30 swine flu cases in India, government says suspend visits abroad

Swine flu cases in India mounted to 30 Monday after seven more teenaged students who returned from an educational tour of the US tested positive for the virus. On its part, the government urged the people, especially students, to suspend their visits abroad.

According to health officials here, seven of a group of 31 students from the Guru Amar Das Public School in Jalandhar, who had gone to New York and Florida to visit National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facilities, tested positive for swine flu.

While one of the students was detected with swine flu Sunday and was hospitilised in Delhi, the rest left for Punjab and were Sunday found to be suffering from flu-like symptoms.

'Ten had developed symptoms of mild influenza-like illness and were kept in isolation at the Civil Hospital in Jalandhar,' said an official statement here.

'Of the 10, seven tested positive for the influenza A(H1N1) virus Monday. All these children are stable and responding to treatment,' the statement added.

The rest of the students, their families and social contacts and those sitting in their proximity on the flight back have been identified, the statement said.

Four doctors from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) here have gone to Jalandhar to oversee the treatment of the students.

So far, samples of 318 people have been tested, of which 30 have tested positive for influenza A (H1N1), a health official said.

Of these, only two are human-to-human transfer cases.

'Among the 318 tested, 92 were identified through health screening at international airports, 10 were identified through contact tracing and the rest were samples from people who have self-reported,' the official said.

In Hyderabad, two sisters aged eight and four and a 45-year-old woman were late Sunday confirmed to be infected, taking the total number of cases in Andhra Pradesh to 12, the highest in India. The confirmed cases include five children.

The two sisters and their mother arrived in Hyderabad from New York June 10. The mother is among five passengers kept under observation for suspected symptoms of swine flu.

Doctors at the Andhra Pradesh Chest Hospital said the samples of the suspected cases, including two children had been sent to the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) in New Delhi.

With the surge in swine flu cases, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who chaired a review meeting Monday morning, said: 'Till this disease is not controlled globally, I would like to request young people from educational institutions going abroad to suspend their visits for the time being.

'They can go after 2-3 months,' he told reporters.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) Thursday raised its alert against the swine flu to the highest level - Phase 6. The swine flu pandemic is the first since the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968 that killed one million people.

Azad said situation was under control as of the total infected people, 11 had been discharged after being treated.

'Medicine is available in plenty and the most important thing is that this disease is 100 percent curable. Of the total 23 cases (repeated at the time he spoke), 11 have already been treated and discharged. So you are only left with 12 cases,' he said.

He said that keeping in mind India's size and population, the cases here were minimal as compared to the huge numbers most developed countries have reported.

Azad said the director general of health services should immediately send a Rapid Response Team to Punjab and make available adequate quantities of Tamiflu tablets to help contain spread of the disease.

The health minister also spoke to chief ministers of all the states urging them to gear up their health machinery to prevent the spread of the virus.

England knock champions India out of World Cup

England knocked defending champions India out of the Twenty20 World Cup with a three-run victory in their second-round match at Lord's on Sunday.

India needed 19 off the last over to stay in the tournament but, despite a one-handed six by Yusuf Pathan over long-off, the task was too much and they finished on 150 for five.

The England victory silenced the large contingent of noisy Indian fans packed into Lord's and India failed to make the semi-finals after also losing their first Super Eight match against West Indies on Friday.

Off-spinner Graeme Swann captured the crucial wicket of Yuvraj Singh for 17, including two sixes, stumped neatly by James Foster.

Left-arm swing bowler Ryan Sidebottom, returning to the side in place of leg-spinner Adil Rashid, bowled the final over and was given the man-of-the-match award after capturing two for 31 from his four overs.

England lost Luke Wright for one in the second over after losing the toss and being asked to bat.

Ravi Bopara and Kevin Pietersen added 71 for the second wicket with Bopara hooking the first six of the match off Ishant Sharma.

Pietersen whipped Sharma through mid-wicket for four and moved down the pitch to left-arm paceman RP Singh as if he were playing a spinner to off-drive a four.

The introduction of Ravindra Jadeja's left-arm spin seemed to turn the match India's way. Jadeja bowled Bopara for 37 and dismissed Pietersen lbw for 46, trying to sweep a full delivery.

But five wides from Harbhajan Singh in the final over allowed to England to creep to 153 for seven, a defendable total on a pitch offering variable bounce.

