Anna Hazare is an angry man. Hazare who turned 74 yesterday lashed out at the government today saying what was the need of forming a Lokpal panel if there were going to be two different drafts from both parties in the draft panel. He will now fast on August 16 in a do or die promise. 

Another swami who is in the media glare only after he died fasting to save the Ganga, was buried today. Swami Nigamananda's family claimed his body.

The other stories today... 

1. Digvijay: Gadkari is inconsequential
2. Gaddafi would agree to supervised polls: Son
3. Nigamanand's family fasts for his body
4. Court admits 3 petitions in Dey murder case
5. Indonesia jails Bali bomber for 15 years
6. Obama: Libya attack legal
7. Karzai to quit as Afghanistan pres in 2014
8. Al Qaeda: Al Zawahiri succeeds Laden
9. Pak SC judge to probe scribe Shahzad's murder
10. Governments lie to each other: US on Pak
11. Olympic tickets held back from Libya
12. Gaddafi's compound hit again in Nato strike

Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh reacts to BJP President Nitin Gadkari's remarks that UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi's resolve to fight corruption is similar to Pakistan fighting terrorism.

"Gadkari is a person we need not respond to because his stature is such that he is one person, who has never won an election all his life, but is just banking on the strength of his support, of Mohan Bhagwat of RSS, he has become the national president of BJP.

So, he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously, but at the same time he should first introspect," said Singh.

"What has he (Gadkari) done against the corruption charges on Karnataka Chief Minister? What has he done against the corruption charges against the Reddy brothers of Karnataka? What has he done against the corruption charges of Uttarakhand Chief Minister? What has he done against the corruption charges of Chief Ministers of Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh (Raman Singh)?" he asked.

Arvind Kejriwal of the Lokpal Panel says the talks were a waste of time, yesterday, since the government has no intention of removing corruption. He said in fact, graft did not even figure in the government's agenda. 

Meanwhile, Anna Hazare said he was going to fast again at Jantar Mantar on August 16.

Upset at the way the Lokpal meeting ended in a stalemate between the government and the civil society members, Hazare said he was not scared and was ready to face lathicharge.

Justice Hegde, the Karnataka Lokayukata said the meetings on June 20 and 21 were just a formality.

No justice, it seems.

Former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic has been transferred to a regular cell at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal's detention unit after completing a battery of medical tests.

Martin Petrov, chief of the UN court's registrar's office, said Mladic "is now following the standard detention regime" for all suspects held in the cell block, which is housed inside a regular Dutch jail close to the North Sea coast.

That means being locked every night into a one-man, cell equipped with a computer -- without Internet access -- and a television that can air broadcasts from the former Yugoslavia.

During the day his cell is unlocked, allowing him to mingle with other inmates in his wing of the detention unit, cook meals, exercise and take classes in English and computing.

Cushy, considering he is responsible for the deaths of nearly 8000 Muslims. No rats to chew on his toes when he sleeps.

If you're in Mumbai and haven't been to Juhu beach to see MV Wisdom, do. It won't be there for much longer.

Five days after it broke free from its tow and ran aground at the beach, efforts began today to salvage the freighter with Naval helicopters pressed into service.

Indian Navy helicopters began dropping heavy duty wires and other equipment on the deck of the merchant vessel this afternoon. 

"The Naval helicopters are helping in tying the huge and bulky tug ropes onto the vessel. Once this is complete, the ropes will be attached to a tug which will pull out M V Wisdom," Director General of Shipping S B Agnihotri told PTI.

The tug is expected to reach the spot late this evening and salvers hope to take advantage of the high tide tomorrow morning when they plan to start the pull-out of the vessel, Agnihotri said. The salvage efforts are likely to conclude by Saturday evening.

A truly tragic story on the Daily Mail and a warning for anorexics.

Read: Our deadly anorexia pact

Just in: Another postmortem will be performed on Swami Nigamananda, the seer who died after a 115-day fast, protesting illegal mining along the Ganges. The first postmortem revealed the cause of death has pesticide poisioning.

Read what the earlier postmortem report said

Even as the Al Qaeda announced Al Zawahiri as their top boss after Osama's death, a report in the Sun reveals that Eton College and The Ritz hotel are on a hit-list of bomb targets drawn up by a ruthless al-Qaeda commander.

