Current Affairs 22 January 2014

Supreme court commutes death sentence for 15

Fifteen death-row prisoners, whose mercy petitions were rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee, received commutation of their sentences to life imprisonment with the Supreme Court on Tuesday ruling that inordinate delays ranging from seven to 11 years in the disposal of their pleas, as well as psychiatric conditions developed during incarceration, are grounds for clemency.
A Bench of Chief Justice P. Sathasivam, Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Shivakirti Singh also ruled against solitary confinement for death row prisoners.
It said death row convicts should be informed at least 14 days before the execution, making a last family reunion mandatory.
The Bench also overturned an earlier judgment which drew a distinction between murders related to terrorism and others.

Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has warned food business operators across the country that the deadline for obtaining licences and registration under Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, will not be extended again.
When the Act was notified and implemented from August 5, 2011, businesses were given an initial deadline of a year to register.
Following this directive, food safety officials have launched an awareness campaign urging all food businesses ranging from road side eateries and canteens to star-category hotels and restaurants to either register or obtain licence.
The Act provides for imposing a fine of up to Rs. 5 lakh besides imprisonment up to six months on food businesses operating without licences.
The Designated Officer estimated that there must be around 22,000 food businesses in Coimbatore district. Till now, 2,658 food business operators have been issued licences and another 6,636 issued registrations, totalling 9,264.
Firms with annual turnover below Rs. 12 lakh will require registration and those above have to obtain licences.
The Food Safety Act mandated all food manufacturers, packers, distributors, importers, 100 per cent food export-oriented units, restaurants, canteens, transporters and food processors to get registered or obtain a licence.

India’s first indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, will undergo sea trials in “a few weeks or months” as its preliminary harbour acceptance trials were over, Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff Rear Admiral L.V.S. Babu said here on Tuesday.
During the trials, all systems, including its ballistic missiles, will be tested before the submarine is finally commissioned into the Navy.

Targeted therapy, precision medicine and cancer genomics — this is the new vocabulary of cancer research and treatment that Harold Varmus, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize, advocated in his lecture ‘New directions in cancer research’ at the Indian Institute of Science on Tuesday.
“It is more important to know which gene causes cancer than what tissue it affects,” said Prof. Varmus, who is also the director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), U.S. While conventional cancer treatments such as chemotherapy targets cancer tissues, cancer genomics looks at the mutations the disease triggers, the proteins associated with it, therefore helping with more precise treatment, he said.
Cancer was rising especially in less developed countries, he cautioned, and added that the number of deaths by cancer was projected to be 11 million by 2030 around the world. The study of cancer genes had, however, dramatically helped improve cancer therapy, Prof. Varmus said.

The 2008 delimitation process was remarkably politically neutral, but MPs and MLAs who were on the delimitation commission’s advisory committee were able to circumvent inconvenient redistricting, an empirical analysis of the process has found.
Lakshmi Iyer, an economist and associate professor at the Harvard Business School, and Maya Reddy of Harvard’s McLean Hospital, looked at the delimitation process that involved the redrawing of constituency boundaries to reflect demographic changes and reallocation of reserved constituencies, for the first time in 30 years.
They looked at Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, which differed in significant ways from each other, including the political party in power at the time, the nature of regional politics and political culture.
Using Geographic Information System, maps and demographic data, the researchers looked at the proportion of his or her original voters an incumbent politician would lose following the delimitation.

Manufacturing a nuclear weapon does not, as a senior Indian Minister in 1998 claimed, create credible deterrence. Deterrence is entirely a matter of perceptions, a mental effect that is created on the adversary that nuclear use will entail assured retaliatory holocaust.
The possibility of nuclear use is thereby pre-empted.
The Indian nuclear doctrine, in that sense, is well articulated — on paper. Since 1998, more than 15 years have passed and in the Indian sub-continent, nuclear arsenals have grown far beyond the small nuclear ambitions that were articulated then.
Yet there is an increasing fund of world literature being published, pointing to structural and operational weaknesses in the Indian nuclear arsenal.
The question is not whether India has built enough nuclear bombs. Hardly anyone questions this basic fact, but the ideational systems that will ensure the ‘massive’ retaliation promised in the doctrine are being increasingly questioned by scholars and analysts worldwide.
Pakistani observers cannot help but be swayed and dangerously influenced by such literature, thereby inducing them to think the unthinkable.
What does not help in encouraging sober thinking is the fact that since the end of the Second World War, South Asia has seen the largest number of shooting wars in the world.
So the questions of nuclear use will not arise in the quiet peace of neighbourly relations, but in the stress of combat over the Line of Control or the international border.