AWARDS
Magsaysay Awards, 2012
Kulandei Francis, from India. He is being recognized for “his visionary zeal, his profound faith in community energies, and his sustained programs in pursuing the holistic economic empowerment of thousands of women and their families in rural India.”
Chen Shu-Chu, from Taiwan. She is being recognized for “the pure altruism of her personal giving, which reflects a deep, consistent, quiet compassion, and has transformed the lives of the numerous Taiwanese she has helped.”
Romulo Davide, from the Philippines. He is being recognized for “his steadfast passion in placing the power and discipline of science in the hands of farmers in the Philippines, who have consequently multiplied their yields, created productive farming communities, and rediscovered the dignity of their labour.”
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, from Bangladesh. She is being recognized for “her uncompromising courage and impassioned leadership in a campaign of judicial activism in Bangladesh that affirms the people's right to a good environment as nothing less than their right to dignity and life.”
Yang Saing Koma, from Cambodia. He is being recognized for “his creative fusion of practical science and collective will that has inspired and enabled vast numbers of farmers in Cambodia to become more empowered and productive contributors to their country's economic growth.”
Ambrosius Ruwindrijarto, from Indonesia. He is being recognized for “his sustained advocacy for community-based natural resource management in Indonesia, leading bold campaigns to stop illegal forest exploitation, as well as fresh social enterprise initiatives that engage the forest communities as their full partners.”
Established in 1957, the Ramon Magsaysay Award is Asia’s highest honour and is widely regarded as the region’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It celebrates the memory and leadership example of the third Philippine President, and is given every year to individuals or organizations in Asia who manifest the same sense of selfless service that ruled the life of the late and beloved Filipino leader.
This year’s Magsaysay Award winners will each receive a certificate, a medallion bearing the likeness of the late President, and a cash prize.
DEFENCE
INS Sahyadri commissioned
On July 21, 2012, Defence Minister A.K. Antony commissioned the 6,200 tonne warship INS Sahyadri, which is the third and last of the Shivalik-class stealth frigates under Project 17, built indigenously at the Mazagon Docks Limited (MDL).
The first two ships in the class are INS Shivalik and INS Satpura and are now on active duty. The three have cost some Rs 10,200 crore and have been commissioned in the past two years.
The INS Sahyadri is an indicator of the generational shift in India’s warship-building capability. The 143m long ship can tactically fire weapons even before the enemy detects it.
The warship has long-range surface-to-surface Klub missiles, area defence missiles Shtil and Barak, anti-submarine torpedoes, 100 mm mounted gun and six-barrelled 30 mm gun. Ships like this will form the core of India’s battle fleet in the first half of this century. Powered by a unique combination of gas and diesel engines, it can stay in sea for more than three weeks or cover 10,800 km without refueling.
Another set of seven new stealth warships—named Project 17-A—will be a derivative of the Shivalik-class frigates. These will cost some Rs 45,000 crore, and will incorporate newer building materials like composites besides a very high degree of automation to allow a smaller crew to operate it. MDL will build four and the Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers Ltd (GRSE), Kolkata, will construct the remaining three.
The changes over the existing stealth frigates will help accommodate an advanced version of the Barak-2 Medium Range Surface to Air Missile (MRSAM) and a latest area air defence system that will include the 40km-range Shtil-1 MRSAMs, missile launchers besides a new E-band radar and BrahMos.
HEALTH
First-ever pill to prevent HIV
For the first time, a once-a-day pill which reduces the chance of contracting HIV among high-risk groups “significantly” has got a green signal in the US, where 1.2 million people are infected by the deadly disease.
The drug, “Truvada” can now be used by those at high risk of the infection and anyone who may engage in sexual activity with HIV-infected partners.
In two large clinical trials, daily use of the drug was shown to significantly reduce the risk of HIV infection.
There are, however, concerns that circulation of such a drug could engender a false sense of security and mean people will take more risks. There have also been fears that a drug-resistant strain of HIV could develop. The USFDA has stressed that the drug should be used as part of a “comprehensive HIV prevention plan”, including condom use and regular HIV testing.
PERSONS
Bose, Satyendra Nath
The discovery of a new subatomic particle, possibly the Higgs boson, considered “a key to the cosmic riddle”, has put the spotlight once again on Satyendra Nath Bose, the Indian scientist from whose surname the word ‘boson’ is derived.
