Today's Hot Stories - February 16, 2013
10 Headlines for Today(1) Curfew lifted from Kashmir Valley
(2) Forest land cannot be diverted for Vedanta project, says Centre
(3) High skilled immigration bill introduced in U.S. Congress
(4) 'Centre may have to open a cash tap to keep AI running'
(5) Gold ETFs allowed investing in Gold Deposit Schemes
(6) Polish-Australian team wins Rakha mine EPC deal
(7) Nadal rallies to reach Brazil Open semifinal
(8) Anand held by Meier again; Caruana stretches lead
(9) Philander takes five, Pak all out for 338
(10) 20 species of rare birds spotted in squirrel sanctuary
5 Stories for Today
(1) India moves to scrap VVIP chopper deal
(2) Meteor explosion shockwave injures 1,000
(3) Policy to facilitate flexi-work environment sought
(4) U.S. alleges insider trading ahead of Heinz deal
(5) Govt cuts import tariff values of gold, silver
(1) India moves to scrap VVIP chopper deal
Even as the Central Bureau of Investigation began an inquiry into allegations of bribery in the Rs3,600-crore deal with AgustaWestland U.K. for procuring 12 VVIP choppers, India on Friday sought to scrap the pact that has been marred by charges that kickbacks worth Rs362 crore were paid by Italian parent company Finmeccanica to bag the contract.
The Defence Ministry issued a show-cause notice to AgustaWestland, asking it to explain within a week the bribery allegations, Ministry spokesman Sitanshu Kar said on Friday. The notice asked the company why the deal, signed in February 2010, should not be scrapped.
“The Defence Ministry issued a formal show-cause to AgustaWestland, seeking the cancellation of the contract and taking other actions as per terms of the contract,’’ the spokesman said.
On Thursday, the Ministry warned of strict legal action, including invoking the integrity pact that provides for cancellation of the contract if bribes are paid and recovery of the money paid.
Noting that there were reports in Italy on investigation in to the alleged scam in the deal and Finmeccanica CEO Giuseppe Orsi being arrested in Milan on Tuesday, India had made a fresh request for information in the matter, sources in the government here said.
(A similar request was made by India in the recent past and Italy’s stand was that its judiciary was independent and was pursuing the probe.)
Report’s copy sought
The sources said the Indian mission in Rome was requested to make a formal application to the court authorities to get an authenticated copy of the preliminary report of the Italian prosecutors that had levelled allegations of payoffs to agents and middlemen that reportedly helped the Italian defence giant to swing the deal in its favour.
The Defence Ministry also asked AgustaWestland to state whether any money was illegally paid to any Indian entity or individual.
India has received three of the 12 helicopters and paid up to 30 per cent of the amount but suspended further payments and put on hold the delivery of the remaining choppers.
Reports appeared in October-November 2012, alleging that Finmeccanica had clinched contracts in four countries due to the contacts of the former Premier, Silvio Berlusconi, and his most trusted aides such as the former Minister and People of Freedom party coordinator, Claudio Scajola.
The reports quoted statements of Lorenzo Borgogni, former director of Institutional Relations at Finmeccanica, made to investigating magistrates Vincenzo Piscitelli and Henry Jon Woodcock, which revealed “underhand dealings’’ behind international orders in India, Panama, Indonesia and Russia.
Source: The Hindu
(2) Meteor explosion shockwave injures 1,000
A meteor burnt up in a blinding fireball on Friday over central Russia, creating a shockwave that blew out windows and collapsed some walls, leaving about 1,000 people injured.
The space rock, thought to have weighed nearly 10 tons, streaked at 18 kilometres per second across a clear morning sky over the Urals region, stunning and panicking residents.
The shockwave rattled buildings, damaged roofs and shattered windows, while super-heated fragments rained down in parts of the Chelyabinsk region, 1,500 kilometres east of Moscow.
