According to Facebook's vice president for mobile partnerships and corporate development, Vaughan Smith, India is Facebook's third largest market in terms of number of users and they believe India will soon be its largest user base soon.

Currently Indonesia and the US lead. Indonesia has over 45 million Facebook users and India has around 30 million.

Over three-fourths of Facebook's 800 million users are outside the US, and of those India is growing at a phenomenal pace. According to recent Comscore data, one in three Internet users in India is a Facebook user.

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16 people were crushed to death and some 50 others injured in a stampede at a religious ceremony near the river Ganga in Haridwar.

The stampede happened in the morning when thousands of devotees mostly from east UP and Bihar were climbing stairs to cross a mini bridge ahead of the religious ceremony Gayatri Mahayagya.

14 women died of suffocation from smoke from the venue as the stampede of pilgrims pressed forward. In the fray a hoarde of devotees blocked the Delhi-Rishikesh national highway.

The Uttarakhand CM BC Khanduri has ordered a magisterial investigation into the circumstances leading to the stampede.

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By December, India will be the third largest Internet market in the world after China and the US, as the country adds nearly 5-7 million users each month.

According to a survey by IMRB and the Internet & Mobile Association of India, at the end of December this year 121 million Indians will access the Internet at least once a week. This will also make India one of the world's leading markets for Net-based businesses.

Smalltown India has evolved into a large net user base, boasting more users than the top 8 metros put together. Schoolgoers make up over a fifth of these users and over 1 in 10 belong to the lowest socio-economic groups.

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A study by India's largest clinic-based survey Screening India's Twin Epidemic (SITE), found that one in every five Indian adults living in urban areas suffers from hypertension and diabetes.

In Maharashtra 67% either have diabetes or hypertension or both. The only parameter where Maharashtra performed better than the all-India average was in the level of awareness.

The SITE study that was sponsored by Sanofi, tested some16,000 people living across eight states in cities including Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Delhi, Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, Bangalore, Mangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, Vizag, Vijaywada, Bhopal, Indore, Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Kolkata, Hoogly and Howrah.

Obesity is said to be the reason for the surging numbers, as 80% of the people studied had abdominal obesity. That, and the rising trend of non-vegetarianism and excess salt in diets. Both these are the result of a changing lifestyle especially among young people.

In all India has approximately 75 million people who are diabetics.

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Niranjan V, an alumnus of the National Law School of Indian University, Bangalore, and a Rhodes scholar, beat out 150 classmates to top Oxford Univerity's post graduate programme that included the courses Conflict of Law, Restitution, Personal Taxation and Law of Evidence.

A jubilant Niranjan said he enjoyed the hard work and the enormous workload and spent most of his vacation studying.

He learned of his results after he returned to India and said his stint there was incredible. He is the son of a chartered accountant and works under a senior advocate in the Madras high court.

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