7th SEPTEMBER 2014

Power generation in the second unit of Tuticorin Thermal Power Station (TTPS) was affected on Saturday evening due to technical snag. Sources in the TTPS said power generation in the second unit was stopped after a puncture in the boiler affected the functioning of the plant.

The Madras High Court Bench here has directed the Madurai Collector to preserve three waterbodies — Murugakone Kanmoi alias Muruganeri, Puthukanmoi and Nayakkankulam kanmoi — on the foothills of Alagar hills near here though a settlement tahsildar had granted patta (land ownership document) with respect to them to private individuals way back in 1970.

cellphone will soon play the golden collections in the sound archives of Doordarshan and All India Radio. Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar promised here on Saturday that the archives would be made accessible to the people through mobile-phone applications.AIR has four lakh hours of archives and Doordarshan three lakh hours.

Preliminary work has begun to develop a 1,620 km waterway on the Ganga between Haldia in West Bengal and Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, touching important cities like Kolkata and Varanasi. The World Bank is expected to support the project with an initial assistance of $50 million. The Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI), which is implementing the project, has estimated the cost at Rs. 4,200 crore. The project, labelled as National Waterway-1, will pass through four States, touching eight major cities and their industrial hinterlands.

In a demonstration of operational excellence and robustness of the Indian nuclear power reactors, the fifth unit at Rawatbhatta of the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS) recorded a continuous run of 765 days on Saturday at its full capacity of 220 MWe. This is the second highest operating record after a unit (500 MWe) of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Canada achieved a continuous run of 894 days which ended in 1994.  (R.K. Sinha, Chairman, Atomic Energy  Commission )

India, along with 21 other members of the Asia Pacific Forum (APF), has resolved to use a five-pronged strategy to promote and protect human rights from 2015 to 2020. In a three-day conference, which concluded here on Friday, the National Human Rights Commission and its regional counterparts agreed to focus on gender equality, peace and security, business, priority vulnerable groups. Vulnerable sections include children, women, the disabled, the elderly and displaced persons. A key inclusion has been that of ‘Business’. While national human rights institutions have traditionally focussed on violations by state actors, the changing economic scenario has led to the scanner on violations by companies.

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan launched the biggest ever anti-TB drug resistance survey on Saturday. India has the highest multi-drug resistant TB burden with an estimated 64,000 cases emerging annually. The survey will enable officials to evolve a strategy to combat drug-resistant TB and provide a statistically representative national estimate of the prevalence of anti-TB drug resistance among new and previously treated patients.

Union Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change Prakash Javadekar announced here on Saturday that a Special Rhino Protection Force of local youth would be raised to check poaching in the Kaziranga National Park (KNP) and other rhino-populated areas in Assam.“There will be zero tolerance towards rhino poaching and our efforts would be to bring down the number of rhino poaching incidents to zero,”

Bahrain court ruled on Saturday that prominent rights activist Maryam al-Khawaja be kept behind bars for an extra 10 days despite a U.N. call for her release. The Bahraini co-director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, who also has Danish citizenship, was arrested for assaulting a police officer after arriving at the Manama airport on August 30. Her lawyer Mohammed al-Jishi told AFP the judge ordered that Ms. Khawaja be kept in custody on that charge.

The Omkar Realtors & Developers Group will sponsor the Invitation Cup 2015 in Mumbai. Mr. Devang Verma, Director of the Omkar Group, who was here to present the Omkar Million, signed the agreement with the RWITC, Chairman, Mr. Vivek Jain in the paddock on Sept. 6. Mr. Verma also presented a cheque for Rs. 1 crore 55 lakhs to Mr. Jain towards the sponsorship of the Invitation Cup to be run in March 2015 in Mumbai.