India's judicial system to be reformed - Moily

India would take measures to improve the quality of the judiciary by reforming the legal education system and making the country the most preferred destination for investors by setting up international arbitration courts with a mandate to dispose off any litigation within a year.

"The Government of India would like to improve quality of the judiciary through reforming the legal education. We need to make India the most preferred destination of investment," Law and Justice Minister M Veerappa Moily said last night.

Moily, a former chief minister of Karnataka and Chairman of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, said: "any investment above Rs five crore will be decided in commercial courts within a year."

Sahara to face disciplinary actions for placing Queen's Baton replica.

Sahara is in trouble for displaying a replica of the Queen's Baton for the Commonwealth Games in Lucknow on Saturday. The authorities plan to take legal action against company officials for disrespecting the baton, an official said.

After the customary run of the baton, it was taken to Rai Bareli. But some officials of Sahara displayed a replica at Sahara Shahr, the residence of Sahara India chairman Subroto Roy, in Gomti Nagar.

"Legal action would be taken against the Sahara officials for showing disrespect to the Queen's Baton and displaying it without permission," said Lucknow's district magistrate Anil Sagar.

Sonia asks Jaiswal to probe in Boy's death in Kanpur

Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Saturday asked Minister of State for Coal, Statistics and Programme Implementation Sriprakash Jaiswal to make inquiries into the death of an 8-year-old Kanpur boy Aman Khan.

The parents have blamed Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh's security for their son's demise and alleged that he died due to roadblocks erected during the Prime Minister's recent visit to Kanpur.

They claimed they were not allowed to take the shortest route to the hospital to give their son medical treatment on time.

Y.S.R. Jagan Mohan slams state Congress Leadership

Hitting out at the Congress leadership, party MP YS Jaganmohan Reddy on Saturday alleged that Andhra Pradesh's ministers and legislators were being prevented from joining his yatra.

In the first open attack on the leadership since resuming his yatra on Thursday, the young MP claimed that ministers and legislators wanted to accompany him but were being prevented from doing so.

"What crime I have committed? I am asking you if it is justified to ask ministers and legislators not to accompany me," said Jagan, without naming Chief Minister K. Rosaiah, who asked his cabinet colleagues and legislators not to join the yatra.

Google china's license renewed

China has renewed Google's licence to operate in the country, the search giant announced today.

Writing on the company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond said: "We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China."

Google – which has a 30% market share of Chinese search traffic – recently began directing Google.cn visitors to its uncensored Hong Kong site, saying the new approach ensured it stayed true to a commitment not to censor searches from internet users in China.

Indian vehicle sales will up by 12% by March'11 - SIAM

The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) is hoping that the passenger car market will witness a 12-13 percent growth in sales for the year ending March 2011.

Due to favourable factors like the rising income, easy access to finance and new launches in the next six months, the increase of cars will hit an all-time high of 22 lakh units.

The current statistics clearly indicate the promising growth of the car market. During the first quarter of 2010-2011, Indian auto market saw a growth of 33 percent as 5.54 lakh units of cars were sold.

Analysis on GSLV-D3's failure complete

Non-availability of liquid hydrogen supply to the thrust chamber of the main engine could have resulted in failure of the third developmental flight of Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle from Sriharikota on April 15, a failure analysis committee has found.

The flight of GSLV-D3 primarily meant for testing of indigenously developed cryogenic upper stage (CUS) had failed to achieve the mission objectives following which ISRO had instituted a two-tier process to carry out an in-depth analysis of the flight performance and identify the causes of the failure and recommend corrective measures.

Murali named Vice Captain for first test against India

Sri Lanka on Friday named retiring spinner Muttiah Muralitharan as the vice-captain and brought back seamer Lasith Malinga for the first Test against India starting on July 18 at Galle.

Muralitharan will be Kumar Sangakkara's deputy in the Galle Test before he quits the longer version of the game.

The selectors also brought back the pace duo of Malinga and Dilhara Fernando, naming them in the 16-member squad, which includes uncapped batsman Lahiru Thirimanne.

