OU Degree Results 2011

As Higher Officials said Degree Annual Examination Results 2011 of Osmania University will be released on 22nd June 2011. Degree :- BA, B.Sc, B.Com. Total Results will be kept in the official site of Osmania University www.osmania.ac.in. Students have to wait until 22nd june.
to get the direct results link click here for Results

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2nd UPDATE: India April Car Sales Grow At Slowest Pace In Nearly 2 Years

NEW DELHI (Dow Jones)--Local car sales in India grew at their slowest pace in nearly two years in April as higher loan rates as well as rising fuel prices forced people to put off purchases.
Also, several auto makers raised vehicle prices over the past few months to offset an increase in the cost of steel and other commodities.
All these factors led to the lowest percentage gain since June 2009 as car sales edged up 13% in April to 162,825 autos from 143,862 a year earlier, showed data issued Monday by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers.
This is the lowest percentage rise since an 8.2% growth in June 2009, said Sugato Sen, a senior director at the automobile industry lobby group.
Car sales in India climbed 30% in the financial year ended March 31, the biggest increase since 1999-2000, as customers benefited from easier availability of low-cost loans, the introduction of new models as well as rising incomes in an expanding economy.
But a spate of interest rate increases by the central bank to control spiralling inflation, and a spurt in commodity costs resulting in higher vehicle prices, have since led customers to hold on to purchases of new cars, commercial vehicles and motorcycles.
"In line with our expectations, automobile sales have already begun to slow down," Sachin Gupta and Chetan Vora, analysts at Mumbai-based Edelweiss Securities Ltd., said in a May 2 note.
They expect cars and commercial vehicles to be the most affected, "since their sales are highly dependent on bank funding and susceptible to rise in interest rates and inflation."
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. (532500.BY), the country's largest car maker by sales, posted a 7.6% rise in April to 73,905 cars.
Second-ranked Hyundai Motor Co.'s (005380.SE) sales grew 11% to 31,604 cars, but Tata Motors Ltd. (TTM), the third-largest car maker, reported a 1.1% decline to 19,544 cars.
The local units of General Motors Co. (GM) and Ford Motor Co. (F) posted a 1.7% and 11% decline in April sales at 7,105 cars and 7,941 cars, respectively.
Sales of Honda Motor Co.'s (HMC) local car manufacturing unit fell 43% to 1,990 cars in April, but the local unit of Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) recorded a more than six-fold increase in sales to 5,458 cars from 904 a year earlier, mainly due to strong demand for its Etios sedan.
"We are anticipating some postponement of purchases due to high interest rates and higher prices of vehicles due to commodity prices," said Sen. "Consumer confidence is also low as all the economic parameters are wobbling."
He said SIAM is maintaining its guidance of 16%-18% growth in car sales for the current fiscal year which started April 1 as sales are expected to pick up in the coming months.
Commercial vehicle sales grew 8.2% in April to 53,202 vehicles, mainly because sales of medium and heavy commercial vehicles rose only 0.7% to 22,391 vehicles. Sales of light commercial vehicles increased 14% to 30,811 vehicles, despite a decline in sales of light buses.
Commercial vehicle sales generally tend to slow in April as companies give bulk orders for vehicles in March, the last month of the financial year, to save on depreciation costs.
Sales of motorcycles increased 23% in April to 809,565 autos, boosted by gains at companies such as Hero Honda Motors Ltd. (500182.BY), Bajaj Auto Ltd. (532787.BY) and the local unit of Yamaha Motor Co. (7272.TO).
Scooter sales surged 48% to 175,054 autos, benefiting from growth recorded by the local units of Honda and Suzuki Motor Corp. (7269.TO) as well as TVS Motor Co. (532343.BY) and Hero Honda.

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SC clears common medical entrance test for govt, pvt colleges

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday ordered that single entrance test would be held for MBBS and post graduate medical seats of government and private medical colleges.

Earlier, a panel set up by the health ministry to run the Medical Council of India ( MCI) had suggested that a common entrance exam would lessen the stress of the student.

Member of the panel Dr Devi Shetty had said that at present, a student wanting to study medicine has to appear for 10-15 examinations, which can be highly stressful to both the student and his family. A common entrance exam will allow a student to give his best shot at one go.

President of the panel Dr S K Sarin had said that a common entrance will reduce hassles for students appearing for multiple medical exams.

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IIT-K Prof develops process to improve steel quality

KANPUR: Professor Brahma Deo of department of material science and engineering has developed an algorithm beta supersonic blow control, in association with the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant. In order to further develop and test the algorithm, the institute and Visakhapatnam have joined hands.

The IIT-Kanpur authorities stated that the institute has been working in collaboration with some steel plants in India and abroad since the last two decades. The institute and Visakhapatnam Steel Plant have been working to improve various aspects of steel making process since 2002 and there has been a continuous exchange of knowledge between the two.

The institute authorities informed that on the basis of analysis of the operating practices at various Steel Plants, Professor Brahma Deo came out successful in developing a new algorithm to control the process, called Beta Supersonic Blow Control. The algorithm is now being used as part of the implementation of Level-II control at Steel Melting Shop-I of Visakhapatnam Steel Plant (VSP). "Interestingly, the Beta Supersonic Blow Control algorithm steers the steel making process such that it avoids/reduces or suppresses, the Chaotic attractors which lead to operational problems of either dry slag formation or intense foaming of slag, popularly known as slopping," said Brahma Deo.

"The beta supersonic blow control algorithm directs, dynamically, the changes required in the process control parameters such as lance height and oxygen flow rate, and advises the timely additions of iron ore and fluxes, while the blow is in progress, so as to arrive at the desired temperature and composition. Under the new scheme of Level-II control at VSP, the recording and processing of data is done on-line. The algorithm makes use of the on-line data provided and takes into account the changing process conditions with time," Deo added.

The collaboration between premier academic institutions like IIT, Kanpur and the heavy industries like steel plants is desirable not only for financial reasons, but also for developing the cutting edge technologies which we can then sell to the world.

