MillionFace

Update:

The dust was yet to settle for the Tummala family after Soumya Reddy was found dead in Chicago - came another shocker when the authorities in Missouri found the body of Soumya’s cousin Tummala Vikram Kumar Reddy in a lake on Monday.

The body of 27-year-old Vikram surfaced from the lake on Monday. Vikram, son of Soumya’s mother’s elder sister, was working as a software engineer in Chicago. His death was expected to have taken place around the same time as Soumya’s. The St Louis County police, who said Vikram was also shot, though would not discuss the specifics but stopped short of calling the shootings a murder-suicide.

Call it sher ill luck or sad irony of fate, brilliant Indian students continue to be killed in the US

The murder brings to an end a brilliant career even before it got going. Tummala Soumya Reddy, the 23-year-old MS student in Southern Illinois University, Chicago in U.S., was killed on Sunday morning by an assailant whose colour of skin remains the only mark of identity .

The 23-year-old Tummala Soumya Reddy was pursuing her MS degree in electrical engineering from Southern Illinois University. This is the fourth incident of a student hailing from Andhra Pradesh, India being killed under suspicious circumstances in the United States in the last 10 months.

The family was informed over phone at about that an unidentified African American has shot dead Soumya near a lake, about 20 km from her residence in Chicago.

Soumya, the second of three children of late Bhupal Reddy and Hema, was said to be extremely brilliant at studies. She had completed her BE at Hyderabad’s VIF college. Her elder sister Sahaja is also an Engineering graduate while brother Rajesh is in IIT Chennai.

Soumya had joined the MS Electronics course in August 2007 soon after completing the BE.

Mr. Gajanand Reddy, who is liaisoning with officials of the International Students Federation (ISF) in Chicago, said the Chicago police had not provided information with regard to the motive of the killing. “We were just informed by an officer of the ISF named Geet that Soumya had been shot dead by an unidentified person. Some of the information we got from other sources indicates that the girl was returning to the campus after consulting one of her professors under whom she apparently worked,”

Investigations are under way to ascertain the motive behind the murder.

Soumya is the fourth student from Andhra Pradesh killed in the US in the last 10 months. While A Srinivas, a PG medical student from Karimnagar, was killed in March this year, Allam Kiran Kumar and K Chandrasekhar Reddy, both pursuing their Ph D courses, were shot dead at Louisiana University in December 2007.

The following pictures are photos taken of the Columbia (SPACE Shuttle) explosion. These sequential pictures of the Shuttle Explosion were taken from an Israeli Satellite in space.

The loss of Columbia was a result of damage sustained during launch when a piece of foam insulation the size of a small briefcase broke off the Space Shuttle external tank (the main propellant tank) under the aerodynamic forces of launch. The debris struck the leading edge of the left wing, damaging the Shuttle’s thermal protection system (TPS). While Columbia was still in orbit, some engineers suspected damage, but NASA managers limited the investigation on the grounds that little could be done even if problems were found

Read the rest of this entry »

The Carmelit is the one and only funicular (underground metro) in Israel and was originally built in 1956. However, after existing for only 30 years, it was decided to stop the running of the Carmelit, as it was showing signs of structural old age and system breakdown

It runs underground in the city of Haifa, Israel and it’s the country’s only subway system

Due to the city being located on the side of mount carmel, the entire single track ‘funicular’ system has been designed to accommodate the incline, hence the strange stepped stations and diagonal trains

Because much of Haifa is built on top of the Mt Carmel, the Carmelit goes up and down the mountain. The altitude difference between the first and last stations is 274 meters

The Carmelit is one of the smallest subways in the world, having only four cars, six stations and a single tunnel 1800 meters long. The four cars operate as two two-car trains, which run on single track with a short double-track section to allow trains to cross.