Kathmandu, October 17, 2007

The Ministry of General Administration today decided to stop payment to at least 38 staffers working in the Narayanhiti Royal Palace despite the government’s decision to retire them on the basis of age limit.

Speaking to media persons, secretary of the ministry Yubraj Pandey said the government has decided to stop salary of those staffers who have been in office, ignoring the time limit. “The government will not distribute salary to those who have disobeyed the government’s decision.

It includes even those who were given ‘life-long’ employment,” he said. On March, the government had decided to discontinue jobs of 51 staffers, who were 58 years old and had been working despite their age limit. Out of them, 38 are reportedly still working in the palace. When the decision was made, there were 774 staffers and now there are around 720.

Still, the ministry is yet to finalise the future of the rest. “We are now at the final stage of drafting the regulation for all such issues. This will be clear only then,” he said. The regulation is yet to be sent to the cabinet. He added that there will possibly be a secretary level officer, working in ‘reserve pool’ of staffers, who will take care of the staffers and make necessary arrangements.

Earlier, the employees of the palace were managed by an independent body, which was not regulated by government rules of general administration. BK and Bhhojiya Tharuni.

Internet preparing to go into outer space

Agence France Presse

Seoul, October 17, 2007

After expanding across Earth, the Internet is now set to spread into outer space to reach parts no network has gone before, one of its co-creators predicted today. Vinton Cerf said the proposed “interplanetary” Internet would allow people an ability “to access information and to control experiments taking place far away” from Earth. Expanding into the solar system would bring new rules and regulations, too, he told an annual Seoul forum, saying he and other experts were working on a set of standards designed to guide space-era Internet communications. “Finally, the Internet can take us where no network has gone before,” said Cerf, who is Google’s vice-president and chief internet evangelist, He said he and a team of engineers at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory would complete a key part of the project — establishing standards for space communications like those for Internet — in three years. Cerf told a separate news meet that new standards were needed because of the huge distances and time delays involved in communication across space. He went on: “This effort is now bearing fruit and is on track to be space qualified and standardized in the 2010 time frame. “Eventually, we will accumulate an interplanetary backbone to assist robotic and manned missions with robust communication.”