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IBM Researcher Explains What Makes Watson Tick [VIDEO]

Humanity took a beating from the machines this week. The world’s best Jeopardy player is longer from the human race.
This week, IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated Jeopardy‘s greatest champions, and it wasn’t even close. When all was said and done, Watson won $77,147, far more than Brad Rutter ($21,600) or 74-time champion Ken Jennings ($24,000). Its ability to dissect complex human language and return correct responses in a matter of seconds was simply too much for humanity’s best players.
A few years ago though, Watson couldn’t even answer 20% of the questions it was given correctly. And it took hours, not seconds, for Watson to process through a question.
At an intimate event in San Francisco, John Prager, one of the researchers developing Watson’s ability to answer complex questions, gave a presentation detailing the work he and his colleagues did to turn Watson into a Jeopardy champion. During his presentation and a Q&A afterwards, Prager and fellow researcher Burn Lewis revealed some key nuggets of information, such as why Watson made those odd, uneven bets during Daily Doubles (an IBM researcher thought it would be boring if Watson’s bets ended with zeros, so he added random dollar amounts for kicks) or which programming languages the researchers used to build Watson (Java and C++).
So what’s next for Watson? Prager says that the next frontier is health care; he hopes that Watson’s technology can help diagnose ailments by analyzing vast quantities of data against patient symptoms and queries.
Check out the video to get a deeper dive into the technology behind Watson. Check it out in HD if you want to read the slides.
 

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Tech Mahindra Recruiting Freshers through employee referral

Fill the attached excel sheet & send back to dheerajbapat@gmail.com along with your resume.
60% 2009-2010 passouts..
Fw to anybody who is seeking for job.

 

Click Here To Download Excel Sheet


Don't modify the sheet, just fill your details carefully according to the instructions.

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Osmania University Time Table, Exam datesheet 2011

Time table for all examination and courses are available on Osmania University website at the following link:

http://117.211.84.30:808/exambranch/TimeTables.htm

Osmania University Time table, Exam datesheet 2011

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Telangana: Divided We Stand

Businesses in Andhra Pradesh have good reason to worry about the fallout of the Srikrishna Report. But the report indicates that the storm may pass soon.
Now that the Srikrishna Committee on Telangana has completed its job, it is for the Union government and the political process to take a call on the situation in Andhra Pradesh.

Although the committee talked about six options, four of them were set up by it as dummies to be shot down. The five-member body clearly put its weight behind the option of keeping the state united. However, it recommended that some constitutional and statutory measures be put in place to allay the apprehensions in the minds of the people of Telangana region. It recommended the bifurcation of the state only if it is ‘unavoidable’. While agitators for a separate Telangana unequivocally rejected the recommendations, ‘integrationists’ from the coastal region expressed happiness over them.

In the coming months, attention will be focussed on the shape the separate Telangana agitation will take and on its impact on the business and investment climate of Hyderabad. The developments will also have a bearing on the stability of the state Congress government. The political fallout in the state is important because it is the main pillar of strength for the Congress-led UPA at the Centre. Without the 33 MPs given by the state Congress, the party could not have formed UPA-2.

With the Srikrishna Committee revealing its preferred solution in no uncertain terms, the Centre is unlikely to make an announcement in favour of creating Telangana state. It will try to structure the discussions with political parties to evolve a consensus on constitutional or statutory mechanisms to keep the state united. It would not like to think bifurcation as an ‘unavoidable’ course of action. Telangana state protagonists would like to create conditions to make the bifurcation of the state ‘unavoidable’. In other words, they will have no option but to try and make their preferred solution the only and ‘unavoidable’ course of action for the Centre to address the situation.

 Despite announcements by main political formations that they would carry on their agitation for a separate state peacefully, Hyderabad will, in all likelihood, witness disruptions that will adversely impact its business climate. This is because the mainstream political formations have very limited control over the groups that are likely to resort to violent forms of agitations. This is perhaps the essence of the message the Srikrishna Committee passed on to the home ministry in the sealed cover. It did not deal with the law and order aspect in the open report. It said that it conveyed its opinion on it separately to the government.

Businesses in Hyderabad, therefore, are wary. Most of the software establishments are moving their project teams with tight timelines to other cities so that their delivery schedules are not compromised. Many of the offices and malls with glass facades have made huge investments in throwing protective nets around their buildings. In the short run, and only in the short run, there will be room for this kind of apprehensions to prevail. This climate is unlikely to last long, though. However, the realty sector’s recovery will be delayed at least by one more year, if not more. Hyderabad will be put in the category of less preferred investment destinations.

In the next few weeks, Congress and Telugu Desam legislators from the Telangana region will come under intense pressure to resign their Assembly and Lok Sabha seats. Telangana protagonists who are outside the mainstream political formations have time and again said that a separate state is possible only if the state plunges into a constitutional crisis. If the leaderships of the respective parties cave in, the state will surely face a political crisis and the Centre will not have any other option but to impose President’s rule. And that is likely to be a long spell.

After the grandstanding and posturing are done with, the long-term impact of the Srikrishna Committee on the attitudes of the political parties towards the division and unity of the state will inevitably come to surface. The committee’s report will be remembered not for the six options that it had discussed. It will become a point of reference in the years to come, mainly for its examination of development and backwardness of various regions in the state since its formation. On the other hand, it will also create conditions for a more proactive and conscious public policy with regard to deployment of resources. The report said that the demand for separation is ‘not without justification’. But in the same breath it also showed that the shrill propaganda of economic exploitation, backwardness, and political domination are not borne out by data and historical facts.

If the political and business leaderships in the state steel themselves to ride out the temporary storm that might rage in the coming weeks, the state will be back on rails sooner than later. And Hyderabad will soon regain the sheen it lost. Andhra Pradesh has provided linguistic organisation of states as the principal element of the architecture for the Indian Republic. If it rides out this storm, it would have done its bit to save India the labour of searching for an alternative architecture. Alternative to language as an organising principle could be religion, caste, ethnicity, or even all of them. This search should be the last thing that India should expend its energies on in the second decade of the 21st century. 

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In editorial, RSS questions Aseemanand confession

New Delhi:  Raising questions over the role of investigating agencies, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) said it found "intriguing" that only those persons arrested for alleged links to Hindu radicalism were "confessing" to terror acts, whereas convicted militants like Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru appeared to be more "tight-lipped" with them.

"...Intriguing that only persons named in alleged Hindu radicalism seem to be making 'confessions'. We have not heard of a Kasab or Afzal Guru or captured jehadi, terrorist making such a confession. Are they so tight-lipped?" the Sangh said in an editorial in its mouth-piece 'Organiser'.

