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Live Mint Abhiram Ghadyalpatil Wed, Dec 20 2017   In Gujarat elections, BJP won 23 seats in cotton cultivation areas, while the Congress took 30 THE RULING BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY (BJP) IN MAHARASHTRA IS WORRIED ABOUT THE ELECTORAL REVERSALS THE PARTY SUFFERED IN RURAL GUJARAT, ESPECIALLY THE COTTON-GROWING PARTS. RESULTS OF THE GUJARAT ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS ANNOUNCED ON MONDAY SHOWED THE CONGRESS MADE SIGNIFICANT GAINS IN THE SAURASHTRA-KUTCH REGION AND NORTH GUJARAT WHERE COTTON AND GROUNDNUT ARE THE MAIN CASH CROPS. IN THE BELT THAT ACCOUNTS FOR 54 ASSEMBLY CONSTITUENCIES, THE BJP WON ONLY 23 SEATS, 12 FEWER THAN IN 2012, WHILE THE CONGRESS TOOK 30 SEATS, 14 MORE THAN IN 2012. AND ACROSS THE STATE, THE BJP WON ONLY 55 OF THE 127 RURAL AND SEMI-URBAN SEATS AS AGAINST 68 BY THE CONGRESS. KISHORE TIWARI, CHAIRMAN OF THE MAHARASHTRA GOVERNMENT-APPOINTED VASANTRAO NAIK SHETKARI SWAWALAMBI MISSION—A TASK FORCE FORMED TO SOLVE VIDARBHA’S AGRARIAN CRISIS— AND VIDA...

Indian Express Hilal Mir December 20, 2017 Given the situation in Kashmir — continuing military operations, toothless polity — Dineshwar Sharma initiative appears futile. The Government of India’s special representative Dineshwar Sharma’s close-door interactions with individuals, groups and organisations in Jammu and Kashmir are certainly not an icebreaker, a prelude to some bigger and more serious political initiative for resolving the dispute. What, then, is the purpose of his mission? So far, he appears to be surveying the results of the BJP-led government’s iron-fisted policies on Kashmir. Previous such initiatives would be rolled out in sugar-coated rhetoric and to the accompaniment of visits by all-party delegations and confidence building measures. Even if those initiatives were no more than time-buying exercises, the mood used to be conciliatory. In contrast, what preceded Sharma’s appointment and what is happening on the ground currently is perfectly in line wi...

Indian Express Shubhajit Roy December 20, 2017  Nepal’s political leadership has often felt that India uses blockades of essential supplies to discipline the smaller country. With the China-leaning Left Alliance winning Nepal’s elections, India will have to work extra hard to repair the trust deficit In October 2002, when Shyam Saran, then India’s ambassador to Indonesia, was appointed envoy to Nepal, then National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra told him that his mandate was to bring the monarchy and political parties together to “neutralise the Maoists”. The worry in South Block was a possible “Red Corridor” into India. This was a little more than a year after the infamous 2001 Narayanhiti Palace massacre in Kathmandu, which left 10 members of the royal family dead and Nepal’s monarchical polity in chaos. Saran was India’s ambassador in Kathmandu for just 22 months before he became foreign secretary, but India’s priorities changed. “What began as a valiant and mos...

Live Mint 20 December 2017 MoS (housing and urban affairs) Hardeep Singh Puri says the rural development ministry has advised states to explore the use of Aadhaar for registration of properties. There was no proposal to make Aadhaar linkage mandatory for property transactions, Parliament was informed on Tuesday. In a written reply in the Lok Sabha, Union minister of state (independent charge) for housing and urban affairs Hardeep Singh Puri, however, said the rural development ministry had advised the states and Union territories to explore the possibilities of using consent-based Aadhaar authentication for registration of properties under the provisions of the Registration Act, 1908. The comments assume significance in the backdrop of Puri reportedly stating last month that seeding Aadhaar to property transactions was a great idea and as the government was linking Aadhaar with bank accounts, it might take some additional steps for the property market also. To a query o...

The Hindu AP,  BEIRUT,   DECEMBER 19, 2017 The terror group’s Syrian factions are engaged in a power struggle in Idlib As Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seeks to reassert his authority in Idlib, the only remaining Province in Syria where his forces have almost no presence, he may be aided there by deep fractures within al-Qaeda, which dominates the region. A recent wave of detentions and a spate of violence within al-Qaeda have also raised fears of an all-out war between insurgents in the heavily populated Province near Turkey as Mr. Assad’s forces make their push. Tensions inside Idlib have been on the rise for months, reflecting a power struggle between hard-line foreign fighters loyal to al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, and its more moderate Syrian members. The tensions worsened in late November after a wave of detentions by an al-Qaeda-linked group against more extremist, mostly non-Syrian members. The detentions, ordered by Abu Mohammed al-Golani, th...

  The Hindu Special Correspondent Chennai,   December 20, 2017 Union Minister of State for Health Ashwini Kumar says several drugs set for clinical trials India is currently working on vaccines to prevent dengue and the Phase 1 clinical trials for one of them is slated to be held in 2020, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, Minister of State for Health, told the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday. In response to questions raised by another member T.K. Rajendran, Mr. Choubey said DSV4, the vaccine developed by The International Centre for Genetic Biotechnology (ICGEB)-Sun Pharma collaborative venture, is a recombinant vaccine on the Virus-Like Particles (VLP) platform with a tetravalent four-in-one VLP design; expressed in yeast, it elicits antibodies to all four DENV serotypes in a shorter schedule of 0, 1 and 2 months. The vaccine is expected to move into Phase I clinical trials by 2020, Mr. Choubey said. The other experiment involves the Panacea Dengue Vaccine, which is a cell cultur...

The Hindu Jacob Koshy December 20, 2017  The pioneering computer scientist prophesies that machines smarter than humans will emerge in the next two decades Juergen Schmidhuber, 54, is a computer scientist who works on  Artificial Intelligence (AI) . Considered to be one of the pioneers in improving neural networks, his techniques, the best known being Long Short-Term Memory, have been incorporated in speech translation software in smartphones. In this interview conducted in Berlin, he speaks of developments in AI, why the fear of job loss due to AI is unfounded, and his work.  Excerpts: What is the most exciting AI project under way in the world? I would be quite biased because I’d say what’s happening in my lab is the most exciting. My goal remains the same as it has been for a very long time: to build a general-purpose AI that can learn to do multiple things. It must learn the learning algorithm itself (that can help it master chess as well as drive...

Economic Times AP Dec 20, 2017 Big US companies have been piling up cash for years, but have spent little of it on buying equipment and raising wages and other things to grow the economy.  Republicans say they know how to fix this: Give companies even more money by cutting their taxes.  The $2.6 trillion in cash that US companies have stored abroad is enough to send a check for more than $7,000 to every man, women and child in the country. The tax plan overhaul would add to that pile under the theory that more money will get companies to invest more, hire more and increase pay for their workers.  The conservative Tax Foundation estimates that the entire overhaul could lead to 4.8 percent more spending by companies on equipment and other capital goods over a decade, and an additional 1.5 percent boost to wages.  Many experts think that is wishful thinking.  "There is more than enough cash for investment," said Daniel Alpert, managing partner at i...