The 26-year-old Malinga has played 28 Tests so far, the last being against England in December 2007.

On the other hand, 30-year-old Fernando, a veteran of 33 Tests, is making a comeback since the tour of Pakistan last year.

Sri Lanka squad:
Kumar Sangakkara (captain), Muttiah Muralitharan (vice-captain), Tillakaratne Dilshan, Tharanga Paranawithana, Mahela Jayawardene, Thilan Samaraweera, Anjelo Mathews, Prasanna Jayawardena, Lasith Malinga, Rangana Herath, Dilhara Fernando, Dhammika Prasad, Suraj Randiv, Thilina Kandamby, Chanaka Welagedara and Lahiru Thirimanna.

Harbhajan denied entry into airport in Chennai

India spinner Harbhajan Singh was denied entry into the Anna International Airport for not having a ticket and had to wait for about 45 minutes outside the entry area before finally getting in.

The tweaker arrived at the domestic airport from Mumbai and was taken to International airport from where the Indian cricket team was scheduled to leave for Sri Lanka.

Most of the team members had already arrived in the city, on Thursday.

Instead of joining teammates at a city hotel, Harbhajan preferred to go straight to the International airport and wait for the team.

Telcom Operators will start rolling out 3G services within months of providing airwaves

Mobile Broadband Summit 2010 -- A number of major Indian mobile operators are set to launch their 3G services within weeks of being handed their new airwaves, Nilanjan Mukherjee, president of Reliance Communications Ltd. , said here today in his keynote address at the Mobile Broadband Summit.

Seven privately owned carriers, including Reliance Communications, Aircel Ltd. , Bharti Airtel Ltd. (Mumbai: BHARTIARTL), Idea Cellular Ltd. , Tata Teleservices Ltd. , and Vodafone Essar , won 3G spectrum in the April auction, and will be handed their new airwaves in September.

That will enable them to compete with the two state-owned carriers -- Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL) -- that were handed their 3G spectrum in 2008, and which launched their 3G services more than 18 months ago.

HCL auquires NTS group

HCL Infosystems jumped 5.36% to Rs 118.90 at 09:06 IST on BSE after the company acquired a 60% stake in NTS Group, a leading IT services and solutions provider based in Dubai, involving an investment of about $6.5 million.

The announcement was made after market hours on Thursday, 8 July 2010.

Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was up 140.02 points, or 0.79%, to 17,791.75

On BSE, 73,361 shares were traded in the counter as against an average daily volume of 72,835 shares in the past one quarter.

ICICI Direct website unavailable on Thursday

A technical snag hit ICICI Direct, the country's top brokerage house, disrupting its online trading services on Thursday.

Investors were unable to log on to their accounts on ICICIdirect.com, a wing of ICICI Securities that offers retail trading and investment services.

When contacted, a spokesperson from ICICI Securities said that "the problem was due to a technical snag and we are trying to address it".

"However, people willing to square-off the open positions were able to execute orders through phone," she added.

In a message to investors on its website, the company said, "ICICI Direct is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We will be available shortly."

ICICI Securities Ltd is the largest equity house in the country that provides end-to-end solutions (including web-based services).

Facebook beats youTube in India

If you thought YouTube and Flickr were the largest video and photo sharing sites in India, it might be time to have your statistics updated.

The world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, has beaten Google’s YouTube and Yahoo’s Flickr, at least in India, to become the largest video and photo sharing site, in terms of unique visitors.

Unique user count for websites is measured using cookies. When a browser, say Chrome or Firefox, visits a website, it checks for the existence of a particular cookie (like a cookie for Facebook). Counting unique cookies gets the unique number of users.

UN recalls envoy from Lanka

The United Nations on Thursday recalled its top envoy to Sri Lanka and closed down an office in Colombo following angry protests against a U.N. panel which was set up to probe allegations of war crime during the country’s civil war.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has slammed as “unacceptable” the failure of the Sri Lankan government to facilitate the normal working of the U.N. offices.