The RSS editorial was a reflection on the recent alleged 'confession' of Swami Aseemanand, a key accused in the 2007 Mecca Masjid blast that killed nine people, to the CBI.
 
He was heading the RSS-affiliated Van Vasi Kalyan Ashram, Shabri Dham in Dangs, Gujarat.
Aseemanand has allegedly confessed to playing the role of an ideologue to the terrorists. Besides presiding over terror meetings held in Dangs and Valsad in Gujarat, he also selected Malgeaon, Ajmer Sharif and Hyderabad as terror targets.
   
The Sangh said in the editorial that if the agencies wanted to really unearth the plot behind the terror strikes, they would not have given "this kind of propaganda to the so-called confession of Aseemanand".
   
The Sangh termed the "leak" of the "confession" to the media as "politically motivated".
   
"Before the CBI took over the case, the Hyderabad police named HuJI, the banned outfit, to be behind the Mecca Masjid blast", it said.


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Maharashtra leads CAT 2010 results

New Delhi: Eight men scored a perfect 100 percentile in the second online edition of the Common Admission Test (CAT) 2010 which decides the fate of thousands of students seeking admission to some of India's top business schools this year.

The much-awaited CAT results were declared as per schedule on Wednesday following a scare of scores leaked on the Indian Institutes of Management website 10 days ahead of its release date.

Eight male candidates scored 100 per cent this year in the CAT 2010, while 19 B-school aspirants scored 99.9 per cent including two women from Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. 

Three of the top eight are from Maharashtra - two from Mumbai and one from Pune - and one each from Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Indore. The identity of the toppers has not been revealed.

In keeping with the tradition of the CAT, engineering students dominated the top slots this year.

Candidates can download their scorecards from the CAT website, www.catiim.in However, the website was down on Wednesday as anxious candidates tried to log in to find out if they made the cut.

IIM Lucknow and IIM Calcutta have put up the roll numbers of candidates short-listed for the group discussion and interview. The CAT 2010 results will decide the admission to 11 Indian Institutes of Management and over 150 B-schools.

The Indian Institutes of Management along with the US-based Prometric India conducted the test online for the second time in 2010. This year the test window was extended to a 20 day period from the 10 day window of 2009.

CAT 2010 also saw registration figures of 2.06 lakh, a 15 per cent drop over the previous year.

CAT is a test held annually for the admission to the post-graduate and Fellow Programs in management courses of several management institutes in India.

The institutes include top business management schools like IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Lucknow, IIM Kolkata, IIM Kozhikode, IIM Indore, IIM Bangalore, FMS New Delhi, JBIMS Mumbai, SPJIMR Mumbai, IILMGSM, IMT Ghaziabad, MDI Gurgaon and NITIE Mumbai.

The test is conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) and considered to be a major requirement for a candidate seeking admission to the prestigious management institutes of India.

On January 2, the CAT results were rumoured to have been leaked on the website, 10 days ahead of their actual day of release. This was denied later by the Convener for CAT 2010 Himanshu Rai.

There was frenzy among management students who tried to log in to find out their test scores after the rumour spread on the internet.

Students said they saw the results on the website, which Rai said could have happened due to live testing of the results that are usually done in an offline mode.

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Technology resolutions for 2011

A new year has just begun. And if you’re like many of us, you may already be well on your way to forgetting any New Year’s resolutions you made during an evening of revelry.

But when it comes to your life with technology, a sobering fact remains: bad habits can cost you. The good news: it’s never too late to protect your data, your privacy, and your security. Here are some New Year’s technology resolutions that will help you achieve a carefree 2011 with technology.

These days, there’s little excuse for not backing up your data in multiple ways. You need to look at multiple types of backups in part because they’re available and in part because any single type of backup can let you down. In short, for important data, you need backups of backups.

Start with traditional backup. Two terabyte (TB) hard drives now retail for around $80. Pair one of those with a USB 3.0 external enclosure, or install one into your existing desktop, and you’ll probably have more than enough space to schedule daily backups of everything on your PC.

But don’t stop there. You should have multiple copies of your mission-critical files, and there’s no better solution to creating a second or third backup than by using one of the many online backup services today.

Mozy, Carbonite, Backblaze, Amazon S3, iDrive, Norton Online Backup, and SOS Online Backup are some of the most highly rated services. Most of these are “set it and forget it” services which run continuously in the background to back up your files.

If like millions of others around the world, you now call Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or Bebo your home, make sure you’re not inadvertently letting the world see your dirty laundry.

Too many social networking users post personal or potentially embarrassing photographs or information about themselves and fail to use the privacy setting available in Facebook and other networking sites to determine what others can – and cannot – see.

Remember that by default, many social networking sites are designed to make finding your information easy through search engines such as Google.

You might not want that, however, as those who look you up on the internet – including potential employers – might stumble across your social networking site and get the wrong idea about you.

In Facebook, open the Account menu, click Privacy Settings, and spend some time configuring your account.

Each year, a new study comes out to confirm a tired old fact: most people use the same password for everything. And those passwords are not secure. The most popular passwords from one recent poll conducted by RockYou.com: “123456″, “password”, and “iloveyou”, followed by an array of first names.

Make 2011 the year you get serious about password security. After all, your passwords are probably the only thing between you, your financial data and credit cards, and some hacker.

The highly rated, free LastPass toolbar integrates unobtrusively with every major browser and makes short work of both creating and remembering your passwords.

“Phishing” refers to the practice of trying to procure from you account information, personal identifying information, or anything else that scammers can use to try to gain access to your money.

Phishing attacks come in all forms: e-mail messages that look like they come from legitimate financial institutions, requesting that you log on to your account; phone calls that appear to be from official agencies, again requesting sensitive personal information; websites that redirect you to other sites, where applications are surreptitiously installed on your PC in an effort to extract account information.

In 2011, do not respond to any external request that you log on to your bank account or provide account information verbally or by e-mail. If you have a question about whether a request is legitimate, call the institution in question to verify that you were contacted.

In addition, make sure you’re using a full-featured anti-virus application and be sure that the virus signatures are up to date.

