| Padma Bhushan for a Chinese Sanskrit expert
If informed sources are to be believed, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao told Singh in mid-January that Ji was his mentor. The Indian government had been in the process of examining Ji's case since December 2006 when Nirupama Rao, the ambassador in Beijing, obtained a rare interview with the 97-year-old scholar who lives in a military hospital and hardly ever meets outsiders. But Wen's remarks might have given the final push for the government to decide in favour of honouring Ji. "This is a great event. The award will have a very positive effect in the manner ordinary Chinese look at India," Wang Bang Wei, a professor of Sanskrit at Beijing University said. Ji is the most suitable Indologist to be chosen for the purpose, he added. Xu Ke Qiao, an expert on Sino-Indian cultural communication at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, sees it as a clear signal that India looks at the relationship from a holistic viewpoint covering history, cultural traditions and contemporary trends.
A moldy, costly mess
The lawsuit, filed in June 2006, wasn't settled until November of last year. It generated 385 legal filings sprawled across 6,470 pages. Attorneys for Garvey Schubert Barer, the Seattle firm that represented the Housing Authority, rang up more than $1 million in legal fees – almost three times the amount Cochran, the tenants' attorney, collected from the settlement. The two sides didn't get along. Battles over admissible evidence got testy. Both sides traded accusations of misconduct. They fought about the proper conduct of apartment inspections. They fought about deadlines. They fought about who was missing more of them. They fought over how to search the Housing Authority computers: "Mold" was an acceptable search term. "Sued" was not. The Housing Authority's defense began to crumble in April 2007, after 10 months of litigation.
Dog-sledding rides give tourists timeless view of Alaska's glaciers
The Norris is one of 38 large valley glaciers in the 1,500-square-mile Juneau ice field. From the prime seat next to the pilot, a panoramic view unfolded as the green spruce trees and placid, cruise-ship-filled harbor curved like a clam shell against a denim sky. Flying at 120 mph, 3,300 feet above the Earth, it felt like a Disney ride. Just a month earlier, Jim, a trim guy with a goatee, baseball cap and friendly grin, had flown this helicopter cross-country from Lake Charles, La., where he'd been working for the same aviation company, but in a different job: hopscotching about the oil platforms, flying folks over the Gulf of Mexico. Originally from Arizona, his family was headed up to spend the summer with him in the Last Frontier, as Alaskans like to call their state.
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