Friday, 24th Feb, 2012

HEADLINES

• In a midnight encounter chennai police shoots down bank thieves
• Ramlila incident assault on basic democratic values says supreme court; court also blames ramdev of negligence
• Italian minister says sorry; says shooting on piracy perception.
• New Akash Tablet, Akash – 2 will be at the same price
• Avalanche kill 16 soldiers in Kashmir valley

NATIONAL NEWS

• Goof up on gay rights puts centre in a fix
  • There was a goof-up by the Centre in the Supreme Court with the Additional Solicitor-General opposing homosexuality between two consenting adults and the Union Home Ministry issuing a press release within minutes distancing itself from the ASG's stand.
  • This happened during the hearing on a batch of appeals filed by the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights and others challenging the Delhi High Court decriminalising Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code
  • ASG P.P. Malhotra submitted that homosexuality was immoral and the High Court judgment declaring Section 377 ultra vires the Constitution and legalising it between two consenting adults was not in tune with the country's cultural practices. The hearing has been adjourned till feb 28^th.
    
    
• 4.5% quota for minorities in IITs from this year.
  • The IIT-JEE Admission Committee has decided to implement 4.5 per cent reservation for the minorities within the 27 per cent seats meant for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) from this year.
    
    
• Ramlila incident assault of basic democratic values : Supreme court
  • The action of the Delhi Police in evicting yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his followers on the night of June 4/5, 2011 — they were sleeping at the Ramlila ground — demonstrated the might of the State and was an assault on the very basic democratic values enshrined in our Constitution, the Supreme Court held.
  • The Bench, however, blamed Baba Ramdev for contributory negligence stating that he did not advise his followers to leave the Ramlila grounds once the order granting permission was withdrawn.
    
    
• MS Swaminathan calls for synergy between technology and public policy
  • Synergy between technology and public policy is essential for enhanced productivity in agriculture and aquaculture to meet the food and nutritional needs of the growing population, said M.S. Swaminathan.
  • Inaugurating an aquatic health testing facility at the Central Institute of Brackishwater Aquaculture (CIBA) in Chennai, he said that India was far below the production levels of China in agriculture and aquaculture.
    
    
• Ministry not a stumbling block to development works : Jayanthi Natarajan
  • The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests is not a stumbling block to development works or projects. It is only discharging its duties in protecting the environment, Union Minister for Forests and Environment Jayanthi Natarajan said.
  • The Minister told this on the sidelines of a Tree Growers' Mela organised by the Institute of Forest Genetics and Tree Breeding (IFGTB) that her Ministry had the mandate to protect ecology and ensure “pure water and pollution free air” to the people.
  • The Ministry is focusing on conservation of giant squirrel population across the country and to prevent pollution along rivers in Tamil Nadu.
  • The IFGTB with the help of the Rs.1 crore funding from the Ministry would provide 15 lakh seeds/seedlings of casuarinas to farmers in Villuppuram and Cuddalore districts and Puducherry that were recently hit by cyclone Thane.

• Flaw led to claim of faster than light
  • Researchers have found a flaw in the technical setup of an experiment that startled the science world last year by appearing to show particles travelling faster than light.
  • The problem may have affected measurements that clocked subatomic neutrino particles breaking what Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein considered the ultimate speed barrier.
  • Two separate issues were identified with the GPS system that was used to time the arrival of neutrinos, One could have caused the speed to be overestimated, the other could have caused it to be underestimated
  • The experiment involved neutrinos being fired from CERN's site on the Swiss-French border to a vast underground laboratory 730 km away at Gran Sasso in Italy.
  • Researchers found that the neutrinos appeared to arrive 60 nanoseconds sooner than if they were travelling at light's speed of 299,792 km a second.

• NSG gets fourth and final regional hub in Mumbai
  • The regional hubs at Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai have been set up to reduce the response time and reach the area of operation as quickly as possible.
  • Mr. Chidambaram said that a mini-regional centre is set to come up in Hyderabad within a few years. The state-of-the-art training facility at Ibrahimpatnam will train commandos for southern and western States.

