4th NOVEMBER 2014

Thirteenth Finance Commission Chairman Vijay Laxman Kelkar has been appointed as Chairperson of the Finance Ministry’s think tank National Institute of Public Finance & Policy (NIPFP). He replaces the former Reserve Bank Governor C. Rangarajan.

Mauritius, often accused of being a route for round-tripping of funds by Indians, on Monday conveyed to India that it was ready to support its Special Investigation Team (SIT) to unearth black money.

Ashok Kumar, a 1982 batch IPS officer, is the new Director-General of Police and head of the police force. He succeeds K. Ramanujam, who was heading the Tamil Nadu police since May 2011.

The Justice (retired) Mukul Mudgal Committee, probing the betting and spot-fixing scandals in the Indian Premier League, submitted its final investigation report on the alleged role of former Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) president N. Srinivasan and 12 others in a sealed cover to the Supreme Court on Monday. Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, who represents the committee, told the Bench led by Justice T.S. Thakur, that the report was ready and sought the court’s permission to file it.

The Bangladesh Supreme Court on Monday upheld the death penalty to Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mohammad Kamaruzzaman for war crimes that include mass murder and rape in 1971. The verdict comes a day after Mir Quasem Ali, who was chief of the Chittagong unit of Al Badr — the pro-Pakistan militia during the country war of independence — was found guilty of murder, torture and abductions. Motiur Rahman Nizami, the supreme commander of Al Badr and now Jamaat-e-Islami chief, was handed the capital punishment last week for his role in execution of intellectuals, mass killing, rape and loot during the nine months of bloodshed 43 years ago.

Thirteen years after the 9/11 terrorist attack, the resurrected World Trade Center is again opening for business marking an emotional milestone for both New Yorkers and the United States as a whole. Publishing giant Conde Nast will start moving Monday into One World Trade Center, a 104-story, $3.9-billion skyscraper that dominates the Manhattan skyline. It is America’s tallest building. It’s the centrepiece of the 16-acre site where the decimated twin towers once stood and where more than 2,700 people died on Sept. 11, 2001.

China has developed a highly accurate homemade laser defence weapon system capable of shooting down small-scale drones flying at low attitude. Characterised by its speed, precision and low noise, the system is designed to destroy unmanned, small-scale drones flying within an altitude of 500 metres and at a speed below 50m/s, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. 

When the Mudgal panel was given more time to enable it to file final report, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for BCCI president Mr. Srinivasan, who is currently the International Cricket Council Chairman, objected to the extension, arguing that it affected the valuable rights of his client and the BCCI. The same hearing had seen the court refuse Mr. Srinivasan permission to participate in a Board meeting scheduled for September 30. However, the BCCI’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) was postponed to November 20. The Cricket Association of Bihar (CAB) challenged the postponement in court, saying it was done against the BCCI’s own constitution. The CAB had alleged that the AGM was postponed to facilitate Mr. Srinivasan’s return. But the Supreme Court advised the CAB to wait for the probe committee report.

Lewis Hamilton took a big step towards a second Formula One world championship on Sunday with his 10th win of the season in a US Grand Prix that saw Mercedes equal the record for one-two finishes. The Briton stretched his lead over teammate Nico Rosberg to 24 points with two races and a maximum of 75 points remaining, a gap that guarantees the title chase will go down to the final round in Abu Dhabi whatever happens in Brazil.

Last year’s winner Air India will meet State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH) in the Cup Division final of the RCF-all India PSU Twenty20 cricket tournament on Tuesday. Sushant Marathe, Prashant Naik and Salman Ahmed helped Air India chase 160 set by Food Corporation of India (FCI). Anoop Rai, Alfred Absolom and Ahmed Quadri starred in State Bank of Hyderabad’s 19-run victory over State Bank of Travancore. The plate final will be played between RCF and HPCL.

Karnataka’s K.L. Rahul is the front-runner for the much-debated spot of the third opener in the Indian squad for the four-Test series in Australia, beginning at Brisbane on December 4. The team will be picked in Mumbai on Tuesday. With the left-handed Shikhar Dhawan expected to be given another opportunity to partner the impressive Murali Vijay, the reserve opener’s spot is up for grabs. The 22-year-old Rahul, who impressed with his technique and fluent shot-making while notching up a century in each innings of the recent Duleep Trophy final, has a lot going for him. He appears comfortable off his back-foot – an essential ingredient on the bouncy tracks down under – and has time to play his strokes.

