Continuity in China ties despite regime change: official
India on Monday assured China that there was “broad consensus” across the political spectrum on engaging with Beijing, as both sides held talks laying the groundwork for a series of high-level engagements set to take place in an election year.
Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh said she conveyed to the Chinese leadership that there was “broad continuity in India’s China policy going back to Rajiv Gandhi’s historical visit of 1988.”
“It has always been a forward trajectory. We expect that to continue regardless of what the new dispensation is,” she said following the sixth round of the annual strategic dialogue held with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin.
Ms. Singh said she also raised India’s long-expressed concerns on Chinese investments in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which the Chinese leadership has made clear will continue despite Indian opposition. China has devoted increasing attention and resources to pushing a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which runs through parts of PoK.
Supreme Court calls for scientific methods in crime detection
The Supreme Court has asked investigating agencies to adopt scientific methods in crime detection to save the judicial system from low conviction rates. Justice Radhakrishnan said there was a need to strengthen forensic science for crime detection. The judiciary needed to be equipped to understand and deal with such scientific materials.
Global commerce is set to grow by 4.7 per cent this year, the World Trade Organization said on Monday, with recovery in rich economies expected to mitigate risks in developing nations.
The WTO previously had forecast that trade would expand by 4.5 per cent in 2014, up from an estimated rate of 2.1 per cent in 2013.
So, the latest forecast points to substantially more than a doubling of the growth achieved last year.
Trade is a key measure of the health of the global economy, which it both stimulates and reflects.
Asia will continue to fuel growth rates, the WTO said, although China's exceptionally strong expansion is slowing.
In addition, Europe and North America's recovery is also set to be a key driver on both the import and export fronts.
The WTO said that risks had receded in Europe thanks to an easing of the eurozone crisis, and in the United States owing to the easing of brinkmanship over budget limits and tax policy between the Obama administration and the Republicans which led to last year’s government shutdown.
Concerns in developing economies include large current account deficits in countries such as India and Turkey, currency crises in some countries including Argentina, overinvestment in productive capacity, and rebalancing economies to rely more on domestic consumption and less on exports.
The WTO also pointed to geopolitical risks, notably conflicts in the Middle East, Asia and Ukraine, which, it said, could provoke higher energy prices and disrupt trade flows if they escalate.
UNESCO to scrutinise Delhi’s bid for Heritage City tag
Before Delhi is accorded the tag of a World Heritage City, United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation will be sending a team of archaeological experts here in June to examine the heritage sites in New Delhi and Shahjahanabad that had been included in the dossier submitted by the Union Culture Ministry.
For India it is important that Delhi bags this title because it would give tourism a boost. “There would be more footfalls to Delhi from various countries to see the hundreds of havelis in Shahjahanabad. We are planning to convert them into tourist lodges. More than tourism, we want to instil pride among the inhabitants of Delhi,” the official added.
Gyaan
World Heritage Cities Programme
The World Heritage Cities Programme is one of six thematic programmes formally approved and monitored by the World Heritage Committee. It aims to assist States Parties in the challenges of protecting and managing their urban heritage. The programme is structured along a two-way process, with
1) the development of a theoretical framework for urban heritage conservation, and
2) the provision of technical assistance to States Parties for the implementation of new approaches and schemes.
Just as the chapter on Hwang Woo Suk, a South Korean stem cell researcher and one of the biggest known research fraudsters, came to an end recently, another major fraud by a Japan-based stem cell researcher has taken centre-stage. Two “path-breaking” papers published on January 30 in Nature by a team led by 30-year-old Haruko Obokata of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe claimed to have made the process of reprogramming adult mice cells to pluripotent stem cells (capable of becoming any of the specialised adult tissue) very simple. Also, by being able to contribute to the formation of placental tissue, the pluripotent stem cells so produced were shown to be more versatile than even embryonic stem cells. But a torrent of questions on falsification, manipulation and duplication of images and plagiarism were raised days after the publication. Scientists were also unable to replicate the study in their labs; one of the co-authors of the papers failed in his attempts post-publication. With the papers and Ms. Obokata coming under intense scrutiny, researchers unearthed a few unethical practices in her thesis as well — about 20 pages of her thesis, completed in 2011, bear a striking similarity to information posted in the National Institutes of Health website. Also, two images used with one paper, produced through an experiment completely different from the published work, appear in her thesis. But the most damaging factor is that the two stem-cell lines produced from a particular strain of mouse have been found to come from different strains.
Unfortunately, for a fraud of this magnitude, the investigation by a six-member committee constituted by the Riken Center did not measure up to the standards one would normally come to expect of such institutions. The scope of the examination was limited — only six issues concerning image manipulation and duplication and plagiarism were scrutinised but the core issue of examining the veracity of the study was skirted. While dismissing the four problems as “innocent errors,” the committee judged the manipulation of an image and the use of an image from her doctoral thesis as deliberate attempts to falsify data. Though it has labelled her actions as “scientific misconduct,” the committee has only confirmed what is abundantly clear. Unlike Riken, the Seoul National University did brilliantly in probing Mr. Hwang’s case. With Nature yet to conclude its investigation, Ms. Obokata planning to appeal the judgment and another committee being set up to determine punishment, the last word has not been said. But Ms. Obokata has surely not read the journal’s elaborate points of information for authors on the matter of image manipulation, which was added after the Hwang episode.
The echoing silence of caste
Good Article for Essay and for interview purpose...
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