New Delhi, August 22: President Pranab Mukherjee Friday asked the IITs to explore ways to improve the country's quality of higher education so that India can become a global supplier of skilled manpower.

Speaking at the inauguration of a day-long conference of chairmen, board of governors and directors of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mukherjee described the IITs as "knowledge leaders of the nation" and urged them to "explore how quality of education can be improved".

"There is need for soul searching on what is holding back good governance in institutes of higher learning," said the president as he called upon the council of IITs to draw up a roadmap for governance in line with the best global practices and implement it without delay.

"In spite of our technical capabilities to put the satellites of other countries into space, we are still importing technology starting from security features and papers for Indian currency to defence equipment," he said.

The president advised the council to focus on how IITs can become a source for meeting technology needs of the government and become a harbinger of the vision 'Make in India' and 'Made in India'.

"So far we have been giving attention to industry-academia inter-linkages, but now we also must focus on the government-academia inter-linkages," he said.

The president said constraints such as huge shortage of faculty should be urgently addressed as the vacancy position in IITs varies from 10 to 52 percent, and the overall vacancy in 16 IITs is over 37 percent.

He said India's biggest strength in the coming years is going to be its demographic dividend. "This offers us a unique opportunity to become a global supplier of skilled manpower. For this, we must achieve our target of training 500 million people by 2022".

Houston, August 22: Astronomers have uncovered rhythmic pulsations from a rare type of black hole 12 million light-years away by sifting through archival data from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite.

The signals have helped astronomers identify an unusual midsize black hole called M82 X-1, which is the brightest X-ray source in a galaxy known as Messier 82. Most black holes formed by dying stars are modestly-sized, measuring up to around 25 times the mass of our sun. And most large galaxies harbor monster, or supermassive, black holes that contain tens of thousands of times more mass.

“Between the two extremes of stellar and supermassive black holes, it's a real desert, with only about half a dozen objects whose inferred masses place them in the middle ground," said Tod Strohmayer, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Explore M82 X-1 and learn more about how astronomers used X-ray fluctuations to determine its status as an intermediate-mass black hole.

Astronomers from Goddard and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) have suspected M82 X-1 of being midsize for at least a decade, but compelling evidence excluding it from being a stellar black hole proved elusive.

"For reasons that are very hard to understand, these objects have resisted standard measurement techniques," said Richard Mushotzky, a professor of astronomy at UMCP.

By going over past RXTE observations, the astronomers found specific changes in brightness that helped them determine M82 X-1 measures around 400 solar masses.

As gas falls toward a black hole, it heats up and emits X-rays. Variations in X-ray brightness reflect changes occurring in the gas. The most rapid fluctuations happen near the brink of the black hole’s event horizon, the point beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

Astronomers call these rhythmic pulses quasi-periodic oscillations, or QPOs. For stellar black holes, astronomers have established that the larger the mass, the slower the QPOs, but they could not be sure what they were seeing from M82 X-1 was an extension of this pattern.

"When we study fluctuations in X-rays from many stellar-mass black holes, we see both slow and fast QPOs, but the fast ones often come in pairs with a specific 3:2 rhythmic relationship," explained Dheeraj Pasham, UMCP graduate student. For every three pulses from one member of a QPO pair, its partner pulses twice.

By analyzing six years of RXTE data, the team located X-ray variations that reliably repeat about 5.1 and 3.3 times a second, a 3:2 relationship. The combined presence of slow QPOs and a faster pair in a 3:2 rhythm sets a standard scale allowing astronomers to extend proven relationships used to determine the masses of stellar-mass black holes.

The results of the study were published online in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Nature.

Launched in late 1995 and decommissioned in 2012, RXTE is one of NASA's longest-serving astrophysics missions. Its legacy of unique measurements continues to provide researchers with valuable insights into the extreme environments of neutron stars and black holes.

A new NASA X-ray mission called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) is slated for launch to the International Space Station in late 2016. Pasham has identified six potential middle-mass black holes that NICER may be able to explore for similar signals.

Bangalore, August 22: ISRO is planning to develop communication satellites in higher frequency bands and power and data handling capacity in the range of 100 Gigabits per second to meet the growing demands of broadband internet and rural telecom connectivity, ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan said.