Former National champion Mohit Mayur defeated Chih-Jen Ho of Chinese Taipei 6-3, 7-5 in the first round of the Gondwana Cup $10,000 ITF men’s Futures tennis tournament at the VP Club courts here on Monday.

3rd NOVEMBER 2014

Around 200 enthusiasts gathered on Sunday morning at the fort here to participate in the first-ever Heritage Marathon in the historic city of Bidar. Men and women aged above 60 ran alongside a group of children aged between 10 and 15. A large number of the runners were young IT engineers, doctors, other professionals and students from Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Latur, and also from Kerala. Some had even come from beyond the borders.

Chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) R.K. Pachauri on Sunday said the window of action on tackling climate change was closing rapidly and warned that the path of inaction would be more costly than the path of action. Speaking at the launch of the IPCC’s Synthesis Report in Copenhagen, he said the scientific community had done its job and was in a sense passing on the baton to politicians and decision-makers. The Synthesis Report points to the human influence on climate but also points out that there were means to limit climate change and build a sustainable future. He said the global community must look at the numbers in this report and bring about change. “There is no Plan B because there is no planet B,” he said to questions.

The new Maharashtra Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, has retained Home and Urban Development portfolios. Eknathrao Khadse has been given Revenue, Minorities Development and Wakf, Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, Dairy Development and Fisheries and Excise. Sudhir Mungantiwar will be Minister of Finance and Forests. BJP’s only Maratha face, Vinod Tawade, got Education, among others. Pankaja Munde, daughter of deceased veteran BJP leader Gopinath Munde, has been given the portfolios of Women and Child Development, and Rural Development and Water Conservation. Vidya Thakur has been made the Minister of State for these two Ministries.

India’s defence establishment will be fully responsible for a DRDO-developed critical propulsion system that will go into the last two of the six Scorpene submarines being built under technology transfer at Mazagon Dock, Mumbai, say the original makers of the submarine. The system, called air-independent propulsion (AIP), enhances the underwater endurance of conventional (diesel-electric) submarines. Without it, they are forced to surface to periscope depth to recharge their batteries — a position where they are most susceptible to detection — at more frequent intervals.

France and the United States headed a chorus of panic on Sunday after a major U.N. report on climate change warned that the Earth was on track for potentially disastrous global warming. France, which is hosting a U.N. conference in December 2015 that is supposed to seal cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, said the report required “immediate, all-round mobilisation”.

2nd NOVEMBER 2014

GSLV Mark-III, the bigger and better space vehicle that will enable larger national communication satellites to be launched from India, is set for its first partial test flight in the first half of December. The landmark test flight will lead to a “future workhorse vehicle that will stay with us for many years,” ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan said. It also tests features of an unmanned crew module that will be flown down from space and recovered from sea.

Hello Kitty, Japan’s global icon of cute marked her 40th anniversary on Saturday with a human-size version of the feline character regaling fans at an upscale Tokyo department store and a theme park. The moon-faced creation, who has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry, began her birthday by trying her hand as manager of the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo’s glitzy Ginza district. Clad in pink from head to toe with a customary bow on her head, a human-size Kitty showed up at an in-house meeting at the store, drawing cheers and applause from hordes of employees.

Nineteenth-century artist James E. Buttersworth, although a titan in the field of marine art, cannot be described as famous. Prized for his exquisitely detailed portraits of racing yachts and clipper ships, he remains unknown to the general public and therefore has limited drawing power. To overcome this obstacle, the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, hit on a novel solution for its new exhibition of his work: Toss in a forgery and challenge museum visitors to sniff it out from among the 34 genuine Buttersworth works.

The Union Culture Ministry will set up a National Cultural Audio-Visual Archives here to identify and preserve the cultural heritage of India. A memorandum of agreement for a pilot project was signed here on Friday between the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) under the Ministry of Culture and Rupayan Sansthan.

Lithuania on Saturday enacted a ban on selling energy drinks to anyone under 18, in what officials in the Baltic country claimed was a global first. “It’s a revolutionary development the world over: we didn’t find a single other country to have this kind of ban,” health ministry official Almantas Kranauskas told

A massive nationwide power blackout hit Bangladesh on Saturday after a transmission line failed, leaving homes, businesses and shops in the densely-populated country without electricity. Power was restored in some parts of the capital Dhaka after several hours, and authorities said they hoped to have electricity back on across the nation of 155 million by Saturday evening.

