New Delhi, Feb 6,2021: India has become the fastest country to reach five million mark in Covid vaccination with the country achieving the feat merely in 21 days.
The country is followed by the United States which reached the five million mark in 24 days, the UK and Israel both in 45 days, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said in a statement on Saturday.
India has registered an unprecedented record in the number of COVID-19 cumulative tests, crossing the landmark of 20 crore (20,06,72,589) total tests on Saturday with 7,40,794 tests conducted in the last 24 hours.
With 2,369 testing labs in the country, including 1,214 government laboratories and 1,155 private laboratories, the daily testing capacity has got a substantial boost.
Active caseload dropped under 1.5 lakh- the lowest in 8 months and more than 54 lakh health workers were vaccinated.
The active caseload now consists of just 1.37 per cent of the country’s infection count.
The cumulative positivity rate is also declining and presently pegged at 5.39 per cent.
The country has seen less than 100 fatalities (95) and 11,713 infections in the last 24 hours.
New Delhi, Feb 6,2021: India and the European Union will hold regular talks to initiate a bilateral trade and investment agreement (BTIA), with an interim agreement to start with.
The two sides held their first High Level Dialogue (HLD), co-chaired by Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal and EU Executive Vice-President & Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, on Friday.
“In a significant step forward, regular interactions for re-initiation of bilateral trade and investment agreements, with an interim agreement, to start with, were discussed,” the Commerce ministry said on Saturday.
Negotiations for a broad-based BTIA started in 2007 and were suspended in 2013.
The talks collapsed over certain EU demands such as greater market access for automobiles, wines and spirits, and further opening up of India’s financial services sector such as banking, insurance and e-commerce.
At last year’s India-EU Leaders Summit, the two sides agreed to explore the possibility of reviewing BTIA talks and decided to hold the HLD.
During the HLD, the Ministers emphasised on the importance of global cooperation and solidarity in the post COVID-19 era and agreed for further deepening of bilateral trade and investment relationship through a series of regular engagements, aiming at quick deliverables for the businesses in these tough times.
They also agreed to meet within the next three months, with an objective for reaching consensus on a host of bilateral trade and investment cooperation issues, such as a bilateral Regulatory Dialogue, and an India-EU Multilateral Dialogue, to explore further possibilities of co-operation.
The Ministers concluded the talks to work towards a renewed India-EU commercial and economic partnership, reflecting full potential of bilateral commercial relations, said the ministry.
Naypyitaw [Myanmar], February 6,2021: After blocking Facebook in the name of public interest and state stability, the Myanmar Army further expanded its internet crackdown by ordering a block on Twitter and Instagram, days after seizing power in a coup.
On Friday, the Myanmar Ministry of Transport and Communications ordered mobile networks and internet service providers in the country to block Twitter and Instagram, CNN reported citing Norwegian company Telenor, which offers mobile services in the country.
“While the directive has legal basis in Myanmar’s telecommunications law, Telenor Myanmar has challenged the necessity and proportionality of the directive … and highlighted the directive’s contradiction with international human rights law,” the company said in a statement.
In response to the move, Twitter said that it was “deeply concerned” about the order.
“It undermines the public conversation and the rights of people to make their voices heard… The Open Internet is increasingly under threat around the world. We will continue to advocate to end destructive government-led shutdowns,” a Twitter spokesperson told CNN Business.
In a statement, a spokesperson from Facebook said: “Telecom providers in Myanmar have been ordered to permanently block Instagram. We urge authorities to restore connectivity so that people in Myanmar can communicate with family and friends and access important information.”
The step to block Facebook, which is used by 53 million people in Myanmar, has been taken as a bid to quell dissent.
Facebook has emerged as a key platform for opposition to Monday’s coup with photos of civil disobedience campaigns and nightly pot-and-pan protests widely shared, Al Jazeera reported.
Myanmar’s military launched a coup on Monday morning and detained Aung San Suu Kyi, Win Myint and other National League for Democracy (NLD) members.
The military also announced a one-year state of emergency in the country, vowing to “take action” against alleged voter fraud during the November 8 general election, which saw Suu Kyi’s NLD party win resoundingly.
The military also said it was committed to the democratic system and vowed to hold new and fair elections after the state of emergency ends.
Amaravati (Andhra Pradesh), February 6,2021:: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy on Friday directed the officials to come up with an action plan to set up three concept cities near Visakhapatnam, Tirupati, and Bengaluru to house information technology and related industries in the state.
As per an official release, the Chief Minister said that these cities should contribute to the IT progress and help in the development of the state by bringing in as many industries as possible and focus on creating a large number of jobs.
