of a terror attack. But the police suspect the guard was hallucinating and cooked up the “ firing”. The Central Industrial Security Force ( CISF) constable, Jadhav Bhagwan, claimed he fired back, forcing the attackers to flee.
New Delhi, March 17: This is one world No. 1 tag that ’emerging India’ would love to shed. Indians comprised 58% of all people across the world who regularly defecated in the open in 2008.
That’s more than half the Indian population (54%), a WHO-UNICEF report said. While 18% of urban India indulged in the practice, the percentage was as high as 69% in rural parts of the country.
Dubai, March 16: A British pair caught kissing in public in Dubai face up to a month in jail in the Gulf Arab emirate for indecency after an Emirati mother complained her child had seen their indiscretion.
The pair, a British man living in Dubai and a female friend, were arrested in November on accusations of kissing and touching each other intimately in public and consuming alcohol, their lawyer said. They were ordered jailed for a month.
New delhi,March 15 :Lalu Prasad as a Railway Minister used railway saloon during journeys in his tenure unlike Mamata Banerjee who has so far not availed the facility.
Lalu had availed the saloon facility 369 times in five years, mostly during the journeys to his home state Bihar.
Besides using it more than a dozen times to travel to Patna from Delhi, Lalu also used the customised saloon for travelling to places like Puri, Jammu, Chhapra, Udaipur, Gorakhpur, Saharsa, Bhabua Road, Ajmer, Gaya, Ludhiana, Varanasi from the capital.
London, March 14: The normal person’s sex life ends by the age of 70, according to an account available today in the British Medical Journal. Males of the age of 30 years have an average of 35 years of sexually energetic life remaining, corresponding to 31 years for women, researchers at the University of Chicago’s department of obstetrics and gynecology projected after analyzing an inspection of 3,000 people.
Paris, March 13 :PRINCESS Diana died after attempts to frighten her into dumping Dodi al Fayed and ending her anti- establishment activities went horribly wrong, a leading lawyer has claimed.
Michael Mansfield claimed he was sure Diana’s “ killers” had no intention of ending her life in a Paris tunnel in August 1997 and simply wanted to scare her.But he claimed the operation to torpedo her relationship with Dodi, and silence her planned criticism of the British government over foreign arms sales, backfired spectacularly.
Patna, March 12: SHARDA Devi’s family was distraught when the woman was declared dead by doctors at a top Bihar hospital.
But their grief turned to shock when the 45- yearold woman “ came back alive” at her funeral pyre minutes before she was to be cremated.
While her family was happy to term it “ God’s miracle”, this was more a case of sheer apathy by negligent doctors at the hospital, whose almost indecent haste to declare the woman dead without proper tests paints a sorry picture of hospitals in the state.
Sharda was a resident of Daniyawan, about 40 km from Patna.
New Delhi, March 12: Normalcy returned to the Lok Sabha on Thursday after three days of acrimony that sent Rs 3.2 crore of public money down the drain.
In a bid to clear the confusion that the Bill, party president Sonia Gandhi hosted a dinner on Thursday night. This was the first time spouses were also invited. Some partymen saw it as a bid to reinforce her bonhomie with the MPs at a time when the Yadavs and some BJP leaders were covertly inciting a revolt against the Bill.
Washington, March 12: 911 Emergency Service operators are used to getting calls from terrified people. But when operator Monique Patino in Norwalk, California, received a call from a panic-stricken 7-year-old boy whose family was being attacked by three armed robbers it was the start of an “unbearable” ordeal for her.
This is a transcript of the 911 call by the boy, identified only as Carlos, released by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department:
Carlos: Can you come really fast? Please, please!
Operator: Can you tell me what happened?
Paris, March 12 :They always seemed a rather mismatched couple. But now it appears that 5ft- 5in Nicolas Sarkozy and his supermodel wife Carla Bruni may have found something in common. They are, if the rumour mill is to be believed, both having affairs.
The 55- year- old French president is said to be romancing his 40- year- old ecology minister, who is alaso a karate champion. Bruni, 43, is rumoured to be involved with a pop star six years her junior.
New delhi,March 12 :Wedding photos of Anoop Kumar Sahai, the Ghaziabad godman who is on the run after the police turned the heat on him, has given a new twist to his tale.Sahai, alias Swami ji , is alleged to have kidnapped a 25- year- old MBA student from Ghaziabad.
But on Wednesday, the Greater Noida police found wedding photos of the 40- year- old Sahai with Priyanka Srivastava, who was allegedly kidnapped by him.Sahai is already married and has a seven- year- old daughter. His wife and daughter live in Gorakhpur.
New Delhi, March 10: More than 14500 have applied and send their bio datas to get married to Rahul mahajan who is son of a major political force in BJP.Having watched Rahul Mahajan on Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega, you’ve probably wondered how any self-respecting woman would want to commit to a man who ideally should be committed himself… to an asylum, preferably. For Rahul doesn’t come with a squeaky clean reputation: he talks to aliens, was allegedly a wife beater and was found in a bathtub, after an alleged drug overdose.
Kabul, March 09: For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a “city of 80,000 people” as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand.
That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marjah was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centers in Helmand.
New Delhi,March 09: The guru, who allegedly abducted an MBA graduate to forcibly marry her, is a member of the ministry of labour and employment’s central advisory committee.
The police on Monday issued look- out notices against Anup Kumar Sahai alias Swamiji, 40. The godman — who is married and has a seven- year- old daughter — had allegedly abducted 25- year- old Priyanka Srivastava from Raj Nagar in Ghaziabad on February 15.
Seoul, March 08: In South Korea, where people often remove their shoes before entering homes, restaurants or funeral parlours, it is a nagging problem: people walking off with others’ shoes, either by mistake or, sometimes, intentionally.
Still, Detective Kim Jeong-gu’s jaw dropped recently when he opened the warehouse of an ex-convict in Seoul and found 170 apple boxes packed with 1,700 pairs of expensive designer shoes, sorted by size and brand, and all believed to have been stolen.
“Shoe theft is not unusual here,” Detective Kim, 28, said. “But we gasped at this one.”