What to eat this summer for gorgeous skin !

The summer is great for so many reasons, like going to the beach and wearing dresses with floral patterns, but it’s also great because some of the tastiest fruits and vegetables are in season! These fruits and veggies are more than delectable treats for your palate, they actually provide some amazing benefits for your health and can keep your skin glowing—even after a day in the sun! Here’s a list of ten of Tata’s favorite summer fruits and veggies and the benefits that come with them:

Avocado: Obagi Avocados’ are often thought of as vegetables since they’re more savory than they are sweet, however the benefit they serve to your skin comes from the high levels of monounsaturated fat—typically thought of as “good” fat. Monounsaturated fat moisturizes skin and also replaces oil that  gets removed from washing your face (that is, if you use a cleanser with soaps or detergents, which we don’t recommend. Maybe try the Regenerating Cleanser instead, for preserved moisture?

Plum: The plum is one of many sweet fruits that just happen to also be good for your skin! Plums have a lot of antioxidants and are a great source of dietary fiber (like many fruits). Fiber helps in ridding your body of harmful toxins by ushering them through the digestive tract.

Mango: Mangoes are a triple threat: great health benefits, good for your skin and amazing taste. Mangoes are rich in vitamin-A and antioxidants, which together help combat skin ageing, regenerates skin cells and restores the elasticity of skin.

Blueberries: For small fruits, blueberries have a lot of benefits! It’s been found that certain compounds in blueberries, as well as other berries, lessen inflammation and oxidative damage to your skin and body at large (two things that usually appear for age-related reasons).

Red Bell Peppers: Vegetables also have tremendous health benefits—in fact, a medium-sized bell pepper contains about 200% of your daily needed vitamin C. Vitamin C has been reported to repair DNA damage caused by the sun’s harmful UV rays on your skin, an extremely useful tip to remember for summer!

Carrots: Eating carrots can help keep your skin glowing throughout the whole summer! Carrots contain two carotenoids called beta carotene, an antioxidant that converts to vitamin A inside the body, and lycopene that help protect skin from the sun’s harsh rays and the damage they cause your skin. Not to mention, a lack of vitamin A can causes dry skin, so eat up!

Corn: Like carrots, corn also contains a carotenoid that helps your skin, it’s called lutein and it also shields your skin from UV damage. Corn is grown in the spring and summer in the northeast, however frozen fruits and vegetables will provide the same benefits when they’re out of season, since fruits and vegetables are usually frozen at their ripest, which is when they are the most nutrient-packed.
Spinach: Spinach (along with kale and other dark green leafy vegetables) is  packed with folic acid, vitamin A, vitamin C and vitamin E, and also other components that boost the skin’s natural shield against the damage caused by the sun’s UV rays. Not to mention spinach can help reduce your chances of getting skin cancer! Spinach is another veggie that seems to be made for summer.

Tomatoes: Tomatoes, as we all know are actually a fruit and not a vegetable, are rich in lycopene, a UV-protecting compound, which is what makes tomatoes red but actually prevents your skin from looking red! Sunburn protection increases as you eat more tomatoes, while simultaneously enhancing your natural collagen levels to help prevent skin sagging and wrinkles. Fresh tomatoes are better than nothing, however heat helps concentrates lycopene levels in the fruit, so more of it is actually contained in processed or cooked tomatoes found in ketchup, paste, soup and juice.

Strawberries:  Strawberries are just one of the many fruits filled with vitamin C, and it has been shown that eating more vitamin C packed foods can actually help in warding off problems related to your skin’s aging, like dryness and wrinkles.  Vitamin C basically has skin-smoothing effects, since it is able to absorb the free radicals produced from the sun’s (sometimes) harmful UV rays and the role it plays in collagen production.

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This list was just a small showing of how great fruits and veggies can be for your skin—all of these are in season during the summertime, so make a day of it and go to your local farmer’s market, if you can. Eat up and enjoy!

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WINTER SKIN WOES: CHICKEN SKIN

Its nickname is “chicken skin,” but the formal name is keratosis pilaris. Whatever you call it—it isn’t easily corrected, and treatment can last for  six months. It appears as little red bumps on the back of the upper arms, the thighs, torso, and/or derriere, and frequently affects people with eczema or asthma. Obagi Skin Care This condition has a genetic component, and is caused by hot showers, loofahs, and abrasive scrubs, and can be exacerabated by cold, dry winter air.

