Hyderabad: A delegation comprising industries and trade representatives from Sweden, led by the country’s Ambassador Jan Thesleff, met Telangana’s IT and Industries minister KT Rama Rao at Dr B.R. Ambedkar Telangana State Secretariat on Wednesday.
The Minister said that Telangana is the best investment destination in India and complete support will be provided to the Swedish companies willing to invest in the State. During the course of interaction, The Minister explained to them the Telangana government’s industrial policies and a wide range of investment opportunities in the state, a press note informed.
Welcoming the Swedish companies to Telangana, the industries minister urged them to invest in technology and manufacturing sectors here.
The delegation appreciated the state government’s industry-friendly policies and made a special mention of the infrastructure created in the city in the past eight years, the press note further said.
Ambassador Jan Thesleff assured the minister that he will try to bring in more investments to Telangana. He said that they formed the investment facilitation mechanism to work with the companies willing to invest in India and that it worked with Swedish companies.
The Ambassador informed KTR that their embassy regularly researches investment opportunities in Telangana and extends support to Swedish companies.
A Japanese startup attempting the first private landing on the moon has lost communication with its spacecraft and said that it assumes the lunar mission had failed.
Ispace said that it could not establish communication with the uncrewed Hakuto-R lunar lander after its expected landing time, a frustrating end to a mission that began with a launch from the US more than four months ago.
“We have not confirmed communication with the lander,” a company official told reporters about 25 minutes after the expected landing on Wednesday.
“We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” the official said.
Officials said they would continue to try and establish contact with the spacecraft, which was carrying payloads from several countries, including a lunar rover from the United Arab Emirates.
Takeshi Hakamada, the Ispace founder and CEO, said after the apparent failed landing that the company had acquired data from the spacecraft all the way up to the planned landing and would be examining that for signs of what happened.
The lander, standing just over 2 metres (6.5 feet) tall and weighing 340 kg, has been in lunar orbit since last month. Its descent and landing was fully automated and it was supposed to reestablish communication as soon as it touched down.
So far only the US, Russia and China have managed to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface, all through government-sponsored programmes.
In April 2019, Israeli organisation SpaceIL watched its lander crash into the moon’s surface.
India also attempted to land a spacecraft on the moon in 2019, but it crashed.
Two US companies, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, are scheduled to attempt moon landings later this year. “We congratulate the ispace inc team on accomplishing a significant number of milestones on their way to today’s landing attempt,” Astrobotic said in a tweet.
“We hope everyone recognises – today is not the day to shy away from pursuing the lunar frontier, but a chance to learn from adversity and push forward.”
Ispace, which listed its shares on the Tokyo stock exchange growth market earlier this month, was already planning its next mission before the failure of Hakuto-R.
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The spacecraft, whose name references the moon-dwelling white rabbit in Japanese folklore, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 11 December, on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets.
The lander carried several lunar rovers, including a round, baseball-sized robot jointly developed by Japan’s space agency and toy manufacturer Takara Tomy, the creator of the Transformer toys.
It also had the 10kg chair-sized Rashid rover developed by the United Arab Emirates, and an experimental imaging system from Canadensys Aerospace.
With just 200 employees, ispace has said it “aims to extend the sphere of human life into space and create a sustainable world by providing high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the moon”.
Hakamada touted the mission as laying “the groundwork for unleashing the moon’s potential and transforming it into a robust and vibrant economic system”.
The firm believes the moon will support a population of 1,000 people by 2040, with 10,000 more visiting each year.
It plans a second mission, tentatively scheduled for next year, involving both a lunar landing and the deployment of its own rover.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Pesticides banned in the EU because of their links to human health risks are being exported and used on farms in Brazil supplying Nestlé, an investigation has revealed.
Europe is home to some of the world’s biggest and most profitable chemical companies, including the Swiss-based Syngenta and the German multinationals BASF and Bayer.
But a number of the pesticides and fungicides they produce have been banned by European health officials after they were linked to cancer, reproductive problems and neurodegenerative diseases.
Despite the ban, millions of pounds worth of the products are still being exported to Brazil, where they are used on farms that supply the international sugar market, according to a new investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Repórter Brasil.
Documents from the Brazilian agriculture ministry obtained through a freedom of information request reveal that a fungicide made by BASF and based on epoxiconazole, a chemical banned in the EU, was sprayed over two sugar plantations that supply Nestlé.
One of the farms using this banned fungicide is part of the giant Brazilian sugar corporation Copersucar, which sold €1bn (£880m) of sugar to Europe in 2020.
In São Paulo state, Usina Atena, a Brazilian sugar plantation, is under investigation after a complaint from a neighbouring resident about the health impacts from the spraying of chemicals on the farm.
Justice ministry officials in São Paulo found the farm had the Syngenta fungicide Priori Xtra. This contains the active substance cyproconazole, which is banned for use in the EU.
