India-New Zealand FTA to come into effect on Oct. 20

The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between India and New Zealand that was ratified on Monday and comes into effect on October 20 aims at doubling bilateral trade to ₹35,000 crore in the "next four to five years", according to Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal.

A Malacca-Singapore model for resolving Hormuz

As the siege warfare continues in the Strait of Hormuz and the world suffers, it may be instructive to revisit the Straits of Malacca and Singapore.

The Strait of Malacca runs for some 800 kilometres between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, connecting the Andaman Sea to the Strait of Singapore, while the Strait of Singapore, some 105 km long, forms its eastern continuation and connects the Malacca Strait to the South China Sea.

Unsafe space

Deployment of weapons calls for multilateral governance in space

AIthough the U.S. military doctrine was openly considering offensive and defensive space control by 2025, the admission on September 14 by U.S. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, and confirmed by Space Force chief Gen. Douglas Schiess, that the country has deployed "on-orbit space control weapons" to "defend against hostile adversary action" is cause for concern.

Why did the SC reject methanol rules?

• The Supreme Court struck down Maharashtra's rules requiring methanol sold to non-drug manufacturers to be denatured with colourant and bitterant, finding them disproportionate and unconstitutional under Articles 14 and 19(1)(g)

• It held that the rules did not have a reasonable and proximate nexus with preventing methanol misuse in illicit liquor, while imposing continuing burdens on legitimate industries

How will Gaganyaan's crew module deploy its parachutes?

The story so far:

Any spacecraft entering the earth's atmosphere will rely primarily on atmospheric drag to lose a significant fraction of its velocity. To gently touch down on land or in the sea, additional decelerating systems like parachutes have to be activated.

The parachute used for crewed space vehicles demands extraordinary engineering with multi-staging, redundancy, high-performance materials and high-pressure packing to reduce storage space.

India to attend session on UN-based multilateralism

India will join a number of countries committed to supporting United Nations (UN)-based multilateralism, away from "Superpower" politics, as External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar was set to attend the "Partners for Mul-tilateralism" (P4M) meeting at the United Nations.

Accused entitled to release if grounds of arrest not given: SC

The Supreme Court in a judgment on Monday held that an arrested person kept in the dark about the grounds of arrest and without access to a lawyer was entitled to immediate release.

New high-speed corridors to get one-metre high wall to prevent cattle menace

The Centre has prescribed a one-metre high wall along the outer edge of high-speed corridors to prevent "unauthorised ac-cess and entry of stray cattle" in its first-ever guidelines that standardise design and development of such National Highways.

This is the first time the National Highways Author-ity of India (NHAI) has prescribed standardised technical and safety provisions for high-speed corridors.

'Nearly 40% of coal power plants critically low on fuel'

Nearly 40% of India's coal-fired power plants are operating with critically low fuel stocks due to a surge in power demand amid hotter-than-usual weather linked to El Niño, govern-ment data showed on Monday.

Why scientists are rethinking the chemical 'arms race' against fungi

Global warming

Dermatophytes are molds: fungi that grow in long strands. The other common category of fungi is yeast, which are single, oval-shaped cells. Among the yeasts, Candida auris is rapidly emerging as a multidrug resistant pathogen in ICU facilities. It enters the blood stream and causes severe infections, most of which are untreatable by the available antifungals. According to Professor Rudramurthy, those infected suffer 

30%-40% mortality rate.