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.