The plot details were found on the body of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the terror group's chief in East Africa, after he was shot dead.

Security chiefs held a top-level summit with Government ministers and anti-terror police yesterday after the discovery of the Al Qaeda plot.

With all these fasts add another million tonnes of grain to the rotting heap outside the godowns.

Now the family of Swami Nigamanand has threatened to go on an indefinite fast if the seer's body is not handed over to them for the last rites. Swami Nigamanand's father Subhash Chandra Jha and other  family members reached the ashram at Haridwar and claimed over his body saying they wanted to perform his last rites at his native place in Darbhanga district of Bihar.

If you haven't checked out the Google doodle today, do it now.

It has emerged that the world spent 10.7 million hours playing with guitar legend Les Paul's doodle last week.   

A Google homepage doodle posted last week honouring Paul has cost the world 268 million dollars, despite only setting the internet giant back a mere 15,000 dollars, said Extreme Tech.  

It also said the amount covers 10.7 million man-hours in lost productivity, assuming the average Google user earns 25 dollars an hour.  

During the two days that the Les Paul doodle was online, those 740 million visitors, according to analytics from RescueTime, spent 26 seconds more on the Google home page than normal.

740 million times 26 seconds is 5,344,444 hours - and over two days, that's a total of almost 10.7 million man hours spent playing with the Les Paul Google Doodle.

If you still can't get enough of Steven Spielberg's dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, here's news that'll uncoil your DNA strands.

The Hollywood veteran is reportedly brainstorming with writer Mark  Protosevich to reboot the lucrative franchise for a fourth movie.  The franchise, born of the late Michael Crichton's 1990 novel, has been in cold storage since 2001. 

The third film grossed just USD 369 million worldwide while Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park grossed USD 915 million and USD 619 million, respectively.

In a first for US president Barack Obama, a group of 10 lawmakers has filed suit against him, saying that the operation in Libya is unconstitutional.

The White House meanwhile, has also sent a 30-page report to Congress that justifies the Libyan mission from a legal standpoint.

As part of the report, the White House is arguing that it has not been involved in full-blown "hostilities' in Libya since April 7, so the section of the War Powers Resolution that imposes the upcoming 90-day deadline on such hostilities should not be invoked.

The Indonesian court has delivered its vedict on the Bali bomber.

Indonesia has jailed radical cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir for 15 years, after he was convicted of supporting an Islamic militant training camp in Aceh.

The sentence was handed down amid tight security at court in Jakarta, where more than 3,000 police were on duty, reports bbc.co.uk.

Ba'asyir, 72, was convicted of helping to organise a jihadi training camp that was planning to attack government targets and impose an Islamic state. He has been involved in radical Islamic groups in Indonesia for four decades.

We gave you gist earlier (11:53 pm post), but here are the details of what happened in the Bombay High Court today in the J Dey murder case.

The court today directed the Maharashtra government and police to file by June 21, a status report on the murder probe. 

Justice Ranjana Desai and Justice R V More said in view of the importance of the case, they were also directing the State to ensure that Advocate General Ravi Kadam argues the matter himself.

The bench was hearing two petitions filed by lawyer V P Patil and former journalist Ketan Tirodkar seeking a CBI probe into Dey's killing.

The court also allowed applications filed by two journalist organisations -- Press Club, Mumbai and Marathi Patrakar Parishad -- to intervene in the matter as they also pleaded for a CBI probe into murder of Dey, who was shot dead by four unidentified assailants in suburban Powai on June 11. 

Public prosecutor Pandurang Pol said investigations were on and the city police and its crime branch were moving in the right direction. He said the government was aware and there was no need to transfer the probe to the CBI at this stage.

Another one of those hairbrained studies we were telling you about...

A study finds that one in three women lose three weeks' of sleep every year because of their husband'ssnoring. The survey of 2,500 adults also found that snoring is such a nightmare that 39 per cent of other halves regularly flee to a spare room in search of peace -- while one in nine couples sleep apart permanently because of the problem.

And contrary to what women might like to think, it is not just men who are guilty of the habit, although they are the most common perpetrators, according to the study.

Seems like just yesterday that Hamid Karzai became Afghan President, but it's already been seven years since.  

