A domestic help and his two accomplices allegedly decamped with cash, jewellery and other valuables worth Rs. 30 lakh after thrashing his female employer at Ghumar Mandi, Rani Jhansi Road, on Monday.
The victim, who wished not to be named, was alone at home at the time of the incident. Surprisingly, though the incident occurred in the very busy Ghumar Mandi area, no one noticed anything or saw the robbers fleeing.
In her complaint, the woman said she was alone at home around 2:30pm, when their domestic help, Varinder, a Nepalese, appeared there with his two accomplices.
She said Varinder introduced the two men as drivers and said they were looking for a job. But, they suddenly pounced over her and inflicted kicks and blows on her. They then tied her up with piece of cloths, dragged her to a bathroom and locked her inside.
It was only after her husband, Anil Kumar, owner of Swan Hosiery, returned home that he found the household items lying strewn and freed his wife. He then sounded the police, who reached the spot and initiated investigation.
Area councillor Narinder Sharma Kala, a relative of the family, said the accused stayed in the house for around one hour, ransacked the whole house, and robbed Rs. 3 lakh in cash, gold jewellery and other valuables worth Rs. 30 lakh, before fleeing the spot.
A sketch artist prepared a sketch of the domestic help that the police have circulated to all police stations.
Assistant commissioner of police (crime) Jaswinder Singh said a case had been registered at Division Number 8 police station. He said though CCTV cameras were installed in the house, they were not working.
He claimed that the police had got some vital clues about the accused and would also arrest them soon.
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Ashraf Ghani was inaugurated as the new president of Afghanistan on Monday at a ceremony in the presidential palace marking the end of Hamid Karzai's 13-year rule since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.
"I will abide by the constitution and other laws and protect their implementation," Ghani said in an oath administered by the chief justice.
The first democratic handover of power in Afghanistan's history has been far from smooth: the deal for a unity government was cobbled together only after months of deadlock over a vote in which both Ghani and opponent Abdullah Abdullah claimed victory.
The inauguration marks the end of an era with the departure of President Hamid Karzai, the only leader Afghans have known since a US-led invasion in 2001 overthrew the Islamist Taliban that had given sanctuary to al Qaeda.
Already-tight security was heightened around the capital Kabul ahead of the inauguration for fear Taliban insurgents might try to disrupt the ceremony or attack international dignitaries who flew in to attend.
Both foreign backers and Afghans hope that Ghani and Abdullah can put aside their acrimonious election rivalry and work to improve life in a country that has suffered war and poverty for decades.
"We expect both to fulfil the promises they made to the people," said unemployed Kabul resident Mohammad Sharif. "We, the people of Afghanistan, are monitoring their performance to see whether they can serve the people or not."
The new government inherits massive problems, including fighting an emboldened Taliban that in recent months has been launching ever more aggressive attacks as foreign troops draw down.
Ghani must also reset relations with the United States, which have soured in recent years under Karzai. One of Ghani's first acts as president is expected to be signing a bilateral security agreement to allow a small contingent of U.S. forces to remain to train and assist the new Afghan army and police.
Karzai has refused to sign it, but both Ghani and Abdullah are in favour of signing it promptly.
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The ranks of Hong Kong democracy protesters who have paralysed parts of the city swelled into their tens of thousands Monday, digging in for another night of confrontation with police in their campaign for free elections.
In the worst unrest since the former British colony was handed back to China in 1997, demonstrators fought hours of running battles with police Sunday night, choking on clouds of tear gas as officers attempted to suppress the crowds.
Riot police retreated Monday, handing demonstrators both a major morale boost and control of three major thoroughfares on the key financial hub's main island and across the harbour.
But protesters defied government calls to go home and instead readied themselves to counter any new attempt by police to retake the streets.
Pro-democracy groups are locked in a struggle with the city's authorities over China's refusal to grant unfettered democracy, in one of the most significant challenges to Beijing's authority since the bloody Tiananmen protests of 1989.
Public anger over rampant inequality and Beijing's political interference is at its highest in years in a city once renowned for its stability.
Last month China said Hong Kongers could elect their next leader in 2017 but only candidates who had been vetted would be allowed to stand -- a decision critics branded a "fake democracy".