Bose (1894-1974), a physicist from Kolkata and a contemporary of German scientist Albert Einstein, did path-breaking work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, using maths to describe the behavioural pattern of the bosons—bone of the two families of fundamental particles that the universe is classified into.
The other family of fundamental particles—fermions—is named after Italy-born American physicist Enrico Fermi.
Bose worked with Einstein in the 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose-Einstein statistics and the Bose-Einstein condensate. He is also acknowledged as the person who laid the foundation of quantum statistics. However, Bose never won the Nobel Prize, even though in later years the award was given several times for research on bosons.
Mukherjee, Pranab
He has been elected as the 13th President of India. His election to the President's office came as a fitting finale for the 77-year-old Congressman from West Bengal. He is not a lawyer by training but is considered an expert in the working of the Constitution and governance.
Mr Mukherjee was born on December 11, 1935 in Birbhum’s Mirati village, to senior Congress leader Kamada Kinkar Mukherjee and Rajlakshmi. A post-graduate in political science and history, he can recollect any event of historical importance or mundane political and other events, a matter of envy to many of his colleagues.
He got married to Suvra on July 13, 1957, and has two sons—Abhijit and Indrajit—and daughter Sharmistha. Abhijit is a Congress MLA in West Bengal.
Mr Mukherjee started his public life in the 60s in Bangla Congress, during the time of late Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee of the United Front government, when Jyoti Basu was Deputy Chief Minister in West Bengal. He had a brief stint as lawyer, teacher and journalist before being embedded to his destiny of politics in 1969, when he became a member of the Rajya Sabha.
He fought his first direct election to the Lok Sabha in 2004 from Jangipur in West Bengal. He repeated his victory in the 2009 elections.
As Finance Minister of India, between 1982 and 2012, he presented seven Union Budgets. He has five books published to his credit on political and economic issues, and under his editorial guidance, the history of Congress was published in which there was a candid admission of excesses during the Emergency.
He got the best Parliamentarian Award in 1997. Ten years later, he was awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour.
RESEARCH
Scientist discover a new sub-atomic particle
Scientists at Europe's CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering of scientists and the world’s media near Geneva on July 4, 2012.
The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.
What scientists don’t yet know from the latest findings is whether the particle they have discovered is the Higgs boson as described by the Standard Model, a variant of the Higgs or an entirely new subatomic particle that could force a rethink on the fundamental structure of matter.
The Higgs is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the theory that describes the basic building blocks of the universe. The other 11 particles predicted by the model have been found and finding the Higgs would validate the model. Ruling it out or finding something more exotic would force a rethink on how the universe is put together.
Scientists believe that in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a gigantic soup of particles racing around at the speed of light without any mass to speak of. It was through their interaction with the Higgs field that they gained mass and eventually formed the universe.
The Higgs field is a theoretical and invisible energy field that pervades the whole cosmos. Some particles, like the photons that make up light, are not affected by it and therefore have no mass. Others are not so lucky and find it drags on them as porridge drags on a spoon.
The particle is theoretical, first posited in 1964 by six physicists, including Briton Peter Higgs. The search for it only began in earnest in the 1980s, first in Fermilab’s now mothballed Tevatron particle collider near Chicago and later in a similar machine at CERN, but most intensively since 2010 with the start-up of the European centre’s Large Hadron Collider.
In particle physics, Boson is a subatomic particle with integer spin (i.e., angular momentum in quantum-mechanical units of 0, 1, etc.) that is governed by Bose-Einstein statistics, named after Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein. Bosons include mesons (e.g., pions and kaons), nuclei of even mass number (e.g., helium-4), and the particles required to embody the fields of quantum field theory (e.g., photons and gluons). Bosons differ significantly from a group of subatomic particles known as fermions in that there is no limit to the number that can occupy the same quantum state. This behaviour gives rise, for example, to the remarkable properties of helium-4 when it is cooled to become a super-fluid.
STANDARD MODEL: The Standard Model is to physics what the theory of evolution is to biology. It is the best explanation physicists have of how the building blocks of the universe are put together. It describes 12 fundamental particles, governed by four basic forces.
But the universe is a big place and the Standard Model only explains a small part of it. Scientists have spotted a gap between what we can see and what must be out there. That gap must be filled by something we don’t fully understand, which they have dubbed ‘dark matter’.
