HEADLINES
- Army called out as violence in Assam escalates
- Anna Hazare to start fasting again
NATIONAL
NEWS
- India asks Beijing art gallery to censor art show over gujarat video
- Beijing’s most well-known art galleries received a censorship request of a different kind: it was told to remove a work deemed “offensive” not by the Communist Party’s censors, but by the Indian government officials.
- The “Indian Highway” contemporary art show, curated by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist of London’s Serpentine Gallery, has been displayed in more than four countries since its 2008 inauguration in the British capital, travelling to Oslo, Lyon and Rome.
- The biggest ever display of Indian art in China, it has attracted more than a thousand visitors daily and as many as 10,000 guests on one weekend, according to organisers and Indian officials.
- The 2003 video by Tejal Shah, called “I Love My India,” focuses, according to a description by the Serpentine Gallery, on “the ignorance and lack of understanding of the genocide against the Muslim minority in Gujarat in 2002.”
- Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) officials told reporters in New Delhi that the video, which had “random interviews” with Indian youth, had some “politically controversial overtones.” “The MEA took it up with the organisers who have removed the clip,”
- Bio hydrogen produced from waste water, industrial effluents
- scientists from the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) here have a developed a know-how to produce bio-hydrogen, a renewable energy, through wastewater and industrial effluents.
- By adopting a process called ‘dark fermentation’, the scientists have produced bio-hydrogen (hydrogen gas) using the carbon source available in the wastewater.
- He said the process developed at IICT would be cheaper than the electrolysis method of producing hydrogen.
- BEEC had focussed on production of energy (bio-hydrogen) by treating effluents. The process basically involved conversion of the pollution load (COD-chemical oxygen demand) to produce bio-hydrogen.
- Andhra pradesh to host world meet on prison administration
- The Centre preferred Andhra Pradesh in the light of hectic competition from other States. The selection comes close on the State hosting the prestigious Conference of Parties (COP 11), the global biodiversity conference and delegates from close to two dozen countries converge here to discuss the existing processes in prison administration and the scope for reform.
- Another Tritium leak at Rawatbhata nuclear station
- Yet another leak has been reported within a month at the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS) at Rawatbhata near Kota, exposing workers to tritium radiation, and causing concern among the country’s nuclear energy watchers. The senior management at Rawatbhata, a site getting ready for India’s second-biggest Nuclear Fuel Complex (NFC) with a capacity of 500 tonnes a year, however, has dismissed the leak as a “routine’ matter
- The NRC, or the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, website describes tritium as a “mildly” radioactive isotope of hydrogen. “Tritium emits a weak form of radiation, a low-energy beta particle similar to an electron. The tritium radiation doesn’t travel very far in air, and cannot penetrate the skin. Nuclear power plants routinely and safely release dilute concentrations of tritiated water,”
- Child labour consistently increasing in unorganised sector
- The first-ever protocol on child labour-free Rajasthan to be evolved in consultation with a multitude of stakeholders will be based on the convergence of different departments and agencies working on the issue and coordination among the officials looking after different spheres of child labour, child protection, rehabilitation of rescued children and prosecution of offenders.
- The strategy for devising an action plan to control child labour, which would later be used for the protocol’s formulation, was discussed at a day-long workshop organised jointly by the Rajasthan State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (SCPCR) and Action Aid
- a protocol on child labour was adopted in Delhi in 2009 on the Delhi High Court’s direction and the role of nodal agency was accorded to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. Since all legislations define a child rather than a child labour, authorities face a problem in identifying and rescuing the kids forced to work,
- Supreme court bans tourism in core areas of tiger reserves
- To protect tigers, the Supreme Court on Tuesday banned all tourism activities in the core areas of the tiger reserve forests.
- Giving three weeks — as the last opportunity — to those States that have not yet notified the core areas and filed affidavits, the Bench imposed Rs. 10,000 in costs on them.
- Over 500 new border out posts will be set up: Chidambaram
- Home Minister P. Chidambaram on Tuesday said over 500 new border out posts (BOPs) would be constructed along international borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh to check infiltration and cross border movement of terrorists.
