1 Game-changer case for software biz (San Francisco Chronicle) The legal showdown between Silicon Valley giants Oracle and Google could test the very boundaries of copyright protections for software and rewrite the rules for much of the industry. In a case unfolding in San Francisco District Court, Oracle alleges that Google violated its intellectual property in developing the popular Android smart phone. Specifically, it claims the search company used 37 "application programming interface packages," or APIs, for the Java programming language without paying licensing fees.
"Should Oracle be able to convince the court (that the APIs) are fully protected by copyright and were substantially copied by Google, that could potentially turn the industry on its head," said Mark Webbink, executive director of the Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School, in an e-mail interview. "If Oracle succeeds, it could potentially invite numerous other copyright infringement suits in the software industry with non-productive results." Google acknowledges that the applications created with a programming language can be copyrighted. But it insists that programming languages and API, can't be copyrighted any more than the English language can.
2 Corpses line Sudans’ border (San Francisco Chronicle) The road to Heglig, an oil town that South Sudan and Sudan are fighting over, is lined with discarded furniture, destroyed buses and tanks, and clusters of dead Sudanese soldiers. South Sudan's army, known as the SPLA, moved north into Heglig earlier this month, sparking the bloodiest fighting since South Sudan broke off from Sudan in July and became the world's newest nation. The area around Heglig produces about half of Sudan's oil, but the south lays claim to it and says its ownership is in dispute.
3 Solar industry shares dive 75% (San Francisco Chronicle) There has been a 75% year-over-year decline in the Bloomberg Large Solar Index, which tracks 17 of the biggest solar-energy companies. The plunge shows how much the industry slump has hurt large solar-equipment manufacturers, not just upstarts. First Solar - the top maker of thin-film panels (a type of solar collector) - announced Tuesday that it would cut 30% of its workforce. The problem: Solar subsidies are disappearing, and companies face low-cost competition from China. Most of the 2,000 jobs to be eliminated will be in Germany and in Malaysia, where it's idling four production lines. The company will pay $245 million to $370 million in severance and related costs.
4 Clean tech on the brink (The New York Times) Clean energy technology has grown robustly and come down in price in recent years, driven by hefty government stimulus spending, expectations of future regulation and substantial private investment. But that technology is going to fall off a cliff unless government steps in quickly to revitalize the solar, wind, nuclear, battery and clean vehicle sectors with new spending and federal policy, according to a new study from three research groups.The report says renewable energy generation doubled from 2006 to 2011, the first new nuclear plants in decades are under construction, and prices for solar, wind and other clean energy technologies have fallen while employment in those sectors has risen by 70,000 jobs even during a deep recession. Those gains could all be lost unless the federal government at least temporarily renews and pays for a variety of subsidies and production credits that have supported those industries as they strive to compete with fossil-fuel based energy sources, the report states.
5 Credit-crunch warning from IMF (The Guardian) Europe's banks risk triggering a major credit crunch if they all take drastic action to repair their balance sheets at the same time, the International Monetary Fund has said. The IMF said it expected 58 of the biggest banks in the European Union to slim down by $2.6bn by the end of 2013, or almost 7% of their assets. While 75% of the deleveraging would be as a result of asset sales, credit would also be harder to obtain. In the event governments stalled on reforms or were overwhelmed by fresh shocks to the system, the Global Financial Stability Review warned of a much more severe credit crunch that would see balance sheets reduced by almost $4 trillion and credit supply cut by 4.4%.
6 India test-launches intercontinental missile (BBC) India has successfully launched a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile able to carry a nuclear warhead. The locally-developed Agni-V missile has a range of more than 5,000km, within range of targets in China. Analysts say the Agni (meaning "fire" in Hindi and Sanskrit) missile family is to be the cornerstone of India's missile-based nuclear deterrent. The missiles are among the country's most sophisticated weapons. In 2010, India successfully test-fired Agni-II, an intermediate-range ballistic missile with a range of more than 2,000km. Only China, Russia, France, the US and UK have such long-range missiles. Israel is thought to possess them.
7 Why is it always Mr Khan? (Bikram Vohra in Khaleej Times) By their very nature airports are the most racist and prejudiced places in the world. Let us take the case of Indian film actor Shah Rukh Khan who is in the fortunate position of having the Indian government rush to his rescue. Thousands of other Indians, highly accomplished, unsurprisingly stand in mute submission for much longer in immigration queues. It is one of the ironies of the Indian subcontinent that a film star can provoke outrage and bring the Foreign Minister to speak out, while thousands of hardworking Indians in the largest diaspora in the world placed in such a situation would be hard-placed to get through to their embassy.