At the largest protest site in Admiralty district, where many international businesses are based, crowds swelled to some 20,000 people by the afternoon, AFP reporters estimated, taking over nearly a kilometre of highway.
Smaller protests in their low thousands blocked key thoroughfares throughout the day in Mongkok and Causeway Bay, two densely packed shopping districts.
"I'm staying until the end, until we get what we want to get, which is true democracy," 18-year-old high school student Michael Wan told AFP, surrounded by thousands of fellow supporters sheltering under umbrellas from the hot sun.
Underlining their assertive stance, some 1,000 masked protesters gathered outside a police station where senior officers held a press conference defending their liberal use of tear gas against crowds on Sunday night.
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A three-year-old Chinese girl died of a brain tumour but helped save the lives of five other persons when her heart, liver, kidneys and corneas were donated.
The donor, Liu Jingyao, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour earlier this year after she was observed walking unsteadily.
Her parents visited multiple hospitals in several cities, but each doctor said the condition was terminal, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The girl's head swelled and she began to have trouble speaking, eventually becoming confined to bed.
Her father, Liu Xiaobao, discussed the possibility of donating her organs.
"The word 'donation' was difficult for her to understand, so I tried to explain that if we would give something from her body, she could save the lives of others. She agreed to this," said Xiaobao.
The girl's physical condition deteriorated earlier last week and she died on September 23 in the People's Hospital of Jiangxi Province in east China.
Her organs were soon removed for transplantation.
"She was too young and some of the organs were very small. But we were able to transplant her kidneys into one patient. Her heart, liver and corneas were given to four other patients, respectively,"?said doctor Zhang Ming.
Doctors said the five recipients were in stable condition, indicating that the transplants were successful.
"You lit up five people's lives. You are the most beautiful princess in the world," Xiaobao said to his deceased daughter.
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Black holes - the most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape - do not exist, a physics professor in the US has claimed.
Laura Mersini-Houghton at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place.
For decades, black holes were thought to form when a massive star collapses under its own gravity to a single point in space - imagine the Earth being squished into a ball the size of a peanut - called a singularity, researchers said.
An invisible membrane known as the event horizon surrounds the singularity and crossing this horizon means that you could never cross back. It's the point where a black hole's gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it, they said.
The black holes pit two fundamental theories of the universe against each other. Einstein's theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes but a fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear.
Efforts to combine these two theories lead to mathematical nonsense, and became known as the information loss paradox. In 1974, physicist Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes emit radiation.
Since then, scientists have detected fingerprints in the cosmos that are consistent with this radiation, identifying an ever-increasing list of the universe's black holes.
But now Mersini-Houghton describes an entirely new scenario. Mersini-Houghton agrees with Hawking that as a star collapses under its own gravity, it produces Hawking radiation. However, in her new work, Mersini-Houghton showed that by giving off this radiation, the star also sheds mass.
So much so that as it shrinks it no longer has the density to become a black hole.
Before a black hole can form, the dying star swells one last time and then explodes. A singularity never forms and neither does an event horizon. The take home message of the work is clear: there is no such thing as a black hole, researchers said.
The paper, which was recently submitted to ArXiv, an online repository of physics papers that is not peer-reviewed, offers exact numerical solutions to this problem and was done in collaboration with Harald Peiffer, an expert on numerical relativity at the University of Toronto. Experimental evidence may one day provide physical proof as to whether or not black holes exist in the universe.
But for now, Mersini-Houghton said the mathematics is conclusive. Many physicists and astronomers believe that our universe originated from a singularity that began expanding with the Big Bang.
However, if singularities do not exist, then physicists have to rethink their ideas of the Big Bang and whether it ever happened.
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An armed man took an employee hostage at a hotel in the Brazilian capital Monday and forced him to don a vest apparently stuffed with explosives, authorities said.
The gunman called a hotel courier in the early hours, and pushed him into a room on the 13th floor, a police spokesperson told AFP.
The hostage taker called reception to inform them. He has since appeared several times on the balcony, waving a pistol, with his handcuffed hostage wearing a jacket that appeared to contain explosives.
"It has not been confirmed if the explosives are real -- we have taken all security measures," the police spokesman said, without indicating whether the identity of either man was known.
The area around the Saint Peter hotel in Brasilia had been cordoned off.
The spokesman said the hostage taker had made a number of demands, including some of a political nature.
"Security evacuated the hotel and three negotiators are trying to resolve the situation peacefully. A bomb disposal unit is on the scene."
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Film sets can be quite unnerving for children, but Saugat Bista is very comfortable in such settings. In fact he is in control of what happens in the studio or outdoors.
This eight-year-old from Kathmandu has already directed a feature film and has his eyes set on the Guinness World Records to become the world’s youngest film director.
A student of Class II at Suryodaya School, Saugat’s film ‘Love You Baba’ is due to be released at movie theatres across Nepal this December.
Once that happens and his claim is accepted by Guinness, he will replace current record holder India’s Kishan Srikanth who directed ‘Footpath’ (2006) when he was just nine years old.
While Srikanth’s film told the story of an orphaned boy who wants to go to school, Saugat’s venture deals with the struggles of father as he attempts to raise his 10-year-old daughter alone.
“When I asked my father if I could direct a film he checked online and found that a nine year old from India had already done it. That gave him the confidence that I could also make an attempt,” Saugat told a gathering at the film’s launch last month.
Deepak Sharma Bajgain of World Records Holders’ Council of Nepal informed that proof of Saugat’s record bid are being collected to be forwarded to the Guinness World Records.
The director also makes an appearance on screen.
“The visualisation of the script turned out better than expected. We are confident that this film is worth watching and the public will like it,” he said during a promotional event on Sunday.
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Chinese censors and opponents of the protests sweeping Hong Kong are engaging in a cat-and-mouse game with demonstrators and commentators in a bid to stop news of the unrest spreading online and, in particular, reaching the mainland.
Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters have braved police tear gas to make their views known.
Spreading the word over Western and Chinese social networks is a lot safer, but it is becoming increasingly difficult as mobile phone networks are disrupted and concerns about possible surveillance grow.
The intervention is beyond what is normal for the usually free-talking Hong Kong, even as people are used to Chinese censors scrubbing the Internet in the mainland when mass demonstrations erupt.
On Sunday, users reported that Facebook Inc's photo sharing app Instagram was inaccessible on China's mainland.
Chinese websites, including Baidu Inc's search engine and the Twitter-like Weibo Corp microblog, have set about deleting references to the Hong Kong demonstrations.
Others have reported messages on Tencent Holdings Ltd's hugely popular WeChat messaging app being removed.
"I think it is still quite safe except WeChat, which is China," said Oscar, a 21-year-old student at Hong Kong's Polytechnic University, who uses Facebook and WhatsApp to communicate and plan with other protesters.
"It depends on your phone, because some China (brand) phones, they can detect your messages," he said.
Others in Hong Kong were still using WeChat, but had noted signs of censorship.
"WeChat is not blocked, I think some stuff is being deleted," said Jennie, who, after growing up in mainland China and being educated in the United States, now runs a Hong Kong-based charity.
"I forwarded an article (on Hong Kong) on today and it was deleted. The mainland should think it's good people are expressing ideas on behalf of the mainland government, but they even deleted that. Basically they're preventing the opportunity
for dialogue, which if you think about it is quite scary."
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Israel has invited India to be part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest pet project of national cyber defense authority-- a dedicated force to fight cyber threats—during his meeting with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi in New York on Sunday.
This invitation comes at a time when India is focusing a great deal on building its cyber security defence systems with countries across the world including the US and the UK. This discussion between Modi and President Obama will also figure homeland security issues, terrorism and cyber security threats.
This body is envisaged as a vital link between the civilian and military authorities in the sphere of cyber security, an interface for leading experts in the filed. Israel prime minister told Modi that the officials from both sides can be in touch on the issue.
“Cyber security is an area, where Israel is focusing a great deal about. They are futuristic in their approach”, said an Indian official.
This authority will work along side the Israel National Cyber Bureau, in Israeli PMO that would cover all aspects of cyber threats both in terms of national security, economic activities and data of individuals.
Defence cooperation and technology cooperation in water and agriculture are two other areas the two prime minister had focused on.
A statement from Israel prime minister’s office said Prime Minister Netanyahu “raised the issue of the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran as well as the global threat posed by Islamic terrorism” with Modi. Israel prime minister also invited Modi to visit Israel.
