Indian Current Affairs: 03.06.2007

Announcement: Due to the heavy demands of personal life, I couldn’t do any posting on 2^nd June. We continue with our posting from today. Quiz will resume from tomorrow morning as usual.
Here is the second piece I promised on preparing for the General Studies paper for the Mains exam. Take a look at it. Please don’t mind the formatting. Somehow Blogger has been trying my patience.
BMW case: Bar council announces probe

The Chairman of the Bar Council of India KK Manan has constituted a fact finding committee comprising of three advocates to investigate the affair.
Most of you may be by now aware that a sting operation conducted by NDTV has revealed the collusion between the prosecution and the defence lawyers in the sensational BMW hit-and-run case.
The members of the committee are: CL Sachdeva, Surya Prakash Khatri and RS Rana. The senior advocates who are poor light in this episode are RK Anand and IU Khan.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is arriving in India today. The trip is expected to strengthen the relationships between the two countries.

It is China. It has decided to enact an action plan on climate change.
As a developing country China is not obligated to meet targets set by the Kyoto Protocol, under which 38 developed countries must reduce their gas emissions by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels, during the period 2008 to 2012.

Management graduates amongst you would have surely heard about it. Let’s see some details about it.
It originated at Motorola in 1986 and became a staple of corporate life in the 1990’s.
The term is now so widely and divergently applied that it is hard to pin down what it actually means. At some companies, it is plainly a euphemism for cost-cutting. Others explain it as a tool for analyzing a problem and then using data to solve each component of it. But on a basic level, it seeks to remove variability from a process. In that way you avoid errors or defects and increase predictability.
Technically Six Sigma quality has come to be accepted as no more than 3.4 defects per million.

Our duty structure on imported wines and spirits is not WTO compliant. Hence we have been taken to court over this by the US and EU. That means, they have complained in the WTO and it has accepted their complaint and constituted a dispute resolution panel.
India is likely to fall in line with the multilateral obligations.
At present the combined duties and taxes are upto 550% for spirits and 264% for wines. According to the WTO norms, tariffs for wines and spirits cannot go beyond 150%.

It is played on a court, which is surrounded on all four sides – and a ceiling – by a highly tensioned net. The actual pitch is the same length and configuration as an outdoor cricket pitch. The floor of the court is covered in synthetic turf. The ball used is soft-centered so that fielders avoid the risk of injury. Batsmen use normal cricket bats and gloves, but no one wears pads.

I think I should get used to covering about Second Life more frequently than what I have been, if we are to really stay current with that game. I have my serious reservations on calling a ‘game’ at all now.
There is a Swedish competitor to Second Life called Entropia Universe.
Second Life is reported to be having a daily turnover of $6 lakhs and claims to have created the equivalent of 6000 full-time jobs as its residents make furniture or clothes or sell land or services. It is talking about having its own Chancellor to control money supply and manipulate interest rates when its banks start lending money.
Second Life’s supporters claim that it has three killer applications:

1. Unlike the Internet, it has a system of micro-payments using its own currency Linden dollars, convertible into real dollars.
2. Unlike other virtual worlds such as the massively popular Word of Warcraft, it lets residents keep the intellectual property rights to what they create.
3. Its owner Linden Lab, recently welcomed Open Source movement, allowing anyone qualified to create their own applications whether games, education or business projects.

With all these developments happening right before our eyes, I am left wondering at times, whether it is time for all of us to start interacting in Second Life!!!

The Taliprot or Corypha umbraculifera is the three I am reporting about.
It produces about 12 mn flowers which contain more than 500 kg of seeds. Once it bears fruits, the plant dies. It gradually uses up all the nutrient reserves accumulated in the trunk over the decades.
It is monocarpic, flowering only once when it is 30 to 80 years old. It takes about a year for the fruits to mature.

Justice Fathima Beevi. October 6, 1989 to April 29, 1992.
Second is Sujata Manohar. Third is Ruma Pal. Justice Ruma Pal is still continuing in office, having been appointed in 2000.

Indian Current Affairs