They also found the insecticide Regent 800WG, produced by BASF, and Certero, made by Bayer, which include the active ingredients fipronil and triflumuron. Both substances are banned in the EU.
The ECHA has classed epoxiconazole as a suspected carcinogen, and similar concerns were highlighted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
Sugar at a Copersucar warehouse in Santos, Brazil. The company sold €1bn of sugar to Europe in 2020. Photograph: Patricia Monteiro/Bloomberg/Getty
Marcos Orellana, UN special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, called the continued export of the chemicals by EU-based companies an “abhorrent practice” and urged the EU to implement a ban.
CropLife International, which represents agri-chemical companies including BASF, Bayer and Syngenta, said the active ingredients in the pesticides had “valid use registrations in several OECD countries”.
It said in a statement: “A non-registration or deregistration in the European Union does not automatically mean a product cannot be used in another country. Pesticides are not automatically ‘more hazardous’ or ‘less necessary’ because they are not authorised in Europe.”
Bayer and BASF maintain that all their products are safe for humans and the environment.
Copersucar said it complied with Brazilian and international legislation, exporting its products within safety standards in the regions where it operates.
A spokesperson for Nestlé said all its suppliers must meet Nestlé’s responsible sourcing standard, including in relation to good agricultural practices. “We continue to closely follow regulatory developments everywhere we operate to ensure full compliance for all our products. Nestlé is not involved in campaigning against an export ban on pesticides and active ingredients banned in the EU.”
Officials at DG Sante, the EU body responsible for regulating pesticides, said the export of banned pesticides would be phased out in line with the chemicals strategy for sustainability, although no timetable had been set for implementation.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Abu Dhabi: More than 10,500 United Arab Emirates (UAE) citizens have joined the private sector in the first three months of 2023.
The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation announced an 11 percent increase in the number of UAE citizens joining the workforce compared to the first quarter of 2022.
The latest additions bring the total number of Emirati employees in the private sector to more than 66,000 in more than 16,000 companies.
“The UAE works on economic development through public-private partnerships and is keen to implement targeted measures to enhance the role of Emiratis in the job market, particularly in the private sector,” MoHRE said in a statement.
“We are expecting a stronger rhythm of employing Emiratis in the next two months as the deadline for achieving the 1 percent semi-annual Emiratization target for private sector companies with 50 employees or more will be June 30, 2023,” it added.
معالي د.عبدالرحمن العور وزير الموارد البشرية والتوطين : 10,501 عدد المواطنين المنضمين للقطاع الخاص منذ بداية العام الجاري 2023 pic.twitter.com/Mr61YBgpKd
The five sectors that showed growth were construction— 14 percent, commerce and repair services— 13 percent, manufacturing— 10 percent, business— 10 percent and financial brokerage— 4 percent.
By January 1, 2023, companies with more than 50 employees must have ensured that at least 2 percent of their employees are UAE nationals as part of a government campaign to encourage more nationals to enter this sector.
Any employer who fails to reach the target will have to pay a fine of up to Dirhams 73,446 (Rs 16,41,709) for each Emirati worker who fails to hire him.
Visakhapatnam: As many as 29 companies, including seven international players, have submitted bids for supply of raw materials and providing working capital to Visakhapatnam Steel Plant
The deadline for filing of Expression of Interest (EoI) invited by the Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd (RINL), the corporate entity of Visakhapatnam Steel Plant (VSP), ended Thursday.
The Telangana government, which had sent a team of Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) last week to VSP to study the feasibility of filing EoI, stayed away from the process.
Sources in the VSP said both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments showed no interest in filing bids for the EoI.
Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao had sent a team of SCCL officials to the VSP to study the feasibility and the move had triggered curiosity in political circles.
While employees of the VSP, who have been protesting against the Centre’s decision to privatise the public sector undertaking, had welcomed the move, Andhra Pradesh’s ruling party YSR Congress had criticised the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) government of adopting double standards on the issue.
Andhra Pradesh Industry Minister Gudivada Amarnath had slammed BRS for opposing the privatisation of VSP and at the same time, planning to participate in the bidding.
Parties opposing privatisation of the VSP had also demanded that the YSRCP government of Andhra Pradesh to participate in the bidding to save the PSU.
As per the earlier schedule, the deadline for submitting bids for EoI was to end on April 15 but the RINL extended the last date by five days.
The RINL had invited EoI for supply of raw materials and (or) funding of working capital against the supply of finished steel products
Meanwhile, former CBI joint director V.V. Lakshmi Narayana, who has submitted a bid, asked the VSP management to clarify if they accept public donations to tide over the working capital crunch which led to the issuance of EoI.
