Mossad-mouthpiece DEBKAfile reports that the assault on the US dollar as reserve currency by America’s most prominent foreign adversaries (including our trading partner China) is about to get underway.

India is the first buyer of Iranian oil to agree to pay for its purchases in gold instead of the US dollar, debkafile’s intelligence and Iranian sources report exclusively. Those sources expect China to follow suit. India and China take about one million barrels per day, or 40 percent of Iran’s total exports of 2.5 million bpd. Both are superpowers in terms of gold assets.

By trading in gold, New Delhi and Beijing enable Tehran to bypass the upcoming freeze on its central bank’s assets and the oil embargo which the European Union’s foreign ministers agreed to impose Monday, Jan. 23. The EU currently buys around 20 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

The vast sums involved in these transactions are expected, furthermore, to boost the price of gold and depress the value of the dollar on world markets.

Three people were seriously injured in the leopard attack before the leopard was tranquilized. A former journalist and lawyer called Deva Kumar Das succumbed to his injuries on Sunday. The condition of the other two was said to be stable.

The BBC reported:

The leopard was first sighted on Saturday morning near a crematorium in the town.

As the funeral of a Congress Party leader’s son was going on, the place was full of dignitaries, ministers and other VIPs.

Police sent them to a safer place and chased the leopard out, but it turned towards the Shilpukhuri residential area.

“First, it jumped across several multi-storey buildings, including a bank, then jumped on to the ground,” said Manas Paran, photojournalist for the Sunday Indian magazine and an eyewitness.

Local people armed with sticks and iron rods tried to chase the leopard away. The enraged animal then started attacking locals, Mr Paran told BBC.

Mr Paran kept following the big cat at extremely close quarters to get good pictures for his magazine.

Deb Kumar Das, aged around 50, was one of the first people whom the leopard clawed at. He suffered severe wounds to the head, ear and neck.

He was treated in hospital but later returned home, where he was found dead on Sunday. ...

When the leopard entered a shop, locals locked it up. Forest officials and vets reached the scene after some time with tranquilisers and were able to capture it.

“After it was tranquilised and treated in Guwahati Zoo, we released it in the Manas Wildlife Sanctuary today”, said Utpal Borah, head of the zoo.

So, the leopard shows up in a large city, kills one man and seriously injures two more people, and they tranquilize it and then release it. That makes a lot of sense.

We live in the age of imbecility, don’t we?
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Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Hat tip to David Wagner.

The Times of India reports that recent renovations have detected the presence of a sealed chamber.

A mysterious room has been discovered in the 250-year-old building a room that no one knew about and no one can enter because it seems to have no opening of kind, not even trapdoors.

The chamber has lain untouched for over two centuries. Wonder what secrets it holds. The archaeologists who discovered it have no clue either, their theories range from a torture chamber, or a sealed tomb for an unfortunate soul or the most favoured of all a treasure room. Some say they wouldn’t be surprised if both skeletons and jewels tumble out of the secret room.

Belvedere House as the National Library building was known during the Raj was among the many buildings Mir Jafar built in Alipore in the 1760s after he was forced to abdicate his throne in Murshidabad. He gifted it to the first Governor General of India, Lord Warren Hastings. What happened to the house between 1780, when Hastings is said to have sold it, and 1854, when it became the official residence of the Lt Governor of Bengal, is uncertain. But from 1854 to 1911, Belvedere housed a number of Lt Governors till the British capital shifted to Delhi.

After Independence, the National Library (which was then in Esplanade) was shifted to Belvedere House. Since the Belvedere House is of great architectural and heritage value, the treasure of books has been shifted to a new building on the 30-acre campus while the old building is getting restored.

The ministry of culture that owns the National Library decided to get the magnificent building restored by the Archaeological Survey of India since it is heavily damaged. Work has already started. It was while taking stock of the interior and exterior of the building that ASI conservation engineers stumbled upon a blind enclosure’ on the ground floor, about 1000 square feet in size.

A lot of effort has been made to locate an opening so that experts can find out exactly what it was built for or what it contains. But there is not a single crack to show.

“We’ve searched every inch of the first floor area that forms the ceiling of this enclosure for a possible trap door. But found nothing. Restoration of the building will remain incomplete if we are not able to assess what lies inside this enclosure,” said deputy superintending archaeologist of ASI, Tapan Bhattacharya. “We’ve come across an arch on one side of the enclosure that had been walled up. Naturally speculations are rife,” said another archaeologist.

