LOW oil prices in 2015 will benefit the consumers

US gasoline prices have dropped for more than 90 straight days. They now average $2.28 a gallon, which is remarkable considering that just a few months ago, some of us were routinely paying $4 and sometimes close to $5. Diesel prices are down in Europe, too, but not nearly as much as in the US because of taxes.Not so coincidentally, the US economy surged by 5% last quarter, and does not appear to be slowing down. South Korea’s economy will growat least 0.5% faster next year. India’s inflation is down by 3.5 percentage points from 2013. Such is the potency of lower fuel prices, which are churching through consumerist countries—Indonesia, India, Japan, and Turkey among them. When you average the impact over a year, it puts an extra $1.3 trillion in consumers’ pockets versus six months ago.

All of which makes it surprising that many linear-minded economists are sticking with pre-oil-plunge forecasts suggesting little or no economic boon from the fall in prices. Some have even argued that the plummet is possibly a negative dynamic because it may reflect something deeply awry with the global economy. That is twisted reasoning: In all the modern oil price collapses—in the mid-1980s, in the late 1990s and in the late 2000s—economies surged. As perhaps the most basic of the building blocks of economies, oil, when it is priced moderately, is a driver of broadly healthy micro- and macroeconomic growth.In short, economists: get real

RUSSIA has a tough year ahead - fortune teller for 2015

Just how grim is the outlook for Russia? Here’s one data point: Russian banks and companies owe $600 billion to the outside world, and western sanctions prevent most of them from using US or European banks to refinance it. So where will the money come from?

Clearly, Russian president Vladimir Putin needs to contemplate his political tactics anew. For instance, he can stay at loggerheads with the West, but he’ll simultaneously need to encourage his home-grown technology and manufacturing industries to up their game. In short, he’ll have to jettison his fear of loss of control and let go. Does that sound like the Putin we’ve come to know?

Russia is in real trouble now as america is getting independent and not buying oil from opec 
that main agenda is to crush the economy of russia and many other countries who tend to look into the eyes of america. America being a superpower cannot tolerate this at all. so the lower oil prices will shake the economy of Russia badly.OPEC is losing money and is said to
be moving toward irrelevance, but it is hard to to make that argument stick. The cartel is fighting a war for dominance and controls about one-third of the daily global supply. Looking ahead, it seems likely that when the smoke clears and prices return to $80 a barrel or more, its influence will snap back. For cartel members who use this time of disarray to really clean up their economic systems, the low price bout could be a blessing.

Missing AIR ASIA Passengers meets tragic end??

AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished Sunday in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. The search expanded Monday, but has yet to find any trace of the Airbus A320.

“Based on the coordinates that we know, the evaluation would be that any estimated crash position is in the sea, and that the hypothesis is the plane is at the bottom of the sea,” Indonesia search and rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo said at a news conference.

First Adm. Sigit Setiayana, the Naval Aviation Center commander at the Surabaya air force base, said 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships were taking part in the search, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia.

The Australian Air Force also sent a search plane. Searchers had to cope with heavy rain Sunday, but Setiayana said Monday that visibility was good.

“God willing, we can find it soon,” he told The Associated Press.

At the Surabaya airport, passengers' relatives pored over the plane's manifest, crying and embracing. Nias Adityas, a housewife from Surabaya, was overcome with grief when she found the name of her husband, Nanang Priowidodo, on the list.

The 43-year-old tour agent had been taking a family of four on a trip to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia's Lombok island.

"He just told me, 'Praise God, this new year brings a lot of good fortune,'" Adityas recalled, while weeping.

Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore, particularly on holidays. Flight 8501 took off Sunday morning from Indonesia's second-largest city and was about halfway to Singapore when it vanished from radar. The jet had been airborne for about 42 minutes.

There was no distress signal from the twin-engine, single-aisle plane, said Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia's acting director general of transportation. The last communication between the cockpit and air traffic control was at 6:13 a.m. (23:13 GMT Saturday), when one of the pilots asked to increase altitude from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet, Murjatmodjo said.

The jet was last seen on radar at 6:16 a.m. and was gone a minute later, he told reporters. Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia launched a search operation near Belitung island in the Java Sea, the area where the airliner lost contact with the ground. AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes flew to Surabaya and said at a news conference that the focus for now should be on the search and the families rather than the cause of the incident.

“We have no idea at the moment what went wrong,” said Fernandes, a Malaysian businessman who founded the low-cost carrier in 2001. "Let's not speculate at the moment."

Malaysia-based AirAsia has a good safety record and had never lost a plane. But Malaysia itself has already endured a catastrophic year, with 239 people still missing from Flight 370 and all 298 people aboard Flight 17 killed when it was shot down over rebel-held territory in Ukraine.