Radhakrishnan also said the premier space research organisation is looking for suitable foreign partners to acquire the technology and upgrade ISRO's current satellite platforms to meet the future demands.

"For the future, we are looking for communication satellites in the higher frequency bands with about 15 KW of power and data handling capacity in the range of 100 Gigabits per second that can meet the ever growing demand in the country towards broadband internet, rural telecom connectivity etc," the chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation said.

He was speaking at the convocation of BITS-Pilani Hyderabad campus.

Besides launching new satellites, the organisation has also plans of replacing the ageing satellites and enhance the observation capability to the level of 0.25 m spatial resolution and provide new capability for imaging from geo stationary orbit with 50 m spatial resolution, he said.

ISRO is also partnering with Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA to jointly develop a dual frequency microwave imaging satellite by 2020, Radhakrishnan said.

"In this scheme of alliance, ISRO is responsible for the overall satellite platform, S Band synthetic aperture radar and the launch of the satellite by GSLV," he explained.

On the moon mission, he said India is in the process of developing its own Lander-module and lunar rover as well as orbiter craft for Chandrayaan-2 that is targeted for launch by GSLV within the next three years.

Elaborating on the Mars mission, the ISRO head stated that the Mars orbiter space aircraft has traversed nearly 88 percent distance along its designated path to the red planet.

"The next operational milestone is the insertion of the spacecraft into the Martian orbit on September 24, 2014. If successful, India will be the first Asian country to orbit a spacecraft around planet Mars and the first country in the world to achieve this in the first attempt," he said.

According to him, a number of critical technologies are being developed for a possible human spaceflight in the future.

Panaji, August 22: Goa's 90 odd open-cast iron ore mines, currently closed for nearly two years following a mining ban, could be tapped for generating hydel power, says wildlife conservationist Bittu Sahgal.

Speaking during the inauguration of an environment film festival in Panaji Friday, Sahgal, a member of the National Wildlife Board, also said that mining is necessary but not at such a scale that it "consumes us".

"We certainly need mining to do a whole load of things, but we don't need it at a scale that mining itself consumes us," Saghal said.

"The potential to convert old mining pits into natural dams that could power mini hydro-electric plants must be seriously examined," Sahgal said.

Until the time mining was banned by the Supreme Court in September 2012, Goa's 90 odd operational iron ore mines produced 45 million tonnes of iron ore annually.

The ban was lifted in April this year, but mining could not be resumed because of formalities and policies which the apex court has asked the state government to put in place.

Open-cast mines are shaped like volcanic craters and in these millions of cubic feet of water is collected during the monsoon. This water is normally pumped out and is literally wasted, before mining operations begin.

"Nature will never argue with you....it will only punish and, or reward everybody, uniformly, irrespective of whether or not you've been good or bad to the environment," Bittu said.

Mumbai, August 16: In another date with the Navy after spending time on board aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will commission the largest-ever warship built in India till now, the 6,800-tonne destroyer INS Kolkata, at Mumbai on Saturday.

The entire programme to build INS Kolkata and two follow-on destroyers (INS Kochi and INS Chennai), being undertaken at the Mazagon Docks under the Rs 11,662 crore Project-15A, is running several years behind schedule. Once the construction of these three destroyers was over, the plan was to launch Project-15B to build four guided missile stealth destroyers.

Both INS Kolkata and INS Kamorta are part of the 44 warships currently on order in Indian shipyards at a cost of over Rs 2 lakh crore, as part of the endeavour to steadily build a three-dimensional blue-water Navy capable of taking care of India's huge strategic interests in the region stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Strait.

The largest warship being indigenously built, of course, is the 40,000-tonne aircraft carrier INS Vikrant at the Cochin Shipyard. The Modi government recently cleared the allocation of Rs 19,000 crore to complete its construction, which had derailed due to paucity of funds, as was first reported by TOI.

Around 75% of the carrier's basic structure, including the hull and deck, has been completed till now at a cost of around Rs 3,500 crore. Now, the superstructure, the upper decks, the cabling, sensors, weapons and the like will be integrated on INS Vikrant, which will be commissioned only in 2018 as per the re-revised timeframe.

Though the IAC project was approved in January 2003, the actual construction of the huge warship began only in 2006. After the carrier's keel was laid in 2009, it was "launched" into water in August last year.

