19 JANUARY 2014

Ø  Mumbai-based author-journalist Cyrus Mistry won the prestigious DSC prize for South Asian literature for 2014 here on Saturday for his book Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer on the painful lives of members of the small Zoroastrian community of corpse carriers. The prize, comprising $50,000, , was announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival here. American feminist-journalist Gloria Steinem presented the award to Mr. Mistry at a glittering ceremony at Diggi Palace in the presence of many eminent authors.

Ø   The Centre will soon include Third Line therapy for persons living with HIV in the government’s Anti-Retroviral Treatment programme.

Ø  Agni-IV, India’s surface-to-surface missile with a range of about 4,000 km, will be test-fired from the Wheeler Island, off Dhamra village on the Odisha coast, on January 20. It is a strategic missile which can carry a nuclear warhead weighing about one tonne.

Ø  A high-level panel of the Union government has cleared five national highway road projects worth Rs.7,595 crore. The Public Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC) at its 62nd meeting cleared the projects that will be executed under the PPP mode. Since its inception in 2006, the PPPAC has cleared 272 Central projects worth Rs.2.96 lakh crore.

Ø  Following a 16-month hiatus, India-Pakistan relations showed signs of thawing on Saturday with the two sides agreeing to find ways of establishing reciprocal Non-Discriminatory Market Access (NDMA) by February-end. This includes issuing bank licences to allow banks to function in each other’s country. the Commerce Ministers of both the countries said they had agreed to open the Wagah-Attari border for trade at all times of the year. They also agreed to allow containers, which were until now unloaded at the check-post and re-loaded on the other side, to be moved right up to Amritsar and Lahore. “We have also decided to expedite the process of giving bank licences so that Indian and Pakistani banks can operate in the other country. This would facilitate trade,” Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma said after the meeting. Bilateral trade between the two countries is slightly more than $3 billion a year. Both sides expressed hope that trade would go up many times when NDMA is established on a reciprocal basis. For this, India needs to open up to Pakistan 614 items. Pakistan, on the other hand, needs to open up to India two lists comprising 936 and 1209 items, said the Indian officials.

Ø  The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe aims for a spectacular first in space exploration. The billion-euro machine will catch up with a comet, circle it slowly, and throw down a lander to the surface. With gravity too weak to keep it there, the box of electronics and sensors on legs will cling to its ride with an explosive metal harpoon. Together, the Rosetta probe and its lander, Philae, will scan and poke the comet as it tears towards the sun. As the comet draws near, it will warm and spew huge plumes of gas and dust in a tail more than one million kilometres long. The spectacle has never been captured up close before.  The comet, named 67P/Churyumov—Gerasimenko, formed from cosmic debris 4.6bn years ago, before material had coalesced to form the Earth and our nearest planets, and the sun was a newborn star.

Ø  Biotechnology company Biocon on Saturday launched a new and cheaper drug to treat ‘metastatic’ breast cancer that aggressively spreads to other parts of the body. CANMAb, the world’s first ‘biosimilar’ or remake of Swiss multinational Roche’s original drug trastuzumab, would cost about 25 per cent less than the original. Biocon co-developed the new product with U.S. pharma major Mylan; their 2009 partnership covers four more products and a shared market.