Aizawl, March 17 (IANS) The Mizoram government will introduce a New Land Use Policy (NLUP) to help farmers move away from the traditional slash-and-burn method of cultivation to more sustainable land-based means of livelihood, state Governor M.M. Lakhera said Wednesday.
"A Rs.2,527-crore NLUP has been taken up for sustainable land-based economic activities and to remove the age-old 'jhum' cultivation in the state," the governor said in his customary speech on the opening day of the week-long budget session of the state assembly. (Continue reading)
Beijing, March 17 (IANS) China's economy would expand 9.5 percent in 2010, the World Bank said in a report released Wednesday.
"In 2010, government-led investment is bound to decelerate, while exports are likely to continue to recover amid a pick up in the global economy, and consumption would remain solid," Xinhua news agency quoted Ardo Hansson, the World Bank lead economist for China, as saying. (Continue reading)
Lahore, Mar.17 (ANI): Pakistan and Iran have inked a deal on the gas pipeline project in Istanbul, Turkey. (Continue reading)
Ranchi, March 17 (IANS) Free cycles will be distributed to Class 8 girl students in Jharkhand to check dropout rates in government schools, a minister said.
"All the girls studying in Class 8 will get free bicycles," state Human Resource Development (HRD) minister Hemlal Murmu said Tuesday night while replying in the assembly on his department's budget for 2010-11. (Continue reading)
Washington, March 16 (ANI): Theorists have predicted that desktop experiments could point the way to dark matter discovery, complementing grand astronomical searches and deep underground observations. According to recent theoretical results, small blocks of matter on a tabletop could reveal elusive properties of the as-yet-unidentified dark matter particles that make up a quarter of the universe, potentially making future large-scale searches easier. This finding was announced today by theorists from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES), a joint institute of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, at the American Physical Society meeting in Portland, Oregon. (Continue reading)
London, March 16 (ANI): New evidence indicates that signs of life on Mars might be all over the Red Planet in the form of sulphur, and the next Mars lander should be able to detect the proof. No mission to Mars has ever found complex carbon-based molecules, from which life as we know it is built. But sulphur is everywhere on Mars. In fact, it is more abundant there than on Earth, and it could contain one of the signatures of life. On Earth, the activity of some microbes converts one class of sulphur-containing compounds, the sulphates, into another, the sulphides. The microbes prefer to work with the lighter sulphur-32 isotope, so the sulphides they produce are relatively deficient in the heavier isotope, sulphur-34. Planetary scientists have long wondered whether we could use this pattern to discern signs of life on Mars. Now, the prospects for this technique look better than ever. (Continue reading)
London, March 16 (ANI): New calculations have suggested that a hurtling star is on its path to enter our solar system in about 1.5 million years, scattering millions of comets into paths that cross Earth’s orbit. According to a report in New Scientist, Vadim Bobylev of the Pulkovo Observatory in St Petersburg, Russia, modelled the paths of neighbouring stars using data from the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos satellite and from ground-based measurements of the speeds of stars. (Continue reading)
Nevada (US), Mar 16 (ANI): “The Green Warriors of Chandi’s Fortress”, a zero-budget film shot on recycled tapes using a handy cam about an environmental campaign of Chandigarh, will form part of international “Green Lifestyle Film Festival” in University of California—Los Angeles (USA) from March 19-21. (Continue reading)
Jerusalem, Mar.16 (ANI): Israel has admitted that its relations with the United States are in a "crisis of historic proportions" in the wake of the row over 1,600 new settler homes. In a telephone call, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered Netanyahu to reverse a decision to build 1,600 homes for Israeli settlers in occupied East Jerusalem that sparked the diplomatic row. (Continue reading)
Tel Aviv, March 16 (DPA) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Monday plans for further housing construction in Jerusalem despite sharp international criticism and what was called the worst crisis in Israel's ties with the US in 35 years.
Amid further repercussions from last week's announcement by Israel of new construction in East Jerusalem, US diplomats said that a visit by Washington's Mideast envoy George Mitchell to kick off indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks remained uncertain Monday. (Continue reading)