Much like aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, which was dedicated to the nation by Modi in June, INS Kolkata is also somewhat naked in the absence of long-range surface-to-air missile (LR-SAM) systems to tackle enemy aircraft, drones and missiles.

Sanctioned in 2005 at a cost of Rs 2,606 crore to arm major Indian warships, the joint DRDO-Israeli Aerospace Industries development project is yet to deliver the requisite LR-SAMs with an interception range of 70-km.

Moreover, INS Kolkata is also bereft of critical advanced light towed array sonars (ALTAS), which tail behind warships to detect and track enemy submarines on the prowl. It has hull-mounted sonars, towed array ones provide better detection capabilities.

New Delhi, August 16: In his maiden Independence Day address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged people to work for a new and clean India by shedding the "poison" of communalism and making the country the world's manufacturing hub.

Addressing tens of thousands of cheering people gathered at the Red Fort complex on a bright morning, Modi spoke for over an hour, focussing mainly on nation building and underlining the need to forge national consensus on major issues.

In the process, Modi, 63, who took charge of India May 26, outlined his vision for the country, frankly admitting the faults within and calling on neighbouring countries to team up with India to battle poverty.

He also announced a burial of the Planning Commission, saying it was not needed any more. He said a new institution will take its place.

For the first time in years, there was no reference to Pakistan in the Independence Day address. Indeed, he made no mention to any other country except neighbouring Bhutan and Nepal which he recently visited.

Indians, he said, needed to give up the "poison" of casteism and communalism and added it was a shame that these plagued India even so many years after independence.

"How long will this continue?" he asked, sounding emotive. "We have fought enough, we have killed enough. Turn back and see, has anyone gained anything?"

He said decades of bloodshed had caused deep wounds to "Bharat Mata", adding there should be no violence for 10 years.

Wearing his trademark white half-sleeve kurta pyjama with a polka-dotted flaming orange turban, Modi reached the 17th century Red Fort after paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi at Raj Ghat.

Before beginning the speech, Modi -- in a departure from convention -- took salute from the armed forces. He spoke mostly extempore, occasionally looking down for a peek at his notes.

Asking the world to "Come, Make in India!", Modi urged global investors to make this country a manufacturing hub.

"I tell the world, Make in India! Sell anywhere but manufacture here. We have the skill and talent."

He said it should be every Indian's dream to see "Made in India" products around the world -- green friendly and with zero defects.

Reiterating his dream to make India a clean place, Modi asked: "Do we want to live in filth?"

He said India should become clean and hygienic by 2019 -- the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, a staunch believer in cleanliness.

Modi made special reference to women's safety and the girl child.

Despairing over India's skewed sex ratio, he told Indians to end female foeticide. "I appeal to parents not to sacrifice the girl child."

Modi added: "Our heads hang in shame when we hear news about rape."

Dubbed by critics as a divisive personality, the prime minister underlined the need to take everyone along. "Let us walk together, think together, and make a determination to take ahead the nation together."

Lending a personal touch, the prime minister hailed Indian democracy for allowing a person from "a poor family, an ordinary family" to assume the country's top post.

"I stand before you today not as the prime minister but as the Pradhan Sevak (Chief Public Servant)." The remark, made at the start of his speech, drew thunderous applause.

Modi also called himself "an outsider to Delhi. But an outsider came to Delhi and got an insider view (of the administration)".

India before Independence:




India gains Independence on 15th August 1947:



A new India: 1947 Independence Day



A rare Coloured video of Independence Day:

New York, August 14: Microsoft’s India-born CEO Satya Nadella was doused with a bucket of ice water on his head as part of a challenge he took to raise awareness about a neurodegenerative disease and in turn challenged Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google co-founder Larry Page to do the same, news agency PTI reported. 

Nadella was challenged by former pro-football player Steve Gleason on Twitter to take the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise awareness about Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

46-year-old Nadella accepted the challenge and willingly allowed a group of employees to dump the bucket of ice water on his head yesterday.

“The thing I’m really excited about is what Steve and the team have done to raise awareness for ALS,” Nadella said in a video posted on Microsoft’s website showing him standing with the group of employees who later poured the ice water on him.

“This is a great opportunity for all of us to contribute to not only raising awareness but to the research that can find cures” for the disease.

