13 APRIL 2014

Ø  A day after the Election Commission banned BJP leader Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh Minister Mohammad Azam Khan from holding public meetings and rallies and directed the Uttar Pradesh government to initiate criminal proceedings against the duo, two FIRs were lodged against each of them. Both FIRs against Mr. Shah were registered in Muzaffarnagar district. The FIRs against Mr. Khan were registered in Ghaziabad and Shamli districts.

Ø  The co-pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 made a desperate call from his mobile phone moments before the jet went off the radar. The call ended abruptly, the New Straits Times reported. Malaysian Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussein, however, cast doubt on the report’s veracity.

Ø  Lyricist-filmmaker Gulzar was on Saturday chosen for the prestigious Dada Saheb Phalke award, the highest official recognition for film personalities in India.

Ø  ATMs would soon be armed with a mechanism that would spray hot foam in the face of the attacker if he tries to force it open. Researchers at ETH University in Zurich have developed a special film that triggers an intense reaction when destroyed.

Ø  International e-commerce company Amazon is preparing to release a smartphone in the second half of 2014. Amazon, it said, hopes to differentiate its phone from other models with a screen that displays hologram-like, three-dimensional images, which can be viewed without special glasses. Earlier this month, the retailer unveiled a new media streaming device, Amazon Fire TV, which it touted as simplifying the experience of watching video online.

Ø  The world’s largest-ever swarm of genetically modified mosquitoes has been released in Brazil to combat infectious disease. Jacobina, a farming town in Bahia, has been plagued for years by dengue fever, a mosquito-borne tropical disease and a leading cause of illness and fatality in Brazil. the newly-hatched Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have been engineered to wipe out their own species. The so-called ‘Franken—skeeter’ has been genetically modified in a laboratory with a gene designed to devastate the non-GM Aedes aegypti population and reduce dengue’s spread. The mosquitoes contain a lethal gene but are kept alive in the laboratory with the help of the antibiotic tetracycline. Once they reach larval stage, the males are separated from the females, which are subsequently destroyed. Then the males, which don’t bite, are released so they can mate with wild females. Their offspring inherit the lethal gene and then die before they can reproduce because they are not treated with tetracycline.

Ø  The Indian government has topped the list of global governments asking for censorship of content on social network Facebook, according to the ‘Global Government Data requests’ report released by the US-based company. This is the second such report from the world’s largest online social network and corresponds to the time period from July to December last year. In terms of requests for user data information, the US government topped the list yet again with 12,598 requests for user data. However, when it came to requests to remove content, the Indian government had made 4,765 requests. The Turkish government came second in that list with 2,104 requests. Facebook had responded with data for 53.5 per cent of the requests made by Indian government.

Ø  Government representatives today approved a U.N. report listing options for rolling back emissions from greenhouse gases. In a six-day wrangle, they hammered out the summary of a vast report on choices to tackle the source of climate change. Compiled by more than 200 scientists over four years, the report is the third piece in an overview by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Summary for Policymakers , due to be unveiled in Berlin tomorrow, will provide a palette of options to mitigate heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuels and agriculture. While making no recommendations, it is expected to say the U.N. target — to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius— is feasible if surging emissions are swiftly braked and then reversed.