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The President on Monday appointed Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar as the 44th Chief Justice of India from January 4, 2017. The incumbent Chief Justice T.S. Thakur had on December 6 communicated his recommendation to the government to appoint Justice Khehar. Chief Justice Thakur retires on January 3 after a tenure of a year. Though the government notification informing the President’s clearance of Justice Khehar as next Chief Justice comes close to the swearing-in day, the decades-old convention of following the seniority norm has been duly complied with. Justice Khehar, who led the Constitution Bench which scrapped the government’s National Judicial Appointments Commission law, will be the first Chief Justice from the Sikh community. Justice Khehar will have a tenure for over seven months till August 28, 2017. He assumed office as judge of the Supreme Court on September 13, 2011. Justice Khehar headed the Bench which had set aside the imposition of President’s Rule in Arunachal Pradesh i...

They enter land as sea ice they rely on for hunting seals is receding : Come fall, polar bears are everywhere around this Arctic village, dozing on sand spits, roughhousing in the shallows, padding down the beach with cubs in tow and attracting hundreds of tourists who travel long distances to see them. At night, the bears steal into town, making it dangerous to walk outside without a firearm or bear spray. They leave only reluctantly, chased off by the polar bear patrol with firecracker shells and spotlights. On the surface, these bears might not seem like members of a species facing possible extinction. Scientists have counted up to 80 at a time in or near Kaktovik. But the bears that come to Kaktovik are climate refugees, on land because the sea ice they rely on for hunting seals is receding. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and the ice cover is retreating at a pace that even the climate scientists who predicted the decline find startling. Much o...

State’s claims belied by data showing 40 per cent of malnourished children in seven regions Maharashtra faces the ‘stark reality’ of malnutrition among children in tribal areas, according to the State government’s own report. The official study reveals that in seven tribal belts, over 40 per cent of children are affected by some form of malnutrition. In comparison, in the best performing block, Harsul in Nasik, 27.3 per cent suffer from malnutrition, down from 42.3 per cent in 2012. Just 24 hours before the report was presented, in reply to a ‘calling attention’ motion moved on Thursday by 86 MLAs in the Assembly — citing around 8,000 child deaths due to malnutrition between April and August 2016 — the State had claimed that its preventive approach on malnutrition is working. The report, titled Malnutrition Status in Tribal Belts, highlights shortcomings such as supply of grains infested with insects, worms and other contaminants to meal schemes, and children getting ...

There is also interest from BRICS countries to commit funds for research, says ICMR chief Hit by funds crunch since 2014, the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) Project — fronted by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and conceived as a unique global programme to find new drugs for tuberculosis — has now been subsumed within a new programme to be led by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). The proposed India TB Research and Development Corporation (ITRDC), announced last month and led by the ICMR, has got a Rs. 20 crore infusion by Tata Trusts and expects to be a Rs. 750-crore enterprise half funded by the government and the rest by international donor agencies and private companies, said officials associated with it. “We need to have a nimble agency that can sharply work on, say, delivering diagnostic devices, a short course therapy for TB,” Soumya Swaminathan, Director-General, ICMR, told The Hindu. “It has to be independent and needs to be free o...