• Use of enriched Uranium in PHWRs proposed
  • The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) plan to use slightly enriched uranium (SEU) in the future 700 MWe Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) instead of the current technology of using natural uranium as the fuel in all the PHWRs of Indian nuclear programme until now.
  • Natural uranium contains only 0.7 per cent of the fissile isotope Uranium-235, the rest being the fertile isotope Uranium-238, which gets converted to Plutonium-239 in the reactor by neutron absorption. The SEU, which is being proposed to be used in future 700 MWe PHWRs, will contain 1.1 per cent of U-235.
  • The Light Water Reactors (LWRs) of the type being built at Kudankulam and the types that are likely to be supplied by other foreign vendors use low enriched uranium (LEU), which has 3 to 5 per cent U-235 enrichment.
  • The advantage of using SEU is the higher nuclear burn-up that can be achieved.
  • Burn-up is a measure of the amount thermal energy that is extracted from a given amount of nuclear fuel. The burn-up achieved with natural uranium in the present Indian PHWRs is about 6700-7000 megawatt-days (MWd)/tonne (t) of uranium-oxide. The burn-up that is achievable with SEU in PHWRs would be about three times this value (about 21,000 MWD/t )
    
    
• HRD ministry launches virtual labs
  • In an effort to provide easy access to education in the rural areas, the Human Resource Development Ministry on Thursday launched Virtual Labs — a collection of 91 online laboratories containing hundreds of experiments in nine disciplines of science and engineering.
  • It is part of the government's National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), focusing on providing graduate and undergraduate students the facility to perform experiments, using the World Wide Web, a standard computer, and an Internet connection.
    
    
• HRD ministry launches virtual labs
  • The Centre has ordered a probe into the causes behind the breaches in the gates of Farakka barrage on the Ganga. The broken gates resulted in unregulated water flows of about 47,000 cusecs — of which, about 15,000 cusecs was additional discharge — into neighbouring Bangladesh.
  • The Chairman of the Central Water Commission (CWC) will conduct the inquiry into the reasons for the breakage of the two gates and the delay in repairs and submit a report within 15 days.

• Three more nuclear fuel complexes to be set up
  • The Department of Atomic Energy plans to set up three more nuclear fuel complexes in the wake of a massive plan to increase the capacity of nuclear power plants to 63,000 MW by 2032, from the current level of 4,780 MW.
  • At present, only Hyderabad has such complex. It produces fuel bundles and other components for all the 20 reactors that are in operation in the country.
  • The first of the three additional plants would come up at Kota in Rajasthan and would be used to supply fuel to the four 700 MW Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors being built at neighbouring Rawatbhata and Kakrapar in Gujarat. The sites for the other two are yet to be finalised. It would have a capacity to supply up to 500 tonnes of fuel a year. It would also have a zirconium fabrication facility with a capacity of 65 tonnes a year.

INTERNATIONAL

• Argentina seeks Indian support in territorial claim
  • Argentina has sought Indian assistance in pressing its claim over Malvinas Islands (Falkland Islands) which were forcibly occupied by the British in 1833 and saw a brief conflict in 1982.
  • The recent presence of a British nuclear submarine which violated the pact on keeping the region free of nuclear weapons has created a controversy of sorts.

• China wants to partner India in Piracy fights
  • China has said it wants to work with India and other countries to boost maritime cooperation, particularly with regard to coordinating naval escorts in the Indian Ocean to fight piracy.
  • Chinese officials said they were particularly keen to increase coordination with the Indian navy, as naval officials from 20 countries met in the eastern port city of Nanjing on Thursday at the start of a first-of-its-kind two-day international initiative on ocean escorts, hosted by the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).
  • The countries had agreed to follow an integrated escort schedule, arranged on a quarterly basis, with the schedule-making being led by “a reference country” chosen every quarter. China, as the first reference country, had already proposed a schedule, and other countries involved in the operation would formulate their schedules accordingly

• Call for urgent action against Somalia
  • Leading nations, including India, on Thursday agreed that the international community must respond urgently to the crisis in Somalia, described by Prime Minister David Cameron as the “world's worst failed state”, blighted by two decades of civil war and famine and caught up in a vortex of terrorism, piracy and famine.

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS AND COLUMNS

• An article on the Devas – Antrix deal explaining the Chaturvedi – Narashiman report
• Editorial on the new method of engineering entrance examination proposed

ECONOMICS, BUSINESS

• More crude sought from Saudi Arabia
  • Seeking to lessen its dependence on Iran crude oil in view of rising tensions due to sanctions by the U.S. and the EU against Iran, India has asked Saudi Arabia for an additional 5 million tonnes of crude oil for next fiscal.
  • India buys 27 million tonnes of crude oil per annum from Saudi Arabia while its annual import from Iran is about 17 million tonnes.
  • Country had a spare production capacity of 2.5 million barrels per day beyond the current output of 9.8 million barrels a day. India also sought more LPG from Saudi Arabia to meet growing energy needs.
  • Also, India sought more LPG to meet rural cooking gas demand. India imports nearly 2 million tonnes of LPG from Saudi Arabia.