Galaxies are also hurtling away from each other faster than the forces we know about suggest they should. This gap is filled by ‘dark energy’. This poorly understood pair are believed to make up a whopping 96 percent of the mass and energy of the cosmos.
Confirming the Standard Model, or perhaps modifying it, would be a step towards the holy grail of physics – a ‘theory of everything’ that encompasses dark matter, dark energy and the force of gravity, which the Standard Model also does not explain. It could also shed light on even more esoteric ideas, such as the possibility of parallel universes.
LARGE HADRON COLLIDER: The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, a 27-km (17-mile) looped pipe that sits in a tunnel 100 metres underground on the Swiss/French border. It cost 3 billion euros to build.
Two beams of protons are fired in opposite directions around it before smashing into each other to create many millions of particle collisions every second in a recreation of the conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when the Higgs field is believed to have ‘switched on’.
The vast amount of data produced is examined by banks of computers. Of all the trillions of collisions, very few are just right for revealing the Higgs particle. That makes the hunt for the Higgs slow, and progress incremental.
THRESHOLD FOR PROOF? To claim a discovery, scientists have set themselves a target for certainty that they call “5 sigma”. This means that there is a probability of less than one in a million that their conclusions from the data harvested from the particle accelerator are the result of a statistical fluke. The two teams hunting for the Higgs at CERN, called Atlas and CMS, now have twice the amount of data that allowed them to claim ‘tantalising glimpses’ of the Higgs at the end of 2011 and this could push their results beyond that threshold.
MISCELLANEOUS
GAAR
General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR), allows tax authority to declare an ‘impermissible avoidance arrangement’. Once the case is declared so under GAAR, tax liability is to be determined as if the arrangement did not exist.
As per the draft guidelines of GAAR, any step in or a part or whole of any transaction, operation, scheme, agreement or understanding, whether enforceable or not would be covered. P-Notes and sub-accounts have been excluded. GAAR will also not have any retrospective effect and onus of proof will lie on the tax authority.
GAAR, essentially, covers tax avoidance (as result of actions taken by assesses, none of which are illegal or forbidden). It does not cover tax evasion or tax mitigation.
GAAR has been part of global tax laws for a while now. Australia introduced it in 1981, Canada in 1988, China in 2005 and South Africa in 2006.
Magsaysay Awards, 2012
Kulandei Francis, from India. He is being recognized for “his visionary zeal, his profound faith in community energies, and his sustained programs in pursuing the holistic economic empowerment of thousands of women and their families in rural India.”
Chen Shu-Chu, from Taiwan. She is being recognized for “the pure altruism of her personal giving, which reflects a deep, consistent, quiet compassion, and has transformed the lives of the numerous Taiwanese she has helped.”
Romulo Davide, from the Philippines. He is being recognized for “his steadfast passion in placing the power and discipline of science in the hands of farmers in the Philippines, who have consequently multiplied their yields, created productive farming communities, and rediscovered the dignity of their labour.”
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, from Bangladesh. She is being recognized for “her uncompromising courage and impassioned leadership in a campaign of judicial activism in Bangladesh that affirms the people's right to a good environment as nothing less than their right to dignity and life.”
Yang Saing Koma, from Cambodia. He is being recognized for “his creative fusion of practical science and collective will that has inspired and enabled vast numbers of farmers in Cambodia to become more empowered and productive contributors to their country's economic growth.”
Ambrosius Ruwindrijarto, from Indonesia. He is being recognized for “his sustained advocacy for community-based natural resource management in Indonesia, leading bold campaigns to stop illegal forest exploitation, as well as fresh social enterprise initiatives that engage the forest communities as their full partners.”
Established in 1957, the Ramon Magsaysay Award is Asia’s highest honour and is widely regarded as the region’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It celebrates the memory and leadership example of the third Philippine President, and is given every year to individuals or organizations in Asia who manifest the same sense of selfless service that ruled the life of the late and beloved Filipino leader.
This year’s Magsaysay Award winners will each receive a certificate, a medallion bearing the likeness of the late President, and a cash prize.
DEFENCE
INS Sahyadri commissioned
On July 21, 2012, Defence Minister A.K. Antony commissioned the 6,200 tonne warship INS Sahyadri, which is the third and last of the Shivalik-class stealth frigates under Project 17, built indigenously at the Mazagon Docks Limited (MDL).
The first two ships in the class are INS Shivalik and INS Satpura and are now on active duty. The three have cost some Rs 10,200 crore and have been commissioned in the past two years.
