Pinki smiles at Oscars

It is yet another day at Rampur Dibai village in Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh. There is the usual drone of tractors working in the fields, the barking of stray dogs and the bustle of a windy morning in the tiny hamlet.

Suddenly crews of various news television channels begin to converge at the home of Rajendra Sonkar in the village.

Sonkar and his daughter Pinki are away in Los Angeles, where a 39 minute documentary Smile Pinki, made by filmmaker Megan Mylan, won the best documentary.

Pinki’s mother Nirmala Devi, aka Shimla Devi, is looking befuddled. “How does it feel to win the Oscar?” asks a TV reporter. She replies: “Jeetne par to achcha hi laga.”

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26/11 planning started a year ago, and we had the evidence

The planning for the November 26 terror attack started a year ago, and security agencies had evidence of it - nine maps plotting the attack sites recovered from a Lashkare-Tayyeba terrorist arrested in Uttar Pradesh on February 10. But the evidence was buried in a bulky chargesheet.

The story began in 2003 in Dubai, where Fahim Ansari, originally a resident of Goregaon (W), was looking for a job.

Fahim, already an activist of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India, was spotted by a Lashkar recruiter Police sources said Fahim was indoctrinated and sent to Pakistan by sea. He was trained in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, in handling computers and arms.

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Wildlife smugglers hunt on Orkut

Even stringent laws and a recently constituted bureau dedicated to check wildlife crime, it seems, cannot deter country’s wildlife smugglers from trading.

In a first of its kind case for Indian authorities, two men have been arrested who had hit upon a rather clever way to smuggle endangered species through social networking website Orkut.

Registering country’s first case of wildlife smuggling through internet, authorities now are busy trying to find out how this trading was being operated. Though there have been cases of wildlife smuggling through internet in countries like US and UK, for Indian authorities its first such case. Authorities maintain that the duo were well connected to customers worldwide through internet.

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