
Thursday, October 29, 1998
McEwan's Amsterdam beats favourites to win Booker
Ian McEwan has won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction for his novel Amsterdam. McEwan collected a 33,000 dollars cheque at the 1998 awards ceremony in London's Guildhall on Tuesday. It was McEwan's third nomination.

A Ladakh villager makes artificial glaciers to harvest water
Chewang Norphel, 62, may not get a Nobel Prize for his innovation but what he has done in Ladakh is firmly based on the principles of Senian welfare economics. A rustic man and a civil engineer by training, Norphel has been making artificial glaciers to make life easier for the hard working but terribly poverty-stricken peasants of Ladakh.

Royal Siamese cats reclaim ancestry
In the hierarchy of felines, there will always be disagreement on which pedigree is king, but Thailand's royal cat keeper Namdee Witta presents a strong case in favour of the Siamese variety. He says his Siamese cats -- all 50 of them -- are direct descendants of an original pair of `Khao Manee', or diamond eye, cats which once had their run of the royal palace under Thai King Rama V, who ruled from 1868 to 1901.

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