Quick notes: Price gouging | Ascendant Dhaka ..

• Price gouging? Dr Reddy's prices DRDO's 2DG anti-Covid drug at Rs 990 per sachet.



• 'Kingpin' in bed allotment scam is a BJP worker: The Central Crime Branch sleuths investigating the Bengaluru bed-allotment scam have arrested the suspected kingpin, said to be an aide of BJP MLA Satish Reddy



• Ascendant Bangladesh: Covid aid to India, financial help to Sri Lanka — Bangladesh is showcasing its economic rise



• Mess in the name of vikAss: The whole of Lakshadweep is a fragile ecosystem with an average height of just about 8 feet above sea level and any development that does not cater to sustainability, will render the whole area useless and uninhabitable in no time. There are islands that have sunk under the sea in our times.



• Japan wants TSMC, Sony to build 20 nanometre chip plant: Japan's most advanced semiconductor plant is a 40 nanometre chip factory operated by Renesas Electronics Corp



• Antitrust lawsuit against Amazon: Thou shalt not undercut Amazon prices.. "Amazon fixed online retail prices through contract provisions and policies".. If a vendor sells a product on Amazon, it can’t sell the same product elsewhere. Amazon reserves the right to kick non-compliant vendors off its platform, among other punishments.



• Raag Hansadhwani: Mohd Aman

Quick notes: Guard of the Himalayas | 3rd dose...

• Sundarlal Bahuguna,‘Gentle Warrior’: “Himalaya is a land of penance. Nothing in the world can be achieved without penance. I am doing this on behalf of all who are striving to save our dying planet. Why should a river, a mountain and forest or the ocean be killed, while we cling to life?”.
  
  As late as 2018, when Bahuguna was 91, he said in an interview that dams were paving the way for calamities and expressed concern that lakhs of trees will be cut down to make way for the Char Dham road and Pancheshwar dam. “The well-being of the Himalayas is important not just for Uttarakhand but the rest of the country as well”.




• Protection wanes by 6 months: Efficacy of Chinese vaccines is “not high” — officials back 3rd dose



• Only Allopathy gets benefit of doubt? AP govt stops distribution of herbal Covid cure. . . . No side effects, say Ayurvedic experts. ‘The mixture, containing 18 ingredients, is safe for administration to COVID-19 patients’



• More of East India loot? India challenges $1.2 billion Cairn arbitration award, says 'never agreed to arbitrate'.. When an Air India aircraft lands at any US airport, Cairn would be able to move court and get that attached before it flies out.



• Mango exports: US apples arrived in India without the Indian inspector being in the USA, but vice versa was not allowed. No Indian mangoes in US for second year in a row.



• What are weeds? An empty field left undisturbed for long enough will inevitably turn into a forest, given enough time. Nature will fill empty, barren or disturbed ground with plants which quickly stabilise and build the soil, to prepare the ground for progressively larger plants, until the area is filled with trees, and many layers of understory plants beneath them. This process is called Forest Succession.
  
  Why forests? Because forest systems are one of the most productive and most sustainable systems known, it is what Nature creates at almost every opportunity. Forest systems can be designed to produce food if we construct them using edible plant species, and they can produce other useful resources such as timber, fibres, dyes and medicines. In addition, what makes them special is that they are living ecosystems, and therefore support great biodiversity, they provide a home to a wide range of flora and fauna, which all comes together to create a balanced, natural, pest and weed free system.
  
  When any soil is laid bare or disturbed, Nature has a system for repairing the degraded ground in order to prevent soil erosion and to reconstruct the ecosystem which was there or should be there. As the first line of action, Nature deploys pioneer plants, to stabilise the soil. These plants all have various unique attributes and aid the reconstruction process in various ways. Here are some examples:
  
  - Plants with deep tap roots drill into hardpan to decompact it, creating channels to allow water and air back in the soil.
  
  - Plants with fine, net-like root structures hold the soil together and prevent erosion on slopes and banks.
  
  - Plants with thorns or which are poisonous protect the ground cover plants from being over-grazed by herbivores.
  
