Sri Lankan Guv allegedly kills 20,000 Tamil civilians in the final assault on LTTE

An aerial view of the former battlefront on the outskirts of the northern Sri Lankan town of Vavuniya Photo: REUTERS

Hundreds of thousands of Tamil refugees are now being held in camps in Sri Lanka Photo: AFP/GETTY

The UN estimates between 80,000 and 100,000 people died in the 26-year LTTE struggle Photo: AFP/GETTY

The death toll among refugees trapped in the last Tiger redoubt in north eastern Sri Lanka is three times higher than that acknowledged by the government.

Sri Lankan authorities say their military observed a “no-fire-zone” and stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 when 100,000 Tamil civilians were trapped.

However aerial pictures and witness testimony suggest the army in fact launched a three week artillery barrage from the end of April.

Confidential United Nations documents say 7,000 civilians had died in the zone by the end of April and sources told The Times newspaper the toll then grew to around 1,000 a day.

The figures would put the final death toll, before the zone was finally overrun and Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was killed, at more than 20,000.

“Higher,” a UN source told the newspaper, “Keep going.”

Aerial photographs show makeshift sandy burial mounds in the no fire zone.

Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, has said the LTTE recruited child soldiers and used civilians as human shields during the conflict, while the military had indiscriminately shelled areas packed with civilians. Both sides have denied the allegations.

Hundreds of thousands of Tamil refugees are now being held in camps in Sri Lanka.

The UN estimates between 80,000 and 100,000 people died in the 26-year LTTE struggle for a separate state for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamils.

A spokesman for the Sri Lankan High Commission in London rejected the newspapers allegations.

He said: “Civilians have not been killed by government shelling at all. If civilians have been killed, then that is because of the actions of the LTTE [rebels] who were shooting and killing people when they tried to escape.”

The Telegraph

Kavya Shivashankar (13) wins Spelling Bee 2009 title

After months of training, in the end it took Kavya Shivashankar, 13, just nine correct letters to be crowned the new US spelling champion.

She correctly spelt Laodicean, meaning to be lukewarm or indifferent in religion or politics, to claim victory in the 2009 Scripps Spelling Bee.

A record 293 spellers, including 28 from countries outside the US, had made it to the final stages of the contest.

Among the 9-15 year olds were 33 who speak English as their second language.

The spellers in the Washington DC auditorium were confronted with a baffling range of words used, often rarely, in American English.

They could ask for a word’s part of speech and language root and although they did not need to know its meaning, were allowed to ask for a definition if they thought it would help them make more sense of challenges like “apodyterium”.

Many, like “passacaglia”, were once foreign words that have been adopted from other languages.

“This country is made up of people of so many different nationalities, and all of them brought their languages here,” Barry Bridwell, the father of one of the competitors, told the AFP news agency.

“That’s what makes the English language and this competition so difficult.”

His daughter, Keiko, lost her chance of victory by incorrectly spelling “thylacine”, a carnivorous Tasmanian marsupial.

“I spelled it with an ‘o’ instead of an ‘a’,” she said.

Birthday missed

The second prize went to 12-year-old Tim Ruiter, who tripped up on the word “maecenas”, meaning a generous benefactor.

SPELLING BEE WORDS Maecenas: a generous patron of literature or art Laodicean: lukewarm or indifferent in religion and politics Menhir: a monumental stone Apodyterium: a Roman dressing or robing room Passacaglia: a slow musical composition in triple time Source: Oxford English Dictionary

“I had absolutely no clue about that word. I was just racking my brain for anything possible that could help me,” he said.

“I’ll probably be spelling it in my sleep tonight.”

The contest has been open to spellers from countries outside the US since 1978, and this year 28 children from the Bahamas, Canada, China, Ghana, Jamaica, New Zealand and South Korea took part.

Kavya, who comes from Kansas, had made the top 10 in each of her previous three appearances at the bee.

She was the seventh Indian American to win the contest in the past 11 years and took home a $30,000 (£18,500) cash prize, several reference collections and a large trophy.

“I can’t believe it happened, it feels kind of unreal,” said Kavya, who had traced each word on her hand as she spelled it.

Her mother, Mirle, said the day was a “dream come true”.

“This is the moment we’ve been waiting for,” she told the Associated Press.

“We haven’t skipped meals, we haven’t lost sleep, but we’ve skipped a lot of social time.”

That missed social time included her daughter’s last birthday, as the intense training had left no time for celebrations.

“Spelling has been such a big part of my life,” said Kavya.

She hopes one day to become a neurosurgeon but said that nothing would ever replace spelling.

With words such as “acrocephaly”, “glossopharyngeal” and “vestibulocochlear” featuring in her chosen profession, she may not have to worry.

BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8073558.stm

Why Maxthon Download Manager is better than Firefox’s DownThemAll!?

If you have used both Maxthon’s Download manager and Firefox’s DownThemAll, then you will get a feel that the former one’s tool is a much better one than the Firefox’s. Maxthon, who has used Thunder’s technology in integrating it into their download manager, has done a much better job. You can customize the download manager a lot, and make it utilize all of your available banndwidth resources.

In Firefox 3, I was hoping to see a better download manager out of the box, but alas, it is only marginally better than that of its previous avatar.

Maxthon however, did not build a download manager from scratch. Instead they used Thunder, the most popular download manager in China. In China, Thunder has won millions of users with speed and innovative features, and became the most popular download manager in merely 2 or 3 years after debut. Maxthon got Thunder’s permission to build its integrated download manager, Maxthon Downloader, on Thunder’s established technology.

Based on a matured and full fledged download manager, Maxthon Downloader inherits more features than any integrated download managers, and is as fast and reliable as any integrated or standalone download manager. And naturally Maxthon Downloader integrates with Maxthon more tightly than any standalone download manager integrates with a browser.

While Maxthon Downloader is configured and downloads are managed within Maxthon, Maxthon Downloader has its own process which is opened and closed automatically according to usage.

It boasts of features like multi-part/thread download, cross section pause/resume, download all/selective links etc, Maxthon Downloader is already more capable than the simple download replacement requested a few years back.

Maxthon Downloader also has special features to boost download speed. Some download managers has option to use 3rd party sources/mirrors to improve download speed, but most of the 3rd party sources/mirrors are not actively maintained. Maxthon Downloader is supported by Sandai which maintains the largest File Download Portal in China (and possibly in the world), and is among the most visited sites in China daily. And Maxthon Downloader even support P2P for ordinary downloads. But naturally these speed boosting features are all optional in Maxthon Downloader.

Read the source

http://blog.maxthon.com/?p=82

Hope, Firefox developer team comes up with something to counter this!