Sachin slams 43rd Test ton; completes 30,000 runs

Sachin Tendulkar completed 30,000 runs in international career and he slammed his 43rd century during the India-Sri Lanka first Test.

Sachin slammed 43rd century in his fight to save the first Test against Sri Lanka in the final day.

After completing 17,000 runs in the 50-over format of the game, the batting maestro achieved another milestone by completing 30,000 runs in his international career during the first Test.

Master Blaster Sachin became the first batsman to complete 30,000 international runs when he scored his 35th run in the second innings against Sri Lanka.

He has so far played 160 Tests, 436 ODIs and a lone Twenty20 scoring 88 international hundreds and 144 fifties in all.

Tendulkar touched the magical 17,000-run mark in One-Day International cricket earlier in this month. Sanath Jayasuriya is second on the list with 13,377 runs followed by Aussie captain Ricky Ponting who has a lot of catching up to do.

Sachin has scored 17178 runs in One-dayers thus far. The Indian batting legend has 45 One-day hundreds and 91 ODI fifties under his belt. The veteran batsman has scored 43 hundreds and 53 half centuries in the Test format of the game.

The diminutive Mumbaikar, who made his ODI debut Pakistan in 1989, is already way ahead of his contemporaries when it comes to accumulating runs.

Thousands of farmers protest over sugarcane pricing, PM calls emergency meeting

Thousands of sugarcane farmers from north India staged a demonstration to protest the new sugarcane pricing policy of the government and
demanded an increase in procurement prices.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held an emergency meeting on the issue with senior cabinet colleagues.

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, Law minister M. Veerappa Moily, Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and Home minister P. Chidambaram attended the meeting at Parliament House.

Sources said: "The decision taken at the meeting will be placed before the cabinet today (Thursday)." The cabinet meeting will take place at 5 pm here.

Holding sugarcane stems and shouting slogans against the government, the farmers marched from Ramlila grounds to Jantar Mantar, a demonstration hotspot in the city, this morning as the Winter Session of Parliament began.
The protest is organised by Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal, Bharatiya Kisan Union of Mahendra Singh Tikait and Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan.

The Centre brought in an ordinance recently specifying a price of Rs 129.85 per quintal for sugarcane during the 2009-10 crushing season under the Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) system, which the protestors and opposition parties say is less.

In case a state government fixes the state advisory price (SAP) higher than the FRP, it will have to pay the difference.

"We are protesting against the government's FRP ordinance. We are also asking the government to hike the prices of sugarcane and paddy. The price of sugarcane should be increased to somewhere between Rs 280-400," Tikait said.

Samajwadi Party General Secretary Amar Singh told the protestors that "the FRP is something right for industrial tycoons but not for farmers. It is forcing farmers to commit suicide."

He accused the UPA government of sleeping over the issue.

Agitating farmers burn documents and furniture

MUZAFFARNAGAR: Agitating farmers set afire documents and furnitures of a sugar mill office here, even as work remained suspended in the factories following ongoing protests over cane prices.

Farmers led by Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Manju Devi Tikait, on Wednesday gheraoed the office of a sugar mill at Sisoli here and set the documents and furniture on fire.

Receipt of payments made to farmers was burnt in Lohari. Meanwhile, 15 sugar mills which had reopened yesterday could not carry out any processing work as they were short of sugarcane due to ongoing agitation.

The sugar mills included those in the western part of the state, including Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Saharanpore, Bijnore and Bulandshar.

Meerut District Magistrate warned that the administration would take immediate action would be taken if there were any incidents of black marketing of sugarcane or sugar.

Canegrowers across Uttar Pradesh have been agitating against the announced State Advisory Price of Rs 160 to Rs 170 per quintal, with an effective hike of Rs 25 per quintal, terming it as insufficient.

Mumbai attack suspects should be brought to justice in Pak: US

Ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Washington, the US on Wednesday pressed Pakistan to act against perpetrators of Mumbai attacks, including Jamaat-ud Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, saying it wants to see results.

Describing Lashkar-e-Taiba as a global threat, US Ambassador to India Timothy J Roemer said Pakistan should recognise the dangers and dismantle the terror infrastructure existing on its soil.

Situation in Pakistan, the Mumbai attacks and cooperation in counter-terrorism will be high on the agenda of Singh's meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington on November 24, amid the US' keenness to work "hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder" with India in preventing terror strikes.

The two leaders will also discuss implementation of the historic civil nuclear agreement, regarding which a few issues like liabilities, licensing and reprocessing, remain to be sorted out.

Climate change, education and poverty-alleviation would also be among the issues of discussion of the Singh-Obama meeting during which the two sides are expected to unveil a "new relationship based on strategic global partnership" and chalk out path of cooperation for meeting global challenges.

"The seven Mumbai suspects should be brought to justice in Pakistan... We need to see action and results from our partners in Pakistan," Roemer told a press conference here, adding even Saeed should be brought to justice.

Equating 26/11 with 9/11, the US Ambassador said the Mumbai attack was "tragic and heart-rending" incident, which will be discussed by PM Manmohan Singh and Obama.

Talking about the already-existing unprecedented cooperation in counter terrorism between India and the US, Roemer said collaboration like information sharing is taking place even on hourly basis.

He also highlighted the fact that FBI had testified against "blood-thirsty" attackers of Mumbai.

Referring to the visit of Home Minister P Chidambaram to the US recently, he said it was successful and he had "captured the best" the coordination between the two countries.

Asked whether the US would extradite to India David Coleman Headley, an LeT operative held by FBI, he said it was a hypothetical question.