Now US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates has indicated that Karzai will quit office by 2014. Afghanistan's Constitution limits presidents to two terms.

Karzai was first elected president in 2004. He won a second term as the president in 2009.  

Gates, revealed Karzai's desire to leave the presidential office at a Senate committee meeting.  

The timing of Karzai''s departure will coincide with a scheduled deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. All security operations will be taken over by Afghanistan in 2014.

Stringent security arrangements have been put in place ahead of the crucial trail.

About 3,000 security personnel have been deployed around Jakarta, most of them stationed in the area around the courthouse.

The 72-year-old cleric has accused Australia and the US of playing a major role in having him brought to court and tried on terror charges. 

From the Independent:

Chinese scientists have produced a herd of genetically modified cows that make milk that could substitute for human breast milk - a possible alternative to formula in a nation rocked by tainted milk powder scandals.

Researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology of the China Agricultural University introduced human genetic coding into the DNA of Holstein dairy cow embryos, then transferred the embryos into cow surrogates.

In 2003, after years of testing on mice, scientists managed to create the first cow that could produce milk with the same nutritional properties as human breast milk, but with a taste even stronger and sweeter.

Horrible image of a baby suckling a cow comes to mind...

On Twitter: A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. ~ William Styron

Amitav Ghosh's book launch -- River of Smoke -- next week.

An al-Qaida-affiliated website says Egypt-born Ayman al-Zawahri has succeeded Osama bin Laden as head of the terror network.

Bin Laden was killed in a US commando raid in Pakistan last month. Al-Zawahri, who will turn 60 next week, had been bin Laden's second in command, reports the Independent.

He is the son of an upper middle class Egyptian family of doctors and scholars. His father was a pharmacology professor at Cairo University's medical school and his grandfather was the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, a premier center of religious study. The announcement was posted today on a website known to be affiliated with the terror network.

Love these inane studies since they make such interesting reads. And nine times out of 10, the result is obvious.

A study has revealed that an understanding male partner, who can communicate and listen well, is more likely to give his female partner an orgasm.

The US study, which is the first to find a solid relationship between mental well-being and sexual pleasure, looked at three qualities, self-esteem, autonomy and empathy.

These were compared to three measures of sexual pleasure: regularity of orgasm, enjoyment of receiving oral sex and enjoyment of performing oral sex.

The team from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that sexual enjoyment in women was consistently linked to an empathetic male partner.

We told you yesterday, that Tamil superstar Rajinikanth has been discharged from the St Elizabeth hospital in Singapore; what we didn't and hereby amend, is news that the first person he called was Amma. 

Rajini called TN CM Jayalalithaa and congratulated her on assuming office and said the state had been 'saved' after she won the April 13 assembly polls by a massive mandate. He said he wanted to speak to her first after being discharged.

In a parallel, in Pakistan, the government today gave in to pressure from journalists' organisations and announced the formation of a judicial commission headed by a Supreme Court judge to investigate the murder of reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad.

The government had on Tuesday formed a commission headed by Federal Shariat Court Chief Justice Agha Rafiq to investigate the abduction and killing of Shahzad, who went missing two days after he alleged in an article last month that the Pakistan Navy had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda elements.

However, journalists' organisations insisted that the probe should be handled by a serving Supreme Court judge.

Just in: The Bombay High Court has asked the Mumbai police to file a report on the status of the probe in the murder of senior journalist J Dey. The HC has also asked the advocate general to be present for the next hearing of the case on Tuesday.

A PIL has been filed in the HC seeking a CBI probe into the muder, which occured on Saturday afternoon. The case has been adjourned for Tuesday.

Not a peep out of the family when Swami Nigamananda was on fast to save the Ganga over illegal mining. Now that Nigamananda died on Monday after he slipped into a coma in a 114-day fast, his father, Prakash Chandra Jha, has asked Matru Sadan Ashram in Haridwar, to hand over his body.

"I want the body of my son for the funeral. The Matru Sadan Ashram should hand over his body to the family," said Jha ,who is staging a dharna in front of the ashram.

"The family has every right to perform his last rites; it's an age-old tradition, but the ashram wants to deny us this right," Jha said in a choked voice.