But the real culprit is a protein in the skin (called keratin) that plugs the hair follicles.
Depending on the severity, there are several courses of treatment. ZO Skin Health’s Body Emulsion (which contains an ultra-high concentration of lactic acid) should be applied to the affected areas. It’s both an emollient and humectant, so it softens and smoothes the skin, while also exfoliating. Apply it after showering, while the skin is still damp, and then 2-3 more times throughout the day. For many people, this treatment alone will suffice. In combination with this product, you may want to consider having an aesthetician perform microdermabrasion.

If you don’t see improvement after several weeks, see a dermatologist, who may recommend a light peel of retinoic acid and TCA, or low dose prescription retinoids.
First, though, try to treat keratosis pilaris without prescription drugs—ZO Skin Health Body Emulsion should be your first option. Check out now on facebook

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Hyderabad bomb blasts: 16 killed, one detained in Old City today

Hyderabad:  A man in Hyderabad has been detained in connection with yesterday's twin blasts which killed 16 people and injured 117 in the busy neighbourhood of Dilsukhnagar. The government will have to explain if the city was compromised because danger signs were ignored or missed, with innocent people paying with their lives for allegedly major lapses.

Here are the latest developments:
1) The opposition says the government must explain whether intelligence alerts were not taken seriously or acted upon. In Delhi, intelligence agencies warned 72 hours ago of a possible terror strike in cities, including Hyderabad and Bangalore. (See pics of blasts)

2) Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, who visited Hyderabad today, said there was intelligence about attacks, but that it was general.

3) But Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, pointed out in Parliament this morning that in October, the Delhi Police said that alleged Indian Mujahideen terrorists had disclosed that they had surveyed Dilsukhnagar as the location for a possible terror strike. (Hyderabad blasts despite intelligence reports: Sushma Swaraj)

4) This morning, police with cameras and gloves searched the debris in Dilsukhnagar. Officials from the National Investigation Agency and commandos of the National Security Guard arrived from New Delhi to help with the investigation.

5) Crucial forensic evidence may have been destroyed by crowds swarming the area last night, who ignored police orders to leave the area for several hours.

6) Among the 16 people who were killed were three young students who were at the market to buy textbooks. (Among injured, man who survived Mecca Masjid blast)

7) Police say Improvised Explosive Devices or IEDs were used in the blasts. Traces of RDX have been found. Timers were used to trigger the explosions.

8)  Wires of a security camera near the location of the blasts had been snapped four days ago. Traffic police sources say they were aware of this but did not re-connect the camera. (Intelligence alert mentioned Hyderabad)

9) The bombs, placed on bicycles near a small restaurant in Dilsukhnagar, went off just after 7 pm yesterday, within five minutes of each other. The Hyderabad police chief, on way to the Sai Baba temple, had passed by about 15 minutes ago.

10) The test match between India and Australia, scheduled to start in Hyderabad on March 2, has not been re-scheduled.

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Staying Private on the New Facebook

Facebook is a personal vault that can contain photos of your firstborn, plans to bring down your government and, occasionally, a record of your indiscretions.

It can be scoured by police officers, partners and would-be employers. It can be mined by marketers to show tailored advertisements.

And now, with Facebook’s newfangled search tool, it can allow strangers, along with “friends” on Facebook, to discover who you are, what you like and where you go. 

Facebook insists it is up to you to decide how much you want others to see. And that is true, to some extent. But you cannot entirely opt out of Facebook searches. Facebook, however, does let you fine-tune who can see your “likes” and pictures, and, to a lesser extent, how much of yourself to expose to marketers.

The latest of its frequent changes to the site’s privacy settings was made in December. Facebook is nudging each of its billion subscribers to review them. 

The nudge could not have been more timely, said Sarah Downey, a lawyer with the Boston company Abine, which markets tools to help users control their visibility online. “It is more important than ever to lock down your Facebook privacy settings now that everything you post will be even easier to find,” she said.

That is to say, your settings will determine, to a large extent, who can find you when they search for women who buy dresses for toddlers or, more unsettling, women who jog a particular secluded trail.

What can you do? Ask yourself four simple questions. 

QUESTION 1 How would you like to be found?

Go to “who can see my stuff” on the upper right side of your Facebook page. Click on “see more settings.” By default, search engines can link to your timeline. You can turn that off if you wish.

Go to “activity log.” Here you can review all your posts, pictures, “likes” and status updates. If you are concerned about who can see what, look at the original privacy setting of the original post.

In my case, I had been tagged eating a bowl of ricotta with my fingers at midnight near Arezzo. My friend who posted the picture enabled it to be seen by anyone, which means that it would show up in a stranger’s search for, I don’t know, people who eat ricotta with their fingers at midnight. I am tagged in other photos that are visible only to friends of the person who posted them.

The point is, you want to look carefully at what the original settings are for those photos and “likes,” and decide whether you would like to be associated with them.

