Sunday, June 3rd, 2012

HEADLINES

• Anna Hazare, Baba Ramdev to fast in delhi today
• New Delhi MLA shot at; Critically injured
• Life term for Hosnie Mubarak, while his two sons are aquitted

NATIONAL NEWS

• Manipal university mulls first Indian campus in China
  • Manipal University is in talks with Chinese officials to open the first campus of an Indian university in China
  • The Karnataka-based private university is exploring a tie-up with two Chinese universities, Tianjin University and Shanghai's Tongji University, to set up what would be China's first all-English educational institution that will provide training in Information Technology (IT) and in the sciences.
    
    
• Pakistani businessmen push for tourist visas
  • A number of businessmen and traders who have descended from Pakistan for the five-day Shimla Mega Mart festival have demanded tourist visas for their nationals since the people-to-people contact and business and investment opportunities are increasing between the two countries.
  • More than three dozen traders who have come along with counterparts from Egypt, Afghanistan and many States from India claimed that they would like to make the business interactions between various industrial chambers in India and Pakistan a regular feature. The Shimla Mega Mart festival is being organised by the PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry
    
    
• India cautious on Korean nuclear park offer as posco hangs fire
  • Even as its mega investment plan for the Posco steel plant is hanging fire, South Korea has sought permission for another big ticket item — a nuclear park. But New Delhi is moving cautiously and would like Seoul to first set up a technology demonstrator or a small civil nuclear plant
  • Indian officials said they favoured a technology demonstrator unit because their atomic energy counterparts were unfamiliar with South Korean reactors.
  • While these two mega projects are still in the pipeline, India and South Korea are renegotiating the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) signed in 2009. Since then, both countries have made better offers to other countries in some product lines and want to accommodate these in the India-Korea CEPA
    
    
• New science and technology policy to be unveiled this year
  • India will formulate a new science and technology policy this year, updating an earlier document, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced
  • Dr. Singh, the first Prime Minister to be appointed general president of the ISCA for 2012-13, expressed the hope that scientists would use the centenary year events to reflect on “how we can frame the science and technology policy that reflects our aspiration for making science a spearhead of development in our country.”
  • The theme of this year's congress is ‘Science for shaping the future of India.'
  • He also announced a special scheme for 100 doctoral research fellowship in the public-private-partnership mode, between the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Confederation of Indian Industry, and another scheme to invite 25 research scholars from neighbouring countries to undertake doctoral research in India.
    
    
• India condemns syrian killings
  • India joined 41 other countries at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva to vote for a resolution “strongly condemning'' the recent El-Houleh incident, which resulted in the death of over a hundred civilians including women and children.
  • It urged all sides to comply with their obligations under the Annan Plan, a point made forcefully in April at the UNSC with External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna calling up former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan before the vote to underscore New Delhi's support for the initiative led by him.

• Tagore's poetry comes alive in colour
  • Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's prose and poetry burst out in a riot of colours on scrolls painted by the wandering patua artists of Bengal. Each episodic narrative is accompanied by songs penned by the patuas on the themes embedded in each drawing. “Tagore Tells and the Patua Paints” is a project that enables the reinterpretation of Tagore's texts by the chitrakars or patua artists.

INTERNATIONAL

• Russia backs syrian government in Houla issue
  • Russia has backed the Syrian government's stand on massacre in the region of Houla saying the bloodshed was the result of foreign assistance to rebels.
  • Referring to a probe conducted by Syrian authorities in the killing of more than 100 people in Houla the Russian statement said it showed that “the crime was an act well planned by the rebels in order to undermine political solution to the Syrian crisis