The INS Sahyadri is an indicator of the generational shift in India’s warship-building capability. The 143m long ship can tactically fire weapons even before the enemy detects it.
The warship has long-range surface-to-surface Klub missiles, area defence missiles Shtil and Barak, anti-submarine torpedoes, 100 mm mounted gun and six-barrelled 30 mm gun. Ships like this will form the core of India’s battle fleet in the first half of this century. Powered by a unique combination of gas and diesel engines, it can stay in sea for more than three weeks or cover 10,800 km without refueling.
Another set of seven new stealth warships—named Project 17-A—will be a derivative of the Shivalik-class frigates. These will cost some Rs 45,000 crore, and will incorporate newer building materials like composites besides a very high degree of automation to allow a smaller crew to operate it. MDL will build four and the Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers Ltd (GRSE), Kolkata, will construct the remaining three.
The changes over the existing stealth frigates will help accommodate an advanced version of the Barak-2 Medium Range Surface to Air Missile (MRSAM) and a latest area air defence system that will include the 40km-range Shtil-1 MRSAMs, missile launchers besides a new E-band radar and BrahMos.
HEALTH
First-ever pill to prevent HIV
For the first time, a once-a-day pill which reduces the chance of contracting HIV among high-risk groups “significantly” has got a green signal in the US, where 1.2 million people are infected by the deadly disease.
The drug, “Truvada” can now be used by those at high risk of the infection and anyone who may engage in sexual activity with HIV-infected partners.
In two large clinical trials, daily use of the drug was shown to significantly reduce the risk of HIV infection.
There are, however, concerns that circulation of such a drug could engender a false sense of security and mean people will take more risks. There have also been fears that a drug-resistant strain of HIV could develop. The USFDA has stressed that the drug should be used as part of a “comprehensive HIV prevention plan”, including condom use and regular HIV testing.
PERSONS
Bose, Satyendra Nath
The discovery of a new subatomic particle, possibly the Higgs boson, considered “a key to the cosmic riddle”, has put the spotlight once again on Satyendra Nath Bose, the Indian scientist from whose surname the word ‘boson’ is derived.
Bose (1894-1974), a physicist from Kolkata and a contemporary of German scientist Albert Einstein, did path-breaking work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, using maths to describe the behavioural pattern of the bosons—bone of the two families of fundamental particles that the universe is classified into.
The other family of fundamental particles—fermions—is named after Italy-born American physicist Enrico Fermi.
Bose worked with Einstein in the 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose-Einstein statistics and the Bose-Einstein condensate. He is also acknowledged as the person who laid the foundation of quantum statistics. However, Bose never won the Nobel Prize, even though in later years the award was given several times for research on bosons.
Mukherjee, Pranab
He has been elected as the 13th President of India. His election to the President's office came as a fitting finale for the 77-year-old Congressman from West Bengal. He is not a lawyer by training but is considered an expert in the working of the Constitution and governance.
Mr Mukherjee was born on December 11, 1935 in Birbhum’s Mirati village, to senior Congress leader Kamada Kinkar Mukherjee and Rajlakshmi. A post-graduate in political science and history, he can recollect any event of historical importance or mundane political and other events, a matter of envy to many of his colleagues.
He got married to Suvra on July 13, 1957, and has two sons—Abhijit and Indrajit—and daughter Sharmistha. Abhijit is a Congress MLA in West Bengal.
Mr Mukherjee started his public life in the 60s in Bangla Congress, during the time of late Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee of the United Front government, when Jyoti Basu was Deputy Chief Minister in West Bengal. He had a brief stint as lawyer, teacher and journalist before being embedded to his destiny of politics in 1969, when he became a member of the Rajya Sabha.
He fought his first direct election to the Lok Sabha in 2004 from Jangipur in West Bengal. He repeated his victory in the 2009 elections.
As Finance Minister of India, between 1982 and 2012, he presented seven Union Budgets. He has five books published to his credit on political and economic issues, and under his editorial guidance, the history of Congress was published in which there was a candid admission of excesses during the Emergency.
He got the best Parliamentarian Award in 1997. Ten years later, he was awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour.
RESEARCH
Scientist discover a new sub-atomic particle
Scientists at Europe's CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering of scientists and the world’s media near Geneva on July 4, 2012.
The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.
