11th OCTOBER 2014

Kailash Satyarthi, 60-year-old child rights activist from Madhya Pradesh, and Malala Yousafzai, who has risked her life to wage a campaign for girls’ education in Pakistan, are the joint winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. 

Cyclone Hudhud intensified into a very severe cyclonic storm and lay centred 470 km east-southeast of Visakhapatnam. The system is expected to cross the coast near Visakhapatnam by forenoon of Sunday.

India’s investment in polar research might seem strange to some but not to Norway’s King Harald V. “That is where we see the changes most quickly as far as climate change is concerned. [In the Arctic] it is very very obvious what is happening,” the King told The Hindu in an interview.

Five poetry collections short-listed for the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry were announced at the Kasauli Literature Festival on Friday. The award will be given away at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival in January. The Khushwant Singh Prize aims to promote poetry across all Indian languages in celebration of the genre that was very close to his heart.

Queen Elizabeth II has honoured campaigning actress Angelina Jolie in a Buckingham Palace ceremony. The queen made Jolie an honorary Dame for her work against sexual violence in war zones and her services to British foreign policy. She received the award on Friday during a private meeting with the queen. The decision to grant it was announced in June when Jolie co-chaired a conference in London aimed at curbing war-related sexual violence. She worked closely with former British Foreign Minister William Hague on that conference. Jolie has drawn praise from many world figures for her work on behalf of refugees and victims of sexual violence. She recently married longtime partner Brad Pitt.

Archaeologists armed with top-notch technology have scoured one of the richest shipwrecks of antiquity for overlooked treasures, recovering a scattering of artefacts. Lying 164 feet down a steep underwater slope off Antikythera Island, in southern Greece, the Roman commercial vessel’s wreck was accidentally located by sponge divers more than a century ago. Assisted by the Greek navy, they raised, among other things, the so-called Antikythera Mechanism, a complex clockwork computer that tracked the cycles of the Solar system and could predict eclipses to a precise hour on a specific day.

China and Russia have begun implementing their $400 billion mega-gas deal — a strategic project that would allow Moscow to lower its dependence on the European market, and open prospects of tapping the growing energy demand in the Asia-Pacific, with Beijing as the star consumer.

In a relief to Vodafone, the Bombay High Court, on Friday, ruled in favour of the Indian subsidiary of Vodafone Group PLC in the transfer pricing case. The division bench of the Bombay High Court, headed by Chief Justice Mohit Shah, held that there was no question of imposing transfer pricing regulation, and that Vodafone India Services Pvt. Ltd. (VISPL) was not liable to pay the additional tax amount of over Rs.3,000 crore.

Coming hard on top stock exchange NSE for its conduct with regard to ‘freak’ 920-point crash in benchmark index Nifty, the Securities and Exchange Board of India on Friday censured the bourse and ordered an independent comprehensive review of its processes and systems to ensure overall market stability. In a strongly-worded order, SEBI also asked the National Stock Exchange (NSE) to be “careful and cautious in its dealings in the securities market and comply with all the legal requirements that govern its functions as a stock exchange.’’ SEBI also said that “the system followed by NSE is not robust” and the incident, which took place on October 5, 2012, shows that “wrong action on the part of one individual could result in bringing the entire system to a halt.