Gujarat porngate: Speaker gives clean chit to accused MLAs; BJP says will demand apology from Congress

Ahmedabad:  Gujarat Assembly Speaker Ganpat Vasava has given clean chit to two BJP MLAs who were accused by a local journalist of looking at obscene photos in the state Assembly on an iPad. The Speaker said that a forensic team found nothing objectionable in the iPad.

Emboldened by the Speaker's verdict, the BJP has said it will demand an apology from the Congress tomorrow.

Journalist Janakbhai Purohit, working with a local newspaper Gujarat Samachar, released a video clip - captured on a cellphone by another journalist - purportedly showing the two MLAs, Shankar Chowdhary and Jetha Bhai Dharwad, looking at obscene photos of women on an iPad while sitting in the House.

"First they started by watching the pictures of Swami Vivekananda, then cartoons and then pics of women... I saw them watching some sleazy photographs of women and felt it was wrong... I went to the Speaker's chamber and complained about it to his Personal Assistant that it was a repeat of Karnataka; he informed the Speaker and the viewing was stopped," the journalist said. "This went on for about 20 minutes...they were engrossed in watching the vulgar pictures," he added.

The Speaker had ordered an investigation by a special empowered committee of the Gujarat Assembly. He also ordered MLA Shankar Chowdhary to deposit his iPad with his special secretary.

Mr Chowdhary had denied that any such incident happened. "This has no basis... no such incident happened... somebody is trying to defame me," the BJP MLA had said. Mr Dharwad, who allegedly viewed porn along with Mr Chowdhary, said, "We will resign if found guilty."

The Congress lashed out at the BJP saying it exposes "the real face of the Narendra Modi government."

Earlier this year, three ministers in the Karnataka Assembly, where the BJP is in power, were accused of watching porn on a cellphone. The ministers were forced to resign. A committee set up there by the Speaker of the House has concluded that there was evidence to indict one of them.  

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Maharashtra govt suspends two serving bureaucrats accused in Adarsh scam

Mumbai:  Senior IAS officers Pradeep Vyas and Jairaj Phatak have been placed under suspension pending investigation in the Adarsh Housing Society scam, Maharashtra government informed the Bombay High Court today.

While Mr Vyas was the Collector of Mumbai, Mr Phatak was City Municipal Commissioner when the scam took place.

According to the CBI, Mr Vyas (49), during his tenure as Collector from August 2002 to May 2005, allegedly connived with other accused and accepted false documents as proof of income and granted membership to those who were not eligible.

His wife Seema Vyas, also an IAS officer, has a flat in the posh Adarsh building.

Mr Vyas, a 1989 batch officer was arrested for his alleged role in the scam yesterday.

Mr Phatak is alleged to have allowed the height of the building in upmarket Colaba to be raised beyond 100 metres without the approval of the High-Rise Committee of the municipal body. His son received a flat in the Adarsh Society building allegedly as quid pro quo.

The High Court is hearing a batch of public interest litigations filed by social activists Simpreet Singh and Pravin Wategaonkar seeking monitoring of the probe by the High Court and invoking provisions of Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the case.

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Wife of accused soldier kept blog on anguish of Army life

New York:  She detailed her pregnancy, with her husband a world away. She described the knot she got in her stomach from missing him. She wrote of her disappointment after he was passed over for a promotion.

But mostly, Karilyn Bales - the wife of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers last week - relayed the simple anguish of life as a military spouse, tending to a home with two young children, with a husband summoned for repeated deployments.

"Bob left for Iraq this morning," she wrote in her family blog on Aug. 9, 2009. "Quincy slept in our bed last night."

Though much of the family's online presence appears to have been removed in recent days, the fragments that remain capture the daily travails typical of any family with a loved one stationed abroad.

A little less than a year ago, in March 2011, Ms. Bales wrote on her blog that her husband had not received a promotion to E-7, sergeant first class. The family was disappointed, she said, "after all of the work Bob has done and all the sacrifices he has made for his love of his country, family and friends."

But Ms. Bales was also relieved, she wrote, because she hoped that the Army might allow the family some autonomy in choosing its next location, after Sergeant Bales had spent years at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State.

She listed her top choices: Germany ("best adventure opportunity!"); Italy ("2nd best adventure opp"); Hawaii ("nuff said"); Kentucky ("we would at least be near Bob's family"); and Georgia ("to be a sniper teacher, not because it is a fun place to live").

In some of these locations, Sergeant Bales's chances of being deployed to a war zone would probably have been lower. Wherever they went, Ms. Bales said, she hoped to rent out their house in Lake Tapps, Wash., she wrote, "so that we would have it to come back to when our adventure is over."

More often, Ms. Bales focused on ordinary struggles. She described surprise phone calls and solo doctor's appointments, attempts to clean the house while Sergeant Bales was gone and the "bad dreams" she woke from after a nap on the day he left in 2009.

She recalled discussions of baby names with him while he was away, and celebrating Easter one Sunday early, so that Sergeant Bales could decorate eggs with their daughter, Quincy, before leaving home again.

In 2006, while she was pregnant with Quincy, Ms. Bales wrote that though she was careful not to wish the days away, "I only want the days to go by fast when it comes to Bob coming back home."

A few days later, Ms. Bales wrote about a common tic she shared with her unborn child: "I get the hiccups all the time these days, I always think that Bob is thinking about me."

One morning, she continued, she could feel the baby hiccupping in her belly. "I guess Bob was thinking about her too," Ms. Bales wrote.

When Quincy was born in December 2006, Ms. Bales wrote, she received a call at the hospital. "It was Bob calling from the airport in Kuwait!!" she wrote. "It was so good to hear his voice. I told him how the birth went and he got to hear Quincy squeaking in the background."

In August 2007, she described some of the child's first words. "Much to Daddy's happiness," she wrote, "she now says 'D' as in Dadadadadada."

Ms. Bales's post from March 2011, about the Army promotion, appears to have been the blog's latest entry. In it, she seemed to hint at why she maintained the site in the first place. The collection of posts was a "time capsule," she wrote, and she hoped that her children would one day "enjoy reading about the decisions that Mom and Dad went through during their lives."

With a relocation expected, she said, the family's coming months would be full of change. "I am hoping to blog about it and look back in a year," she wrote, "to see how far we have come from right now." 

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Indian American mother accused of drowning baby

Houston:  A 30-year-old Indian American pharmacist, suffering from postpartum depression, allegedly killed her one-year-old son she hated by drowning him in a bathtub.

According to police reports, Neha Patel, of Florida allegedly drowned her infant son Ishan on February 16, then wrapped him in a blanket and went on a 13-hour drive through Florida, including the Tampa International Airport, where she intended to jump from the parking structure.

According to the Polk County Sheriff's Office, from the day her son was born, Neha said she hated him and the hatred reached a fatal level on that day, when she first slapped him and then purposefully left him alone to drown in a bathtub half full of water.

When she returned 10 minutes later and found him unconscious, she refused to perform emergency cardiopulmonary resuscitation, even though she knew the procedure, the sheriff's office said.

Patel had reportedly been diagnosed with postpartum depression but was apparently not taking her medication, according to police and media reports. When Patel returned home at 2 AM the next morning, she told her husband Rasesh Patel, a quality assurance manager at JP Morgan in Tampa, that Ishan was dead, handed the lifeless body to the father and again drove off in the car, telling her husband she planned to kill herself.

Neha was arrested that afternoon at the Tampa International Airport, sitting in her car on the fourth floor of the parking structure.

She is being held without bail in a medical dormitory at a county jail, according to Carrie Eleazer, public information officer for the Polk County Sheriff's Office.

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