• Sikkim basks in the glory of its tourism achivements
• 2nd Bhutanese refugee killed in Nepal, UNHCR calls for restraint
• China's current low birth rate facing challenges
• Exercising keeps weight off longer

• IAF will get Hawk from HAL in '08
• VFS 'ignored' online visa service security flaw
• US patent on Yoga? Indian gurus fume
• Blind pilot flies halfway round world

The Advanced Jet Trainer "Hawk" from Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) would be delivered to the Indian Air Force in the first quarter of 2008, a top HAL official said. "Hawk will be delivered in the first quarter of 2008, around March in 2008," A.K. Saxena, managing director, HAL, told reporters here on Friday on the sidelines of a All India Management Association-Madras Management Association conference. He said the Indian aeronautics major was developing the Intermediate Jet Trainers used by the IAF for training pilots. "The intermediate jet trainers are going through flight trials. We have to get certification for it, following which it will be inducted into the IAF," he said. The Intermediate Jet Trainer would then replace the Kiran's that is currently being used by the Air Force, he said. "We are planning to get it certified by 2008. Then the the production and induction would start," he added.

Courtesy: www.asianage.com, May 26, 2007

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With a 30 percent growth in tourism-related revenue, Sikkim, the smallest and youngest State in India's North East, is poised for both prosperity and development. The buzzing markets in Gangtok and the number of vehicles plying is indicative of how well things are moving. "The growth of tourism in Sikkim has been tremendous. I think, in ten years, we have seen about 30 per cent growth. When we initially started this business in way nineties, tourism was almost as good as negative. Now over the years we have seen about 250 thousand domestic travellers which is a real boom to the economic growth in the state of Sikkim for tourism. And as far as the foreign clients are concerned we have about 5-10 thousand people visiting for various aspects of cultural nature and adventure tourism," S.K Pradhan, President of the Travel Agent Association of Sikkim. The region is endowed with diverse tourist attractions and each State has its own distinct features. The attractions and the people of the region constitute the tourism resources at large. "I like cleanliness, greenery and mountains and everything. Sikkim is a good place," said Ankit, a tourist from Andhra Pradesh. "I am very much impressed with the development of tourism here. I think there is a lot for the tourists to see. It seems the government called the summit to put in some infrastructure which means tourists can come here and stay at very nice hotels. There is a lot to see there is a lot of History," said Seema, another tourist from Australia. Recently, the fourth Sectoral Summit on Tourism and Hospitality of North Eastern Council was organised here on how to promote tourism in the region. Union Minister for North East Affairs Mani Shankar Aiyar in his address said: "To give them really detailed exposure to all the sectors in which Thai investment can take place. And if it works then you'r really opening the gate to South East Asia." Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio has appealed to the Centre to remove some legal barriers to boost tourism. Representatives of other North Eastern states have suggested measures like improving infrastructure and basic amenities. The North East Summit decided to open hotel management institutes in all states of the region to promote tourism. Today, Sikkim stands out as a model for other North Eastern states as to how the potential of the state can be utilised to its optimum if there is tranquillity, no unstable and uncertain political conditions.

Courtesy: www.newkerala.com, May 24, 2007

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The serious security flaw in the server of VFS Global, which facilitates online visa applications for countries across the world, that enabled anybody and everybody to access personal details of thousands of applicants, would have gone unnoticed but for the power of the blog. VFS Global is an Indian firm offering IT-enabled services to foreign missions in India and abroad for online visa applications. Among its clients are the Governments of the US and the UK, apart from the UAE, Ireland, Australia, Italy, France, Canada, Thailand, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands and Austria. The firm has signed a 190-million-pound five-year contract with the British Foreign Office to facilitate online visa applications in India, Singapore, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, China, Ghana, Qatar, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand. Data theft is a serious concern in all these countries which have strict laws to check 'identity theft'.

The VFS website promises data protection and declares: "Under the Data Protection Act, we have a legal duty to protect any information we collect from you. VFS shall not disclose or allow access to any personal data provided by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office or acquired by VFS during the execution of the contract." Apart from the fees paid by client Governments, VFS Global also charges a hefty fee from applicants. But if Channel 4 is to be believed, and according to Sanjib Mitra of Bangalore who stumbled upon the security flaw in the VFS server in April, 2006, the company did nothing for a year to plug the loophole. Mitra says he sent an e-mail to VFS Global immediately but never received a reply. He sent a mail to the British High Commission; two months later he got a reply saying officials were looking into his complaint. Frustrated by the stonewalling, Mitra opened a blog where he put down his experience and how he stumbled across the security flaw in the VFS server by tweaking the URL. Davey Winder, a London-based journalist who specialises in computer security issues, came across Mitra's blog and picked up the story from there. It is when Winder started making inquiries from VFS Global and the British Foreign Office that alarm bells began to ring in London and Delhi. VFS Global moved to plug the loophole, the British High Commission suspended the online application facility and the Information Commissioner in the British Government asked for details as data privacy had been compromised. "I immediately contacted VFS Global to alert them to the fact that this problem was still ongoing and ask what they were doing about it. Although they refrained from making any direct comment, senior vice president in New Delhi, Ms Venku Murthi, did assure me that as a direct result of my probing an immediate investigation would be launched by the VFS IT team," says Winder. Having investigated data and identity theft in the past, Minder says, "Frankly, I am amazed that this has been allowed to continue for so long, exposing thousands of Indian identities with enough sensitive data to make ID theft child's play. I am even more amazed that nobody, apart from that VFS vice president, cared enough to acknowledge I was writing this story and try to prevent my posting it, or provide some kind of mitigating comment by way of an apology and promise that the hole had been sealed immediately." Experts say that data can be compromised if service providers do not invest in good hardware with inbuilt security devices and software that fobs off those fishing for personal data. While it is unlikely that data that may have been stolen from the VFS Global server will be of any use in committing financial fraud, it can be used for replicating false passports with valid details. These would be of tremendous use for terrorist organisations. With realisation dawning, this is one concern that is bothering everybody now.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, May 21, 2007