Was it used as a punishment room by Hastings or one of the Lt Governors who succeeded him? It was common practice among the British to “wall up” offenders in “death chambers”. Some sources say this enclosure has exactly the same look and feel. The British were also known to hide riches in blind chambers as this.

“It could be just about anything. Skeletons and treasure chests are the two things that top our speculations because it is not natural for a building to have such a huge enclosure that has no opening. We cannot break down a wall, considering the importance of the building. So we have decided to bore a hole through the wall to peer inside with a searchlight,” said D V Sharma, regional director, ASI.

National Library authorities have written to the ministry of culture seeking permission for this. “The ASI cannot drill into a building of such great historical significance as this without permission.

The Pentagon press officer characterized the reports in the Indian media as absurd.

I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy — some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier — in support of the president’s trip to Asia,” said Morrell at today’s Pentagon briefing. “That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”

The US Navy does not provide on the Internet direct indications of the present location of US carrier groups. But general news reports indicate that at the present time there are, in fact, two US carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) in the US 5th Fleet Area of Responsibility.

Thus, 20% of the American carrier force was already in the neighborhood.

It would not be completely surprising if one of the two groups was tasked in addition to its normal duties with operating special patrols looking for terrorist ship traffic approaching Mumbai and assigned air patrol duties in connection with the Obama visit.

Wikipedia says: “On October 17, 2010, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) and guided missile cruiser USS Cape St. George (CG 71) arrived off the coast of Pakistan to support the coalition troop surge in landlocked Afghanistan”

If you have a carrier group “off the coast of Pakistan,” it is indeed in a suitable position to interdict the sea lanes off Mumbai and to provide air support in the region of that city.

How reasonable presidential security measures are, and how justifiable their cost, is inevitably a matter of opinion. A recent video taken in Seattle during a campaign visit just before the recent election by President Obama gives some indication of the scale of ordinary domestic security measures. Watch the video and tell me you don’t think they’d put a carrier group on alert.

Theo Spark labels this video “Obama Goes for Pizza,” but the French source merely says that Obama Has Quite an Escort.

The video’s British title, referring to going for pizza, like the Indian press reports, may feature an element of exaggeration in phraseology. Obama may simply have been traveling anywhere in Seattle or leaving for the airport. The carrier and its 34 escort ships were clearly already somewhere not terribly far away.

But all you have to do is look at the video and read about the tunnel and the removal of coconuts and you know that, give or take a shade of self-indulgent reportorial emphasis, the substance of the story was not wrong.

Obama didn’t “take” a carrier group with him. It was already in the general area, but New Dehli and Mumbai are not Republican strongholds. The Indian media has no dog in domestic American political fights, and if they felt moved to poke fun at the scale and expense of security measures going on in their own backyard for the presidential visit, their reaction was not partisan or contrived. They really were amused.

An American president visiting a foreign country needs to bring along some staff, equipment, and a protection detail. Brarack Obama seems to need a little more staff and protection than most presidents. He needs 800 rooms worth of staff and requires a fleet headed by a carrier for protection.

The White House will, of course, stay in Washington but the heart of the famous building will move to India when President Barack Obama lands in Mumbai on Saturday.

Communications set-up, nuclear button, a fleet of limousines and majority of the White House staff will be in India accompanying the President on this three-day visit that will cover Mumbai and Delhi.

He will also be protected by a fleet of 34 warships, including an aircraft carrier, which will patrol the sea lanes off the Mumbai coast during his two-day stay there beginning Saturday.

Barack Obama’s planned visit to Mani Bhavan —the Gandhi museum — on November 6, soon after he reaches Mumbai. On Monday, US secret agents visited the museum to plan Obama’s security detail.

They were accompanied by officers of Mumbai Police and civic officials of the D ward (where Mani Bhavan is located). While inspecting the route and the buildings lining up the route to the museum, the Americans detected a skyscraper near Peddar road and also found the area to be highly populated.

Since it is difficult to monitor such a congested area, they came up with a quick solution which left the Indians accompanying them amazed: A bomb-proof over-ground tunnel — to be installed by US military engineers in just an hour.

