BEIJING — “Stick out your tongue. Now give me your wrist.”

That’s how “Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)” practitioners begin to diagnose what ails you. It’s often followed by a prescription of foul-tasting herbs, to be taken daily, along with exhortations to consume or avoid certain “hot” or “cold” foods.

But after more than 2,000 years of practice, the question remains: Is there scientific evidence that traditional Chinese medicine actually works? A doctor at one of Beijing’s top hospitals is challenging these time-honored methods with a modern proposal: cash prizes for proof.

Dr. Ning Fanggang is offering 100,000 renminbi ($16,300) to anyone who resolves the common claim that traditional practitioners can tell if a woman is pregnant just by taking her pulse. “If [someone is] successful, I will never state that Traditional Chinese Medicine is a fake science,” Ning promised. The 38-year-old is chief surgeon at Beijing Jishuitan Hospital, which specializes in burn victims, and is also one of the best-known doctors on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

His challenge calls for readings of 80-percent accuracy, using the pulse method alone. Critics complain that isolating the wrist from the rest of the system undermines the validity of a diagnosis, and thus the challenge.

So far, only one person has taken Ning up — but he appears to be backing out.

Another doctor from Chengdu, Lu Jilai, author of the “Chinese Encyclopedia of Losing Weight and Body Building” and “Traditional Medicine Trinity Theories,” boasted that he could even

Twelve days before his retirement, Central Bureau of Investigation Director Ranjit Sinha on Thursday suffered a major blow when the Supreme Court removed him from the 2G scam case, saying the allegations against him of protecting some accused appears to be “prima facie credible”.

The Apex court, in an unprecedented order, handed over the case to the senior-most officer after Sinha in the 2G scam investigating team.

A bench headed by Chief Justice H L Dattu, however, refused to pass an elaborate order on the issue saying that it would “tarnish” the “image and reputation” of the premier agency.

The fate of the top cop, who is due to retire on December 2, in the case became abundantly clear when the bench, also comprising justices M B Lokur and A K Sikri, before rising for the lunch break, asked senior advocate Vikas Singh, appearing for Sinha, about various options.

The court said it did not want to pass an elaborate order, because it would be against the interest and image of the agency.

“Prima facie the allegations made in the application (by NGO Centre for Public Interest Litigation) are credible and required to be accepted,” the bench observed.

However, his counsel insisted that the allegations levelled against Sinha of scuttling the 2G probe were “untrue”.

The CBI chief’s role was criticised by the Apex court-appointed Special Public Prosecutor Anand Grover and counsel appearing for CBI, K K Venugopal, also raised questions on Sinha naming a senior IPS officer as mole in the team.

The Apex court also recalled its earlier order by which it directed the NGO to disclose the name of whistleblower who had provided documents and visitors diary of Sinha’s residence.

At the outset, the Special Public Prosecutor raised serious questions on the conduct of the top cop and contended that the whole case against some of the accused would have been “demolished” if Sinha’s instructions had been followed in the trial.

Grover said that stand taken by Sinha was “completely inconsistent” with the agency’s stand and said he tried to interfere at the last stage of the trial when the prosecution evidence was almost over.

He said that information that he gathered, after going through all file notings, is “shocking” and cannot be revealed in an open court.

The independent prosecutor also raised questions on the opinion of Law Ministry to allegedly favour some of the firms facing trial in 2G case.

“It is a sad story how ministry works. An official deposed saying that it was done on the basis of file notings of the minister but the question is who was the person behind the minister? It is shocking,” he said.

At this stage of proceedings, the hearing took a new turn with advocate Prashant Bhushan alleging that CBI counsel in 2G case K K Venugopal was directed by Sinha not to argue in this case.

The bench then queried who had given such direction.

CBI joint Director Ashok Tiwari, who was present in the court room, said that Venugopal continues to be the CBI counsel in the Apex court and also tried to shield his chief in the present controversy.

The court took strong exception to Tiwari trying to defend his boss and also raised question on the presence of around nine senior officers of CBI inside the court room.

“You are not agents of the Director and you cannot be his mouthpiece. You do not need to take responsibility. How is your presence required here,” the bench questioned.

“Why are so many CBI officers here? How come so many officers are sitting in the court room? We do not require their presence. We are not hearing 2G investigation case. We are hearing an application filed against the Director,” it said.

The bench asked the officers to leave the courtroom and “do their duty rather than observing court proceedings”.

The officers thereafter left the courtroom.