If you carry data around with you, as many do on USB sticks, secure that data with encryption. Otherwise, anyone can plug in your stick and read what’s on that drive. Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise come standard with BitLocker. For everyone else, there’s the free, open-source TrueCrypt.

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Andhra may be heading for political uncertainty – News Analysis

With the movement for a separate Telangana gathering momentum again, Andhra Pradesh appears to be heading for another round of political uncertainty.

Hunger strikes, boycott of examinations, campus unrest and street protests are back as the Srikrishna committee is set to submit its report to the central government.

The indefinite hunger strike by Congress MPs from Telangana demanding withdrawal of cases against those who took part in the campaign last year and this year and deployment of central paramilitary forces in Hyderabad and elsewhere to tackle protests have injected a sense of urgency.

This, coupled with the rebellion the Congress is facing from loyalists of former MP Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy, his plans to float a new party and the spate of farmers’ suicides triggered by the crisis in agriculture, has pushed the state into an uncertain future.

The leadership vacuum created by the death last year of chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy was felt throughout 2010, feel political analysts.

The Telangana issue has divided the ruling Congress and the main opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) vertically and pushed all other issues to the backseat.

TDP chief and former chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu’s attempts to fill the vacuum by taking up the cause of farmers with an eight-day-long fast have been overtaken by the developments over Telangana.

Naidu was hoping that the fast, which helped him earn support from eight national and regional parties, will help him take the centrestage again and divert attention from Telangana.

But the initiative taken by Congress MPs from Telangana with an indefinite hunger strike has brought the focus back on the emotive issue.

Naidu, the longest serving chief minister of Andhra (1995-2004), plans to continue his efforts by organizing a massive public meeting on farmers’ problems at Guntur Dec 30.

However, with the Srikrishna committee on Telangana set to submit its report to the central government by Dec 31, Telangana is expected to dominate everything else.

After YSR’s death, Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) chief K. Chandrasekhara Rao outsmarted Naidu by grabbing the opportunity and going on an indefinite fast for Telangana.

Naidu, who hails from Rayalaseema, had backed the demand for Telangana in the 2009 elections but adopted a neutral stand after protests against the centre’s Dec 9, 2009, announcement to initiate the process for formation of a Telangana state.

Even Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy seems to have no answer to the emerging situation. Kiran Kumar Reddy, who also comes from Rayalaseema, is opposed to the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh.

Though a leader picked up by the Congress leadership, Kiran Kumar Reddy may not get a free hand in tackling the pro-Telangana agitation, says Rama Brahmam, head of the department of political science in the University of Hyderabad.

“After Dec 31, the Congress may say we need time to study the report of the Srikrishna committee. A decision may be delayed until the budget session of parliament gets over,” he said.

“Since the Congress can’t take a risk by carving out Telangana, it may try to put the issue in cold storage. There are already many demands for separate states in various parts of the country,” he pointed out.

The Telangana issue may only add to the problems of the Congress in the state. The party is already shaken by the participation of over two dozen party legislators in the two-day hunger strike of Jaganmohan Reddy for farmers last week.

Jagan, as the son of YSR is known, is set to launch his own party. As the Congress has only 156 legislators in the 294-member assembly, analysts say the government will collapse if two dozen legislators walks out with Jagan.

Banking heavily on the political legacy of his father, Jagan is aspiring to fill the political vacuum but like Naidu and Kiran Kumar Reddy he too faces the Telangana obstacle.

As the young leader comes from Rayalaseema and is focusing outside Telangana, he is also waiting for any decision on Telangana before making the next move.

Political observers feel Jagan and his loyalists from Andhra and Rayalaseema may hasten the process of bringing down the government if New Delhi decides to carve out a separate Telangana state.

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WikiLeaks, drugs and sex: Scandals of 2010

WikiLeaks seems to have tarnished everyone it touched. But there were plenty of politicians and celebrities who did not need help from the internet whistle-blower to get themselves into trouble in 2010.

WikiLeaks’ release of cables from US embassies to Washington – often bluntly written accounts of confidential discussions – have in most cases only confirmed what was already widely suspected in international relations. But they have nevertheless embarrassed US friends and foes alike and risk undermining US diplomacy.

According to the documents: Saudi King Abdullah, no friend of Tehran, suggested that the US use military force to stop the Iranian nuclear programme; a member of the Chinese politburo ordered hacker attacks on internet giant Google; Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s eccentricities include a heavy reliance on a “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse; and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is “risk averse and rarely creative”.

If nothing else, the WikiLeaks case was an unprecedented scandal of the internet age.

By comparison, Silvio Berlusconi spent 2010 on well-trodden ground.

Italians might have expected their prime minister to tone down his lifestyle following the criticism triggered by his escapades the previous year, which included alleged cavorting with a teenage girl – leading to the breakdown of his marriage – and embarrassing disclosures by a self-described escort.

Instead, in October, the 74-year-old conservative politician’s private life once again came under the spotlight when a Moroccan go-go dancer – stage name Ruby Rubacuori (Ruby Stealer-of-hearts) – claimed she attended, while still 17 years old, parties hosted earlier this year by Berlusconi at his residence near Milan.

The revelations added a new term to Italy’s political lexicon: bunga-bunga, which the woman, Karima El Mahroug, said was used to describe the erotic games featured at the premier’s parties.

Berlusconi dismissed the reports as “colossal lies”, but admitted intervening in May on behalf of Ruby when she was being held by police on suspicion of theft.

A telephone call from the premier’s office informed police officials that they had arrested a niece of Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak, and that she should be released to avoid a diplomatic incident. Opposition politicians were appalled by what they said was Berlusconi’s interference with the course of justice.

His response: “It is better to have a passion for beautiful girls than to be gay.” The remarks triggered another controversy, with activists and many commentators accusing the premier of “hate speech” against homosexuals.

In Poland, former deputy Prime Minister Andrzej Lepper was sentenced in February to 27 months in jail after being found guilty of demanding and accepting sexual favours from female members of his Self-Defence party.

The district court in central Poland also sentenced former Self-Defence parliamentarian Stanislaw Lyzwinski to five years for rape and taking sexual advantage of female members of his party – a nationalist agrarian party known for its loud protests.

Party worker Aneta Krawczyk said Lepper demanded sexual favours in 2001 in return for a job in a regional office of the party. Krawczyk said she was unemployed with two children to support when she was made the offer. She continued granting sexual favours until 2006 in order to keep the job.

