Monday, 11th june, 2012

HEADLINES

• IITs faculty federation rejects new format
• Former army officer kills self, and family in US

NATIONAL NEWS

• Agriculture ministry closely monitoring advance of monsoon
  • Agriculture experts and officials are closely monitoring the advance of the southwest monsoon, which is crucial not only for the important summer kharif crop but also the socio-economic wellbeing of the country.
  • “The Ministry has plans ready for various agro-ecologies and can advise farmers on delayed monsoon sowing, deficient rains, arid, semi-arid and drought-prone zones,”
  • The delay of five days in the onset of monsoon over Kerala and its gingerly movement has made Central government officials sit up and sound the State governments to be ready with contingency plans that advise farmers on what seeds to sow, the cropping methodology to adopt in scarce conditions, how to control unwanted pests and take care of cattle, fodder and feed.
  • The monsoon is delayed and the El Nino effect might kick off in August, but the rain is most likely to be normal in July, the most crucial month.
    
    
• Defence secretary in pakistan for talks on siachen
  • Defence Secretary Shashikant Sharma arrived in Pakistan on Sunday for crucial talks over the military standoff on the Siachen glacier against the backdrop of calls to demilitarise the world's highest battlefield following an avalanche that killed 139 people.
  • The Pakistani side will be led by Defence Secretary Nargis Sethi, a close confidant of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.
    
    
• India to host alternative International Aids conference
  • When stakeholders from across the world converge at Washington next month to participate in the International AIDS Conference (IAC) to share their experience and evaluations and to influence both popular and official perceptions and practices for curbing HIV/AIDS, India will host a parallel event for those who cannot make it there
  • The event will be organised inKolkata by Durbar Mahila Samanway Samiti (DMSS) — an umbrella organisation of over 65,000 sex workers of West Bengal in collaboration with the Global Network of Sex Work Project (NSWP). The U.S. government's strict travel restrictions for sex workers will bar many of them from attending the event,
  • There will be satellite communication between the two conferences so the Conference Hub in Kolkata will complement the main conference by facilitating sex workers' and other stakeholders' participation.
    
    
• Myristica swamps, a vanishing ecosystem in the swamps
  • Nestled in the deep valleys of the Western Ghats that is home to a rich diversity of flora and fauna are the vestiges of a pristine habitat that could yield precious information about evolutionary biology and climate change.
  • Scientists from the Centre for Earth Science Studies here and the Agharkar Research Institute (ARI) in Pune are studying the Myristica swamps, a vanishing ecosystem, now largely confined to 53 patches in the Kulathupuzha and Anchal forest ranges and the Shendurney wildlife sanctuary in Kerala.
  • The Myristica swamps are tropical fresh water swamp forests with an abundance of Myristica trees, the most primitive of the flowering plants on earth. The evergreen, water-tolerant trees have dense stilt roots helping them stay erect in the thick, black, wet alluvial soil.
  • “As of now, the Myristica swamps of the Western Ghats are fragmented, with Kerala holding a major share of this habitat. Leaving aside a few more patches in Karnataka and Goa, this exceptional wetland has almost disappeared from the Indian subcontinent due to the climatic vicissitudes over the last 18,000 to 50,000 years, a period referred to as the Late Pleistocene period,”
    
    
• Dynamic e – textbooks on the anvil
  • A project of the State Institute of Educational Technology (SIET) to develop ‘dynamic e-textbooks,' which dovetail text, audio, video, graphics, animation, and reference tools into a digital textbook, has been given in-principle nod by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development.
  • Initially, these textbooks would be available on the SIET web portal and later, through computer/tablet devices that the government provides to schools in the State of Kerala”.

INTERNATIONAL

• Flame creators make virus commit suicide
  • The creators of the world's most complicated espionage virus, Flame, have sent a ‘suicide' command that removes it from some infected computers. Security firm Symantec caught the command using booby-trapped computers set up to watch Flame's actions
  • Symantec has kept an eye on Flame using so-called ‘honeypot' computers that report what happens when they are infected with a malicious program. According to Symantec, the ‘suicide' command was “designed to completely remove Flame from the compromised computer,”
  • Flame came to light last week after the U.N.'s telecom body asked for help in spotting a virus found stealing data from many PCs in the Middle East. Analysts who have investigated the virus said Flame, also called Skywiper, was one of the most complex computer espionage threats ever seen.

• Spain relieved but angry over the humiliating deal
  • Spain became the fourth and largest of the 17 countries that use Europe's common currency to request a bailout a big blow to a nation that a few years ago took pride as the continent's economic superstar only to see it become the hot spot in the eurozone debt crisis. Its economy is the eurozone's fourth largest after Germany, France and Italy.
  • The amount of the rescue fund, if all is tapped, amounts to 21,000 of new debt for each person in the nation of 47 million where the average annual salary for those with work is about the same amount and the unemployment rate for those under age 25 is 52 per cent.

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS AND COLUMNS

• Important article to read on Siachen issue
• A nice debate on the recent controversy surrounding the NCERT cartoon fiasco
• Editorial on the alternative HRD ministry is trying to bring in foreign universities
• Editorial on Indian slums

ECONOMICS

• Another article to read about IPV6