India is perhaps one of the few countries in the world that still has the model of centralised universities which design the syllabus, conduct exams and give degrees while the teaching is done in affiliated colleges that have no control on academic content or evaluation. Though there are many things that are wrong with our higher education set-up, removing this totally anachronistic model should be at the top of the agenda.

London: A new controversial analysis by an astronomer of Indian origin has suggested that the Big Bang might not have come at the beginning of the Universe, but after a long and slow period of shrinkage. According to a report in Nature News, the theory has been put forward by Amit Yadav, an astronomer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Bhawani Saur, a Gond widow of Baissa village in Tikamgarh, was preparing for her daughter's wedding next week. So, when a request came from officials for her to make a meal for 20, she was totally unprepared.

Bodeli (Vadodara): Four children miraculously survived Wednesday's Gujarat bus accident in which 44 were killed. A 13-year-old survivor, Mamta Baria, was crying uncontrollably for several hours after the accident, lamenting that she had failed to save her friends.

Mercifully there is a law in place completely banning cigarette advertisements, or else, this Supreme Court judgment could have dented the campaign of health minister Anbumani Ramadoss against film actors smoking in public. It set aside a national consumer forum directive to Godfrey Phillips India to discontinue all advertisements featuring actor Akshay Kumar with a slogan

Chennai's Siddharth has become the country's youngest patient to successfully undergo a complete liver transplant. Doctors at Delhi's Sir Gangaram Hospital, who conducted the operation on 11-month-old Siddharth, say he beat the earlier record held by Pakistani national Shreyar. A resident of Karachi, Shreyar was one-year-old when he underwent the liver transplant in 2006 in the same hospital.

Heavy rains in Tamil Nadu resulted in the loss of 24 lives and caused extensive damage to 3.91 lakh hectares of standing crops, government told the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. In response to a question, minister of state for home affairs Radhika V Selvi said, "Tamil Nadu has submitted a memorandum seeking central assistance from the National Calamity Contingency Fund for relief operations in the areas affected by heavy rains during March 2008.' TNN

Sela Pass (Tawang): Rashmi Rijiju, 37, runs a restaurant at Sela Pass, a strategically important peak at 13,700 feet in Tawang, bordering China in western Arunachal Pradesh. She moved there almost the same time seven years ago when the Army set up an outpost and positioned its troops, she recalls.

The yawning gap between rhetoric and action was evident on Wednesday during the discussion on inflation. In both Houses, finance minister P Chidambaram had hardly any company on the treasury benches as he took notes and prepared for his reply to the debate.In Lok Sabha, even the few MPs who did turn up quietly sidled out of the House. There was a possibility of a quorum call,but since no one raised the matter, MPs were spared the blushes.

With India looking forward to having good relations with the democratically elected Maoists in Nepal, New Delhi on Wednesday made it clear that there was no specific evidence to indicate any nexus between naxals of both the countries. Though India had stated this on earlier occasions as well, the statement