India and Egypt today held talks on providing new opportunities for investments in IT, education and health, and discussed ways to further strengthen bilateral ties.

The talks were held between India’s Ambassador to Egypt Sanjay Bhattacharyya and Alexandria Governor Mohamed Sultan on the sidelines of celebration the an India Day held in the coastal city of Alexandria.

“We met the Governor in the morning and thanked him for the support provided to Indian investments and to Indians in Alexandria as well as to Indian cultural activities, especially the International Yoga Day,” Bhattacharyya said.

“We discussed new opportunities for investments in IT, education and health. I briefed him on establishment of infrastructure projects, to which he responded very favourably, noting priority in transport and public utilities,” he said.

The film festival was opened with the popular Indian film ‘Om Shanti Om’ starring Shah Rukh Khan. An exhibition on Gandhi is also being organized

The 32-hour countdown for Thursday’s early launch of the IRNSS-1L navigation satellite is progressing smoothly at the Sriharikota rocket port, around 105 km from here, Indian space agency officials said.

The countdown began at 8.04 p.m. on Tuesday.

The 1,425-kg satellite — part of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) — will be carried by Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket XL variant that will blast off on Thursday at around 4.04 a.m., said an official of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

This will be the ninth of the IRNSS satellite series and will be a replacement for IRNSS-1A as its rubidium atomic clocks have failed. The atomic clocks are important to provide the accurate positional data.

Simply put, the IRNSS or NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation) is similar to the US-owned GPS.

The Rs 1,420-crore Indian satellite navigation system NavIC consists of nine satellites — seven in orbit and two as substitutes.

The IRNSS-1L will be the second satellite that will be sent up as replacement for IRNSS-1A. The first replacement IRNSS-1H satellite launch mission ended in a failure.

Each satellite has three Rubidium atomic clocks and a total of 27 clocks for the navigation satellite system (including the standby satellites) were supplied by the same vendor.

Like its other IRNSS predecessors, IRNSS-1L also carries two types of payloads for navigation and ranging.

The navigation payload of IRNSS-1L will transmit navigation service signals to the users. This payload will be operating in L5-band and S-band.

The ranging payload of IRNSS-1L consists of a C-band transponder, which facilitates accurate determination of the range of the satellite. IRNSS-1L also carries Corner Cube Retro Reflectors for laser ranging.

The four stage/engine PSLV-XL stands 44.4 metres tall and weighs 321 ton at the
lift-off stage.

Around 19 minutes 20 seconds after the lift-off, the rocket will sling IRNSS-1L at an altitude of around 507 km.

According to ISRO, NavIC is useful for fishermen to reach potential fishing areas. The fishermen can also get alert messages relating to bad weather, high waves or when they approach international maritime boundary line.

These services are provided through a software application on a smart phone.

The Indian space agency also said NavIC is useful for merchant ships in their navigation and also during search and rescue operations.

In the road transport sector, NavIC helps commuters to traverse distances and also enable transport operators to track their vehicles.

According to ISRO, the navigation system is also helpful for railways in tracking trains and also giving an alert in the case of unmanned level crossing.

The Indian space agency said NavIC is also used for other applications like location-based services, survey and alignment, time synchronised services

NavIC provides two types of services — standard positioning service and restricted service. The former is for all users while the latter is an encrypted service only for authorised users.

Starting in July 2013, the Indian space agency has launched eight navigation satellites, with the last one launched on Aug 31, 2017.

The Aug 31 mission was a failure as the rocket’s heat shield did not separate three minutes after the rocket’s lift-off. As a result, the IRNSS-1H remained housed inside the heat shield.

Each satellite has a life span of 10 years.

(IANS)

In the fall of 2011, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission released its original Tour of the Moon, a five-minute animation that takes the viewer on a virtual tour of our nearest neighbour in space. Six years later, the tour has been recreated in eye-popping 4K resolution, using the same camera path and drawing from the vastly expanded data trove collected by LRO in the intervening years.

The tour visits a number of interesting sites chosen to illustrate a variety of lunar terrain features. Some are on the near side and are familiar to both professional and amateur observers on Earth, while others can only be seen clearly from space. Some are large and old (Orientale, South Pole-Aitken), others are smaller and younger (Tycho, Aristarchus). Constantly shadowed areas near the poles are hard to photograph but easier to measure with altimetry, while several of the Apollo landing sites, all relatively near the equator, have been imaged at resolutions as high as 25 centimetres (10 inches) per pixel.
The new tour highlights the mineral composition of the Aristarchus plateau, evidence for surface water ice in certain spots near the south pole, and the mapping of gravity in and around the Orientale basin.

The CBI on Friday questioned ICICI Bank CEO and MD Chanda Kochhar’s brother-in-law Rajiv Kochhar for a second consecutive day in connection with a case of Rs 3,250 crore loan to the Videocon Group in 2012.

Rajiv Kochhar is being questioned at the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) Bandra-based office since morning.