Back in the US, Mel Gibson, 54, and Charlie Sheen, 45, Hollywood’s perennial bad boys, continued to make news for all the wrong reasons.

Gibson’s notorious temper once again got the better of him, if there’s an inkling of truth to the sordid allegations levelled at him by Oksana Gregorieva.

The Russian mother of Gibson’s young daughter Lucia alleges that he hit her while she was holding the baby and threatened her with a gun. She backed up her claims with recordings of the “Mad Max” star’s volcanic telephone rants.

Sheen was also up to his old shenanigans, destroying a swanky New York hotel room in an apparent cocaine and alcohol-fuelled binge, while an adult film actress he was supposed to be … entertaining … locked herself up in the bathroom for protection. Making matters worse, the incident occurred while Sheen was on a trip to New York with his ex-wife and kids.

Lindsay Lohan was another Hollywood figure who continued to make gossip columnists rich as she battled her drug demons, while Paris Hilton gave the world a moment of diversion during the World Cup when she was arrested for smoking marijuana in the dignitaries’ area of the stadium in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Luckily for her, a lesser-known friend who was with her at the time took the rap.

Back to the online world, the twin powerhouses of Facebook and Google continued to be embroiled in privacy scandals. The world’s dominant social networking site was found to be sharing the private data of its 500 million members with advertisers, while the world’s dominant search company used its Street View data collection vehicles to snoop on unprotected wireless networks and scoop up people’s passwords and other sensitive information.

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What tech surprises lie in store for 2011

What’s in store for technology in 2011? Plenty. While 2010 saw the unveiling of hot products like the iPad and iPhone 4 – 2011 looks poised to build on the best of what the preceding year had to offer.

Apple’s iPad was just the beginning. In 2011, expect an onslaught of competitors that want to take a bite out of Apple’s near monopoly in the “pad” market.

New models from HP, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, Motorola, Dell, Asus, Cisco, Lenovo, and others are expected to be rolled out in 2011.

While these products may not have the instant name recognition of an iPad, they’ll all likely have something that the iPad doesn’t: affordability. What will Apple do in response? There are plenty of shortcomings in the iPad that could be addressed by an iPad successor. Expect to see one in 2011.

Upstarts like Facebook and Twitter took the world by storm in 2010. Will tech heavyweights like Google stand by and watch success like that go unchallenged? Unlikely.

Twitter’s 140-character niche may be tough to replicate, but expect 2011 to see competitors attempt to chip away at Facebook’s success. Google is currently rumoured to have a “Google Me” product in the wings, which is expected to give Facebook some competition in 2011. Others are likely to follow suit.

There are plenty of reasons for cloud computing to be taken seriously – by both corporations and consumers – in 2011.

The first is accessibility. Internet access is close to ubiquitous in many areas now, so storing your data on some server that you can reach only when online is less of an issue than it used to be.

The second, though, is cost. In an age when budgets are under the microscope, the cost of running and maintaining your own storage or servers is a factor that can feasibly be eliminated by using cloud-based applications and storage.

And finally, there’s the issue of backups. Put simply, backup routines are someone else’s problem when your data is on the cloud – and that’s a good thing, since many people fail to back up their data adequately, if at all.

Think big and fast in 2011. Traditional mechanical hard drives will be available in 3-terabyte (TB) capacities and larger – and at prices that will be budget-friendly.

Speed freaks, though, will want to look at the upcoming crop of solid state drives (SSDs), which will take full advantage of the newest 6 gigabit per second (Gb/s) SATA drive connectivity standard to pump data through your PC at roughly twice the speed of today’s widespread 3 Gb/s standard.

SSDs will continue to command a price premium in 2011, but increasing capacities overall will bring down prices on the units that are currently the costliest. For those who have been waiting for SSDs to get big enough to be interesting, expect 600 gigabyte (GB) drives to appear early in the year.

Networks are generally boring, but 2011 will see some exciting advances in how you get online – and how quickly.

First, the speedy 802.11n wireless standard will become firmly entrenched in notebooks and wireless routers, making wired-like speeds widely available to notebooks and other wireless devices.

Even better, a plethora of “three-stream” routers will hit the market, making it possible to stream different types of data across wireless spectrums, so your music listening and file downloading won’t slow down your internet surfing.

USB 3.0 was unveiled in 2010, but hardly anyone noticed. Expect that to change in 2011, as a flood of new products are unleashed that take advantage of USB 3.0’s tremendous speed advantage over USB 2.0, as well as its bi-directional communication prowess.

In 2011, don’t buy a desktop or notebook PC that’s not equipped with the improved USB standard.

Expect more choice and more tumult in the mobile space than ever before. For the first time, the smartphone market won’t consist of BlackBerry and iPhone and everyone else.

Google Android-based phones and even Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 will provide real competition for the market leaders from both a price and feature standpoint.

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What tech surprises lie in store for 2011

What’s in store for technology in 2011? Plenty. While 2010 saw the unveiling of hot products like the iPad and iPhone 4 – 2011 looks poised to build on the best of what the preceding year had to offer.

Apple’s iPad was just the beginning. In 2011, expect an onslaught of competitors that want to take a bite out of Apple’s near monopoly in the “pad” market.

New models from HP, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, Motorola, Dell, Asus, Cisco, Lenovo, and others are expected to be rolled out in 2011.

While these products may not have the instant name recognition of an iPad, they’ll all likely have something that the iPad doesn’t: affordability. What will Apple do in response? There are plenty of shortcomings in the iPad that could be addressed by an iPad successor. Expect to see one in 2011.

Upstarts like Facebook and Twitter took the world by storm in 2010. Will tech heavyweights like Google stand by and watch success like that go unchallenged? Unlikely.

Twitter’s 140-character niche may be tough to replicate, but expect 2011 to see competitors attempt to chip away at Facebook’s success. Google is currently rumoured to have a “Google Me” product in the wings, which is expected to give Facebook some competition in 2011. Others are likely to follow suit.

There are plenty of reasons for cloud computing to be taken seriously – by both corporations and consumers – in 2011.

The first is accessibility. Internet access is close to ubiquitous in many areas now, so storing your data on some server that you can reach only when online is less of an issue than it used to be.

