51% of the world is female; ok guys do the math ... you have less than a 50/50 shot at having a son!!!

Gender selection

Reshma Bano wails as she holds the body of her 3-month-old daughter Neha Afreen outside a hospital morgue in Bangalore, India, April 11. Afreen was admitted to the hospital on April 8 after being battered by her father for being born a girl. Police said the father confessed to the crime and was in custody, according to media reports.

US Coal Exports to China & India => you can feel it

Although the government's message about squeezing coal out of U.S. electricity production is loud and clear, coal producers will be able to ship their product abroad.

Even now, Congress is hinting at banning U.S. natural gas exports. They want to keep prices as low as possible for as long as they can — and that means limiting future LNG shipments.

Those Countries with a Natural Gas advantage WIN!!!

Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA)’s $1.6 billion bid for Cove Energy Plc (COV) starts a race to develop natural-gas fields off Mozambique’s Indian Ocean coast that may hold more gas than Norway’s entire reserves.

Winning Cove would give Shell an 8.5 percent stake in a block where Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC) has found 30 trillion cubic feet of gas. Italy’s Eni SpA (ENI) has discovered even more in a neighboring area. Together, there’s sufficient fuel for the development of two $20 billion liquefied natural gas plants to supply customers in Asia, according to Deutsche Bank AG.

“We’re a natural partner in that project,” Shell Chief Executive Officer Peter Voser said in an interview in The Hague yesterday. “We are the global leader in LNG, so this is an interesting province for us to actually further grow.”

East Africa’s fields offer a fresh source of gas supply for China and India, the world’s fastest-growing major economies. Demand for LNG in Asia is rising at almost 20 percent a year, outstripping the pace of production growth, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Prices in the region reached a record in November.
Shell won’t be the last company looking for a way into Mozambique. India’s Oil & Natural Gas (ONGC) Corp. was among Asian producers considering a bid for Cove and a counter-offer remains possible. At the same time, Eni and Anadarko have both said they’re willing to sell stakes in their discoveries.

India's Reliance in emerging financial fraud case....

A legal battle in London has revealed that a conglomerate controlled by Anil Ambani, the Indian telecoms tycoon, used a Mauritius-based fund to make covert investments in one of its own companies, triggering calls in India for a full investigation.


UK regulators have found that Mr Ambani’s Reliance Group, spanning interests from financial services to infrastructure, invested $250m in the offshore fund that in 2007 bought securities linked to one of the companies within the group, in violation of Indian law.

The complex chain of investments, long the subject of media speculation in India, is now at the centre of a disciplinary action brought by the UK’s Financial Services Authority against the former private bankers at UBS who set up the investment fund.

The long-running case has already established serious compliance failings at UBS, the Swiss bank whose flagship wealth management arm competes fiercely for the business of billionaires such as Mr Ambani. The bank paid an £8m fine in 2009 for control weaknesses on its “Asia II” private banking desk based in London, which dealt with “mega clients” such as Mr Ambani and several other Indian tycoons.

So far, only Mr Ambani’s group has been publicly identified as using this structure. But one Indian investor with knowledge of the vehicle claimed that as many as 25 Indian businessmen had used similar funds.

India can show the USA how to roll out cost effective solar power that is just a few sunrises away from competing with the price of coal fired power!

India, the world’s third-largest energy consumer, is cutting solar-power costs to a record by forcing project developers into auctions, helping avoid the spiraling renewable-energy subsidies that have hurt Europe.



The lowest bid in India’s latest national auction on Dec. 2 came from Solairedirect SA, France’s second-largest producer, which offered to sell photovoltaic electricity at 7,490 rupees ($147) a megawatt-hour. That’s 38 percent below the average price set in a December 2010 auction and about 30 percent cheaper than the global average for solar projects.



Governments in Europe including Germany and Spain, the world’s largest solar-panel markets, this year cut above-market rates paid to all plant operators that led to ballooning costs amid an escalating debt crisis. India is staying ahead in driving down costs by forcing companies to compete on price.


“Astonishingly competitive pricing in the latest auction,” Anand Mahindra, managing director of Mahindra Group, whose solar unit won two of the 28 contracts awarded for the solar plants, said in a Twitter feed that was confirmed by his spokeswoman Roma Balwani. “The sun appears to be shining on India’s solar power program.”


Globally, power project developers on average demand to be paid $208 per megawatt-hour to build a solar plant, $78 for a wind farm and $76 for a coal plant, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance levelized cost of energy analysis.




The auction’s results for $700 million of projects shows the price of solar power in India is closing in on the cost of coal-fired generation faster than expected as photovoltaic equipment costs plunge, said Mohit Anand, senior consultant at Bridge to India Pvt., a New Delhi-based advisory firm.

A Financially Inclusive World...you may call us dreamers but we're not the only ones....come and join us!!!

