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October 15, 2012

Maruti Alto 800 wait gets over; ready to hit the road today

New Delhi: India's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki is gearing up to regain lost ground in the small car segment with the launch of a completely new version of its erstwhile best-selling model Alto on Tuesday.

The new version, called as 'Maruti Alto 800', is likely to be priced at around 2.5-3 lakh, allowing it to compete with Tata Nano and Hyundai EON.

The company will launch the all-new Alto 800 on Tuesday (October 16) and is set to replace the existing Alto as the company seeks to overcome tough market conditions, especially high petrol price and interest rates that have hurt small cars sales.

It is also offering CNG option in the new Alto 800.

The company is banking on Alto 800's improved fuel efficiency of 22.74 kmpl, which is 15 percent higher than the previous model, to be one of the key factors to create customer pull, apart from its new design and other features like improved gear shift and more leg room for rear passengers.

Let’s have a look at some of the interesting facts about new Maruti Alto 800.

-Car Variant: The car will come in six variants — three in CNG and three in Petrol.

-Mileage: Petrol variant is expected to give a mileage of approximately 23 kilometre per litre while the CNG version will give a mileage of around approximately 31 kilometre per litre.

-Interiors: Fashionable and trendy, the car is likely to sport stylish headlamps, better headroom and legroom.

-Colours: The car will come in six vibrant colours.

-Price: The petrol version is likely to be priced between Rs 2.5 lakh and Rs 3 lakh while the CNG version will be priced between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 3.5 lakh.

Sales of the Alto have declined 34.83 percent in the April-August period to 89,000 units as compared to 1.22 lakh units in the year-ago period. The model has been MSI's best selling model for many years until Swift overtook it earlier this year.

Last year, the company had sold 3.08 lakh units of Alto and the year before it stood at 3.4 lakh units.

Hit by the declining sales of its smaller cars, specially Alto, MSI's share had gone down below 40 percent in the Indian passenger vehicles market which stood at 10,49,961 units in the April-August period this fiscal.

Launched in 2001, the Alto sold a total of 20 lakh units in the domestic market and exported another 2.47 lakh units.

MSI and its vendors have spent Rs 470 crore in developing the new Alto 800, which is based on the platform of the previous model.