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One more Bhutanese refugee was killed on Monday when the police opened fire at the refugees who clashed with the Armed Police Force (APF) personnel in defiance of an indefinite curfew clamped in Jhapa's Beldangi camp area, some 310 km east of capital Kathmandu. The local media group's website ekantipur.com reported on Monday that at least 14 policemen, including Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Krishna Raj Pathak and seven refugees were injured during the clash. The government of Nepal's Jhapa District Monday issued a curfew order in the refugee camp in Beldangi as tensions soared following the death of a refugee in a clash with Nepali armed police force on Sunday. The district administration office imposed a curfew in the Beldangi area from 11:45 a.m. (0600 GMT). Nara Pati Dhungel, 17, was killed Sunday when police opened fire after refugees attacked a police team that had gone to the camp after receiving information that refugees were engaged in a fight. The fighting between two groups of refugees, one in favor of the third country resettlement and the other for repatriation, broke out following a dispute with Hari Bagale Adhikari, secretary of the camp. Meanwhile, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Monday expressed concern over the situation in Belgandi camp and called on the refugees to show restraint. In a press statement, the UNHCR said that violence broke out between groups of refugees in favor or against third-country resettlement on Sunday and the police intervened in order to curb the escalating violence in the camp. "The situation continues to be tense in the camp which seems to have spilled over to the other refugee camps in the eastern region, " the UNHCR said. "We are alarmed by this incident and deeply regret the tragic death of a minor despite efforts by the police to quell the unrest in the camp," said Abraham Abraham, UNHCR representative in Nepal, adding, "This is a disturbing state of affairs and I earnestly call upon all refugees and concerned parties to resolve the matter peacefully." Asking the refugees to abide by the laws of the country, the UN refugee agency said it was closely monitoring the situation and was in close contact with the government authorities at both central and district levels.

Courtesy: http://english.people.com.cn, May 19, 2007

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Be ready to pay each time you do your morning yoga! Call it a deliberate attempt to make inroads by the West into the lucrative Indian market, or an enterprising NRI trying to grab an opportunity, Bikram Yoga founder and US-based Bikram Choudhary's move to get copyright for his method of teaching yoga has sent shockwaves among yoga enthusiasts and experts in India. They say the idea of patenting knowledge like yoga is patently absurd and violates the ancient Indian art. Born in Kolkata in 1946, Bikram began yoga at the age of four with one of the famous gurus at that time, Bishnu Ghosh. Now, Bikram - who teaches in California - has applied for the patent of yoga, which is essentially yoga in a steam room. Bikram came to the US at the invitation of President Richard Nixon in 1973 and became one of the most sought-after yoga teachers in the West as celebrities, athletes, and others began to flock to him. Popular yoga guru Swami Ramdev has sought intervention from the government and yoga organisations to prevent Choudhary's move. "Yoga can't be owned and run like a company. Since there are attempts to patent this tradition (of yoga) in America, the Centre and yoga organisations should take measures to prevent it," Ramdev said in Shimla recently. "How can yoga be taught at a controlled 45 degrees Celsius temperature when it is ideally taught in the cold Himalayas?" wondered Ramdev, adding that "how can any Tom, Dick and Harry, who has no knowledge of century-old Indian tradition, can get patent of yoga?" Yoga enthusiasts and gurus have said that the move is unjustified as yoga belongs to the entire human race. The US Patent and Trademark office has reportedly issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 trademarks on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. The Union government hasn't yet reacted to these patents but recently it set up a task force that is cataloguing traditional knowledge, including ayurvedic remedies and yoga postures to protect them from being pirated and copyrighted by foreigners.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, May 18, 2007

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China's current low birth rate may not be sustained due to the widening wealth gap and early marriages in rural areas and the world's most populous nation is facing risks of a "population rebound," a senior official has warned. "Early marriages are still prevailing in some parts of the country, especially in rural areas, which goes against the family planning policy," director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC), Zhang Weiqing has said. China's Constitution rules that men may marry at 22 and women at 20, while the country's family planning policy, which has been implemented since the 1970s, encourages late marriages and late childbearing, and limits most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two. China's widening wealth gap is challenging the country's family planning efforts as its new-rich disdain the decades-old one-child policy to pay to have as many children as they like, Zhang said.