The tunnel would be a kilometre long and measure 12ft by 12ft — enough to let Obama’s cavalcade pass through. The tunnel would be centrally air-conditioned, fitted with close-circuit television cameras, and will be heavily guarded at every point, including, of course, its entry and exit.

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Even with his own personal tunnel, there remained a coconut threat to be neutralized.

While President Obama may have taken one on the jaw in Tuesday’s elections, officials in India are seeing to it he doesn’t take one on the head during his upcoming visit.

City officials in Mumbai have ordered the removal of all the coconuts from the trees around a museum dedicated to Gandhi for fear one could come loose and fall on the President’s head.

“We told the authorities to remove the dry coconuts from trees near the building,” Meghshyam Ajgaonkar, executive secretary of the museum, told the BBC. “Why take a chance?”

The presidential evacuation will cost $200 million per diem. Do you suppose they’d keep him if we offered $400 million per diem?

From Glenn Reynolds.

The Telegraph remembers Meghrajji III, the last ruling Maharaja of Dhrangadhra-Halvad, and the last surviving knight of the Order of the Indian Empire.

Meghrajji III was the 45th and last ruling descendant of the Jhala clan of Rajputs, of the Suryavanshi lineage, claiming descent from Surya, the Hindu Sun god. They were a warrior clan who originated in Baluchistan and arrived in India during the eighth century. The clan name derives from a miraculous feat by its founder Harapaldev’s wife, Shaktidevi, who caught up her children through an open window when they were charged by an elephant in must. Jhalvan is Gujarati for ‘catching’ and her children and descendants thus began to be called Jhala.

[I]n 1952, he opted out of what he described as “that rare and gubernatorial prison” for the freedom of a commoner at Christ Church, Oxford. There was some grumbling about his lack of academic qualifications, but he enjoyed the friendship of the House’s senior censor Hugh Trevor-Roper. When it was objected that Raj (as he signed himself in private correspondence) had not done any military service, Trevor-Roper pointed out that he had been commander-in-chief of the Dhrangadhra armed forces for six years.

The prince drove a sky-blue Jaguar at great speed around Oxford, and in 1953 received an invitation to the Coronation in Westminster Abbey. Over a period of six years he read Philosophy, took a diploma in Anthropology, and earned a BLitt with a thesis on the Brahma Samskâras (sacraments) as well as finding time to study drawing at the Ruskin School of Art and design ties as part of his heraldic studies. He also played the flute.

At his parties the champagne flowed freely. Allotted a set of four rooms, he had a retinue that included an ADC, a secretary and two servants dressed in dove-coloured coats and black caps. In deference to his age and position, he was made a member of the senior common room.

Dhrangadhra and his fellow princes had governed 565 states that covered almost half of the subcontinent, and at first they kept themselves aloof in the new republic. But on returning home from Christ Church he found that his fellow former rulers were gradually taking to democratic politics, proving an increasing irritant to the Congress government.

In 1967 he was elected to the legislature in Gujarat, the western Indian state into whose Saurastra peninsular Dhrangadhra-Halvad had been amalgamated. He subsequently became a member of India’s Lok Sabha (the country’s lower house of parliament), where he introduced measures to safeguard the constitutional rights of former rulers, particularly against the proposed abolition of the princes’ titles and their privy purses. Together with the Maharaja of Baroda and the Begum of Bhopal, he led the “concord of princes” which conducted a bitter battle over three years.

Interviewed by Harold Sieve of The Daily Telegraph, Dhrangadhra was agreeable to letting slip princely trappings, but his fellow princes were proud of their titles and didn’t see why they should no longer be permitted to fly their flags on cars while every lorry and taxi driver could do so. There was a brief reprieve when the Constitution Amendment Bill, stripping them of their titles, was declared illegal. As a result parliament was dissolved. But on the day of the subsequent election Dhrangadhra was ill in University College Hospital, London, and narrowly lost his seat.

Under the new government the chief justice was replaced and the Constitution Amendment Bill was reintroduced. After it became law Dhrangadhra was most exasperated by his fellow princes’ failure to back the compromise he had proposed.

Born Mayurdwajsinhji on March 3 1923, his birth was celebrated with the beating of war drums and the release of all Dhrangadhra-Halvad’s prisoners. Although small in comparison with its neighbours, the state comprised 1,157 square miles with a population of about 250,000, and rated a 13-gun-salute.

