Skip to main content

AROUND THE WORLD;16-03-2014


1.Rwandan jailed for genocide

Pascal Simbikangwa, a 54-year-old former member of the Rwandan presidential guard, was found guilty of perpetrating genocide and of complicity in crimes against humanity  to 25 years in prison over the 1994 genocide .

2.U.S. defends snooping as ‘lawful’ and ‘valid’

The United States defended its controls on mass surveillance on Friday before a U.N. watchdog body, amid a sweeping review of Washington’s record on civil and political rights.During a session of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, experts from the 18-member panel repeatedly quizzed Washington’s delegation about the scale and scope of spying.

3.Road map for ‘Crimean Spring’

Crimea’s referendum on Sunday to break from Ukraine and join Russia is regarded as illegitimate by the West but seen in Moscow as an example of self-determination like Kosovo leaving Serbia.
Here are some facts and figures for the vote that has sparked a security crisis on Europe’s eastern border and is being carried out with Russian forces in control of the strategic Black Sea peninsula.
Voting: Polls open at 0600 GMT and close at 1800 GMT, with more than 1,200 polling stations spread out over the rugged diamond-shaped region.
Media: There are 623 journalists from 129 media accredited and a professional-looking press centre has been set up at the headquarters of “Krym” state television in the regional capital Simferopol.
Exit Poll: Crimean pollsters will survey voters, with their estimate expected very soon after polls close. They will have white baseball caps reading: “Crimea. Poll. Spring” — a reference to what local authorities are calling the “Crimean Spring.”
Voters: Around 1.5 million ballots have been printed, organisers say, dismissing as “lies” the claim by officals in Kiev that many more are in fact being prepared so as to falsify the result.
Ukrainian military: Organisers say there are “no obstacles” for Ukrainian soldiers in bases surrounded by Russian forces to come and vote too. Chief organiser Mikhaylo Malyshev said he had received calls from Ukrainian soldiers who want to vote but are being prevented by their commanders.
Social media: Updates in English and Russian are being posted on the Facebook page “Openpresscentr” and through the Twitter account @crimea_gov. The website referendum2014.ru is also regularly updated.
Results: The preliminary results are expected to be announced “soon after” that by Mr. Malyshev as well as from concert stages being set up in Simferopol and Sevastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Final results are due by Monday morning, after which Crimea’s pro-Moscow authorities have said they will declare independence from Ukraine.

4.Robotic fish swims ‘like the real thing’

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has unveiled a robot fish that it claims can change direction almost as fast as the real thing.The fish was designed to explore performance capabilities, not long-term operation,” said Marchese in MIT’s announcement of the research“Next steps for future research are taking that system and building something that’s compromised on performance a little bit but increases longevity.”
That will involve switching carbon dioxide for a pumped-water system that could keep the fish swimming for around 30 minutes of a time. Such a device could eventually be used to swim alongside schools of real fish to study their behaviour in the wild.

5.U.S. to cede Internet oversight

The United States will give up its role overseeing the system of Web addresses and domain names that form the basic plumbing of the Internet, turning it over in 2015 to an international group whose structure and administration will be determined during the next year, government officials said on Friday.
Since the dawn of the Internet, the United States has been responsible for assigning the numbers that form Internet addresses, the .com, .gov and .org labels that correspond to those number
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »