Washington: The Homeland Security Department ordered border agents to verify that every international student who arrives in the US has a valid student visa, according to an internal memorandum obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The new procedure is the government's first security change directly related to the Boston bombings.
The order, which is effective immediately, came from a senior official at US Customs and Border Protection, David J Murphy. It was circulated Thursday, one day after the Obama administration acknowledged that a student from Kazakhstan accused of hiding evidence for one of the Boston bombing suspects was allowed to return to the US in January without a valid student visa.
The student visa for Azamat Tazhayakov had been terminated when he arrived in New York on January 20. But the border agent in the airport did not have access to the information in the Homeland Security Department's Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, called SEVIS.
Tazhayakov was a friend and classmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tazhayakov left the US in December and returned January 20. But in early January, his student-visa status was terminated because he was academically dismissed from the university....
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10:59 AM, May 04, 2013
London: For the first time in 48 years, London's iconic Big Ben will fall silent on Wednesday as a mark of respect for 'Iron lady' Margaret Thatcher's funeral. The former Conservative Prime Minister died of a stroke in London on Monday aged 87. She will be given a ceremonial funeral with military honours, one step down from a state funeral. It is the first time that the bells of Big...
01:17 PM, Apr 16, 2013
Chicago: Far-flung family members, co-workers and friends frantically used social media, cellphones and even a "people finder" website on Monday to try to learn the fate of participants and spectators at the Boston Marathon, where two people were killed and dozens injured after a pair of bombs exploded near the finish line of one of the world's great marathons. The search was made more difficult because heavy cellphone use caused...
05:20 AM, Apr 16, 2013
London: Plans to create a mega library-cum-museum and training centre in memory of Margaret Thatcher are being devised in the lead up to the funeral of the former British premier on Wednesday. Supporters of the 'Iron Lady', who died of a stroke aged 87 last week, aim to raise around 15 million pounds in private funds towards the library and museum to celebrate her legacy. The project is being promoted...
07:49 PM, Apr 14, 2013
London: Capturing the unruly, ever-changing Internet is like trying to pin down a raging river. But the British Library is going to try. For centuries the library has kept a copy of every book, pamphlet, magazine and newspaper published in Britain. Starting Saturday, it will also be bound to record every British website, e-book, online newsletter and blog in a bid to preserve the nation's "digital memory." As if that's...
12:32 PM, Apr 06, 2013
London: Almost 100 firefighters battled a blaze earlier on Tuesday that engulfed Newington Library at London's Southwark. 15 fire engines spent hours putting out the fire, while no injuries have been reported so far. A probe is still on to find the cause of the fire. More details are awaited. ...
10:45 AM, Mar 26, 2013
A reading chair reclines at a comfortable angle. Spectacles lie within arm's reach. Old teak consoles with black marble tops line the room, which is dominated by book-crammed cupboards. Old frescoes of Hindu gods accentuate the sacred emotion of reading and growing with each book. An old hookah and an ebony-and-ivory chess board add to the personal sense of the space. Thakur Amar Singh could have just left his library...
05:45 PM, Mar 07, 2013
National Archives has lived up to the expectations of President Pranab Mukherjee by getting a 200-year-old historical book presented to the then British Viceroy Lord George Curzon in 1904 restored in good condition for Rashtrapati Bhavan library. ...
09:03 PM, Mar 03, 2013
Briefing the media at an informal interface in Rashtrapati Bhavan on Tuesday, Mukherjee said the library was big enough for "anybody to spend five years reading". ...
06:48 PM, Jan 15, 2013
Jerusalem: More than six decades since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls - and thousands of years after they were written - Israel on Tuesday put 5,000 images of the ancient biblical artifacts online in a partnership with Google. The digital library contains the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the second listing of the Ten Commandments, and a portion of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, dated...
10:53 AM, Dec 19, 2012
Mumbai: Yet another controversy surrounding Associated Journals Ltd has been unearthed. CNN-IBN has accessed RTI documents that raise fresh questions. The documents show that the Maharashtra government gave premium land in Bandra in 1983 to Associated Journals, now acquired by the Gandhis' Young Indian company, for building a Nehru memorial library and a research centre. However, the documents reveal, that Associated Journals squatted on the land and did not build...
06:26 PM, Nov 08, 2012
Patna: Initiating a unique experiment, the Bihar government has decided to set up a gymnasium and a library in all its jails to promote physical and mental health of prisoners. "The jail department has released money for setting up a gym and a library in all the eight central jails and 31 districts prisons across Bihar," Director General, Prisons, Anand Kishore told PTI on Saturday. He said setting up gym...
02:27 PM, Oct 27, 2012
Chennai: The library of the University of Madras is now embroiled in yet another controversy with senior professors raising questions about the timing of the post-centenary celebrations slated for September 25. The fete takes place even as the library has remained headless for about four years with several big ticket projects struggling to take off. Sources in the university said that the celebrations have been organised 5 years after the...
12:50 PM, Sep 22, 2012
Local NGO rescues Uttarkashi habitats as the Bhagirathi ravaged the hills; Iswar Sankalpa provides home to the people with special needs. ...
09:49 PM, Aug 11, 2012
Chandigarh: In a first of its kind initiative, a library of RTI documents has been set up in Chandigarh. It aims at becoming a repository of RTI documents that have already reached the public domain and need not be applied for again. So, if you have filed an RTI application in Chennai or Guwahati, Hemant Goswami in far-flung Chandigarh is its safe-keeper. He has been diligently spending hours formulating a...
08:09 AM, Aug 06, 2012
New York: E-book readers have been relatively slow to borrow digital works from the library, frustrated by a limited selection and by not even knowing whether their local branch offers e-releases, according to a new study. The Pew Research Center published a survey Friday that reports around 12 percent of e-book users 16 years and older downloaded a text from the library over the past year. Earlier in 2012, Pew...
09:12 AM, Jun 24, 2012
Jerusalem: He's considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time. But Isaac Newton was also an influential theologian who applied a scientific approach to the study of scripture, Hebrew and Jewish mysticism. Now Israel's national library, an unlikely owner of a vast trove of Newton's writings, has digitised his theological collection - some 7,500 pages in Newton's own handwriting - and put it online. Among the yellowed...
12:32 PM, Feb 16, 2012
London: The newspaper coverage was troubling: London's huge international showcase was beset by planning problems, local opposition and labor woes - and the transportation was a mess. It sounds like the 2012 Olympics, but this was the Great Exhibition of 1851 generating stories of late trains, unscrupulous landlords and dangerous overcrowding. Coverage of the event is found in 4 million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries being...
11:10 AM, Nov 30, 2011
CHENNAI: A day before Childrens Day, a sea of bobbing purple balloons seemed to be making their way towards the new Hippocampus Childrens Library on Sunday morning. Then, a group of children, complete with a saxophone player at the helm, marched merrily towards what would be the citys first model library for children. Chandni Khanna, Director of the library in Chennai said, We designed this place to be fun with...
08:27 AM, Nov 14, 2011
Bangalore: Online retailer Amazon.com said Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership will now get access to the company's new digital book library service. Kindle owners with the Prime membership can choose from thousands of books to borrow for free on a Kindle device, including more than 100 current and former New York Times bestsellers, as frequently as a book a month, the company said. Amazon Prime costs $79 a...
12:12 PM, Nov 03, 2011
