Saturday, June 16, 2012

HEADLINES

• UPA announces Pranab Mukherjee as its presidential candidate; NDA yet to announce its decision; Mamata Banerjee sulks and says game is not over yet
• YSR Congress wins 15 out of 18 assembly seats in Andhra Pradesh
• Rajat Gupta, one of the most successful Indian-Americans on the Wall Street, was found guilty on Friday of passing confidential market information to Galleon hedge-fund founder Raj Rajaratnam in one of America's biggest insider trading cases

NATIONAL NEWS

• ICFOSS to promote free financial accounting software
  • The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) has decided to adopt and promote GNU-Khata, a FOSS-based financial accounting software developed by a team based in IIT-Bombay;
  • Supported under the National Mission for Education through Information Communication Technology (NMEICT) project, GNU-Khata is a multi-user, Web-based financial accounting application built on open source platforms and freely downloadable by any user;
  • Besides supporting the final stages of development of GNU-Khata, ICFOSS will also help in suggesting new features, evaluating and testing the application, translating it into Malayalam and other Indian languages, providing promotion and capacity building, and exploring alternative deployment modes like the Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Kerala is the first state in India to move completely to open source software in all its Govt activities.
• Delhi Govt likely to move the SC against Haryana for not delivering water Munak Canal which was built by Haryana with funds from Delhi to address its water shortage

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

• Exemption from Iranian oil sanctions only for 180 days, says the US
  • Clarifying that the exemption from the sanctions imposed on Iran, given to seven countries, including India, by the United States, is valid for only six months, a senior U.S. official has hoped that these countries would continue to reduce their dependence on Iranian oil;
  • The clarification came days after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted that these countries have “significantly” reduced their dependence on Iranian oil.
• Egypt activists see a military coup in court order
  • Egypt's pro-democracy activists are calling Thursday's ruling by the country's highest court that dissolved an elected Lower House of Parliament but allowed a Prime Minister in former strongman Hosni Mubarak's Cabinet to contest presidential elections a “de facto military coup” that has set the stage for the next phase of a meandering revolution;
  • Former presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abul-Fotouh, a soft Islamist who had projected himself as a bridge between Muslim hardliners and diehard liberals, said the judgment that followed an earlier ruling, which gave the army sweeping powers to carry out arbitrary arrests, was nothing short of a “military coup”;
  • Egypt's young activists, who were at the heart of the uprising that brought down Mr. Mubarak, agreed that Thursday's rulings marked a major assault on their aspirations for democracy. “We are now legally, constitutionally, and directly under military rule/dictatorship,” tweeted Gigi Ibrahim, a young activist who emerged as one of the stars of last year's 18-day anti-Mubarak revolt. Much of the anger among the liberal campaigners is directed against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) — the military clique that is running the country, and which now seems ready to define Egypt's post-Mubarak Constitution.
• Woman on China's space mission
  • China will launch its Shenzhou-9 manned mission, carrying the first Chinese woman into space, on Saturday evening in a major step towards the country's plan to build its own space station by 2020;
  • The Shenzhou-9 spacecraft is scheduled to take off from the Jiuquan launch centre in the desert of north-western Gansu province at 6.37 p.m. on Saturday, officials said. The spacecraft will, during the 13-day mission, dock with the Tiangong-1, or “heavenly palace”, space laboratory module which has been in orbit since September 2011. An unmanned docking mission was carried out successfully by Shenzhou-8 in November last year;
  • 33-year-old Ms. Liu Yang, a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force Major, is the first female astronout from China and will go up in the Shenzhou-9. Ms. Liu will be accompanied by astronauts Liu Wang and Jing Haipeng, who will become China's first astronaut to travel into space twice.

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS & COLUMNS

• Read this article on Japan-India joint naval exercise called JIMEX 12
• Read this article on diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 and the impact it had on the Indian struggle for independence. Very important article from an examination perspective
• Read this article on disability activism in India
• If you have time, read this article on the Rio+20 conference
• If you have time, read this article on why the RBI should permit currency hedging in India