The Spanish government has successfully passed a new copyright law which imposes fees for online content aggregators such as Google News, in an effort to protect its print media industry. The new intellectual property law, known popularly as the “Google Tax” or by its initials LPI, requires services which post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the organisation representing Spanish newspapers, the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies (known by its Spanish-language abbreviation AEDE). Failure to pay up can lead to a fine of up to €600,000

Tamil Nadu’s Velavan Senthilkumar and Delhi’s Adya Advani won the under-17 boys’ and girls’ titles respectively in the National sub-junior and junior squash championships here on Saturday. Kush Kumar and Harishit Kaur Jawanda retained their titles in the under-19 section.

1st NOVEMBER 2014

There was no redemption for Warren M. Anderson — accused no. 1 in the criminal case pertaining to the Bhopal gas tragedy — in life. On Thursday, it seemed there was none in death. Hearing of his death, a full one month after he passed away at a nursing home in Vero Beach, Florida, on September 29, survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy assembled outside the now-defunct Union Carbide factory and placed a large portrait of him. Then, one by one, they spat at the photograph. With his death, the struggle to get the former CEO of Union Carbide extradited has hit a dead end.

The State government on Friday expressed its difficulty before the High Court to implement the recommendations made by a committee that looked into eligibility of persons to retain sites allotted to them by the Bangalore Development Authority, under ‘G’ category, based on the recommendations of then Chief Ministers.

Indian Oil Corporation’s (IOC) retail outlets in the city stand fully automated from Friday. Makarand Nene, Director (Marketing), IOC, made the declaration at the inauguration of automation at a retail outlet at Palarivattom. Kochi is the second city after Thiruvananthapuram to be declared as fully automated.

Education Ministers and officials of eight South Asian countries have resolved to collaborate on increased use of information technology and improving the quality of education. At the second meeting of Education Ministers of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) here on Friday, representatives of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka issued a joint statement titled “The New Delhi Declaration on Education.” Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani chaired the meeting.

OUAGADOUGOU: Burkina Faso's embattled President Blaise Compaore announced on Friday that he was stepping down to make way for elections following a violent uprising against his 27-year rule that saw parliament set ablaze.

Myanmar’s Parliament will consider amending the country’s constitution — which currently bars opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming President — ahead of crucial elections next year, an official said on Friday.

Hungary’s Prime Minister on Friday scrapped plans to introduce an Internet tax that had sparked major demonstrations and further concerns about civil liberties in the central European EU member state. Proposed changes to the tax code that would have imposed a new levy on online data transfers “cannot be introduced in its current form,” the right-wing Viktor Orban (51), said in a morning radio interview. He said the legislation, which was to have been voted on in Parliament on November 17, would be amended and that a “national consultation” on the Internet and taxes would be organised in January.

31st OCTOBER 2014

The Kerala High Court on Thursday upheld the State government’s decision not to renew the licences of bars in two and three-star and other hotels even as it allowed a batch of petitions challenging the decision not to issue licences to four-star and heritage hotels. The judge said the proposal to shut down bars in four-star and heritage hotels surfaced all of a sudden in the liquor policy of 2014-15. The preferential treatment given to the bars in hotels in five-star and higher categories could not be justified as well.

The coordinator of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group on Wednesday voiced confidence that Iraqi Kurdish reinforcements would stop the jihadists from capturing the Syrian town of Kobane.

Tata AIA Life Insurance Company (Tata AIA Life) on Thursday announced the appointment of Naveen Tahilyani as its Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director. He will assume office at Tata AIA Life in January, 2015

Pankaj Advani won a grand double by clinching the World billiards championship (time format) at Leeds (England), just days after winning the points format title. Advani cruised past England’s Robert Hall 1928-893 in the final late on Wednesday night, capping a memorable week.

30th OCTOBER 2014

Technically, 2018 appears to be the next best time to go for a second Indian Mars trip. An opportunity to go to Mars from Earth comes up every 26 months; the next date, 2016, is believed to be too soon for ISRO and not conducive. The Indian Mars Orbiter Mission of 2013-14 should have a successor, but “it is not an active thought nor is it in the realm of any planning yet,” says S.K. Shivakumar, Director of the ISRO Satellite Centre.