Nadella exclaimed “wow, that is cold” after being thoroughly soaked and then extended the challenge to Bezos and Page.

“Now, let me take this opportunity to challenge Jeff Bezos and Larry Page to take their own ice bucket challenge.

“And let me tell you again from personal experience, it’s better to have your head in the clouds than under a bucket of ice,” Nadella said as he was cheered on by his employees.

Gleason has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and his foundation aims to raise awareness about ALS, as well as to give others living with it the “leading edge technology, equipment and services” they need.

According to the ALS Association, an American dies of ALS every 90 minutes.

ALS strikes people between the ages of 40 and 70 and as many as 30,000 Americans have the disease at any given time.

It is commonly called the Lou Gehrig’s disease, named after the legendary American baseball player who succumbed to the disease.

The ALS ice bucket challenge has gone viral with people posting videos online of dumping a bucket of ice water over their heads.

Once soaked with cold water, they extend the challenge to others and ask them to either do the same or make a donation to an organisation dedicated to fighting ALS.

ALS Association said the challenge has “literally soaked” the nation with everyone from 86-year old widow of Senator Robert Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy to singer Justin Timberlake pouring a bucket of ice water over their heads and challenging others to do the same.

New Delhi, August 14: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a message posted on micro-blogging website Twitter, said: “I convey my greetings to the people of Pakistan”.

The Indian premier’s message came days after he accused Pakistan of waging “a proxy war” in Kashmir.

Right from Narendra Modi hs became India's Prime Minister, a series of dialouge was initiated in a friendly manner. Pakistan also seemed responding positive to India's attempts to strenghten bi-lateral relations. But, the the continued ceasefire violation by Pakistan army is diluting the process.

New Delhi, August 14: Parliamentary approval was accorded to two bills seeking to end the collegium system for appointment of judges with the Rajya Sabha on Thursday adopting the measure as passed by the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

The Constitution (99th Amendment) Bill, which seeks to put the proposed judicial appointment commission and its entire composition in the constitution, and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Bill, 2014, which lays down the procedure to be followed by the proposed body for appointment of Supreme Court judges and transfer and appointment of chief justices and other judges of the high courts, will now go for the president's assent.

The bills were passed by the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, and the Rajya Sabha passed them on Thursday.

In the upper house, where the government has just 59 of the 243 members, the constitutional amendment bill got the support of 179 out of 180 members present.

A bill for amending the constitution needs the support of at least two-thirds of the members present in the house, and at least half of the members should be present at the time of voting.

Ram Jethmalani, an Independent member from Rajasthan, was the only member who abstained from voting. The Rajya Sabha then passed the judicial appointment commission bill with a voice vote.

The two bills seek to scrap the collegium system of appointing judges and set up a commission for this.

The bills propose that the Chief Justice of India will head a six-member National Judicial Appointments Commission, other members of which would be the law minister, two senior Supreme Court judges and two eminent people.

A collegium comprising the prime minister, the Chief Justice of India and the leader of the single largest party in the Lok Sabha will select the two eminent people.

One eminent person will be nominated from among the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, OBCs, minorities or women.

The bill states that the commission will seek the views of the governor and chief minister of the state concerned in writing before appointing or transferring a judge of that high court.

New Delhi, August 14: Hockey India (HI) Wednesday blasted the Kapil Dev-led Arjuna Awards selection committee after none of the seven players it had recommended were chosen for the prestigious award.

The seven players were Joydeep Kaur and Ritu Rani from the women's team and Dharamvir Singh, V.R. Raghunath, Tushar Khandker, Bharat Chetri and Shivendra Singh from men's hockey.

HI secretary general Narinder Batra wondered how out of 15 Arjuna Awardees, five hailed from just one state, Kerala.

"Out of 15 Arjuna Award winners five are from one state only. Is it a co-incidence or a professionally managed coup by the SAI and the sports ministry. I will not name the athletes since they should be respected for what they have been rewarded with," said Batra.

Batra also questioned the conflict of interest in the committee, especially commentator Anupam Ghulati, who is a former employee of HI.

"Is it known to the committee Anupam Ghulati who was member of this committee was an ex-employee of Hockey India and was asked to leave Hockey India in a bad taste? Did he recuse himself when hockey was discussed," said Batra.

