Swine flu toll in India hits century, 109 affected

New Delhi: Five more people, including a 12-year-old girl, tested positive for swine flu Tuesday taking the total number of cases reported so far to 109, the health ministry said. At least 70 patients have been discharged after being fully cured.

"A total of 739 persons have been tested so far of which 109 are positive for Influenza A H1N1. The situation is being monitored," a health ministry statement said.

The ministry said that 211 out of the 739 people were identified through entry screening, 27 through contact tracing and the rest were self reported.

"Of the 109 positive cases, 70 have been discharged. Rest of them remain admitted to the identified health facility," it added.

Of the five new cases, two were reported in Bangalore, two in Mumbai and one in Delhi. The two cases in Bangalore are a 38-year-old woman and her 12-year-old daughter. Both of them had returned from New Jersey June 25.

In Mumbai, one of those who tested positive for swine flu is a 30-year-old man who travelled from London. The other is a 28-year-old man who flew in from Chile via Johannesburg.

The patient in Delhi is a 55-year-old man who had returned from Sydney.

According to World Health Organization, 116 countries have reported 70,893 laboratory confirmed cases of influenza A (H1N1). There have been 311 deaths.

Telecom regulator issues regulations for number portability

New Delhi: India's telecom regulator Tuesday issued draft regulations for mobile number portability (MNP), highlighting the rights, obligations and duties of service providers.

MNP allows users to switch operators without changing numbers.

"The draft regulations lay down the business process for implementing mobile number portability," the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in a statement here.

The guidelines have highlighted subscribers' eligibility for porting - switching operators without changing number - as well as the rights, obligations and duties of operators - both donors and recipients.

A donor is the operator from whose network the subscriber exits and the recipient is the user's new service provider.

According to the draft, a subscriber would be "eligible" to make a request for "porting" only after using his network at least 90 days.

The recipient operator, within five days of receiving a written request, has to carry out subscriber verification for acquiring the new user.

Once verified, the request will be forwarded to the donor operator for seeking its clearance.

Upon receipt of the porting request, the donor operator will verify and in turn communicate the details to the MNP service provider within two working days.

TRAI had first floated the consultation paper on MNP in July 2005 followed by the regulator submitting the recommendations in 2006 to the Department of Telecom (DoT).

Subsequently, DoT issued guidelines last August and envisaged geographical division of the country into two number portability zones, each consisting of 11 licensed service areas.

In March, two MNP service providers were selected - one for each zone - Syniverse Technologies (in north and western India) and MNP Interconnection Telecom Solutions (for east and southern India).

TRAI has sought comments from the stakeholders on these draft regulations by July 14.

11 Useful SpeedLinks for Blogger Users

Here are some of the best tutorials and sites for Blogger users which have caught my attention this week:
1. Customized Feedburner Subscription Box After reading a thread on the Blogger Buster forums about customizing Feedburner's email subscription box, Doug Cloud has written an excellent tutorial to explain how he created a version to match his template design using Photoshop and CSS styling. If you haven't already visited Doug's blog, I really do suggest you pop over to see a beautiful Blogger powered design...

2. Add Yahoo! Buzz Buttons to your Blogger template Over at Woork, you can read how to add Yahoo! Buzz links to your Blogger template to benefit from this new social bookmarking system. While you're there, check out the amazing new design!

3. Utilize Blogger to reduce email overload
As part of an article explaining methods of reducing email overload, Digital Inspiration suggests using Blogger! I won't explain the details here as the post itself is an excellent read :)

4. iBlogSpot with Lifecast (iPhone App Review)

Over at The Blog Herald, you can read a review of Lifecast: an iPhone application for those using Blogger.

5. Weebly (An alternative to Google Pages)

As many of you may be aware, Google Pages will be phased out by the end of the year. So if you're looking for a free alternative host for your scripts and template files, Weebly is an excellent option. (Thanks to Fernandoo1 for the tip!)

6. Wowzio Widgets
Alisha of the Wowzio team let me know about this new service which automatically produces useful widgets for your blog based on the content from your blog feed. It certainly seems easy to use, and you can preview your widgets right away.

7. Show the current date in your blog
Over at ThemeLib, you can find a useful tutorial to display the current date in your blog with only minor tweaks to your template.

8. Show off your followers (new feature for Blogger)

I'm dying to try out this latest new feature for Blogger, but my dashboard hasn't been updated yet! If you'd like to know more, head over to Blogger Buzz to read this introductory post.

10. Ratings Widget for Blogger (With Popular Posts Widget for your Sidebar)
Although Blogger has recently introduced "star ratings" for our posts, this still lacks a fundamental function which I'm sure we'd all love to use: a popular posts widget for to showcase the most popular posts as determined by our readers.

Yellow Turnip has developed a ratings widget which you can add to your template with ease. There's no need to register, AND you can use a popular posts widget too!

11. Blogger Showcase
This Blogger powered site showcases the best of Blogger designs and is well worth a visit just to see how well it's been designed! You can vote for your favorites and submit your own designs for consideration: