New Delhi, March 2 (IANS) Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith Tuesday said his country has ‘zero tolerance for assaults on Indians or against anyone else who comes to Australia’.

‘Regrettable… as I said to my parliament that there have been some racial or racist overtones to a small number of those assaults and we condemn them absolutely,’ he said, shortly after he arrived here on his third visit to India.

Smith underlined that several steps have been taken to ensure that people have an ‘enjoyable and safe experience’ when they visit his country.

Smith’s comments come soon after a fresh assault against a Sri Lankan man and his Indian wife in Melbourne Sunday morning.

The attacks on Indian students and steps taken by Canberra to ensure the safety of Indian students in that country will figure prominently in discussions between External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna and Smith Wednesday.

‘(I) will brief the Indian government on the actions taken by authorities to create a safe and rewarding study environment for Indian students in Australia,’ Smith said in a statement in Melbourne prior to his departure.

‘Krishna and I will discuss Australia’s and India’s close cooperation in trying to solve the recent problems faced by some Indians in Australia,’ he added.

There have been a series of visits to India by top Australian leaders, including Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard, to allay concerns in the wake of assaults on Indian students that are suspected by many in India to be racist in nature despite Canberra’s denials.

The assaults on Indian students started in May last year, putting bilateral ties under stress.

Despite the losses, the bank is set to announce it will pay bonuses totalling £1.3bn to its staff.

But the bank’s head, Stephen Hester, said it had lost money by not paying big bonuses to retain productive staff.

The UK taxpayer owns 84% of RBS after the government bailed out the bank at the end of 2008.

‘Experiment’

Chief executive Mr Hester told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “We’ve had a small experiment in this respect… some of our best-performing people have been leaving in their thousands.

“The people who left us last year, I believe, would have increased our profits by up to £1bn beyond the ones that we’ve got.”

Mr Hester has decided not to take his own bonus, which would have been £1.6m.The company’s £3.6bn loss was lower than the £5bn many experts were expecting and is well below the £24bn it lost in 2008.However, the level of bad debts rose sharply to just short of £13.9bn, up from £7.4bn in 2008, although the bank says it thinks these have now peaked.As well as the RBS chain of banks, the company’s UK businesses include NatWest, Ulster and Coutts banks, and the insurance companies Churchill and Direct Line.

Torrid time

Mr Hester said he expected the bank to return to profit next year.

The banks have been through a torrid time since the credit crunch struck in 2007, an event sparked by the banks’ own unwillingness to lend to each other after the major lending spree they had been on started to turn bad.

Added to that was RBS’s unique heavy burden – its takeover of the Dutch bank ABN Amro in October 2007, just as the banking boom was about to turn to bust.

A consortium led by RBS paid 71bn euros (£49bn at the time) for ABN Amro in October 2007, but RBS then wrote down the value of the business by £17bn a year later.

The Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, said bank investors had been living in a “fool’s paradise”, with people’s money being used for risky activities while they themselves thought they were taking no risks.

He told the cross-party Future of Banking Commission that the case for simple, utility banks was “irrefutable”.

RBS is the second major UK bank to report 2009 results, after Barclays announced profits of £11.6bn last week. Lloyds Bank, which is also partly state-owned, will report its results on Friday.

Under fire

Aside from bonuses, one other controversial topic for the banks has been their role in lending to business and home buyers.

RBS said that it was satisfied it was fulfilling both the letter and the spirit of its lending commitments, which were to make an additional £9bn available to the mortgage market and £16bn to businesses.

It said it had beaten its mortgage target, but had fallen short of its business lending target as many companies had been concentrating on reducing their debts and the recession meant that demand for loans had been weak.

RBS has shrunk massively in size over the year. In 2008 its assets stood at £2.1tn.

It has been running down a vast portion of its business – mainly bad loans – and its assets are now worth £1.5tn.

A bank spokeswoman said that was the equivalent of shedding an organisation the same size as the profitable US financial institution, Goldman Sachs.

SanDisk launched a 64 GB memory card powered for SDXC format. The new ultra SDXC memory card is specially designed for latest high-megapixel cameras and HD camcorders that support the new SDXC format. The cards feature a Class 4 rating to ensure smooth HDvideo capture and playback and fast transfer speeds of up to 15MB/s. The SDXC format under the SD 3.0 specification allows the cards to scale up to 2TB and 300MB/s.

Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar acknowledges the crowd after reaching his century during the second one day cricket match between India and South Africa, in Gwalior, India, Feb. 24, 2010.

Milestone man Sachin Tendulkar re-wrote the record books today, hammering the first double century in the history of one-day cricket to add another feather to his well-adorned cap.