- EU allows treaty talks to allow copyright waiver for print disabilities
- The European Union is holding up a treaty to allow books and other printed works to be converted into a format accessible to the visually impaired and other print disabled people without seeking the permission of the copyright holder.
- India, and most other developing countries, strongly support such a legally binding treaty currently being negotiated at a World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) meeting in Geneva. However, non-governmental organisation sources at that summit say that the EU is stalling the treaty by placing unreasonable restrictions on how copyrighted works are to be converted, and by whom
- Accessible formats would include Braille, electronic text and audio versions of books, making Western publishers' jittery about piracy fears. Hence, some countries are demanding stringent tracking mechanisms and legal requirements that activists say will effectively block access to disabled people in developing countries — where more than 85 per cent of them live.
- “In India, our Parliament recently passed an amendment to our copyright law that grants persons with disabilities, and those who are working for them, a strong yet simply-worded right to have equal access to copyrighted works as sighted persons.”
- Kerala slips, punjab moves up in educational development index ranking
- Punjab has replaced Kerala as the best in the composite educational development index (EDI), to be among the top three States. It is now ranked third, with Puducherry and Lakshadweep occupying the first two slots.
- The study, conducted in the 35 States and Union Territories by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, shows that Punjab jumped four places, from the seventh last time. Kerala, which stood third last year, has gone down to fifth, and Tamil Nadu moved up to the fourth rank.
- The study, ‘Elementary Education in India: Progress towards Universal Elementary Education,’ is based on the data received from 1.36 million schools in 637 districts. At the bottom are Bihar, Assam, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
- India pruning mission in unsafe syria
- With indiscriminate violence having arrived in Damascus, India is thinning down its mission in Syria and evacuating family members of those who will remain.
- Although Syria is home to displaced Palestinians and Iraqis, besides people of many other nationalities and faiths, there were only 900 Indians when powerful bomb blasts starting rocking Damascus. Now there are about 100 left including the embassy staff and a few from Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
- Railways to install biotoilets
- All trains could soon have bio-toilets, with the Ministry of Rural Development offering to bear half the total cost — Rs. 500 crore — of installing them.
- Rural development Minister Jairam Ramesh said his Ministry would pay 50 per cent of the cost of retrofitting all 50,000 existing train coaches with green toilets, provided that the Railways pay the rest of the bill.
- All new rail coaches would also have bio-toilets made by the Defence Research and Development Organisatio
INTERNATIONAL
NEWS
- Protesting monks not men of religion says Panchen lama
- The Beijing-backed Eleventh Panchen Lama has appeared to hit out at Tibetan monks who have set themselves on fire in recent months by describing protesting monks as not being “men of religion” in rare comments on the self-immolations
- The Panchen Lama, Gyancain Norbu, is seen by many Tibetans as a controversial figure. He was appointed with Beijing’s approval in 1995 in place of Gendun Choekyi Nyima, who was chosen by the Dalai Lama as the eleventh reincarnation and was later disappeared. In 2010, Norbu was appointed by Beijing to its top legislative body, and has increasingly been promoted as the leading figure of Tibetan Buddhism in China.
- On the trail of a smile
- Archaeologists unearthed a skeleton in a rare state of preservation in Florence in a crucial step towards unravelling the mystery of the identity of the woman with the most enigmatic smile in the world.
- Several bodies have been discovered in the hunt to find the mortal remains of Lisa Gherardini, the Florentine noblewoman widely believed to have served as the muse for Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”.
- Del Giocondo is thought to have commissioned the portrait from the Renaissance artist, and though there is little proof, most art historians agree that Lisa Gherardini served as the primary model for the bewitching painting.
- Meet reflects HIV challenges
- U.S. will contribute an additional $157 million to the fight against HIV-AIDS, even as a constellation of celebrity speakers at the ongoing International AIDS Conference here admitted that the world continued to face serious challenges in halting the spread of the epidemic.
- India found specific mention as a nation with one of the largest HIV-positive populations, when Ms. Clinton said that along with South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana, India may be able to provide more and better care by committing more of its own resources to the cause.
EDITORIALS,
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