“I don’t get this Facebook thing either,” said one woman whose friend request I had accepted in January 2008. “But everyone in our generation seems to be on it.”

If you are concerned about things that might embarrass or endanger you on Facebook — Syrians who endorse the opposition may not want to be discovered by government apparatchiks — comb through your timeline and get rid of them. The only way to ensure that a post or photo is not discovered is to “unlike” or “delete” it.

Make yourself a pot of tea. This may take a while. The nostalgia may just be amusing. 

QUESTION 2 What do you want the world to know about you?

Go to your profile page and click “About me.” Decide if you would like your gender, or the name of your spouse, to be visible on your timeline. Think about whether you want your birthday to be seen on your timeline. Your date of birth is an important piece of personal information for hackers to exploit.

A tool created a couple of weeks ago by a team of college students offers to look for certain words and phrases that could embarrass other college students as they apply for internships and jobs. It is called Simplewash, formerly Facewash, and it looks for profanity, references to drugs and other faux pas that you do not necessarily want, say, a law school admissions officer to see.

Socioclean is another application that scours your Facebook posts. It is selling its service to college campuses to offer to students. 

QUESTION 3 Do you mind being tracked by advertisers?

Facebook has eyes across the Web; one study found that its so-called widget — the innocuous blue letter “f” — is integrated into 20 percent of the 10,000 most popular Web sites. If that is annoying, several tools can help you block trackers. Abine, DisconnectMe and Ghostery offer browser extensions. Once installed on your Web browser, these extensions will tell you how many trackers they have blocked.

Facebook also has a mechanism to show you ads based on the Web sites you have visited. It works with third-party companies to place cookies on my computer when, for instance, I visit an e-commerce site. That brand knows that I might be looking at girls’ dresses. It can ask Facebook to show me an ad for girls’ dresses when I log in to Facebook. You can control this. Hover over the “X” next to the ad and choose from the drop-down menu: “Hide this ad,” you could say. Or hide all ads from this brand. Facebook does not serve the ads itself, so to opt out of certain kinds of targeted ads, you must go to the third party that Facebook works with to show ads based on the Web sites you have browsed.

QUESTION 4 Whom do you want to befriend?

Now is the time to review whom you count among your Facebook friends. Your boss? Do you really want her to see pictures of you in Las Vegas? And the woman you met in Lamaze class: do you want the apps she has installed to know who you are?

Privacyfix.com, a browser extension, shows you how to keep your friends’ Facebook applications from sucking you into their orbit. It is preparing to introduce a tool to control what it calls your “exposure” to the Facebook search engine.

Secure.me offers a similar feature. Depending on your privacy settings, that photo-sharing app that your Lamaze compatriot just installed could, in one click, know who you are and have access to all the photos that you thought you were sharing with “friends.”

One of Facebook’s cleverest heists is the word “friend.” It makes you think all your Facebook contacts are really your “friends.” They may not be.

Obagi

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Chinese Blogger Thrives as Muckraker

BEIJING — With his five cellphones constantly ringing, it is not easy these days to get the undivided attention of Zhu Ruifeng, a professed citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom.

“Shush, I’ve got the BBC on the phone,” he said one afternoon last week, silencing the crowd of acolytes and journalists who had flocked to the bookstore where he holds court most days.

A former migrant worker with a high school education, Mr. Zhu has become an overnight celebrity in China in the two months since he posted online secretly recorded video of an 18-year-old woman having sex with a memorably unattractive 57-year-old official from the southwestern municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr. Zhu gained a million or so new microblog followers.

The takedown was just the opening act, Mr. Zhu says. He promises to release six more sex videos that he predicts will make a number of other men run for cover. “I’m fighting a war,” he said with characteristic bombast, his voice a near-shriek. “Even if they beat me to death, I won’t give up my sources or the videos.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Zhu, 43, has made a few enemies within the government. Late last month, five men showed up at his apartment with state security ID cards. As they thundered from the other side of his locked front door, Mr. Zhu dialed foreign journalists, texted his lawyers and sent out an electronic S O S to the multitudes. The agents left only after he promised to appear for questioning the following morning.

The next day, he emerged from the station house like a triumphant prizefighter, telling waiting supporters how he had verbally outflanked interrogators during seven hours of questioning. “I dared them to throw me in jail and then watch how many human rights and journalism awards I win,” he crowed. “In the end, they turned white with fear.”

It is impossible, of course, to verify Mr. Zhu’s claim. But his cocky behavior and bristling indignation have come to personify the popular fury over official malfeasance that has flourished alongside China’s torrid economic growth. He has also become a litmus test of how committed China’s new leaders are in their battle against corruption — and whether they can tolerate a populist crusader like Mr. Zhu.

