Government announces measures to deal with terrorismTo provide foreign secretary with thesaurusAfter a cabinet meeting lasting nearly three hours in the capital today, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that India would get tougher with Pakistan on the issue of terrorism.
“We are going to provide Shyam Saran with a thesaurus shortly. This will mean sterner responses to any attacks. No more soft letters indicating displeasure, we will use all the words in the 2006 edition of the Oxford press thesaurus to deal with Pakistan,” he said while being patted on the head by Sonia Gandhi.
In an indication of the kind of policy India would adopt, the prime minister said the words the foreign secretary had already looked up were ‘perhaps, maybe and spine.’
In a retaliatory statement, Pakistani foreign minister Kasuri announced in Islamabad that unlike India, the Pakistani foreign office did not need a thesaurus as they were already in possession of a dictionary purchased last week to look up ‘democracy’.
Insiders say that the cabinet discussed various measures to deal with the problem including the idea of airdropping Brinda Karat into Lahore, but decided on this measure on Pranab Mukerjee’s advice. “Saying a lot and not meaning it is a strategy that the left front lives by, and going by their success, it was but a matter of time before the government tried it at the international level,” a source from the foreign office said.
Denying allegations from opposition parties that Indian foreign policy relating to Pakistan was influenced by the United States; the secretary said that the government would formally issue a statement on the matter shortly, “as soon as the fax from Washington arrives”
In other news, the White House has defended US president George bush’s backrub to the German Chancellor Merkel, declaring it his as his attempt to return to the ‘Clinton era’.
Zindane head butts father
Says father insulted mothers cookingIn another startling incident that perhaps indicates world cup fever has not subsided yet, retired French football star Zinadine Zidane head butted his father for what he termed as a “provoking attack on his mothers cooking”.
Reports coming out have indicated that Ismail Zidane may have passed unflattering comments about Mrs. Zidane’s ‘flamed duck in tartar sauce’, which lead to Zinadine attacking him. However Mr. Ismail Zidane denied saying anything about the duck and said that the he was actually insulting the ‘frog’s legs with caviar’.
It is also believed that he later head butted his mother because he felt that the duck did indeed taste like ‘fish in tartar sauce’ as alleged by his father.
In a nationally televised TV address, the French president publicly pardoned Zidane and said anybody insulting French cooking, or insulted French food by cooking it badly deserved to be head butted anyway.
But in what is seen as dangerous copycat behavior, children all across France began to head butt their mothers for serving ‘unpalatable food’. Jean Dufor, a nine year old who had just head butted his mother claimed “her muffins had too much cinnamon” and added “I want to grow up to be a food critic.”
In Britain and the United States, all staff at Burger king and McDonald’s outlets have been provided with protective chest padding.
In other news, to put an end to the Middle east crisis, Miss Universe, Zuleyka Rivera Mendoza was airdropped into Lebanon after she claimed during the final round that she wanted to ‘achieve world peace’.
Citizens group accuses Times of India of publishing News
Says hints of journalism in the last edition.
In a startling accusation that shook the media world today, citizen media watchdog Presswatch.com accused the Times of India of publishing what it termed as ‘news’ in its last edition. The accusation was put up on its website and was instantly followed by a media frenzy that attracted a swift rebuttal from the Times.
Bennet and Coleman, the holding company of the Times in a press release said, “ The Times of India group has been in the publishing business for over fifty years and not once have we been accused of publishing news. We make every effort to keep that sort of thing out of our paper and for that we have an excellent editorial team. An inquiry is being conducted and if it is found that there was any news disguised as an advertisement in the edition, stringent action will be taken.”
The accusation comes after rumors that the Times had begun to hire staff with degrees in journalism, a charge that the group said was ‘false and baseless’. “A marketing degree is still the requirement no matter which department you work in” a spokesperson for the paper said.
Later in an interview to radio Mirchi the country’s number one radio channel as per a report by the Times of India, group chairman Vineet Jain admitted that there might have been a few instances of news accidentally leaking into the paper but “nothing substantial has ever been reported by the paper and so these isolated incidents must not be focused on”.
He also assured customers that no ‘journalists would ever be hired’ by the paper and the increase in the number of pages had nothing to do with news.
In financial news, prices of rubber fell in early trading when Paris Hilton announced her abstinence from sex for a year.
British museum to study MadonnaPop star might be oldest relic ever studied, museum says.The British museum announced today that its next big project would be the study of pop star Madonna. “This project will be our largest and most complicated ever. It will take massive funding and might take an estimated eight years to complete.” Museum director Peter Jenkins said.
Explaining the decision, he said “Madonna is an excellent archeological and anthropological study. We have conducted some preliminary tests and have determined that she might be over eight hundred years old, perhaps even older than Mick Jagger. On the anthropology front, we are looking to determine which culture she belongs to exactly, British, American or Amazon.”
Professor Monty Burns, the man who successfully lead the Bill Clinton study that determined that he was ‘horny as hell’ told mediapersons he was ‘very, very excited’ “I have never worked on something this ancient. It took us three months to do a preliminary study. We couldn’t get her to stop talking about herself and while she did, her accents kept changing and she would scream out things like ‘I am god’ and ‘die you bastards’. “It’s like studying a lost relic, only this one just doesn’t seem to get lost”.
But the project is not without its share of problems. Museum insiders say that her skin samples have not been sent for carbon dating yet because all the Botox needs to be drained first. There are also reports that the museum might not have the funding required to continue the project till the end. “they have already spent a lot of money on hiring language experts to determine her nationality but without any success.”
The British government has promised to help fund the project with the Prime Minister Tony Blair saying “something that is probably older and more controversial than the Turin shroud deserves all the attention and study it can get. Plus if we can prove she is American, maybe I can get George to take her back.”
In other news, Brian Lara accused the wind at Jamaica of acting against the interests of home side by not supplying him with enough ‘hot air’ to win the match.