The second, though, is cost. In an age when budgets are under the microscope, the cost of running and maintaining your own storage or servers is a factor that can feasibly be eliminated by using cloud-based applications and storage.

And finally, there’s the issue of backups. Put simply, backup routines are someone else’s problem when your data is on the cloud – and that’s a good thing, since many people fail to back up their data adequately, if at all.

Think big and fast in 2011. Traditional mechanical hard drives will be available in 3-terabyte (TB) capacities and larger – and at prices that will be budget-friendly.

Speed freaks, though, will want to look at the upcoming crop of solid state drives (SSDs), which will take full advantage of the newest 6 gigabit per second (Gb/s) SATA drive connectivity standard to pump data through your PC at roughly twice the speed of today’s widespread 3 Gb/s standard.

SSDs will continue to command a price premium in 2011, but increasing capacities overall will bring down prices on the units that are currently the costliest. For those who have been waiting for SSDs to get big enough to be interesting, expect 600 gigabyte (GB) drives to appear early in the year.

Networks are generally boring, but 2011 will see some exciting advances in how you get online – and how quickly.

First, the speedy 802.11n wireless standard will become firmly entrenched in notebooks and wireless routers, making wired-like speeds widely available to notebooks and other wireless devices.

Even better, a plethora of “three-stream” routers will hit the market, making it possible to stream different types of data across wireless spectrums, so your music listening and file downloading won’t slow down your internet surfing.

USB 3.0 was unveiled in 2010, but hardly anyone noticed. Expect that to change in 2011, as a flood of new products are unleashed that take advantage of USB 3.0’s tremendous speed advantage over USB 2.0, as well as its bi-directional communication prowess.

In 2011, don’t buy a desktop or notebook PC that’s not equipped with the improved USB standard.

Expect more choice and more tumult in the mobile space than ever before. For the first time, the smartphone market won’t consist of BlackBerry and iPhone and everyone else.

Google Android-based phones and even Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 will provide real competition for the market leaders from both a price and feature standpoint.

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Internet now single biggest source of global information

What began modestly in the late 1960s as a way to connect research establishments by the US military has grown phenomenally to become the Internet, networking and empowering billions of people worldwide in myriads of ways. For instance, the latest Wikileaks, comprising million of documents, demonstrate the power of the Internet to change the world and bring transparency in governance.

Today, the “Net” is the world’s single biggest source of information on every known and unknown subject and the world’s largest mail-order catalogue. More than a billion people were using the Internet by 2005. The world is observing The Decade of the International Internet (2000-2010).

Driving this spectacular growth has been the engine of dotcoms and dotnets, the legions of domain names which populate the net, becoming household words. Currently, the year’s third quarter closed with a base of nearly 202 million domain name registrations, up by 3.8 million over the second quarter’s figures and 13.3 million or seven percent over the year.

The Domain Name System (DNS) divides the Internet into a series of component networks called domains that enable e-mail and other files to be sent across the entire Internet. Each and every site in the Internet is linked with one of the domains.

Universities, for example, belong to the “edu” domain. Other domains are gov (government), com (commercial organizations), mil (military), net (network service providers), and org (nonprofit organizations).

The combined base of dotcom and dotnet domain names has surpassed 103 million. New registrations totalled 7.5 million during this year’s third quarter, representing an increase of seven percent from a year ago. The dotcom/dotnet renewal rate for the third quarter was 72.8 percent, down from 73.2 percent for the second quarter, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by VeriSign, Inc.

VeriSign’s average daily DNS query load (number of queries) during third quarter 2010 was 66 billion per day, with a peak of 78 billion. Compared to the same period in 2009, the daily query average increased 23 percent and the peak grew by 27 percent.

The latest Domain Name Industry Brief also spotlights the importance of International Domain Names (IDNs), as the growth of the Internet spreads around the globe.

Today the English-speaking world makes up nearly 40 percent of Internet users. Africa had less than five million Internet users a decade ago; now, it has more than 100 million. In 2000, Asia was level with Europe and North America for users; today it has more than those two continents combined.

In the coming decade, the Internet will continue to become a ubiquitous, multi-cultural tool, fueled in part by the adoption of IDNs.

By enabling online content and businesses to be represented in local scripts and languages, IDNs help the Internet to expand the power of technology to regions and cultures, and connect the world in new ways.

The IDN Software Developer’s Consortium last met in Amman, Jordan, on Oct 29,
and included representatives from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Russian Federation, Japan, China, Korea, Hong Kong and Australia. The next consortium meeting will be in Cartagena, Colombia, during the ICANN meeting.

VeriSign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole.

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A Day inside the Browser

This young engineering student could pass for any regular guy.

Dressed in T-shirt and bug-eyed, he keeps his bony fingers through flicking through different tabs on his Firefox browser. When they start loading (”man, you can’t wait to see the page you want”), he fidgets; when it crashes(”this sucks”), he cusses. When power is off(or when he has to return to the nether-world you and me live in, for God’s sake), he moans.

World Wide Web is his default reality. Firefox is his default door into that.

What sets this young man, and people like him, apart, is the amount of time they spend inside their browsers,fussing over which browser to use, which loads faster, tweaking them to ramp up their performance. They have a feel fro the browsers. “I cannot do without being on the web,” says Raghu Ram, an engineering student. “It’s cool, you know, just feeling the kick out of clicking, and clicking and browsing.” With the browser mediating his experience with WWB, he says, ” I always look for improvements in different browsers, the way they perform, I just don’t want getting slowed.”

The Zen of Browsers:

A web browser , Wikipedia says, is ” a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.” As such, it’s an existential necessity for the those who spend most of thier lives cooped up inside the browser.

You have to have an in. Browsers— Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera—do give you an in.”what is interesting is , you just type in, off it goes and fetches the web page,” says

Kiran Kumar, a castaway into the web land who keeps several windows of his Chrome browser open at the same, each teeming with multiple tabs and them firing, and him flipping them for the heck of it.

For those who spend a lot of time inside the browser, using a particular browser seems an obsession, a harmless passion. They have a feel for simplicity, elegance, speed, compatibility, and above all, about how many tabs one could keep running concurrently. In addition to these, gushing about it to whoever listens. “Chrome is the best thing, it runs each process in parallel, so even one of the things gets messed up, it doesn’t affect the whole performance of the browser.” Moreover,”Chrome is kind of intuitive, with its no-frills input bar, it knows when to search, and when to just show the web page.”