Tika, as the eldest son was traditionally known, was allotted apartments with his two brothers and eight sisters, and they had limited contact with their parents apart from a meal on Sundays. They were educated at the palace’s royal school, where he learned to recite Kipling’s poem If, and started his day either riding or doing drill at 6.30am. Scouting, carpentry, ploughing with bullocks and tinkering with cars as well as academic work followed. The feudal atmosphere was tempered by the headmaster, Jack Meyer, a tough member of MCC. Meyer was pleased when he asked Tika whether, when he was rich, he would buy cars or dig wells, and the boy replied: “Dig wells.”

In 1933 the royal school moved to England, where it became the public school Millfield in Somerset. But although Tika was one of the first seven boys in the school, he soon left to end his English school days at Haileybury before returning to India in 1939. He next went to St Joseph’s Academy at Dehra Dun and started at the Shivaji military school in Poona before becoming the maharaja.

After the princes’ parliamentary defeat, Dhrangadhra abandoned politics for scholarship, concentrating on the history of the Jhala family, a warrior clan whose proudest boast was that eight succeeding generations had died in battle against the Mughals. While declining to send his historical work to academic journals, he set up a small palace press to disseminate his work to friends, and obtained software to re-create tartans worn by Dhrangadhra soldiers in the 1940s.

The Maharaja of Dhrangadhra was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1948, and was the last surviving KCIE. He was president of Rajkumar College in Rajkot; and a life member of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association; of the World Wildlife Fund; the International Phonetic Association; and the Heraldry Society. He was also a member of the Cricket Club of India, the Fencing Association of Great Britain and the Bombay Masonic Lodge.

Hat tip to Rafal Heydel-Mankoo, who has since published a very nice tribute to Meghrajji III on his own blog.

Cobalt-60 is a radioactive isotope of Cobalt with a half life of 5.27 years. Cobalt-60 is not found in nature, and is artificially produced by bombarding Californium-59 with slow neutrons or by placing Cobalt rods in a nuclear reactor.

Cobalt-60 in very small quantities is used to sterilize medical equipment, to irradiate food, and for medical and industrial radiography.

It can also be used to create a dirty bomb.

One week ago (April 8), in the West Dehli industrial area of Mayapuri, two local scrap dealers, Deepak Jain, Bablu, and five others fell ill as the result of exposure to “very powerful” radiation.

Indian Express (April 9)

Economic Times (April 9):

Indian Times (April 14)

Hindustan Times (April 9):

Sources at Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (BARC) told HT the radioactive waste recovered was commercial in nature and may have been used at biochemistry or a haematology laboratory.

Police said the waste in the form of “entangled wires and pellets” could have been brought from outside the country and was handed over to Deepak Jain, the scrap dealer, through an agent.

Jain is battling for his life at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals after sustaining prolonged exposure to the substance.

The officials of Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) collected eight bags of the substance from two of Jain’s godowns located 300 metres away from each other.

Two more sources found (April 14).

The Cobalt-60 is assumed to have originated outside India, because no legitimate production of the isotope takes place inside the country.

Hat tip to Debkafile and Thorvald Maada.

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Technological tour de force: Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque 6:20 video of virtual choir performance, 185 performers from 12 countries recorded on 243 tracks.

Audition videos (link).

How it was organized (link).

How it was made (link).

Via Kottke.
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What American states & cities have the best-equipped male residents? Condomania has the list. New Hampshire and New Orleans win.
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Why do I walk like that?

Detail of Megan Jaegerman police graphic discussed by Edward Tufte.

Via Cory Doctorow.

Strategy Page reports that a formidable new ally, a powerful fighter particularly skilled in mountain warfare, recently joined the Western Anti-Jihadist Coalition.

In Indian Kashmir, an Islamic terrorist leader, and one of his followers was killed by a black bear. Two other terrorists were wounded, but were able to flee to a nearby village. Although the terrorists were armed with assault rifles, the bear attacked quickly, and at night, and the men were unable to use their weapons in the restricted confines of the cave. Apparently the bear was going to use the cave to hibernate in, and was upset to find that the terrorists had moved in. The four terrorists thought the cave was abandoned, and a good place to hide out in.

