ANUPAMA THAPA GIRL TOPPER IN SLC EXAMS Kathmandu,16 June:Anupama Thapa of VS Niketan School, Tinkune in the capital is the topper among girls with 92.87 percent marks in SLC results announced this week, claimed the school’s Principal Babu Ram Pokharel. A boy from a Biratnagar school topped among boys, an earlier report said. Three more students who failed the examinations this year committed suicide in Banke, Kanchanpur and Sindhupalchowk. Seven girls who failed the test had committed suicide until Thursday. nnnn Nnnn CHINA PREPARES TO LAUNCH WOMAN INTO SPACE Kathmandu, 16 June: China will launch three astronauts, including a mother of one who flies transport planes, to live and work on a space station for about a week, a major step in its goal of becoming only the third nation with a permanent base orbiting Earth, AP reports from Jiuquan.. Liu Yang, a 34-year-old, volleyball-playing air force pilot, and two male colleagues will be launched on Saturday in the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft that will dock with the bus-sized Tiangong 1 space module now orbiting 322 kilometres above the Earth. Two of the astronauts will live and work inside the module to test its life-support systems while the third will remain in the capsule to deal with unexpected emergencies. State media have said the mission will last about 10 days before the astronauts travel back to Earth in the capsule that will land on the Western Chinese grasslands with the help of parachutes. The official Xinhua News Agency announced today that Liu would be joined by male astronauts Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang and that the launch would take place at 6:37pm (1237 GMT) on Saturday. Success in docking - and in living and working aboard the Tiangong 1 - would smooth the way for more ambitious projects, such as sending a man to the moon, and add to China’s international prestige in line with its growing economic prowess. If completed, the mission will put China alongside the United States and Russia as the only countries to have independently maintained space stations, a huge boost to Beijing’s ambitions of becoming a space power. It already is in the exclusive three-nation club to have launched a spacecraft with astronauts on its own. The mission “demonstrates China’s commitment to its long-term human spaceflight plan,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chinese space programme at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island. Still, that is some years away. The Tiangong 1 is only a prototype, and the plan is to eventually replace it with a permanent - and bigger - space station due for completion around 2020. The permanent station will weigh about 60 tonnes, slightly smaller than NASA’s Skylab of the 1970s and about one-sixth the size of the 16-nation International Space Station. The three astronauts will conduct scientific and engineering tasks on Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which was put into orbit in September. nnnn