“The Secretary-General finds it unacceptable that the Sri Lankan authorities have failed to prevent the disruption of the normal functioning of the United Nations offices in Colombo as a result of unruly protests organised and led by a Cabinet Minister of the Government,” Farhan Haq, Associate Spokesperson, told journalists.

Draft for National Misson for green India to be finalised soon

The draft of the ambitious green mission to increase the forest cover and enhance eco-system services will be finalised by the month-end and then submitted to the Prime Minister, Union Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh said on Friday.

“The draft document for the mission will be finalised by this month end and submitted to the Prime Minister,” he told the NGOs at the sixth public consultation organised about the plan at Indian Forest Management Institute here.

‘National Mission for a Green India’ aims to increase the forest cover by 10 million hectares by 2020 and enhance eco-system services at an estimated cost of Rs 44,000 crore.

ISRO launch RH200 successful

ISRO has successfully launched the RH 200 rocket, which had a part of its payload developed by students from Vellore Institute of Technology University (VITU) in Tamil Nadu.

The RH 200 rocket, a technology demonstrator flight, was launched on July 7 from Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) attached to Vikram Sarabhaio Space Centre, a VSSC release said today.

The payload developed by the VITU students was part of ISRO's initiative of encouraging varsity students as partners in payload development.

Solar Plane can fly non stop round the earth

When the Solar Impulse airplane took off on its pioneering round-the-clock flight on Wednesday, the solar panels spread over a wing similar in size to that of an Airbus generated a tiny fraction of an airliner's power.

Each of the prototype's four solar-powered electric propellor motors produces barely more thrust than the flimsy petrol engine that helped the Wright Brothers make history with the world's first powered flight in 1903.

“We're rather far from commercial aviation,” acknowledged Pascal Vuilliomenet of the Swiss federal institute of technology in Lausanne (EPFL), a technical university that is heavily involved in the solar-powered aircraft.

karnatka LokYukta to be powerful enough to question Govt officials

Days after he almost quit citing helplessness and lack of powers, Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde has been given more powers.  He can now take up cases without waiting for a complaint.

But there is an all-important rider. The Chief Minister, other ministers, MPs and MLAs have been left out of the purview of these powers.

Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa announced this on Friday, saying that rules would also be amended to allow the Lokayukta to proceed against the Chief Secretary and Principal Secretary.

Apollo Health care to recruit 23,000

The country's leading healthcare firm, Apollo Hospital, today said it plans to hire nearly 23,000 employees in the next 3-4 years to support its Rs 1,800 crore expansion plans.

Apollo will also increase its bed-capacity to 12,000 from the current 9,000 beds by 2015, for which it plans to have a total workforce of 85,000 employees, Group Executive Director (Operations) Sangita Reddy told reporters here.

"Our workforce is growing. We are employing at a rate of 15 per cent per year and currently we have 62,000 team members," Reddy said on the sidelines of a CII event here.

"In the next 3-4 years, we will have 12,000 beds and our workforce will be close to 85,000 employees," Reddy said.

The proposed expansion plan, estimated to entail a total investment of Rs 1,800 crore, will lead to an increase of about 23,000 people in the company's workforce.

The company operates one of the largest hospital chains in the country and currently has 9,000 beds at its hospitals.

Reddy said that the investment on the planned expansion will be around Rs 60 lakh per bed.

UIDAI aims to enrol 60 crore by 4 yrs

With the first phase of UIDAI aiming to enrol 600 million residents of the country into its database in next four years and its possible use in improving the Public Distribution System, the Authority Chairman Nandan Nilekani today said the journey will be “long” and “tough”.

Nilekani expressed satisfaction over the pace of the project and said the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was on “the right track”.

The Authority which has been set up to provide a unique 12 digit number to each resident of the country aims to roll out the first number between August 2010 to February 2011.

“It is a very complex project and what we are going to do now (issuance of first Aadhaar number) is only a start. We have promised that we will have 600 million enroled in the next four and half years. It is going to be a long tough journey, the former chief of IT giant Infosys said on the sidelines of a function here.

