Tuesday, 6 March 2012

Bihar News, Latest News from Bihar, News of Bihar, Biharprabha News

Bihar News, Latest News from Bihar, News of Bihar, Biharprabha News

Mizoram says a big NO to Tobacco

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 04:33 PM PST

Mizoram has taken a very firm step in curbing the tobacco use in the state.
The State government has decided to enact tough laws to curb the use of tobacco products and drug abuse blamed for cancer and heart ailments, an official said here Sunday.

“Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla held a meeting here last week with ministers and officials and decided to enforce inflexible laws to check drug abuse and tobacco related menaces,” a health department official told reporters.

“It was decided that the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances act and the Assam Drug Control Act (adopted by Mizoram) would be enforced with state specific amendments to suit the prevailing problem,” the official stated.

The proposed laws would be tough and with sufficient penalty and imprisonment for the guilty, he said

According to a study by social group Mizoram Population Base Cancer Registry, cancer claims lives of 550-600 people on an average annually in Mizoram, whose total population is a little over one million.

As per the state government records, the mountainous northeastern state, bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh, had topped the country eight years ago in tobacco consumption.

“Smoking has already been banned in the premises of government offices, educational institutions, health centres and crowded places across Mizoram,” an official release quoted the chief minister as saying in the meeting.

Social activist and chief minister’s wife, Lal Riliani said that more than 50 percent of cancer cases among Mizos were caused by tobacco.

Micorsoft India to setup its center in Tamil Nadu

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 09:24 AM PST

Global software giant Microsoft International Tuesday expressed interest in setting up cloud computing centres in Tamil Nadu in a meeting with Chief Minister J.Jayalalithaa.

Microsoft International president Jean Philippe Courtois called on Jayalalithaa at the state secretariat and discussed about further investments in the fields of education, e-governance and others, said a government statement.

He told Jayalalithaa that the company is desirous of setting up of cloud computing centres that would serve as a centre of excellence in the field.

Courtois also said the company is interested in extending its core programmes such as faculty empowerment for non-IT faculty at higher education level; peer coaching programme for select teachers to serve as peer coaches for their colleagues; and nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship among students in higher education/information technology
departments and software start-ups

India peaks to over 900 million Cellphone Subscribers

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 07:23 AM PST

The number of Cellphone phone subscribers in India rose to 903.73 million in January with Uninor alone signing 2.49 million new subscribers, official data showed Tuesday.

According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the wireless user base grew 1.11 percent with an addition of 9.88 million subscribers, from 893.84 million in December.

With this, the total number of telephone subscribers, including land line holders, touched 936.12 million, registering a growth of 1.04 percent.

Overall teledensity in India has reached 77.57 percent.

However, of the total 903.73 million wireless subscribers, only 659.97 million were active on the date of peak visitor location register (VLR).

VLR is a temporary database of subscribers who have roamed into the particular area, which it serves. Each base station in the network is served by exactly one VLR, hence a subscriber cannot be present in more than one VLR at a time.

The total number of subscribers of Uninor, whose 22 licences stand cancelled following a Supreme Court order covering 122 licenses, stood at 106.38 million.

The apex court has ordered cancellation of 122 telecom licences issued in 2008 affecting 7 firms. Uninor, a joint venture between Norway’s Telenor and India’s Unitech, would be the worst affected firm if asked to shut shop in India.

Idea Cellular added 1.75 million subscribers to take its subscriber count to over 108 million.

Bharti Airtel added 1.3 million customers, taking its subscriber base to 176.95 million while Reliance Communications added 949,271 users, increasing its subscriber count to 151.

State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) added 874,756 subscribers to go up to 97.64 million users while Vodafone added 855,349 customers to take its user base to 148.6 million.

According to the data, the broadband subscriber base grew 0.90 percent from 13.30 million in December to 13.42 million in January. However, the wireline segment declined marginally from 32.69 million in December to 32.39 million in January.

World’s oldest sea-going boat to sail again

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 06:25 AM PST

The world’s oldest sea-going boat, the Dover Bronze Age Boat is to sail again 3,500 years after it crossed the English Channel, the Daily Mail reported.

The project, “Boat 1550 BC” aims to rebuild the boat, which had lain hidden under the centre of Dover, a town and major ferry port in the county of Kent, for 3,500 years until it was rediscovered in 1992 during the construction of an underpass.