The HI secretary general said it was Ghulati who told the committee that hockey should not considered since there were no results in the last four years.

Batra also revealed that Ghulati was forced to resign by HI after he had shortlisted 30 probables for the 2012 London Olympics on his own and forwarded it to the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) with consulting the selection committee.

Batra said the seven hockey players have been cheated by the sports ministry and the Sports Authority of India (SAI).

"Since the government of India has cheated the seven players of their rightful place in getting at least one award, we Hockey India will give them Rs.2 lakh each," he said.

New Delhi August 14: Infrastructure major Lanco Infratech Ltd. wednesday said it has sold a 1,200 MW thermal power plant in Karnataka to Adani Power for about Rs.6,000 crore, in a move to cut its debt.

"For Lanco Infratech, this transaction will support the company in reducing its debt and will enable Lanco to receive about Rs.2,000 crore as cash and additionally, Adani Power will take Udupi Power's long-time debt of around Rs.4,000 crore," Lanco said in a statement Wednesday.

According to Lanco Infratech, the Udupi plant is the "first independent power project in the country based on 100 percent import coal with a captive jetty of four million tonnes per annum and an external coal handling system in the new Mangalore Port Trust.

"The capacity can be, if required, expanded to handle another four million tonne capacity," it added.

Lanco's Udupi power plant has already signed with the Karnataka government for further expansion of 1,320 MW, the statement said.

While 90 percent of the electricity generated from the plant is supplied to Karnataka, the remaining goes to Punjab.

Currently, Adani Power has an installed generation capacity of about 8,580 MW.

Moscow, August 14: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday described the situation in Ukraine as "bloody chaos", pledging that Moscow will spare no efforts to facilitate an earliest end of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine.

"The country has fallen in bloody chaos, fratricidal conflict," ITAR-TASS quoted Putin as saying at a meeting with Russian lawmakers in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta.

He said that the situation is deteriorating. "A major humanitarian catastrophe has broken out in the southeast (of Ukraine)."

The Russian president also said he believed that Crimea may play a unifying role for healing historical scars and cementing Russian society.

"I believe that Crimea today may be a unique yardstick. It is capable of playing a unique unifying role for Russia, the role of a historical and spiritual source and another line of reconciliation of the Reds and the Whites."

Putin will be visiting Crimea later  on Thursday, where he is due to make a speech and meet local people.

Meanwhile, heavy shelling was reported in the centre of Donetsk, a stronghold of insurgents in eastern Ukraine, as more than 100 lorries carrying Russian aid into the region were approaching a rebel-controlled border crossing in the Luhansk region.

Ukraine has said the convoy must be inspected by international monitors before it can be let in.

New Delhi, August 14: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to unveil an ambitious financial inclusion scheme on the Independence Day tomorrow to provide bank accounts to 15 crore poor persons with an overdraft facility of Rs 5,000 and accident insurance of Rs 1 lakh reports PTI.

The-two phase Financial Inclusion Mission, which has been approved by the Cabinet, will be formally launched by Modi here at the end of this month, sources said.

The government is gearing up to operationalise the scheme across the country on August 28 or 29, they added.

The scheme, to be pushed by the government in a mission mode, seeks to provide two accounts to 7.5 crore identified households by August 2018.

The main features of the scheme include Rs 5,000 overdraft facility for Aadhar-linked accounts, Ru Pay Debit Card with inbuilt Rs 1 lakh accident insurance cover and minimum monthly renumeration of Rs 5,000 to business correspondents who will provide the last link between the account holders and the bank.

The new scheme, sources said, is a significant improvement over the UPA's financial inclusion programme.

The earlier scheme had no focus on households and no emphasis was given on urban financial inclusion, according to some experts. Besides, they maintained that there was a cumbersome Know Your Customer formality, restricting account opening.

Other deficiencies cited included lack of credit disbursement and 47 per cent of business correspondents being untraceable, resulting in inactive accounts.

The new scheme, sources said, has tried to address all the possible deficiencies and its monitoring would be done at state and district levels.

The 'mission mode' approach has been envisaged with the Finance Minister as head of the mission.

New Delhi, August 14: President Pranab Mukherjee today said intolerance and violence is a betrayal of the letter and spirit of democracy and slammed those who believe in the "poison drip of inflammatory provocation", news agency PTI reported.

