Verizon in talks to buy Alltel: Vodafone!!

Britain's Vodafone confirmed on Thursday that US-based Verizon Wireless, in which it has a 45 percent stake, is in advanced talks about buying US rural mobile service provider Alltel Corp.

Verizon Wireless is close to buying Alltel for around $27 billion, including around $23 billion of its debts, a source familiar with the talks told Reuters on Wednesday. See

The deal would mean Verizon Wireless -- which is 55 percent owned by Verizon Communications -- would overtake AT&T as the top US wireless service.

Vodafone and Verizon Comms proportional ownership of Verizon Wireless will not change under an Alltel deal, the source said.

A Verizon deal would value Alltel at eight times its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, compared with its November sale to private equity firms for about nine times EBITDA, the source said.

Some analysts said Verizon could be in a good position to refinance Alltel's debt at a lower interest rate; others said that a deal could also help Verizon create savings from a network and handset perspective.

Verizon's move was a surprise to many analysts as it came only seven months after Alltel was taken private by TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs' GS Capital Partners.

The leveraged buyout saddled Alltel with the debt.

That $27.5 billion deal in November 2007 was the largest ever private equity investment in the US wireless industry, but it closed amid a mounting credit crisis that has curtailed the leveraged buyout boom.

SBI employees call for nationwide strike on June 6!

State Bank officers on Tuesday said they would hold a day-long nationwide strike on June 6, protesting against SBI management's policies on different issues.

Their demands include a review of the existing State Bank pension scheme, recruitment of adequate staff, termination of the contract system and regulated working hours for officers.

"The strike would be observed nationwide. The Government and the Indian Banks Association (IBA), despite having signed an agreement on various issues, have not taken any significant steps to resolve our issues," All India State Bank Officers' Federation's General Secretary, G D Nadaf, told reporters in Mumbai.

Nadaf said SBI management, with its decision to go ahead with the merger proposal of State Bank of Saurashtra, was not taking into account the feelings of employees on the matter.

"Such a merger between State Bank and its associates will lead to a plethora of issues, including termination of jobs in different categories. Any such move (of merger) will definitely be met by nationwide protests from the unions," Nadaf said.

Bank unions had struck work early in 2008 to voice their protests on various critical issues including the merger of state-owned banks and one more option for employees to join in the pension scheme.

Later, bank unions and the Indian Banks' Association had signed an agreement following intervention by the Union Finance Minister, leading to deferral of the two-day nationwide strike called for, just prior to the Budget in February end.

Nadaf charged the IBA with not taking any steps so far to resolve the outstanding issues.

Communist and opposition parties in India are holding nationwide protests against a 10% rise in fuel prices!

The Communist-governed states of West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala are badly hit by a strike called by the parties who say the rise will fuel inflation.

The government says it had no choice because of surging global oil prices.

India imports nearly 75% of its crude oil requirements but subsidises the cost of domestic fuel products to help contain inflation and protect the poor.

India's Congress party-led government faces key state polls this year ahead of general elections due in 2009.

The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder in Delhi says the party is now worried about the political fallout from its latest move.

Total shutdown

Communist parties, which support the government in Delhi, say more expensive fuel will push prices up across the board. Business leaders take a similar view.

In the states of West Bengal and Tripura, where the Communists are in power, there was a total shutdown, the BBC's Subir Bhaumik in Calcutta says.

The Communists as well as the main opposition BJP are also holding protest marches in the capital, Delhi, and other cities across the country.

Calcutta saw shops, markets, schools and colleges closed. All flights to and from Calcutta airport have been rescheduled.

Vehicles, including buses and trams, largely stayed off the roads and many staff at government offices did not go to work.

Many people had trouble getting to their destinations.

"I have to stand in a queue here in pouring rain after having walked two kilometres from my hotel," said visa seeker Sumitra Hazarika Gogoi outside the US consulate.

