The planned run-of-river hydro project would have generated 1,200 to 1,300 MW of electricity, reports indicate.

The project, first proposed two years ago, was still being studied, but the partners could not win the support of regional aboriginal groups

Once again, the problem with winning local/regional support. This is really becoming a billion $ problem, isn’t it?

Source

Steel giant POSCO wants to build the plant in the eastern state of Orissa, in what would be India’s largest foreign investment project since the country launched market reforms in 1991.

Three of the four-member panel cited “many serious lapses and illegalities” in assessing the plant’s environmental impact, including “serious violations” in the public hearing process with many communities being left out.

“The committee therefore strongly recommends that the Environmental Clearances… be immediately revoked,” their report said.

Source

This raises difficult questions. While the panel might indeed be correct in its intentions, what signals do such decisions send about investing in India (or for that matter, any other country that does a similar act)? It should be noted that POSCO signed an MoU for the plant way back in 2005 and I am sure tens of millions of $ would have been spent by the company so far in making progress. I am not supporting the company, perhaps it can afford such costs, and perhaps it is all good for the environment and the people if the plant were not put up, but the investment questions there will many more questions asked by other foreign investors in India investing in similar sectors.

The Partnership, a coalition of governments, non-profits, companies and international organisations, said 47 billion dollars are needed to save five million lives between now and 2015, including two million women and children.

Each year, nine million people contract TB, which hits hardest in the developing world. Most cases occur in Asia (55 percent) and Africa (30 percent), with India and China alone accounting for 35 percent of all cases, the Stop TB Partnership said.

Close to two million people die of the contagious lung infection each year — most from treatable cases, the Partnership said in its 2011-2015 “Global Plan to Stop TB”.

How indeed do we stop this deadly disease from killing many more millions?

Article source

The article goes on to say that doing this (developing an application that will catch fire on social networks) is not easy as it sounds. Interesting read, full article here

The two questions raised deserve some scrutiny:

1. How can you turn the Web’s social-network users into consumers?
2. And how can you turn idle browsing into a flourishing bottom line?

In a small way, folks like me benefit from social network consumers…mainly by getting good web traffic to flow to our sites…but wowing such a massive networking with killer apps and making those fickle-minded folks to take your application (ever for free) is a completely different story. How does one do that? And how can one indeed profit from the millions of eyeballs and fingertips spent on idle browsing?

Interesting, significant questions

The Merchant Royal limped through the sea on Sept. 23, 1641, weighed down by tons of gold, silver and jewels, and sank. The ship, though privately owned by Britons, carried a load of treasure fresh from Spain’s American mines.

In May 2007, Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration released footage of gold and silver coins it says came from a shipwreck. The company has been tight-lipped about the ship’s identity…but British shipwreck historian Richard Larn, who maintains the seven-volume, nearly 50, 000-entry Lloyd’s Shipwreck Index of the British Isles, said he’s almost certain Odyssey has found the Royal.

With this recovery will come important questions. Who owns treasure? Spain, the country that mined the gold and silver? England, the country whose ship transported it? The descendants of the slaves who dug it out of mines? The captain of the ship? Or is it the company that found it – Odyssey?

These questions might be considered academic, until one realises that the value of the treasure could be over half a billion, and who knows, perhaps even much more than than given the uncertain values that people place on antique and vintage treasures.

That’s a billion dollar question for you today!

Read the full report from the St Petersburg Times

While enormous amounts of money are spent on making a site look good and one more tranche of enormous sum of money on tech gizmos on the site, how much money is spent on monitoring and ensuring that your web site performs well at a basic level?

That is, how much money do we spend on:

1. Monitoring what % of time the web site is up & running
2. How fast is the pipe leading to your web site / server and hence the download time for a user?
3. Do you lose traffic at times because bandwidth allocated to you by your service has been exceeded?

Put another way, how much money and efforts are we spending to ensure that the site we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on, is up & running?

A simple, but very important, question indeed!

By staff reporter, 3/14/2007

A superoxide dismutase (SOD) supplement, GliSODin, in combination with diet and lifestyle changes can significantly reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, French researchers have reported.

SOD has a different mode of action to vitamins. First discovered in 1968, it is the first antioxidant mobilized by the cell for defence. It is thought to be more powerful than antioxidant vitamins as it activates the body’s productions of its own antioxidants, including catalase and glutathione peroxidase.

Read the full news report from here @ Nutra Ingredients USA

26th March 2007, By Victoria Harrison

Isis Pharmaceuticals has said new results from its monotherapy phase II clinical trial of cholesterol drug showed improvements in LDL cholesterol.

Patients with high cholesterol were treated for ten weeks with 400 mg/week of the drug ISIS 301012. In this study, increasing the dose of ISIS 301012 to 400 mg/week was well tolerated and further reduced atherogenic lipids, with median improvements in LDL-cholesterol of 70%.

Read the full report here @ Pharmaceutical Business Review Online

Mar 26, 2007

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Patients with a specific gene variation for hereditary hemochromatosis, an autosomal recessive disease associated with increased iron accumulation, have more than double the risk of stroke, new research suggests.

Hemochromatosis affects how the body metabolizes iron, which results an iron build-up in the liver. Without treatment, the condition causes liver enlargement that can lead to cirrhosis or liver cancer. The disease can also cause diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and other serious conditions.

Read the full report here @ Reuters, UK