Nothing really happened to Mr Khan, with due respect. In the word of Omar Abdullah, it was not such a big deal. No one says it should have happened nor does anyone endorse it, but this is the reality of the world we live in. Africans going to Europe know they will be placed in another line. Muslims going to the US gear themselves for the inevitable double check. Indians do it to Pakistanis and Pakistanis return the compliment.
Mr Khan says he faces the sword because his name is Khan. It is also possible that he has the same name as someone on the wanted list. Maybe they are star struck and keep him there deliberately. The next time he travels he should pre-check his status or call on the US embassy and ask why he is being so profiled. In that world we speak of, where pilots respond to crew sixth senses and offload a passenger because a steward feels he has a beard or is behaving oddly or is dressed funny or speaks some odd language this was not such a major issue.
8 Peace on sale (Jawed Naqvi in Dawn) I’ve searched the broad history of capitalism, and looked up the evolution of global trade. Nowhere could I find a single clue to the mantra for peace between warring nations as flaunted by Messrs Asif Zardari and Manmohan Singh. Both want us to believe that their business elites are best equipped to normalise the dodgy relations between India and Pakistan. If anything, officially sponsored trade — as opposed to the days of the good old Kabuliwallah — has been a source of conflict everywhere. Everywhere. Look it in the eye. The worst-case scenario for a global conflict today exists between the world’s two largest trading partners — China and the US.
The East India Company was about trade, we know. Was it also about peace? Before Saudi Arabia prescribed the death penalty for carrying cannabis (which you can still smoke freely in Amsterdam), colonial Britain and its Indian compradors were pumping opium into China in the name of free trade. The Opium Wars, the Boston Tea Party in America were all aspects of trade for profit with official imprimatur. I hear India, a net importer of oil, will sell petroleum products to Pakistan. The last time there was an oil shock India had to surrender a portion of its gold reserves to stave off defaulting on international loans. The move thrust Dr Manmohan Singh at the centre-stage of Indian politics and the IMF as the country’s economic shepherd.
Two issues need to be understood in their context by the common people in India and Pakistan. The business community anywhere is not known for its sensitivity towards matters of peace. It can and often does make more profit out of war and prevailing tensions between states. I am not revealing a secret in asserting that businessmen by the very nature of their pursuit are prone to shore up right-wing politics. Trade was one of the eight or nine issues between India and Pakistan in their composite dialogue. It would be self-defeating to saddle it with the responsibility of heralding peace. That was never its strength, and it can’t be today.
9 Truly a (gas) pipe dream (Dawn) This is odd, if not outright bizarre. Pakistan, Afghanistan and India talking about the pricing formula of a unit of Turkmen gas to be conveyed by a pipeline across war-torn Afghanistan. Afghanistan will charge Pakistan and India for hosting the pipeline across its mountainous mass, while Islamabad will in turn ask New Delhi to pay it a like amount. Assuming that the three sides will develop a consensus, some pertinent questions deserve to be asked: is peace around the corner in Afghanistan? Will gas start flowing through the TAPI pipeline by December 2016 as hoped for? If all this is in the realm of uncertainty, doesn’t common sense suggest opting for the relatively hassle-free and terrain-wise easy Iran pipeline?
10 Who’s returning to India and why (The Wall Street Journal) Finally, here’s a good news story about India in the international media. It seems that for at least one group of people, India is still the Promised Land. A recent front page article in The New York Times documented the migration of second generation Americans back to their ancestral countries, including India, China, Brazil and Russia. India’s faltering growth may be disappointing, but it’s still much more rapid than the continued stagnation of the US economy.
Labor economists call this kind of migration the “reverse brain drain.” Ironically, the migrants are often the kids or sometimes grandkids of the original “brain drain,” skilled workers and professionals who left India and other developing countries in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s to seek opportunities in the booming US economy. In fact, a more accurate term for the highly mobile skilled workers of today, favored by labor economists, is “brain circulation.” If things don’t work out in India, they might return to the US or try their luck somewhere else. This development is surely good, and a far cry from the days of the brain drain.
There are indeed opportunities in India, but it’s hardly a cake-walk: you need the right package of connections to make them succeed. And, like the rest of us, they need reserves of patience and a good dose of luck. Genuine “prospectors,” with a few bucks and a dream, but without an established network of one kind or another, are less likely to hack it in India. It doesn’t make for a feel-good first page story, but that’s the hard reality of making it here.