In his Independence Day-eve address to the nation, he referred to bigotry and noted that an increasingly turbulent international environment has sparked off rising dangers "in our region and beyond".

"Though an ancient civilisation, India is a modern nation with modern dreams. Intolerance and violence is a betrayal of the letter and spirit of democracy. Those who believe in the poison drip of inflammatory provocation do not understand India's values or even its present political impulses.

Indians know that progress, economic or social, is difficult without peace," Mukherjee said. The President's remarks assume significance in the context of rising incidents of communal violence in the country.

He recalled Maratha king Shivaji's letter to Aurangzeb when he imposed 'jizya'. He told the emperor that Shah Jehan, Jehangir and Akbar could also have levied this tax "but they did not give place to bigotry in their hearts, as they considered all men, high and low, created by God to be examples of the nature of diverse creeds and temperaments".

Mukherjee said the 17th century epistle of Shivaji carries a message, which is universal. It must become a living testament that guides our behaviour today. "We can least afford to forget this message at a time when an increasingly turbulent international environment has sparked off rising dangers in our region and beyond, some clearly visible, and some crawling out of the debris of unprecedented turmoil," he said.

Strongly disapproving of disruptions in Parliament, President Pranab Mukherjee today said the need of the hour is to restore the grandeur and glory of institutions that have sustained democracy. "I sometimes wonder: has our democracy become too noisy?

Have we lost the heart of contemplation and calm thinking?Is is not the time to restore the grandeur and glory of our institutions that have sustained and nourished our beautiful democracy.

Should not Parliament become the great hall of sombre thought and well debated legislation? Should not our courts of law become temples of justice? This calls for collective action by all the stakeholders," the President said in his Independence day-eve address to the nation.

He said freedom is a celebration and independence is a challenge. In the 68th year of freedom, India has reaffirmed the power of individual and collective liberties by electing through a remarkably peaceful electoral process, a stable government with a clear majority for a single party after three decades.

Mukherjee said the increase in voter turnout to 66 percent from 58 per cent in the last elections showed the vitality of democracy."This achievement has given us an opportunity to take up the challenge of governance by reforming the policies, practices and systems of governance so that the enormous aspirations of our people can be fulfilled with vision, commitment, integrity, speed and administrative capability," he said.

Toronto, August 13: Canada has said it will donate to the World Health Organisation (WHO) up to 1,000 doses of an experimental vaccine against the Ebola virus, to be used in the African countries most affected by the outbreak of the disease.

"I am pleased to offer the experimental vaccine developed by Canadian researchers as a global resource to help fight this outbreak," Canadian Health Minister Rona Ambrose said in a statement Tuesday.

Ambrose said Canada would donate between 800 and 1,000 doses of the vaccine, from a total of about 1,500 that it possessed.

The health minister added that the vaccine, known as VSV-EBOV, has so far not been tested on humans, although results have been promising during animal trials.

"Canada feels this experimental vaccine is a global resource, so in response we are sharing it with the international community, while keeping a small supply in Canada", Ambrose said.

The WHO Tuesday reported that the toll in Ebola virus disease in western Africa - Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria - had risen to 1,013, and approved the use of experimental drugs to fight the disease.

In a statement, the WHO's Ethics Committee said that in the light of the scale of the outbreak and the high number of deaths, it was ethical to use untested drugs against the virus, which causes haemorrhagic fever and has a 90 percent mortality rate.

The disease is transmitted by direct contact with infected blood or body fluids, and is considered a threat to world health.

Seoul, August 13: Two Indian-origin mathematicians have won prestigious global prizes in the field of mathematics with one of them being awarded the Fields Medal - known as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics".

Manjul Bhargava, a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, was on Wednesday conferred the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2014 hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in Seoul, a press release issued by the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences said.

Also on the same occasion, another Indian-origin mathematician Subhash Khot won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, awarded by the IMU), for his "prescient definition of the 'Unique Games' problem, and leading the effort to understand its complexity and its pivotal role in the study of efficient approximation of optimisation problems".

Bhargava, born in 1974 in Canada, was awarded the Fields Medal for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves.

He is the recipient of the Mathematical Association of America prize in 2003, the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2005, the Cole Prize in Number Theory of the American Mathematical Society in 2008 and the Infosys Prize in 2012.