  We are all familiar with these amazing pioneer plants, we commonly call them weeds! Weeds are by definition “plants growing where we don’t want them to” and that is not a biological or ecological categorisation, it’s just a unscientific value judgement of the worth and place of certain plants in the ecosystem according to subjective human opinion. The pioneer plant’s action of stabilising any soil disturbance or damage is only the first of many steps of a full-blown reconstruction process which Nature carries out.



• Planting the water: Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water. It uses water canals called amunas – to divert wet-season flows from mountain streams and route them to natural infiltration basins. Because the water moves more slowly underground as it travels through gravel and soil, it emerges downslope from springs months later, when the comuneros collect it to water their crops. Because much of their irrigation soaks into the ground and eventually makes its way back to the rivers, repairing abandoned amunas scattered throughout the highlands could extend water into the dry season for city dwellers too.



• Iran unveils its domestic supercomputer: Wholly designed and built by a team of Iranian engineers, it has a performance capacity of 0.56 petaflops at the moment and will reach one petaflops in two months.



• 2DG: “It is a glucose molecule analogue which can’t undergo further glycolysis. Monocytes/macrophages in Covid lungs (proliferative tissues: inflammation/tumour) become highly glycolytic after infection and facilitate SARS-CoV-2 replication which accumulates in virally infected cells and prevents virus growth by stopping viral synthesis and energy production.. Dr Jain showed that 2-DG can function as a differential radio-chemo-modifier, which can sensitize cancer cells while protecting normal cells. It enhances cellular damage and cell death by inhibiting repair and recovery.”

After Just 1 Hour of Administring Dose ...

Effect of '2-deoxy-D-glucose' of DRDO video of CHL Hospital, Indore.

Great work by our Scientists👍🇮🇳🙏pic.twitter.com/UKVTHhyuaD

— Megh Updates 🚨 (@MeghUpdates) May 24, 2021

Quick notes: Fishing fleet | Desi 5G...

• China's fishing fleet: New evidence has emerged that China’s state-owned fishing fleet may be a front for covert intelligence operations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. The investigation revealed that numerous "fishermen" are actually militiamen responsible for guarding China’s outposts.



• Shoddy oxygen concentrators flood Indian market: Relaxed govt rules allowed consumers to import China-made oxygen concentrators for personal use through e-commerce portals. “If the devices are run for a period of time, the concentration of oxygen suffers a substantial dip”. Buyers are finding this out the hard way.



• Can IBM rescue Intel? IBM already licenses its transistor designs to GlobalFoundries and Samsung, so Intel is joining a team of TSMC competitors to pool research and share the huge cost of developing ever-smaller transistors.. Intel could leap directly from 7nm in 2022 to IBM’s 2nm in 2024. By working together, the two American companies can put Intel back onto an equal footing with TSMC.



• Atmanirbhar America: U.S. Senators close to inking $52 Billion Semiconductor funding plan.. The $52 billion five-year plan pales in comparison to South Korea's intention to support its semiconductor industry with $450 billion over the next 10 years.



• 5Gi: The Indian 5G standard is capable of providing broadband connectivity in rural India using ultra long-range cell sites. However, if 5Gi comes into force, network gear makers as well as mobile device companies will have to make India-specific products, which will lead to an increase in costs as they will not get the advantage of global economies of scale.



• ‘Vikas gando thayo chhe’: Bangladesh beats India in per capita income.. Modi-sarkar's clueless on tech hurts India



• Raga Yaman: Nicolas Delaigue (Sitar), Bhaskar Das (Bansuri)




• Changing life in the hills with jobs: Dhiraj Dolwani is stemming the tide of migration to cities and ushering in social change in Uttarakhand in the process.



• USA betrays its friends again: “They absolutely are going to kill us.” Afghans who helped US now fear being left behind. “The Taliban is calling us and telling us, ’Your stepbrother is leaving the country soon, and we will kill all of you guys.’”



• India loses out in Iranian roulette: For years, ONGC has been working on the project and invested over $400 million in prospecting the gas field. However, when it came to commercially developing the gas find, the National Iranian Oil Company dumped ONGC. Something similar happened to developing Iran’s 620-kilometre $2 billion railroad connecting Chabahar Port to Zahedan in Afghanistan.



• The origin of COVID: Nicholas wade's article.. Video by Shekhar Gupta elucidating it.



• An Easy Way To Understand Variants:

Quick notes: Pharmacy of the world | Lathi force...