A protest against the rise in gas prices in Delhi on 4 June 2008
Many people are angry about the price rises

Another strike, called by West Bengal's opposition Trinamul Congress, has been called for Friday.

In Tripura too, schools, colleges, shops and markets were closed and there was little traffic on the streets.

The US consul general in Calcutta, Henry Jardine, said the back-to-back strikes "reflects poorly on Calcutta".

"Your state seeks investments but investors get a wrong message if you have strikes so frequently," Mr Jardine told a business chamber meeting late on Thursday after the strikes were announced.

The business chambers have also criticised Bengal's "strike culture".

'No money'

After debating for almost two weeks, the Indian cabinet finally announced increases in the price of petrol, diesel and cooking gas on Wednesday.

It said the move was necessary because state-owned oil companies were losing millions of dollars every day because of the increase in global oil prices.

The increase - the second this year - comes at a time when inflation is already at its highest level in four years.

"It must be appreciated what has been done is the bare minimum," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in an address to the nation on Wednesday night.

"There are limits to keep consumer prices unaffected. This way we will have no money to import oil," Mr Singh said in defence of the price rise.

Malaysia and India Increase Price of Subsidized Fuel

India and Malaysia risked the wrath of voters by raising the price of subsidized fuel, measures that could further weaken the governments of both countries, already made fragile by recent electoral setbacks.

In India, the increase was quickly condemned by political parties from all sides, two of which promised demonstrations. A Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman called the move the equivalent of “economic terrorism.”

Economists and policy makers described the increase as painful but necessary. Fuel subsidies in Malaysia alone would have totaled $17 billion this year.

Consumers in Malaysia, like the woman above, will see gasoline prices go up by 40 percent, and more increases are planned, said Shahrir Abdul Samad, Malaysia’s domestic trade and consumer affairs minister. Gas prices vary across India, but the announcement amounted to an increase of around 10 percent.

Review of open source content!

You need a content management system (CMS), but you don't know which application framework to choose. The software must be free and open source, with a web-based user interface. Perhaps your employers have already mentioned that they want to avoid committing to a proprietary, closed application. With all the choices available, it can be daunting to choose one.
Whether you want to build the next big social networking site or a personal weblog, there is a CMS for you. Rather than searching for the CMS par excellence, choose the solution that best fits your project's requirements.
This article provides an overview of five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions: CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. I describe their differences and similarities — based on my personal experience — to help you choose.
The similarities
All five OSS applications are free and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Their server-side code is written in PHP, and they use MySQL as the database. And all five are operating system–independent.
Software bundles such as WAMP (Windows), MAMP (Macintosh), and LAMP (Linux) make it easy to install the set of components (usually Apache, MySQL, and PHP) that make up the web server infrastructure.
All five CMSs have:
Online communities that provide free support via forums
Developers who contribute modules to add new functionality
Human-readable and search engine–friendly URLs for search optimization
Web browser WYSIWYG interfaces for site maintenance
Themes and templates to update the page design
Translations and multilingual content integration
Syndication of site content in RSS/XML feeds
They can be used to create the following and more:
Blogs
Contact forms
Events calendars
Guest books
Image galleries
Online newsletters
Search engines
While these five CMSs have many similarities, each one also has unique benefits and limitations. The following sections describe each application and make comparisons based on my experience.

CMS Made Simple
CMS Made Simple and Drupal both include workflow engines for process management beyond basic approval of content. You can get up to speed much faster with CMS Made Simple, but Drupal has far more features (which you may or may not need).
I found that setting up a CMS Made Simple site was very straightforward, but not nearly as easy as using WordPress. Creating site navigation is easy, and you can quickly launch a simple site.
CMS Made Simple, Drupal, and WordPress all follow the W3C specification for XHTML compliance.
Theme templates enable you to easily update your site's layout, and modules extend functionality.
Unlike the other CMSs, CMS Made Simple does not offer support for creating the following features:
Forums/discussion boards
Tests/quizzes
Wiki sites
System-wide content versioning
E-mail verification (using an activation key)
On the support forums, there's a great deal of activity in the German language section, which creates a bit of a barrier for English-language speakers. The documentation is not as extensive as the other CMSs reviewed in this article, so accessing help in the forums is essential.Sample site: Russell Davis Architects