The retired IPS officer submitted a letter to Chairman and Managing Director of VSP, informing him that he wished to request people to donate funds required for the working capital of the RINL in the form of public donations credited directly to the RINL bank account. He mentioned in the letter that recently people have contributed in the form of donations for the construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya.
“It was stated during discussions that to keep the plant running at full capacity of 7.3 MTPA an estimated amount of Rs 850 crore is required per month for a period of 4 months,” Lakshmi Narayana wrote.
Addressing a press conference along with Lakshmi Narayana on Wednesday, Praja Shanti Party President and evangelist K. A. Paul had said that he was ready to purchase the steel plant at five times more than the quoted price.
He said he was also fighting a legal battle against the privatisation of the VSP.
New York: Amid massive ongoing layoffs in the tech sector, the top 30 H-1B visa employers hired 34,000 new workers in 2022 and laid off at least 85,000 workers in 2022 and early 2023, an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analysis found.
According to EPI researchers, tech and outsourcing companies are exploiting the highly-skilled H-1B visa program, created to fill labor shortages in professional fields, by laying-off a bevy of workers employed in firms like Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.
“Most employers hire H-1B workers because they can be underpaid and are de facto indentured to the employer,” the EPI research said.
Also, 13 of the top 30 H-1B visa employers were outsourcing firms that underpay migrant workers and offshore US jobs to countries where labor costs are much lower.
“Its implementation has been bungled by the US Departments of Labor and Homeland Security,” the analysis said, adding that since employers aren’t required to test the US labor market to see if any workers are available before hiring an H-1B worker or pay their H-1B workers a fair wage, employers have exploited the program.
ECI said, in 2022, 48,000 employers registered with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in hopes of hiring at least one H-1B worker, and nearly 30,000 employers ultimately hired at least one new H-1B worker.
Citing an example, the ECI research said Amazon was at the top of the list in terms of both new H-1B workers and layoffs. It hired 6,400 new H-1B workers in 2022, and hired the most new H-1B workers in 2021 as well, when it hired nearly 6,200 workers. The tech giant has either recently laid off or plans to lay off 27,150 of its employees — more than twice the number of H-1B workers it hired in 2021 and 2022 combined.
Google and Meta, both long-time top H-1B employers, together hired over 3,100 new H-1B workers last year.The duo laid off 33,000 employees, almost 11 times the number of new H-1B workers they hired in 2022.
The H-1B program is the largest US temporary work visa program, with a total of approximately 600,000 workers employed by 50,000 employers.
Most of these workers are employed in occupations like computer systems analysis and software development.
Visas for new workers are capped at 85,000 per year, but many employers are exempt from that annual cap, including universities and their affiliated nonprofit entities, nonprofit research organizations, and government research organizations.
The study urged President Joe Biden to “implement regulations and policy guidance to prevent misuse of the program, stop the exploitation of college-educated migrant workers, and ensure the program is consistent with congressional intent”.
San Francisco: Microsoft will pay $3 million in penalty in the US for selling software to sanctioned companies in Russia, Cuba, Iran and Syria from 2012 to 2019.
The majority of the apparent violations involved blocked Russian entities or persons located in the Crimea region of Ukraine, and occurred as a result of the Microsoft Entities’ failure to identify and prevent the use of its products by prohibited parties, according to the US Department of the Treasury.
“The settlement amount reflects Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) determination that the conduct of the Microsoft Entities was non-egregious and voluntarily self-disclosed, and further reflects the significant remedial measures Microsoft undertook upon discovery of the apparent violations,” it said in a statement.
According to an enforcement notice from OFAC, Microsoft, Microsoft Ireland, and Microsoft Russia failed to oversee who was buying the company’s software and services through third-party partners.
Between July 2012 and April 2019, the Microsoft Entities engaged in 1,339 apparent violations of multiple OFAC sanctions programmes when they sold software licenses, activated software licenses, and/or provided related services from servers and systems located in the US and Ireland to SDNs, blocked persons, and other end users located in Cuba, Iran, Syria, Russia, and the Crimea region of Ukraine.
“The causes of these apparent violations included the lack of complete or accurate information on the identities of the end customers for Microsoft’s products,” said the Treasury.
The total value of these sales and related services was $12,105,189.79.
Microsoft Russia employees may have also intentionally tried to defeat the company’s due diligence efforts, according to the US agency.
A Microsoft spokesperson said that “Microsoft takes export control and sanctions compliance very seriously, which is why after learning of the screening failures and infractions of a few employees, we voluntarily disclosed them to the appropriate authorities”.
New Delhi: Internet firms like Google, Facebook and Twitter may lose protection under safe harbour if they fail to remove content identified by the government-notified fact-checker as false or misleading information, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Thursday.
He said that fact-checkers are a reference point to fight against misinformation and rejected arguments that it will adversely impact “free speech”.
“If you want section 79 safe harbour protection as an intermediary then you have some obligation. The obligation is that you have to be proactive on misinformation.
