News Roundup - 20 November 2014

1. First Amma Pharmacy opened at Tiruchi with the aim of selling medicines and drugs at a discount.
2. The 2002 post-Godhra riots were “purely communal” in nature and erupted specifically as a reaction to the Sabarmati train burning incident. The Gujarat government and the police took all necessary steps to control the incidents, Justice (retd.) G.T. Nanavati, Chairman of the Nanavati Commission of Inquiry.
3. Intelligence agencies in Bangladesh and India have exchanged lists of suspected fugitives believed to be hiding in each other’s countries to evade trials.
4. Indian Space Research Organisation won the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2014.
5. Medileaks, a website that will allow stakeholders to register complaints, point out irregularities in healthcare and generate information about malpractices in the medical care sector, was launched in Delhi. The website, inspired by Wikileaks, will allow whistleblowers to post information anonymously. It will be vetted by a team of volunteers before being shared on the portal, advised the website’s founders Sunil Nandraj and Alam Singh. The founders asserted that the aim was to offer useful information to patients, care-givers, journalists, researchers and policy-makers to help them make informed choices.
6. The collaboration for the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider discovered two new subatomic particles belonging to the baryon family. A baryon is a composite subatomic particle made up of three quarks. The particles were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before.  A related particle was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012. Like the well-known protons that the LHC accelerates, the new particles are baryons made from three quarks bound together by the strong force. The types of quarks are different, though: the new particles both contain one beauty (b), one strange (s), and one down (d) quark, CERN said in a statement. Thanks to the heavyweight b quarks, they are more than six times as massive as the proton. But the particles are more than just the sum of their parts: their mass also depends on how they are configured. The results match up with predictions based on the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), researchers said. QCD is part of the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that describes the fundamental particles of matter, how they interact and the forces between them.
7. Modi announced slew of lines of credit and development assistance totalling $ 80 million for Fiji and a visa-on-arrival for all the 14 island countries in the Pacific region. He also announced a $ one million Special Adaptation Fund for the Pacific nations and a proposal to develop Pan Pacific Islands Project for tele-medicine and tele-education. His trip is the first by an Indian Prime Minister to Fiji in 33 years after Indira Gandhi in 1981. India and Fiji also agreed to expand their security and defence cooperation during Mr. Modi’s day-long visit to Fiji, considered as hub in the Pacific Ocean region, as Suva rolled out the red carpet with billboards “Vula Modi” (Welcome Modi) dotting various traffic intersections. 
8. Kottarapattu Chattu Kuttan, the legendary hotel doorman who served world leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Richard Nixon at the famous Galle Face Hotel here, died at 94. Mr. Kuttan, from Thrissur district in Kerala, served the hotel for 72 years. Mr. Kuttan virtually became the symbol of Sri Lanka’s booming hospitality industry as well as the Galle Face Hotel as his photograph has adorned the covers pages of many travel magazines all over the world.
9. The 45th edition of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) will open on 20^th November: Amitabh Bachchan (Chief Guest) and film directors Jeon Soo-il (South Korea), Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Iran) and Krzysztof Zanussi (Poland) are the guests of honour. Film star Rajinikanth will be bestowed the Centenary Award for Indian Film Personality of the Year at the opening ceremony to be held at Shama Prasad Mukherjee indoor stadium at Taleigao. The award was instituted last year to commemorate 100 years of Indian cinema. Actor Waheeda Rehman was the first recipient of the award. Chinese film-maker Wong Kar Wai will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award. The 11-day festival will open with The President , directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and close on November 30 with The Grandmaster by Wong Kar Wai. IFFI 2014 will screen 178 films from 79 countries.
10. A Christian has been sworn in as Governor of Indonesia’s capital for the first time in 50 years despite protests from Islamic hardliners. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, also the first ethnic Chinese person to become an Indonesian Governor, took the oath of office on Wednesday in a ceremony led by President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo. Mr. Widodo was Governor until becoming President in August. Mr. Purnama had served as his deputy. Mr. Purnama has a reputation for outspokenness and has a track record of combating graft and cutting red tape. 
11. Police found the bodies of the reigning Miss Honduras, Maria Jose Alvarado, and her sister dumped beside a river. She had planned to fly to London to compete in the Miss World contest. Honduras, a poor Central American country of eight million people, has the world’s highest homicide rate: 90.4 per 100,000 inhabitants.
12. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on Wednesday revamped the ‘Prohibition of Insider Trading’ regulations with more stringent measures, aligning its norms with international practices. The new rules, based on the Justice Sodhi Committee report, would replace the SEBI (Prohibition of Insider Trading) Regulations 1992. The definition of ‘insider’ has been made wider by including persons connected on the basis of being in any contractual, fiduciary or employment relationship that allows such person access to unpublished price sensitive information (UPSI). However, SEBI said that directors, employees and all other persons in the deeming category covered under 1992 regulations would continue to be covered. Insider will also include a person who is in possession or has access to UPSI. Now, “immediate relatives will be presumed to be connected persons, with a right to rebut the presumption.” In 1992 regulations, definition of connected person was largely position based. Further in the case of connected persons the onus of establishing, that they were not in possession of UPSI, “shall be on such connected persons.” A provision of ‘Trading Plans’ on the lines of the U.S. has been introduced for insiders with necessary safeguards. “Such a plan has to be for bonafide transactions and has to be disclosed on stock exchange platform in advance.” Amending the SEBI (Delisting of Equity Shares) Regulations, 2009, the capital market regulator said delisting would be considered successful only when the shareholding of the acquirer together with the shares tendered by public shareholders reaches 90 per cent of the total share capital of the company. It also needs to get at least 25 per cent of the number of public shareholders  — holding shares in de-materialised  mode as on the date of the board meeting which approves the delisting proposal — tender in the reverse book building process. Further, the promoter/promoter group would be prohibited from making a delisting offer if any entity belonging to the group has sold shares of the company during a period of six months prior to the date of the board meeting which approves the delisting proposal. It also said that companies, whose paid-up capital does not exceed Rs.10 crore and net worth does not exceed Rs.25 crore as on the last day of the previous financial year,  are exempted from following the reverse book building process. Timeline for completing the delisting process has been reduced from 137 calendar days (about 117 working days) to 76 working days. However, if the delisting attempt fails, the acquirer would be required to complete the mandatory open offer process under the Takeover Regulations and pay interest at 10 per cent per annum for the delayed open offer. 
13. New York Stock Exchange-listed SunEdison, a globally known developer of solar farms, has signalled its entry into the wind power business. It has taken the acquisition route to enter the wind power field. SunEdison and its 64 per cent owned publicly-traded power plant subsidiary TerraForm Power have said that they would acquire First Wind, a leading developer and operator of wind farms in the U.S. The total cost of acquisition is estimated at $2.4 billion. It comprises two components. There will be an upfront payment of $1.9 billion. And, the reminder $510 million will be in the form of ‘earn out’, that is, it will be paid if First Wind completes projects in its backlog. SunEdison’s portion of the consideration will be $1.5 billion, comprising an upfront payment and the ‘earn out’. SunEdison said it had secured $1.5 billion of non-recourse capital from six global banking institutions. SunEdison said the acquisition of First Wind would make it a leading renewable energy development company in the world.
14. The OECD has upped its 2015-16 growth projection for India to 6.6 per cent. The Paris-based think tank had pegged it at 5.7 per cent in May. The growth had remained sub-5 per cent in the last two financial years. The OECD projects it to be 5.4 per cent this financial year.
15. IBM launched its new e-mail application for businesses that integrates social media and analytics to help organisations and employees increase productivity. The new e-mail, ‘IBM Verse’, which is part of the company’s strategy to shift from hardware services to cloud computing and data analytics, is the first application to come out from the company’s $100 million investment in design innovation.
16. Online furniture and home decor marketplace Pepperfry.com is planning to raise $40-50 million in a fresh round of funding.
17. Online restaurant search and discovery firm Zomato has raised $60 million from its biggest shareholder Info Edge (India) Ltd. and Vy Capital. Existing investor Sequoia Capital also participated in the latest round, which values the firm at $660 million.
18. Chennai-based Zoho Corporation launched Zoho.in, a suite of application for the domestic businesses. In a move to attract more customers, the company will offer various software packages for free for the first 25 users in any business.
19. NTPC hit the overseas debt market with a benchmark dollar-denominated bond sale issue to raise about $500 million as a part of its $2 billion medium-term note programme. The 10-year fixed-rate unsecured bonds are being sold to global investors except resident Americans (Regulation S notes).
20. PepsiCo India has divested its four plants in the North to its bottling partner Varun Beverages, a part of RJ Corp, as part of a franchise agreement.

Credits: The Hindu, Google.