Flood in Punjab & Haryana worsens

Situation in flood ravaged districts of Punjab and Haryana further worsened today as fresh breaches in Hansi Butana canal in Kaithal and Ghaggar in Sangrur district left several villages marooned even as army and other authorities were trying to plug the breaches.

A 15 feet breach occurred in Hansi Butana canal, some four km from Kaithal town in Haryana, inundating around 40 villages badly, officials said.

Two breaches of about 50 to 60 feet have been created due to gushing waters in Ghaggar river at Rasoli and Naiwala villages in Sangrur district of Punjab, flooding some other 50 villages, they said.

RDX recoverd in J&K

At least 75 kg of RDX was recovered from Jammu and Kashmir’s Kishtwar district, police said on Friday.

“This is one of the biggest recoveries of explosives in Jammu and Kashmir,” a Jammu and Kashmir Police spokesman said.

The spokesperson said the recovery was made on a tip that the militants had stocked a huge quantity of ammunition in the mountainous area of Chatroo, about 250 km from here.

About 250 g of RDX is sufficient to blow up a four-storey concrete building, a police source said.

Flood alert in 10 districts of western UP

A flood alert has been sounded in ten districts of western Uttar Pradesh with swelling of Yamuna while water level in Ganga was also rising at many places.

Deputy Secretary of the Revenue Department Raj Raten said that the flood alert has been issued in Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Baghpat, Meerut, Aligarh, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar, Hathras and Mathura districts.

According to Central Water Commission (CWC), Ganga is rising in Ballia, whereas Ramganga is rising in Moradabad and Bareilly.

River Yamuna is also rising in Etawah while river Sharda is rising in Paliakalan in Kheri, it said.

Ghagra is also rising in Elgin Bridge (Barabanki) Katarniyaghat in Bahraich and Ayodhya respectively.

Rapti was on the rise in Balrampur, it said.

Woman claims security restrictions caused her child's death

A woman, whose son died allegedly because he could not be taken to hospital in time due to security restrictions during the Prime Minister’s visit here, has written a letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi asking her to ensure that such incidents do not recur.

Usha Sharma and her husband Tasdud Hussain allege that they were stopped from taking their only child, eight-year-old Aman, who sustained serious head injuries after falling from a height at their home, to hospital by security personnel who had barricaded all major roads for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to IIT here on July 3.

The couple, residents of Shyam Nagar locality, claim that though they requested security persons to allow them to commute through Coca-Cola crossing which had been barricaded to facilitate the Prime Minister’s security cover, they were asked to take a longer route to the nearest hospital.

Aman, a student of Class II, bled to death on his way to the hospital.

In her letter to Ms. Gandhi, written on July 6, Ms. Sharma has requested the UPA Chairperson to make sure that in future security forces do not stop the injured from being taken to hospitals. She has also sought a compensation of Rs 10 lakh.

Additional District Magistrate Shailendra Kumar Singh told that some roads had been closed on July 3 in view of the Prime Minister’s visit to IIT in the city.

An inquiry has been ordered into the incident, he said.

Naxals could Cities

Naxal leaders and bombmakers could develop a capability to strike at urban targets in India, a top US think tank warned, adding it will be important to watch for any indication that cadres are developing the “tradecraft” for urban terrorism.

Stratfor, a body which deals with strategic issues, however said that Naxalism is “fairly contained” in India.

It expressed these views in a report while taking a “closer Look” at the Naxal problem in India, calling it as one of the world¿s longest-running insurgencies.

INSAT 4B suffers power supply problem

Scientists of the Indian space agency are working to fix a power snag that switched off 12 transponders of the INSAT-4B comunication satellite Wednesday night, affecting services of some television channels and telecom operators.

'An expert team is looking at the possibilities of partial utilisation of some of the transponders that were switched off. The team is working to restore the services at the earliest,' S. Satish, director (Publications and Public Relations), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told.

There was a power supply anomaly in one of the satellite's two solar panels and six Ku Band and six C-Band transponders of the satellite got switched off, Satish said.