Monday, 16th April, 2012

HEADLINES

• Taliban strike across Afganistan; targeting diplomatic area, NATO bases and parliament; around 400 prisoners freed from prison attack.
• Maoists set deadline; The new deadline has come after the government has refused to release their leader ghasi as he faced grievous charges.
• Taliban's military chief Maulvi muhammed Ismail is to be tried by the Jihadist outfit as he tried to have unauthorized negotiations with the Afganistan's higher peace council.

NATIONAL NEWS

• Plans to bring defence ministry under offset authority
  • Moves are on to bring the Ministry of Defence under a national offsets authority that the government plans to make an umbrella body for procurement by all its departments
  • The defence offsets policy stipulates that contracts over Rs. 300 crore must have a minimum offset of 30 per cent and be fulfilled along with the main contract. As per the policy, the winner of the bid or vendor has to source a third of the goods and services from domestic suppliers.
  • To facilitate implementation of the policy, the Ministry has created a Defence Offset Facilitation Agency to assist vendors to interact with the Indian defence industry and work to identify potential offset products/projects and provide data and information.
    
    
• India – US to have multi faceted talks
  • India and the United States have chalked out an active calendar of high-level contacts in the run-up to the Foreign Minister-level strategic dialogue in June
    
    
• Now the blind and the deaf can read and send SMS
  • Now the visually and audio impaired can ‘read' and send SMS through a simple application called PocketSMS. It can be downloaded for free from Bapsi.org.
  • It works on the premise that both the visually-challenged and the hearing-impaired can feel the vibrations that indicate an SMS has been received and reply through short and long vibration pulses. The idea is to make them independent communicators.

INTERNATIONAL

• George Washington named UK's greatest foe
  • George Washington, who led the U.S. victory over Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War, has been named as the U.K.'s ‘greatest-ever foe,' according to a survey, which also included Tipu Sultan and Rani of Jhansi.
  • In the second place after the first American President was Irish leader Michael Collins, followed by French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, German Field Marshal during World War II Erwin Rommel, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder and first President of Turkey.

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS AND COLUMNS

• An article on why professors should be paid more