Oh boy, oh boy.

As Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cozies up to the Bush Administration, his youngest daughter Amrit Singh blasts the same administration for borrowing methods from tyrannical regimes (and she is right).

In her new book Administration of Torture, Manmohan Singh’s U.S-based daughter Amrit Singh plunges the dagger deep into the rotting carcass of the Bush administration, twists the knife around and exposes the maggot of lies and evasions surrounding the brutal torture of prisoners by American soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Written in a take-no-prisoner style, Amrit Singh and her co-author Jameel Jaffer tell a compelling and shameful story of pervasive torture, abuse and mistreatment of prisoners by the U.S. military in America’s war on terror.

 

Through meticulous documentation, Amrit Singh and Jameel Jaffer leave no doubt that American servicemen tortured prisoners through beating, sleep deprivation, electrocution, burning, kicking, intimidation with dogs, waterboarding and occasionally by murder.

Some American soldiers, in fact, have gone beyond torture of detainees by engaging in rape and murder of civilians as well. But American soldiers’ atrocities on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan is a story for another day.

Administration of Torture tears into the Bush administration for merely talking the talk on commitment to democracy and human rights but not walking the walk when it comes to action.

 
Amrit Singh
(Courtesy: ACLU)

A graduate of Yale Law School, Cambridge and Oxford Universities and a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, Amrit Singh

Internet darling Google’s shares surged past $700 for the first time on Wednesday barely a few weeks after the stock breached the $600 barrier.

Defying commonsense, Google shares closed at $707 Wednesday giving the Internet search company a market capitalization of $220.7 billion.

Consider this – Google’s market capitalization is now higher than that of business stalwarts such as Berkshire Hathaway (run by legendary investor Warren Buffet), Citigroup and Bank of America.

Investor mania for Google shares seem to be driven by news of the so-called Google Phone, the company’s ambitious plans on the social networking side, 46% growth in profitability in Q3 and the search for a safe haven in the aftermath of the sub-prime mortgage carnage on Wall Street affecting most of the financial service providers.

Google shares have risen over eight times since the shares debuted at $84 in August 2004.

All of us know how the Tulipmania and the DotCom Mania ended.

Will the Google Mania end any differently?

The trial of Mahender Muralidhar Sabhnani and his wife Varsha Mahender Sabhnani charged with enslaving and abusing two Indonesian women servants opened in a Federal Court in Long Island on Monday.

Mahender Sabhnani, 51, and Varsha Sabhnani, 45, residents of the wealthy enclave of Muttontown in Long Island have pleaded not guilty to a 12-count federal indictment accusing them of conspiracy, involuntary servitude and other charges.

The Sabhnanis, owners of an international perfume business, are free on $4.5 million bail but under house arrest.

Social networking web sites seem to be the big rage in Internet-land with News Corp, Microsoft and Google all owing a piece of the action in this hot segment.

Now media laggard HT Media, parent company of the Hindustan Times newspaper, has belatedly developed the social networking itch.

The slow-moving HT Media says its subsidiary Firefly e-Ventures in the process of acquiring a social networking web site to establish a footing in this rapidly-growing space and complement its other proposed web initiatives.

Firefly also intends to roll out online vertical classifieds around jobs, matrimonials and real estate.

HT did not provide details but claimed that the relaunched Hindustantimes.com web site was seeing higher page views.

Long term, we are skeptical that the HT group’s forays in the Internet domain will amount to much.

The HT folks are too slow-moving compared to other Indian media players like Times of India. Come on, it took HT decades to launch a business newspaper. And Mint, HT’s busines daily is still published only in Delhi and Bombay. The Bangalore edition of Mint is expected to show up sometime in the third quarter.

On Monday, the Indian stock market sent a strong message of the economic vibrancy in the country to visiting U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson by driving the BSE Sensex to a record high of 20,000 points.

The BSE Sensex is an index of 30 large and actively traded stocks on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

After hitting a high of 20,024.87 in intra-day trading, the market ended up 3.82%, or 734.5 points, to close at 19,977.97. It was the third-biggest single day gain for the Sensex.

Traders were optimistic about rate cuts at the U.S. Fed meeting on Wednesday. Domestic institutional investors were also active in the market.

The Sensex has gained 2,417.69 points or 13.77% in six days.  

Over the last 10 months, the rise in the Sensex – which ended 2006 at 13,786.91 – has been amazing.

The Indian economy and its stock market has been growing gangbusters just as the U.S. economy is in a meltdown because of the self-inflicted sub-prime mortgage disaster, high oil prices, Iraq catastrophe and effete political leadership. 

Religare Securities president for equities Amitabh Chakraborty told Reuters:

India is no longer an option but a compulsion for an overseas investor, and money will flow like water as we are a very lucrative market. 

Coincidentally, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was in Bombay, India’s commercial capital, on Monday to address the U.S.-India CEO Forum Infrastructure Conference.

Senior U.S. officials are quietly pressuring India to sign the nuclear deal that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has put on the backburner because of domestic political compulsions.

After all, at stake for the American companies like GE and Westinghouse are multi-billion dollar contracts.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Chief Spokesman for big American businesses, told reporters on Sunday in Amtala village near Kolkata:

It is a very important deal…I would encourage moving forward as quickly as possible.

In plain English, Paulson is telling Indian officials to stop dicking around, sign the  goddamn nuclear deal and start giving U.S. companies your multi-billion dollar contracts.

Paulson is in India this week to meet with government officials and business leaders.

Other senior U.S. administration officials have also expressed eagerness to get the nuclear deal moving.

Former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who once infamously called Indians bastards, suggested in an interview with CNN-IBN that India’s failure to go ahead with the nuclear deal:

would certainly, in an intangible way, affect calculations because when an American leader goes down a certain road he stakes his prestige on the ability to get it executed, so in that sense it would be a setback.

According to the U.S.-India Business Council, a lobbying group of 300 big American corporations doing business in India, the expansion of nuclear power generation in India represents a business opportunity valued at hundreds of billions of dollars and up to 27 thousand new jobs each year over the next ten years in the U.S. nuclear industry alone.

In India, the Communist parties, who are allies of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ruling coalition, are strongly opposed to the nuclear deal and have threatened to bring down the government and force an election if the agreement goes through.

Since the ruling Congress party is too scared to face the voters, Manmohan Singh has shied off from moving forward with the nuclear deal.

Lost in all the blah-blah-blah of the “historic agreement” and scent of big commercial opportunities is the indisputable fact that nuclear power brings enormous problems with it.

Besides the massive cost and safety issues involved in transporting and storing the radioactive nuclear waste for thousands of years, there’s also the deadly risk of accidents, terrorist attacks on the nuclear facilities and the need for huge amounts of water to cool the nuclear reactors.