During the meeting, Modi mentioned about the historical ties between India and Israel, Citing his meeting with the Jewish community in New York, Modi said all appreciated “that there is a deep recognition in Israel that India is the only country where anti-semitism has never been allowed to come up, where Jews have never suffered and lived as an integral part of our society.” PM pointed out there was a time in the city of Mumbai that Hebrew was officially taught in the university and even one of the city mayors came from the community (Elijah Moses Raspurkar).
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The head of a Pakistani company which created an app called StealthGenie allowing users to spy on other people's mobile devices was indicted on US criminal charges, officials said Monday.
The Justice Department said the indictment of Hammad Akbar, 31, of Lahore, Pakistan, is the first-ever criminal case concerning the advertisement and sale of a mobile device spyware app.
Akbar is chief executive of InvoCode Pvt Ltd, which advertises and sells StealthGenie online and which uses a data center based in Virginia.
The app enables the monitoring of voice calls and chats on mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone and Android handsets.
According to officials the business plan of the group was to market the app to people who suspected cheating by a spouse or partner.
Akbar was charged in the indictment with conspiracy, sale of a surreptitious interception device and related charges.
He was arrested in Los Angeles last week and was to appear before a magistrate judge in federal court in California, according to a justice department statement.
"Selling spyware is not just reprehensible, it's a crime," said Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell.
"Apps like StealthGenie are expressly designed for use by stalkers and domestic abusers who want to know every detail of a victim's personal life -- all without the victim's knowledge."
The indictment alleges that StealthGenie allowed the purchaser to monitor a person's incoming and outgoing voice calls, e-mails and SMS messages, and provided access to voicemail messages, address books, photographs and videos on the device.
StealthGenie is among several apps that can monitor activity of a mobile device. The company's website was shut down by court order, but a cached version included a disclaimer saying the software must not be used to monitor the smartphone of anyone over 18 without their written consent.
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The riot-torn and communally volatile Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh is in jihadi crosshairs and has become a new reference point for motivating new recruits joining terror modules, multiple counter-terror sources told HT.
“An accidental blast in a room in Muzaffarnagar’s neighbouring Bijnor town on September 12 revealed the presence of a suspected six-member module of outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) here. One member of the module got injured in the blast. Though, we have reasons to believe that the module was planning a terror strike in Muzaffarnagar. The members of the module are yet to be nabbed,” said a counter-terror official of UP police.
Central counter-terror officials say it was not the first time a terror strike was planned in Muzaffarnagar.
“In March, two suspected Pakistani nationals were arrested by the UP police who had been tasked with carrying out fidayeen attack. Again Muzaffarnagar was discussed as one of the targets,” said another counter-terror official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Delhi police arrested an alleged Indian Mujahideen (IM) operative Ejaz Sheikh from Saharanpur, a neighbouring town of Muzaffarnagar, on September 6.
“After his arrest, an ‘explosive draft email’ was allegedly recovered from Shiekh that had many references to Muzaffarnagar riots and how they should be avenged. The draft email was most likely sent by Sheikh’s key handler and IM’s top boss Riyaz Bhatkal, who is based in Karachi, Pakistan,” said the counter-terror official based in Delhi.
The Ranchi module of SIMI, led by Haidar Ali who was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in May this year also allegedly spoke about Muzaffarnagar riots in his meetings where he used to spot new recruits.
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At a time when India is celebrating the success of ISRO and the Mars mission, which is expected to renew the interest of students in satellite communication, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has decided to discontinue the ISRO chair that undertook research in related fields — for lack of funds.
The university has also decided to discontinue other chairs including CV Raman chair for science education, Mother Teresa chair for social work, UNESCO chair in technology and e-governance, Vishveswarya chair for work in education linkages.
The decision is based on the recommendations of the board of management (BoM) which approved the guidelines for establishment of chair. According to the new guidelines, each chair should have a sponsor and no chair should be established with university funds.
“We decided to continue with chairs that are sponsored by an outside agency and did not utilise the funds of the university,” M Aslam, vice-chancellor of IGNOU, told HT.
Aslam said the chairs that have been discontinued were not functioning for a long time for lack of funds. “I cannot be using the fee of my students to sustain a chair,” he added.
While the VC was emphatic that the decision was taken in the interest of the university, there was opposition to it with some of the academic staff calling it unilateral.
“The guidelines for establishment of chair sets rule for setting up new chair, it does not say anything about discontinuing an existing chair,” a university staff said, on condition of anonymity.
The decision comes on the heels of university’s resolution to shut down community colleges, leaving in lurch more than a lakh students undertaking training in fields like hospitality, constructions and automobile.
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Jawaharlal Nehru believed that his ambition to build India with first-rate citizens (meritorious) should not be constrained by too much reservation at all levels, former union law minister HR Bhardwaj has said in his book.
“However, he relentlessly advocated for creating educational opportunities and reservations at some preliminary stages, not at later stages,” he added. The book, titled Nehru: Gazing at Tomorrow, will be released by vice president Hamid Ansari on Wednesday.
Bhardwaj quoted extensively from Nehru’s letter to chief ministers on June 27, 1961 in which the then prime minister had opposed quota on caste and communal lines, particularly in service.
“If we go in for reservations in communal and caste basis, we swamp the bright and able people and remain second-rate or third-rate. I am grieved to learn how far this business of reservation has gone based on communal consideration,” Nehru wrote.
“It has amazed me to learn that even promotions are based sometimes on communal and caste considerations. This way lies not only folly, but disaster. Let’s help the backward groups by all means, but never at the cost of efficiency. How are we going to build our public sector or indeed any sector with second-rate people?”
The Congress party, however, steered clear Bhardwaj’s book. “I haven’t read the book and hence will not be able to comment. Moreover, if anything has been written in the book, it could also be his personal opinion,” party spokesperson Raj Babbar said.
In February this year before the Lok Sabha polls, Congress president Sonia Gandhi had snubbed senior party colleague Janardan Dwivedi over his demand for ending the caste-based reservation and seeking quota for financially weaker sections bringing all communities under its ambit.
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The Indian Army and Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) divisional commanders are expected to hold a meeting at Spanggur Gap on Tuesday to confirm the withdrawal of troops from both sides to September 1 positions from Demchok and Chumar along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Eastern Ladakh.
Authoritative government sources said troop withdrawal from both sides was discussed at the divisional commanders level meeting in Chushul on September 26 and followed by a meeting between external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in New York the next day. The troop withdrawal from both sides began at 6.00 am on September 27, even as Swaraj went on record saying that both sides will vacate any transgression on the LAC by September 30. The withdrawal was completed the same day.
Official sources said that both armies conducted an aerial reconnaissance on September 28 to confirm that PLA troops had vacated transgressions on Point 4991, Point 63, Point 30R and Point 5109 in the Chumar sector and Chinese civilians had gone back from Demchok sector.
“Both sides have confirmed the withdrawal by aerial verifications with the Chinese PLA uprooting their tents and going back to their original positions of September 1. The September 30 meeting is being held to undertake a review post-withdrawal and raise outstanding issues, if any,” said a senior Indian official.
One section of the Indian security establishment attributes the PLA incursions during Chinese President Xi Jinping visit to Delhi as a message that the border is still disputed, while Beijing watchers feel that the latest flare-up was part of the tussle within the middle kingdom. According to them, the Chumar incident was a response to President Xi elevating two PLA generals close to him as vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and head of the military’s disciplinary commission. On September 21, after returning from India, President Xi ensured that the PLA commanders followed his instructions to the last word without any deviation such as Chumar.
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The Election Commission (EC) is considering the possibility of deferring assembly polls in Jammu and Kashmir as the state administration is still trying to recover from the devastation caused by the recent floods.
There could be two reasons for delaying the polls.
First, the non-availability of updated electoral rolls, the revision of which had to be suspended due to the floods that hit the state in the first week of September. Second, there is not enough time to do necessary ground work for concluding the polls before January 19 - when the term of the state assembly expires - as the harsh winter is fast approaching.
EC sources said the feedback from J&K's chief electoral officer was not "favourable" in terms of holding the polls on schedule in November-December.
"There could be lot of operational problems if the polls are be held in November onwards," an EC official said, adding the final call would be taken only after the full poll panel visits the state in October.
