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- Lebanon's polling stations have opened for the first parliamentary elections in nine years.
- On 6 may vote is taking place amid tight security with army and police forces deployed near polling stations and on major intersections.
- The main race is between a Western-backed coalition headed by Prime Minister Saad Hariri and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group.
- There are about 3.7 million eligible voters and the early results are expected to start coming out after polling stations close at 7 p.m. Some 586 candidates, including 86 women, are running for the 128-seat parliament that is equally divided between Muslims and Christians.
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- Indian javelin thrower and the Commonwealth games gold medalist Neeraj Chopra has shattered his own national record at the IAAF Diamond League, beng held in Doha.
- He cleared a distance of 87.43m to finish fourth in the season opening League series. Chopra had recently won the gold medal in XXI Commonwealth Games at the Gold Coast with a throw of 86.47m.
- It is the first time in history that three athletes recorded 90m plus throws in at any competition.
- Thomas Rohler took the top spot with a 91.78m throw with compatriots Johannes Vetter (91.56m) and Hofmann Andreas (90.08m) finished second and third respectively. The next leg of the elite event will take place in Shanghai, China on May 12.
- Neeraj first entered the records book in 2016 with the a world record throw of 86.48 m at the World U20 Championships in Poland. Since then he has been steadily progressing with consistent performances.
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- Currencies in 500, 200 and 100 denominations are comfortable mode for transactions and the printing of Rs 500 notes have been ramped-up to about Rs 3,000 crore everyday to take care of extra demand, economic affairs secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said.
- He said the cash situation in the country is "quite comfortable" and extra demand is being fully met.
- Speaking to PTI, Garg also said the fundamentals of economy does not call for an interest rate hike at the moment as there has not been any "disproportionate rise in inflation" or "extra ordinary growth in output".
- The secretary said he had reviewed the cash situation in the country last week and 85 per cent of the ATMs was functional."Overall in the country, I think its (cash situation) quite comfortable. There is enough cash which is being supplied and there is extra demand which is being fully met. I don't think there is any cash related crisis or problem at this point of time," Garg said.
- There are about Rs 7 lakh crore of Rs 2,000 notes in circulation, which is more than adequate and and so no new Rs 2,000 notes are being issued.
- "500 and 200 and 100 rupee note is people's medium of transaction. That's what people use, people don't find Rs 2,000 rupee note as a very comfortable medium for making transaction. 500 rupee notes is very adequately supplied. We have ramped up production to the level that it is about Rs 2,500-3000 crore a day. So, that is much more than any demand. People's need for transaction is being taken care of by these," he said.
- The Reserve Bank has been strengthening the security features of currency notes to ensure that they are not duplicated."In last 2.5 years, there has been much less instances, almost non existent instances, of high quality fake notes being reported in the country. But still RBI keeps on reviewing, finding out, adding new features," Garg said.
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- After sitting till midnight recently to hear matters, Justice Shahrukh Kathawalla of the Bombay high court topped his own record on the HC’s last working day before summer vacation by rising only at 3.30am. The rush of matters for interim relief is usually high before the break, and his board had 134. He capped it at 122 for the day and didn’t rise till he had heard them all.
- When Justice Kathawalla finally called it a day, it was the wee hours, when the only other place buzzing with similar energy in Mumbai is T2 of the international airport. He sat for over 10 hours beyond the regular court closing time of 5pm, making it three court days in one to prevent a backlog pile-up.
- The judicial hours in HC are from 11am to 5pm, with a one-hour lunch break at 2pm. TOI had on April 27 reported how he had been sitting till midnight for some days to clear backlog.
- At 6pm on Friday, Kathawalla’s courtroom at one end on the first floor was teeming with litigants and lawyers as usual. The scene was the same at midnight too. The judge hadn't taken a dinner break. After the post-midnight record, on Saturday, the judge was back in court at 10am, all set to hear 14 matters listed on board.
- By 11pm, other facilities in the HC had shut, even the library on the second floor and the Bombay Bar Association on the third. A lady lawyer complained about toilets being shut. The judge summoned the court keeper, and, rapping him, asked him to open the washrooms.
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- Vladimir Putin will tomorrow be inaugurated for his fourth Kremlin term under the shadow of hugely strained ties with the West and a crackdown on the opposition, with Alexei Navalny and hundreds more detained at the weekend.