Because he has no state-issued journalist’s credentials, Mr. Zhu occupies a tenuous gray zone, which partly explains his penchant for surrounding himself with reporters and supporters — people he hopes might decrease the likelihood of his disappearing into the black hole of the state’s security apparatus.

“Here on Chinese soil, it’s almost impossible for citizen journalists like him to survive long term,” said Zhan Jiang, a media scholar at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

On the face of it, Mr. Zhu’s goals dovetail nicely with those of Xi Jinping, the new Communist Party leader who is to become president next month. Since his installation in November, Mr. Xi has been regularly assailing systemic graft, warning that officials large and small — both “tigers” and “flies,” as he put it — should be brought to justice.

So far the actual results have been minimal. But whether intentional or not, Mr. Xi’s jeremiads have inspired freelance scandal-chasers like Mr. Zhu to seize the moment and pick off misbehaving officials with the help of the Internet. The takedowns often begin with a tip from a jilted mistress or back-stabbing associate and end with an online exposé that forces the authorities to act, and the state-run media to take notice.

The daily smorgasbord of official greed and licentiousness has become so unwieldy that newspapers have begun providing readers with charts to keep track of the implicated and their loot. One particularly rapacious former bank official from Shaanxi Province, Gong Aiai, has become known as “House Sister” for having parlayed bribes and kickbacks into a real estate portfolio of 41 apartments in Beijing.

So far the most senior official to be exposed is Liu Tienan, the nation’s top energy regulator, who is under investigation for accusations of lying about his academic credentials, colluding with a businessman to pocket fraudulently acquired bank loans and threatening to kill a former mistress.

Mr. Zhu, who began his Web site in 2006, relies largely on whistle-blowers to funnel damning evidence to him. Through the years, he said, he has exposed 100 officials, bringing down more than a third of them. He has been threatened and beaten; more than once, he says, he has been offered huge sums of money to delete an incriminating post from his site, which is called People’s Supervision.

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Valentines Day 14 Feb

Valentines Day Week or 7 days of celebrations is also called as Valentine Week. Valentine Week is a great fun time for all lovers. It includes the seven Important days in the month of February or valentine week.

With the commencement of this valentine 7 days week, the love takes the front stage. This valentine week starts with a sweet gesture of rose day on 7th February, every year, as it gives a chance to express love to the beloved. This week is moved ahead with the second day as the propose day, now is the time when you have to speak out your feelings as rose has done its part on the first day. Then from the 3rd day, the series of showering love and pampering begins as it happens to be the chocolate day following it there are days for cuddling and committing like teddy day, promise day, kiss day, hug day and falls into the most romantic day, the valentine’s day on 14th February.

It is considered as the most romantic and passionate time of the year. The longing to be with your beloved’s hand becomes even more, strong. By now you must be ready with your partner as you must have given rose, proposed her, then pampered her with teddy and hugs, given her a promise followed with kisses. This is the time, when you walk out with your beloved holding her hands, looking in those deep eyes, exchanging glances and conversing with unspoken words. This all create butterflies in the stomach and heart goes on doing its pitter-patter. With that mesmerizing smile on your beloved face seems, like you have accomplished everything.

Romance adds verve to your love and can be called as the essence of love.  Love is revived and ignited; by sprinkling romance, in the relation. Valentine’s Day paves way to it. Les Miserable’s have, aptly stated “To love another person is to see the face of God”. This is a perfect definition of true love, because the one you love is everything to you and there should be no conditions. Nothing speaks more than Valentine’s Day to the couples in love!


Gear up to paint the town red, on this Valentine’s Day and spend eminent time together. Let your sweetheart know how important she is in your life. Shower your love with these sweet gestures on each day of the valentine week and make her yours forever. The best form to express your feelings is to put into words and when in black and white then you are sure to win your love, because the words speak aloud on the behalf of your heart.  If you accompany your love letter with romantic love quotes, it fetches a perfect ten, as these romantic sayings and quotations blends romanticism with poetry! It is a saying, “now or never”, and it can be applied to this day, as for the lovers, it is the day to convey their secret love for their partner, no matter what would be the consequence.



1.Rose Day on Feb 7, Happy Rose Day
2.Propose Day on Feb 8, Happy Propose Day
3.Chocolate Day on Feb 9, Happy 4.Chocolate Day
4.Teddy Day on Feb 10, Happy Teddy Day
5.Promise Day on Feb 11, Happy 7.Promise Day
6.Kiss Day on Feb 12, Happy Kiss Day
7.Hug Day on Feb 13, Happy Hug
Valentine’s Day on Feb 14,  

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