current affairs january 2013
National
Mamata govt. sitting on rights
panel report to curb crime against women
Even as the Chief Minister urged the Centre to enact stringent laws to curb
violence against women, the
Mamata Banerjee government has been sitting on the recommendations of the
West Bengal Human Rights
Commission submitted. “The Commission is firmly of the view that the State,
having regard to its glorious
tradition of protecting women’s honour, should bring in amendments to make
Section 354 of the Indian Penal
Code more compatible with human rights norms.” Section 354 deals with
assault or use of criminal force on a
woman with intent to outrage her modesty. Justice Ganguly said Odisha and
Andhra Pradesh had amended
Section 354, making the offence non-bailable and mandating higher
punishment. The punishment for an
offence under Section 354 (two years’ imprisonment), which is cognizable
but bailable, is a “mockery.”
World's largest solar
telescope coming up in Ladakh
India
is expected to start building the world's largest solar telescope on the icy
heights of Ladakh to study the
sun's
atmosphere and understand the formation of sun-spots and their decay process.
The Rs 300-crore
project
is expected to come up at either Hanle or Merak, which is very near to the
Ladakh's Pangong lake
along
the Line of Actual Control with China. Currently, the world's largest solar
telescope is the McMath-
Pierce
Solar Telescope with an aperture size of 1.6 metres in Kitt Peak National
Observatory at Arizona in
the
US. The telescope, with an aperture size of two meters, is planned to be
completed by 2017 and will be
the
largest such facility in the world at least till 2020 when US is expected to
commission its four-meter
telescope
at Hawaii. Most of the back-end instruments of the telescope would be made
in-house and the
instrument
for night time observations would be developed in collaboration with Hamburg
Observatory in
Germany.
International:
Barack Obama re-nominates
Indian American as federal judge
Indian-American
Srikanth Srinivasan is among the 33 federal judges re-nominated by the US
President
Barack
Obama for the US Court of Appeals. Srinivasan is the only Indian American
re-nominated by Obama
for
the District of Columbia Circuit. Srinivasan was born in Chandigarh, and grew
up in Lawrence, Kansas.
He
received his BA with honors and distinction in 1989 from Stanford University
and his JD (Juris Doctor)
with
distinction in 1995 from Stanford Law School, where he was elected to Order of
the Coif and served as
an
editor of the Stanford Law Review.
World’s longest subway
system boosts China’s public transport push
China came out with a new policy to boost usage of public transport, days
after the capital, Beijing, put into
operation four subway lines with a combined length of 70 km — whose
addition makes the sprawling 16-line
Beijing subway system the world’s longest. The new lines take the total
length of the subway network past
442 km exceeding the around 400 km lengths of the metro systems in Shanghai
and London.
Turkey lifts ban on
thousands of books
From
communist works to a comic book, thousands of titles banned by Turkey over the
decades were taken
off
the restricted list, thanks to a government reform. In July, the parliament
adopted a bill stipulating that any
decision
taken before 2012 to block the sale and distribution of published work would be
voided if no court
chose
to confirm the ruling within six months. Among them were several communist
works such as the
"Communist
Manifesto" written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as writings
by Soviet tyrant
Joseph
Stalin and Russia's revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Others included a
comic book, an atlas, a
report
on the state of human rights in Turkey and an essay on the Kurds.
Technology
FDA approves first new
tuberculosis drug in 40 years
The US Food and Drug administration has approved a Johnson & Johnson
tuberculosis drug that is the first
new medicine to fight the deadly infection in more than four decades. The
agency approved J&J's pill,
Sirturo, for use with older drugs to fight a hard-to-treat strain of
tuberculosis that has not responded to other
medications. However, the agency cautioned that the drug carries risks of
potentially deadly heart problems
and should be prescribed carefully by doctors. Roughly one-third of the
world's population is estimated to be
infected with the bacteria causing tuberculosis. The disease is rare in the
US, but kills about 1.4 million
people a year worldwide. Of those, about 150,000 succumb to the
increasingly common drug-resistant forms
of the disease. About 60% of all cases are concentrated in China, India,
Russia and Eastern Europe.
Sirturo, known chemically as bedaquiline, is the first medicine
specifically designed for treating multidrugresistant
tuberculosis. That's a form of the disease that cannot be treated with at
least two of the four primary
antibiotics used for tuberculosis.
Business & Economy:
C Rangarajan for higher
taxes for super rich
Pitching
for higher rates of taxes for super rich, Prime Minister's economic advisor C
Rangarajan said the
forthcoming
budget could look at imposing surcharge on income above a threshold. India
taxes income at
three
rates - 10 per cent, 20 per cent and 30 per cent. These rates were fixed in
1997 by then Finance
Minister
P Chidambaram. Earlier, US Congress voted for raising taxes on rich Americans,
as part of
resolutions
of crisis over the so-called fiscal cliff. The US legislation raises taxes on
individual earning more
than
$4,00,000 per year, and on couple earning more than $4,50,000. The veteran
economist, a former RBI
governor,
also stressed on fiscal discipline to promote growth.
Yamaha Motor unveils women's
training program
Yamaha
Motor has launched India’s first Yamaha Female Riding Training Program (YFRT)
in Chennai. The
company
had entered the scooter segment in India in September 2012 with Ray, which
targets a niche
customer
base of young, urban women. The company has developed and launched the Yamaha
Female
Riding
Training Program for women customers who have a concern to ride a scooter or
want to obtain a
riding
license. The company plans to conduct the YFRT programme in various cities
across India.
New OS soon for smartphone
The
Indian market might see a new operating system for smartphones soon, as
Japanese telecom major
NTT
DoCoMo and Samsung Electronics are jointly developing one that will likely be
released in Japan and
other
Southeast Asian countries. The operating system (OS) that DoCoMo, along with
other partners such
as
Vodafone and France Telecom, is developing, is called the ‘Tizen’. In India,
DoCoMo has a presence in
the
form of Tata DoCoMo, a joint venture which is a cellular service provider on
both the GSM and CDMA
platforms.
The ‘Tizen’ operating system has been backed by Samsung since 2012 but has been
invariably
shelved
for various reasons.
Sport
Sania and Mattek-Sands pair
takes honours
India’s Sania Mirza was off to a winning start in 2013 when she combined
with American partner Bethanie
Mattek-Sands to clinch a 4-6, 6-4, 10-7 win over Anna-Lena Groenfeld and
Kveta Peschke in the Brisbane
International women’s doubles final. In the super tie-break, Sania and
Mattek took a 9-5 lead before closing it
out at 10-7 to
emerge a deserving winner.
No comments:
Post a Comment