Web 2.0 crowned one millionth English word

A U.S.-based language monitoring group crowned Web 2.0 as the one millionth word or phrase in the English language on Wednesday, although other linguists slammed it as nonsense and a stunt.

The Global Language Monitor, which uses a math formula to track the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media, said Web 2.0 appeared over 25,000 times in searches and was widely accepted, making it the legitimate, one millionth word.

It said Web 2.0 started out as a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services but had crossed into far wider circulation in the last six months.

This list included "Jai Ho!" an Indian exclamation signifying victory or accomplishment, and "slumdog," a derisive term for children living in the slums of India that became popular with the Oscar-winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire."

Other linguists, however, denounced the list as pure publicity and unscientific, saying it was impossible to count English words in use or to agree on how many times a word must be used before it is officially accepted.

There are no set rules for such a count as there is no certified arbiter of what constitutes a legitimate English word and classifying the language is complicated by the number of compound words, verbs and obsolete terms.

"I think it's pure fraud ... It's not bad science. It's nonsense," Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters.

Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, brushed off the criticism, saying his method was technically sound.

"If you want to count the stars in the sky, you have to define what a star is first and then count. Our criteria is quite plain and if you follow those criteria you can count words. Most academics say what we are doing is very valuable," said Payack.

He has calculated that about 14.7 new English words or phrases are generated daily and said the five words leading up to the millionth highlighted how English was changing along with current social trends.

The list also included "cloud computing", meaning services delivered via the cloud or Internet, "carbon neutral", a widely used term in the climate change debate, and "N00b," a derogatory term from the gaming community for a newcomer.

"Some 400 years after the death of the Bard, the words and phrases were coined far from Stratford-Upon-Avon, emerging instead from Silicon Valley, India, China, and Poland, as well as Australia, Canada, the U.S. and the UK," said Texas-based Payack.

As TV moves on, millions may face blank screens in US

San Francisco, June 11 (DPA) In a land where television has long been a basic necessity of life, millions of people may find themselves without access to television Friday when the US switches from analog to digital broadcasting.

The change is part of a long-delayed update in the allocation of the wireless spectrum, which is used to broadcast everything from TV signals to mobile phone services and emergency radio traffic.

It is designed to free up valuable frequencies previously used by television stations to broadcast their signals and which will now become part of the information superhighway on which users of iPhones, Blackberries and other smartphones and mobile laptops will increasingly get the information they need to stay connected 24/7.

Those broadcast spectrums have already been sold by the US government to mobile phone companies for billions of dollars. But at least for now the scheme is far from a win-win situation on the road to communications nirvana.

Critics complain that it is the poor and disadvantaged who once again are paying the price for progress as the analog signals of local and network stations are terminated - forcing people to either subscribe to costly cable or satellite service or to buy and install digital converters for their TV sets.

Industry trade group DTV Across America estimates that between 20 and 30 million household faced the need to transition to the new system.

Aware of these issues, the US government has spent more than $2 billion on a voucher programme, in which every household can get two vouchers worth $40 each to buy two converter boxes.

However, despite a massive advertising campaign and a three-month postponement of the switch date, millions of households are estimated not to have availed themselves of the new service and are set to lose their signal entirely when analog broadcasting becomes a relic of history June 12.

The latest survey by the Nielsen Company indicates that as of the end of May, more than 10 percent of the 114 million households that have television sets are either completely or partly unprepared.

Many of those are likely to turn to a 4,000-people strong call centre set up by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to help people make the switch.

In an interview with the New York Times, acting FCC chairman Michael J. Copps conceded that the impact was likely to be hardest on poor families, the handicapped, the elderly and in homes where little English is spoken.

'We are much better prepared than we were in February, when the original transition was to have occurred, but there will nonetheless be significant disruptions,' Copps said. 'In the past five months we've tried to accomplish what should have been done over the last four years.'

There are advantages and disadvantages to watching TV through these converter boxes. Firstly, the boxes can be a hassle to install - especially for those not fond or adept at moving their televisions and dealing with the mass of cables in the back. Numerous companies do offer installation services for the new converter boxes but these services bump the cost of conversion far above the $40 value of the coupons.

