Skip to main content

AROUND THE WORLD;19-03-2014

1.India not to support Western sanctions against Russia

With Russia facing sanctions from the United States and some other countries after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine, India on Wednesday made it clear that it will not support any “unilateral measures”
against Russian government.“India has never supported unilateral sanctions against any country e.g. Iraq or Iran. Therefore, we will also not support any unilateral measures by a country or a group of countries,” sources in the government said here

2.Biden warns Russia, says US will defend NATO allies

Issuing an outright warning to Moscow, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden declared on Wednesday the United States will respond to any aggression against its NATO allies, as Russia’s neighbours looked warily to the escalating crisis in nearby Ukraine.

3.Thailand may have detected MH370 pass

Thailand’s military said on Tuesday that its radar detected a plane — that may have been Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — just minutes after the jetliner’s communications went down, and that it didn’t share the information with Malaysia earlier because it wasn’t specifically asked for it.

4.Pakistan's first LNG terminal to be ready by November

Faced with a severe power crunch, Pakistan which is planning to import LNG as a stop gap arrangement, expects the first terminal in the country at Karachi to be ready by November this year.

4.Russia, Crimea sign accession pact

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a treaty on Crimea’s accession to Russia after delivering a defiant speech defending his move and blasting the West for pursuing “containment” of Russia and flouting international law. The treaty was also signed by the Crimean leaders who attended a special joint session of the Russian Parliament in the Kremlin. Mr. Putin said he was confident the Russian Parliament would ratify the pact

5.Royal mint unveils new pound coin

The Royal Mint announced plans on Wednesday to replace the weighty flat piece with a 12-sided coin made with two separate metals. It resembles a “threepenny bit” a coin that circulated in Britain from 1937-1971.

6.U.S. troops for Baltic states

The three Baltic states, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania are members of NATO, but have no NATO troops on the ground, except for a few fighter jets patrolling their airspace.

In a swift reaction to Russia’s acceptance of Crimea into its fold the United States announced plans to deploy American troops to the former Soviet Baltic states and slap further sanctions on Moscow.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

High dose of Vitamin C and B3 can kill colon cancer cells: study (downtoearth)

In a first, a team of researchers has found that high doses of Vitamin C and niacin or Vitamin B3 can kill cancer stem cells. A study published in Cell Biology International showed the opposing effects of low and high dose of vitamin C and vitamin B3 on colon cancer stem cells. Led by Bipasha Bose and Sudheer Shenoy, the team found that while low doses (5-25 micromolar) of Vitamin C and B3 proliferate colon cancer stem cells, high doses (100 to 1,000 micromolar) killed cancer stem cells. Such high doses of vitamins can only be achieved through intravenous injections in colon cancer patients. The third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer can be prevented by an intake of dietary fibre and lifestyle changes. While the next step of the researchers is to delineate the mechanisms involved in such opposing effects, they also hope to establish a therapeutic dose of Vitamin C and B3 for colon cancer stem cell therapy. “If the therapeutic dose gets validated under in vivo...

"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...