MUMBAI: Indian Institute of Materials Management, the only professional body of Supply Chain executives is to organize DISHA 2008, a seminar on Synergised supply Chain to drive competitive advantage to be held on March 13th and 14th, 2008 at Hotel Leela, Mumbai. The two day event will focus on Purchasing, Logistics and Supply-Chain Management and launch an International course Certified Professional & Supply Management (CPSM) by The President of International Federation of Purchasing & Supply Management, USA.

The 2 Day program for top executives and professionals within the fraternity will cover sessions and modules that aim to enhance executive skills and equip participants with the latest strategies and methodologies in Supply-Chain Management. Among the topics to be covered are Purchasing, Logistics and Supply-Chain Management, besides panel discussions. Speakers include doyens from India, from MNCs, Retail and IT industries and abroad, including the President of International Federation of Purchasing and Supply Management (IFPSM) among others.

?Disha 2008? - An International Seminar on Synergised Supply Chain

City : MUMBAI

Date: 13th and 14th March 2008

Venue: Hotel Leela, Ballroom 1,2,4 &5, Mumbai

Organizers: Indian Institute Of Materials Management (IIMM)

Speakers :

Paul Novak - President, International, Federation of Purchasing and Supply Management

Binny Mathews - Sr. General Manager, e-sourcing, Metal Junction

MUMBAI: It‘s that time of the year when you drop your inhibitions and get drenched in the colours of the season!! Star Plus adds joy to your celebrations with its Holi special programme, Rang Barse on Sunday, March 16th, 10 p.m. Star Plus has taken the initiative to bring together the entire television fraternity to spread the message of unity and dissolve all differences in the many colours of the festival. Rang Barse showcases a gamut of the most adored television Stars from across all channels enjoying the festivities of Holi together. Produced by Balaji Telefilms, it‘s a spectacular visual treat.

Television‘s hugely popular jodi Mihir (Ronit Roy) and Tulsi (Gautami Kapoor) play the perfect hosts and invite all the celebrity guests to participate in the fanfare. For the first time ever, viewers will be privy to the celebrations among television‘s most popular good and bad boys and the leading ladies and vamps. Not to be left far behind are the little singing prodigies, the participants from Amul Star Voice of India - Chhote Ustaad. Soniya, Vyom, Prakriti and Aishwarya join the celebrations to floor everyone with their talent by singing Holi songs.

42 of the most favourite faces of television like Ronit Roy, Gautami Kapoor, Sakshi Tanwar, Hiten Tejwani, Karan Patel, Naman Shaw, Rakshanda Khan, Suvarna Jha, Parul Chauhan, Sara Khan, Prachi Desai, Sanjeeda Shaikh, Baa Bahu Aur Baby family and many others come together to participate in the festivities of Holi.

Also, for the first time ever, the two dancing divas Sanjeeda Sheikh and Prachi Desai come together to set the dance floor on fire with their smashing performance on the hit song from Devdas, Dola Re.

And that‘s not all!! The two hottest on-screen couple of the television industry will also be the special surprise guests of Rang Barse. The evening is filled with entertaining dance performances, impromptu Antakshari competitions, and lots of masti as the pranksters break the matki and regale with jokes all through the episode. Watch out for all of this and more in this exclusive Holi special episode.

So here‘s your opportunity to celebrate Holi with your favorite leading lady or the dashing hero or indulge yourself into mischief with the handsome bad boy or the super hot vamp.
Don‘t miss the excitement & fun of the Holi special celebration "Rang Barse" - Bura na mano holi hai, Sunday, March 16th, 10 p.m. only on Star Plus.

MUMBAI: Ford India launches Fusion Plus, an exciting new variant to the Ford Fusion range.

The new well-equipped Fusion Plus was developed in response to consumer feedback, and their desire for a Fusion with additional features and distinctive styling.

The Fusion range offers best in class headroom, legroom and shoulder room. And within its well sized interior, the Fusion Plus offers enhanced comfort with a height adjustable driver‘s seat and power adjustable outside rear view mirrors.

The Fusion Plus has an all-new anti-lock braking system (ABS) that assists the driver during extreme braking situations, an added featured in the new variant to provide the driver with greater control.

The Fusion Plus carries additional features and styling enhancements such as 15-inch alloy wheels, body coloured outside rear view mirrors, body-colour bumpers, door handles, side moulding and deck lid. A Fusion+ badge is a final distinguishing touch to the new top-end variant.

Available with either a 1.6-litre Duratec petrol engine or a 1.4-litre Duratorq TDCi turbodiesel engine, Fusion Plus boasts features that are contemporary and desirable to make it the most practical car in the category.

Priced enticingly at Rs. 6,16,500 and Rs. 6,83,500 (Ex-showroom, Delhi) for the Duratec petrol and the Duratorq diesel variants respectively, the Fusion Plus offers potential consumers excellent value for money. The introductory offer on the Fusion Plus this month includes a MP3 player with 4 speakers, making it even more attractive.

Ford India has passed on the recent reduction in excise duty to benefit the Fusion Plus consumer ensuring the diesel variant is even more gentle on the wallet.

‘‘We have enhanced the value equation of the Ford Fusion Plus with the inclusion of key features. But we were very careful to retain well known Fusion qualities such as superior performance and driving pleasure,‘‘ said Scott McCormack, Ford India‘s vice president Marketing, Sales and Service.

The 1.6 Duratec petrol engine of the Fusion Plus delivers 101PS at 6500rpm and 146Nm of torque at 3400rpm.