A team of researchers from India and Sri Lanka has discovered seven new species of Golden-backed frogs in the Western Ghats-Sri Lanka global biodiversity hot spot, throwing new light on the highly-distinct and diverse fauna in the two countries.

Champion for girls’ rights Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in history, won the World’s Children’s Prize on , after a global vote involving millions of children.

Japanese and Indian officials on Wednesday discussed development plans for Varanasi, as part of the sister city agreement between Kyoto and Varanasi signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Japan. Kenichi Ogasawara, Vice Mayor of Kyoto, is in the capital to attend the eighth meeting of the India-Japan Joint Working Group on Urban Development. He met Urban Development Secretary Shankar Aggarwal and is scheduled to visit Varanasi on Thursday. During the meeting, Mr. Agarwal suggested that Kyoto could consider extending cooperation for Varanasi’s development through effective waste management systems.

A new, lighter version of the supersonic cruise missile BrahMos called BrahMos-M (Mini) weighing around 1.5 tonnes is being planned for use by the Navy and the Air Force. “BrahMos Aerospace is currently getting the user requirements to finalise the configuration,” said Sudhir Mishra, CEO and MD of BrahMos Corporation (BA).

India ranked 142 among the 189 countries surveyed for the latest World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” report released on Wednesday, a drop by two places from the last year’s ranking, as Singapore topped the list.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has revealed a new drug to stem the global spread of multi-drug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis, but has cautioned that its use must follow a set of guidelines issued by it.

The governments of India and Russia have agreed that BrahMos missile will be exported to a list of mutually agreeable countries for defensive purposes. There is also a negative list to which exports are barred.

GSAT-6, the advanced communication satellite that got ISRO’s arm Antrix Corporation embroiled in a controversy with erstwhile partner Devas Multimedia P Ltd in 2011, is slated for a March 2015 launch. The S-band GSAT-6 satellite with five special transponders for multimedia services is “all done”, integrated and should start thermovacuum tests in late November, according to ISRO Satellite Centre’s Director, S.K.Shivakumar, whose centre readies all Indian spacecraft in Bangalore.

LUSAKA: Zambia's President Michael Sata — nicknamed "King Cobra" for his sharp tongue and manner — has died, officials said on Wednesday, making his vice-president Gary Scott Africa's first white head of state in decades.

Harinder Pal Sandhu and Dipika Pallikal emerged winners in the fourth and final leg of the JSW-PSA men’s Challenger and the JSW-WSA women’s event respectively at the ISA courts, here on Wednesday.

29th OCTOBER 2014

Cyclone Nilofar is set to make landfall at Naliya village in Kutch district, along the Gujarat coast, on Saturday, a day later than expected, says a revised weather forecast on Tuesday. The landfall was earlier forecast on Friday morning.

Calling India’s defence cooperation with Vietnam “among our most important,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a commitment to “modernise Vietnam’s defence and security forces” on Tuesday after talks with his counterpart Nguyen Tan Dung. The two countries signed several agreements, including a memorandum of understanding for exploration by ONGC Videsh Limited in two blocks in the South China Sea. As  reported on Monday, Mr. Modi also announced the operationalisation of the $100 million line of credit for Vietnam’s defence purchases.

Dozens of Kurdish peshmerga fighters left a base in northern Iraq on Tuesday headed for the battleground Syrian town of Kobane, an AFP journalist reported. The town on the Turkish border has become a crucial front in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group, which overran 

large parts of Iraq in June and also holds significant territory in Syria.

SoftBank, kick-starting its plans to put in about $10 billion in India, on Tuesday, announced investments in home-grown market place Snapdeal and popular mobile app for cab bookings Ola.

Global Aircraft major Airbus Defence and Space and India’s Tata Advanced Systems Limited (TASL) of the Tata group have jointly offered the Airbus C295 medium transport to replace the Indian Air Force’s fleet of 56 Avro aircraft, an Airbus release said. The partnership follows a detailed industrial assessment and stringent evaluation of the Indian private aerospace sector by Airbus Defence and Space. In the event of C295 being selected, the first 16 aircraft will come in ‘fly-away’ condition from Airbus’s final assembly line.

Japanese firm Toshiba Corp, in collaboration with the Electronic Corporation of India, has received an order to supply transportable Doppler weather radar system to the India Meteorological Department (IMD). This will be the first weather radar that Toshiba will supply to outside Japan, and will be installed in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, in January next, Toshiba said in a statement.