Wednesday, May 30, 2012

HEADLINES

• Manmohan Singh dismisses the charges and says he is ready to quit public life if the charges leveled against him by team Anna are proved
• Centre to appeal the AP High Court judgement striking down the 4.5% sub-quota for minorities
• Govt has issued a travel advisory for Indians to avoid all unnecessary travel to Syria, after two Indians are killed in a bomb blast near Syria-Iraq border
• Another quake in Italy in 10 days measuring around 5.9; more than 10 feared dead
• To attract more foreign capital and stabilise the Indian rupee, the Govt has permitted residents of the Gulf nations and all EU nations to invest directly in stock markets and individual overseas investors to bring up to $1 billion to the debt market

NATIONAL NEWS

• Supreme Court says that bribery cases cannot be reduced just because amount demanded was negligible
  • Observing that corruption corrodes the spine of the nation and makes its economy sterile, the Supreme Court has held that guilty officials do not deserve any leniency even if the bribe amount is just Rs. 50;
  • Interpreting the Prevention of Corruption Act, the Supreme Court said that under Section 7(1), when an offence was proved, the public servant shall be punished with imprisonment which shall not be less than six months but which may extend to five years and shall also be liable to fine;
  • The accused had petitioned the Supreme Court to use its special powers under Article 142 of the Constitution to reduce the sentence as they had already suffered lot of hardship in the case;
  • The Court said that “where the minimum sentence is provided, we think it would not be at all appropriate to exercise jurisdiction under Article 142 to reduce the sentence on the ground of the so-called mitigating factors as that would tantamount to supplanting the statutory mandate and further it would amount to ignoring the substantive statutory provision that prescribes minimum sentence for a criminal act relating to demand and acceptance of bribe.”
• Supreme Court pulls up Centre over the disposal of Bhopal waste
  • The Supreme Court has pulled up the Centre for not being serious about cleaning up the toxic waste lying around for the past 28 years, in the defunct Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. At a special hearing by a vacation Bench on Monday, the court asked if the government's attitude stemmed from the fact that the victims were poor;
  • The court had deferred its earlier order, directing disposal of the toxic waste by the Pithampur waste treatment storage and disposal facility in the Dhar district, because of serious concerns raised by the Madhya Pradesh government, victim and supporter groups and other organisations;
  • The Madhya Pradesh government wanted to send the waste abroad to be incinerated, as none of the Indian incinerators were competent enough, stating that if it were done in India, it would cause a second mass poisoning;
  • A group of ministers are expected to meet on the issue on June 8. The matter will be heard further by the Court on June 2.
• Public Private Partnership model for new airports mooted
  • Union Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh will soon move the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure (CCI) with the proposal to develop and maintain new airports in various townships across the country on private public partnership (PPP) mode;
  • Development of four new airports at Navi Mumbai, Goa, Itanagar in Arunachal Pradesh and Kunnur in Kerala under the PPP model are being considered and the planning commission is also looking into it. Development and maintenance of the Chennai and Kolkata airports under the PPP are also being considered;
  • Developing these non-metro airports to enhance air connectivity in the hinterland is part of AAIs plan to reactivate, upgrade and modernise at least 225 airports by 2020, way up from 84 airports which are currently operational.
• New Union Public Service Commission member appointed
  • Rajiv Gandhi University (Itanagar) Vice-Chancellor Prof. David R. Syiemlieh has been appointed a member of the UPSC;
  • Former honorary director of ICSSR-NERC, Prof. Syiemlieh is also at present a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi. A Fulbright Fellow, he has published a number of books and papers on the history of the North-Eastern region.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