Letter from the CEO of ACCION:


Fifty years ago this year, ACCION was founded on the belief that we can create a better world by helping people to help themselves. Half a century later, we continue to fulfill this mission by providing high-quality, affordable financial services with dignity to those who need it most – those living in poverty.



Our vision is to build a financially inclusive world with access to economic opportunity for all. Over the last year, your support has enabled us to advance our mission and vision in many ways, including the provision of loans and other key financial services to millions.


Despite this progress, more than 2.7 billion people remain excluded from the world’s financial systems and the opportunity such access can create. With your support we can continue to bridge this gap, bringing life-changing microfinance services to the poor.

This year, ACCION made significant progress in all three of our strategic focus areas.


First, we are building the next generation of top-tier microfinance institutions – enabling these institutions to deliver a range of high-quality, affordable financial services. Highlights include:

• Inaugurating ACCION Microfinanças in Brazil, in June – a new MFI in the heart of the Amazon, where half of the region’s 14 million inhabitants live in poverty.

• Creating microfinance services for rural clients in Latin America through a grant from the Inter-American Development Bank. Over 130,000 clients in Peru, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Colombia and Ecuador have already been reached with rural credit products. Micro-savings programs that help clients recover from natural disasters and other unexpected events have been rolled out in Peru, Colombia and the Dominican Republic.
• Building and strengthening EB-ACCION Microfinance, a new microfinance institution in Cameroon, where more than 65 percent of the actively employed population lacks access to any form of secure, financial services.

• Providing secure savings accounts for more than 250,000 low-income people served by our partners in Tanzania, Nigeria and Cameroon, and proudly recognizing the achievement of both ACCION Microfinance Bank (AMfB) in Nigeria as ‘Microfinance Bank of the Year,' and EB-ACCION Savings and Loans in Ghana as African Banker’s ‘Microfinance Institution/Project of the Year 2011.’

• Strengthening our pioneering microfinance work in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, China through partnership with the International Finance Corporation.

• Redoubling our commitment to the future of Indian microfinance, through equity investments and guarantees for our Mumbai- and Bihar-based partners, Swadhaar and Saija.

• Increasing opportunity here at home by working ever more closely with the ACCION U.S. Network – the largest microlending network in the country. Since inception, the Network has extended more than $300 million in small, working-capital loans.

• Continuing to explore un-served and underserved countries and regions of the world, such as Kenya, the Philippines, Pakistan and beyond, where our management, investment and governance skills can help foster financial inclusion.

Second, we are fueling innovation in financial inclusion, providing funding and technical assistance to promising start-ups and sustainable technologies beyond MFIs that serve people at the bottom of the pyramid:

• ACCION’s Frontier Investments Group continued to invest in ground-breaking financial services this year, such as mobile payments in Zambia, cashless payments in Peru, and a new technology services company in India staffed by people with disabilities.

• We are developing plans for the launch of a new venture capital fund that will provide patient capital to very small start-ups whose experimental but promising business models could catalyze the next leap in financial inclusion.

Third, we are proud to report that your support is helping us to build a strong microfinance industry with the highest possible standards:

• Through the Smart Campaign, ACCION’s Center for Financial Inclusion is helping to direct the industry’s first-ever, global consumer-protection initiative. With over 2,400 signatories serving more than 40 million clients in 130 countries, the Campaign is helping to ensure quality delivery of services, worldwide.

• We are helping to build industry capacity at training centers in India, Ghana and China, and in the last three years have taught more than 3,000 industry professionals new skills for delivering high-quality services.

• We continue to publish leading-edge, thought-provoking research on the industry, such as the recent reports on the state of client protection, and ‘opportunities and obstacles’ to financial inclusion.

• And we are expanding our collaboration with other industry leaders, including the ACCION Network of partners in Latin America and a working group of microfinance organization CEOs, on a common agenda to address key industry challenges. Our goal is to redouble the industry’s commitment to consumer protection, pricing transparency and meaningful measurement of social impact.

ACCION’s work has helped the microfinance industry to grow by orders of magnitude – from reaching tens of thousands of the world’s poor a few decades ago, to approximately 200 million today. Yet we know that much more remains to be done. That is why we are asking you for your continued support for our work around the globe.

As we look ahead to our next 50 years, we renew our pledge to build a truly financially inclusive world, where all of society can benefit from all that society offers. Thank you again for your participation. It has already made a difference; together, we can do so much more.

1 step forward; 1 degree warmer; and several billion tonnes of mercury later...

Developing nations led by China and India pledged they’d work toward an agreement that would limit their fossil fuel emissions for the first time, the biggest advance in the fight against global warming in 14 years.