11 Start with the last girl (Jennifer & Peter Buffett in The Economic Times) Imagine if someone gave you $1 billion with one condition: use the money to create positive change in the world. What would you do? That’s exactly what happened to us in 2006, when we received a fax that changed our lives. Peter’s father, Warren Buffett, had decided to award our small foundation with a pledge valued at approximately $1 billion with that one, simple, enormous requirement. As we determined where to focus our giving, we were reminded of Warren’s own investment philosophy: invest in companies undervalued in the marketplace but that have great potential for growth.
Adolescent girls — who are profoundly undervalued but have enormous potential — clearly met this standard. Girls worldwide are less educated, less healthy and offered less opportunity than their male peers. But if given a chance, they will improve their own lives — and the lives of those around them. We have just travelled to India to meet such undervalued girls. We saw the realities of poor adolescent girls in Kolkata and rural Bihar. Around the world, we’ve seen what happens when we invest in girls’ dreams. When a girl gains the assets of education, good health and a supportive community before she reaches the crossroads of puberty, her life path changes. If invested in properly, girls can be leaders in building a world where everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their highest potential.
12 Killing the Indian farmer softly (TK Arun in The Economic Times) Rural India has been denied access to globalisation, penalising farmers and farm labour. India banned cotton exports on March 5 and sort of lifted the ban a week later. The price of cotton crashed and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi vented fury on the Congress for sacrificing farmers’ interest to please the textile lobby. In panic, the Congress-led central government asked the Cotton Corporation of India to procure cotton from the farmers at nearly twice the support price.
This little episode highlights one method in which India’s policymakers go about killing farmers softly: export restrictions, denying farmers access to the rising demand for food and industrial farm produce across the world. India bans export of wheat, rice, potato, onion, you name it, at the least provocation. This makes India an unreliable supplier, ruling out steady, long-term supply contracts, planned investment in producing the contracted supply, additional output and related incomes.
Why are Indian farmers so competitive in the export market, so much so that Indian policymakers have to ban exports to protect domestic supplies? Subsidy, is the short answer. India subsidises fertilisers, canal water for irrigation, diesel and power for pumping water from wells and tubewells, and, in these days of allowing work under the employment guarantee scheme to be performed on private farms, some bit of labour as well.
13 Cow belt or buffalo nation? (Harish Damodaran in Business Line. This one is my top pick for the day.) Indian farmers traditionally reared cattle for three main purposes. For draught, dung (fertiliser-cum-fuel) and milk. These three purposes made the cow a much-venerated creature not just from a religious standpoint, but even for its practical indispensability to farm and off-farm operations. As the renowned economist, Prof KN Raj put it, the cow was uniquely endowed with a simultaneous capacity as producer of consumer good (milk), intermediate good (dung), capital good (oxen for traction) and ‘mother machine' (for reproducing other cattle).
This exalted position, however, has been considerably undermined since the advent of the Green Revolution. Between 1971-72 and 2009-10, the estimated share of draught animals in total power deployed in Indian farms has fallen from 53% to below nine per cent. The latest 2011 Census results also show only 10.9% of rural households in India to be utilising dung cake as fuel for cooking. All this has, therefore, reduced the utility of cattle to largely being milk-producing machines. But cows account for less than 45% of India's milk output today. More than 55% of the milk that Indians consume now flows from the udders of buffaloes, which are neither born holy nor have holiness thrust upon them. The share of buffaloes in the overall bovine numbers has also steadily gone up since Independence.
For an indication of where farmers' rational choices are leading to, one needn't look beyond Gokul and Vrindavan – the holy sites of Lord Krishna's childhood life centred around cows, milk, butter and gopis. According to the 2007 Livestock Census, Mathura district, of which they are part, had a total cattle population of 141,326, whereas its buffalo numbers were five times higher, at 722,854. So much for the Cow Belt!
Most tormenting news items of the day:
1 A life destroyed by acid attack (Sydney Morning Herald) Fakhra Younus gave a face to the thousands of Pakistani women who are disfigured as a result of acid attacks, typically carried out by husbands who accuse their wives of dishonouring them. Younus was born to a heroin-addicted mother in Karachi's red-light district, probably in 1978. She was 18 and working as a prostitute when she met Bilal Khar, a former member of the Provincial Assembly of Punjab and son of a former Punjab governor, Ghulam Mustafa Khar.
The two married after six months, but, by her account, from the start her husband subjected her to a sustained campaign of sexual, physical and verbal abuse that lasted three years before she eventually escaped and moved back to live with her mother. But her peace did not last long. On May 14, 2000, she was asleep at home when she heard a man yelling at her. ''I jerked as he held me by my hair and opened my mouth. Because I resisted he couldn't get me to swallow. But then he threw something on me. I did not understand what had happened to me.'' She collapsed on the floor, screaming. Her hair had been burned off her head; her lips had fused together; her left ear was obliterated; she was blinded in one eye; and her breasts had melted to the bone. She could breathe only with extreme difficulty. She spent three months in hospital.
