Taliban claims second Korean killed

The Taliban says it has killed a second male South Korean hostage among a group of 23 Christian volunteers captured more than a week ago.

Al Jazeera received an exclusive video from outside Afghanistan showing some of the South Korean women hostages wearing headscarves, with fighters in the background.




Its authenticity as well as when and where it was made could not be verified.

Qari Mohammad Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, told Reuters by phone on Monday: "We shot dead a male captive because the government did not listen to our demands."






The AFP agency quoted him as saying: "We set several deadlines and the Afghan government did not pay attention to our deadlines.

"Finally tonight at 8:30 we killed one of the Koreans named Sung Sin with AK-47 gunshots."

Video Link

Watch Al Jazeera's exclusive footage of Taliban's hostages


There was no independent confirmation of his death.

The body of the hostage had been dumped in the Qarabagh district of the southern province of Ghazni, Ahmadi said.

The area is where the South Koreans on an aid mission were abducted on July 19 while travelling on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar, about 140km south of the Afghan capital

Serious

The South Korean embassy in Afghanistan has refused to comment to the media on the case.

James Bays, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Afghanistan, said that while the Taliban had extended the deadline in the past, it was "serious this time".

He reported there was a build-up of security forces in the area near the main highway where the South Koreans were kidnapped.

The leader of the group, Bae Hyung-kyu, a 42-year-old pastor, was shot dead on Wednesday and his bullet-riddled body found in a desert area of the province.

Bae's body arrived in South Korea on Monday.

Al Jazeera's Melissa Chan reported from Seoul that the family members would not hold a funeral until the rest of the hostages were safely back.

Taliban denial

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"If anything happens to them, the Afghan government and the South Korean government will be responsible"

Qari Mohammad Yousuf Ahmadi, for Taliban


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Earlier on Monday, Ahmadi had denied that there had been any agreement to extend talks.

"We are still awaiting the decision of the leadership council. We have not extended the deadline till Wednesday," he told Reuters by telephone from an unknown location.

Reports had said that the Taliban extended its "final" deadline at the request of Afghan mediators, but insisted that the release of Taliban prisoners was the only way to settle the crisis.

The "final deadline" was issued by the movement's leadership council on Sunday and originally ran out at 07:30 GMT.

The Taliban has demanded the withdrawal of South Korean troops from Afghanistan and the return of prisoners held by the Afghan authorities.

On Sunday, Ahmadi said the group's demands remained the same.

He said: "We have the same previous demands; the first is accepting to withdraw the Korean forces from Afghanistan.

"The second demand is still pending as the Afghan government delegation has said that it does not have the authority to release Taliban prisoners."

Hostage swap

Afghanistan's interior ministry and the presidential palace have said a hostage swap is out of the question.

An Afghan team that was supposed to have held more talks with the Taliban on Saturday could not reach the group because of security concerns in Ghazni province, a provincial source said.

The Taliban has said that if anything happened to the South Korean hostages, "the Afghan government and the South Korean government will be responsible".

Vietnam takes championship at Kobe Osaka Karate 2007

VietNamNet Bridge – Nguyen Hoang Ngan has won the gold medal for kata contents at the World Karate Championship Kobe Osaka 2007, which took place from July 22-29 in Bulgaria.



The event saw the participation of players from 45 countries and territories. Vietnam’s Nguyen Hoang Ngan defeated strong rivals from Japan, China, Macau and Nepal, including Japan’s Morooko Nao, who defeated Hoang Ngan in the final match of ASIAD 2006, to win the gold medal.



This is the second consecutive year Hoang Ngan took the championship for kata content at Kobe Osaka. Ngan was the only Vietnamese player participating in the Kobe Osaka held in Greece one year ago and won the gold medal.



The Kobe Osaka is an annual event held by the Kobe Osaka Karate International Association, drawing players from many countries and territories. In the past five years, Vietnam has consecutively won gold medals at those events, including six gold medals in 2004.



Before coming to Kobe Osaka 2007, the Vietnamese karate team won the championship at the Thailand Open Karate Tournament 2007 with six gold medals, including one by Hoang Ngan.



From now to the 24th SEA Games, Hoang Ngan and her fellows will take part in the Asian Karate Championship.



T.A

Saving Phu Quoc dog from extinction

VietNamNet Bridge - A national association of dog breeds needs to be established, especially aiming at preserving the dog breed originating in Phu Quoc Island off southern Kien Giang province, said Vietnamese Belgian Professor Du Thanh Khiem, member of the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (World Canine Organization) at the talk of Phu Quoc dogs in HCMC recently.


The phu Quoc canine breed

Professor Khiem supplied latest scientific information of origin, peculiarities and history of the rare dog. He advised dog keepers to conserve and develop the Phu Quoc dog to lessen the danger of extinction, and said the government also should examine applying for membership to the Fédération Cynologique Internationale.

Phu Quoc dogs are one of the world’s three rarest dogs with whorls on their backs. They are excellent hunters, unafraid of heights, intelligent and fiercely loyal yet are very trusting with strangers, so they make poor guards.