The Asiatic Black Bear is related to the American black bear, but is larger (up to 400 pounds for an older male), and is much more aggressive towards humans. The Asiatic bear has a more powerful jaw, and bigger claws.

You have to give him credit. Obama certainly has turned one sector of the economy around.

Ammoland.com

One of the principal contributors at fellow boutique blog Maggie’s Farm has done several postings on the Oriental Rug, and I thought he’d enjoy a look at this particular example. I like rugs, too, but ours are all rolled up and stored away in our house right now, since we adopted a Basset Bleu de Gascoigne named Cadet. Dogs will reliably regurgitate the latest nasty thing they found out in the yard by preference right in the middle of your favorite and most expensive antique oriental rug.

[T]he Aynard carpet, considered one of the greatest pashmina knotted Mughal carpets, contains a bouquet of blossoms that resemble octopi floating languorously on a crimson sky filled with dragon-head chi clouds. Here, we enter the surreal world of the artist’s brilliant imagination, whose floral bouquet of voluptuous efflorescence sweeps us away into a metaphysical reverie.
—Frank Ames.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of “gun control”. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.

The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all “prohibited weapons” under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen.

In Britain we might recall the prolonged failure of armed police to contain the Hungerford killer, whose rampage lasted more than four hours, and who in the end shot himself. In Dunblane, too, it was the killer who ended his own life: even at best, police response is almost always belated when gunmen are on the loose. ...

The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country.

In India, victims watched as armed police cowered and didn’t fire back at the terrorists. A photographer at the scene described his frustration: “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything. At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.”

Meanwhile, according to the hotel company’s chairman, P.R.S. Oberoi, security at “the hotel had metal detectors, but none of its security personnel carried weapons because of the difficulties in obtaining gun permits from the Indian government.”

India has extremely strict gun control laws, but who did it succeed in disarming?

The terrorist attack showed how difficult it is to disarm serious terrorists. Strict licensing rules meant that it was the victims who obeyed the regulations, not the terrorists.

John Hinderaker of Power-Line loses patience with the mealy-mouthed political correctness of the mainstream media.

The very same media which gleefully lynches opponents to the right, like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin, on the basis of its own trumped up charges has no enemies to the left, so any terrorist (even one captured in a photograph holding an automatic weapon in the midst of a murderous mass attack) is always only a potential suspect, someone whose status requires a full-scale courtroom procedure, and a complete professional defense, before it can possibly be pejoratively characterized.

Reuters’ caption for the photo begins: “A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station in Mumbai November 26, 2008.”

Notice the object the terrorist is holding in his hands. It’s a gun. He isn’t a “suspected gunman,” he’s a “gunman.”

First link collection

Here is a recent acquisition: a boar spear blade made by
Bodraj of Aurangabad, one of the preferred models of blade used for Pig-Sticking, the finest sport in Asia, by British officers and colonial administrators in the pre-WWII days of the Empire.

(Click on the above picture for more. The link goes to another web-site I use for image and file distribution. I plan to post more photo collections of antique weapons from my personal collection from time to time.)

Sir Robert Baden-Powell describes it, thusly:

The Bodraj head is a flat oval blade tapering to a point. It is 4 inches long, three-quarters to 1 inch broad at the widest part, with a neck and socket of 4 inches long ; a projecting rib runs from point to socket along the centre of each side of the blade, standing about one-sixth of an inch, and sharpened along its back. This head is particularly adapted for use in Pig-sticking Cup Competitions.

“Snaffles,” The Finest View in Asia, 1928

It used to be Texans who made news with unprecedentedly large outlays on conspicuous forms of high living. These days, it’s billionaires from India.

The DailyMail reports:

India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is planning a palace in the heart of Mumbai with helipad, health club, hanging gardens and six floors of car parking.

His wife, mother and three children will live there with him, looked after by 600 live-in staff.

Construction has already started on what will eventually be a 175m tower and planners are aiming to complete it in September 2008.

Earlier this year, Forbes rated Mr Ambani as the richest resident Indian with a net worth of US$20.1 billion.

He came 14th in Forbes’ 2007 worldwide rankings.

Currently he is chairman of petroleum major Reliance Industries Ltd, India’s largest private sector company

The building, already worth £500 million, could start a rush on skyscrapers.

