The government has been dithering over the construction of 1200-MW thermal plant proposed to be set up at Nabha in Patiala district. Initially, the government had planned two mega thermal plants at Nabha and Talwandi Sabo (1800 MW). While a notification for acquiring 2,100 acres under Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act has been issued for the Talwandi Sabo thermal plant, the notification for the Nabha plant has been withheld.

Director of the company, which has been entrusted the construction of the plants, K.P. Kansal said they had sent the case for issuing notification for acquiring 1,196 acres for the Nabha thermal plant to the government. However, till date the government has not acted on it, he added.

Sources in the PSEB said the government was dithering over the Nabha plant in the face of a stiff resistance by the farmers whose land is likely to be acquired.

Genzyme comes up with cure

Genzyme Corp., one of the state's largest biotech companies, said it has resolved a sticky problem with Framingham's sewage system, allowing the Cambridge company to go ahead with plans to build a $260 million drug manufacturing plant there.

Though Framingham and Massachusetts officials both promised to work to secure state funding for the project, company executives said they couldn't afford to wait much longer for the state to make a commitment. And even if the funding eventually came through, Genzyme managers fretted the sewage project wouldn't be finished by the time the manufacturing plant was ready to open in 2010, prompting them to begin considering alternative sites.

Woomail Wants To Woo You Away from Spam

The recipient gets an e-mail saying, "I only read secure e-mail" and a link that takes the recipient to a reply page on the Woomail server , so that no part of the communication travels through cyberspace.

Putting Users in Control

John Halloran, a Puerto Rico-based precious-metals dealer, created Woomail after struggling with the huge amount of spam his brokers and office staff were dealing with. He said that his goal was to put users in charge of their communications, inbound and outbound.

"The problem was that anyone in the world can send you communication from anywhere, and I can't stop them from sending it to my servers," he said. "If I can get them to come to me by typing in a URL or Woo to Woo message, then I can control communications on my server and so I can prevent fraudulent use." (A "Woo to Woo" message is one in which both parties have Woomail accounts.) Sending a message from within the site cannot be done without a challenge-and-response question, putting the kibosh on automated spammers.