Medical seat sale racket

It is not only Munnabhai in the blockbuster 'Munnabhai MBBS' who lands a medical seat with a proxy writing the entrance exams for him. There are gangs engaged in similar operations and making huge bucks by selling medical and dental seats, Karnataka Police have found.

Medical and dental seats cornered through proxies passing entrance exams are sold for sums ranging from Rs.7.5 million to Rs.9 million, police discovered after busting the racket.
Eleven people belonging to two groups involved in the racket have been arrested, Bangalore's Commissioner of Police B.G. Jyothiprakash Mirji told reporters Monday.
Of the arrested, eight were held for offering medical seats and three for dental seats, he said.
Mirji said the gang members would engage 'qualified and employed' people to write the common entrance test (CET) conducted by the Karnataka government for professional courses (medical, dental and engineering) courses.
The gangs would also engage such people to write similar test conducted for private colleges by COMED-K, a consortium of private medical, dental and engineering colleges.
The proxy 'students' who got the medical and dental seats would surrender them and these seats were sold by the gang as management quota seats for prices ranging from Rs.7.5 million to Rs.9 million, Mirji said.
Police stumbled on the racket on the complaints of a few students who had been promised the management quota seats but did not get them even after paying the amount to gang members.
The students went to police after they were threatened by the gang members when they sought return of the money.
Mirji said most of the students duped were from other states.
He said the arrests took place in Bangalore Saturday. Police seized Rs.2.5 million in cash and demand drafts amounting to Rs.1.25 million from the arrested.
Mirji appealed to students and their wards who had been cheated to provide details to the city police.

Azharuddin's son dies

Former Indian cricket captain Mohammad Azharuddin's son Ayazuddin, died on Friday, five days after being critically injured in a road accident.

Confirming the nes, doctors at the Apollo Hospital in Hyderabad said Ayazuddin had sustained critical injuries after a high-end sports bike he was driving skidded off the road at Puppalguda on Outer Ring Road (ORR) here last Sunday.
Ayazuddin's cousin, Ajmal-ur-Rahman (16) who was riding pillion, succumbed to his injuries while undergoing treatment.
Ayazuddin is the youngest of the two sons of Azharuddin from his first wife Naureen, whom he divorced to marry former actress Sangeeta Bijlani.
In a medical bulletin issued on Thursday evening, Apollo Hospitals (Central Region) CEO Dr K Hari Prasad said, "Brain function tests conducted on Ayazuddin indicate brain dysfunction. And his status remains critical.

2012 Liability For Obama

Barack Obama's road to re-election is lined with lots of boarded-up homes.

Though the high unemployment rate dominates talk in Washington, for many 2012 voters the housing crisis may well be a more powerful manifestation of a sick economy. And, in an unfortunate twist for Obama, the problem is at its worst in many of the battleground states that will be decisive in determining whether he gets another term.
Swing states Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan — they all pulse red-hot on a foreclosure rate "heat map." And by themselves those five add up to 80 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
Mortgage default notices surged nationally last month. One in every 118 homes in Nevada received a foreclosure filing in August, according to the foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac. One in 248 in Arizona. One in 349 in Michigan. One in 376 in Florida. And so on.
A foreclosure's impact is visceral and outsized, rippling far beyond one household.
"Entire neighborhoods see what's going on," says Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton administration official. "The visibility contributes to the psychology of continued economic troubles."
There's the in-your-face eyesore sometimes created by a vacant house next door sprouting weeds on the front lawn.
There's the downward pressure on housing values that can follow for everyone else in the neighborhood.
There's the welling frustration felt by neighboring homeowners who may owe more on their own mortgages than their homes are worth.
Nearly a quarter of all U.S. homeowners with mortgages are now underwater, representing nearly 11 million homes, according to CoreLogic, a real estate research firm.
Again, many of the states with the highest underwater mortgage rates also are political battleground states: In Nevada, 60 percent of homeowners are upside down, according to CoreLogic. Arizona is at 49 percent; Florida, 45 percent; Michigan, 36 percent.

Air Race Crash

A World War II-era fighter plane flown by a veteran Hollywood stunt pilot plunged Friday into the edge of the grandstands during a popular air race, killing three people, injuring more than 50 spectators and creating a horrific scene strewn with smoking debris.

The plane, piloted by 74-year-old Jimmy Leeward, spiraled out of control without warning and appeared to disintegrate upon impact. Bloodied bodies were spread across the area as people tended to the victims and ambulances rushed to the scene.
Authorities were investigating the cause, but an official with the event said there were indications that mechanical problems were to blame.
Maureen Higgins of Alabama, who has been coming to the air races for 16 years, said the pilot was on his third lap of a race when he lost control.
She was sitting about 30 yards from the crash and watched in horror as the man in front of her started bleeding after debris hit him in the head.
"I saw body parts and gore like you wouldn't believe it. I'm talking an arm, a leg," Higgins said "The alive people were missing body parts. I am not kidding you. It was gore. Unbelievable gore."
Among the dead was Leeward, of Ocala, Fla., a veteran airman and movie stunt pilot who named his P-51 Mustang fighter plane the "Galloping Ghost," according to Mike Houghton, president and CEO of Reno Air Races.
Renown Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Kathy Carter confirmed two others died, but did not provide their identities.
Stephanie Kruse, a spokeswoman for the Regional Emergency Medical Service Authority, told The Associated Press that emergency crews took a total of 56 injury victims to three hospitals. She said they also observed a number of people being transported by private vehicle, which they are not including in their count.
Kruse said of the total 56, at the time of transport, 15 were considered in critical condition, 13 were serious condition with potentially life-threatening injuries and 28 were non-serious or non-life-threatening.
"This is a very large incident, probably one of the largest this community has seen in decades," Kruse told The Associated Press. "The community is pulling together to try to deal with the scope of it. The hospitals have certainly geared up and staffed up to deal with it.