The oak-built boat sailed across the Channel at a time when Stonehenge was still in use, and before Tutankhamun became ruler of Egypt.

The project aims to understand how people were able to cross the Channel in 1,550 BC, using ancient boat-building techniques and Bronze Age tools to construct a half-size replica boat.

The boat will be launched in the sea when it is completed in two and a half years time, and will be part of a touring exhibition which will visit France, Belgium and Britain to mark the 20th anniversary of the boat’s discovery, the Mail said Tuesday.

Twitter users slam Give it to Woman tag, on Male trousers

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 05:09 AM PST

A clothing company sparked a Twitter outcry after the label in a pair of its trousers suggested it is the women’s job to do washing.

Madhouse, a nationwide chain of discount men’s clothing stores, was branded “shameful” and “outrageous” by hundreds of Twitter users Monday, because of the label’s washing instructions to “Give it to your woman”, The Telegraph reported Tuesday.

The beige pair of chinos in question were purchased in London at Madhouse’s flagship Oxford Street store last month. The incident shows the power of Twitter to embarrass companies which make such gaffes.

Vanessa Truskey, a publicity executive, commenting on the Madhouse trouser label, tweeted: “Lately I can’t tell which decade I’m living in. What brand are those trousers?! I can only assume that’s a joke.”

NASA to land a probe on Mars in August

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 04:45 AM PST

NASA will attempt to lower a probe onto the surface of Mars for the first time as it continues its search for signs of life on the red planet, The Telegraph reported Tuesday.

The new approach to landing a rover on the planet, to be attempted in August, will involve winching it slowly to the surface using nylon ropes attached to a spacecraft overhead.

Once the probe, named Curiosity, has safely reached the ground the 25 feet-long cords will be cut and the parent ship will use rockets to fire itself well away from the probe for a crash landing.

But NASA experts admitted the project, which will come to a head during the attempted landing Aug 6, is a gamble which could prove to be a 1.7 billion pounds ($2.5 billion) disaster.

XXX domain extensions causing tremors in the Web

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 03:35 AM PST

.XXX domains have created a big war in the web and has become a major boon for cyber squats. Internet in IndiaWithin three months of the launch of the Internet “pornography” domain “.xxx,” 10 cases have been launched against Web pirates registering sites on it using the names of reputable companies and people, insiders said on Monday.
Sources at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that among complainants to its dispute resolution system over .xxx — usually called dot-triple x — were banks, a jewelry business and an online shopping operation.
One individual complaint, against a site called femjoy.xxx, was brought by someone named George Streit, according to WIPO’s dispute website. But the sources could not say if this was George Strait, the U.S. country music singer. WIPO officials could also not confirm whether the slightly different spelling was a typographical error.
WIPO, whose Director General Francis Gurry reported on Monday that cases of Web piracy, commonly called cybersquatting, rose 2.5 percent last year involving a record 4,781 sites with nearly 90 percent resolved in favor of complainants.
Many world-famous personalities, such as film star Tom Cruise and soccer player Wayne Rooney, and major corporations and brand names like Barclays Bank and Nestle, have in the past won cybersquatting cases in WIPO.
But these have all been brought against owners of sites registered under well-known and long-established domains such as dot-com, dot-int and dot-org, or the national suffixes identifying countries, including France’s dot-fr.
Cyberquatters often register at a nominal fee using commonly known names or brands with the aim of selling them at a profit to the real name-owners. But they also use misleading sites to attract Web surfers to their own products or services.
Dot-triple x came into operation on December 6, 2011, after years of debate within the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), on how to control the spread of pornography on the Web and make it manageable.
AID TO PARENTS
Supporters of the idea of a special domain argued that it would enable parents and employers to control more easily the sites to which their children and employees had access by cutting off a single domain rather than separate sites.
Critics said most pornographic site providers might register under dot-triple x — named after the X used in the past to rate films with sexual content — but would keep their sites also under dot-com or whatever domain they had used before.
The first case over a site on dot-triple x was brought less than three weeks after it opened with the Turkish online shopping company Markafoni, owned by giant South African multimedia company Naspers, complaining to WIPO over the site markatoni.xxx.
The others have followed this year, with several of them involving more Turkish companies, a major Swedish real estate portal HemNet Sverige over a site called hemnet.xxx and Polish bank BGZ.SA over bgz.xxx.
WIPO officials, who have been running their dispute settlement system for more than a decade, say they expect an additional surge of cases when a range of new domain names approved by ICANN come into use in the coming months and years.
They declined to give details of the cases, apart from the names of the registered complainants, until the expert judges — usually one per case — have made their rulings, generally within three months after the case has been filed.

