Indian Current Affairs: 26.04.2007

In a departure from my habit of answering queries through the shoutbox or individual mails, I decided to answer a couple of queries directly through the blogs this time.
Yesterday I was asked by Rishi: What’s the best way to prepare in the last 25 days before the prelims exam? Take a look at what I wrote in the “Discover It” blog today.
I was also asked by Sridhar: Sir, Could u plz explain this line "Monetary measures will moderate inflation. Monetary measures come with the price of high interest rate". What exactly is this Monetary measure (used in FOREX).

Monetary measure include tightening i.e., increasing any of the rates like CRR, SLR, Bank Rate, repo rate, reverse repo rate etc.
What this does is that money becomes costly and interest rates go up. When interest rates go up, people will have less liquidity with them thereby inflation gets moderated.
That’s why you see that everybody expected RBI to increase some of these key rates. But RBI governor, as is his wont, has surprised the market by not touching them now during the recent policy announcement.
Monetary measure in respect of forex can only be with reference to allowing the rupee rate either to go up or keeping a lid on the rupee rate. Here we usually are talking in terms of the US dollar. If you allow the rupee to appreciate, the exports will become less competitive and imports will become cheaper. This is expected to have a softening effect on domestic prices. Attacks inflation, to a certain extant.

Is celebrated on 26th April.
Most people are aware of intellectual property (IP) - of copyright, patents, industrial designs and trademarks. But many still view these as business or legal concepts with little relevance to their own lives. To address this gap, WIPO’s Member States decided in 2000 to designate an annual World Intellectual Property Day. They chose April 26, the date on which the Convention establishing WIPO originally entered into force in 1970.
The aims of World IP Day are:

to raise awareness of how patents, copyright, trademarks and designs impact on daily life;
to increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps promote creativity and innovation;
to celebrate creativity, and the contribution made by creators and innovators to the development of societies across the globe;
to encourage respect for the IP rights of others.

The General Secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW) has been elected as one of the five vice-presidents of the Women International Democratic Federation (WIDF).

A planet, which is believed to be Earth-like, orbiting a star called Gliese 581 in Libra constellation, is found by radial velocity method by European Astronomers working at European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla, Chile.
This star is among the 100 closest stars to Earth, at just 20.5 light years. A light year is about 10 trillion kilometers or 6 trillion miles.
Radial velocity is the velocity of an object in the direction of the line of sight. The light of an object with a substantial radial velocity will be subject to Doppler effect, so the wavelength of the light increases for receding objects (redshift) and decreases for approaching objects (blueshift).
The radial velocity of a star or other luminous but distant object can be measured accurately by taking a high-resolution spectrum and comparing the measured wavelengths of known spectral lines to wavelengths from laboratory measurements. By convention, a positive radial velocity indicates the object is receding; if the sign is negative, then the object is approaching.

Currently on at Taian City, China.
Chinese women are dominating the event.
Indian lifters Renu Bala (58 kg) and Soma Rani (63 kg) have so far won two bronze medals each.

Government is planning to tap the USO fund to deliver 2 mbps through state-owned MTNL and BSNL.
The idea is to boost economic activity in general
Project can be financed spending only a portion of the burgeoning corpus of the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).
The move has the potential to kill the telecom business.

By the group of three headed by Royal Bank of Scotland. The other two members of the consortium include Spain’s Santander and Dutch-Belgian bank Fortis.
They have put in a bid for $98 bn.
Remember, yesterday we were noting about the record-breaking acquisition bid by Barclays?

Email spoofing is reported to be haunting big deals by private equity players.
In email spoofing, the sender’s address in the email header is altered so as to appear as if the mail originated from a different source.
There are four methods to spoof emails:

One can visit sites like mail.com and choose domain name of choice.
The ‘from’ ‘return-path’ and ‘reply-to’ fields can be changed.
Hijack mails during transmission, make changes and then route them to a particular destination.
Hackers can send a mail such as admin@companyname.com asking to reply back with certain information.

Remember we have been covering about the choice of allocation of 3G spectrum to telecom companies for quite some time?
Government has finally chosen the auction route. It is expected to rake in nearly Rs. 8000 crore through these auctions.

Dubai is planning to build this. This will consume much less electricity than what it produces.

The MRTPC (Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission) is planning to investigate whether or not there is a cartel in pricing cement.
According to the MRTPC Act, the regulator has to establish that there was a ‘meeting of minds’ to fix prices and that there was price parallelism.
While it is very difficult to prove the first one (meeting of minds) because of the availability of sophisticated communication channels, companies are doing their best not be caught on the second point. They never increase the prices in tandem. The prices will be increased in such a way that the picture that emerges can be easily portrayed as the play of market forces.

The Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramdoss said that a National Regulatory Authority (NRA) would be set up to ensure the effective implementation of tobacco control laws.
In India more than 40% of cancer cases are caused due to tobacco use.

Indian Current Affairs