Local authorities said the biggest impact left a crater about 6 metres across on the edge of a frozen lake 80 kilometres west of Chelyabinsk city, which has a population of 1.1 million. Russian soldiers closed off the area.
Some 200 children were among the 1,000 injured, most bruised or cut by flying shards of window glass. About 40 people remained in hospitals, including two with serious injuries.
Residents reported rushing outside in fear at 9:23 am into the freezing cold, many suspecting an aircraft had exploded.
Thousands witnessed the flash of the explosion and the meteor’s trail of smoke.
“There was a big fireball which descended. The whole thing lasted just a few seconds,” a resident told the Itar-Tass news agency, describing the images seen by millions in online amateur videos.
Paul Chodas, a NASA scientist who studies asteroids and meteors, told reporters the object would have “been brighter than the sun” for those on the ground in Russia and said such large meteors hit Earth on average about once every century.
It exploded with such force that it could be measured on global network of detectors designed to monitor nuclear blasts.
As residents and workers rushed out of buildings, the mobile phone system briefly collapsed under a flood of calls. All local schools and kindergartens stayed closed for the day.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered emergency services to the region, with officials saying about 20,000 members of the civil defence and seven aircraft had been deployed.
A priority would be to repair the shattered windows of the 3,000 damaged buildings, amid winter temperatures as low as 20 degrees below zero, local authorities said.
The damage was estimated at 1 billion roubles (33.2 million dollars), local governor Michail Yurevich said.
There was no warning, in part because the meteor struck in daylight, when it could not be seen by any Earth-based telescopes, NASA’s Bill Cook said.
It may have consisted of nickel and iron, which would explain how parts of it made it through the lower atmosphere without burning up, said Valeri Shuvalov of Russia’s Academy of Sciences.
Television images showed a partially collapsed factory building.
The meteor had an estimated diameter of 15 metres and weighed 7 metric tons before it burnt up in the atmosphere and shattered some 19 to 24 kilometres above the Earth, NASA said.
Russian officials said the damage could have been far worse had the fragments hit a more populated area. The nearby nuclear facility of Mayak was not affected, local news reports said.
Substantial meteorites hit the Earth every couple of months, but they almost never hurt people because most of the planet is covered by oceans and sparsely inhabited areas, the ESA said.
The incident recalled a 1908 asteroid that levelled a large but sparsely populated area of Siberia, when a massive blast laid waste to 2,000 square kilometres of uninhabited Siberian forest - an area larger than London.
“This is the first time this has happened, at least as far our records go,” ESA spokesman Detlef Koschny said. “Mostly they land in the ocean, in deserts or in Siberia, so nothing much bad happens.” NASA said the meteor was unrelated to the much larger asteroid, dubbed 2012 DA14, which harmlessly passed Earth 16 hours later from a different direction.
“It’s an incredible coincidence to have them happening on the same day,” Chodas said.
NASA scientists said “the trajectory of the Russian meteorite was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object.” NASA said the Russian meteor was still being analysed but had travelled from north to south relative to Earth, while the later asteroid was moving on an opposite course.
NASA broadcast real-time animation of the asteroid fly-by, and live or near real-time images from observatories in Australia.
The asteroid flew closest to Earth at 1925 GMT, when it was 27,600 kilometres from the planet’s surface, NASA said.
Source: The Hindu
(3) Policy to facilitate flexi-work environment sought
A combination of factors ranging from increasing labour cost to stepped up presence of multi-national companies in the wake of globalisation will drive corporates in India towards a ``flexible headcount’’ regime, according to Paul van de Kerkhof, Chairman, Randstad India Ltd., a subsidiary of the Netherlands-based HR services company.
In an interaction with The Hindu here, Mr. Kerkhof said companies in developed markets such as the U.S. and Europe had the ability to adjust the headcount to the economic cycles since such a provision was embedded in the legal environment.