Rethink your holiday to Greece, if you're headed there, as the country braces for a new government.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou is set to announce a new cabinet in a concessionary move as he seeks support for new austerity measures, reports bbc.co.uk.

Papandreou, who will stay in his post, says he will put the new government to a vote of confidence in the parliament. Renewed fears that Greece will default on its debt have shaken markets.

Athens witnessed some of the most violent protests in more than a year on Wednesday as demonstrators went on to the streets and took part in a general strike.

The US seems to have just woken up to the fact that its ally Pakistan lies.

Apparently, the detention of CIA informants by Pakistan's top spy agency has sparked palpable outrage in US Congress at an ally that receives more than two billion dollars a year in American aid.  

ISI agents have arrested some Pakistanis in recent weeks for allegedly helping the CIA gather intelligence before the May 2 US raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.  

"How long do we support governments that lie to us? When do we say, ''Enough is enough''? They arrested people who helped us get him [bin Laden]," ABC News quoted Senator Patrick Leahy, as asking Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.  

Gates prompted laughter with his response: "First of all, I would say, based on 27 years in CIA and four-and-a-half years in this job, most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done." 

Yesterday, Aamir Khan's Lagaan celebrated its 10th birthday. Everyone involved in the film, talks about what it was be a part of history.

This, from lyricist Javed Akhtar:

"Lagaan was a suicidal project and I tried to prevail upon Aamir Khan not to go ahead with it. I was shocked when Ashutosh Gowariker narrated me the script. It had a long list of dont's of Hindi cinema.

"I thought I should protect Aamir, that he should not commit this suicide. But, both he and Ashutosh treated me like an elder and did not listen to me," Javed said at a celebration party last night.

He wondered what kind of 'song situations' would be there when there are 100 people singing one single song.

On Rediff.com: The whole system changed after Lagaan

Also on Libya, the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games has withheld hundreds of tickets apparently meant for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's regime after the dictator's son ordered them through committee connections.  

Olympics bosses blocked Libyan dignitaries from attending the Olympic events after Gaddafi's eldest son Muhammad requested up to 1,000 tickets as head of his country's Olympic committee.

Serious news now (if you're done with mooning over the Google doodle).

NATO today pounded the area near Muammar Gaddafi's compound during a pre-dawn raid in the Libyan capital Tripoli.

A series of thunderous booms rumbled in quick succession shortly before 5 am, rattling windows in the heart of the city. A column of smoke could be seen rising from the vicinity of the Libyan leader's Bab al-Aziziya compound as sirens from emergency vehicles blared through the streets.

It was not clear what was hit, and there was no word on casualties.

We begin with a story of committment and concern, of how a female scientist tried to tame beluga whales in freezing Arctic temperatures, naked, because whales do not like being touched by artificial materials like diving suits. Read the story in the Daily Mail.

Good morning. Seven meetings later, the government and Anna Hazare have been unable to reach a consensus on the Lokpal Bill. What is now being said is that both sides will prepare separate drafts and present it when the Parliament meets for the monsoon session next month. Next meeting on June 20 and 21st.

Stay with us for all the news today. 

Lokpal: no consensus on fundamental issues (The Hindu)
Government representatives and civil society members have decided to conclude the deliberations and present their separate Bills on the structure and provisions of the Lokpal to the Union government. Read

Sonia on graft is like Pak on terror, says Gadkari; Cong wants an apology (The Indian Express)

BJP president Nitin Gadkari said here today that Sonia Gandhis assurance that her party and the UPA were fighting corruption is similar to Pakistans assurance that its fighting terrorism. The Congress called this gutter-level talk and demanded an apology. Read

Was J Dey killed for refusing a bribe? (DNA)
Five days after the murder of journalist Jyotirmoy Dey, 56, the police on Wednesday detained two people, including an underworld shooter, only to release them late at night. Read

Gogoi worried, to ask govt to take up Brahmaputra issue with China (Hindustan Times)

Worried that any diversion of Brahmaputra river by China could impact his state, Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi will meet External Affairs Minister S M Krishna today to ask him to take up the issue with the neighbouring country. Read

Country witnesses century's longest and darkest lunar eclipse (The Times of India)

Moon's bright white glow turned crimson brick red when it delved into the dark centre of the Earth's shadow during the century's longest and darkest lunar eclipse. Read