AirAsia said Flight 8501 was on its submitted flight plan but had requested a change due to weather. Sunardi, a forecaster at Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, said dense storm clouds were detected up to 44,000 feet in the area at the time.

“There could have been turbulence, lightning and vertical as well as horizontal strong winds within such clouds,” said Sunardi. Airline pilots routinely fly around thunderstorms, said John Cox, a former accident investigator. Using on-board radar, flight crews can typically see a storm forming from more than 100 miles away.

In such cases, pilots have plenty of time to find a way around the storm cluster or look for gaps to fly through, he said.

“It's not like you have to make an instantaneous decision,” Cox said. Storms can be hundreds of miles long, but "because a jet moves at 8 miles a minute, if you to go 100 miles out of your way, it's not a problem."

Authorities have not said whether they lost only the secondary radar target, which is created by the plane's transponder, or whether the primary radar target, which is created by energy reflected from the plane's body, was lost as well, Cox said.

The plane had an Indonesian captain, Iryanto, who uses one name, and a French co-pilot, five cabin crew members and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant, the airline said in a statement. Among the passengers were three South Koreans, a Malaysian, a British national and his 2-year-old Singaporean daughter. The rest were Indonesians.

AirAsia said the captain had more than 20,000 flying hours, of which 6,100 were with AirAsia on the Airbus 320. The first officer had 2,275 flying hours.

“Papa, come home, I still need you,” Angela Anggi Ranastianis, the captain's 22-year-old daughter pleaded on her Path page late Sunday, which was widely quoted by Indonesian media. "Bring back my papa. Papa, please come home."

At Iryanto's house in the East Java town of Sidoarjo, neighbors, relatives and friends gathered Monday to pray and recite the Holy Quran to support the distraught family. Their desperate cries were so loud, they could sometimes be heard outside where three LCD televisions had been set up to monitor search developments.

“He is a good man. That's why people here appointed him as our neighborhood chief for the last two years,” said Bagianto Djoyonegoro, a friend and neighbor.

Many recalled him as an experienced Air Force pilot who flew F-16 fighter jets before becoming a commercial airline pilot. The missing aircraft was delivered to AirAsia in October 2008, and the plane had accumulated about 23,000 flight hours during some 13,600 flights, Airbus said in a statement.

The aircraft had last undergone scheduled maintenance on November 16, according to AirAsia. The airline, which has dominated cheap travel in Southeast Asia for years, flies short routes of just a few hours, connecting the region's large cities.

Recently, it has tried to expand into long-distance flying through sister airline AirAsia X. The A320 family of jets, which includes the A319 and A321, has a good safety record, with just 0.14 fatal accidents per million takeoffs, according to a safety study published by Boeing in August.

Flight 8501 disappeared while at its cruising altitude, which is usually the safest part of a trip. Just 10 per cent of fatal crashes from 2004 to 2013 occurred while a plane was in that stage of flight, the safety report said.

Mystery behind Missing AirAsia plane: strange parallels with MH370

The disappearance of an AirAsia flight between Indonesia and Singapore has, perhaps inevitably, prompted comparisons with the unsolved case of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Flight 370 vanished without a trace on March 8 as it carried 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

An initial multi-national operation to locate the wreckage far off Australia’s west coast turned up empty, without a single piece of debris found.

After a four-month hiatus, the search resumed on October 4 with new, more sophisticated equipment. The hunt is ongoing and answers are yet to be found.

Officials initially ruled out terrorism, but conspiracy theories have endured.

Although details of the latest disaster to befall an Asian aircraft are still unfolding, there do already appear to be a number of parallels between the two incidents , beyond the fact that both involved Malaysian airlines.

Pilots discussing the case of AirAsia flight QZ8501 in online forums have pointed out the time lapse between the moment the plane lost contact with air traffic control and the declaration of an emergency.

The Airbus A320-200 took off from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, at 5:31am local time and the last communication between the pilot and Jakarta’s air traffic control was at 6.13am.

All contact was lost by 6.18am, with only the flight plan view remaining on the radar screen.

At 7.08am, air traffic control declared “INCERFA”, meaning that the aircraft’s position was uncertain.

At 7.29am an emergency alert was announced and at 7.55am air traffic control reported “emergency distress.”

Almost 10 months earlier, it was not until nearly four hours of fruitless efforts to locate MH370/MAS370 had passed that officials activated an emergency response effort.

One pilot going by the name Hempy, posting about the AirAsia flight, suggested there were “shades of MAS370” apparent, claiming that “INCERFA would have been declared by 06.26 in any western country.”

The area where the AirAsia aircraft went missing was not far from the Indonesian island naval base at Bangka Belitung.

It remains to be seen whether this will fuel the kind of speculation that followed the disappearance of MH370, which according to one conspiracy theory had landed on Diego Garcia, the British-owned island in the Indian Ocean that is home to a major US military base.