“The world around is changing. And, India needs to adapt to the change,’’ he said. Asserting that the ``clients demand are changing,’’ he said India too was maturing. The staffing rules, however, remained unclear, he said.
Rising labour cost, he said, was a sure sign that flexi-staffing would gain currency in India, too. Mr. Kerkhok felt that ``flexiblising headcount’’ required an enabling regulatory framework. ``Also, the Government needs to follow it up. It is a big challenge,’’ he pointed out.
Fielding a range of questions, he said ``flexi-staffing’’ was already happening in ``professional space’’ especially in areas such as information technology and engineering as many of these companies laid much store by flexibility in total cost.
In this context, he pointed to the huge flexi-staffing of the low-end kind in the construction industry. ``This is happening in an informal way,’’ he pointed out.
He said Randstad was focussed on white-collar jobs in telecom, BFSI (Banking, financial services and insurance) and FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) segments.
Randstad, he said, would beef up its IT infrastructure and bring in global best practices.
To a query, he said Randstad would like to emerge as a leading player in the emerging HR outsourcing space in India.
Source: The Hindu
(4) U.S. alleges insider trading ahead of Heinz deal
U.S. federal regulators have alleged that a brokerage account in Switzerland was used for illegal insider trading ahead of the H.J. Heinz acquisition.
The Securities and Exchange Commission obtained a court order on Friday to freeze the account and prevent the assets from being moved.
The account was used for trades placed Wednesday that netted $1.7 million after the deal was announced. The SEC says it doesn’t know the identity of the traders but said they “took risky bets” that Heinz’s stock price would increase.
On Thursday, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Brazilian firm 3G announced they agreed to buy Heinz. Heinz’s stock rose nearly 20 per cent after the announcement.
The SEC is alleging that the traders must have known in advance about the pending transaction based on inside information. The traders bought call options to make a huge profit of roughly 1,700 percent after the acquisition was announced.
Call options let investors place a bet on a stock without committing to buy the shares. Investors instead have the option to buy the shares later for a set price.
The Swiss account hadn’t traded securities related to Heinz for nearly six months before purchasing the options, the SEC said in a complaint filed in federal court in New York.
“Irregular and highly suspicious options trading immediately in front of a merger or acquisition announcement is a serious red flag that traders may be improperly acting on confidential nonpublic information,” Daniel Hawke, an SEC official, said in a statement.
Representatives for Berkshire Hathaway and the public relations agency representing 3G and Berkshire in the deal did not immediately return messages for comment. A spokesman for Heinz said the company hadn’t been contacted by the SEC and therefore did not have any comment.
The SEC’s complaint does not allege any wrongdoing by Heinz or the company’s new owners.
The account was held at a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs in Zurich. Tiffany Galvin, a spokeswoman at Goldman, said the company is “cooperating with the SEC’s investigation.”
The acquisition is intended to help Heinz accelerate its expansion from a dominant American name into a presence on grocery shelves worldwide. In addition to ketchup, the Pittsburgh-based company also makes baked beans, pickles, vinegar, Classico pasta sauces and Ore-Ida potatoes, as well as a growing stable of sauces suited to regional tastes around the world.
Source: The Hindu
(5) Govt cuts import tariff values of gold, silver
The government, on Friday, slashed the import tariff value of gold to $535 per 10 grams and reduced the rate for silver marginally to $1,003 a kg due to weakening global prices of precious metals.
The tariff value is the base price on which the customs duty is determined to prevent under-invoicing.
In the last fortnight, the tariff value for gold was $545 per 10 grams, while for silver it was $1,018 a kg.
The Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) issued a notification in this regard.
However, the government has increased the import tariff value of RBD palmolein to $912 from $870 a tonne in the last fortnight, while the tariff value of brass scrap was lowered to $4,074 from $4,077 a tonne.
Source: The Hindu
Disclaimer: All news stories and content sourced from freely available material on the internet. All sources are acknowledged.
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