Holi gradually fading its holiness

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 02:25 AM PST

Unlike many other festivals, Holi, according to pandits and learned scholars of the Braj area “is the time for gay abandon, for dropping the artificial barriers, class differences, snobbish or elitist tendencies and mix around”. But, now the festival of ‘colours’ sees ‘no mixing’ as the level of patience is declining and people are becoming “intolerant”.

Culture critic Mahesh Dhakar of Agra said: “Long back the city of Taj used to organise Maha Moorkh (fool) Sammelans (gathering), where all important people in town used to gather. They were then awarded Puruskars and titles of different levels of Moorkhata(foolishness). The top award was Maha Moorkha. This went on in the Belanganj area for years.”

Shishir Bhagat, one of the owners of the famous 250-year-old Bhagat Halwai, in Belanganj told IANS: “Times have changed. Those days the relations were deep and genuine and no one reacted sharply to Holi frivolties. Weeks in advance, groups of street urchins would pester pedestrians and passersby, to collect small donations for the final day celebrations. But now the Holi celebrations have lost their original flavour and become generally an indoor club activity. No more mixing with the masses.”

With changing lifestyles and values, Holi revelry has taken new hues: modern, less expressive and boisterous.

“It has become so difficult to laugh your guts out without artificiality. Earlier it used to be impossible to move out of the house because of the rowdies stopping everyone, throwing dirt or demanding money for celebrations. We have gradually become urbane and civil, but the rural areas continue to engage in full throated singing and dancing to the beat of dholaks and nagadas,” said old timer Surendra Sharma, president of the Braj Mandal Heritage Conservation Society.

Liquor has replaced the traditional Thandai and Bhang.

“People gather at common places, birds of a feather flock together type, but there is very little effort made to break the social barriers these days,” laments social activist Sudhier Gupta.

“Even the municipal corporation organised mela on Holi remains a detestable demonstration of caste loyalties. Each caste panchayat puts up its stall where its members greet one another. Definitely the finer aspects of Holi revelries are all a feature of the past,” added Gupta.

High costs and increasing economic burden on families have also contributed to limiting the celebrations to just a few hours on Holi, said home maker Padmini.

In Mathura-Vrindavan, the celebrations are now largely confined to temples.

“The fervour rarely spills over to the streets. It could be an invitation for trouble if someone chose to smear gulal or throw colour on strangers. The geet-sangeet parampara(tradition) is also on the decline, largely because the conventional Haveli Sangeet of Braj is not attracting new adherents,” explained Bihari Sharma, young journalist of Vrindavan Kunj.

Holi, also called as Phag, is time for folk dances, songs and Rasia dangals, a form of poetry peculiar to this region.

Agra being a quintessential Mughal city, can not overlook the rich tradition of celebrations set by Akbar and Jahangir.

Both Mughal emperors indulged in the merriment and showered gulab and colours on the revellers. Musical mehfils were held all night and community bhang drinking was the order of the day.

Urdu poets Nazir Akbarabadi, emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and so many others have penned special songs including “phags” to be sung during celebrations.

Sufi saints Amir Khusrau and Nizammuddin Aulia also sang songs in pure Persian celebrating the spirit of what was then called Eid-e-Gulabi, when the royals exchanged gulab, rose water and itr, while the drummers kept beating their nagadas (big round drums).

Contemporary paintings show Jahangir playing Holi with his wife Noorjahan. The carnival lasted several days, even during the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar who had special arrangements made for the celebrations.

Talking to IANS after receiving the prestigious “Maha Moorkha Award”, at a function held Sunday evening, the National general secretary of Indian People’s Theatre Association, Jitendra Raghvanshi said: “Yes each age has to redefine its idiom and forms of expressions, necessitating re-invention and repackaging of emotions in various shades. Changes in perception, and levels of tolerance are factors that seem to be transforming Holi from a mass festival to a class and caste festival, but these are temporary phases.”