Drupal
Drupal is pronounced droo-puhl. (To hear the correct pronunciation, listen to the Drupal song.) This CMS won Packt Publishing's Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.
Drupal has extensive online documentation, supplemented with active forums, and Drupal.org is chock-full of instructions, such as the Drupal Cookbook, to help you get started.
I've found that Drupal is flexible and accessible, while being fairly easy to use as a powerful solution for a wide variety of projects. However, its vast feature set may be too much of a good thing if you are only planning to build a simple blog.
Unlike the other CMSs, Drupal offers some database replication for better scalability. And only Drupal supports NTLM authentication.
Drupal includes a PHPTemplate theme engine to create custom themes. PHP code snippets are used to define the look of the site, and are kept in a presentation layer — enabling designers to own the page layout without interacting with site functionality code.
After installing modules, the process of enabling, setting, and configuring permissions feels a bit redundant. Locating the areas to perform each of these tasks in the Administration menu can be challenging until you have done it a few times.
Drupal really shines in the way taxonomy and permissions can be assigned at a granular level. Rather than being limited to groups, individuals can each have their own access levels. And the level of categorization in Drupal is unlimited, so you can set up infinite views.
Drupal's global developer community participates enthusiastically and contributes new modules with add-on functionality at an amazing rate.
Sample site: FIEL

Joomla!
Joomla! is a forked evolution of Mambo. The differences between Joomla! and Mambo are subtle to the end user. Joomla!'s administration panel has been redesigned, but the primary difference is the large online community involved with Joomla! that is committed to the principles of open source development (there is a frenzy of activity on the Joomla! forums).
Developers create free extensions to add functionality, and these are available in the Joomla! extensions directory. It is worth noting that, for now, extensions that work with Mambo also work with Joomla! without requiring modifications, although this may change in future versions.
Joomla! supports e-commerce functionality, such as shopping carts, inventory tracking, and payment processing through third-party vendors. However, taxonomy is an area that could be improved because you are restricted to only a few levels. This may or may not affect your development — depending on the levels of categorization you need for your site.
Although I haven't experienced it myself, I have read that sites with high traffic report slower load times. I have also found the WYSIWYG editor to be less intuitive to use than the other CMSs I evaluated.
Sample site: ArtSessions.net

WordPress
Since 2003, WordPress has become the largest self-hosted blogging software in the world, visited by millions of people every day.
Due to its popularity and longevity, there are more themes available online for WordPress than for any other CMS I investigated. The ThemeViewer is a great way to find one to use for your site.
According to WeblogToolsCollection.com, 0.8% of the Internet is run by WordPress. They project that at the current growth rate that number could reach 2–2.5% in a few years.
There are many online resources, such as the very clear online documentation, the WordPress Podcast, and plug-ins you can download to extend functionality.
Some high-traffic sites report slow performance, but by installing the WP-Cache plug-in and doing some tweaking to the wp-config.php file, you can enable caching to help increase load times. Many online tutorials address this if you happen to run into this issue.
Sample site: Ford Motor Company