“The Chief Minister has directed officials to focus on ensuring uninterrupted internet service should be provided in every village. He had stressed on the construction of libraries with accessible bandwidth internet connections in every village. Apart from building libraries, the Chief Minister instructed that all the secretariats and Rythu Bharosa Kendras (RBKs) in the village should also be connected to the internet,” it said.
The release said that the Andhra government is also chalking out plans to develop an integrated industrial park in Visakhapatnam, which will includes high-end skill university, incubation centers, labs, departmental offices, data centre and IT towers.
“The government now plans to set up an institute of emerging technology and research university,” it said.
Reddy also directed officials to set up hubs for all e-governance applications in fields of education, health, agriculture and other services of the state.
Washington, Feb 6,2021: The Biden administration has notified Congress it will remove Yemen’s Houthi movement from the US list of groups designated as foreign terrorists, the Washington Post reported citing a State Department official and three congressional aides.
The report on Friday said the Biden administration has formally informed Congress it will remove the Houthis from the US foreign terrorist organizations list.
The Trump administration added the Houthi movement to its list of foreign terrorist organizations days before the end of its tenure.
The leader of the movement, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, his brother and military commander Abd al-Khaliq al-Houthi and another Ansar Allah commander Abdullah Yahya al-Hakim were listed as global terrorists.
WASHINGTON,Feb 05,2021: U.S. congressional investigators found “dangerous levels of toxic heavy metals” in certain baby foods that could cause neurological damage, a House Oversight subcommittee said in a report released on Thursday in calling for new standards and testing requirements.
FILE PHOTO: Baby food products are pictured in a shop at Nestle headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, February 15, 2018. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
The panel examined products made by Nurture Inc, Hain Celestial Group Inc, Beech-Nut Nutrition and Gerber, a unit of Nestle, it said, adding that it was “greatly concerned” that Walmart Inc, Campbell Soup Co and Sprout Organic Foods refused to cooperate with the investigation. The U.S. baby food market was worth an estimated $8 billion in 2020, according to Euromonitor.
The report said internal company standards “permit dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals, and documents revealed that the manufacturers have often sold foods that exceeded those levels.”
The report urged U.S. regulators to set maximum levels of toxic heavy metals permitted in baby foods and require manufacturers to test finished products for heavy metals, not just ingredients, while baby food companies said they were working to reducing levels of metals that occur naturally in food products.
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat who chairs the panel that released the report, said it found “these manufacturers knowingly sell baby food containing high levels of toxic heavy metals … It’s time that we develop much better standards for the sake of future generations.”
A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) spokesman said the agency was reviewing the report.
The agency noted toxic elements are present in the environment and enter the food supply through soil, water or air. “Because they cannot be completely removed, our goal is to reduce exposure to toxic elements in foods to the greatest extent feasible,” the FDA said.
Campbell said in a statement on its website that its products are safe and cited the lack of a current FDA standard for heavy metals in baby food. The market’s sixth biggest brand said it thought it had been “full partners” in the study with congressional researchers.
Walmart said it submitted information to the committee in February 2020 and never received any subsequent inquiries. The retail giant requires private label product suppliers to hew to its own internal specifications, “which for baby and toddler food means the levels must meet or fall below the limits established by the FDA.”
Happy Family Organics said it was “disappointed at the many inaccuracies, select data usage and tone bias in this report. We can say with the utmost confidence that all Happy Family Organics products are safe for babies and toddlers to enjoy.” It added it welcomes “additional guidelines from the FDA.”
Hain Celestial – the baby food market’s No.4. player which makes Earth’s Best – said the “report examined outdated data and does not reflect our current practices” and said it “inaccurately characterized a meeting with the FDA.”
Hain added since then it “took several steps to reduce the levels of heavy metals in our finished products – including no longer using brown rice in our products that are primarily rice based, changing other ingredients and conducting additional testing of finished product before shipping.”
A representative from Gerber – which sells about a fifth of all baby food in the United States – said the elements in question occur naturally in the soil and water in which crops are grown and added it takes multiple steps “to minimize their presence.”
Beech-Nut Nutrition said it was reviewing the report and is working with other companies “on science-based standards that food suppliers can implement across our industry.”
The report was critical also of the administration of former President Donald Trump, saying it “ignored a secret industry presentation to federal regulators revealing increased risks of toxic heavy metals in baby foods.”
The report said “in 100% of the Hain baby foods tested, inorganic arsenic levels were higher in the finished baby food than the company estimated they would be based on individual ingredient testing.”
It said that in August 2019 the FDA received a secret slide presentation from Hain that said “corporate policies to test only ingredients, not final products, underrepresent the levels of toxic heavy metals in baby foods.”
The report said the FDA took no new action in response. “To this day, baby foods containing toxic heavy metals bear no label or warning to parents. Manufacturers are free to test only ingredients, or, for the vast majority of baby foods, to conduct no testing at all,” the report said.
