Friday, July 13th, 2012

HEADLINES

• Shettar sworn in as chief minister
• Pakistan supreme court asks new prime minister to open case against president Zardari
• Wrestler turned actor Dara singh dead
• Earthquake of magnitude 6.1 hits kashmir with Hindukush as epicentre
• Tamil computing wizard Anto peter dead

NATIONAL NEWS

• Sex workers should not be allowed to operate, Centre tells supreme court
  • The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to examine the Centre’s plea that sex workers should not be allowed to operate in the country under the cloak of working “with dignity” as suggested by a panel, since that would be contrary to the statute prohibiting the world’s oldest trade.
  • The Centre’s move was, however, opposed by senior counsel Jayant Bhushan, acting as an amicus curiae, and Anand Grover who submitted that the Act only prohibited brothel activities and punitive action against pimps. In other words, counsel contended that if a sex worker carries out the activities on her own volition, then it was not an illegal Act
  • “We may reiterate that this exercise has been done by us because the word ‘life’ in Article 21 of the Constitution of India has been interpreted in several decisions of this Court to mean a right to ‘life with dignity’….. It is only if a sex worker is able to earn a livelihood through technical skills rather than by selling her body that she can live with dignity, and that is why we have requested all the States and the Union of India to submit schemes for giving technical training to these sex workers,”
    
    
• Khar non commital on action against Jundal info
  • Pakistan on Thursday remained non-committal on whether it would act on information shared by India on Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist Zabiuddin Ansari alias Abu Jundal, days after New Delhi pushed Islamabad to take swift action against the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks of November 2008.
    
    
• NBA working towards joining washington accord
  • The National Board of Accreditation (NBA) is working towards joining the Washington Accord, which will enable Indian engineering graduates to take up the profession in Western countries.
  • At present, while they can work in the West, Indian graduates are not allowed to practise engineering as the degree courses here are not recognised by many countries
  • Signed in 1989, the Washington Accord is an international agreement among bodies responsible for accrediting engineering degree programmes.
  • It recognises substantial equivalency of programmes accredited by those bodies and recommends that graduates of programmes accredited by any of the signatory bodies be recognised by other bodies as having met the academic requirements for entry to the practice of engineering.
  • The NBA was established by All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) as an autonomous body for periodic evaluations of technical institutions and programmes.

• India refuses to hike cancer drug price
  • In a hearing on Capitol Hill that slipped under the radar of media scrutiny, a top Obama administration official blatantly pressed the case for the deployment of American lobbying power to keep the price of cancer drug Nexavar closer to the $5,000-per-month-mark that it now sells at in India.
  • In doing so, Deputy Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), Teresa Rea, was equally pushing for Congressional approval for the Obama White House’s strong-arm tactics to bully Indian manufacturers of Nexavar’s generic equivalent into giving up their plan to sell their product at a much more affordable $157 per month.
  • A principal stakeholder that would appear to be deriving vast profits under the aegis of the U.S. President’s protection is none other than pharmaceuticals giant Bayer AG. Following India’s decision not to yield to the clout of the deep-pocketed Bayer, whose earnings touched $3.4 billion last year, Indian pharmaceutical Natco Pharma obtained permission to sell the generic drug and pay a royalty of six per cent on the revenue derived to Bayer.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

• China, US avoid rocking boat on South china sea
  • The United States and China on Thursday pledged to ease strains in their relationship emerging amid renewed disputes over the South China Sea and Chinese concerns over Washington’s “pivot” to Asia.

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS & COLUMNS

• Another article on the recent controversy with cartoons in the NCERT
• Nice article on the problems caused by the American sanction on Iran
• The debate on the recent controversies with the Mumbai police
• Editorial on the recent financial stability report by the RBI

ECONOMY

• Two – tier structure to monitor ppp
  • The Union Cabinet, on Thursday, approved the setting up of an institutional mechanism for effective monitoring of the contract performance of projects under the public-private partnership (PPP) mode to ensure timely completion
  • As per the Cabinet decision on the Planning Commission’s proposal, the institutional mechanism for monitoring of PPP projects will have a two-tier scanning structure by way of a ‘Projects monitoring unit’ (PMU) and a ‘Performance review unit’ (PRU) in view of the fact that a number of infrastructural development projects are likely to be routed through the partnership mode for implementation.
  • To ensure timely completion of PPP projects, while the PMU will monitor their performance at the project authority level, the PRU will also oversee their implementation at the Ministry or state government level. Thereafter, as per the mechanism, the PMU will prepare a report and submit it to the PRU within 15 days of the close of each relevant month.