According to dog experts, the Phu Quoc ridgeback dog was traditionally four main colours: spotted, black, yellow, and striped; however now the colours have become more various. A mature dog is about 20-25kg, with a small head, quite a long snout, and thin ears. The dog’s tapering belly, straight legs and “duck-like” toes allow it to swim and run exceedingly well.

The residents on Phu Quoc Island are proud of the rare and valuable dog, regarding them as their faithful and close friends. Visitors to the island always want to see and take home a dog, but breeding them is not easy away from their native land.

Mr. Khiem said that he will take the Phu Quoc dog to the 2011 World Dog Show in Paris.

(Source: SGGP)

Fans celebrate historic victory of Vietnam’s football

VietNamNet Bridge – At big cities in Vietnam, especially Hanoi and HCM City, thousands of Vietnamese fans flocked to the streets to celebrate the victory of the national soccer squad as it has entered the quarter-finals of the Asian Cup 2007.



Fans flocked to central roads of Hanoi and HCM City to wave the national flag and shouted, “Vietnam, champion!” At Hoan Kiem Lake in central Hanoi, tens of thousands of people gathered to shoot off firecrackers and drive motorbikes around the lake.



The Vietnamese national squad would have been unable to enter the quarter-finals without the triumph of the United Arab Emirates over Qatar in a match which took place at the same time as the Vietnam-Japan match in HCM City. So along with Vietnamese flags, one could see some flags of the UAE on HCM City streets last night.



VietNamNet captured the ‘football festival’ in Hanoi and HCM City:

ASP.NET

Introduction
With the advent of ASP.NET we see a shift from traditional scripting to the
beginning of full-fledged programming online.VBScript isn’t the only option
anymore, as programmers can now employ the full power that lies behind both
Visual Basic (VB) and C within their ASP.NET assemblies.
There is no denying the widespread acceptance that .NET received from the
developer community. It’s proven itself to be a well-developed framework with
solid ideas on how the programming world should continue to change.The
introduction of a software solution that enables anyone to code in any language
that is compatible with the framework is groundbreaking to say the least.
In this chapter we will take a look at how Active Server Pages (ASP) itself
began just a couple of years ago and how it has captivated programmers ever
since. It has had some problems, of course, but the .NET architecture seems to
have found solutions to many preexisting programming problems.There have also
been changes with how ASP works with the server and client, to provide the user
with the information that you want to provide.
Even though this is a stable beta, and many people are assuming already that
what we are seeing within Beta 2 is basically the “freeze” for many features, it still
has a couple of caveats, due to its beta nature. Learning from these problems
within the framework can allow for preparation against it.
Learning from the History of ASP
You can trace the history of ASP right back to 1995 and the momentous occasion
when Microsoft realized they were falling behind in a fundamental shift in
the industry by not embracing the Internet. Up until that point Microsoft had
been developing their proprietary technologies, tools, and network protocols for
the Microsoft Network; all of a sudden they needed an Internet strategy and fast.
Microsoft has gone from a position of playing catch-up to one close to dominance,
with the Internet Explorer Web browser having a strangle-hold on the
Web browsing market, and Internet Information Server (IIS) installed at the
majority of Fortune 1000 companies.
The Origins of ASP
Back in the mid ‘90s, when the commercial Web world was still young, there was
not a great deal of choice of tools for the Web developer who wanted to make
his or her Web site a truly useful place to do business.The choices were limited
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in both available server-side programming platforms and also desktop development
tools to produce the solutions. In the end, the programmer was stuck with
clumsy Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs using compiled languages
such as C, Delphi, and Visual Basic, or interpreted scripting languages like Perl or
Rexx, and operating system shell scripts on systems such as UNIX.
In early 1996 Microsoft had a first stab at improving the situation by
including the Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) technology
as part of Internet Information Server. ISAPI is an extension to the
Windows Win32 API. It was developed as a way to create Web server software
that interacts with the inner workings of Internet Information Server, bringing
what was claimed to be a five-fold increase in performance. As you can well
imagine from this description, as well as the immediate performance increase, it
also had a side effect of increasing the complexity of the development for the
programmer. It wasn’t for the faint hearted, and it takes some serious hardcore
programming knowledge to do ISAPI applications right.As well as ISAPI,
Microsoft encouraged developers to embrace their Internet Database Connector
(IDC) technology.This was a new way to connect Web sites to back-end
databases through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).
The ISAPI and IDC technologies lifted Microsoft’s youthful and as yet
unproven Web server from being a glorified file server to being a basic interactive
application server platform for the first time.
Other vendors had tools out there, and several were very popular, such as
Netscape Livewire. Livewire was a technology that ran under Netscape’s Web
server and used a version of JavaScript for page logic, and also used Java components.
Unfortunately, Livewire had similar limitations to ISAPI in that it was a
compiled technology and the server needed stopping and starting to make
changes visible.
Why ASP Was Needed
Not all Web developers have the programming skills needed to write ISAPI
applications, and because ISAPI requires the compilation of programs, there are
extra steps in producing an ISAPI-based site that slow development down.
Novice and intermediate programmers found the need to learn an industrialstrength
language, such as C++, and compile even the simplest of their page logic
into .dll files a real barrier.
Visual Basic programs, although easier to develop, when used for CGI, performed
poorly and the overhead hogged resources. Other languages such as Perl
require the Web server to launch a separate command-line program to interpret
Introducing ASP.NET • Chapter 1 3
4 Chapter 1 • Introducing ASP.NET
and execute the requested scripts, increasing page-load time and reducing server
performance. CGI itself hogs resources because every page request forces the Web
servers to launch and kill new processes and communicate across these processes.
This is time consuming and also uses up precious RAM.
Another problem facing development teams in the mid ‘90s was the fact that
a Web site is a mixture of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and logic.They
needed a way to mix the programmer’s code with the designer’s page-layout
HTML and designs without one messing up the other.There were many solutions
to this problem, ranging from custom template systems to Sever Side
Include (SSI) statements that told the server to execute code based on special
HTML comment tags.
Database-driven interactivity was another challenge.The demand for complex
Web sites had just kicked off, and developers needed to supply that demand in a
manageable fashion, but the tools available did not make this an easy task.Those
who could achieve it demanded rewards that matched the difficulty of what they
were being asked to do.
What was needed was a solution for the rest of us. It needed to be a simple
scripted text-based technology like Perl, so developers could tweak and alter their
pages without compilation and with simple text-editing tools such as Notepad. It
needed to have low resource requirements while keeping high performance;
therefore it needed to be executed within the server environment just like ISAPI,
but without the complexity. Designers and cross-discipline teams demanded that
it should include SSI and template features to make integrating page layouts simpler
to manage.To be truly popular, it should run off a language that would be
easy to pick up and was familiar to a large community of developers. Enter Active
Server Pages!
Why ASP Was Not Originally Embraced
Active Server Pages was not an overnight success, though understandably it did
capture the imagination of a large sector of the development community, particularly
those already well versed in Visual Basic programming or Visual Basic for
applications scripting.
Others who did not have an investment in Visual Basic knowledge found the
limitations of Visual Basic, and by extension Visual Basic Scripting, reasons to
avoid the technology. Faults included poor memory management, the lack of
strong string management abilities, such as Regular Expressions, found in other
established languages.When compared to CGI with Perl,ASP was found lacking.
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Introducing ASP.NET • Chapter 1 5
At that time, Internet Information Server was in its infancy, and take-up was
low, despite Microsoft’s public relations juggernaut going into full flow after the
company’s much-reported dramatic turnaround. In comparison to current versions
of the software it seems very poor, but it was still competitive on performance.
Until 1997, back-end Web programming was pretty much owned by CGI
and Perl. High-performance Web sites usually had a mix of C-compiled programs
for the real business engine, and Perl for the more lightweight form processing.
There was a fair amount of doubt and suspicion around Microsoft’s Internet
efforts, including IIS and Internet Explorer, and ISAPI had not done all that
much to bring across a huge sector of the development community. Despite this
uncertain atmosphere, Microsoft saw many Windows NT 4 licenses being bought
specifically for Web hosting and development increasing.Third-party support for
anything other than small components was initially slow, but, as with all Microsoft
products, after the first couple of releases they usually get things right, and ASP
was no exception.
Whereas Perl had a huge community of developers led by the heroic figure
of Larry Wall, the ASP developer was not yet well supported.A Perl programmer
was encouraged from the top to share and make his or her code open, so the
community thrived, with every conceivable solution or library just a few clicks
away at the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) site, or at one of the
many other Web sites and news groups. Contrast this with the ingrained competitive
and financially led philosophies of the third-party component vendors in the
Windows Distributed Internet Applications (DNA) world. Of course, it did not
take the ASP community long to grow to be the loving, sharing success it is now

"Pao’s Story" to run at int’l film festivals

VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese film "Chuyen cua Pao" (Pao's Story) will be shown at a series of international films to be staged in the Asia-Pacific.


"Pao's Story" will also be a competitive entrant in the Asia-Pacific Film Festival.
The acclaimed, epic will be run at the Bangkok International Film Festival from July 25-27 along with another homegrown piece, "Dong mau anh hung" (The Rebels).

"Pao's Story" will also be a competitive entrant in the Asia-Pacific Film Festival to be held in Australia from August 2-12 and the Brisbane Film Festival from August 3-6.

Set in the breathtaking mountainous province of Viet Nam, the film tells the story of an ethnic H'mong girl named Pao on her journey to find her mother who abandoned her when she was young.

The film took home last year's Special Award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in Taiwan.

"Pao's Story" is Ngo Quang Hai's first work as a director. His second film "Mua he lanh leo" (Cold Summer) is scheduled to begin shooting by November.