US officials denied the missing airliner was there, but still not everyone was convinced.

There have also been business links between the companies behind the two missing planes.

In 2011, AirAsia and its rival Malaysian Airline System agreed a share swap deal, which they hoped would boost growth.

Tune Air, the parent company of AirAsia, was to exchange 10% of AirAsia shares for 20.5% of MAS stocks.

The two carriers also announced they would be co-operating in areas such as buying aircraft and launching new routes.

But the deal was short-lived: nine months later, the companies scrapped the proposed share swap following pressure from the employees’ union at MAS, who feared such collaboration could spell job losses.

As hopes begin to fade for the passengers of flight QZ8501, their relatives will be praying that their fates, too, do not mirror those of the vanished on board MH370.

The brave guard of army public school peshawar who helped many kids to run and was assasinated

A watchman at Army Public School, Muhammad Bilal Awan, 34, leaves behind a three-year-old son Abbas Khan. It was perhaps his fatherly instinct that prompted Bilal, who was on duty fixing pipes in the washroom, to save the life of Muhammad Sarfaraz, a student of grade eight, among others.

“I called Sarfaraz and told him to hide in a room or run away since there was news of an armed assault on the school,” said the eighth grader’s father Riaz Pehalwan. Sarfaraz, along with five other students, took shelter in the restrooms. It was Bilal who forced the children to run towards the gate and accompanied them to a certain distance while showing them the way towards Defence Park.

Pehalwan was relieved to hear from Sarfaraz on the second phone call that he was out of the hellhole and a watchman had aided him in the escape.

Himself a serviceman, Pehalwan rushed to the school which was cordoned off by the military due to the ongoing gunfight. When he saw an ambulance full of bodies leave the premises, he was sure he had imagined the phone calls and that Sarfaraz had not survived. He finally found Sarfaraz and his friends who were escorted by soldiers. Bilal had left the children at the main entrance and returned inside.

Recalling the horrific ordeal of the incident, Bilal’s teary-eyed father Pervaiz Shah told The Express Tribune, “We were told that the school had been attacked. We tried Bilal’s number for hours, but there was no response.” He added an unfamiliar voice answered the phone at last, claiming to be a paramedic at Combined Military Hospital. “The man broke the news that Bilal was no more.” No one could ascertain under what circumstances Bilal met his fate. His funeral in Shaheen Colony was unornamented, in complete contrast to his heroic sacrifice.

A plumber by profession and a resident of Nothia, Bilal was able to secure a watchman’s job at the school with the help of a friend two years ago. “He was my firstborn and the sole breadwinner of his family. I work as a painter at a motorcar workshop and we lead the most frugal lives. Bilal was hardly able to make ends meet working as a plumber and he was overjoyed when he got the job,” said Shah.

Despite the high death toll and the most morbid imagery in the aftermath of the Army Public School attack, numerous incidents of sheer resilience have surfaced in the face of terror. The heroics of teachers standing in the line of fire to protect their students and classmates helping others escape the spraying bullets embody the collective conscience of our people about militants.

Whether anyone remembers the heroics of the watchman or not, the father and son will remain indebted to Bilal forever.

Last wordicts of terrorist Dr.Usman and Arshad before execution

Stay strong pakistan its not over yet!

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the interior minister of Pakistan said that information has been received which hints out that terrorists are getting ready to strike again and carry out one more deadly attack, similar to the Peshawar attack.

While addressing to the media, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said:  “We will have to stay alert to thwart another possible terrorist act.”

He added that the nation of Pakistan should be aware of the fact that the country is in a state of war and asked the people to stand by the Pakistan Army. “The enemy is not from outside, it is from within.”

He further added that the counter terrorism policy of the government will be shared with the nation.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said that it will be wrong to call all the students of the seminaries terrorists, and over 90 percent of the total Madaris operating in Pakistan have nothing to do with terrorisms related activities.

He appreciated the Ulema and extended his gratitude to them for condemning the Peshawar attack.

To tighten up the security, he called upon the cellular service providers to desist from issuing illegal SIMs. He said that a terror case will be registered against the company, if its SIM is used to launch the terrorist attack.

He also instructed the hotel owners to verify the credentials of the guests before checking them in for the stay.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan remarked that Pakistan Army is a highly responsible institution which adheres to the Islamic principles and they would never harm women and children. “The parameters of the Pak Army’s actions are very well defined.”

A phone number will be provided to the people that will enable them to report about any suspicious activity, item or a person they come across. He appealed to each and every citizen to step forward and play his or her role to fight against terrorism.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan directed the SHOs to stay informed about the activities going on in their designated areas. He also ordered the DPOs to carry out search operations in sensitive areas.