In the soft glow of the screen, the browser is capable of astonishing things. “I am really hooked to the web,” says Satyanarayana, a developer, “it’s all because now we have browsers that can do a lot of work.” With lot of images, graphics, audio and video streaming through the web, browsers have lot riding on them.

“Yeah, there are truckloads of them out there on the web,’ he continues, ” and with that load you are looking for browser that’s really fast, doesn’t eat up system’s resources and doesn’t crash. I use different browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome for different purposes. I love this. It’s a developer’s game.”

A lot of mouth-breathing is done when the graphics and images pop on the screen. This is the place you go soak it —inside the browser.

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Tourists Spotted At Yadagiri Gutta

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AN UNTOLD STORY OF SURVIVING AN MBA

IIM-K director takes you into a world of no baths, no breakfasts, no time

The IIMs produce roughly 5 per cent of the MBA population in the country. We select our students through the Combined Admissions Test (CAT) examination. For every 100 students who take the CAT exam, only one makes it to one of the IIMs. The CAT-scanned boys and girls represent a selection excellence that is unparalleled in the world.
The popularity of the MBA programme comes from a very stiff entry barrier and multiple exit options in the form of job opportunities. This is unlike university courses where the entry barrier is not that high and job options are much less.

It is only natural, then, that recruiters in industry pay a lot of attention to our students and consider them fit for lucrative jobs. Where else would recruiters find such tried and tested students with a very high degree of general intelligence?
Having started on a note of optimism, I wish to share with you the untold story of what actually happens once you get into the MBA programme. The views expressed here does not pertain to IIMs in particular, but to most good MBA schools in general.

Getting admission to the MBA programme is only part of the story. Being selected is just one function of your test-taking ability. It may not have much to do with your managerial ability. Your success in the jobs you get will depend not just on your quantitative and verbal skills that had helped you successfully crack the CAT.
The challenges on the job will demand a lot more: social skills, ethical behaviour, capacity for on-the job-learning, emotional maturity and leadership. Here, I attempt to highlight some of these: The learning curve: From the day one of joining the programme, you have to move steeply up the learning curve. Your accelerated learning has to accommodate reading upto 200 pages of printed matter a day.

The readings will include case studies, books and newspapers for general awareness. You will be dissecting a human enterprise with the help of theories of demand, constraints, emotions and behaviour. You will be tested for your ability of not just learning by rote, but also learning from the experience of practising mangers and some wise professors.
Time & self-management: You have to complete at least 36 courses of 30 contact hours each in two years. Time passes by like a rocket and if you are not self-organised, you may feel like an astronaut who has just missed the spacecraft! Everything here may seem to be at an accelerated pace than your "previous life". Some B-schools insist on a minimum percentage of class attendance. So, chronic bunking downgrades you in more ways than one.

Every day you may have to make critical multiple choice decisions about time management. One student describes this as follows: (a) have bath and breakfast both (becoming rarity in campus), (b) bath but no breakfast, (c) breakfast but no bath, and (d) neither (becoming an alarmingly regular option).
The mess food: The food in the mess, like in most students' mess, is likely to obey the law of marginal utility that you study in economics: the more you have, the less you want to have. A student light-heartedly describes mess food as an advance warning: "You may have a stomach-churning unforgettable experience of drinking a liquid preparation that the mess cook calls soup!"

There are some students who overeat as a defence against anxiety they are unable to handle. This gorging is more evident before exams--you eat as an advanced compensation before you are eaten up by your exams! In all earnestness, you may have to plan the right diet for you to be in match condition for the challenging MBA curriculum.
Each year, some students are asked to repeat or abandon the programme because they are not able to cope. You certainly do not want to be one of them. Gender parity: Most high-profile MBA programmes have adverse gender ratios that are generally skewed in favour of male students (about 90%).

Women constitute roughly 10% of the batch size. At IIM-Kozhikode this year, we have some good news for those who believe that women make good managers: about one-third of the incoming MBA batch of 300 will be women. This is very different from the usual. It means that if you have to be man enough to be very well-behaved and courteous before an intelligent female classmate.
All the women that you would see here have come on their own merit and deserve to be respected for who they are. Besides, most women come with the requisite social and managerial skills that make them equal to or more than men in the eyes of the top recruiters of the world.

Think of Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, or Chanda Kochhar, MD and CEO of ICICI Bank--you will get the picture.
Multi-dimensional character: If you are a potential Nobel laureate and a social entrepreneur like Muhammud Yunus, you will not be a complete misfit in the MBA course. We have had people who have owned their own football clubs and scripted promos for Bollywood after passing out from IIMs.

Yunus of Grameen Bank, for instance, talks about the multi-dimensional man who does not want to do business for profit alone. He says we can put poverty in the museum. Imagine! So, what is this multi-dimensional human? Yunus thinks people are motivated by a variety of impulses--not simply a desire to get filthy rich. The existing system, says Yunus, has created a one-dimensional human being to play the role of business leader. We've insulated him from the rest of life, the religious, emotional, political, and social.
He is dedicated to one mission only-maximise profit. If you want to change the system being part of the system, you are welcome to IIM Kozhikode. Here we encourage not exclusive mercenaries, but inclusive excellence. We are privileged here to create socially sensitive citizens who would some day lead India in their chosen paths of excellence.

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Glance: Rains lash, traffic snarls stop Delhi and more

Heavy rains directly hit the 'heart of Delhi' when 18.5 mm record rain not only waterlogged Connaught Place but also majorly affected the vehicular movement around the area. After a facelift, the legendary 'Jal Mahal' here will be thrown open for tourists from October. Environmentalists have expressed concern over the damage the oil spill has caused to some of the beaches off the coast of Mumbai.

Delhi waterlogged

Water-logging at an under-construction site in Connaught Place in New Delhi. The day began with humidity on a higher note, resulting in inconvenience to the citizens. The humidity oscillated between 59 and 89 per cent. The showers started at around 3:30 pm and rain gauges measured 18.5 mm till 8:30 pm. The weatherman forecast more rains on Friday.

