Month: July 2014

Officials said that the U.S. is sending another 300 troops to Iraq to increase security at the U.S. Embassy and elsewhere in the Baghdad area to protect the U.S. citizens and property.

The Pentagon said that this raises the total U.S. troop presence in Iraq to approximately 750.

Meanwhile, the State Department announced that it was temporarily moving an unspecified ”small number” of embassy staff in Baghdad to the U.S. consulates in the northern city of Irbil and the southern city of Basra, Huffington Post reported.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), now calling itself Islamic State, staged a military parade in Syria’s northern city of al-Raqqa, showcasing plenty of weaponry and military gear it looted from military depots in neighbouring Iraq, activists said Tuesday.

The Syria Mubashar activists’ group said the ISIS displayed a long convoy of armoured vehicles, tanks, US-made military vehicles, heavy artillery and assorted weaponry and most notably a big rocket that resembled a Russian-made Scud missile, Xinhua reported.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius Tuesday discussed strengthening cooperation in defence, trade, investment and urban development.

Fabius, who is on a tour of India, also extended President Francois Hollande’s invitation to Modi to visit France.

Both leaders reiterated their commitment to further strengthen and expand their bilateral relationship.

Fabius called the meeting “warm”, and said he had “positive” talks on issues of urban planning, tourism and low-cost defence manufacturing.

A 40 year old Housewife committed suicide by hanging at her residence on Monday night hours in Rajendranagar Police Station Limits.

According to Rajendranagar police, the deceased G Sunitha (40) an House wife W/o Lakshmaiah R/o Tejaswini Nagar colony of Attapur, committed suicide by hanging at her residence on Monday night hours.

The family members of the woman told the police that she slipped into depression due to ill health for last few years and might have ended her life over it.

The Meerpet police have found the body of an unidentified man who was brutally murdered by unknown persons.

According to Meerpet police, 35 years old unidentified man body was found in a open area of Sai Ganesh Nagar Colony of Meerpet on Tuesday early hours.

Police said unknown persons brutally murdered by thrown a boulder on his head due to which he was died on the spot. Locality people informed to police, immediately police rushed to the spot.

The Punjab government Tuesday announced that it will give financial assistance of Rs.20,000 a month to the distressed families of 40 Punjabis stuck in conflict- affected Mosul town in Iraq.

Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal said the assistance would be given to save the affected families from financial hardship when their bread-winners were in crisis in Iraq.

At least 40 men from Punjab have been taken hostage by militants in Iraq’s Mosul town. They have been in captivity since June 11.

Bombay Natural History Society and American Alliance of Museums have joined hands for project ‘e-Mammal’ to track, study and document mammals across selected sites in India with the help of school students, an official said here Tuesday.

The e-Mammal project will promote cultural understanding among children through applied scientific research across schools in India, the US and Mexico.

GHMC Commissioner Somesh Kumar said that the High Court has not given any status quo in the N-Convention case. He said that the matter was still going on in the Court and the GHMC has been waiting for the Court orders to initiate further action.

A minor boy had a narrow escape after suffering an electric shock when he touched an air cooler in a park, police said Tuesday.

The incident occurred around 8.30 p.m. Sunday when the four-and-half-year-old boy, Sunny, was playing in a park in the Shalimar Bagh area of west Delhi.

The boy got electric shock and got stuck to the air cooler as soon as he touched it, said a police official.

The cooler is installed outside a room in which a water pump is kept and is also the living quarters of a guard.

Seeing his condition, the boy’s friends who were playing with him panicked.

Deputy Leader of Opposition in Legislative Council Mohammed Ali Shabbir on Tuesday accused Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao of not giving importance to the issue of public importance.

Speaking to media persons here, Shabbir Ali said that the Telangana State was facing problems like shortage of drinking water, power criris, lack of irrigation facilities and uncertainity over fee reimbursement. Further, the government has missed June 30, the deadline to settle the farm loans. However, he said that the TRS Government has failed to take any positive step in the last one month of its rule.

The TRS Legislature Party on Tuesday dicussed and finalised the strategy to be adopted for the election of Chairman of Telangana State Legislative Council to be held on Wednesday.

The TRSLP meeting, held in the Assembly premises, was also attended by TRS Secretary General K Keshava Rao, Ministers K Tarakama Rao, T Harish Rao, Swamy Goud and other leaders. However, the MLCs who have defected Congress and TDP to join the TRS, did not participate in the meeting. The TRS leaders reportedly discussed the strategy to be adopted for the election of Chairman.

To check illegal mining and overcome shortages, the Himachal Pradesh government Tuesday decided to go for open auction of all sand and grit quarries along the riverbed as well as on government and forest lands.

The government will initially auction 30 mines in Una district and later in Hamirpur and Kangra districts, an official statement quoted Industries Minister Mukesh Agnihotri as saying.

He said the lease would be valid for 20 years so that the right-holders could derive maximum benefit from the quarries.

Despite strong criticism from home and abroad, the Japanese cabinet Tuesday approved a resolution that will allow the country to exercise the right to collective self-defence by reinterpreting the country’s pacifist constitution.

