Thursday, July 12, 2012

HEADLINES

• Underworld don Abu Salem will remain in India as the top Portugal Court has observed that it is not obliged to send him back to the European country due to lower court verdict on violation of deportation rules by Indian authorities
• World Population day is on July 11th every year

NATIONAL NEWS

• Monsoon advances, but the crop situation in Karnataka, Maharashtra worrisome
  • The south-west monsoon has covered the entire country in the last ten days but the crop situation remains worrisome in Karnataka and Maharashtra, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said. Sowing of coarse cereals has been hit hard due to delay and slow progress of monsoon in parts of the country;
  • The monsoon was deficient by 23 per cent. Karnataka and Maharashtra had received scanty rain so far and the position had not improved to a satisfactory level;
  • “There is a cause for concern about production of coarse cereals and drinking water in the two States. Elsewhere sowing is on in paddy, cotton and sugarcane and they are expected to pick up,” Mr. Pawar said;
  • Cultivation of groundnut and soyabean was expected to improve as there was good rain in parts of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat in the last two days;
  • The delay in arrival of monsoon and its slow progress has affected sowing of major kharif crops including paddy, pulses, oilseeds and coarse cereals. The rainy season is crucial for kharif season as only 40 per cent of cultivable area is irrigated.
• Education reaches children of migrant labourers
  • Taking advantage of the new Right to Education Act, an ambitious project for extending hand-holding support to the children of migrant brick kiln labourers in Nadbai block of Bharatpur district has connected the kids with the mainstream schooling after shifting the authorities’ emphasis away from the outdated non-formal education system;
  • Thousands of workers from far-off States such as Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, as well as those from the nearby areas, toil for long and erratic hours at about 100 brick kilns functioning in Nadbai block in the peak production period between October and February. Many of these brick kilns are situated along the Jaipur-Agra national highway;
  • Children displaced from their native places and deprived of proper care and education when their parents work at the kilns are the worst sufferers in an insensitive system in which the contractors hire the unorganised labourers and bring them with their families to Rajasthan for a few months. Young kids could neither get proper education in their own villages nor continue schooling as the migrants;
  • An advocacy group active in Nadbai block has taken up the cause of education of these children by utilising the RTE Act. With the Act giving statutory right to every child to go to school, activists attached to the group, Prayatn, convinced the Education Department officers that the alternative routes would not work for them;
  • The project for enrolment of children of brick kiln workers as regular students in the Government schools has so far benefited the kids staying with their parents at about 20 furnaces in 15 villages in the region. Their admissions to schools are facilitated through a constant dialogue of activists with the parents as well as school authorities;
  • The biggest issue faced is the dropout rate of such students. However, Prayatn has taken up the responsibility for bringing back the children to schools for admission to the next class after they come back from their native places in the next season of work.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

• China, Japan tensions flare over disputed islands
  • Japan on Wednesday lodged a formal protest with China, summoning its Ambassador in Tokyo, after three Chinese patrol boats were spotted in waters off disputed islands in the East China Sea, over which both countries claim sovereignty. The boats left the area after a warning from the coast guard;
  • The strain emerged as their Foreign Ministers met in Phnom Penh, on the sidelines of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) meeting, where China’s territorial disputes with many of its neighbours are in focus;
  • Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, who held talks with his Japanese counterpart Koichiro Gemba, “reaffirmed China’s principled position” and “stressed that the Diaoyu Islands and their affiliated islets have always been China’s territory since ancient times, over which China has indisputable sovereignty”, according to a statement;
  • The two countries have in recent months sparred over the islands, referred to by Japan as the Senkaku islands. Tensions rose further in recent days after Tokyo spoke of plans to “buy” the islands from a private developer, a move rejected by China as a provocation. In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Liu Weimin told reporters China “does not accept the representation lodged by Japan”, adding that the vessels had “entered into the waters under Chinese jurisdiction to conduct official duties in accordance with Chinese law”.
• China spruces up highway through Aksai Chin
  • Chinese officials have said they are close to completing the repaving of the Xinjiang-Tibet national highway, which runs through the disputed Aksai Chin region (India holds claims to it), for the first time in 50 years. The 2,143-km road runs from Yecheng county in Kashgar prefecture in Xinjiang south to Lhatse in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR);
  • The Xinjiang section of the road is 654.8 km in length. It is regarded as the highest traversable road in the world. Construction of the road began in 1951, and its completion in 1957 caught India by surprise, triggering tensions ahead of the 1962 conflict. The rebuilding of the road along with the earlier project of the high speed train through the region only increase the asymmetry of infrastructure between the countries in the region.
• Farm production needs to increase by 60% by 2050 according to UN agencies
  • World farm production must rise 60% by 2050 to meet the needs of a growing population but this has to happen in a “more sustainable way”, the U.N. food agency FAO and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Wednesday;
  • The two organisations said growth in production will come mainly from developing countries particularly latin american and sub-saharan countries but would be less vigorous than in recent years;
  • World farm production has grown at 2% a year in recent decades but the rate is expected to slow to 1.7%, the joint report said. Despite the slowdown, the rate is to exceed expected demographic growth, meaning that farm output per inhabitant will grow by 0.7% a year;
  • The calculations in the FAO-OECD report do not, however, take into account the rapid growth in the bio-fuels sector, with experts estimating that world production of bio-ethanol and bio-diesel will nearly double by 2021.
• Russia has sent a large flotilla of warships to Syria even as NATO is conducting war games in the region. The Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 comprising Turkish, German and French warships is conducting anti-terrorist drills not far from the Syrian borders