• Pharmacy of the world: India failed to enlist the vast swathe of its manufacturing capabilities - biologics factories, for instance, that could have been repurposed into vaccine production lines.
  
  After its grandstanding over its capacities to vaccinate the world, India now finds itself in a situation where it not only has to answer other nations who were promised doses, but also has to answer for the shutters-down boards at centres across the country.



• The data is there for all to see: The origins of the second wave are to be found in various parts of the Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh, in early January 2021, and not in Maharashtra a month later as is popularly assumed. It lies in the heart of the farmers’ agitation, in Chandigarh, where non-resident Indians arrived in droves from the UK, in selected districts of the Punjab and Haryana, and even in Delhi.



• Police heavy-handedness: Stop using lathi while enforcing lockdown norms, HC tells Karnataka govt

With many motorists receiving a couple of sharp thwacks of the lathi land on their buttocks, this cyclist in Udupi comes prepared with rear protection, helmet and a mask :) @IndiaToday pic.twitter.com/hoTWV7vBSm

— Nolan Pinto (@nolanentreeo) May 11, 2021




• Can Dharamsala stop PLA's Tibetan gambit? The first priority for the new Tibetan administration in Dharamsala should be to look at Tibetan recruitment in the PLA, suggests Claude Arpi.



• Yugan Yugan Hum Yogi: Pt Kumar Gandharva sings Kabir




• Cairn Energy wants to attach PSB assets abroad: Given that deposits with overseas branches is public money and not a sovereign asset, attaching funds in such accounts is beyond the realm of rights of the said company.



• Discovered in India: 2-DG anti-Covid-19 drug originated at DRDO'S Gwalior lab in 1998. The drug works by accumulating in the virus infected cells and prevents virus growth by stopping viral synthesis and energy production. . . . . . . Drug for brain tumour patients, repurposed for Covid.



• Silicon supremacy: Korea unveils $450 billion push for Global chipmaking crown

What’s the ‘bullwhip effect’ and how can we avoid crises like the global chip shortage? https://t.co/j7HAqGxb4S pic.twitter.com/JAQAErbjGT

— World Economic Forum (@wef) May 12, 2021

Quick notes: Isolating India | Han duplicity...

• China pressures world to isolate India over covid: This is very different from how China demanded it should be treated when the CCP unleashed the Wuhan coronavirus upon the world. The Chinese govt, and its political and medical proxies, argued vociferously that restricting travel from China was unscientific and unnecessary, or even counter-productive.



• Han duplicity: "PLA may undertake operations this summer to achieve whatever objectives they could not achieve last May".



• Wuhan virus spreads in the air: Meat and poultry processing facilities have been sites for several Covid-19 superspreading events and workers in those industries have been especially likely to become infected.



• Intellectual capital: UK wants Indian brains. India loves to lose its smartest.”

UK is upgrading by sending back useless illegal immigrants to India. Replenishing by bringing in the best brains.
India doing the opposite: sending out the smartest and bringing back the uneducated.

— Rajiv Malhotra (@RajivMessage) May 4, 2021




• Socialism doing its thing in Biden's America: “Businesses can’t hire people because govt is paying them to not go back to work.”



• Rhodium Group: China emissions exceed all developed nations combined




• Epic Archery: Lars Andersen tries to perform tricks from Mahabharata.

Quick notes: Mocking the dead | Bulldozed heritage...

• China mocks India’s dead: “China lighting a fire versus India lighting a fire”... The now-deleted post emanated from the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs – one of CCP’s most powerful organs.




• VikAss: Heritage gets bulldozed

By uprooting the Akshayavat tree in Varanasi, the arrogant government officials in charge of the construction work for the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor managed to do what even the hostile Mughals could not pull off. pic.twitter.com/cNRvsMQbQ2

— Unroll (@unroll_media) April 30, 2021






• Taiwan bans Chinese poaching of its semiconductor talent: Taiwan tells recruiting firms to remove listings for high-tech positions based in China. To combat brain-drain.



• VinFast: Vietnam’s answer to Tesla. . . . . . . . Vietnam making rapid strides in tech even as India aims for Gold in history debates.



• The Dharwad Gharana: Hindustani music's southern home