Sunday, April 1, 2012

HEADLINES

• Myanmar votes today in historical by-elections
• Expulsion of Sasikala from AIADMK withdrawn after she issues statement disowning her family
• Team Anna member, Prashant Bhushan bats for closure of the Kudankulam nuclear plant
• Essar Group promoters Ravikant and Anshuman Ruia and Loop Telecom promoters Kiran and I.P. Khaitan move bail applications in 2G case

NATIONAL NEWS

• River link project only with Kerala's consent
  • Union Water Resources Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal has reportedly assured Kerala that it would implement the Centrally sponsored Pamba-Achencoil rivers link project with the Vaipar in Tamil Nadu only with the consent of Kerala.
• Anti-malarial compounds from marine organisms
  • Indian scientists have achieved a breakthrough in the search for new anti-malarial compounds of natural origin to combat different strains of the parasites responsible for the dreaded disease;
  • Named ‘Discovering Anti-malarials from Marine Organisms,' the collaborative project involves the Centre for Marine Biodiversity under the University of Kerala, the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), New Delhi; Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), Hyderabad; and the Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (IHBT), Palampur. The Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, is funding the project;
  • Extracts of more than 200 organisms including different species of marine fungi, seaweeds, mangroves, sponges, cnidarians, molluscs, echinoderms and ascidians were screened during the first two phases of the project which began in 2004. About 25 organisms showed the presence of anti-malarials;
  • The two most promising candidates are reported to be effective against drug sensitive and resistant strains of the malarial parasites. One of the organisms was found to possess as many as 10 anti-malarial compounds. Some of the promising leads are very effective even at very low concentrations. Efforts are on to patent the findings. The samples have been collected mostly from the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay where coral reefs abound.
• NRHM provisions, a transgression of human ethics
  • Certain provisions in the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) that task non-medical social health workers with administering medicines to babies with sepsis have stirred a debate in medical circles, with experts cautioning that any such move would amount to a transgression of medical ethics, besides having disastrous consequences on the infants;
  • The provisions in question pertain to the training module 7 for the ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) which allow these outreach workers to manage sepsis with antibiotics Cotrimoxazole and Gentamicin;
  • While most people appreciate the role of the NRHM in bring down infant mortality rate, they also argue that the ASHA must be used as social health activist, not as doctor in a setting where there is none.
• BrahMos, the India-Russia joint-venture, has developed an anti-aircraft carrier variant of the supersonic cruise missile and successfully tested it recently

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

• Neutrinos claim: physicist resigns
  • Antonio Ereditato, an Italian physicist at the head of a team that made a cautious but hugely controversial claim that neutrinos may travel faster than the speed of light has resigned following calls for his dismissal;
  • The neutrinos were timed at their departure from CERN's giant underground lab near Geneva and again, after travelling 732 km through the Earth's crust, at their arrival at Gran Sasso in the Apennine Mountains;
  • To do the trip, the neutrinos should have taken 0.0024 seconds. Instead, the particles were recorded as hitting the detectors in Italy 0.00000006 seconds sooner than expected. Knowing their findings would stir a storm, the OPERA team urged physicists to carry out their own checks to corroborate or refute it. CERN said technical hitches may have skewed the initial measurements, something that critics of the findings said they had always suspected.
• All eyes on enforcing Kofi Annan brokered ceasefire in Syria
• Mali coup leaders say that they plan to hold elections at the earliest
• US says there is enough global oil to sideline Iran

ECONOMY & BUSINESS NEWS

• SEBI norms for automated trading
  • The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has issued broad guidelines on Algorithmic Trading, that is, any order that is generated using automated execution. This move comes at a time when automated trading is picking up popularity;
  • The market regulator has asked stock exchanges to undertake system upgradation, including periodic upgradation of its surveillance system, in order to keep pace with the speed of trade and volume of data that may arise through algorithmic trading;
  • Further, the stock exchanges were asked to put in place monitoring systems to identify and initiate measures to impede any possible instances of order flooding through this system. “The stock exchange shall ensure that all algorithmic orders are necessarily routed through broker servers located in India and the stock exchange has appropriate risk controls mechanism to address the risk emanating from algorithmic orders and trades.