“Eventually the essential spirit of celebration will find new forms of expression,” Raghvanshi added.

Angkor Wat construction started in Vaishali

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 01:45 AM PST

Angkor wat in vaishali BiharThe much-awaited ‘bhumi-pujan’ (foundation laying) for what would become the world’s largest Hindu temple was done in Bihar’s Vaishali district Monday.

The temple, to be built at a cost of Rs.100 crore would be a recreation of the world-famous Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia.

“Our thrust is to recreate the Angkor Wat temple on a sprawling 30 acres of land surrounded by greenery,” Acharya Kishore Kunal, a retired IPS officer and the man behind the mega project told IANS.

According to him, the five-storied and 222-feet tall temple will be the tallest structure of its kind in the world.

“Land worth around Rs.30 crore has already been acquired for the purpose from locals,” Kunal,secretary of the cash-rich Mahavir Mandir Trust, which is building the temple, said.

The proposed temple will be named ‘Virat Angkor Wat Ram Mandir’ and it will house the idols of Radha-Krishna, Shiva-Parvati, Ganesh, Surya, Vishnu and the ‘Dashavataram’, the ten incarnations of Vishnu.

It will take upto five years to construct the temple and another five years to give the final finishing touches to it.

On selection of the specific site for construction of the world’s largest Hindu temple, Kunal said the place has mythological significance as it was said that the Ramayana characters, namely Ram, Lakshman and Vishvamitra had set foot on the site and were welcomed by the King Sumati of the Vaishali kingdom.

The Angkor Wat temple was built in Cambodia in the 12th century during the rule of the then Cambodian king Suryavarman (1141-1152 AD). It is a listed UNESCO-world heritage site.

Chandigarh not happy by protests over Osama based movie

Posted: 06 Mar 2012 01:24 AM PST

Chandigarh artistes are unhappy over the protests against the shooting of Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” on the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Theatre personalities and others in the creative fraternity feel the demonstrations only show India in poor light.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Shiv Sena supporters shouted anti-Pakistan and anti-Osama slogans at the film shoot here last week.

They objected to the film unit using Pakistani flags, Urdu sign boards and other things to recreate Pakistani’s Abbottabad city, where US special forces shot dead the elusive Al Qaeda chief last year.

“They are creating an issue out of nothing. Creativity should be left alone by these elements,” Kuldeep Sharma, director of Tagore Theatre, the city’s only theatre for arts and cultural activities, told IANS.

“If people have come to our country to shoot, they should be left to do it peacefully. If not here, they will pick some other city.

“The protesters should focus on other social issues instead of gaining mileage from such issues,” Sharma said.

Others were equally upset.

“Just because the director is showing ‘Pakistani streets’ is not a fair reason to protest. I don’t know what ideology these people have,” said Zulfiqar Khan, a leading theatre director and actor.

“Whatever Kathryn is shooting will obviously be according to the script. Until the movie is released and we see it, what is the point of creating a fuss about the shooting?” Khan asked.

The Hollywood film crew, which has been in the city since last week, had ironically conducted Hindu prayers before starting work here.

Sudesh Sharma, director of Theatre for Theatre, was equally dismissive of the VHP and Shiv Sena.

“They need to bring some change in their thinking. I suppose only God can do that! Until a movie is ready, how can they question it?”

Satirist-actor Jaspal Bhatti is also upset.

“Creating a scene of Pakistan is part of the script. When ‘Gadar’ was shot, no one created a fuss on its shooting.

“The Pakistan shown in that movie was also made somewhere in India. It is the most illogical thing I have heard. It is an infringement of artistic activities,” Bhatti told IANS.

Educationist and author Neel Kamal Puri agreed: “People need to be more open minded. I do not really see a reason to protest about. Kathryn is just doing her job.”

The administration and police have defended the film unit, saying they have all the permission.

Police officer Rajesh Shukla told IANS: “When the government of India and Chandigarh administration have given the crew permission to shoot, how can we stop them?”

Local traders had also protested against the shooting in the Mani Majra suburb last week saying their business was being hit. The film unit reportedly paid Rs.700,000 to compensate the loss of trade.

Shukla said: “The market welfare association was aware of the shooting.”
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