Tantrik held for cheating NRI woman of Rs 7L

NEW DELHI: A tantrik was arrested for allegedly cheating a NRI woman settled in Britain of over Rs 7 lakh by promising to help her resolve marital  discord. Naseem Khan alias ‘Baba’, a resident of Gulabi Bagh, was caught earlier this week following investigation into a complaint lodged by a British citizen, Vaijantimala Kumar, police said.

According to police, Vaijantimala’s husband Anil Kumar had returned to India from Middlesex in UK as their relations had become sour. “Vaijantimala followed her husband to India to persuade him to return to UK but he refused. In the meantime, she came in contact with one Shashi, a resident of Punjabi Bagh, who introduced her to the ‘Baba’ (tantrik),” said DCP (north) Sagarpreet Hooda.

The tantrik allegedly assured her that he would put an end to her marital woes through black magic and gave her some stones and jewels to wear. “Initially, she paid Rs 15,000. The ‘Baba’ then hypnotized her and she paid Rs 7 lakh through money transfer besides bringing gifts for the tantrik during her subsequent visits to India,” said Hooda.

The tantrik also took her to various dargahs in the country in the past six months by making her believe that such pilgrimage brings good luck and fortune. All expenses during such visits were borne by the woman.

Though she spent a lot money, Vaijantimala did not find any improvement in her situation as assured by the tantrik. She then demanded her money back, but Naseem refused and threatened her of dire consequences following which she approached the police on Tuesday. The accused was arrested on Wednesday.

Fugitive NRI woman, son found in Chennai after two-year hunt

CHENNAI: CBI sleuths on Saturday traced an NRI woman who was on the run after fleeing from the US to India with her minor son on June 28, 2007.

Vijayashree Voora and her seven-year-old son, Aditya, were detained in Chennai while checking out from a hotel in Nungambakkam. They were taken to Delhi, where they were produced before Justice Tarun Chatterjee of the Supreme Court, who directed the CBI officials to produce them before the court on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court had asked the CBI to trace the duo after Aditya’s father, V Ravi Chandran, complained that Vijayashree had disappeared with their son three months before a New York family court dissolved their marriage on September 8, 2005. The court gave Ravi Chandran the custody of the child, but the mother and son remained untraceable despite efforts by the police of several Indian states. Later, the New York family court issued non-bailable warrants against Vijayshree.

Ravi Chandran moved the Supreme Court in India in September 2007 seeking a writ of habeas corpus, saying his son was being illegally detained by Vijayashree. On August 29, the Supreme Court asked the CBI to trace Vijayashree and Aditya.

City police sources said a CBI team from Delhi had arrived here a few days ago. “The CBI team had some definite clues. They watched Voora’s movements for a while and took her into custody while she was vacating her room in a hotel to move into another at Nungambakkam,” a police official told TOI. Vijayasheree had been dodging the police, moving constantly from one place to another, changing her contact numbers and destroying her credit cards and other identity documents. “She never stayed in a hotel for more than three days and never allowed any room boy or hotel authorities to enter the room. She never lost sight of Aditya. She preferred three-star hotels instead of five-star ones, checking herself in as a tourist,” the official said.

CBI officials in disguise were waiting at the reception of the hotel when Voora was checking out. The mother and son were detained and taken to Delhi by air.

Eating Candy in Childhood Linked to Adult Crime

What parent hasn’t used candy to pacify a cranky child or head off a brewing tantrum? When reasoning, threats and time-outs fail, a sugary treat often does the trick. But while that chocolate-covered balm may be highly effective in the short term, say British scientists, it may be setting youngsters up for problem behavior later. According to a new study, kids who eat too many treats at a young age risk becoming violent in adulthood.

The research was led by Simon Moore, a senior lecturer in Violence and Society Research at Cardiff University in the U.K., who specializes in the study of vulnerable youngsters. Moore had been investigating the factors that lead children to commit serious crimes, when, during the course of his work, he discovered that “kids with the worst problems tend to be impulsive risk takers, and that these kids had terrible diets – breakfast was a Coke and a bag of chips,” he says.

Intrigued by this association, Moore turned to the British Cohort Study, a long-term survey of 17,000 people born during a one-week period in April 1970. That study included periodic evaluations of many different aspects of the growing children’s lives, such as what they ate, certain health measures and socioeconomic status. Moore plumbed the data for information on kids’ diet and their later behavior: at age 10, the children were asked how much candy they consumed, and at age 34, they were questioned about whether they had been convicted of a crime. Moore’s analysis suggests a correlation: 69% of people who had been convicted of a violent act by age 34 reported eating candy almost every day as youngsters; 42% of people who had not been arrested for violent behavior reported the same. “Initially we thought this [effect] was probably due to something else,” says Moore. “So we tried to control for parental permissiveness, economic status, whether the kids were urban or rural. But the result remained. We couldn’t get rid of it.”

In other words, regardless of other environmental and lifestyle factors, like family-income level, parenting style or children’s level of education, the data suggested it was only the frequency of confectionery consumption in childhood that strongly predicted adult violence. “The key message is that this study really raises more questions than answers,” says Moore.

One of those questions is whether sweets themselves contain compounds that promote antisocial and aggressive behavior, or whether the excessive eating of sweets represents a lack of discipline in childhood that translates to poor impulse control in adulthood. Moore is leaning toward the latter. It’s possible that children who are given sweets too frequently never learn how to delay gratification – that is, they never develop enough patience to wait for things they want, leading to impulsivity in adulthood. It’s also possible that children who are poorly behaved from the start tend to get more candy.