Venugopal then brought to court’s notice media reports on Singh naming a DIG-rank officer Santosh Rastogi as a “mole” who supplied documents and guest list of Director’s residence to Bhushan.

The CBI through Venugopal criticised Sinha’s stand and urged the court to ask him to withdraw the statement.

“Yesterday’s statement was not right that the officer is a mole in the CBI. If there is any evidence then it must be produced. The statement must be withdrawn as the officer needs protection,” he said.

Bhushan also submitted that he never met the officer and somebody else had given him the documents and filed an affidavit in this regard which was taken on record.

The bench also raised objection that image of the officer cannot be allowed to be tarnished and said that it was wrong on the part of Sinha’s counsel to name the officer while arguing the case.

Going by file notings on transfer of the officer, the bench said, “It seems that you want to clear the path as the officer was opposing some of your decisions”.

The bench said the decision taken by the Director to transfer the officer amounts to “overreaching” the Apex court order which had directed that no person in 2G probe team be removed without its order.

It said that “all is not well” and “some allegations against him (Sinha) appeared to be prima facie credible and asked Singh about the options available in the case as it did not want to pass an elaborate order with reasons which would have the potential to tarnish the image and reputation of the premier institution.

Vikas Singh, however, preferred to continue with his arguments saying that statements made by SPP and others against the Director were patently false and baseless.

He said that Director’s decision may not be the best but there was no malafide and dishonest intention behind the decision.

The bench, however, brushed aside the contention saying, “For every thing there is justification but the justification should appeal to us”.

At the end of the four-hour long proceedings, the bench passed a brief order directing Sinha to keep himself away from the 2G case and “not to interfere in the investigation and trial of the 2G cases and recuse himself from them”.

“To protect the faith in the institution and reputation of Director, CBI, we are not focusing on elaborate reasons and it is suffice to say information furnished by applicants prima facie appears to be credible and therefore required to be accepted,” the bench said.

Salman Khan’s sister Arpita Khan and Aayush Sharma’s wedding preparations have been making headlines recently. And now they are finally married. They have taken their vows and exchanged garlands in a typical Hindu Punjabi ritual.

Arpita Khan and Aayush Sharma got married at the Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad last night, November 18. Few pictures of the bride and groom have been tweeted from the venue. Arpita can be seen dressed in a heavily embroidered red lehenga and Aayush in white sherwani and sehra. Arpita has dressed up completely like a Hindu Punjabi bride. She had worn choodas and kale’s, a typical Punjabi bride.

Salman Khan and his family were dressed in black and had sported a golden pagdi. The baraat was received by Salman’s father Salim Khan, mother Salma and brothers Sohail and Arbaaz. A jaimala and pheras also took place.

The celebrations, which kicked off with the ‘baraat’ at 4.30 p.m., continued till late in the night at the heritage hotel located in the old city area.

Aamir Khan, Katrina Kaif and Karan Johar were among top stars from Bollywood who attended the marriage. It was not clear as to which other leading stars attended the wedding as the security was very tight.

Ahead of the wedding, Arpita’s sisters-in-law Malaika Arora Khan and Seema Khan, close friend and Malaika’s sister Amrita Arora, and family friend Deanne Panday were photographed in their wedding outfits.

Aayush and Arpita’s reception is expected to take place in Mumbai on November 21.

The redevelopment of Mumbai’s mostly derelict docklands will, if a government appointed panel has its way, create a waterfront where people living in the world’s second most densely-populated city can go to lift their spirits, and the rich can go to play.

“This is a real opportunity to give Mumbai what it doesn’t have, to give it open space,” said Narinder Nayar, a businessman who sits on the panel, whose recommendations will be unveiled this week.

Owned by Mumbai Port Trust, the largest landowner in India’s financial hub, much of the 7 square kilometres (2.7 square miles) up for redevelopment is occupied today by crumbling warehouses, informal housing and workers who eke out a living breaking down disused ships or sorting through scrap metal.

The government, which has valued the land at $12 billion, is pitching the project as a shining example of what urban regeneration in India should look like: transport minister Nitin Gadkari wants a giant ferris wheel similar to the London Eye.

“We should be looking towards the examples of New York, London, Sydney…Barcelona as well, to see what can be done with our former industrial areas on the waterfront,” Nayar said.

Whereas Mumbai’s western shoreline looks out to the Arabian Sea, this land is located on the protected eastern side of the city’s southern tip, affording a view across the harbour to the mainland, where a new deep-sea container port is based.

Nair says the panel will recommend that about 30 percent of the land be opened as public space, and the construction of a hospital and affordable housing, linked by new train lines.

