28.12.2006

• Hutchison puts a floor price for its stake
• Hutchison has said that it will consider selling its 67% stake in Hutchison Essar for a price exceeding $14 bn. This is equivalent to Rs. 62,000 cr. This puts a valuation of $21 bn on the Cellular operator. It is considered very high.
• Meaning of humdinger
• someone of remarkable excellence; "a humdinger of a secretary"
• CBI files chargesheet in Khairlanji dalit carnage
• In this incident a mob killed the wife, daughter and two sons of dalit family in Khairlanji.
• The immediate provocation for the incident was that the wife and daughter duo had intervened in an altercation, one of their relatives had with one of the accused on non-payment of wages.
• The accused are all belonging to the OBC communities -- Kumbi and Kalar
• The Trinamul Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee’s fast unto death on Singur issue
• She had been on the fast for the last 24 days protesting against allotment of land by West Bengal government for Tata’s proposed car factory in Singur.
• The project was allotted a total of 997 acres of land, out of which the Trinamul Congress is contesting that 387 acres were forcibly taken from farmers.
• National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions is headed by Justice MSA Siddiqui.
• CBI files chargesheet against Jaya Jaitley in Tehelka sting case
• The reporters from Tehelka sought assistance from Jaitley to obtain orders for equipment from the defence ministry. In this connection Rs. 2 lakh was allegedly handed over to one Pancherwal at the instance of Ms. Jaitley. In the video footage secretly filmed by the Tehelka reporters, Ms. Jaitley wa shown saying that she would put in a word to “sahib’s office” if the firm was not considered.
• Discounts garnered by airlines from star hotels normally
• Airlines usually get about 40% discount on the rack rates from star hotels.
• Even in this supposedly lean season for Delhi hotels, the hotels are seen offering only about 30% discount as they have seen that there is huge demand for rooms caused due to flight delays on account of fog.
• Government to set up state internet exchange hubs
• It is proposing to set up these exchanges at Mohali, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad.
• Already we have four nodal exchanges at Noida, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.
• Why do we need these exchanges?
• This is to avoid our internet traffic going all the way to the other side of the globe and coming back to us in India. For example, if a Yahoo mail user in Delhi sends an email to somebody in Mumbai, the data may be going all the way up to the US and then re-routed to Mumbai.
• There are 130 active ISPs in India and only 27 of them are connected to the NIXI – the national internet exchange of India.
• A tenth of rural India lives on Rs. 9 per day
• In spite of the superb growth seen in the economy, statistics from NSSO reveal that the villager at the bottom 10% pile of the rural population spent just Rs. 9 a day on his consumption needs, while his urban counterpart was slightly better off with Rs. 13 per day.
• Government may level ATF rates for foreign and domestic airlines
• The foreign airlines are not charged any taxes on ATF bought by them in India. But the Indian carriers are required to pay duties. The central excise is at 8% and the sales tax varies between 4% to 39% across states.
• In a bid to level the playing field between the foreign carriers and the Indian carriers flying to foreign destinations, the government is thinking of allowing a duty draw back for Indian carriers.
• “Let one hundred flowers bloom, let one hundred schools of thought contend” said Mao in 1958, in a bid to encourage constructive criticism. When the criticism did come, he swiftly exiled those who spoke too freely and too soon!
• What is scope creep? How can it be controlled or managed?
• It is phenomenon that causes users to be highly fickle about what they wish their software to do. Software engineers typically notice that there is a confusion in users about what they need and what they want.
• The methods that can be deployed to manage scope creep are:
• Employing the use case method to manage user requirements.
• Making the software development process more cyclical rather than linear.
• Making users play an active role in software evolution.
• Additionally two metrics are also suggested: Requirements clarity indicator and requirements stability indicator. The first one allows a panel of software experts to review a set of requirements early in the life cycle of the project and determine how well the stakeholders even understand what they want from their software. The second metric indicates the number of changes to the requirements and the amount of information needed to complete the requirements definition.
• The Rape of Nanking
• The Chinese city of Nanjing suffered a rampage of murder, rape and looting by Japanese troops in 1937 that became known as “The Rape of Nanking”, using the name by which the city was known in the West at that time.
• Historians generally agree that the Japanese army slaughtered at least 150,000 civilians and raped tens of thousands of women. China says that as many as 300,000 people were killed.
• China and Japan ordered a series of historical study groups in an effort to mend strained ties and reduce bitterness between the two countries.
• Tamilnadu to get two ultra mega power projects instead of one
• Tamilnadu is about to get two projects – one each at Cheyyur and Nagapatnam instead of one originally envisaged.
• E & P, gas pipelines to get infrastructure tag
• This getting of the infrastructure tag means that all incentives would be made available in terms of Section 19(23G) and 80 IA of the Incometax Act.