On the delay in implementation of Indo-US civil nuclear deal, Roemer said four-five issues had remained to be resolved when he arrived in India as Ambassador earlier this year.

"Tremendous progress" has been made on this issue but three issues were yet to addressed, he said. These issues are -- enactment of a Liability legislation by India, negotiations on setting up of a Dedicated Reprocessing Facility in India and licensing aspects.

"We are optimistic that all the three issues will be resolved soon... We are pushing hard to implement the agreement," he said.

Microsoft co-founder ill

Seattle, Nov. 17: Microsoft Corp. co-founder and billionaire investor Paul Allen has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and is undergoing chemotherapy. In a memo sent to employees, Jody Allen, Paul Allen’s sister and the CEO of his investment firm Vulcan Inc., said the 56-year-old received the diagnosis early this month. According to the memo, Paul Allen has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Allen battled another form of immune system cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, more than 20 years ago and survived. Allen “is optimistic he can beat this, too”.

India retains position among the world's most corrupt nations

India is still perceived to be one of the most corrupt countries by the transparency international in its annual corruption perceptions. India has been ranked 84th in the list of 180 countries in terms of public-sector corruption, which is perceived to be highly corrupt. While releasing the list of naming and shaming the world's most corrupt countries, the international watchdog has for the first time recommended that tax havens like Switzerland and Liechtenstein should do away with the secrecy in banking laws. "Corrupt money must not find safe haven. It is time to put an end to secrecy in banking laws," said the Berlin-based group's head Huguette Labelle. The bottom five nations were Somalia, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sudan and Iraq, while the cleanest countries with ranking close to perfect 10 were New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore. This year developing countries like Serbia, Burkina Faso, Peru and Ghana fared better than India by claiming 83, 79, 75 and 69 spots respectively. China scored 3.6 on the scale, thereby indicating slightly better position than India in terms of perception of corrupt countries. In neighbouring countries, Nepal was at 143rd position much below India, Pakistan scored 2.4 claiming 139th position along with Bangladesh while Sri Lanka scored 3.1 and stood at 97th position. Nearly half of the countries have scored three or less on the scale of zero (perceived to be most corrupt) to 10 (perceived to be least corrupt) showing that corruption is rampant across the world. The index prepared by the voluntary group used 13 different expert and business surveys. "Transparency international has found that strong correlation between corruption and poverty continued to exist, jeopardising the global fight against poverty and threatening to derail the UN Millennium Development Goals," Admiral (retd. R H Tahiliani, Chairman of Transparency International India said in a statement.

Spaceworms jet off on Space Shuttle Atlantis

The worms were on board when the Space Shuttle Atlantis was launched from Cape Canaveral on Monday

The unexpected astronauts will help experts in human physiology at the University of Nottingham understand more about what triggers the body to build and lose muscle.

The worms are bound for the Japanese Experiment Module ''Kibo'' on the International Space Station (ISS) where they will experience the same weightless conditions which can cause dramatic muscle loss in astronauts.

The Kibo lab makes use of the weightless conditions in orbit for the study of biomedicine and material sciences.

The worms are used by Dr Nathaniel Szewczyk, from the university's Institute of Clinical Research in Derby, to study the signals that control muscle protein degradation.

He uses the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), because they are the perfect substitute for studying long term changes in human physiology – suffering from muscle loss under many of the same conditions that people do.

Muscle loss, or muscle atrophy, is one of the major health concerns for astronauts.

The research is also hoped to help scientists understand more about the condition which also affects the bedridden, people with muscular dystrophy and diabetes, people immobilised by casts and the elderly.

The worms, traced back to a rubbish dump in Bristol, often feed on bacteria that develop on decaying vegetable matter.

Their predecessors made news in 2003 when they survived the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, including re-entry and impact, and were recovered weeks after the disaster.

Dr Szewczyk, who has carried out three previous space worm missions, is working with Professor Atsushi Higashitani from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.

Professor Higashitani is the Principal Investigator of the CERISE (C. Elegans RNAi In Space Experiment) payload and will be based in Florida during the flight to co-ordinate the payload's experiments.

Dr Szewczyk said: ''We can learn things in space that we would not be able to learn on earth.

''If we can identify what causes the body to react in certain ways in space we establish new pathways for research back on earth.''

C. elegans was the first multicellular organism to have its genetic structure completely mapped and many of its 20,000 genes perform the same functions as those in humans.

Dr Szewczyk's researcher Dr Tim Etheridge has been given the task of preparing the worms for their journey to the International Space Station, roughly 200 miles from the Earth.

They have been carefully selected and brought to a dormant state for the journey, travelling in special cell culture bags.

They will be brought back from their dormant state with the release of food, exposed to conditions in space for four days and then frozen in preparation for the return journey.

The effect of this journey on their muscle mass will be investigated once the worms are returned to the university's laboratories in Derby.

Dr Szewczyk said: ''The CERISE payload is an important space medicine experiment as it will establish if RNAi, which was the subject of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine, is a viable technique for altering the biological response to space flight.

''For example, some of our worms will be treated with RNAi against specific proteases to see if we can stop muscle protein degradation in space.''

The worms will be on board Space Shuttle Atlantis when it takes off from the Kennedy Space Centre today at 2.28pm local time (7.28pm GMT).

Both Dr Szewczyk and Dr Etheridge have travelled to Florida to see the worms safely on-board the space shuttle.

luxury car audi

German luxury car maker Audi Thursday launched a new variant of its existing sedan Audi A6 in the Indian market.

The car will be available in the market in May first week with a price tag starting from Rs 48.0 lakh.