Political parties are divided on the issue. The ruling National Conference leaders favour postponement of the polls but want the interim government to continue till that time.
But legal experts say this would run foul of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution as CM Omar Abdullah's term ends on January 19.
The Congress wants the polls on the due date but many state parties, including the Peoples Democratic Party, have been demanding postponement of elections so that the focus does not shift from rehabilitation efforts.
Jammu and Kashmir Awami Tehreek chief Syed Reyaz Khawar and J&K Gujjar Mahasabha leader Eshfaq-ur-Rehman Poswal have demanded the imposition of Governor's rule at the end of the present assembly's term.
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The Modi government has started work on the first project to artificially connect two rivers, to be followed by two more, as it moves swiftly on a controversial programme first mooted during the Atal Behari Vajpayee-era, which the previous UPA regime had sidestepped.
Groundwork in the Ken-Betwa project, involving Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, has begun after a nod from both states, while a detailed project report to link the Damanganga and Pinjal rivers to provide drinking water for Mumbai has been submitted to the Maharashtra and Gujarat governments.
The Ken-Betwa project involves building a dam on river Ken, a major river of the Bundelkhand region, with a 221-km canal to transfer "surplus" water to the Betwa basin. Its cited benefits include irrigation facilities in over 6 lakh hectares of farmland, water supply for over 13 lakh people in Bundelkhand and generation of 78 MW of power.
The Madhya Pradesh government has approved mandatory alternative land to compensate habitat loss in swathes of the Panna Tiger Reserve. Designs for a third link to connect Par, Tai and Narmada rivers for irrigation benefits in drought-prone Saurashtra and Kutch are likely to be finished by March 2015.
"We will not take up any project if states don't agree and we won't touch rivers with international borders," water resources minister Uma Bharti said. The government has identified 30 such links, which will take 10 years, if states agree.
The previous government had talked of first undertaking a "comprehensive review" before any decision. A legal hurdle got cleared in 2012 when the Supreme Court, disposing of two petitions, asked the government to go ahead.
The benefits of linking rivers are mitigating floods in some areas and drought in others. It is based on a principle that some river basins are "surplus" in nature, while others are "deficit". Critics argue the concept to manage water flow, just like in an electricity grid, could be potentially disastrous, since rivers aren't a man-made resource and the flow in such artificially networked rivers isn't two-way, i.e. the direction cannot be reversed.
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An Indian origin researcher has made it to the list of this year’s list of potential scientists likely to win the Nobel prize for Physics.
Dr Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley is one of 27 scientists and economists who appear on the 2014 edition of the list, issued by Thomson Reuters, on Saturday. The Nobel Prize for Physics will be announced on October 7.
Dr Ramamoorthy’s name figures with the names of James Scott (University of Cambridge) and Yoshinori Tokura (University of Tokyo) as potential candidates for their contributions to ferroelectric memory devices and multiferroic materials.
An alumnus of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore Dr Ramamoorthy went to University of California, Berkeley for a Ph.D. in Materials Science in 1987.In 2004 he joined the University of California faculty in the Materials Science and Engineering and Physics departments.
“ My work is in the broad area of complex oxides.. I got into this field right after my PhD when the field of Hi-Tc Superconductivity had just broken out. In 1989, at Bellcore, I started a basic program on ferroelectric thin films for memories.. almost by accident, we stumbled onto oxides that exhibited the "colossal magnetoresistance" effect.. this led to a worldwide research activity on the fundamental physics of these materials.. then in 1999, we started looking into the confluence of electricity and magnetism through Multiferroic materials... The original idea was to control magnetism by electricity to enable a broad range of low power electronics.. of course, we have to figure out the fundamentals first,” Dr Ramamoorthy, who hails from Chennai told HT.
For these estimations the main point which is taken into account, is that which nominee’s research has been cited the most, by the scientific community. These forecasts were started in 2002 by Thomson Reuters and so far, rightly guessed 35 Nobel Prize winners.
On how was he feeling - nervous, excited - he said while quoting a sholaka from Bhagwada Gita: “ This is just a prediction. We should not take it very seriously. If I get it, it will be dedicated to humanity, to science and to the young people of the world. If I do not, then I have to take it on an equally good stride?"
