Mid Day International News |
| Beijing car quota to counter gridlock Posted: The city will only allow 2.4 lakh new car registrations in 2011 -- two-thirds less than last year -- by lottery For thousands of hopeful commuters in China's capital, 2011 started with a click, not a bang. Residents hoping to snap up Beijing car licence plate numbers under a new quota system aimed at easing paralysing traffic logged onto a website that launched in the first moments of the new year. Within 10 minutes, 6,000 people had applied for new plate numbers, the Beijing Daily newspaper reported.  Jam packed: A global survey conducted last year by IBM said Beijing is tied with Mexico City for the world's worst commute. file pic By 5 pm, more than 53,000 applications had been submitted online, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The applicants are competing for the first batch of 20,000 plates, which are to be awarded by lottery on January 25. Every month a new batch of plates will become available. The new system aims to reduce the number of cars in the notoriously gridlocked capital. The city will only allow 240,000 new car registrations in 2011 -- two-thirds less than last year -- and is parceling them out through the monthly online lottery. The city now has 4.76 million vehicles, up from 2.6 million in 2005. Worst commute A global survey conducted last year by IBM said Beijing is tied with Mexico City for the world's worst commute. Worries are growing that Beijing is choking itself for future growth as it gets more difficult to move people and goods around the city. Nearly 70 percent of Beijing drivers told the IBM survey they had run into traffic so bad they've turned around and gone home.
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| Twins' Facebook fight rages on Posted: Winklevoss twins to continue legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg In a 2008 settlement with social networking titan Facebook, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss garnered a windfall now estimated at more than $140 million (Rs 625 crore) over charges that founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. But now they want to undo that settlement, claiming they are owed more -- perhaps $500 million (R2,200 crore), The New York Times reports.  Hopping mad: Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss attend The Social Network premiere in Paris in October, 2010. Pic/Gettyimages This month, the twins and another Harvard student, Divya Narendra, plan to ask a federal appeals court in San Francisco to undo the deal so they can pursue their original case against Facebook and Zuckerberg, and win a richer pay day. They could, though, lose it all. Still, they say it's not about the money, it's about the principle -- and vindication. "The principle is that they didn't fight fair," said Tyler Winklevoss during an interview recently. "The principle is that Mark stole the idea." His brother, Cameron, chimed in: "What we agreed to is not what we got." Facebook denies it did anything improper and says the Winklevosses simply suffer from a case of "settlers' remorse".But the brothers get riled up when they talk about their battle with Zuckerberg. "It shouldn't be that Mark Zuckerberg gets away with behaving that way," said Cameron. In the past, Zuckerberg has denied he stole the Facebook idea from the Winklevosses, saying they planned a dating site, not a social network. While the Winklevosses could end up losing their settlement, the risks for Facebook are high as well. If the court unwinds the agreement, the company will have to decide whether to offer them a richer settlement or face a trial. Recent trades on a private exchange suggest that Facebook, which is not a public company, now is worth about $50 billion (Rs 2.2 lakh crore), and the company may not want the negative publicity associated with a trial, especially if it decides to move forward with a stock offering.
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