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First Post Dated: July 24,2020 Sulekha Nair The Donald Trump government’s latest salvo with regard to H-1B visas is not a surprise. Since Trump’s election in December 2016, the H-1B visa has been a focal point of discussion and has come in for a three-pronged attack from the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Trump, who campaigned on an ‘America First’ platform of favouring Americans for hiring, has remained true to his promise by putting in jeopardy jobs and lives of IT professionals from across the world who work in the US. The latest move by the US government though has come in for criticism across Silicon Valley and the technology sector in general. Nasscom, a trade association of Indian Information Technology (IT) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), in a statement on 23 June said, the US government’s new proclamation will prevent “our companies and thousands of other organis...

First Post Dated: July 24,2020 Ajay Kumar     The Chief Justice of India announced that the Supreme Court will be constituting a seven-judge panel to determine if physical hearings across courts and tribunals in India may resume. It is hoped that this will allow some clarity in when the justice delivery system can move back to pre-coronavirus levels, given that there has been a general shutdown in the dispensation of justice during this lockdown. While urgent applications were being heard, many of the earlier cases that were already pending were stalled. In a judicial system already ripe with backlogs, when courts reopen again, there will be six-months-worth of cases that would have to be filed at the same time. It does cause one to pause to see if an already overburdened judiciary will be able to handle this additional workload. The lockdown also showed us that courts in India could function via virtual hearings. The Supreme Court and the high courts had virtua...

The Telegram Online Dated: July 24,2020 China warned on Thursday it will be forced to respond after the US ordered the shutdown of its Houston consulate, a move the Chinese foreign ministry said had “severely harmed” relations. Washington gave China 72 hours to close the consulate “to protect American intellectual property and Americans’ private information”, marking a dramatic escalation of tension between the world’s two biggest economies. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the Houston consulate on Twitter as the “central node of the Communist Party’s vast network of spies & influence operations in the United States”. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, speaking at a daily media briefing, described the US allegations as “malicious slander”. “In response to the US’s unreasonable actions, China must make a necessary response and safeguard its legitimate rights,” he said, declining to specify an...

The Telegram Online Dated: July 24,2020 The backlog for an Indian national to get permanent residency or Green Card is more than 195 years, a top Republican senator has said, urging his Senate colleagues to come out with a legislative resolution to address this problem.  A Green Card, known officially as a Permanent Resident Card, is a document issued to immigrants to the US as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently. Senator Mike Lee said on Wednesday that the current Green Card policy did nothing for the child of an immigrant whose dead parent’s Green Card application was ultimately denied because his or her job was no longer available.  “Someone from India entering the backlog today would have to wait 195 years to receive an EB-3 green card. Even if we give their children this limbo status, none of them will have a prayer of becoming a US citizen,” Lee said on the Senator floor.  In fiscal year 2019, Indian nation...

The Economics Times July 23,2020 There is welcome progress for stable, green, baseload power. India has deployed home-grown nuclear technology to reap scale economies for its first 700-MW unit at Kakrapar Atomic Power Project in Gujarat. It’s the biggest indigenous variant of the pressurised heavy water reactor (PHWR), which can be gainfully replicated here and abroad. Over a dozen more modern nuclear reactors have received financial sanction pan-India; we are well-positioned to export nuclear technology and carry out attendant project execution internationally. Note that PHWRs, the mainstay of our nuclear energy programme, use unenriched natural uranium as fuel and heavy water as a moderator and coolant. It avoids expensive uranium enrichment facilities very unlike conventional nuclear reactors; it is also thermally more efficient. The massive global safeguards regime and bundobust for enriched uranium is, of course, because the fissile material can readily be used for strat...

NTI Nuclear Security Index     Among countries with weapons-usable nuclear materials, Australia ranks first for the fifth time.  It also ranks first in the sabotage ranking for the third time. Despite its repeated position at the top of the ranking, Australia continues to better its score, improving by +1 in both rankings. Among countries with weapons-usable nuclear materials, Canada and Switzerland tie for second, Germany is fourth, and the Netherlands and Norway tie for fifth. Among countries with nuclear facilities in the sabotage ranking, Canada, Finland, and the United Kingdom rank second, third, and fourth, respectively, and Germany and Hungary are tied for fifth. New Zealand and Sweden tie for first in the theft ranking for countries without weapon-usable nuclear materials, followed by Finland (third), Denmark and South Korea(tied for fourth), and Hungary and Spain (tied for sixth). Pakistan was the most improved country in the theft ranking for countries...

China Daily Dated: 19-06-2019 Zhang Jie The sales figures recorded by "618" online shopping festival show a vibrant market and consumption upgrading trend in China. China's e-commerce platforms registered record high sales during "618" online shopping festival from June 1 to June 18 this year. JD, the company behind the creation of the festival to mark its anniversary, saw 201.5 billion yuan ($31.53 billion) worth of orders to close the campaign on Wednesday, exceeding 159.2 billion yuan a year ago, a year-on-year increase of 26.57 percent. Pinduoduo, a major online retail player focusing on low-tier cities and towns, reported its order volume surpassed 1.1 billion during this year's spree, with the gross merchandise volume, or GMV, surging 300 percent from last year. Suning said its order volume jumped by 133 percent year-on-year during June 1 to 18 at 18:00 pm, with the home appliances order volume growing 83 percent. Juhuasuan, Alibaba...

The Hindu Dated:July 24,2020 The allegation comes amid rising tension between the U.S. and China, particularly related to theft of intellectual property. The Federal Bureau of Investivation (FBI) believes the Chinese consulate in San Francisco is harbouring a Chinese researcher charged in California with lying about her background. Tang Juan lied about her military affiliation in a visa application last October to work at the University of California, Davis and again during an FBI interview last month, according to Justice Department criminal charges. Agents found photographs of Ms. Tang in a uniform of the People’s Liberation Army civilian cadre and news articles from China that identified her military affiliation. The FBI last month interviewed Ms. Tang, when she denied having served in the military or knowing the significance of the insignia of her uniform, and also found more evidence of her military affiliation when they later searched her home, according to a crimina...

The Klaxon July 23,2020 ANTHONY KLAN Pakistan and China have entered a secret three-year deal to expand potential bio-warfare capabilities, including running several research projects related to the deadly agent anthrax, according to multiple intelligence sources. In the wake of the Coronavirus outbreak on Chinese soil, China’s now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology has signed the covert deal with Pakistan military’s Defense Science and Technology Organization (DESTO), to collaborate research in “emerging infectious diseases” and advance studies on the biological control of transmitted diseases. According to highly credible intelligence sources, the program is being entirely funded by China and is formally titled the “Collaboration for Emerging Infectious Diseases and Studies on Biological Control of Vector Transmitting Diseases”. Intelligence sources, including from the Indian subcontinent, have told The Klaxon they have serious concerns about the secret projec...