In some areas the digital signal can be better than analog - though in others it can be worse or even nonexistent. Many digital boxes do offer a useful viewing guide - though some elderly people complain that learning how to navigate the system with a new remote control is fiendishly complicated.

'It has all been a nightmare, and it's very, very upsetting,' said Frances Lim, a 72-year-old woman in San Jose California. 'We don't have money for cable or satellite and were very happy with the few stations we have been getting for years. Now we have to change. I didn't know how to do it. Luckily my grandson helped me. But I'm still learning the new remote control.'

US President Barack Obama is helping the effort to prepare for the switch.

'The number of households unprepared for digital television has been cut in half. Still, some people are not ready,' said Obama in a statement last week. 'I encourage all Americans who are prepared to talk to their friends, family, and neighbours to make sure they get ready before it's too late. I urge everyone who is not yet prepared to act today.' Obama said.

Google takes on the language barrier

Search engine giant commences a regional push by launching its news aggregator in four regional languages

MUMBAI: Jayalekshmy Nair, an avid reader of regional-language blogs, visited a Malayalam news website for the first time recently. How did she get there? Google News, which now aggregates news in Malayalam as well.

Like her, Indians who till now couldn't find an interface for news in their mother-tongue, are discovering a way to read that news online.

The recent launch of Google News in four regional languages -- Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi -- has helped make that possible. And the search engine giant is also launching features that will empower non-English speaking internet users to use web beyond reading just news.

Prasad Ram, head -- research and development (R&D), Google India, is the man pushing this initiative.

Ram is from Karnataka and his parents, he says, are extremely proficient in Kannada literature. "Even they are interested in engaging sources beyond the routine ones. Till now, they've been consuming newspapers, books, art. Soon, they will be able to gain from the collective wisdom of the internet, in their own language."

He points out: "Only 7% of Indians are proficient in English. So, if Google's power has to be experienced by the rest, we have to add languages."

India has over 40 million internet users and this base is growing rapidly, banking not just on broadband infrastructure, but also online lollies such as gaming, social networking, matrimony and job portals.

For Google, news, information and local listings are the next El-Dorado of the web, for which it has begun innovating. It is targeting Indian users who are comfortable with PCs, but not yet proficient in English. Hence, the regional push. "It's not India's burgeoning expat population that's making Google do this. When there are 1.2 billion people within India to tap into, a few million people across the world don't matter. It becomes critical to innovate for the larger base," Ram told DNA Money.

Which is why, the popularity of a few applications from Google, in the near future could supplement and even change the way Indian users interact with regional and English websites.

For example, users can search in 18 different languages by choosing letters from Indic On Screen keyboard using a mouse. The transliteration features allow them to type in English and automatically convert text into Hindi, Tamil, Kannada or Malayalam, by simply hitting the space bar.

And then of course, there's the biggie -- Google Translate -- that helps translate entire websites by simply typing the URL (or the web link) and clicking on the translate button. So a website, say, on diabetes, can be translated just at the click of a button. To exploit community features, Google Map-maker, the Wiki-based application, can help users create local listings -- such as restaurants, local events, landmarks -- and even authenticate the information.

"Essentially, we're allowing the whole country to paint one single canvas by stitching different ones together. So the challenge and the innovation, for us, lies in getting a billion to people to paint together, irrespective of the fact that it's already been done in so many countries," says Ram.

The idea, he says, is to make a "locally inspired global product".

His parting shot: "The lack of innovative and relevant content is stopping people not very proficient in English from accessing info and we're trying to bridge the digital divide. In the future, it'll all happen on cellphones. There's so much that can be done... crop prices, weather, agriculture."

Lankan forces close in on LTTE chief Prabhakaran's hideout

Setting the stage for the final assault on the LTTE, Sri Lankan forces today encircled a small strip of land in the north, where Tiger supremo V Prabhakaran is believed to be holed up, and deployed warships to foil any escape bid by rebels amid global calls for a truce.

Backed by tanks, the security forces surrounded the 8 sq km jungle patch, where an estimated 800-900 Tamil Tigers were still offering resistance, the military said.

A naval blockade was put around northern Mullaittivu close to the areas where LTTE cadres still had access to the sea as Sri Lankan Army chief Sarath Fonseka said the troops knew the "general area" where Prabhakaran could be hiding.

"We are set to destroy him," Fonseka said, admitting that troops were facing stiff resistance from remnant LTTE cadres.