Italy's secret anti-mob weapon


ROME (AP) — A woman who dares to cooperate with police in the fight against a dreaded Italian mob network is murdered, her body dumped in a barrel of acid in the countryside near Milan. Her 17-year-old daughter steps forward and testifies, helping to send six people to prison for life.
The lurid 2009 murder and the court verdict delivered in April gave a rare peek into Italy's secretive witness protection program, which marked its 20th anniversary this year and is considered Italy's single most important window into the secretive world of organized crime. Hundreds of mobsters have been given new identities in exchange for information that helped put longtime fugitive leaders behind bars, including the "boss of bosses" Salvatore Riina.
The use of insiders has combined with the seizure of mob assets to help Italy achieve a once unattainable goal: crippling the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. "It has advanced immensely the fight against organized crime," said Felia Allum, a British academic who studies organized crime.
Italy's famed anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino had fought in the 1980s to establish the two anti-mob weapons, arguing that criminals needed some incentive to step forward and turn state's evidence. They were killed by mob bombs within two months of one another in 1992, but not before they'd laid the foundations for a crime-fighting system that has largely tamed, if not defeated, the Mafia.
Living under state protection does take exact a heavy toll on witnesses. A major problem is that most mobsters in the program are from Italy's underdeveloped south, and they are generally exiled to what they see as a hostile environment in the prosperous north, because it's easier to hide them there. There have been suicides. Some return to crime when their collaboration with the state comes to an end.
"They are given a new identity and a lump sum of money to start their new life but they are not helped as much as they should be to reintegrate back into society," said Allum. The dead woman in the 2009 murder, 36-year-old Lea Garofalo, had left the government program "feeling uneasy" about her protection, her lawyer Vincenza Rando said, adding that she was subjected to unwanted sexual advances from her police guards. "She didn't feel well protected and risked it on her own."
Garofalo's daughter Denise felt that her mother's decision had cost her life, so she decided to put her trust in the program. She was the key witness in the trial and now lives with a new identity in an undisclosed location. The contrasting fates of mother and daughter underscore how critical it is for witnesses in mob cases to obtain new identities. Without one, experts say, turncoats like Lea Garofalo become sitting ducks for inevitable revenge killings.
Denise Garofalo is one of nearly 4,700 people in the program -- about 1,000 so-called "collaborators" who have turned state's evidence and the rest family members, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press on figures up to 2010. It is believed to be the second largest program after that of the United States. Most have been witnesses in cases against the Sicilian Mafia, the Neapolitan Camorra and the Calabrian 'ndrangheta --the crime syndicate in the Garofalo case.
Prosecutors say that no one who has followed the protection rules has been harmed. Those who stray do so at their own peril, like the son of a Camorra boss who returned to his hometown and was slain. Changing immigration patterns and the spread of international terrorism have led authorities to open the program to eastern Europeans, North Africans and several other nationalities, according to the Interior Ministry report to parliament.
Lazhar Ben Mohamed Tlil, a Tunisian who became an Islamic militant and was trained in Afghanistan to kill Americans, entered the witness protection program after providing information to Italian investigators about several detainees at Guantanamo, his court-appointed lawyer, Davide Boschi, told The Associated Press.
The lawyer has said that Tlil, considered an important witness by both Italians and Americans, would not talk to prosecutors without firm guarantees of a new identity, documents, a job, medical coverage and a visit to his parents in Tunisia.
An Interior Ministry report to parliament acknowledged criticism of the way the program works due to a "large, unexpected influx of people" into the program recent years. Witness protection costs some €100 million (more than $100 million) a year. It often fails to help former criminals return to normal life. And foreigners in the program face tough bureaucratic roadblocks to creating decent lives in Italy.
Still, criminal experts give the program high marks despite the headaches it faces in determining who may be lying, creating new identities and trying to hide the turncoats in Italy, where authorities have fewer options than in the much larger United States.
"By demonstrating that its institutions are standing as one in facing the Mafia, Italy is setting an example for the world against organized crime," Interpol Secretary-General Ronald K. Noble told a convention on organized crime in Sicily over the summer.
Until Italy established the program in the early 90s, the most famous witness, Tommasso Buscetta, needed to be sheltered abroad. He helped convict some 350 mobsters in the 1980s before being given a new identity in the United States in the American witness protection program.
While the release of criminals with blood on their hands has been contentious, Alfonso Sabella, a former Palermo prosecutor defended Italy's witness protection program in an interview with the Turin newspaper La Stampa.
It was, he said, a "necessary choice — when it was clear that the Mafia couldn't be brought to its knees through traditional means."

Pussy Riot members face tough life in penal colony

Imprisoned women wait to be escorted for work at a women's prison outside the city of Orel, central Russia. Two members of the punk band Pussy Riot will serve their sentence in a penal colony far from Moscow 

