The Conspiracy Against Ganguly (and other brief notes)

There are protests in Kolkata about the sacking of Sourav Ganguly from the Indian cricket team. Ganguly is a Bengali; some left politicians in Bengal have also complained of a dark political conspiracy against the cricketer.

I think we should send ex-Eagles running back wide receiver Terrell Owens to India to see if he can learn the ins and outs of cricket. And maybe invite Ganguly to Philadelphia? The Eagles could use a new running back...

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Express India also has a piece about a new book that has come out, exploring the status of women in India's IT sector. It seems women are doing well in this industry overall; there is a disproportionate representation of women in IT, and the women interviewed for the study report being satisfied with the work as well as the power it gives them. The book is called Gender and the Digital Economy - Perspectives from the Developing World, edited by Cecilia Ng and Swasti Mitter,

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There's been a lot of publicity this week about a recent case of a forged Wikipedia article, but in fact Wikipedia is pretty accurate -- as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica, according to Nature. An article in the Washington Post on the subject.

I must say I've been using Wikipedia quite a bit as a 'first' reference. Sometimes if I need to check something quickly before class -- say, the different Arabic meanings of the word 'Jihad' -- Wikipedia can be a quick way to bone up.

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Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's trial for speaking against the Turkish state is starting this week in Istanbul. There's a story about it in the BBC. There was also a brief statement on the impending trial in this week's New Yorker, though I 'm not finding a link to that statement online.

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Salam Pax on voting in Baghdad, for the third time in 11 months. The Guardian suggests this may be the last in his series for the paper.

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In the New Yorker, a review of a new biography of Lawrence by a writer who published a three-volume bio of him in the 1980s. I dunno, though I find certain of Lawrence's novels fascinating, stories about his life are a bit depressing: everything he tried to do (outside of writing novels) was a disaster.