What scientists don’t yet know from the latest findings is whether the particle they have discovered is the Higgs boson as described by the Standard Model, a variant of the Higgs or an entirely new subatomic particle that could force a rethink on the fundamental structure of matter.
The Higgs is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the theory that describes the basic building blocks of the universe. The other 11 particles predicted by the model have been found and finding the Higgs would validate the model. Ruling it out or finding something more exotic would force a rethink on how the universe is put together.
Scientists believe that in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a gigantic soup of particles racing around at the speed of light without any mass to speak of. It was through their interaction with the Higgs field that they gained mass and eventually formed the universe.
The Higgs field is a theoretical and invisible energy field that pervades the whole cosmos. Some particles, like the photons that make up light, are not affected by it and therefore have no mass. Others are not so lucky and find it drags on them as porridge drags on a spoon.
The particle is theoretical, first posited in 1964 by six physicists, including Briton Peter Higgs. The search for it only began in earnest in the 1980s, first in Fermilab’s now mothballed Tevatron particle collider near Chicago and later in a similar machine at CERN, but most intensively since 2010 with the start-up of the European centre’s Large Hadron Collider.
In particle physics, Boson is a subatomic particle with integer spin (i.e., angular momentum in quantum-mechanical units of 0, 1, etc.) that is governed by Bose-Einstein statistics, named after Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein. Bosons include mesons (e.g., pions and kaons), nuclei of even mass number (e.g., helium-4), and the particles required to embody the fields of quantum field theory (e.g., photons and gluons). Bosons differ significantly from a group of subatomic particles known as fermions in that there is no limit to the number that can occupy the same quantum state. This behaviour gives rise, for example, to the remarkable properties of helium-4 when it is cooled to become a super-fluid.
STANDARD MODEL: The Standard Model is to physics what the theory of evolution is to biology. It is the best explanation physicists have of how the building blocks of the universe are put together. It describes 12 fundamental particles, governed by four basic forces.
But the universe is a big place and the Standard Model only explains a small part of it. Scientists have spotted a gap between what we can see and what must be out there. That gap must be filled by something we don’t fully understand, which they have dubbed ‘dark matter’.
Galaxies are also hurtling away from each other faster than the forces we know about suggest they should. This gap is filled by ‘dark energy’. This poorly understood pair are believed to make up a whopping 96 percent of the mass and energy of the cosmos.
Confirming the Standard Model, or perhaps modifying it, would be a step towards the holy grail of physics – a ‘theory of everything’ that encompasses dark matter, dark energy and the force of gravity, which the Standard Model also does not explain. It could also shed light on even more esoteric ideas, such as the possibility of parallel universes.
LARGE HADRON COLLIDER: The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, a 27-km (17-mile) looped pipe that sits in a tunnel 100 metres underground on the Swiss/French border. It cost 3 billion euros to build.
Two beams of protons are fired in opposite directions around it before smashing into each other to create many millions of particle collisions every second in a recreation of the conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when the Higgs field is believed to have ‘switched on’.
The vast amount of data produced is examined by banks of computers. Of all the trillions of collisions, very few are just right for revealing the Higgs particle. That makes the hunt for the Higgs slow, and progress incremental.
THRESHOLD FOR PROOF? To claim a discovery, scientists have set themselves a target for certainty that they call “5 sigma”. This means that there is a probability of less than one in a million that their conclusions from the data harvested from the particle accelerator are the result of a statistical fluke. The two teams hunting for the Higgs at CERN, called Atlas and CMS, now have twice the amount of data that allowed them to claim ‘tantalising glimpses’ of the Higgs at the end of 2011 and this could push their results beyond that threshold.
MISCELLANEOUS
GAAR
General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR), allows tax authority to declare an ‘impermissible avoidance arrangement’. Once the case is declared so under GAAR, tax liability is to be determined as if the arrangement did not exist.
As per the draft guidelines of GAAR, any step in or a part or whole of any transaction, operation, scheme, agreement or understanding, whether enforceable or not would be covered. P-Notes and sub-accounts have been excluded. GAAR will also not have any retrospective effect and onus of proof will lie on the tax authority.
GAAR, essentially, covers tax avoidance (as result of actions taken by assesses, none of which are illegal or forbidden). It does not cover tax evasion or tax mitigation.
GAAR has been part of global tax laws for a while now. Australia introduced it in 1981, Canada in 1988, China in 2005 and South Africa in 2006.
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