Kathmandu: Nepal’s embattled king Gyanendra owes more than $460,000 in unpaid electricity bills, making him the Himalayan nation’s biggest power defaulter, a report said on Saturday.
The king, who faces an uncertain future with former Maoist rebels calling for the monarchy’s abolition, owes the money for electricity supplied to four royal palaces and bungalows since early 2005.
“We have been regularly sending cumulative electricity bills to the palace as well as to the royal relatives. None has responded, let alone paid,” the Kathmandu Post newspaper quoted an unnamed government source as saying. Gyanendra is in arrears to the tune of 30.5 million rupees ($462,000).
He owes 24.3 million rupees alone on the sprawling Narayanhiti Royal Palace which serves as his official residence and lies in the heart of the city.
The figures do not include the bills for his residences outside Kathmandu.
If the power costs of Gyanendra’s royal relatives were included, the total sum would come to “over 33 million rupees ($500,000) in unpaid electricity bills” up to January 2007, the official told the Kathmandu Post.
Gyanendra stopped paying his electricity bills when he seized absolute power in February 2005, saying he needed to crush a deadly Maoist insurgency. He was forced to abandon absolute rule in the face of an alliance between political parties and the Maoists who have now signed a landmark peace deal and formed a government.
The unnamed government official said the electricity board could not cut off power supply to the royals “considering their profile.”
Since being forced to end direct rule, Gyanendra has been stripped of most of his powers including his position as head of state of the impoverished nation.

Kathmandu: As the world celebrated the 2,551st birth anniversary of the Buddha on Wednesday, Nepal, his birthplace, had an additional reason to rejoice—the discovery of an ancient cave—an older Ajanta, with exquisite wall paintings, in its northernmost tip jutting into Tibet.
   A team of scholars and climbers stumbled upon the treasure trove last month during a search for historic caves said to be abounding in the virtually uninhabited tract of frozen land, preserved by the icy temperatures and untouched for millennia.
   Funded by adventure gear-maker North Face and a US-based production house, the expedition discovered a partly collapsed enclave containing a mural of 55 panels depicting the life of the Buddha. The paintings are highly evocative of Ajanta, says art conservator Luigi Fieni, referring to the first known Buddhist cave art dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries BC. Fieni has been camping in Mustang, the remote mountainous district that was once a rich and powerful Tibetan kingdom dominating the trans-Himalayan trade between India and Tibet.

   The art, he says, is executed in a style not seen in Mustang. Besides, they depict animals like the deer, leopard and tiger which are not found in Mustang, giving rise to the theory that either the painters were Indians or people familiar with Indian techniques and life in sub-tropical regions.
   The enclave could have been another Nalanda. American author and climber Broughton Coburn, who was part of the expedition, says probably one high cave in the enclave was reserved for Buddhist teachings.

OBJETS D’ART

Cave fresco discovered by miracle, says scholar
Kathmandu: The wall paintings in the ancient cave, being described as an older Ajanta, discovered by scholars and climbers at Mustang in Nepal show various figures, both male and female, making offerings to high lamas and teachers. Other nearby caves have mounds of manuscripts in ancient Tibetan script which, when deciphered, could yield a wealth of knowledge on Tibetan forms of Buddhism and probably on the history of Tibet, Mustang and even Nepal and India.
   “We discovered the cave by a miracle,’’ says Fieni. And it must have been nothing less than a miracle that the expedition happened to catch up with a shepherd who had been inside the cave as a boy of eight. To mark his discovery,
he had scratched his name on the wall and then forgotten all about it. For nearly two decades after that, probably no one else found the cave.
   “When we arrived in the area and told the villagers what we were looking for, the boy, now a young man, remembered his cave. It was a miracle that he could still find his way to it,’’ said Coburn.
   The royal family of Mustang, descendants of the powerful kings, is still around and the expedition and its findings have been blessed by its former king, Jigme Bista. “We are glad the caves are in an inaccessible place and unlikely to be discovered (by marauders),’’ said Coburn. The plan now is to conduct further research and documentation and ask Nepal to protect and preserve them.
   That could be a difficult task. Nepal lacks funds and has not been able to protect national treasures already unearthed. There has been a spate of thefts in Nepal’s temples, including the famed Pashupatinath, with priceless artworks finding way into the international black market.

via TOI

David Sifry has released Technorati’s latest “State of the Blogosphere” report . Sifry’s post tells us that Technorati is now tracking more than 70 million blogs. That’s up from 51 million at their last report. He also points out that new blogs are coming online at the rate of 120,000 per day (or roughly 1.4 blogs per second.) Unfortunately, spam blogs are also coming online at a pretty strong rate. Technorati tracked the creation of more than 11,000 spam blogs (splogs) per day in the month of December.

Interestingly, February was the strongest month of blog growth since last fall, seeing the launch of more than 113,000 blogs per day. By comparison, December saw just 83,000 blogs per day. While those numbers are impressive, they do signal a slight slowing in blog growth. After years of seeing the number of blogs double every six months, Technorati notes that it took 320 days (more than ten months) for the most recent doubling. Blog activity is slowing it’s growth rate as well.

We also see a slowing in growth in the rate of posts created per day; while there are spikes in blog posts during times of significant world crisis — for instance, last summer’s conflict between Israel and Hezbollah — the overall trend is that posting volume is growing more slowly, at about 1.5 million postings per day. That’s about 17 posts per second. In October 2006, Technorati was tracking about 1.3 million postings per day, about 15 posts per second.