Envoys from more than 190 nations also extended the Kyoto Protocol, the only ratified treaty limiting greenhouse gases. They will develop document with “legal force” by 2015 that would curb pollution for all nations, according to a text adopted today in Durban, South Africa.


The move breaks a division enshrined in the United Nations- led discussions since 1992 that allowed the poorest nations to escape commitments on burning coal and oil while requiring industrial nations to clean up the atmosphere. That rift prevented the U.S. from ratifying Kyoto, which is the heart of the international effort to protect the environment.

“Historic is the word,” Grenadian ambassador Dessima Williams, lead negotiator for a coalition of 42 island nations, said in an interview. “The idea that we got everybody to agree to take some form of legal commitment is a major outcome.”

If Exxon & others paid taxes; we'd have the $2 trillion to put into US infrastructure; and guess what... employment problem solved!!!

The United States is falling dramatically behind much of the world in rebuilding and expanding an overloaded and deteriorating transportation network it needs to remain competitive in the global marketplace, according to a new study by the Urban Land Institute.


Burdened with soaring deficits and with long-term transportation plans stalled in Congress, the United States has fallen behind three emerging economic competitors — Brazil, China and India, the institute said.

“Over the next five to 10 years, public concerns will grow over evident declines in the condition of infrastructure,” the report says. “At some attention-getting point after infrastructure limps along, platforms for reinvesting in America could gain significant traction and public support.”

The report is the latest in a series of studies to conclude that the nation will face dire long-term consequences if major investment in transportation revitalization is postponed.

“Infrastructure should be part of the larger conversation about ‘what do you want government to do and how do you want to pay for it?’ ” said Jay Zukerman of Ernst & Young, which conducted the institute’s study.

The report lends global perspective to an issue addressed last fall by a panel of 80 experts led by former transportation secretaries Norman Y. Mineta and Samuel K. Skinner. That group concluded that as much as $262 billion a year must be spent on U.S. highways, rail networks and air transportation systems.

Congress has failed to approve the two major bills that allow for long-term funding and planning for aviation and transportation. The Federal Aviation Administration has been operating under a funding bill that expired in 2007 and has been extended 18 times. The surface transportation act, which provides the balance of federal transportation funding, expired in 2009 and has been extended seven times.

As Congress debates how much should be spent and where to find the money, China has a plan to spend $1 trillion on high-speed rail, highways and other infrastructure in five years. India is nearing the end of a $500 billion investment phase that has seen major highway improvements, and plans to double that amount by 2017. Brazil plans to spend $900 billion on energy and transportation projects by 2014.

The United States, the institute report concludes, needs to invest $2 trillion to rebuild roads, bridges, water lines, sewage systems and dams that are reaching the end of their planned life cycles.

The report says the desire of Congress to curtail spending will push costs onto “budget-busted” state and local governments. It points to highways and water treatment plants, built with federal funds 40 to 50 years ago, that will become financial burdens to local governments as the time comes for replacement.

“We’re seeing less federal support and less local revenues because of unemployment,” said Maureen McAvey, executive vice president of the institute, a non-profit group that analyzes policies and programs. “Some of the ambitions some growing cities had just a few years about are being cut back or put on hold.”

UAE: Sheikh arrested in India for taking a Child Bride

The Hyderabad Police today arrested a UAE Sheikh for allegdly marrying a 12 year-old girl in vicinity of the Old City. According to the sources a team of Santoshnagar Police headed by Inspector Sudarshan Reddy raided a house in the Moinbagh area in Santoshnagar, and took 47 year old Sheikh Hilal Sayeed Mahammed Hilal an UAE National hailing from Sharjah into custody for allegedly marrying a minor girl who is identified as Sana Sultana.

The sources further told that on a tip-off information the police raided the residence of Sana Sultana but by the time police raided the house UAE shaikh Sayeed Mohammed had got married. The police brought the UAE national to the police station and sent the girl to the Government Maternity Hospital for the Age Determination Test.


The Police further told that after the report of the test a case would be booked against Sayeed. The investigation is on.

UAE Human Trafficking; Sexual Exploitation of Women

Human Rights Watch has praised a decision by the Philippines government that could ban domestic workers to three Gulf countries (UAE, Kuwait, & Qatar) and urged other labour exporting countries to follow suit.


The US-based watchdog said it remained concerned about the treatment of domestic workers in the GCC states and called for other governments to step up measures to better protect their nationals working abroad.

“Treatment of migrant domestic workers is a problem throughout the Gulf… It’s very encouraging that the Philippines would be considering such a move, it is steps like this that are essential in order to improve the situation for domestic workers generally,” Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, told Arabian Business.

“Other labour sending countries should be taking the same kinds of measures or certainly conducting the same kinds of investigations, and having the same kind of vigilance on the ground through the embassies and consulates as the Philippines does,” he added.