Moore acknowledges that there is also some intriguing data suggesting that diet itself may have a profound effect on behavior. A University of Oxford researcher recently published controversial findings hinting that prisoners who were fed vitamin supplements – and therefore presumably getting well-balanced nutrition – had lower rates of disciplinary events and aggressive outbursts than a control group who were given placebo pills. While the association is preliminary, says Moore, “I think looking at diet is a fairly novel way to think of behavior over the life course.”

Mid-air scuffle: Air India pilots de-rostered

NEW DELHI: Air India on Sunday grounded two pilots and crew members involved in a mid-air scuffle, even as Delhi Police registered a case of molestation against the pilots on a complaint filed by an air hostess.

“The incident of scuffle between the two pilots and cabin crew members of IC 884 (Sharjah-Lucknow-Delhi flight) was reported yesterday morning,” an Air India spokesperson said on Sunday.

“As there have been claims and counter-claims between the parties involved, the management has ordered an enquiry, which is still in progress,” the spokesperson added.

Taking a serious view of the incident, the management has de-rostered the pilots and two crew members.

“Further course of action will be decided based on the enquiry report,” the spokesperson said.

The incident comes close on the heels of a pilots’ strike that grounded the fleet of 155 planes for five days and caused untold inconvenience to passengers.

Meanwhile, Delhi Police registered a case against the pilots – Commander Ranbeer Arora and Capt Aditya Chopra – who, according to a first information report (FIR) filed with the police, tried to molest an air hostess, and when she resisted, pushed her outside the cockpit.

“The air hostess sustained bruises and injuries on her hand,” Joint Commissioner of Police (operations) Satyendera Garg said, adding her medical examination had confirmed she had been assaulted.

The co-pilot and a flight purser, Amit Khanna, were allegedly injured in the exchange of blows that occurred around 4:30 a.m. on Saturday when the aircraft was flying over Pakistan.

The incident is understood to have originated in verbal exchanges between the confronting sides during the pre-flight briefing session ahead of takeoff from Sharjah, the police said.

The Airbus A-320 was carrying 106 passengers and seven crew members and had reached Lucknow when the matter was reported.

The case has been registered under Sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 354 (assault or use of criminal force against a woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code.

However, Khanna denied there had been any scuffle during the flight.

“I must speak to the Air India management first. Since we are under great shock, I have not been able to talk to them. But there was no fight between us on the flight,” he asserted.

India’s Jurassic nest dug up in Tamil Nadu

COIMBATORE: Geologists in Tamil Nadu have stumbled upon a Jurassic treasure trove buried in the sands of a river bed. Sheer luck led them to  hundreds of fossilized dinosaur eggs, perhaps 65 million years old, underneath a stream in a tiny village in Ariyalur district

Researchers from the Salem-based Periyar University found clusters of eggs of what they believe to be the most aggressive Carnosaur and the docile, leaf-eating Sauropod at Sendurai village.

While Carnosaurs were large predatory dinasaurs, Sauropods were long-necked, herbivores which grew to enormous heights and sizes.

That dinosaurs once roamed the area was known from the fossils found there on earlier expeditions. But this is the first time that hundreds of nests embedded with hundreds of clusters of dinosaur eggs have been unearthed in the district.

Located on the highway between Chennai and Tiruchi, the Ariyalur and the neighbouring Perambalur geological sites nestle in the northern plains of the Cauvery river. The place is a veritable museum of ancient organisms, dating back to 140 million years. Ever since a British couple — the Wines — collected 32 boxes of “strange stone objects” in 1843, the Ariyalur region has drawn geologists from across the world for its rich fossil presence and diversity.

Scientists have found the tiniest marine algae or the nano fossils besides the rare shell-like bivalve, gastropoda, telecypoda and brachiopoda in the geological sites spread across 950sqkm in Ariyalur and Perambalur districts.

“We found clusters and clusters of spherical eggs of dinosaurs. And each cluster contained eight eggs,” says Dr M U Ramkumar, geology lecturer of the Periyar University. Each egg was about 13 to 20 cm in diameter and they were lying in sandy nests which were of the size of 1.25 metres.

In the 1860s, a British geologist first recorded the presence of bone remains of dinosaurs in Ariyalur. Over a century and a half later, the egg of a dinosaur was found in a cement factory of the state-owned Tamil Nadu Cements Ltd in 1990s. But officials realized that it was a dinosaur egg only 10 years later.

On a sultry afternoon on September 12 this year, Ramkumar and his research students went to Ariyalur to scour the rocks and sediments as part of a study funded by Indian and German scientific institutions. As they paused by a stream on a grazing land at Sendurai, they found spherical-shaped fossils peeping out of the sand beds. “We got really excited. As I have seen a dinosaur egg, I was sure these were dinosaur eggs,” said Ramkumar.

A quick digging revealed clusters of eggs beneath seven layers of sand spread over two sqkm. The eggs may not have hatched due to the Deccan volcanic eruptions or seasonal flooding, surmise the team. “We suspect the extinction of dinosaurs was triggered by the Deccan volcano. Volcanic ashes cap the eggs,” said one researcher.

“This is a very significant finding as never before have we found so many dinosaur eggs in the country. Besides the spherical size of the eggs covered with sand and volcanic ash provide significant insight into the possible reasons for extinction of the species,” says Dr Jyotsana Rai, senior scientist, Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany in Lucknow. Her team will collect samples of these eggs to determine its exact age.

Because a similar discovery in Jabalpur led to a plunder of the fossilized treasure, the researchers have requested the Ariyalur district administration to cordon off the site. Samples of the eggs will travel to Germany for further research. The vicinity of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh is considered the richest dinosaur field in the country.