New Delhi, Sep 30,2020: India on Tuesday rejected China’s position that it abides by its 1959 stand on the perception of the Line of Actual Control(LAC), and asked the neighbouring country to refrain from advancing an “untenable unilateral” interpretation of the de-facto border.
The stand by China spelt out by its foreign ministry insisting that it takes the 1959 line on perception of the LAC amid a nearly five-month-long border standoff in eastern Ladakh triggered a strong reaction from India.
“India has never accepted the so-called unilaterally defined 1959 Line of Actual Control (LAC). This position has been consistent and well known, including to the Chinese side,” MEA Spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said in response to a question by the media on the issue.
The spokesperson’s comments came after a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson told Hindustan Times that China abides by the LAC as proposed by then Premier Zhou Enlai to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in a letter dated November 7, 1959.
Srivastava referred to various bilateral agreements including the 1993 agreement on maintenance of peace and tranquility along the LAC, 1996 pact on confidence building measures (CBMs) and the 2005 agreement on political parameters and guiding principles for settlement of the boundary issue, to emphasise that both sides showed commitment to reach a common understanding of the alignment of the LAC.
“Therefore, the insistence now of the Chinese side that there is only one LAC is contrary to the solemn commitments made by China in these agreements,” he said, adding the Indian side has always respected and abided by the LAC.
Referring to Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s recent address to Parliament, Srivastava said it is the Chinese side which by its attempts to transgress the LAC in various parts of the Western Sector has tried to unilaterally alter the status quo.
The MEA spokesperson also talked about repeated affirmation of the Chinese side in the last few months that the current situation in the border areas should be resolved in accordance with the agreements signed between the two countries.
“In the agreement reached between External Affairs Minister and his Chinese counterpart on 10th September also, the Chinese side has reiterated its commitment to abide by all the existing agreements,” Srivastava said.
“We therefore expect that the Chinese side will sincerely and faithfully abide by all agreements and understandings in their entirety and refrain from advancing an untenable unilateral interpretation of the LAC,” he added.
Sept 28,2020: President Ram Nath Kovind on Sunday gave his assent to all the three contentious farm bills, which opposition parties say are anti-farmer and corporate-friendly, after they were recently passed by Parliament during its monsoon session amid vehement protests.
The three bills – The Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill, 2020, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Service Bill, 2020, and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill, 2020 – have now become acts.
The government, which has said that these landmark legislations will make farmers self-reliant, has notified them. More than a dozen opposition parties had urged President Kovind not to sign the contentious bills, alleging that they were passed “unconstitutionally” in “complete disregard” of parliamentary norms.
Farmers, especially in Punjab and Haryana, have been protesting against the bills and have said the Centre’s farm reforms would pave a way for the dismantling of the minimum support price system, leaving them at the “mercy” of big companies.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been trying to allay the fears of the farmers, saying that the country’s agriculture sector has unshackled itself after the passage of these bills. Farmers and the farm sector, Modi said, need to be strong to lay a strong foundation of “Atmanirbhar Bharat”.
“They have the power to sell their fruits or vegetables to anyone, and anywhere. It is this power which is the foundation of their growth, now the same power has been given to farmers across the country. They have got the freedom to sell not only fruits and vegetables but grains, sugarcane, mustard and anything that they grow, they can now sell to anyone and anywhere they like,” PM Modi said while addressing the 69th edition of his monthly ‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio programme.
Washington , September 27,2020: To understand how it functions and to shed light on what goes awry in cardiovascular disease, scientists have created a detailed cellular and molecular map of the healthy heart.
Scientists have created a detailed cellular and molecular map of the healthy human heart to understand how this vital organ functions and to shed light on what goes awry in cardiovascular disease.
The work, published in the journal Nature, was led by investigators at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Germany, Imperial College London, and their global collaborators.
The team analysed almost a half-million individual cells to build the most extensive cell atlas of the human heart to date.
The atlas shows the huge diversity of cells and reveals heart muscle cell types, cardiac protective immune cells, and an intricate network of blood vessels. It also predicts how the cells communicate to keep the heart working.
The research is part of the Human Cell Atlas initiative to map every cell type in the human body.
The new molecular and cellular knowledge of the heart promises to enable a better understanding of heart disease and guide the development of highly individualized treatments.
The work also sets the stage for therapies based on regenerative medicine in the future, the researchers said.