The United Arab Emirates [UAE] is one of the biggest destinations for men and women, predominantly from South and Southeast Asia, trafficked for the purposes of labor and commercial-sexual exploitation. Migrant workers, who comprise more than 90 percent of the UAE's private sector workforce, are recruited from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, China, and the Philippines. Women from some of these countries travel willingly to work as domestic servants or administrative staff, but most are subjected to conditions indicative of forced labor, including unlawful withholding of passports, restrictions on movement, non-payment of wages, threats, or physical or sexual abuse.

Legally, once a foreign female domestic worker enters her employer's house, she is totally under his/her control, since the employer is usually her visa sponsor. Even today, United Arab Emirates labour laws do not recognize domestics as part of the labour force. The employer bears total responsibility for his/her domestic workers and has total control over them.

The immigration regulations governing the status of domestic workers and the social practices towards foreign female domestic worker in the United Arab Emirates enslave them to their employers until the duration of their contract ends.

A significant portion of the foreign female workers in UAE as well as in other Arab countries are forced to offer sex to the employer, as well as many of them are even sold to the private brothels or sex rackets by the recruiting agents or pimps.

There must be a sensible balance between Socialism and Capitalism...and its not playing cards!

Each day, about 2,800 workers punch their time-cards in and out of Hindustan Cables Ltd.’s factories in India. They get paid, receive the occasional raise and eat in subsidized canteens, even though they produce nothing.

The state-owned company, based in Kolkata, hasn’t made any cable since 2004 and has lost $549 million after cellular technology made its telephone wiring obsolete. Labor laws which the World Bank says are among the most restrictive anywhere and tortuous bankruptcy procedures, a legacy of India’s Soviet-era plan economy, mean the government can’t fire idle employees or sell assets such as machinery or land.

While tolerance of unprofitable companies sits at odds with India’s status as the world’s second-fastest growing major economy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, rocked by a spate of corruption scandals, may be wary of changing rules that keep many in jobs. About a third of India’s 249 state-owned firms that make everything from condoms to steel are losing money -- $3.4 billion in the most recent financial year -- just as the government misses a goal of raising $8.7 billion this year selling stakes in companies such as Oil & Natural Gas Corp., the nation’s biggest explorer.

“It is utterly crazy and everyone knows it’s crazy but there is nothing the government can do because of the labor laws,” said M. Govinda Rao, one of four members of India’s Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, a panel which produces periodic reports for Singh’s administration. “The government is literally throwing money away.”


Kishore Rungta, chairman and managing director of Hindustan Cables, declined to comment.

UAE Peaceful Protesters for Indian Hunger Striker Arrested!

Social activist and civil society leader Anna Hazare, who is on fast demanding the passing of Jan Lok Pal bill to fight against corruption, has received overwhelming support not only from fellow citizens of the nation, but non-resident Indians who spread across the world as well.

In UAE, where laws pertaining to carrying protest marches without prior permission are strict, at least five Indians were arrested for protesting in support of Anna Hazare, on Saturday August 20 evening.

It has been reported that on Monday August 22 three more Indians were arrested for the Saturday protest.


A group of around 150 people gathered at Al Mamzar beach, brought together through a campaign on Facebook. While the group was marching with slogans, banners and Indian flags in support of Anna Hazare, Dubai police reached the spot and asked only the leaders who initiated the march to stay and the rest of the people to leave the place.


It is learnt from reliable source that a case has been booked against the leaders for illegally organising the march through Facebook without obtaining permission.

Guess who's listening? (But not to your laws...)

The Emirati Telecommunication firm Etisalat is facing a major legal claim by Majestic Infracon Private, the Emerati telecom firms’ partner in Etislat DB, a joint venture into the Indian mobile market.


The firm could be facing $1.6 billion in fines for foreign exchange violations.

Two directors at Etislat DB, Shadhid Usman Balwa and Vinod Goenka, filed the claim.

The Indian press reported that the allegations include that Etisalat didn’t fulfill management obligations. Etisalat has a 44.73 percent share in Etisalat DB.

Balwa and Goenka are both in jail after corruption charges related to bribing officials to obtain licensing for mobile phone networks.

The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). also expressed concerns about the telecom surveillance software Etisalat had used in a Blackberry service it had introduced in the UAE and recommended that the company should not be allowed to offer Blackberry services in India.

India’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) has rejected Etisalat investment proposals on grounds of possibility of “round tripping”. Round tripping refers to routing of investments by a resident of one country through another country back to its own country to evade taxes.

------------IN NIGERIA

Etisalat, one of Nigeria’s Cellular phone service providers has been slammed with a N10 Million law suit for illegally swapping a subscriber’s active number without his consent.
Taiwo Egbon, an Etisalat subscriber claim that he woke up one morning and discovered his Etisalat line which he uses in communicating with family members who frequently sends him money from overseas had been cloned.