MOSCOW (AP) — It's a far cry from Stalin's gulag, but the guiding principle of the Russian penal colony -- the destination of two members of punk band Pussy Riot -- remains the same: isolate inmates and wear them down through "corrective labor."
Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova will have to quickly learn the inner laws of prison life, survive the dire food and medical care, and risk bullying from inmates either offended by their "punk prayer" against President Vladimir Putin or under orders to pressure them.
"Everyone knows the rule: Trust no one, never fear and never forgive," said Svetlana Bakhmina, a lawyer who spent three years in a penal colony. "You are in no-man's land. Nobody will help you. You have to think about everything you say and do to remain a person."
Alekhina, 24, Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for an impromptu performance in Moscow's main cathedral as Putin headed into an election that handed him a third term as Russia's president. The women insisted their protest was political. But many believers said they were deeply offended by the sight of the band members dancing on the altar in balaclavas.
Imprisoned women stand during a morning inspection at a women's prison in a town of Sarapul, central Russia. Two members of the punk band Pussy Riot will serve their sentence in a penal colony far from Moscow that is like what a former inmate describes as a "nasty Girl Scout camp.”
An appeals court released Samutsevich on Wednesday, but upheld the two-year prison terms of the others. The presiding judge said that "their correction is possible only in isolation from society." In colonies for women, inmates live in barracks with 30 to 40 to a room. They begin the day by shuffling outside for compulsory exercises at daybreak, in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius in winter. After roll call and a breakfast of gruel, they spend seven to eight hours a day at work, usually hunched over sewing machines working on uniforms and other clothing.
Since there is only one women's penal colony near Moscow, female prisoners from the capital are commonly sent to Mordovia, a swampy, mosquito-infested province on the Volga River. Defense lawyers said Alekhina and Tolokonnikova would be transported to a penal colony within two weeks, after receiving copies of their sentences. The location was not yet known.
Despite the harsh conditions, many prisoners nonetheless prefer the colonies to the pre-trial detention centers, where they are kept in cramped, sometimes spectacularly unhygienic cells and only allowed out for an hour a day. The three Pussy Riot members were held in such a center since their February arrest.
Russian inmates are kept in a system that Russia's own justice minister has described as "monstrously archaic" and whose purpose has changed little for hundreds of years. Czarist Russia sent prisoners to remote Siberian colonies where labor was in short supply; the system was inherited and expanded by the Soviet Union, which worked millions of prisoners to death in the gulag. Russia incarcerates more people than any country in the world bar the United States and China, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies.
There have been other high-profile penal colony inmates in Putin's Russia. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned head of the Yukos oil company, served part of his 14-year sentence in an Eastern Siberian colony. Once Russia's richest man, he served his time making mittens. Arrested in 2003, Khodorkovsky was convicted in two cases seen as punishment for challenging Putin's power.
Bakhmina, who once worked for Khodorkovsky, said you have little free time to yourself in the prison colony, where guards often compel prisoners to attend classes or participate in cultural activities. In a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks in 2010, former Ambassador William Burns recalled visiting a women's prison where inmates put on a "bizarre fashion and talent show" for American officials.
"Boredom doesn't exist in the colony. It's too good a concept for it. You just regret the time you spend," Bakhmina said. "A normal person can't even imagine that environment — you have to get used to it and people have to get used to you. It takes several months, maybe half a year. It's all about how you behave — you have to not be conceited and respect other people."
Prisoners are typically paid the equivalent of about $10 a day, which they can use to buy food, cigarettes, and toiletries. Those whose families don't send them supplies scrape through on the unofficial labor market, cleaning up the facilities or doing work for wealthier inmates. Cigarette packs are the colony's internal currency.
Alekhina and Tolokonnikova, both university graduates, are unlikely to have much in common with their fellow inmates. "I didn't think there even were people like 90 percent of the people I met," Bakhmina recalled. "I never had any idea there were so many drug addicts, or so many people with speech impediments."
Spouses are allowed three-day conjugal visits four times a year. Prisoners who show especially good behavior can even be given two weeks' leave outside the camp. Bakhmina became pregnant while serving her term and was released several months after giving birth to a daughter. She saw her two older sons only twice during her three years in the penal colony, afraid it would be too traumatic for them to see their mother imprisoned.
Mothers with children under the age of 3 can keep them in centers on penal colony grounds, or in the case of one colony in Mordovia in their barracks. Alekhina's 5-year-old son and Tolokonnikova's 4-year-old daughter will live with relatives.
The two punk band members can be punished with up to 15 days in solitary confinement for minor infractions such as failing to make their beds or to put their hands behind their backs at roll call or to greet guards quickly enough.
Perhaps the greatest danger for the band members, however, will be posed by their fellow inmates. Physical violence, while a danger, is relatively rare in comparison to men's colonies. But the psychological pressure can be greater, said Vitaly Borshchyov, head of the Public Monitoring Commission, a human rights organization that works with the government to improve prison conditions.
"Colonies are all-consuming for women," he said. "Having a large group of women together in a single space is a recipe for tension and conflicts. You might get beaten up, sexually humiliated or forced to be someone's lover, especially if you're a young woman."
The Pussy Riot members' lawyers and supporters also fear that Orthodox believers may attack them, either inspired by the extremely negative coverage of their protest on state television or egged on by state officials.
"When things get worse on the outside, it gets transferred into the colonies," said Lev Ponomarev, a Soviet dissident who runs the Defending Prisoners' Rights foundation. "Scoundrels think they can get away with more. The authorities are totally indifferent."
The band members have vowed to remain defiant. "We will not be silent," Alekhina told the appeals court Wednesday. "And even if we are in Mordovia or Siberia we will not be silent ... however zealously you try to smear us."