The Ford Fusion Plus is also available with the aluminum alloy 1.4L Duratorq TDCi engine delivering 68PS at 4000rpm. This turbodiesel engine makes no compromises in offering economical fuel consumption and a healthy torque curve. Peak torque of 160NM is reached at 2000rpm. The 1.4-litre Duratorq TDCi engine offers almost 10 percent more torque than does the 1.6-litre Duratec petrol engine.

The Fusion Plus is available in wide range of colours including Brush Steel, Mystic Wine, Moon Dust Silver, Panther Black, Diamond White and Paprika Red.

Fusion Plus exterior styling features:

• New body-colour bumper rub strips, door handles, side moulding and rear deck lid
• New body-colour rear view mirrors
• New 15-inch alloy wheels
• Flexible boot space
• "Lozenge" shaped headlamps with integrated turn indicators

Fusion Plus on-road driving features:

• Maneuverable turning radius of 4.9 metres is well suited to congested city conditions
• Best-in-class ground clearance of 198mm that offers excellent drive on Indian roads - city or highway
• Economical 1.4-litre Duratorq TDCi turbodiesel engine - producing 160Nm at 2000rpm
• Lively 1.6-litre Duratec petrol engine - delivering 101PS at 6500rpm

Fusion Plus interior safety and comfort features:

• Height adjustable driver‘s seat
• Power adjustable rear view mirrors
• Anti lock braking systems (ABS)
• Power steering
• All Power windows
• Plush dual-tone interior
• Soft-touch dash panel
• Distance-to-empty indicator and a digital clock
• Approach lights (activated by key FOB) activates the vehicle‘s interior and exterior lights to illuminate the vehicle for additional safety in poorly lit, dark locations
• Tilt adjustable steering
• Smart starter and smart charger
• Intelligent rear wipers - Rear wipers that come on automatically when the front wipers are on and you shift the car into reverse gear.
• Height adjustable front and rear head rests
• Height adjustable front seat belts
• Defoggers
• Front 12-volt accessory power socket
• Programmable keyless entry
• Over 10 innovative stowage spaces inside the car

The Ford Fusion Plus delivers a superior combination of performance, fuel efficiency, driving dynamics and ride comfort. With these driving attributes and with the inclusion of interior comfort and safety features, the Fusion Plus offers value, luxury, practicality and excitement.

MUMBAI: In Iraq, a place where kidnappings, roadside bombs and sectarian violence are all too prevalent, it is often the women ? faced with the burden of holding fragmented families together ? who suffer the greatest hardships. In ‘Through Their Eyes‘, CNN‘s Baghdad-based international correspondent Arwa Damon intimately profiles women who all share very different stories of survival, heartbreak and determination in one of the world‘s most dangerous places.

Some of these women had to use cameras provided by CNN to record the reality of their day-to-day lives as it was too dangerous for CNN to go, thus giving viewers a candid and raw insight into life in a country plagued by violence and upheaval.

"In some cases we blurred faces [in the documentary] because simply getting caught telling their story could mean a death sentence," Damon says.

CNN was the first television crew allowed in the al-Kadhimiya women‘s prison since the war began nearly five years ago and came across Samar, whose story seemed the most desperate of all the prisoners. She‘s been sitting and waiting on death row for more than three years for a crime she says she did not commit. She says she was tortured by the police into confessing a role in the killings of three relatives, which she says her boyfriend carried out, yet he has never been captured.

"I‘m not like the other girls. Some girls don‘t want to talk to me...they feel sad for me because of my sentence," Samar says. "I don‘t sleep at all on Wednesdays. I stay up from morning through the night because that‘s the day they do the executions, so I‘m always scared until the day is over."

Her family continues to appeal the verdict, but each one has failed, meaning that Samar will be put to death.

Working at an Iraqi hospital, Dr. Eaman is a children‘s doctor, a profession has required her to live apart from her eight-year-old son to protect him from those who would target doctors since they are known in Iraq "to have money." Despite this precaution, her son was accidentally pushed into a bonfire at school, causing third degree burns to parts of his body and debilitating him.

"I don‘t know the future of my one child. How he is going to live? How he is going to depend on himself? But this is unfortunately our life and this is what the war has given us," Dr. Eaman says. "Iraq is my life, my country. I am working for a better Iraq, for a better future and this is a chance that I am not going to escape."

Nahla, mother of a six-year-old autistic boy and manager at a local radio station, was forced to identify her husband‘s charred remains after a car bomb exploded on a bridge he was driving across to pick up their son from school.

"My friends...told me ten were killed, fifteen wounded...at the Jadriya bridge," Nahla says. "It doesn‘t cross your mind; you always think that you are exempt from the numbers. You are pained by them but you are outside of the numbers."

Since Nahla‘s husband was a doctor, she thought he was at a local hospital helping the wounded but she searched through all them all and never found him. She was told there were unidentified bodies melted together in the morgue at one of the hospitals, so she decided to visit it hoping he would not be there, reassuring her he was still alive.

"You have to decide by a gap in the teeth and pin in the knee whether this person, who you shared your life with, is now this burnt thing in front of you," Nahla says calmly. "I knew they were his teeth?but I didn‘t want it to be him. It was a hard moment."

Several months into the making, ‘Through Their Eyes‘ is a dramatic and sometimes harrowing account of the lives of eight women living in Iraq. However, Nahla and the other women profiled in this documentary all share the same strength and determination to carry on in their homeland, sending a hopeful signal to the future of Iraq and the future generations of women whose voices need to be heard.