But the Army chief said the security forces' primary task at the moment was to get trapped Tamil civilians out of the war zone to safety. Authorities had earlier said that more than one lakh civilians had fled the war zone.

Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama termed the flow of civilians from the northern region in the past few days as an "emergency humanitarian situation."

"Our friends in the international community are most welcome to provide emergency relief assistance by way of semi-permanent shelter, water purification plants, sanitation facilities and medical assistance," he told reporters.

Tech Mahindra wins bid to acquire Satyam

Tech Mahindra will pay more than $550 million for a controlling stake in Satyam Computer Services, throwing a lifeline to the fraud-hit firm and propelling itself into the top tier of Indian outsourcing firms.

Tech Mahindra, 31 percent owned by Britain's BT Group Plc, beat engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro, which many analysts had seen as front runner, as well as private equity firm WL Ross & Co to be the highest bidder for a stake of up to 51 percent in the company at the centre of India's biggest corporate scandal.

Satyam's sale could help restore confidence in India's IT services sector at a time when the global economic downturn has slowed growth. But Tech Mahindra will still have to move quickly to restore stability at its target.

"Tech Mahindra will really have to act fast now and if they don't ... client erosion will continue at Satyam," said Tarun Sisodia, head of research at Anand Rathi Financial Services.

Three months ago, Satyam's founder and chairman shocked investors by saying profits had been overstated for years, putting in doubt the survival of a company once ranked as India's fourth-largest software services exporter.

The government quickly stepped in and sacked the board to limit damage to India's once-shining IT sector.

CALCULATED RISK

Mumbai-headquartered Tech Mahindra said it would meet Satyam clients such as Citigroup Inc and Cisco Systems Inc to help restore confidence.

"We have taken on a challenge but we are going to make it work," Chairman Anand Mahindra told reporters. "We have taken a very calculated risk ... We think they are reasonable risks, but there are going to be risks."

With the buy, Tech Mahindra will be better equipped to wrest market share from rivals Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies and Wipro, and diversify away from telecoms, analysts said.

Satyam's annual revenue fell to about $1.5 billion at the end of the March and could fall to $1.3 billion in the year to end-June, Tech Mahindra CEO Vineet Nayyar said.

The bid has to be approved by the Company Law Board, which expects Satyam to seek approval within two to three days.

Tech Mahindra will pay $351 million for a 31 percent preferential allotment of new shares and will then make an open offer for a further 20 percent of the company at a cost of up to around $225 million.

The holders of Satyam's American Depository Shares would be able to participate in the public offer.

Tech Mahindra plans to raise 6 billion rupees through the sale of bonds, sources told Reuters.

The combined entity will have about 73,000 staff and Tech Mahindra will become India's fourth-largest outsourcing firm from a current ranking of sixth.

Tech Mahindra, a unit of tractor and utility vehicle maker Mahindra & Mahindra, offered 58 rupees a share, a premium of 23 percent to Satyam's previous close.

Tech Mahindra shares surged by as much as 25 percent after Larsen & Toubro, which owns 12 percent of Satyam, was reported to be out of the race, but trimmed gains to end up 12.3 percent at 359.45 rupees, their highest close in nearly six months.

Satyam shares rose 3.6 percent to 48.85 rupees, after earlier jumping more than 16 percent to a nine-week high.

UNCERTAINTY OVER VALUATION

Analysts have said Satyam, which means "truth" in Sanskrit, looks attractive due to its long list of blue chip clients. However, they were unsure how to value the company due to uncertainty about its accounts and legal liabilities arising from lawsuits filed in the United States by its shareholders.

The vast majority of Satyam's customers have stayed on through the stake sale, Karnik said. Staffing has dropped by about 5,000 from 53,000 reported at end-September.

Tech Mahindra's Nayyar said the bid was made after an assessment of legal liabilities, but said Satyam's financial viability and retention of clients would be key challenges.

Satyam has not reported results since releasing July-September figures in October. Its accounts are in the process of being restated.

Satyam's board had appointed Goldman Sachs and Avendus Capital to find a strategic investor. Tech Mahindra was advised by Kotak Investment Banking and UBS.

(Additional reporting by Prashant Mehra, Narayanan Somasundaram and Devidutta Tripathy)