The Age reports:

The building, named Antilla after a mythical island, will have a total floor area greater than Versailles.

Hat tip to Dominique R. Poirier.

Reuters reports an epidemic of highway robbery in India.

An elephant in eastern India has sparked complaints from motorists who accuse it of blocking traffic and refusing to allow vehicles to pass unless drivers give it food, a newspaper reported on Monday.

The Hindustan Times said the elephant was scouting for food on a highway in the eastern state of Orissa, forcing motorists to roll down their windows and get out of the car.

“The tusker then inserts its trunk inside the vehicle and sniffs for food,” local resident Prabodh Mohanty, who has come across the elephant twice, was quoted as saying.

“If you are carrying vegetables and banana inside your vehicle, then it will gulp them and allow you to go.”

If a commuter does not wind down his window or resists opening the vehicle door, the elephant stands in front of the car until the driver allows him to carry out his routine inspection.

Forestry officials told the newspaper that the elephant is old and is therefore looking for easy food.

“So far, it has not harmed anybody,” said Sirish Mohanty, a forest ranger working in the state.

“We are telling commuters regularly not to tease the elephant. But if people don’t heed to our advice and harass the tusker, then it can retaliate.”

Elephants are a protected and endangered species in India, which has nearly half of the world’s 60,000 Asian elephants.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

George David Garforth-Bles was born on October 5 1909 at Knutsford, Cheshire. He was the grandson of Sir William Garforth, the inventor of the coal-cutter and a safety lamp and breathing apparatus for miners. David was educated at Rugby, where he played for the first XV and the hockey IX and was Master of the Rugby Rat Hounds (ferrets).

After going up to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read Military Studies and German, he served with The Guides Cavalry (10th Queen Victoria’s Own Frontier Force) on the North West Frontier Force from 1931 to 1939; in the latter year, he played in the regimental polo team which won the last Indian Cavalry Polo Tournament.

In the Second World War Garforth-Bles commanded the 4th Battalion, 3rd Madras Regiment, in fierce fighting against the Japanese in Burma. He was mentioned in dispatches.

In 1948 he retired from the Army and emigrated to Canada, where he took up the post of secretary at the Eglinton Hunt Club in Toronto.

On his return to England, he ran a small family business. In retirement, at Farnham, Surrey, he enjoyed fishing and gardening. He was co-author of Now or Never (1946), an account of his regiment’s experiences in the Burma Campaign.

David Garforth-Bles died on September 27. He married first (dissolved), in 1939, Susan Muir-Mackenzie. He married secondly, in 1948, Ann Deshon. She predeceased him, and he is survived by a son and a daughter from his first marriage and by three sons from his second

His sporting career in India provides one of the most remarkable pig-sticking stories:

Lieutenant-Colonel David Garforth-Bles, who has died aged 96, served in the Indian Cavalry on the North West Frontier and was the central figure in an episode which must rank highly even in the bizarre chronicles of oriental field sports.

In 1937 Garforth-Bles, a young officer in The Guides Cavalry, was attending a course at the Army Equitation School, Saugor, Central India, when he went pig-sticking with a colleague, Denis Voelker. As he wrote shortly afterwards to his parents: “A sounder [herd] of pig broke between us and the heat on the right.

There were three rideable boar amongst them and Denis and I were on the largest. Everyone else was chasing the other two and we were quite by ourselves. Denis had a very fast horse and was about ten yards in front of me and just going to spear the pig. Suddenly the pig and Denis and his horse vanished completely.”

Garforth-Bles at first assumed that his friend and his quarry had descended into a deep nullah (gully), but he could find no evidence of one. He turned his pony round, and came across a well, which was overgrown with long grass.

“I had a nasty moment wondering what I should find at the bottom,” he continued in his letter home, “as most of the wells here are very deep indeed, and some are dry at the bottom. Luckily this was a very wide well and the water was very deep and only about twenty-five feet down from the top, and there were large flat stones sticking out to form steps down to the water.”

When he peered down into the gloom Garforth-Bles made out Denis Voelker hanging on to the bottom step; his horse was plunging about in the water, while the pig was swimming round and round, occasionally rushing at the horse and at Voelker and trying to get on to the step.