Dutch woman in Colombia rebel delegation in talks


BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — The commander of Colombia's main rebel group says its delegation at peace talks set to begin Wednesday in Oslo will include as a spokeswoman a young Dutch combatant who joined the insurgents nearly a decade ago.
Tanja Nijmeijer, 29, of the Netherlands, an alleged member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC. Timoleon Jimenez, better known as Timochenko, the FARC leader, said on Monday, Oct. 15
Timoleon Jimenez, better known as Timochenko, said in pre-recorded remarks broadcast Monday by several Colombian media outlets that the rebel delegation was heading to Norway "with the emotion of being one step closer and deeper toward dialogue."
The talks mark the fourth attempt since the early 1980s to end a nearly half-century-old conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives. An agenda set during six months of secret talks in Havana calls for agrarian reform, full political rights for the rebels and guerrilla disarmament once an agreement is signed.
A news conference is planned for Wednesday to formally mark the start of the talks. Timochenko said "unforeseen delays" had postponed the talks' launch by a few days. He blamed the delay on bureaucracy in the government's case and heavy rains in the case of his Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
"In the one case, it was rising rivers, while the other was affected by the state's pachydermic attitude in making decisions," said Timochenko. "But we're one our way and that's what's important." The FARC leader said 34-year-old Tanja Nijmeijer would be among rebel spokespeople in Oslo, where the talks are to be held at an undisclosed location before moving later in October to Cuba.
Nijmeijer gained fame when she complained of disillusionment in a diary found in 2007, four years after she joined the FARC. In 2010, however, the Dutch woman appeared in a video distributed by the FARC pledging allegiance to the Western Hemisphere's last remaining major insurgency.
Since the last round of peace negotiations were held a decade ago, a U.S.-backed military buildup has badly battered the rebels. At about 9,000 fighters, they are roughly half their 2002 strength. The military has killed three of their most senior leaders since 2008.
Timochenko, 53, complained that the government had not provided guarantees that all delegates the FARC named to the upcoming talks would be permitted to attend. He named, in particular, Ricardo Palmera, the best-known of the rebels' five chief negotiators.
Palmera, 62, is serving a 60-year prison sentence in a maximum-security U.S. prison, convicted of conspiring to kidnap three U.S. military contractors who were captured by the FARC in 2003 when their surveillance plane crashed after mechanical failure.
He is held in solitary confinement at the so-called Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. His lawyer, Oscar Silva, told The Associated Press that the U.S. government bars him from receiving visitors and that he can only speak with Palmera, with no opportunity for confidential discussing, during hearings for a Colombian trial in which Palmera participates by videoconference.
In addition to the U.S. sentence, Palmera has been convicted in Colombia of the kidnapping of the former mayor of the northeastern regional capital of Valledupar, where he was a well-heeled banker before joining the rebels.
Colombia's chief prosecutor, Eduardo Montealegre, says Palmera could be permitted to participate in the talks via teleconference. He told The Associated Press on Monday, however, that the Colombian government had not yet asked the U.S. government for that accommodation.
Timochenko called Palmera's participation "decisive" given his expertise in agrarian economics. The FARC is classified as an international terror group by the U.S. State Department. All but one member of its six-member ruling Secretariat are wanted by the United States on drug trafficking charges, with $5 million rewards out for each.
Colombia's government made no public statement about the impending talks, though one official told the AP on Monday morning that its delegation had not yet arrived in the Norwegian capital. The official said that Wednesday's news conference would mark the talks' official start.
He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.