4 FEBRUARY 2014

Ø  The Directorate-General of Civil Aviation has made it mandatory for military pilots to get licences from it to operate civilian flights. Pilots and engineers of the armed forces must acquire the licence by July if they have been operating civilian flights for over a year with documents issued by the Army or the IAF.

Ø  Pakistani hackers on Monday targeted a website of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and some sub-domains of Doordarshan websites hosted by the National Informatics Centre (NIC). Though NIC sources in New Delhi refused to either confirm or deny whether the Defence Ministry’s Department of Defence Production website ‘ddpmod.gov.in’ had been hacked or brought down for maintenance, screenshots of the website shared earlier show its defacement by Team MadLeets.com, the same group that had claimed responsibility for hacking Indian websites on Republic Day.

Ø  German President Joachim Guack will arrive India on Tuesday on a six-day visit during which he will pick up the threads of discussions held between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chancellor Angela Merkel last April, especially on the setting up a green energy corridor in India, German Ambassador Michael Steiner told. Dr. Singh and Dr. Merkel had described cooperation in renewable energy as a major focus of bilateral cooperation. After having decided to shun nuclear power, Germany developed expertise in renewable energy. More importantly, it was able to transport this energy from southern Germany to the northern parts with minimum transmission loss. This is something Germany will seek to bring to India through a financial-technical agreement of Euros 1 billion that is at an advanced stage of discussion.

Ø  Prime Minister Manmohan Singh presents an award to scientist Yash Pal (right) at the Indian Science Congress in Jammu on Monday. PM announced in the congress: The government would soon come out with another national mission on high performance computing on an outlay of Rs. 4,500 crore and was planning to establish a national geographical information system on an outlay of Rs. 3,000 crore. India would soon join, as an associate member, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN, where international projects such as research on ‘god particle’ was going on. It was planning to host the third detector for the global Gravitational Wave Experiment. “A national mission on teaching to enhance the esteem of our teachers is also being launched.”

Ø  India has committed itself to contributing $4 million over the next four years to GAVI Alliance to immunise children worldwide against life-threatening diseases. GAVI Alliance is a public-private partnership of members, including the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.