"April 2, 2009"
http://www.spaceweather.com/
"Daily Sun: 02 Apr 09 The sun is blank--no sunspot. Sunspot number: 0"
"Far side of the Sun: This holographic image reveals no sunspots on the far
side of the sun."
"Planetary K-index
Now: Kp= 0 quiet"

The face of the Sun is without blemish:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images20...662373pa fgt2

Please visit:
http://blog.nj.com/southjersey_impac...SolarCycle.jpg

The right panel shows the face of the Sun as it looked on a good day during
the late Modern Warm Period. Sunspots are the apparent size of craters on
the moon. The left panel shows a Sun as it appears today. Please write to Al
Gore so that Al knows that the Sun is not living up to his religious
expectations. Al Gore is a divinity school dropout. George Carlin had a
better grasp of the true nature of God's creation, than does Al Gore.

Please visit:
http://www.co-intelligence.org/newsl...es/sun-etc.jpg
which shows the relative sizes of the Sun and planets. Compared to the Sun,
Jupiter is the size of a pea, earth is the size of a grain of sand.

India exports slide for fifth straight month
18 hours ago

NEW DELHI (AFP) - India's exports fell by nearly 22 percent in February from
a year earlier, the fifth monthly contraction in a row, as overseas demand
was battered by the global downturn, data showed Wednesday.

The drop was the biggest since the mid-1990s and analysts said worse was in
store for Asia's third-largest economy as the appetite for made-in-India
goods subsides amid the deepening slowdown in US and European markets.

Merchandise exports fell 21.7 percent to 11.91 billion dollars in February
from a year earlier, according to commerce ministry data.

"This is a pretty significant dip in exports, we're seeing the worldwide
downturn really starting to hit," Crisil principal economist D.K. Joshi
said.

"Advanced economies are expected to contract even more this year so it's
hard to visualise an export recovery soon," Joshi told AFP. Global trade
will slide nine percent this year, the World Trade Organisation has
forecast.

Imports tumbled 23.3 percent to 16.82 billion dollars from a year ago on the
back of a huge fall in crude prices and weakening domestic demand, narrowing
the trade gap by 27 percent to 4.9 billion dollars.

The data came as Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other leaders of
the Group of 20 industrialised and developing nations prepared for a summit
Thursday in London to tackle the worst financial crisis in decades.

India's economy is less dependent on exports than other Asian economies such
as China to spur growth but merchandise exports still account for 14 percent
of its gross domestic product.

India's trade performance is of key concern to the Congress-led government
which faces elections to be held from April 16 to May 13 as the export
sector is one of the nation's biggest job generators.

There have been widespread layoffs in the export-led garment, gems and
jewellery sectors.

"This downturn is going to have repercussions for domestic production,
especially for those industries leveraged on exports. It's downhill for a
while," said Joshi.

For the first six months of the fiscal year to March 31, 2009, exports grew
by 31 percent. But shipments started shrinking in October as the global
crisis began biting, reducing export growth for the first 11 months to 7.3
percent.

The government has already cut its export goal for the 2008-09 financial
year to 170-175 billion dollars from an earlier 200 billion dollars.

It has kept the target at 200 billion dollars for the new financial year but
economists said that with world economies heading into a steeper fall, that
goal looked impossible.

"Tough times for Indian exporters will last for some time yet as giant
economies such as the US and Europe are still deep in recession," said
Moody's Economy.com economist Sharman Chan.

The data came as India's economy has been growing at its weakest pace in six
years with many economists expecting growth for the fiscal year to March 31,
2010 to be 5.0-to-5.5 percent, down from nine percent two years ago.

The growth numbers are still impressive by Western levels but not enough to
raise tens of millions of Indians from subsistence levels.