“If you choose to have a disagreement with the fact checker, you can continue to have that on your platform but then the person who has been aggrieved by that disinformation and you will have a legitimate dispute in the court … section 79 was a safe harbour. That will get removed,” he said.
Internet platforms and social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and internet service providers etc fall within the ambit of an intermediary.
The safe harbour clause protects intermediaries from legal action on them for any objectionable content posted online by their users.
The IT ministry will notify an entity that will flag false information posted online pertaining to the government, Chandrasekhar said.
While releasing guidelines under the IT rules 2021, the minister said that the work on fact check is still in progress.
“Government has decided to notify an entity through Meity and that organisation then would be the fact checker for all aspects of content online and only those content that are related to the government,” Chandrasekhar said.
Chandrasekhar said “Dos and Don’ts” around fact-checking will be shared before it is notified.
“We will certainly have an outliner on what the organisation will look like. Whether it will be PIB fact check and what will be the dos and don’ts. We will certainly have that shared as we notify,” the minister said.
He said that PIB needs to be notified to be a fact checker under the IT rules.
“Odds are that it will be a PIB fact check unit that will be notified. The reason we have not said PIB fact check explicitly under the rule is that it has not been notified under the IT rule,” Chandrasekhar said.
The minister said intermediaries have asked the government to notify a fact checker on whom they can rely for their due diligence around false information.
“We will notify fact-checkers under Meity to essentially help intermediaries decide what is misinformation or not. If they are able to do it on their own, fine. If they need help with government information, there will be a fact checker,” Chandrasekhar said.
The minister said that intermediaries can continue to contest content flagged by the notified fact check entity but they may lose safe harbour protection under the IT Act.
The government as part of the amendment in the IT Rules 2021 has mentioned that “in respect of any business of the Central Government, is identified as fake or false or misleading by such a fact check unit of the Central Government as the Ministry may, by notification published in the Official Gazette”.
New Delhi: In a major crackdown against the manufacture of substandard drugs, central and state regulators conducted joint inspections at 76 pharma companies and cancelled the licences of 18 of them for producing spurious and adulterated drugs, official sources said on Tuesday.
The inspections were carried out across 20 states and Union territories in the past 15 days, they said. The names of the companies are not yet known.
An official source said that the action has been taken against 76 companies in the first phase of a special drive against the manufacture of spurious drugs.
“Licences of 18 pharma companies have been cancelled for manufacturing spurious and adulterated drugs and for violating GMP (good manufacturing practice)…. Besides, 26 firms have been given show-cause notices and the product permission of three firms have been also cancelled,” the source said.
As part of the special drive, the regulators have identified 203 firms. A majority of the companies are from Himachal Pradesh (70), followed by Uttarakhand (45) and Madhya Pradesh (23), sources said.
More such inspections will follow in the coming days, they said.
Recently, questions have been raised over the quality of drugs manufactured by India-based companies. In February, the Tamil Nadu-based Global Pharma Healthcare recalled its entire lot of eye drop allegedly linked to vision loss in the US.
Before that, India-made cough syrups were allegedly linked to children deaths in the Gambia and Uzbekistan last year.
Gandhinagar: The Gujarat government has paid Rs 16,900 crore to Adani Power and Tata Power for purchasing electricity during the last two years, the state Assembly was informed on Monday.
As per the data tabled by Energy Minister Kanubhai Desai during Question Hour, the state government paid Rs 8,160 crore to Adani Power Mundra Ltd while Rs 8,784 was paid to Coastal Gujarat Power Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Power, in 2021 and 2022.
While responding to a set of questions raised by Congress MLAs about the purchase of electricity from these private players, Desai said the state government paid Rs 2,760 crore to Adani Power in 2021 to buy 5,589 million units while Rs 5,400 crore was paid to the firm in 2022 for nearly 6,000 million units.
In 2021, the state government paid Rs 2,751 crore to Tata Power to buy 7,315 million units, while the cost came to Rs 6,033 crore for 10,446 million units in 2022.
The data suggested per unit cost of Rs 2.83 paid to Adani in January 2021 went up to Rs 8.83 per unit in December 2022 (provisional). Similarly, Tata Power charged Rs 4.92 per unit from the government in 2022 against Rs 1.80 in January 2021.
Desai said the per unit cost of electricity went up after 2018 due to “exponential rise” in the price of imported coal, which had forced such power generators to shut their plants in Gujarat.
To ensure people of Gujarat get uninterrupted power, the state government had signed new supplementary agreements with Adani to pay as per the actual cost of fuel, said Desai.
Again in 2021, when gas and imported coal prices saw significant rise, the state government, to ensure uninterrupted power supply, bought electricity from these firms under “special temporary arrangement” as approved by the Centre and state government, Desai said in the Assembly.
