8th OCTOBER 2014

Ms. Jayalalithaa and others may now have to move the Supreme Court for bail. The court adjourned the hearing of the appeal to October 24. The court’s rejection of bail came despite Special Public Prosecutor G. Bhavani Singh telling the Court that “he has no objection for the release of the convicts on conditional bail.” Justice A.V. Chandrashekara said in his order that “no ground has been made out” by the convicts for suspending the sentence.

Opening up another front in the battle against tobacco, Health and Family Welfare Minister Harsh Vardhan now wants farmers to be weaned off growing the tobacco crop.

Two Japanese scientists and a Japanese-born American won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for inventing blue light-emitting diodes, a breakthrough that has spurred the development of LED technology to light up homes, computer screens and smartphones worldwide. Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and naturalized U.S. citizen Shuji Nakamura revolutionized lighting technology two decades ago when they came up with a long-elusive component of the white LED lights that in countless applications today have replaced less efficient incandescent and fluorescent lights. “They succeeded where everyone else had failed,” the Nobel committee said. “Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps.”

When India reported its last wild polio virus case from West Bengal in 2011, Rajasthan had already succeeded in eliminating the virus. Rajasthan saw its last three polio cases in 2009, though it reported 41 cases even in 2002. The decline began that year and the number fell to four in 2006. The State reported the highest number of 63 cases in 1998. The Southeast Asia Region of the World Health Organisation, which includes India, has been certified polio-free on March 24, 2014. India achieved the goal of polio eradication as no case has been reported for more than three years in a row after the last case was reported on January 13, 2011. On February 24, 2012, the WHO removed India from the list of countries with active endemic wild polio virus transmission. Over 24 lakh vaccinators and 1.5 lakh supervisors were involved in the successful implementation of the Pulse Polio Programme, dubbed as one of the biggest public health programmes in the world.

Yahoo India is laying off an unspecified number of employees in India and restructuring its Bangalore operations, as part of its continuing efforts to consolidate its workforce around the world. The news spread in the cyber world early on Tuesday morning, with some tweets even suggesting the number of employees who would be out of a job.

President Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday laid the foundation stone of a new Museum that will come up in the Rashtrapati Bhavan precincts, and showcase past and current presidencies. This museum will be in addition to the existing ones that are already open to public within the President’s Estate. The new museum, expected to be ready by October 2016 is being housed inside a heritage structure which previously was the ‘garages’ of the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Former New York Mayor and philanthropist billionaire Michael Bloomberg was granted an honorary knighthood from Britain on Monday.

A smartphone-controlled dinosaur and a ping pong-playing spider are some of the robot technology showcased at the CEATEC Japan electronics exhibition.

U.S.-based Rockwell Collins and home-grown Zen Technologies, on Tuesday, entered into an agreement to tap the Indian defence market. Both companies will be pooling their respective strengths in simulation and training to target Indian military customers.