• India's resolution on mental health adopted at World Health Assembly
  • India has achieved a major victory at the just concluded 65th World Health Assembly as it managed to push through a resolution on mental health, asking member-states to acknowledge the need for a comprehensive, coordinated response to addressing mental disorders from health and social sectors at the country level;
  • The delegates recognised these measures which include programmes to reduce stigma and discrimination, reintegration of patients into workplace and society, support for care providers and families, and investment in mental health from the health budget;
  • The resolution urged the member-states to develop and strengthen comprehensive policies and strategies that address the promotion of mental health, prevention of mental disorders, and early identification, care, support, treatment and recovery of persons with mental disorders, according to national priorities and within their specific context;
  • The World Health Assembly is the decision-making body of WHO. It is attended by delegations from all WHO member-states and focuses on a specific health agenda prepared by the Executive Board;
  • India played a key role in getting mental disorders included in the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) list at the first Ministerial Conference on Healthy Lifestyles and Non-communicable Disease Control in Moscow last year. Pleading for its case, India argued that “like all non-communicable diseases, mental disorders required long term treatment and affected the quality of life”;
  • The principal non-communicable diseases are cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers and chronic respiratory diseases, which are the leading causes of preventable morbidity and disability, and currently cause over 60 per cent of global deaths, 80 per cent of which occur in developing countries. By 2030, the NCDs are estimated to contribute to 75 per cent of global deaths.
• Cyber 'superweapon' targets Iran
  • A Russian computer firm has discovered a new computer virus with unprecedented destructive potential that chiefly targets Iran and could be used as a “cyberweapon” by the West and Israel;
  • Kaspersky Lab, one of the world's biggest producers of anti-virus software, said its experts discovered the virus —known as Flame — during an investigation prompted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It said the main task of Flame is cyber espionage, meaning it steals information from infected machines including documents, screenshots and even audio recordings. It then sends the data to servers all over the world;
  • Iran appears to have been the main target of the attack and the announcement comes just a month after the Islamic Republic said it halted the spread of a data-deleting virus targeting computer servers in its oil sector;
  • Kaspersky said the virus was several times larger than the Stuxnet worm that was discovered in 2010 and targeted the Iranian nuclear programme, reportedly at the behest of Western or Israeli security agencies.
• Gas rebranded Green energy
  • Energy from gas power stations has been rebranded as a green, low-carbon source of power by a EUR80bn European Union programme, in a triumph of the deep-pocketed fossil fuel industry lobby over renewable forms of power;
  • The switch follows more than 18 months of intensive lobbying by the European gas industry, which is attempting to rebrand itself as a green alternative to nuclear and coal, and as lower cost than renewable forms of power such as wind and sun;
  • But green groups warned that relying on gas would raise energy prices and fail to tackle climate change, and could fatally stunt the growth of the renewables industry. Gas is a fossil fuel — but because it generates less carbon dioxide when burned than coal, gas industry lobbyists have been touting the fuel as a lower-carbon alternative to coal;
  • Further, funds that are earmarked for research and development of renewable energy could now end up being utilised in subsidising this well established fossil-fuel;
  • The gains of switching from coal to gas are short-lived — any gas-fired power stations constructed today would be expected to continue in operation for at least 25 years. That would mean decades of carbon poured into the atmosphere — while scientists and industry experts warn that global emissions must peak by 2020 in order to avoid the worst manifestations of climate change. The document has been agreed by member states.
• India and Pakistan discuss petro trade as Pakistan is keen to import furnace oil and diesel from India (for its power plants which is suffering and has hit manufacturing also)

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS & COLUMNS

• Read this article on food security and the politics of hunger in India
• Read this article about yet another UN backed panel to study global sustainability

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

• Why can't we grow back amputated organs like the Zebrafish?
  • In some animals like zebrafish (a vertebrate), star fish and ascidian (primitive marine animal), limbs or other organs get regenerated when amputated. Zebrafish regenerates a wide variety of tissues, including heart, fin, spinal cord and optic nerve and the regenerative process is much faster. For instance, if a fin in zebrafish is amputated, it grows back within a fortnight, while it is not so in the case of human beings;
  • With zebrafish being 70 per cent similar to humans at genomic level, scientists from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) are studying the bio-mechanism of regenerative process in that animal at the molecular level. They are also looking at star fish and ascidian, although non-vertebrates, to gain more insight into the role of proteins in the regeneration of tissue;
  • The CCMB team led by Dr. Mohammed M. Idris, has analysed the bio-mechanism of zebrafish caudal fin regeneration. It identified 96 proteins that are associated with regeneration of amputated tissue. These proteins were found to be directly linked with various molecular, biological and cellular functions;
  • The study of which gene brings about regeneration and the chance of its presence in humans is being studied.