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A day after he conceded that the timing of Pakistan high commissioner Abdul Basit’s meeting with Hurriyat leaders was “perhaps not totally right,” Pakistan national security and foreign affairs advisor Sartaj Aziz on Monday said they would continue to meet the separatists.
Aziz also reiterated that it was up to India to resume the dialogue because “it was India who called off the talks.”
Referring to Hurriyat leaders as ‘important stakeholders,’ Aziz, who advises Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, told HT on the phone from Islamabad that Pakistan would continue to hold meetings with the separatist outfit. “We will always meet them each time we are holding talks on the issue of Kashmir. Any solution to Kashmir has to be acceptable to the people of Kashmir,” he said.
Asked why he thought the meeting between Basit and the Hurriyat was ill-timed, Aziz said the Indian media had reported his statement partially. “I used the word probably because the two foreign secretaries were meeting to see how to take the dialogue forward. They were not slated to have any substantive talks on the issue of Kashmir.”
Asked if there was pressure from the US on resuming the talks with India, Aziz said, “Many in New York said they would like to see the dialogue being resumed but our position is clear – we did not call off the talks, India did.”
The meeting between India and Pakistan’s foreign secretaries, to be held on August 25, was called off after Basit held talks with separatist leader Shabir Shah.
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All state governments have been asked by the Centre to motivate their employees to be part of Narendra Modi government's ambitious 'Clean India' campaign.
"There are guidelines issued by the Prime Minister's Office. The secretary, department of personnel and training, has informed all chief secretaries of of all the states to motivate employees under them," minister of state for personnel, public grievances and pensions Jitendra Singh said in Delhi on Monday Singh, who was participating in 'Swachh Bharat Mission' or 'Clean India' campaign at gate no 6 of his office in North Block, said all central government employees will take cleanliness pledge on October 2.
These guidelines have been sent to all states too, he said. Singh also broomed the floor as part of the drive.
"This symbolism also has its importance as it serves as a motivation to others," he said when asked whether or not the Prime Minister's initiatives will bring in any result. The Prime Minister will on October 2 launch the campaign.
"You will be surprised to know that as many as 60,000 files have been destroyed in the personnel ministry. Now these files were unwarranted ones. Some information from these files have been digitised," Singh said.
To a question whether or not the drive would stop after October 2, he said cleanliness is a continuous process and it will continue.
"A clean mind lives in clean body. But what is required to do is that there has to be awareness in every common man that it (cleanliness) becomes a permanent stint of one's lifestyle," the Minister said.
Singh said he plans to visit north-eastern states and Jammu and Kashmir to create awareness on the cleanliness drive. All central government employees will be administered 'swachhata shapath' (pledge of cleanliness) in government offices, public functions and events on Gandhi Jayanti, according to a directive issued by Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth to all central government secretaries.
"Each ministry should participate in this national endeavour and undertake cleanliness and awareness campaign in a befitting manner," Seth said. The cleanliness drives led by senior officials will be undertaken in all government and public offices, it said.
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Anant Geete, Shiv Sena's lone memberin the Union Cabinet, will resign, party chief Uddhav Thackeray said at Mumbai on Monday, four days after the split in the saffron alliance.
"After Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns from the US, Geete will go to him and submit his resignation," he said.
Sena sources said the party was also likely to quit NDA.
Uddhav's announcement followed estranged cousin and MNS chief Raj Thackeray riling him at a poll rally here yesterday for the Sena "sticking to" power in Delhi despite breaking up with BJP.
Raj had said that Uddhav should immediately ask Geete to resign as a mark of protest against the insult meted out to Shiv Sena.
Attacking BJP for ending its 25-year-old alliance with Shiv Sena, Raj had said that had party patriarch Bal Thackeray been alive he would have ended the association a month ago.
Sena, ruling NDA's second largest constituent with 18 Lok Sabha MPs, was upset over poor representation it got in the Modi government as well as Geete's heavy industries portfolio, which it considered light weight. Geete, a sixth-time MP from Raigad in Konkan, had taken charge of the ministry after a delay of several days.
In the NDA government in 1999 headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Sena had three Cabinet Ministers despite having fewer MPs. In 2002, it even bagged the coveted post of Lok Sabha speaker for senior leader Manohar Joshi.
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