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India lowest contributor UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24: India is the least contributing nation to the greenhouse gases while the United States contributes the most, an UN....more Method
being used to produce anti-snake PUNE, Feb 24: Officials at the Haffkine institute here have defended the method being used to produce anti-snake and anti-......more
Musharraf
wants India ISLAMABAD, Feb 24: Pakistan’s military ruler Gen Parvez Musharraf has said the settlement of Kashmir dispute depended......more |
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Hundreds of Islamic ISLAMABAD, Feb 24: Police arrested more than 600 Islamic activists in a crackdown on religious fanatics ahead of the hanging of a convicted Sunni muslim murderer, reports said today. All the arrests took place in Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan. Most of those detained are members of the Sipah-e-Sahaba group, as is the condemned man, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, who is due to be hanged on......more Watch
is on for doomsday WASHINGTON, Feb 24: One got the dinosaurs. Another wiped out the trilobites and just about everything else on earth. And an asteroid or comet might get us, too, scientists say.....more US
to send special WASHINGTON, Feb 24: The Vice Chief of US Naval operations will go to Tokyo as a special envoy to meet with Japanese officials on the accidental sinking of a Japanese teaching boat by a US submarine, the navy has announced......more |
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India lowest contributor of greenhouse gases UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24: India is the least contributing nation to the greenhouse gases while the United States contributes the most, an UN environment agency has said. While India emits less than one tonne of greenhouse gases per capita per year, the US, emitting 20 tonnes remains at the top, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) said. UNEP Executive Director, Klaus Toepfer at a press conference recently urged for the cooperation from US Government and industries and said "the United States must be a part of the solution". He said European countries were somewhere in the middle, at about 10 tonnes per year. On postponement by US of next round of discussions on reduction of greenhouse gases, he said he was not discouraged by President George W Bush seeking advancement of the next round of talks and called it a "positive sign". "I believe that this request for more time is a positive signal. It is a signal that there is a very honest work going on in the administration," he said. Bush had sought postponement after he took office and the talks are now expected to resume in June or July. The greenhouse gases pollute the environment and raise the atmospheric temperature leading to global warming. (AP) |
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Method
being used to produce anti- PUNE, Feb 24: Officials at the Haffkine institute here have defended the method being used to produce anti-snake and anti-scorpion venom serum,saying it is the only method available for making the life-saving product. The institute is in the news following the death of six horses during the week, after they were injected snake venom for producing antibiotics in their blood, which in turn is used for processing serum. Similar deaths had occurred in the institute earlier also, leading to a furore by animal rights activisted. There is no other method to produce the serum used for treating snake and scorpion bites, the officials maintained adding that if anyone could suggest a different method, they would only bed too willing to forego bleeding of horses. The officials said the institute produced about 50,000 doses of serum annually which proved life-saving for victims of snake and scorpion bites. Whether human life is more important than the few horses which may die during administration of snake venom or during the bleeding is an issue which needs to be debated, they insisted. The premier institute was established way back in 1899 to produce the serum, for which horses are routinely injected small doses of snake venom so as to trigger production of antibiotics in their blood to fight poison. Institute scientists collect blood samples from horses six months after administration of venom as antibodies take this much time to develop in horses’ blood. Horses are bled twice a month and six litres of blood is collected in each bleeding, officials said. The antibiotic rich blood is then utilised to produce the serum. Similar procedure is followed for producing anti-scorpion venom serum as well. The six horses that died last wednesday were among the nine administered snake venom on that day. The Officials maintained that the six could not cope with physiological reaction triggered by the venom. The Officials said the institute had 714 horses, obtained from the army, which were used for serum-production. The army keeps horses till they reach the age of 18, after which they are killed. "instead of allowing the destruction of the animals, we take them under our care to use them for producing serum," the officials said. (UNI) |
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Musharraf wants India to
review its "rigid" ISLAMABAD, Feb 24: Pakistan’s military ruler Gen Parvez Musharraf has said the settlement of Kashmir dispute depended on whether India was ready to review its "rigid" stance on the issue. "We have seen some statements by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suggesting he might be prepared to reconsider India’s rigid stance on the issue of Kashmir. These words have not been followed by deeds so far," Gen Musharraf told Egyptian Middle East news agency in an interview. Pakistani press published excerpts of the interview but did not mention whether the interview was held before or after the February 22 announcement by India extending the ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir by three months. Renewing his oft-repeated offer to hold talks with India anywhere, any time to discuss Kashmir and other bilateral issues, Musharraf said India avoided talks by imposing unacceptable pre-conditions. "We hope New Delhi will soon realise the futility of its efforts to impose a military solution in Kashmir. There is no alternative to a peaceful resolution of this dispute and no justification for delaying the commencement of a meaningful dialogue for its settlement." Insisting on the visit of an Hurriyat delegation to Islamabad for starting tripartite talks involving India, Pakistan and Hurriyat, Gen Musharraf said Pakistan had already accepted Hurriyat’s demand for three-way talks as they were the representatives of Kashmiris. "The purpose of the delegation’s visit is to hold consultations on the commencement of the tripartite process of negotiations for a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir issue in accordance with wishes of Kashmiri people," he said. (PTI) |