After her release from hospital, Younus found she had become a liability to her family. She and her son were taken in by Tehmina Durrani, a stepmother of Bilal's and a women's rights activist who had chronicled ''the Khars's way of treating women'' in her book My Feudal Lord. In 2001, Durrani helped Younus move to Rome where, over 11 years, she underwent 39 major operations. By the 38th operation, last year, she could move her mouth and one eye, and her face, though still badly disfigured, had regained some of its shape. By this time she had co-written a memoir, Il Volto Cancellato (The Erased Face). Fakhra Younus, who committed suicide, is survived by her son, Nauman.
2 When a school calls kids, ‘useless’(Khaleej Times) There are many ways to discipline a child for misbehaving in school, but rarely is an entire class humiliated through a demeaning punishment. This was the case at Indian High School Dubai on Tuesday, where seventh-standard students were told to walk from school wearing badges stating, “useless boy”.On Monday, the same teacher instructed the entire class to stand with their arms raised for 45 minutes. Dr Raymond H Hamden, clinical and forensic psychologist, said the actions could have long-lasting effects on the children. “Negative reinforcement is very destructive. It provides a false image and takes children into a state of no confidence, low self-esteem and causes a person to suffer low self-worth.
3 Gang rape of mentally ill teenager (Johannesburg Times) Yesterday, South Africans awoke to a brutal story: a 17-year-old with the mental ability of a five-year-old had been gang-raped by seven young men who had offered her R2 for their violent pleasure. Exacerbating her humiliation, they had video-taped the brutal attack and the images have since gone viral across the country. Police are investigating the existence of a second video of another rape of the girl. The complicity lies in the fact that the community knew this teenager, a child really, and must have known she had previously disappeared for weeks on end. She had apparently been raped several times since 2009. But no one seems to have found it necessary to report this to the authorities.
4 Man jailed for killing ‘disobedient’ wife in front of 300 (Sydney Morning Herald) A self-absorbed man who stabbed his estranged wife to death in front of 300 people because she disobeyed him will spend at least 26 years behind bars. Zialloh Abrahimzadeh, 57, was sentenced today to life in jail after pleading guilty on day 11 of his murder trial earlier this year to killing Zahra at a Persian function at the Adelaide Convention Centre in March 2010. He was a violent bully to his wife and three children at home and a respected, caring man to the migrant community in Adelaide. All three of his children testified against him, saying they and their mother were frightened of Abrahimzadeh. They said they all moved out in secret after he threatened Zahra with a knife.
5 UK woman watched as lover killed himself in Delhi (The Times of India Page 1) This bizarre deathwatch occurred across continents 11,000km apart over four months back, but few knew about it until now. A British automobile consultant slashed his throat and wrists in his rented flat in South Delhi while his girlfriend watched in horror on Skype from Reading in the UK. The man, Adrian Rowland, 53, was video-chatting with his partner, Julie Zalinski, when he suddenly slashed himself with a broken bottle. Zalinski said she had informed the British police which, in turn, alerted Delhi police via the British High Commission, but at the end of it all her partner could not be saved and she was left watching helplessly for over 10 hours as Rowland bled to death.
Delhi Police said the police had rushed to Rowland's second-floor flat with paramedics on November 27 after being alerted but they could not enter as Rowland did not open the door. The Oxford inquest was told that Indian laws, unlike British laws, prevented police from breaking into the flat. The Delhi Police version is different. It said policemen had reached the flat even before the high commission alert because a neighbour called up to say Rowland was throwing things about inside his house and something seemed wrong. A police officer had knocked on the door but Rowland told him to "go away". (The Times of India story is followed by a query, ‘Do you like this story?’!
6 UP kids tie boy to bike, drag him till he dies (The Times of India) An intermediate student in Aligarh was allegedly thrashed by his batchmates, tied to a motorcycle and then dragged on the road for more than 2km till he died. Even after the victim was unconscious, the accused kept dragging him through the streets. Witnesses said the accused stopped to check if the victim, Gaurav Sharma of Sadamai locality in Aligarh, was still alive. They continued the barbaric act till they were sure that Gaurav was dead. The accused fled the scene. A hundred plus fellow students of Gaurav and passers-by remained mute spectators to the gory murder. Help arrived only after the accused had left the teenager on the road and sped away.
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(Do keep newspapers away from children, and also keep a tab on whether they are browsing news websites.)
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