Wednesday, july 10th, 2013

HEADLINES

• Supreme court blasts govt apathy to curb acid sale
• Chinese army took away Indian camera
• RBI, SEBI step in to curb speculation

NATIONAL NEWS

• CIC turns down perarivalan's RTI plea
  • The Central Information Commission has held that the reasons for the rejection of his mercy petition cannot be disclosed to A.G. Perarivalan, death row convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, as they were part of the advice tendered by the Council of Ministers to the President.
  • Noting that the advice was protected from disclosure under Article 74(2) of the Constitution, the CIC said: “The Right to Information Act cannot take away the constitutional protection, and therefore the disclosure under the RTI Act has to be in consonance with Article[s] 72 and 74 (2)…”

• Japanese Emperor and empress to visit India
  • In a message to the wider world, and also to its own people, about the importance of its ties with India, Japan on Tuesday announced the first-ever visit to India by its Emperor and Empress.
  • The Emperor of Japan is the titular head of the country, but his overseas visits are carefully calibrated and form an important part of Tokyo’s statecraft. For instance, China has been an important country for Japan after World War II. But the Emperor visited the country in 1992 as Tokyo felt its ties were at a take-off stage

• States urged to set up disaster management body
  • National Disaster Management Authority Vice-Chairman M. Sashidhar Reddy exhorted the State government to constitute a disaster management body at the State level to exclusively deal with prevention of loss of life during calamities.
  • Mr. Reddy said the Centre was coming up with two legislations relating to real estate and engineers in the coming days and the States should emulate the guidelines to ensure that safe structures were constructed in future. “There should be a plan, a standard operating procedure to counter any eventuality,”

• Lighthouses to woo tourists
  • Soon, several lighthouses across the country will become tourist spots, thanks to a joint venture between the Ministry of Shipping and the Ministry of Tourism.
  • As many as 15 out of 185 lighthouses along the Indian coastwould be promoted as tourist spots on a pilot basis.
  • These lighthouses would be developed using a public private partnership model. At present, the Ministry of Tourism has given in principle approval for the sanction of Rs. 5 crore for the pilot project.

• Global warming could do worse damage to J&K than Uttrakand
  • Global warming, coupled by unplanned construction boom and industrial layout, could spell doom “worse than that of Uttarakhand” for the ecologically fragile Jammu and Kashmir, experts have warned at a recent meeting of the Environment Committee (EC) of the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Council.
  • Quoting the year 2010 projections conducted by the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment (INCCA), Director of Environment and Remote Sensing Suresh Chug told the Upper House committee last week that the Himalayan region could experience increase of one degree Celsius to 4.5 degree Celsius in its average maximum temperature by 2030.

• Delhi's take find few takers in Thimpu
  • Even as Indian officials were at pains to clarify that New Delhi’s decision to withdraw subsidies to Bhutan was purely ‘technical’ and had no political subtext, few seem to be buying it in Thimphu.
  • With cooking gas and kerosene prices doubling and tripling respectively, India’s actions have been greeted with unprecedented criticism on social media, and even those who are blaming their own government for mishandling ties do not buy Delhi’s explanation.

• India commits to helping Nepal elections
  • the first high-level Indian visit in two years, also yielded a memorandum of understanding which commits 764 vehicles to support Nepal’s Constituent Assembly elections, more than 700 of which will go to the security agencies and the rest to the Election Commission.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

• Latvia gets green light to enter euro zone
  • The tiny Baltic state of Latvia received the green light from its European partners on Tuesday to become the 18th member of the eurozone from next year.
  • And despite the eurozone’s current troubles, membership would bring with it benefits, the Prime Minister said, pointing to lower interest rates, lower currency conversion costs and increased foreign investment.
  • Latvia emerged from a crisis in 2008-09 to become the EU’s fastest-growing economy, having posted GDP growth of more than five per cent year-on-year in both 2011 and 2012.

• France grants asylum to femen activist Shevchenko
  • The head of the French branch of radical feminist group Femen — known for its topless protests — Ukrainian Inna Shevchenko (23) has said Paris had granted her request for political asylum.

• Indian ocean security pact signed
  • India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives will share capacities and information to address threats to maritime security — such as piracy, terrorism and gunrunning —in the Indian Ocean and to pursue sustainable development of maritime environment.
  • Such development, would also help fishermen and others who also depended on the maritime environment for their livelihood, besides equipping the countries better to deal with emergencies, such as cyclones or a tsunami.

• Australia switches on telescope to explore universe
  • Australia said it had taken a major step toward the ambitious Square Kilometre Array (SKA) astronomy project with the switching of a test telescope to explore the origins of the universe.
  • “In addition to helping us see back to the origins of the universe, the array will also help us to understand the interaction between the Earth and the Sun, give early warning of destructive solar flares and study our galaxy and other galaxies.”
  • Australia was jointly awarded the SKA contract with South Africa and New Zealand last year in a surprise multi-site decision. Construction is expected to start in 2016, with preliminary operations to be under way by 2020.
  • It will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced modern instruments and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universe’s origins some 14 billion years ago.

OPINION/EDITORIALS

• Article by Harish khare on CBI's autonomy
• A must read article on food security
• A navin chawla article on elections in Bhutan
• Editorial on Bodh gaya tragedy
• Editorial on the snowden controversy

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

• RBI tells firms to buy dollars from single PSU bank
  • With the rupee depreciating sharply against the dollar, the Reserve Bank of India, on Tuesday, ordered state-owned oil companies to purchase their dollar requirement from a single public sector bank for every daily transaction so as to curb volatility in the currency.

• RBI, SEBI step in to curb speculation
  • The country’s monetary authority and its market regulator moved in to take the speculative fizz out of the currency market, helping to stabilise the tottering rupee
  • In a parallel action, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), too, stepped in to tighten the exposure norms for currency derivatives.