Garforth-Bles descended into the well to find that his friend had broken his left arm and had a six-inch cut down to the bone of his elbow. He helped the injured man up the steps, then got hold of the horse’s bridle, trying to keep the animal’s head above water.

Garforth-Bles wrote: “It was rather difficult, as he was terrified of the pig, which kept swimming at him and trying to bite him. Then the horse would rear up in the water, beating with his fore legs, and turn over backwards and sink. I thought that he was certain to be drowned.

“By this time several village people had come up and one of them held the horse’s bridle, while I speared the pig several times until it sank. We then got a rope with a stone on the end and lowered it down one side of the horse and brought it up on the other side underneath its belly. I had to dive under the horse to get hold of the rope. We could now keep it from sinking, and there was nothing to do until the others came up. They had killed the two other pigs and arrived at last, seeing the village people round the well.”

While Voelker was taken to hospital, Garforth-Bles asked the nearby veterinary hospital to provide one of the slings used for supporting lame horses; when this arrived he returned to the water, and fitted it to his friend’s distressed horse.

“It was quite tricky work, as I had to dive underneath it several times and it plunged about a bit. However, in the end, the village people, directed by Griffiths, a Sapper officer on the course, got a strong beam across the top of the well, and hauled the horse out. It came out remarkably easily and was not much scratched, though very exhausted and cold, but recovered in the sun and walked home.”

Garforth-Bles added: “General Wardrop, the ultimate authority on pig-sticking, says that it has never been known for pig, horse and rider to fall down a well. Far from spoiling their drinking water, the villagers were delighted. They fished out the pig and ate it!”

The Government of India claimed in July of 2003 the right to ban websites in the interest of

sovereignty or integrity of India,
security of the state
friendly relations with foreign states and public order
preventing incitement to commissioning of any cognisable offences.

Some 17 individual blogs were originally banned. The Indian Government’s list (image here), according to CNN, included:

Two Hindu political sites:

1. HinduUnity.org
12. Hindu Human Rights

The personal blog of one Indian grad student studying in the US:

17. http://rahulyadav.com personal website of an Indian kid earning an MIS at Indiana University. Blocked for having a few links to Indian political sites.

Seven US Conservative Blogs:

2. The Jawa Report
4. Opinipudit
5. Pirate’s Cove
6. “http://commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com” – previous url, currently a Japanese language blog. Should have been: Common Folk using Common Sense
7. My Vast Rightwing Conspiracy
8. Princess Kimberly – Url works, but ceased publication in March of 2004
9. http://merrimusings.typepad.com – previous non-working url banned. Should have been: Merri Musings
10. Macker’s World

Yahoo’s image search url:

15. http://imagesearch.yahoo.com – should be: http://images.search.yahoo.com/images

Four badly typo’d or defunct sites:

11. Dalitstan – an art site, whose name refers to Salvador Dali.
13. http://nndh.com – does not exist
14. http://bloodroyaltriped.com – does not exist. There is also no “http://bloodroyaltripod.com.”
16. http://imamali8.com – does not exist. Tried http://imamali5.com and http://imamali6.com without success as well.

A pretty motley collection, demonstrating some serious incompetence at the Indian Attorney General’s office. Obviously, any American blog which has criticized Islamic extremism (including this one) is just as worthy of the Indian Government’s ban as those on its current list.

The Indian Government, under criticism, yesterday retreated to the extent of issuing a clarification, stating that its intention was to ban only specific blogs, and not entire hosting sites. But the American Conservative blogs listed above remain banned today.

Rusty Shackleford’s original report.

Playing with Google Earth is pretty popular in tech circles. One can snoop into all sorts of earthly matters from heaven’s perspective. Lester Haines at the Register reports on one of Google Earth-ers’ most al-time intriguing finds: a Chinese military installation at Huangyangtan features an astonshingly detailed 900×700m scale model of a very mountainous landscape.

The army of Googlers applied ther obsessive analytic skills and identified the model’s subject location: a disputed region of the China-India border.

The extraordinarily elaborate model was obviously painstakingly produced for some sort of military training. The Google General Staff College theorizes that the purpose may be to familiarize Chinese pilots with the landscape in preparation for some future conflict. Considering just how much trouble and expense the Chinese have gone to with this one, India had better be prepared for a renewal of Chinese pressure for concessions, backed up by military force.

——————————————————Hat tip to PJM.