Other three winners of the Fields Medal are Maryam Mirzakhani, the first Iranian and the first woman to win the medal, and Artur Avila, the first Brazilian, and Martin Hairer, the first Austrian to win a Fields Medal.

Mirzakhani, a mathematics professor at Stanford University, was awarded the prize for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.

Avila, a professor at the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicadab in Brazil, was awarded the prize for his profound contributions to dynamical systems theory, which have changed the face of the field, using the powerful idea of renormalisation as a unifying principle.

Hairer, a mathematics professor at the University of Warwick, was awarded the prize for his outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations, and in particular for the creation of a theory of regularity structures for such equations.

The Fields Medals are awarded once every four years by the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in order to recognise outstanding mathematical achievements.

John Charles Fields was a Canadian mathematician who had a major impact on national and international mathematical studies and research.

Khot is a professor in the Computer Science Department at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He has a PhD from Princeton.

His work has led to breakthroughs in algorithmic design and approximation hardness and to new exciting interactions between computational complexity, analysis and geometry.

The Rolf Nevanlinna Prize is awarded once every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, for outstanding contributions in Mathematical Aspects of Information Sciences, including all mathematical aspects of computer science.

The Fields Medals were started in 1936 and the Nevanlinna Prize in 1982.

Hyderabad, August 13: The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) will set up a unit in Telangana with an investment of Rs.1,600 crore, Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao said on Wednesday.

KCR, as the chief minister is popularly known, Wednesday announced that the state government will allot 100 acres of land for the project at Nagarjuna Sagar, famous for a dam across the Krishna river. He told a meeting of officials that after scouting various states for a suitable location for the strategic unit, the DRDO finalised Nagarjuna Sagar in Nalgonda district.

According to a statement from the Chief Minister's Office, this will be the first such defence unit of its kind in India. It, however, did not reveal the nature of the project.

"Only five countries has this kind of unit. Presently, the Indian defence establishment depends on a unit located in Moscow for its requirements," the statement quoted the chief minister as saying at the meeting convened to review the project.

The facility will also have the capability to meet the requirements of other countries.

KCR said the required electricity and water would be supplied for the facility. He asked officials to immediately accord all clearances.The chief minister hoped that the DRDO unit will give recognition to Nagarjuna Sagar.

He also announced that an air strip will be constructed in the town, which will not only meet the requirements of defence but will also benefit tourists. The DRDO has several laboratories in Hyderabad.

New Delhi, August 13: India on Wednesday clarified that its decision not to ratify WTO's Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) is aimed at ensuring that the country's efforts to ensure food security remain consistent with its international obligations.

"The stand taken by India is aimed at achieving a permanent solution on the issue of public stockholding for food security purposes so that the country's efforts to ensure food security remain consistent with its international obligations," Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.

India's stand is that without such a permanent solution, public stockholding measures in developing countries will be hampered by the current ceiling on domestic support at 10 percent of the value of production. Such support is considered as a trade-distorting subsidy to farmers under existing WTO rules.

During the Ninth Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Bali, Indonesia in December 2013, WTO members, including India, agreed on a Bali Package comprising an agreement on Trade Facilitation and on issues relating to agriculture and development.
"While there was progress on the Trade Facilitation Agreement, other decisions including one on public stockholding for food security purposes and other development issues were sidelined," Sitharaman said.

Since its decision not to ratify the TFA, India has followed up with suggestions on how to ensure time-bound delivery of an outcome on public stockholding for food security, she added.

New Delhi, August 13: In an Independence Day gift of sorts, petrol will be cheaper by at least Rs.2.18 per litre, including local levies, effective August 15, it was announced on Wednesday.

"Indian Oil Corporation has decided to decrease the retail selling price of petrol w.e.f midnight of 14th/15th August '14 by Rs 2.18/litre at Delhi (including state levies) with corresponding decrease in other states," the state-run oil marketer said in a statement here.

This is the second cut in petrol rates after the NDA government assumed charge. The earlier reduction was effected on Aug 1 by 90 paise a litre excluding state levies.

Since the last price change, while international petrol prices have further declined, the rupee-US dollar exchange rate has significantly depreciated, all of which warranted a lowering of prices, Indian Oil said.