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Hundreds of Islamic activists arrested in Pakistan ISLAMABAD, Feb 24: Police arrested more than 600 Islamic activists in a crackdown on religious fanatics ahead of the hanging of a convicted Sunni muslim murderer, reports said today. All the arrests took place in Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan. Most of those detained are members of the Sipah-e-Sahaba group, as is the condemned man, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, who is due to be hanged on Wednesday, the Urdu-language Newspaper Ausaf said. Jhangvi was sentenced to death several years ago for killing an Iranian diplomat in the provincial capital of Lahore in 1990 and his appeals for mercy were rejected at all levels. Maulana Azam Tariq, chief of the Sipah-e-Sahaba, was among those arrested under the maintenance of public order ordinance, which allows the Government to take citizens into preventive detention. (DPA) |
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Watch is on for doomsday asteroids, comets WASHINGTON, Feb 24: One got the dinosaurs. Another wiped out the trilobites and just about everything else on earth. And an asteroid or comet might get us, too, scientists say. That is why dozens of centers are searching the sky for moderate-sized asteroids or comets that might one day collide with the earth. It appears that every 100 million years or so, something big enough to wipe out nearly all life hits the planet, Chris Chyba of Stanford University in California says. Such impacts bracketed the dinosaur age, scientists now think. This week’s issue of the journal science carries a report suggesting that an asteroid or comet was responsible for the "mother of all extinctions" — the permian event 250 million years ago that wiped out 90 per cent of all marine species and 70 percent of animals and plants on land. It would have been about the size of the asteroid believed to have hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, sending up clouds of dust and sparking volcanic activity that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The first impact would have ended the paleozoic age 250 million years ago, starting the mesozoic, during which dinosaurs evolved and thrived. The impact 65 million years ago ended the party for the dinosaurs, allowing mammals and eventually humans to evolve during the present age. "Statistically, there is something like 100 million years between impacts of 10-km objects and the earth," Chyba told a news conference sponsored by the space agency NASA on Thursday. That scenario would allow for a theoretical 35-million-year buffer. But of course asteroids and comets do not operate on schedule. And something smaller could make quite a mess, too. "Smaller impacts ... Even a km in size could also cause not mass extinctions but could strongly affect human existence," Chyba said. It could kick up enough dust to cause a "nuclear winter" that would wipe out crops and might cause tsunamis to swamp coastal areas. It did not take the recent release of asteroid disaster films to make scientists aware of this threat. In 1998 NASA started what is called the spaceguard survey, which aims to find 90 percent of near-earth objects larger than a km in diameter by 2008. Teams of astronomers around the world are surveying the sky with electronic cameras to find objects, and amateur sky-watchers help in the effort. "We think we know all of the 10-km objects," Chyba said. "There aren’t very many of them that are crisscrossing earth’s orbit. We don’t have to worry about them." He said researchers are about halfway through a catalog of one-km objects. If one is found to be on a collision course with earth, Chyba and other experts say there will be plenty of time to think about what to do — whether to launch a spacecraft to try and deflect it, or make the best of a bad situation and move people away from coastal areas and stockpile food. If one has been missed, nasa says the first warning will be the explosion when it strikes. "Statistically, the greatest danger is from a neo (near-earth object) with about 1 million megatons energy," NASA says in its web site devoted to the threat at http://impact.Arc.Nasa.Gov/. This object would be 2 km in diameter. "On average, one of these collides with the earth once or twice per million years, producing a global catastrophe that would kill a substantial (but unknown) fraction of the earth’s human population. Reduced to personal terms, this means that you have about one chance in 20,000 of dying as a result of a collision," NASA says. Of course such impacts give as well as receive. Some scientists believe that meteors, comets and asteroids smashing into the earth may have carried the very seeds of life. Evidence of amino acids and even tiny bacteria have been found in meteorites. Just weeks ago a team at the University of California Santa Cruz said they created an artificial cell wall in space-like conditions and said it showed living cells could have survived a trip through space. (REUTERS) |
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US to send special navy envoy to Japan WASHINGTON, Feb 24: The Vice Chief of US Naval operations will go to Tokyo as a special envoy to meet with Japanese officials on the accidental sinking of a Japanese teaching boat by a US submarine, the navy has announced. Adm. William J Fallon also will deliver a formal letter of apology from President George W Bush for the disaster that left nine Japanese missing and presumed dead, the navy said in a statement yesterday. Fallon was due to arrive in Japan next week. Fallon will brief Japanese officials on the progress of investigations into the crash, including an official navy court of inquiry set to begin March 5, the statement added. Japan had requested that a special envoy be sent to explain the accident. The navy and the US National Transportation Safety Board were conducting separate investigations of the February 9 crash in which the nuclear attack submarine abruptly surfaced and sank the Ehime Maru. The greeneville was practicing a fast-surfacing maneuver nine miles (14 kms) off diamond head on oahu when it hit the trawler. The boat was carrying students from a Japanese high school on a fisheries training project. Twenty-six people from the Ehime Maru were rescued in the tragedy, which has further strained US-Japan ties. Ties between the two allies have been tested in recent years by a string of incidents involving US military forces in Japan. In the case of the Ehime Maru, much of Japan’s anger has focused on the fact that the US submarine was carrying civilians — two of whom were at the controls — when the boat was struck. Various US news reports said yesterday that the navy’s preliminary investigation into the accident concluded the crowd of civilians hindered normal safety precautions on the greeneville. Relatives of those lost in the tragedy and much of Japan’s public are keenly watching the outcome of the navy court of inquiry that will decide whether to discipline the Greeneville’s captain and two other officers. Japan was also awaiting a response from the US Government to its request to raise the sunken Ehime Maru. However, experts say that would be technically very difficult and could take months. The status of a possible salvage operation is among the issues adm. Fallon will discuss with the Japanese Government, the navy said. (REUTERS) |
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