If you’d like to dig further into information about the language of blogs, the frequency of posts, the use of tags and quite a bit of other juicy tidbits, check out Sifry’s full post. If not, then here’s a handy summary that he offers up at the end of the post:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or…
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

The chances of Mumbai scraping through this summer without power cuts seem slim. Whether it eventually does or does not, Mumbaikars can take pride in a painful statistic. The power they consume is now easily the most expensive in the world. Your local neighbourhood grocer, the cyber cafe owner and the businessman trying to build something of global scale out of the city are now billed roughly twice what a consumer pays in Japan and five times what their counterparts would pay in the US, France or China.

And if yours home uses up to 500 units or more of electricity a month, you end up paying more than twice what the Chinese do and one a half times what the American does. Here’s how the math works. At current prices, any business that operates in the city pays about Rs 11.50 for each unit of electricity. In dollar terms, that works out to 26 cents (assuming an exchange rate of Rs 44 to the dollar). Only a Japanese business pays anything close to that at 13 cents, or roughly Rs 5.72. The Americans, French and Chinese pay just a little over Rs 2 for each unit of electricity they consume for businesses.
If you are a home user, it may be cheaper, but only marginally so. Assume that you run a 1.5 tonne air conditioner at home for eight hours each night; you’ll end up consuming something in the region of 380 units each month. Add to this the other assorted appliances that are part of urban life and you easily end up using in excess of 500 units each month.
If you do, on average, the power company will bill you at Rs 6.50 for each unit consumed — in dollar terms, close to 15 cents. Juxtapose this number with the 6.9 cents it costs in China, 9.6 cents in the US and the 13 odd cents you pay in France to get a sense of highcost economy you live in. You’d be better off than Japanese and people in Europe who pay around 19 cents for power they consume at home.
On the other hand, if yours is an average home that uses something like 300 units of electricity a month, you’d be billed at Rs 4.50 per unit — or a little over 10 cents per unit. While that isn’t the most expensive power in the world, it isn’t the cheapest either.
The reason you get away with it is because your consumption is cross-subsidised by business units — a situation that would be unacceptable in any other part of the world where home users pay more per unit of electricity than businesses do. Says a spokesperson for REL, ‘‘These high costs are a function of two reasons. A lot of power is generated on the back of fuels like naphtha, an intermediate product created when crude oil is distilled.”

via Times of India

ETS has cancelled plans to launch the revised Graduate Record Examinations? (GRE?) General Test. The decision was made in consultation with the Executive Committee of the GRE Board
While ETS and the Board remain committed to improving the test, on balance, GRE officials said they believe problems guaranteeing complete access to the new Internet-based test outweighed the benefits of immediately moving to the new format.

ETS originally planned to launch the revised GRE General Test worldwide in September. Instead, the company will continue to offer the test worldwide in its current computer-based, continuous testing format. Registrations in India, China and Japan, which had been closed, will be reopened in the near future to accommodate application deadlines. Likewise, registrations for the current GRE General Test will continue elsewhere.

“The decision to cancel the revised GRE General Test best serves the interests of test takers and the graduate institutions that use those scores to make admissions decisions,” says David Payne, Executive Director of the GRE Program at ETS. “After much debate and evaluation, it became clear that the current format offers students more convenient and flexible opportunities to test when and where they choose, while still providing score users with valid predictors of test takers’ preparedness for graduate school study.”

The primary reason for cancelling the launch of the revised GRE General Test was test taker access. Plans called for the revised test to be delivered over the new worldwide network of 3,200 Internet-based testing centers. Despite the network’s size, ETS officials did not believe that full access to the General Test for all students could be confidently assured.

“As the launch approached, ETS determined that, despite the aggressive development of our Internet-based testing network, we could not guarantee complete access to all students needing to take the exam” Payne explains. “While the graduate community supports, and in fact helped develop and pilot the revised GRE General Test, they have also stated that they are satisfied with the current GRE General Test, until such time as improvements can be gradually implemented. ETS is being responsive to their best interests.”

ETS officials will work with the GRE Board to implement many of the planned test content improvements in the future without the access issues associated with changing to an entirely new test delivered over a brand new testing network.

Administering the GRE General Test in two testing sessions in The People’s Republic of China (including Hong Kong), The Republic of Korea and Taiwan will also continue for the immediate future.

From official ETS site

Citizens can now access the internet from their laptops while sitting in Sambhaji park on J.M. road. The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) successfully took its first step towards making Pune the first ?unwired? city of the country here on Monday.
The ambitious Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (Wimax) project announced by municipal commissioner Nitin Kareer last year took off on Monday for areas near Sambhaji Park and the PMC headquarters.
The project, which is being implemented by both Intel Technology Private Ltd and Microsense, the technical advisors and service providers respectively, will be extended to an area of 20 sq km area including Deccan Gymkhana, Aundh, Baner and Model colony within four months. The entire city will be covered in the next 12 to 18 months, said Kareer at the function to launch the project.
Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, the chief guest for the function said that the project initiated by PMC will be useful to all sections of society and professionals from all fields.
?A lot of avenues will open up for the youth with the initiation of this revolutionary project. Pune is leaping forward in the field of information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology. Wireless connectivity will surely help boost these fields further,? Pawar said. Explaining the technicalities of the project, Kareer said it was an attempt to provide easy internet access to citizens in all open spaces in the city at affordable rates.
?Currently, the service will be provided free of cost. When it is extended to the 20 sq km area, the project will be commercially launched and nominal user charges will be charged for which the modalities have to be worked out,? Kareer said.
He pointed out that the project will be useful to schools and that municipal schools will also be covered under it. ?The PMC will pay the user charges for municipal schools. Some 30 schools falling in the areas covered in the first phase will have access,? he said.

via Times of india