Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Lisbon: The UN body for culture on Sunday blasted a private initiative that drew nearly 100 million Internet and telephone voters to choose seven "new" wonders of the world. "This campaign responds to other criteria and objectives than that of Unesco in the field of heritage," said Sue Williams, the spokeswoman for Unesco, the UN cultural body that designates world heritage sites. "We have a much broader vision," she said. Short-listed sites that missed the final cut included the Acropolis in Athens; Paris' Eiffel Tower; the Easter Island statues; Britain's Stonehenge; Cambodia's Angkor Wat temples; New York's Statue of Liberty; and the Alhambra in Spain. Christian Manhart, Unesco's press officer, criticised the ballot, saying it sent out a "negative message to countries whose sites have not been retained." All of these wonders obviously deserve a place on the list, but what disturbs us is that the list is limited

The Taj Mahal, regarded as one of the world's most beautiful monuments, was voted in a global online poll as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World . Three of the other six chosen are from South America: Peru's Machu Picchu, Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer and Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid . The remaining three are the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum in Rome and Jordan's Petra . There is no pucca list of wonders of the world in existence. You could take your pick from among the Stonehenge, the Colosseum, the Catacombs of Komel Shoqafa, the Great Wall of China, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, the Hagia Sophia, the Taj Mahal, Cairo Citadel, Ely Cathedral and Cluny Abbey. Except for the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum and the Great Wall of China, all others dropped out of the list. There is another list, that of ancient wonders. This includes the Great

By ELIANE ENGELER and ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS Geneva: A global competition to name the New Wonders of the World is attracting widespread interest, with more than 20 million people voting so far in the poll conducted by Internet and telephone, organisers said. The list of candidate has been whittled down to 21, and the winner will be announced on Sunday in Lisbon. The Egyptian pyramids at Giza are the only structures still remaining from the original list of seven architectural marvels put together by different observers of the ancient Mediterranean and the West Asia. Long gone are the Hanging Gardens of Babylon , the Statue of Zeus at Olympia , the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse off Alexandria . Choosing world wonders has been a continuing fascination over the centuries. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, or Unesco, keeps updating its list of world heritage sites, which now

Who makes the Apple iPod? Here's a hint: It is not Apple. The company outsources the entire manufacture of the device to a number of Asian enterprises, among them Asustek, Inventec Appliances and Foxconn. But this list of companies isn't a satisfactory answer either: They only do final assembly. What about the 451 parts that go into the iPod? Where are they made and by whom? Three researchers at the University of California, Irvine - Greg Linden, Kenneth Kraemer and Jason Dedrick - applied some investigative cost accounting, using a report from Portelligent that examined all the parts that went into the iPod. Their study, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, offers a fascinating illustration of the complexity of the global economy, and how difficult it is to understand that complexity by using only conventional trade statistics. The retail value of the 30-gigabyte video iPod that the authors examined was $299. The most expensive component in it was the hard drive, which was m

VARANASI, India (Reuters) - After checking in at the Mukti Bhawan hostel , guests have two weeks to die or else they are gently asked to leave. The hostel -- a short walk from the Ganges river in Varanasi -- is a final stopover for elderly Hindus hoping they will shortly end up on one of the hundreds of funeral pyres lit on the river bank each day. (An old man sleeps on the floor at the Mukti Bhavan hostel in Varanasi June 1, 2007. The hostel -- a short walk from the Ganges river in Varanasi -- is a final stopover for elderly Hindus hoping they will shortly end up on one of the hundreds of funeral pyres lit on the riverbank each day.) "While the rest of the world celebrates a new life when a child is born, similarly we celebrate death," said Bhairav Nath Shukla, the cheerful manager of Mukti Bhawan, one of several places offering shelter to outsiders wanting to die in the city. Hindus believe that dying in Varanasi and having their remains scattered in the Ganges allows thei

Chinese archaeologists excavating a 2,500year-old tomb in east China's Jiangxi province have discovered a well-preserved body, many pieces of bronze, gold, silver items and porcelain and jade from one of the 47 coffins discovered. The tomb, in Lijia village in Jing'an county, is 16 metres long, about 11.5 metres wide and three metres deep. It is believed to date back to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770-221 BC) . It is the largest group of coffins ever discovered in a single tomb and the excavation has been dubbed "the most important archeology project of the year" by cultural experts and media. Nine coffins were opened by archaeologists earlier because they were rotten and partly destroyed by tomb robbers. Archaeologists opened another coffin today and found a relatively complete human skeleton, bodily tissue, as well as many bronze, gold and silver items including porcelain and jade. "This is the first time that such a complete bone structure was found in southern

Too many pro wrestlers dying young ATLANTA (AP) -- Everything is planned. The high-flying moves. The outlandish story lines. The crackpot characters. One thing isn't in the script: the staggering number of pro wrestlers who die young. Chris Benoit was the latest, taking his own life at age 40 after killing his wife and son in a grisly case that might be the blackest eye yet for the pseudo-sport already ridiculed as nothing more than comic books come to life, a cult-like outlet for testosterone-raging' young males to cheer on their freakishly bulked-up heroes. But the tenacious, grim-faced grappler known as the "Canadian Crippler" was hardly alone in heading to an early grave. The very same weekend Benoit killed his family, the body of old tag-team partner Biff Wellington (real name: Shayne Bower) was found in his bed, dead at 42. A couple of weeks ago, former women's champion "Sensational" Sherri Martel passed away at her mother's home in Alabama. Sh