The number of rich people and celebrities having more than one child is on a rapid increase, and nearly 10 per cent of them even have three, according to a recent survey by the NPFPC. Zhang said, young couples, born in the 1970s and 1980s and raised as only children, now in their twenties and thirties, are allowed to have a second child, which also contributed to the rising birth rate in some central and western provinces. The NPFPC will continue to offer preferential services to couples following the family planning policy, Zhang said, adding the Government's spending on family planning will be raised to 30 yuan ($3.8) per person during the 11th five-year plan period (2006-2010). China's family planning policy is credited with reducing the country's population by 400 million and delaying the present 1.3 billion population mark by four years. Meanwhile, a Chinese health official has called for attention to risks facing rural women who dare not to seek professional maternity services because they are having more babies than the country's family planning policy allows. "Some policy-breaking pregnant women, who dared not apply any financial aid of childbearing for fear of legal punishment, chose to deliver babies at home or in substandard private clinics which charge little but have more medical risks," Vice Health Minister Jiang Zuojun said. Statistics show about half of the maternity deaths in east China's Jiangxi province result from illegitimate pregnancies. An underdeveloped social security network in the rural region and people's deeply rooted traditional preference for male heirs has prompted some rural families to defy the policy by having more babies. Meanwhile, those rule-defying pregnant women would rather risk death in giving birth to babies due to substandard childbearing conditions than a heavy fine. Jiang said, the Government will hand out harsher penalties to substandard rural clinics and at the same time build rural medical facilities. Local departments of health, women and children, civil affairs and public security should join efforts to reduce the death toll of rule-breaking pregnancy and to provide proper health services to rural women living in cities, Jiang added.

Courtesy: www.hindu.com, May 08, 2007

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A blind British pilot landed his microlight aircraft in Sydney Monday to complete a record-breaking flight halfway around the world. Miles Hilton-Barber left London on March 7 and flew more than 21,000 kilometres (13,500 miles) to raise funds to fight blindness in developing countries. "It's the fulfillment of an amazing dream," the 58-year-old adventurer said after touching down at Sydney's Bankstown airport. "I've been wanting to do this flight for about four years." Hilton-Barber flies with a sighted co-pilot but relies on speech output from his navigation instruments to steer his course, directing the plane from a wireless keyboard. "I've wanted to be a pilot since I was a kid. Now I'm totally blind and I've had the privilege of flying more than halfway around the world. The big deal is not me doing this, it's raising funds," he said. Hilton-Barber, who has been blind for 25 years, hopes the trip will raise some two million US dollars for the charity Seeing is Believing, which works to cut the incidence of preventable blindness in developing countries. In 1999 Hilton-Barber completed the "Toughest Foot-race on Earth" -- 250 kilometres across the Sahara Desert -- before running in the "Coldest Marathon on Earth", the Siberian Ice Marathon. He has climbed Mt Kilimanjaro and Mt Blanc, Africa and Europe's highest mountains, and set the Malaysian Grand Prix lap record for a blind driver in a 200 kilometre per hour Lotus. On his arrival in Darwin in northern Australia last week, Hilton-Barber described the sensation of flying his aircraft. "It's a very primitive form of flying but for a blind man it's wonderful because it is very sensual," he said. "You can smell the smells coming up from the ground and I can feel the temperature, the wind, the cold." The father of three encountered extreme weather systems during the flight, he said in Darwin. "Over the Lebanese mountains at 13,000 feet (4,000 metres) we got caught in a very bad, freaky snowstorm. We had ice all over the plane and icicles on our suits." At the other extreme, bad thermal weather in the desert over Saudi Arabia suddenly catapulted his machine upwards "like getting in a lift and going up three floors in a second." "When you've got one little seatbelt on that's quite scary," he said.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, May 3, 2007

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People who consistently engage in high levels of exercise over the long haul are the most successful at losing weight and keeping it off, a new study shows. Among a group of overweight men and women participating in an 18-month weight loss programme, those who were still getting 75 minutes of exercise daily a year after the programme ended had lost 12 kilogrammes, compared to 0.8 kg for people who were exercising less. But only 13 of the 154 people who completed the study were able to sustain this level of activity, Deborah F Tate of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and her colleagues found. "Strategies are needed to help participants maintain high levels of activity over the long-term," she and her colleagues conclude. The researchers initially assigned 202 people to either a high physical activity group who aimed to burn 2,500 calories per week (equivalent to a 75-minute walk daily) or standard behavioural treatment, including 30 minutes of exercise daily, equivalent to 1,000 calories per week. Twelve and 18 months later, people in the high activity group had lost significantly more weight than those in the lower activity group. Although the participants in the high activity group were able to sustain the 2,500 calorie per week exercise goal during the 18-month study, their activity level declined once treatment ended, which resulted in no between-group differences in activity or weight loss at 2.5 years.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, May 2, 2007

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