Over a lifetime, the average human heart delivers more than 2 billion life-sustaining beats to the body. In doing so, it helps deliver oxygen and nutrients to cells, tissues and organs and enables the removal of carbon dioxide and waste products.
Each day, the heart beats around 100,000 times with a one-way flow through four different chambers, varying speed with rest, exercise, and stress. Every beat requires an exquisitely complex but perfect synchronization across various cells in different parts of the heart.
When this complex coordination goes bad, it can result in cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death worldwide, killing an estimated 17.9 million people each year.
Detailing the molecular processes inside the cells of a healthy heart is critical to understanding how things go awry in heart disease. Such knowledge can lead to more precise, better treatment strategies for various forms of cardiovascular illness.
“Millions of people are undergoing treatments for cardiovascular diseases. Understanding the healthy heart will help us understand interactions between cell types and cell states that can allow lifelong function and how these differ in diseases,” said study co-senior author Christine Seidman, professor of medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and a cardiovascular geneticist at Brigham and Women’s.
“Ultimately, these fundamental insights may suggest specific targets that can lead to individualized therapies in the future, creating personalized medicines for heart disease and improving the effectiveness of treatments for each patient,” Seidman said.
The team studied nearly 500,000 individual cells and cell nuclei from six different regions of the heart obtained from 14 organ donors whose hearts were healthy but unsuitable for transplantation.
Using a combination of single-cell analysis, machine learning and imaging techniques, the team could see exactly which genes were switched on and off in each cell.
The researchers discovered major differences in the cells in different areas of the heart. They also observed that each area of the heart had specific subsets of cells–a finding that points to different developmental origins and suggests that these cells would respond differently to treatments.
“This project marks the beginning of new understandings into how the heart is built from single cells, many with different cell states,” said study co-first author Daniel Reichart, research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School.
“With knowledge of the regional differences throughout the heart, we can begin to consider the effects of age, exercise and disease and help push the field of cardiology toward the era of precision medicine,” added Reichart.
“This is the first time anyone has looked at the single cells of the human heart at this scale, which has only become possible with large-scale single-cell sequencing,” said Norbert Hubner, co-senior author and professor at Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine. “This study shows the power of single-cell genomics and international collaboration,” he added.
“Knowledge of the full range of cardiac cells and their gene activity is a fundamental necessity to understand how the heart functions and to start to unravel how it responds to stress and disease,” added Hubner.
As part of this study, the researchers also looked at blood vessels running through the heart in unprecedented detail. The atlas showed how the cells in these veins and arteries are adapted to the different pressures and locations and how this could help researchers understand what goes wrong in blood vessels during coronary heart disease.
“Our international effort provides an invaluable set of information to the scientific community by illuminating the cellular and molecular details of cardiac cells that work together to pump blood around the body,” said co-senior author Michela Noseda of Imperial College, London.
“We mapped the cardiac cells that can be potentially infected by SARS-CoV-2 and found that specialized cells of the small blood vessels are also virus targets. Our datasets are a goldmine of information to understand subtleties of heart disease,” she added.
The researchers also focused on understanding cardiac repair, looking at how the immune cells interact and communicate with other cells in the healthy heart and how this differs from skeletal muscle.
Further research will include investigating whether any heart cells could be induced to repair themselves.
“This great collaborative effort is part of the global Human Cell Atlas initiative to create a ‘Google map’ of the human body,” said Sarah Teichmann of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, co-senior author of the study and co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organising Committee.
“Openly available to researchers worldwide, the Heart Cell Atlas is a fantastic resource, which will lead to a new understanding of heart health and disease, new treatments and potentially even finding ways of regenerating damaged heart tissue,” she added.
NEW DELHI ,Sept26,2020: Government said on Saturday it was capping the price of liquid oxygen used to treat victims of novel coronavirus and other respiratory diseases after complaints of hoarding and shortages, as total covid infections hit 5.9 million countrywide.
The health ministry on Saturday reported more than 85,000 cases in the last 24 hours.
“Due to the absence of a price cap on liquid medical oxygen, manufacturers have hiked prices to fillers,” the government said in a statement, referring to off-takers such as hospitals and clinics which use the oxygen.
To ensure that the oxygen is available at reasonable rates, the government has capped manufacturers’ prices at 15.22 rupees per cubic metre (CUM), the statement said.
