I disagree mostly with Benedetto XVI.  But I agree with his position regarding Turkey and the EU. Turkey must become a member. I appreciate his position particularly looking back to the speech he gave some tome ago in Regensburg regarding Islam. It was most inappropriate for the pope of the catholic church to say these harsh words about another religion, but nevertheless they were not wrong, and nevertheless Turkey must join the EU!

See the excellent comment from Federico Punzi at

Friends:n 2 and 3 November, an international workshop on open access was held at the IISc faculty hall. It was jointly organised by the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian Institute of Science and the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation with support from the Open Society Institute. There were 16 overseas experts and a dozen from India.

Please see the workshop website for the presentations and the policy statement that emerged from the
workshop:
<www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/OAworkshop2006/>.

Wheat's lost gene helps nutrition

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Wheat's lost gene helps nutrition

An interesting comment from Ora Lassila regarding the Web 2.0/ Semantic Web discussion

Eine wundervolle Hotelanlage haben wir in Gokarna gefunden: SwasWara, eine cghearth experience OMBeach, Gokarna, Karnataka. 08386 257132, swaswara@cghearth,com www.cghearth.com www.swaswara.com Da stimmte einfach alles

This is the Blog that Arun sent to the BOAI list:

First Workshop on Open Access in Agricultural Science and Technology: Indian
Initiatives, 6-7 November 2006.

05/15/06
Tour of the GAAS Information Institute

05/14/06
Permalink Dinner with President Luo

Sunday night we had the official banquet with President Luo of GAAS, who is also vice secretary of the party committee of Guangdong. Dr. Luo emphasized that the province of Guangdong was among the first in 1998 to bring internet services into rural areas. Bridging the rural digital divide would be one of their main goals and he wishes collaboration whit FAO on this

05/12/06
Meeting with the AGRIS group at CAAS

2 Colleagues from my group particpated in the IST event, organized by the European Commission to present 6th framwork projects on November 21-23 in Helsinki (https://europa.eu.int/information_society/istevent/2006/conference/index_...). Attached is the Presentation given by Marta Iglesias in the Networking session on Knowledge Infrastructures.

This is an email I sent today to some of my colleagues. It is here out of context but could be of interest nevertheless.

Greetings from Bangalore airport, which is a quite uncomfortable place as there are no airline lounges and the crowds are filling up a small waiting area. Unfortunately all outbound flights from here to the "West" depart after 1 am......