Perhaps the only thing more murderous than the commute in Los Angeles may be the daily trek that workers in Gosaba, India have to deal with:

Between 150-200 people from Gosaba have been killed going about their daily work — fishing and cutting wood on the edge of the park or gathering honey deep in the jungle.

The impoverished villagers say they have little choice but to risk their lives in order to eke out an existence in a hostile environment ill-suited to farming.

Every year, 20 to 30 people are carried off by tigers in the Sunderbans, home to 270 of the big cats, according to regional forestry department figures.

Such tragedies have earned Gosaba the unfortunate monicker of “island of widows.”

AFP/Yahoo!: Man-eating tigers wreak havoc on India’s island of widows

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the fuzzy images of the 17-year-old girl having oral sex [NSFW] with her high school boyfriend has sent shock waves through urban India, exposing the growing friction between the conservative middle class, its increasingly Westernized children and modern technology. [Chicago Sun Times]

The boy got off (as it were) with a slap on the wrist, despite cries for his blood. Meanwhile, the girl got sent off to Canada, as if enceinte.

Magistrate Santosh Snehi Mann released the boy on bail after his parents put up 25,000 rupees ($570) and surrendered the minor’s passport. The judge called his actions a “misadventure”. The court ordered the boy, who cannot be named, to undergo a month of counselling and told his parents to supply weekly behavioural reports. However, police and prosecutors had called for the boy to be kept in juvenile detention. A police petition said: “The act of the boy was obscene, depraved and showed his animal instincts and he should undergo psychiatric treatment and counselling. The girl involved has reportedly been sent to Canada by her parents. The teenagers were both expelled from their school. [BBC]

Meanwhile, in a charmingly quaint attempt to grab the limelight, Kareena Kapoor is suing a newspaper for having had the audacity to print photographs of her canoodling with co-star Shahid Kapoor in a restaurant.

An Indian Bollywood film star has begun legal proceedings against a tabloid newspaper that published photos of her passionately kissing her co-star. Kareena Kapoor – one of Bollywood’s most famous actors – is seeking an unconditional apology from the paper. She and her co-star Shahid Kapoor say the photos were doctored, and were not of them. The poor-quality photographs appeared to suggest that the two stars were kissing intimately in a restaurant. The BBC’s Zubair Ahmed says that the photographs and film clip of the two actors – who are not related – were apparently taken by someone with a video-enabled mobile phone. On Thursday, some news channels ran the entire clip. [BBC]

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A poll released Friday by Cornell University has some pretty scary results. Almost half of respondents in the national poll feel that some civil liberties of Muslim Americans should be curtailed as a precaution against terrorism. As stated in their press release:

About 27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should be required to register their location with the federal government, and 26 percent said they think that mosques should be closely monitored by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Twenty-nine percent agreed that undercover law enforcement agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations, in order to keep tabs on their activities and fund raising. About 22 percent said the federal government should profile citizens as potential threats based on the fact that they are Muslim or have Middle Eastern heritage. In all, about 44 percent said they believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans.

Conversely, 48 percent of respondents nationally said they do not believe that civil liberties for Muslim Americans should be restricted.

The Media and Society Research Group, in Cornell’s Department of Communication, commissioned the poll, which was supervised by the Survey Research Institute, in Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The results were based on 715 completed telephone interviews of respondents across the United States, and the poll has a margin of error of 3.6 percent.

The survey also examined the relation of religiosity to perceptions of Islam and Islamic countries among Christian respondents. Sixty-five percent of self-described highly religious people queried said they view Islam as encouraging violence more than other religions do; in comparison, 42 percent of the respondents who said they were not highly religious saw Islam as encouraging violence. In addition, highly religious respondents also were more likely to describe Islamic countries as violent (64 percent), fanatical (61 percent) and dangerous (64 percent). Fewer of the respondents who said they were not highly religious described Islamic countries as violent (49 percent), fanatical (46 percent) and dangerous (44 percent). But 80 percent of all respondents said they see Islamic countries as being oppressive toward women.

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