The resolution, which is regarded as a major overhaul of Japan’s post-war security policy, sets three new conditions that would enable exercise of the right to collective self-defence, including when there are “clear dangers” to the lives of its people and their rights due to armed attacks on Japan or “countries with close ties”, Xinhua reported

Multinational General Electric (GE) Tuesday appointed Munesh Makhija as managing director of its India Technology Centre and chief technology officer of its Indian subsidiary.

“Makhija, who took over from outgoing incumbent Gopichand Katragadda will be based at the John F Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore and will lead our research and development (R&D) efforts in India,” the company said in a statement here.

The technology centre in this tech hub is GE’s first and largest integrated multi-disciplinary R&D centre.

Patients from difficult-to-access locations in the landlocked northeastern states can heave a sigh of relief, as a Guwahati-based hospital is planning to launch air ambulance services to ferry patients from across the region.

The Guwahati Neurological Research Centre (GNRC) Tuesday unveiled a plan to launch air ambulance and medical outreach programme using helicopters to remote areas of all the eight northeastern state – Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim.

The clearing of tropical forests to plant oil palm trees leaves an adverse impact on the quality of water, finds a study.

The process releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is fuelling climate change and significantly erodes water quality, the researchers said.

“Although we had previously documented carbon emissions from oil palm plantation, we were stunned at how profoundly these plantations alter freshwater ecosystems for decades,” said Lisa M. Curran, professor of ecological anthropology at Stanford University in the US.

Automobile manufacturers reported some positive sales numbers for the month of June.

Sales of India’s largest passenger car manufacturer Maruti Suzuki grew by 33.5 percent, including exports, for June at 112,773 units from 84,455 units sold in the corresponding month of 2013.

The company’s domestic sales zoomed by 31.1 percent to 100,964 units during the month under review as compared to 77,002 units sold in the corresponding month of last year.

Gradual increase in an area’s overall temperature actually leads more often to permanent population shifts than do natural calamities, claims a new research.

Researchers at Princeton University examined 15 years of migration data for more than 7,000 families in Indonesia and found that increases in temperature and, to a lesser extent, rainfall influenced a family’s decision to permanently migrate to another of the country’s provinces.

BITS Pilani-Hyderabad has developed a new low-cost, ultra-rapid portable device to test antibiotic sensitivity of human urinary pathogens which can help curb antibiotic resistance to a large extent.

The institute Tuesday announced that it is transferring the technology to an incubate company Xcellence in Bio Innovation and Technologies Pvt Ltd (xBITS) for commercial scale production.

The Delhi High Court Tuesday sought response from Naren Jain, son of former Congress leader Bhiku Ram Jain, on the controversy over the Civil Lines house that has been given on rent by him to former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

On hearing the news that the house was being offered to Kejriwal on rent, Virender Kumar Jain, Naren Jain’s elder brother, moved the court alleging that the offer was in violation of the court’s earlier order that restrained renting of a disputed property.

The much delayed admissions to the three-year undergraduate programme in Delhi University began Tuesday, with the sky-rocketing cutoffs further increasing the students’ wait for admission pending the second list.

The first cutoff list was declared Monday with cutoffs going as high as 100 percent.

“I have scored 94 percent and I want to pursue history. But I couldn’t qualify for the first cutoff, so I have to wait,” Ravi Chandra, a student from Manipur, told IANS.

The high cutoff has forced Mohan Yadav from Madhya Pradesh to wait for some more time.

If you blamed mosquitoes alone for spreading malaria, think again. It turns out mosquitoes are mere victims while the “villain” is the malaria parasite.

Malaria parasites alter the chemical odour signal of their hosts to attract mosquitoes and better spread their offspring, reveals new research.

This scent change could be used as a diagnostic tool, researchers said.

“Malaria-infected mice are more attractive to mosquitoes than uninfected mice,” said Mark Mescher, associate professor of entomology at Pennsylvania State University in the US.

Delhi Metro’s Airport Express line witnessed an increase of 28 percent in its ridership last year, the Delhi Metro said Tuesday.

“The average daily ridership on the line increased to 12,856 in June 2014 from 10,069 in July 2013 – an increase of 28 percent,” a Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) statement said, adding that the Delhi Metro had taken over operations of the line July 1, 2013.

Actress Helena Bonham Carter feels she is not doing enough for her two children.

Carter, 48, juggles her career with caring for Billy, 10, and Nell, six – her children with partner Tim Barton, reports contactmusic.com.

“Juggling motherhood with acting is hard and I’m always dropping balls all the time. You always feel you’re doing everything badly,” Carter told HELLO! magazine.

“Tim’s taking time out now and I think I’ll do the same. We’re trying to be parents, which is harder than anything else,” she added.

An Aligarh-based Muslim body has written a letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi expressing dismay over AK Anotony’s remarks that some sections of society have an impression that the party is inclined to minority communities.

Millat Bedari Muhim Committee (MBMC), which had supported the Congress during Lok Sabha polls, said that Muslims can do without “pseudo appeasement and tokenism which the Congress has been offering during the past few years”.