India’s Sachin Tendulkar has scored the first ever double-century in one-day international cricket, reaching the landmark against South Africa. View Full Image Associated Press Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar acknowledges the crowd after reaching his century during the second one day cricket match between India and South Africa, in Gwalior, India, Feb. 24, 2010. Mr. Tendulkar’s 200 not out on Wednesday beat the previous highest score of 194, made by Zimbabwe’s Charles Coventry against Bangladesh in Bulawayo last August and Saeed Anwar of Pakistan against India at Chennai in May 1997. Mr. Tendulkar’s previous best was 186 not out against New Zealand at Hyderabad in November 1999. Highest individual batting scores in one-day international cricket (x-denotes not out): 200-x Sachin Tendulkar, India vs. South Africa, Gwalior, February 2010 194-x Charles Coventry, Zimbabwe vs. Bangladesh, Bulawayo, August 2009 194 Saeed Anwar, Pakistan vs. India, Chennai, May 1997 189-x Viv Richards, West Indies vs. England, Manchester, May 1984 189 Sanath Jayasuriya, Sri Lanka vs. India, Sharjah, October 2000 188-x Gary Kirsten, South Africa vs. United Arab Emirates, Rawalpindi, February 1996 186-x Sachin Tendulkar, India vs. New Zealand, Hyderabad, November 1999 183-x Mahendra Singh Dhoni, India vs. Sri Lanka, Jaipur, October 2005 183 Sourav Ganguly, India vs. Sri Lanka, Taunton, May 1999 181-x Matthew Hayden, Australia vs. New Zealand, Hamilton, February 2007 181 Viv Richards, West Indies vs. Sri Lanka, Karachi, October 1987

One Day International cricket, since its 1971 inception, had to wait nearly four decades to see a batsman score 200. The previous best mark was shared by Zimbabwean Charles Coventry (194 not out) and Pakistan’s Saeed Anwar (194).

Also, Ravi Shastri mentined while commenting today said : Anwar took a runner most of the time to reach his 194… but Sachin at the age of 36 is still so fit, played alone without taking any runner. He batted for whole 50 Overs and was not out. Though he refused to take a single on second last ball (49.8 Overs) as he was simply exhausted by batting 50 long overs. He asked the then new coming batsmed Dhoni to try some shot on the last ball.

As the crowd erupted with unbridled joy, Tendulkar, tired but composed, took off his helmet, looked skyward, closed his eyes to offer a silent prayer.

His captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni came down from the striker’s end to shake hands and hug him.

Rajdeep Sardesai tweeted in praise of Sachin

: “srk, amitabh, aamir are big stars. sachin is a hero. we celebrate stars, we revere a hero“

FarmVille Valentines are about to expire in less than 24 hours. You should accept all of the Valentines you’ve received within this time period as they may not work once this time limit has expired.

How many Valentines did you collect??

More and more celebrity holdouts are joining the Twitter bandwagon. First Bill Gates started tweeting, then yesterday rapper Lil Wayne joined the service. Today, another famous figure has his own Twitter presence: The Dalai Lama.

There has been an @DalaiLama account for some time. In fact, a fake Dalai Lama fooled the media and the twitterverse early last year, which was part of what spurred the creation of verified Twitter accounts.

This Dalai Lama is verified by Twitter, though — it is the real deal. Currently, the account is pulling albums and blog posts from his website and tweeting them via twitterfeed, though we bet you’ll see real engagement later on. He also only has about 600 followers, but as the media picks up on his new-found Twitter presence, that will grow as well.

Twitter is simply one of the best ways for well-known personalities to spread their message to thousands or millions of people, but it looks like a conversation between Ev and the Dalai Lama was enough of a push to get him to finally join.

We look forward to future tweets from His Holiness.

New stats released today by Twitter reveal that users now send out over 50 million tweets per day. That means every second, 600 tweets fly through Twitter’s network.

As we reported two weeks ago, Twitter saw more than 1.2 billion tweets in January, or around 39 million tweets per day. These numbers came from Royal Pingdom and not Twitter itself, though.

The new numbers blow past Pingdom’s stats. Some of the highlights:

- In 2007, around 5000 tweets were sent per day.

- By 2008, the number grew to 300,000 tweets per day.

- By 2009, around 2.5 million tweets were sent through Twitter every single day.

- Tweet growth shot up by 1,400% in 2009, reaching 35 million tweets per day by the end of the year.

- As of now, Twitter sees 50 million tweets created per day.

NEW YORK (CNN) — Najibullah Zazi, charged with conspiring to detonate explosives in the United States, is expected to plead guilty Monday, a government official familiar with the case said.

Zazi was arrested in September in an alleged plot to build and detonate bombs in New York City around the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Since then, two relatives of Zazi’s have been indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with the case.

Zazi’s father and uncle also have been indicted on charges that they helped discard bomb-making chemicals when they learned of the government’s investigation.

A hearing for Zazi has been scheduled for 2 p.m. ET Monday. The specifics of the deal are currently unknown.