The FDA has declared that inorganic arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury are dangerous, particularly to infants and children, the report noted.
The FDA in August finalized guidance to industry, setting an action level of 100 parts per billion inorganic arsenic in infant rice cereal.
“We acknowledge that there is more work to be done, but the FDA reiterates its strong commitment to continue to reduce consumer exposure to toxic elements and other contaminants from food,” the FDA said Thursday.
New Delhi , February 5,2021: Schools were reopened in Delhi for students of Class 9 and Class 11 and they attended the classes on Friday, around ten months after educational institutions were forced to shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The government had resumed schools for classes 10 and 12 on January 18 in view of the board exams. However, the government had said that the student should be called to school only with the consent of their parents.
Several states have already opened schools with precautionary measures.
Meanwhile, Delhi’s Health Minister Satyendar Jain on Tuesday informed that in the fifth Sero survey done in the national capital, antibodies against the COVID-19 have been detected in 56.13 per cent of the population.
Washington , February 5,2021: A new study has found that people differ as to how strongly they desire better self-control, and reveals some of the factors affecting this desire.
The findings of the study were published in the journal ‘Motivation Science’. Self-control significantly affects well-being and objective success in life. Although many agree that a high degree of self-control is beneficial, helping people develop more self-control is a tricky challenge.
Self-control training, like training in any domain, is affected by the basic question of whether a person is motivated to improve self-control. This study explores that people differ as to how strongly they desire better self-control and uncovers the elements that drive people to improve this important personal quality.
The desire for self-control (DSC) reflects a wish to have an improved self-control ability. This desire is influenced by societal or cultural demands, as well as internal motivations. In the new study led by Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, Australia’s University of Queensland, and Texas Tech University in the US, researchers sought to discover the elements that drive people to experience greater DSC.
The research involved four separate studies. Across all studies, individuals low in trait self-control expressed greater DSC. That is individuals who chronically believe they are deficient in self-control wish they had more (reflecting deficiency). However, importantly, the four studies showed that DSC also hinges on individuals’ sense that self-control is needed to accomplish current goals (reflecting necessity).
In study one, necessity was expressed by a greater fear of failure in not able to meet goals, and in study two, it was expressed by associating DSC with meeting goals in the near future. Crucially, studies three and four used experimental designs and showed that acknowledgment of the relevance of self-control for current goals (by, for example, knowing of an upcoming difficult task) causes an increase in desire for self-control.
The study also found that a stronger desire for self-control predicted a greater willingness to enroll in self-control training, by that highlighting the practical relevance of understanding the bases of this desire.
In a 2017 study, two of the current study’s authors (Uziel & Baumeister) explored the implications of having a strong desire for self-control on task performance. It revealed an ironic effect, whereby wishing for more self-control resulted in impaired task performance in the face of difficult challenges.
Those who wished for more self-control expected to perform worse on the task, and thus gave up. In the context of this study, one might wonder what makes people want more self-control if it leads to dire consequences. The explanation that arises from the present findings is that the desire often arises too late in the process of addressing challenges and the prospects of succeeding cannot improve.
“Wishing for more self-control can lead to better self-control, but only when this wish serves a long-term process of self-improvement. If the desire arises when one already needs a high degree of self-control, the desire could be detrimental,” said Dr. Liad Uziel, of the Department of Psychology at Bar-Ilan University, who led the study.
“In order for desire for self-control to carry beneficial effects, it must arise at a point where change is feasible. Changing one’s self-control is a very difficult challenge and must be considered a journey, not a one-shot occurrence,” noted Uziel.
The findings add a missing piece in understanding the processes that govern people’s ability to develop better self-control. They also highlight the need to address the wish for having better self-control, and to understand its effect in bringing about actual behaviors aimed at improving self-control as an important factor in programs aimed at improving self-control.
New Delhi, Feb 4,2021: The Central Government on Thursday apprised the Delhi High Court that 43 First Information Reports (FIRs) were registered in connection with January 26 tractor rally protests and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) invoked in some of the FIRs, in which banned entity ‘Sikhs for Justice’ is allegedly involved.
The Centre informed that substantial steps have been taken in this regard and out of the 43 FIRs, 13 have been transferred to Delhi Police Special Cell.
A bench headed by Chief Justice DN Patel and also comprising Justice Jyoti Singh was hearing a plea seeking directions to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Delhi Police to take action against perpetrators involved in the January 26 clashes in the capital.
The petitioners, Shubham Awasthi and two others, residents of Delhi NCR, in their plea filed through Advocate Narayan Sharma, sought to direct the Centre to strengthen the laws pertaining to insults to the National Flag and Constitution so that a strong sense of deterrence is brewed among mishchief mongers also sought Centre’s direction to form a committee in this regard.