Hardest hit was 'heart of Delhi'

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People move on near an under-construction site of Connaught Place as beautification work is in progress ahead of Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. Vehicular movement was affected in several areas due to waterlogging. Motorists at the heart of the national capital -- Connaught Place -- also suffered.

Rubble causes problems

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A man walks at an under-construction site of Connaught Place as beautification work is in progress ahead of Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. The construction waste lying on roads went into drains in some areas of Delhi, leading to waterlogging while dug-up roadsides with heaps of rubble caused problems for motorists.

Traffic jams hit Delhi

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Vehicles get stuck in a traffic jam at ITO after rain water accumulates in the streets in New Delhi. The city saw widespread waterlogging despite claims by MCD of having completed de-silting of storm water drains.

Jal Mahal's new look

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A view of the renovated 'Jal Mahal'. After heritage restoration, conservation and new designing, the famous Manasagar lake and its legendary "Jal Mahal" (water palace) will be opened in first week of October. Jal Mahal Resorts Pvt Ltd has spent about Rs 50 cr on heritage conservation and renovation of monument and lake, project director Rajeev Lunkad said. The lake that was in a bad shape has now clean water and aquatic life, Lunkad claimed.

Oil Spill, India

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Containers and sea water mixed with oil from the cargo ship MSC Chitra at the Piruvari Beach at Uran in Mumbai. Environmentalists have expressed concern over the damage the oil spill has caused to some of the beaches off the coast of Mumbai and neighbouring Raigad. Meanwhile, the Indian Navy began moving merchant ships in and out Jawahar Lal Nehru port that had been closed since Saturday due to the accident.

Rescue operations on in Leh

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A woman carries her child at an army relief camp set up for the survivors of the flash flood in Choglumsar near Leh. The cloud burst that occured between the intervening night of August 5-6, leading to subsequent flash floods in Leh, has so far claimed 170 victims. Union Sports Minister M S Gill expressed grief over the loss of life and property in the flash floods in Leh in Jammu and Kashmir and announced an ex-gratia relief of Rs 20 lakhs to be spent on those in distress. He announced the relief from his MPLAD Funds.

North India celebrates 'Teej'

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A foreign tourist shakes hands with a person dressed as Lord Shiva during a procession at the Teej festival in Jaipur. Teej is celebrated by Hindu women for marital bliss, well-being of spouse and children and purification of own body and soul. The festival is a three-day-long celebration that combines sumptuous feasts as well as rigid fasting.

Holy Ramzan...

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Muslim devotees wash themselves as they get ready to offer prayers on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan at Jama Mosque in New Delhi. Devout Muslims refrain from eating, drinking and smoking from dawn to dusk during Ramzan, a time of heightened religious fervour.

Holy Ramzan...

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Muslim devotees wash themselves as they get ready to offer prayers on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan at Jama Mosque in New Delhi. Devout Muslims refrain from eating, drinking and smoking from dawn to dusk during Ramzan, a time of heightened religious fervour.

River in Spate...

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A man watches the rising water level of the River Tawi in Jammu. Hundreds are still missing after flash floods sent massive mudslides down remote desert mountainsides in Kashmir, officials said. The deluge came as neighbouring Pakistan suffered its worst flooding in decades, with millions displaced and about 1,500 dead.

No place to go....

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A displaced Pakistani flood affected family looks on from their makeshift home on a roadside in Khairpur near Sukkar in Pakistan on Thursday. Pakistani flood survivors already short on food and water began the fasting month of Ramzan on Thursday, a normally festive, social time marked this year by misery and fears of an uncertain future.

Survival of the Fittest

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Pakistani flood affected survivors scuffle for food relief dropped by a Pakistani army helicopter in Khairpur on Thursday.

On the Streets...

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A displaced Pakistani flood affected family takes up residence on a roadside in Sukkar. Pakistani flood survivors already short on food and water began the fasting month of Ramzan on Thursday, a normally festive, social time marked this year by misery and fears of an uncertain future.

Iftaar...

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Bangladeshi Muslims gather to buy food for Iftaar, the meal that breaks a day-long fast, during the first day of the holy month of Ramzan in Dhaka.

In Loving Memory...

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A woman, no name given, prepares to place a candle tribute at the St. Nicolas Cathedral in St.Petersburg, where the lists of seamen who perished in submarine disasters are displayed. Russian navy ships are flying flags at half-mast and memorial ceremonies are being held across the nation to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Kursk nuclear submarine disaster.

Wildlife....

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This September 2009 photo shows The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone's Grand Canyon is a popular tourist stop in the park, offering stunning views of the 20-mile-long chasm, which plunges 1,200 feet at its deepest point and is 4,000 feet wide at its broadest point.

Safari Paradise...

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FILE- This Aug. 15, 1997 file photo shows a herd of elk as they graze in the meadows of Yellowstone National Park with the background Mt. Holmes, left, and Mt. Dome, Wyo. In addition to being home to 75 percent of the earth's geysers, Yellowstone is also a wonderful place to view wildlife.

Grief Stricken Lot...

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Villagers stand around the bodies of Afghans who they said were killed by US forces during a raid in Sayed Abad district of Wardak province west of Kabul.

Anger & Pain

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A villager shouts anti- US slogans following the alleged US. raid in Sayed Abad district of Wardak province west of Kabul. A crowd of about 300 villagers yelled "Death to the United States" and blocked a main road in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday as they swore that US. forces had killed three innocent villagers, officials said.

The Monkey Factor

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FILE - In this file photo taken on Saturday, Oct. 25, 2008, a female orangutan named Beki eats bananas at Tanjung Puting National Park on Borneo island, Indonesia. When British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace arrived in Borneo's jungles 150 years ago, one of his great hopes was to see orangutans. Even he was surprised at his success, spotting the red apes feeding along river banks, swinging between branches, and staring down from trees almost the moment he arrived.

A work of art

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A woman, background, walks past handcrafted wooden dancers created by Taiwanese artist Ju Ming displayed at the Living World Series Sculpture Exhibition at the Museum of Art in Beijing.

Daily Job

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Sylvia Friedman, a US trapeze artist of the "Rose" duo, warms up at backstage before performing at the Circuba Festival in Havana on Tuesday. The Circuba Festival 2010 is held in Havana Aug.10-15.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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