- Opposition leader Navalny was held along with nearly 1,600 of his supporters yesterday during nationwide rallies against Putin as police and paramilitary activists used force to break up demonstrations in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
- Putin, who has ruled Russia for 18 years and used his last term to annex Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and launch a military campaign in Syria on the side of Bashar al-Assad the next year, has promised to improve living standards at home during his next Kremlin stint.But he has remained silent on the issue of his succession despite this being an inevitable concern as the constitution bars him from running again when his fourth term ends in 2024.
- Putin has struggled to revive an economy that crashed after Moscow was hit with Western sanctions over its annexation of Crimea in 2014, followed by a fall in global oil prices in 2016.
- Despite this, his victory in the March election was never in question and the prospect of an inauguration in the Kremlin's gilded Andreyevsky hall has generated little excitement.
- This year Putin's minders are reportedly planning a fairly low-key inauguration ceremony that will not include a lavish Kremlin reception in an apparent effort to eschew any bad publicity.
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- Currently there is no preventive vaccine for humans that is available in the market A key peptide that can be used to develop a new preventive vaccine against leptospirosis has been successfully identified by researchers from the Gujarat Biotechnology Research Centre, Gandhinagar. Leptospirosis is an emerging tropical infectious disease, and currently there is no preventive vaccine for humans that is available in the market.
- The researchers used computer-based analysis to study the whole protein set of the bacteria Leptospira interrogans and narrowed the search down to one effective immunogenic protein. This protein was found to be present in almost all the serovars (different types within a species) of the bacteria and can be an effective vaccine candidate against most serovars.
- Major killer - According to a paper published in 2015, leptospirosis causes almost 60,000 deaths every year, globally. The bacteria can be transmitted via exposure to contaminated water or soil or direct contact with reservoirs hosts like wild or domestic animals.
- The proteome (entire protein set) of a serovar Copenhageni strain was studied using bioinformatics (computational biology analysis) approach. “We looked at all the 3,654 proteins in the bacteria with the help of several advanced computational methods and predicted the antigenicity ability to bind to the antibody present on B cells for inducing immune response,” explains Swapnil Kumar, a Junior Research Fellow at the centre and an author of the paper published recently in Scientific Reports. “Extensive analysis helped us narrow down to 21 proteins which had high antigenicity score.”
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- Western Ghats’ forests yield as much as 3 mm per day of rainfall in August-September Researchers have found one more reason why urgent steps have to be taken to stop deforestation in the Western Ghats.
- The dense vegetation in the Western Ghats determines the amount of rainfall that Tamil Nadu gets during the summer monsoon.
- A team led by Prof. Subimal Ghosh from the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has found that dense forests of the Western Ghats contribute as much as 40% of moisture to the southwest monsoon rainfall over Tamil Nadu during normal monsoon years. The average contribution is 25-30%. But during monsoon deficit years, the contribution increases to as high as 50%.
- The study found the forests of Western Ghats contribute as much as 3 mm per day of rainfall during August and September over a “majority of locations” in Tamil Nadu and 1 mm per day during June and July.
- The study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters also found that deforestation of the Ghats led to 0.25 degree C increase in surface temperature across the State. The work was done in collaboration with Prof. Raghu Murtugudde of University of Maryland and Dr K. Rajendran from CSIR-Fourth Paradigm Institute (CSIR-4PI), Bengaluru.
- To study the role of vegetation cover in the Western Ghats in supplying moisture to the southwest monsoon rainfall, the researchers used models to compare the contribution of Western Ghats with and without the forest cover.
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- On the occasion of its Raising Day on May 7, the Border Roads Organisation (BRO), a leader in the arena of infrastructural development in the border areas of the country, will celebrate completing 58 years of glorious service to the nation.
- Since its inception in 1960, the organisation has gone from strength to strength, and numerous projects undertaken by them has been vital for the territorial integrity and the socio-economic uplifting of even the most remote corners of the country, as well as in its neighbours.
- Projects that have been executed in friendly foreign countries are reflective of the BRO's ideology 'Shramena Sarvam Sadhyam'.
- The organisation also endeavours to explore new frontiers while it undertakes systematic modernisation of its construction techniques, with its focus remaining on enhancing productivity and quality construction.
- The Director-General Border Roads, Lt Gen. Harpal Singh, conveyed his greetings to all veterans and BRO personnel on the occasion and called upon all ranks of the Organisation to continue on the path of excellence with renewed vigour and dedication.
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