There are plans for a floating hotel and convention centre too, and a tender is already out to build a luxury marina to cater for the city’s super-rich.

With its natural harbour, Bombay, as it was called back then, was rapidly developed during British colonial times, and much of today’s city sits on reclaimed land that joined up a string of tiny islands off India’s western coast.

Mumbai hasn’t got a great track record for urban planning, however. Mounting demographic pressures and long delays for infrastructure projects have often meant that whatever progress takes place has already been overtaken by the population’s growing needs.

“NOT A SINGLE SQUARE INCH”

“You can really feel the pressure this land must be under from developers,” said Aneerudha Paul, a Mumbai-based architect, staring up at new blocks of flats towering over the empty warehouses lining the docks.

There are some 12.5 million people crammed on the ‘island city’, a narrow wedge of land jutting into the sea, and around 21 million in the greater metropolitan area.

Half of them live in slums, and according to a 2012 study, there is just 1.1 square metres of open space for each resident. This is less than the 15 square metres available in capital city Delhi and the 31 square metres in London.

Residents and urban experts worry that the Mumbai port project will either fail to get off the ground, or succumb to the same unregulated building sprees seen across the country.

There was a plan in the 1990s to reserve a third of 2.4 square kilometres (0.9 square mile) of defunct mill land in central Mumbai for public space, and a third for affordable housing. It ended with most of the area sold privately and turned into luxury skyscrapers set amid landscaped gated gardens.

1. M. Parmar, Mumbai Port Trust Chairman, told Reuters that “not a single square inch” would be sold to developers, although plots might be leased to property firms to raise cash for redevelopment elsewhere.

“So far the intentions from the government have been good,” said Nayar. “But only time will tell.”

Binyamin Netanyahu vows harsh retaliation over ‘despicable murderers’, after four rabbis and policeman killed

Five Israelis were killed in a frenzied assault by two Palestinians who targeted worshippers at a Jerusalem synagogue, the latest in a series of deadly attacks that many fear is pushing the city to the edge of a dangerous escalation in violence.

Four of the people killed were rabbis, three holding joint US citizenship, one with dual British citizenship. The fifth victim was an Israeli policeman, who succumbed to his injuries late on Tuesday night.

The attack was greeted by international condemnation, and Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, vowed to “respond harshly”, describing the attack as a “cruel murder of Jews who came to pray and were killed by despicable murderers”.

The two assailants, cousins Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal, attacked the worshippers with meat cleavers and a gun during early-morning prayers before they were killed by police officers. The circumstances of the incident have added to the sense of crisis in Jerusalem.

Witnesses described a chaotic and bloody scene inside the synagogue as police and the attackers engaged in a shootout at the building’s entrance. Photographs distributed by Israeli authorities showed a man in a prayer shawl lying dead, a bloodied butcher’s cleaver on the floor and prayer books covered in blood.

Many in Israel have been alarmed by the religious dimension to the killings. Violence in Jerusalem, areas of Israel and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, has surged in recent months, exacerbated by tensions over a key holy site revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and Jews as the Temple Mount

Prominent among those who condemned the killings were the US president, Barack Obama and the British prime minister, David Cameron. Denouncing it as a “horrific attack” Obama told reporters at the White House: “Tragically, this is not the first loss of lives that we have seen in recent months. Too many Israelis have died, too many Palestinians have died.”

Netanyahu called the attack a “cruel murder of Jews who came to pray and were killed by despicable murderers”. In an evening press conference he once again accused the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, of stirring tension in Jerusalem, and called on the international community to express its outrage.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack Netanyahu ordered the demolition of the homes of the two attackers. Other measures reported to be under consideration by the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, were the loosening of firearms regulations to allow security personnel to carry guns off duty and the reported establishment of security checks on those leaving Palestinian neighbourhoods of the city.

The US consulate in Jerusalem identified the dead Americans as Aryeh Kupinsky, Kalman Ze’ev Levine, and Moshe Twersky. Israeli authorities said the British man killed was Avraham Goldberg, 68, who had emigrated to Israel in the 1990s. The policeman who was killed was Zidan Saif.

The four rabbis were buried on Tuesday afternoon in funerals attended by several thousand people and by senior political figures. Relatives in the east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Jabal Mukaber later said the attackers were the cousins Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal, who burst into the Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue in Har Nof. Israeli media reported that one of the two assailants had worked in a supermarket in the area.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, quickly condemned the killings. “We condemn the killing of civilians from any side,” he said in a statement. “We condemn the killings of worshippers at the synagogue in Jerusalem and condemn acts of violence no matter their source.”

But Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that runs the Gaza Strip, praised the attack. In Gaza, dozens of people took to the streets to celebrate, with some offering trays full of sweets.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small militant group, said the cousins were among their members, though it did not say whether it had instructed them to carry out the attack.

Speaking to journalists at the scene, Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, expressed shock at the brutality of the attack. “To slaughter innocent people while they pray … it’s insane,” he said.

In a bleak assessment of the wave of violence, the Israeli justice minister, Tzipi Livni, told Army Radio that she had long feared that a religious war was developing. “And a religious war cannot be solved.”

In Jabal Mukaber relatives of the two attackers offered theories about the motives for the attack, with some linking it to the death of a Palestinian bus driver found hanged behind his bus, described by Israeli authorities as a suicide but widely believed by many Palestinians to have been a lynching.

Other family members, however, blamed recent friction at the Temple Mount which has been blamed for a rash of deadly violence and clashes.

A cousin of the men, Sufian Abu Jamal, a construction worker aged 40, described the attack as a “heroic act and the normal reaction of what has been happening to Palestinians in Jerusalem and at the al-Aqsa mosque”.

At the house of Uday, “Abu Salah”, an uncle of one of the men, said his relatives had been made angry by what they had seen on Facebook and television news reports. “It was a situation ripe for an explosion and that is what happened.”

The attack was the latest in a series of deadly assaults. Five Israelis and a foreign visitor have been deliberately run over and killed or stabbed to death by Palestinians. About a dozen Palestinians have also been killed, including those accused of carrying out those attacks.

Residents trace the recent violence in Jerusalem to July when a Palestinian teenager was burned to death by Jewish assailants, an alleged revenge attack for the abduction and killing of three Jewish teens by Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, said the attack was “a pure result of incitement”. In an emotional statement in London, Kerry added: “Innocent people who had come to worship died in the sanctuary of a synagogue. They were hatcheted, hacked and murdered in that holy place in an act of pure terror and senseless brutality and murder.”

Four body builders from U.P, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Punjab are participating in the 4^th Asian Beach Games to be held in Phuket Thailand. This was announced amid a press conference held at Maratha Club, Mumbai on 17^th November.  The Asian Beach games are organized by Olympic Council of Asia from 14^th to 223^d November. Phuket is Thailand’s best know beach destinations.. The event is co-hosted by Ministry of Tourism and Sports and The Tourism Authority of Thailand. The event will see a host of 45 countries participating with the estimated athletes along with officers would be about 3500.

The four wrestlers Amit Chaudhary, Ravi Kumar, Kohtan Taman and Hiral Punjab are optimistic about winning some medals in the body building competition. These four body builders are participating in the game under the aegis of Indian Body Building and Fitness Federation. The Federation is an independent body with no support from the Government. With the help of some enthusiastic body builders these body builders have been sponsored to participate in Thailand.  The federation also organizes Mr India competition annually along with a number of competitions at the state and national level.

Drawing a parallel between the Narendra Modi government and its predecessor UPA, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) today slammed the Centre for refusing to disclose all information on black money, saying it had buckled to the pressure of powerful people who have stashed illegal money in foreign banks.

“The Narendra Modi government’s attempt to block the disclosure of names of individuals who have stashed black money abroad is a betrayal with the people of India and first major breach of trust by this regime,” AAP alleged in a statement.

“The BJP-led government’s stand is identical to its predecessor, the UPA government, and it is now clear that the Narendra Modi government has also buckled to the pressure of powerful people who have kept their illegal money in foreign banks,” it said.

Earlier, the Centre submitted before the Supreme Court that all the information on black money received from foreign countries, with which India has double taxation avoidance agreement, cannot be disclosed.

AAP also demanded that the NDA government must reveal the real reasons for its sudden “u-turn”, which has made it stand in the same line as that of the UPA government.

The party recalled that before Lok Sabha elections, the then BJP president Rajnath Singh, who is now the Home Minister, had promised to bring back all the black money stashed in foreign banks if BJP came to power.

“What is shocking is that the BJP, which had brought an adjournment motion in Parliament in 2011 demanding the disclosure of names of those who have black money stashed in foreign bank accounts, is now giving the same defeated and rejected excuses to deny this information from being made public,” AAP added.

It also added that the AAP will raise the issue in the forthcoming Winter Session in Parliament and will keep asking the government the reason for its unjustified move, which is a direct compromise with the biggest source of corruption.