Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh, suspect in 1988 Syed Modi murder, quits Cong to join BJP

New Delhi, Mar 13: Delhi's Tis Hazari Court on Friday sentenced expelled Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and six others to 10 years imprisonment for the death of Unnao rape survivor's father. Sengar is already serving life imprisonment for raping the minor.

While sentencing them, District Judge Dharmesh Sharma said, "There can be no denying that rule of law was broken. Sengar was a public functionary and had to maintain the rule of law. The way the crime has been committed, it does not call for leniency."

Sengar and his brother Atul has been directed to give 10 lakh compensation to family of the victim for loss of their father. "There are four minor children involved, three girls and one boy. They have also been uprooted from native place," the judge said.

Seven people, including Sengar, his brother and two police personnel, were held guilty for culpable homicide and criminal conspiracy, earlier this month.

The case pertains to the death of rape survivor's father in custody on April 9, 2018. It was alleged that he was assaulted following a quarrel with some of the accused in the case.

He was taken to the police station and then framed for allegedly possessing an illegal firearm. Pursuant to this, he was sent to custodial remand, during which he died.

The case was transferred to Delhi from a trial court in Uttar Pradesh on the Supreme Court's directions in August last year. Both the death and illegal firearm case was later clubbed by the court.

During the arguments on sentencing on March 12, Sengar had told the court that he should be "hanged and acid poured into his eyes if he has done anything wrong".

The former MLA had also raped the daughter of the deceased in 2017 in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district and was sent to jail for "remainder of his natural biological life", last year.

London, May 20: The current physical distancing guidelines of 6 feet may be insufficient to prevent COVID-19 transmission, according to a study which says a mild cough in low wind speeds can propel saliva droplets by as much as 18 feet.

Researchers, including those from the University of Nicosia in Cyprus, said a good baseline for studying the airborne transmission of viruses, like the one behind the COVID-19 pandemic, is a deeper understanding of how particles travel through the air when people cough.

In the study, published in the journal Physics of Fluids, they said even with a slight breeze of about four kilometres per hour (kph), saliva travels 18 feet in 5 seconds.

"The droplet cloud will affect both adults and children of different heights," said study co-author Dimitris Drikakis from the University of Nicosia.

According to the scientists, shorter adults and children could be at higher risk if they are located within the trajectory of the saliva droplets.

They said saliva is a complex fluid, which travels suspended in a bulk of surrounding air released by a cough, adding that many factors affect how saliva droplets travel in the air.

These factors, the study noted, include the size and number of droplets, how they interact with one another and the surrounding air as they disperse and evaporate, how heat and mass are transferred, and the humidity and temperature of the surrounding air.

In the study, the scientists created a computer simulation to examine the state of every saliva droplet moving through the air in front of a coughing person.

The model considered the effects of humidity, dispersion force, interactions of molecules of saliva and air, and how the droplets change from liquid to vapour and evaporate, along with a grid representing the space in front of a coughing person.

Each grid, the scientists said, holds information about variables like pressure, fluid velocity, temperature, droplet mass, and droplet position.

The study analysed the fates of nearly 1,008 simulated saliva droplets, and solved as many as 3.7 million equations.

"The purpose of the mathematical modelling and simulation is to take into account all the real coupling or interaction mechanisms that may take place between the main bulk fluid flow and the saliva droplets, and between the saliva droplets themselves," explained Talib Dbouk, another co-author of the study.

However, the researchers added that further studies are needed to determine the effect of ground surface temperature on the behaviour of saliva in air.

They also believe that indoor environments, especially ones with air conditioning, may significantly affect the particle movement through air.

This work is important since it concerns safety distance guidelines, and advances the understanding of the transmission of airborne diseases, Drikakis said.

Jun 9: Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants all 1.3 billion Indians to be “vocal for local” — meaning, to not just use domestically made products but also to promote them. As an overseas citizen living in Hong Kong, I’m doing my bit by very vocally demanding Indian mangoes on every trip to the grocery. But half the summer is gone, and not a single slice so far.