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS & COLUMNS

• Read this article on the sudden reason that we have witnessed a population decline in Nagaland
• Read this editorial on the HRD Ministry's move to relook the regulations on deemed universities
• Read this article about the ouster of the President of Paraguay
• Read this article on the how demographics play an important role on the internet

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

• World's reefs in rapid decline
  • More than 2,600 of the world's top marine scientists recently warned coral reefs around the world were in rapid decline and urged immediate global action on climate change to save what remains;
  • Coral reefs provide food and work for countless coastal inhabitants globally, generate significant revenues through tourism and function as a natural breakwater for waves and storms, they said;
  • In the Caribbean 75-85 per cent of the coral cover has been lost in the last 35 years. Even the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the best-protected reef ecosystem on the planet, has witnessed a 50 per cent decline in the last 50 years;
  • More than 85 per cent of reefs in Asia's ‘Coral Triangle’ are directly threatened by human activities such as coastal development, pollution, and overfishing, according to a report launched at the forum;
  • The Coral Triangle covers Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, The Solomon Islands, and East Timor and contains nearly 30 per cent of the world's reefs and more than 3,000 species of fish.
• A bacterium that did not live on arsenic
  • Life as we know it does not include a bacterium that is able to live off arsenic, according to two papers published online by the journal Science;
  • In December 2010, a sensational discovery of a unique bacterium isolated from the toxic waters of Mono Lake in California was announced in the same journal. The bacterial strain, GFAJ-1, was substituting “arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth,” declared Felisa Wolfe-Simon, then at the NASA Astrobiology Institute in the U.S., and 11 other scientists in their paper;
  • Life forms on Earth rely on six elements to build their molecules — oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. There was, it seemed, at least one organism capable of substituting arsenic, which is usually toxic, when phosphorus was not available. The GFAJ-1 bacterium was able to use arsenic in this manner in its DNA and proteins, according to Dr. Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues;
  • However, new research clearly showed that the bacterium could not substitute arsenic for phosphorus to survive. Instead, the two papers revealed that the medium used to growth the organism in the original experiments contained enough phosphate contamination to support its growth;
  • This bacterium was likely to be adept at scavenging phosphate under harsh conditions, which would help to explain why it could grow even when arsenic was present within the cells. But, the bacterium’s extraordinary resistance and its arsenic tolerance mechanisms would be of interest for further study.
• New science policy from 2013
  • The government is expected to unveil a new science policy next year which will give primacy to global competitiveness on scientific discoveries and giving affordable solutions through science;
  • The emphasis of Policy will be to provide a renewed impetus for the science and technology sector while creating a vibrant innovation ecosystem that is intertwined with the overall S&T strategy;
  • The new policy would be framed with the aim of providing a transition from perception to evidence-based approaches for investment decisions and gaining technological self-reliance through substantial budgetary support to S&T sector.
• Read this article on decoding the Banana genome and its benefits