Prices of a cubic metre of medical oxygen delivered by cylinder to end-users has been fixed at 25.71 rupees, higher than the previous ceiling price of 17.49/CUM.
The new ceiling prices are applicable for six months and exclude taxes.
India’s demand for medical oxygen has increased by almost four times to 2,800 tonnes a day, straining production and supply, the statement said.
Mathura, Sep 26 (UNI) A legal battle seems to be eminent over the Shree Krishna Janambhoomi as a civil suit has been filed in the local court here demanding removal of the Shahi Eidgah mosque and handing over the 13.37 acres of land to the Janambhoomi trust.
The title suit of vexed Ayodhya issue was decided by the Supreme court on November 9 last year giving the entire land in favour of the Ramjanambhoomi, and now this civil suit could create another turmoil.
A civil suit was filed before the court of civil judge, senior division, Mathura, on behalf of child deity Bhagwan Shri Krishna Virajman, seeking the removal of the Shahi Idgah, adjacent to the Shri Krishna temple complex at Mathura.
A lawyer Ranjana Agnihotri, a resident of Lucknow , filed the suit along with six others on Saturday. Advocates Hari Shankar and Vishnu Jain were others who have filed the suit on behalf of the plaintiff ‘Bhagwan Sri Krishna Virajman’ staking claim on the 13.37 acre ‘Sri Krishna Janmabhoomi’ land and demanding the removal of Shahi Eidgah mosque that stands adjacent to the temple.
All the three lawyers were part of the team which fought for the Ramjanambhoomi case too.
The UP Sunni Central Waqf Board and the Committee of Management of Trust of Shahi Idgah have been arraigned as defendants in the suit.
The suit “reclaim” the entire Krishna Janmabhoomi in the temple town claiming that “every inch of the land… is sacred for the devotees of Lord Shree Krishna and the Hindu community”.The birthplace of Lord Krishna lies beneath the structure raised by the trust, the suit said.
The suit claims that the trust, with the help of some Muslims, encroached upon the land belonging to Shri Krishna Janamasthan Trust and the deity, and erected a structure.
The suit seeks removal of ‘encroachment’ and illegal ‘superstructure’ raised by mosque Committee with the consent of Sunni Central Waqf Board. However, there is no mention of Places of Religious Worship (Special Provisions) Act of 1991 which has barred courts from entertaining litigation over changing status quo of a place of religious worship post-1947.
“It is a matter of fact and history that Aurangzeb ruled over the country from 1658-1707 AD and he being a staunch follower of Islam had issued orders for demolition of a large number of Hindu religious places and temples including the temple standing at the birthplace of Lord Shree Krishna at Katra Keshav Dev, Mathura in the year 1669-70 AD,” the suit said.
“The army of Aurangzeb partly succeeded to demolish the Keshav Dev Temple and the construction was forcibly raised showing the might of power and said construction was named as Idgah Mosque,” it added.
“The Shree Krishna Janmasthan Seva Sansthan is working against the interest of the deity and devotees and fraudulently entered into a compromise with the Committee of Management of Trust Masjid Idgah (Trust) in 1968 conceding a considerable portion of property belonging to the deity and the trust,” the suit said.
The civil judge, Mathura, passed a judgement on the suit regarding the alleged “compromise between the Krishna Janmasthan Seva Sansthan and the Trust” on July 20, 1973.
The present suit has now prayed for “cancelling this judgement”.
It was also claimed that Shri Krishna Janamsthan Seva Sansthan, which is the governing body of the temple complex, entered into an illegal compromise with the Shahi Idgah trust with a view to grab the property in question.
Reacting to the new development, BJP leader Vinay Katiyar said Mathura and Kashi need to be freed too after Ram Janmabhoomi at Ayodhya. “If required a movement will be started to remove Eidgah encroachment and reclaim the Krishna Janmabhoomi,” he added.
Meanwhile, Haji Mehboob called the civil suit absurd and cited that the Supreme Court has categorically said except the Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid case, no plea will be filed and it will not be heard.
“It’s absurd as the Supreme Court has already said it in clear words that apart from the Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid case, no one will be allowed to file any suit regarding any such matter be it Kashi, Mathura or in any part of the country. The government has itself said that they won’t interfere,” he said.
These issues are raised wherever there’s an election in the country, he added.