My loss is due to India’s COVID-19 lockdown, which has severely pinched logistics, a perennial challenge in the huge, infrastructure-starved country. But more worrying than the disruption is the fruity political response to it. Rather than being a wake-up call for fixing supply chains, the pandemic seems to be putting India on an isolationist course. Why?

Granted that the liberal view that trade is good and autarky bad isn’t exactly fashionable anywhere right now. What makes India’s lurch troublesome is that the pace and direction of economic nationalism may be set by domestic business interests. The Indian liberals, many of whom are Western-trained academics, authors and — at least until a few years ago — policy makers, want a more competitive economy. They will be powerless to prevent the slide.

Modi’s call for a self-reliant India has been echoed by Home Minister Amit Shah, the cabinet’s unofficial No. 2, in a television interview. If Indians don’t buy foreign-made goods, the economy will see a jump, he said. The strategy — although it’s too nebulous yet to call it that — has a geopolitical element. A military standoff with China is under way, apparently triggered by India’s completion of a road and bridge near the common border in the tense Himalayan region of Ladakh. It’s very expensive to fight even a limited war there. With India’s economy flattened by COVID, New Delhi may be looking for ways to restore the status quo and send Beijing a signal.

Economic boycotts, such as Chinese consumers’ rejection of Japanese goods over territorial disputes in the East China Sea, are well understood as statecraft. In these times, it’s not even necessary to name an enemy. An undercurrent of popular anger against China, the source of both the virus and India’s biggest bilateral trade deficit, is supposed to do the job. But is it ever that easy?

A hastily introduced policy to stock only local goods in police and paramilitary canteens became a farcical exercise after the list of banned items ended up including products by the local units of Colgate-Palmolive Co., Nestle SA, and Unilever NV, which have had significant Indian operations for between 60 and 90 years, as well as Dabur India Ltd., a New Delhi-based maker of Ayurveda brands. The since-withdrawn list demonstrates the practical difficulty of bureaucrats trying to find things in a globalized world that are 100% indigenous.

Free-trade champions fret that the prime minister, whom they saw as being on their side six years ago, is acting against their advice to dismantle statist controls on land, labor and capital to help make the country more competitive. Engage with the world more, not less, they caution. But Modi also has to satisfy the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the umbrella Hindu organisation that gets him votes. Its backbone of small traders, builders and businessmen — the RSS admits only men — was losing patience with the anemic economy even before the pandemic. Now, they’re in deep trouble, because India’s broken financial system won’t deliver even state-guaranteed loans to them.

The U.S.-China tensions — over trade, intellectual property, COVID responsibility and Hong Kong’s autonomy — offer a perfect backdrop. A dire domestic economy and trouble at the border provide the foreground. Big business will dial economic nationalism up and down to hit a trifecta of goals: Block competition from the People's Republic; make Western rivals fall in line and do joint ventures; and tap deep overseas capital markets. The first goal is being achieved with newly placed restrictions on investment from any country that shares a land border with India. The second aim is to be realized by corporate lobbying to influence India's whimsical economic policies. As for the third objective, with the regulatory environment becoming tougher for U.S.-listed Chinese companies like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., an opportunity may open up for Indian firms.

All this may bring India Shenzhen-style enclaves of manufacturing and trade, but it will concentrate economic power in fewer hands, something that worries liberals. They’re moved by the suffering of India’s low-wage workers, who have borne the brunt of the COVID shutdown. But when their vision of a more just society and fairer income distribution prompts them to make common cause with the ideological Left, they’re quickly repelled by the Marxist voodoo that all cash, property, bonds and real estate held by citizens or within the nation “must be treated as national resources available during this crisis.” Who will invest in a country that does that instead of just printing money?

At the same time, when liberals look to the business class, they see a sudden swelling of support for ideas like a universal basic income. They wonder if this isn’t a ploy by industry to outsource part of the cost of labor to the taxpayer. Slogans like Modi’s vocal-for-local stir the pot and thicken the confusion. The value-conscious Indian consumer couldn’t give two hoots for calls to buy Indian, but large firms will know how to exploit economic nationalism. One day soon, I’ll get my mangoes — from them.