XOOPS
Pronounced zoops, XOOPS is very customizable for controlling the layout of content blocks. The modules, while not as numerous as some of the other CMSs, are easy to install. Future versions promise to add even more Web 2.0 functionality, which is exciting.
The official home of XOOPS has recently been relaunched, and you can visit the XOOPS Foundation site to get more information. Additionally, many modules are available at the XOOPS Addons repository.
Like Drupal, XOOPS has a template engine (named Smarty) to help you customize page design while keeping the presentation code separate from the functionality.
XOOPS and Drupal both offer the ability to display product information and can also manage inventory — making them good candidates for building e-commerce sites.
XOOPS is popular globally, and it is nice to see such a variety of translations for both the software and the user documentation. However, that can also be a disadvantage if you are an English speaker because there is less online support.
Sample site: Concrete Connections
Where to go from here
Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:
Inventory management
Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
Shopping cart functionality
If you are looking to build a single blog website that doesn't need all the bells and whistles — then I recommend WordPress. It's easy to use, has a huge collection of available themes, and is XHTML-compliant.
I tend to agree with Packt Publishing's award. I think Drupal is the best overall CMS available — based on its high level of customization, flexibility, scalability, taxonomy, SSL support, e-commerce functionality, and extremely enthusiastic user community that develops modules and provides technical advice and support.
I hope this has given you some sense of direction as you navigate the many options and determine the CMS that best suits your requirements.

Indian Political Foes File $100 Million Suit Over American Newspaper Ad!

Windsor Genova - AHN News Writer

New York, NY (AHN) - An affiliate of a political party in India has filed a $100 million libel suit in Manhattan against rival party supporters who criticized its leader, Sonia Gandhi, in a newspaper ad in October.

The Indian National Overseas Congress, composed of supporters of the Indian National Congress (INC), took issue with two supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party for placing a $65,000 ad in the New York Times during Gandhi's visit to New York City in 2007. The ad pointed out that the INC chair was not related to Mohandas Gandhi, who led India's independence from British rule.

At the time, Sonia Gandhi was attending the commemoration of her namesake's birthday at the United Nations in observance of the International Day of Non-Violence, a movement Mohandas Gandhi formed.

Sued were former law firm secretary Narain Kataria and retired insurance agent Arish Sahani. Their lawyer described the lawsuit as INC's attempt to silence its critics in the U.S.

Dr. Surinder Malhotra, head of the INC subsidiary, said the unprecedented suit has nothing to do with the party in India, according to NYSun.com.

Malicious software threatens internet economy!!

National economies and security interests face a growing threat from malicious software, says a damning report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Communities involved in fighting malware "offer essentially a fragmented local response to a global threat," says the report, which urges international cooperation to combat the danger.

The report cites evidence that around one in four personal computers in the US – or 59 million – is already infected with malware. A booming market in cyber attack software and services has also made attacks more sophisticated and cheaper to perform.

Day of the 'zombies'

Malware is commonly used to turn ordinary PCs into "zombie" computers, which can then be controlled by criminals over the internet without their legitimate owners' knowledge. These machines are used to send out roughly 80% of all spam and to attack commercial websites and other internet-linked systems with meaningless traffic as part of extortion schemes.

An army of remotely controlled PCs – known as a botnet – can now be rented for as little as as 33 cents per machine, far less that the actual cost of the hardware.

The largest botnets on record have comprised more than 1 million computers. While the number of machines corralled into botnets is increasing, the OECD found that botnets themselves are shrinking to avoid detection.

Rather than launching high-profile attacks to bring down a target, small botnets can subtly reduce the target's internet service over a prolonged period.

Most malware infections (93%) occur on home users' computers. However, OECD research suggests that this can have a knock-on effect on national industries reliant on online transactions such as banking. For example, malware may deter people from using the internet to access more efficient savings products.

A group of British banks put the cost of malware for 2006 at £33.5 million, 90% higher than in 2004 and growing. But such estimates do not include indirect costs such as losing the trust of consumers, the OECD points out.

International rescue

Thirty-eight countries around the world now have national bodies focused on computer security. But the OECD says international organisations and agreements are needed to properly measure the impact of malware attacks and counteract them.

Just weeks ago NATO opened its first "cyber defence centre". It is located in Estonia, which saw its entire internet service crippled by botnets in 2007 after a diplomatic row with Russia.

The full OECD report Malware: A security threat to the Internet economy is available online. Ministers from the OECD's 30 member nations will discuss malware later this month at a meeting on the internet economy.