Informed sources said the CBI was probing Rajiv Kochhar’s link over allegations pertaining to his Singapore-based company Avista Advisory’s dealings with the ICICI Bank.

The bank, however, has denied its engagement with Avista for any services ever.

The CBI on Thursday questioned Rajiv Kochhar for over five hours in connection with the case.

He was on Thursday stopped at Mumbai airport by immigration authorities around 11 a.m. while he was about to leave for Singapore.

Later, he was handed over to a CBI team which brought him to its Bandra office for questioning him in connection with its preliminary enquiry against his brother Deepak Kochhar and Videocon Chairman Venugopal Dhoot.

The agency had registered a preliminary enquiry against Chanda Kochhar’s husband Deepak Kochhar, Videocon Group officials and others for its probe to determine any wrongdoing or otherwise in the sanction of the loan to the Videocon Group by the ICICI Bank as part of a consortium of banks in 2012.

Chanda Kochhar, who is facing questions of conflict of interest on the issue, has not been named in the preliminary enquiry, which was registered after news reports raised questions about Videocon Chairman giving loan of Rs 64 crore to a firm he had jointly promoted with Deepak Kochhar, six months after his group got the Rs 3,250 crore loan.

The said money was part of a loan of Rs 40,000 crore which Videocon received from a consortium of 20 banks led by the State Bank of India.

The CBI on Thursday said it has filed a case against Vadodara-based Diamond Power Infrastructure Ltd (DPIL) and its directors for defrauding a consortium of 11 banks of Rs 2,654.40 crore.

Apart from DPIL, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) FIR filed on March 26 includes names of firm’s founder Suresh Narain Bhatnagar and his sons Amit Suresh and Sumit Suresh.

The FIR also mentions some unidentified public servants.

The CBI has reportedly conducted searches at the corporate office, two factory premises and at the residences of the directors of the firm.

DPIL, which is engaged in the production of cables and other electrical equipment, through its management has fraudulently availed credit facilities from a consortium of 11 banks since 2008, leaving behind a total outstanding debit of Rs 2,654.40 crore as of June 29, 2016, according to the FIR.

The company managed to get term loans and credit facilities, in spite of the fact that they were already appearing in the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s list of defaulters and the caution list of Export Credit Guarantee Corporation of India (ECGCI) at the time of initial sanction of credit limits by the consortium, it said.

At the time of consortium’s formation in 2008, Axis Bank was the lead bank for the term loan and the Bank of India was the lead bank for cash credit (CC) limits.

Bank of India, which tops the list with Rs 670.51 crore of loans, is followed by Bank of Baroda (Rs 348.99 crore), ICICI (Rs 279.46 crore), State Bank of India (Rs 266.37 crore), Axis Bank (Rs 255.32 crore), Allahabad Bank (Rs 227.96), Dena Bank (Rs 177.19 crore), Corporation Bank (109.12 crore), Exim Bank of India (Rs 81.92 crore), IOB (Rs 71.59) and IFCI (58.53 crore).

The company, allegedly with support of officials from various banks, managed to obtain enhancement in credit facilities. During 2011, DPIL had projected turnover of Rs 2,197.60 crore for the year 2012 whereas the actual turnover was Rs 1,267.60 crore only for the year 2011, the FIR said.

“DPIL got credit facilities enhanced from Rs 285 crore to Rs 480 crore.”

Next year, against the estimates of Rs 2,197.60 crore, DPIL actually achieved a turnover of Rs 1,740.38 crore as on March 31, 2012, which was Rs 457.22 crore less from the projected turnover figure, despite the fact that the CC limit was fully availed by the company, said the FIR.

As per the FIR, Bank of India officials, while conducting the credit review, did not decrease the cash credit limit and kept it unchanged at Rs 480 crore even though such figures were based on grossly exaggerated sales figures.

Facebook has deployed technology tools like artificial intelligence and thousands of people to work on security as the company’s “major focus” this year is to protect the integrity of upcoming elections in several countries, including India, on its platform, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said.

Terming 2018 a “big year” for elections, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was enhancing its security features to prevent trolls from spreading information.

The social media giant has been slammed over a major data breach scandal by Cambridge Analytica, a British firm linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

“In the US Senate Alabama special election last year, we successfully deployed some new artificial intelligence (AI) tools that removed Macedonian trolls who were trying to spread information during the election. We now have about 15,000 people working on security and content review and we’ll have more than 20,000 by the end of this year,” Mark Zuckerberg told reporters during a conference call on Tuesday.

“This is going to be a big year for elections ahead with the US midterms and elections in India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Hungary and others. This is going to be a major focus for us,” he said.

Several states like Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh are scheduled to go for polls this year and the general elections are due in a little over a year from now.

A day earlier, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook had taken big steps by taking down Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) pages that were targeting the US.

“Since we became aware of their activity after the 2016 US elections, we’ve been working to root out the IRA and protect the integrity of elections around the world,” he said.

“There have been a number of important elections that we’ve focused on. A few months after the 2016 elections, there was a French presidential election and leading up to that we deployed some new AI tools that took down more than 30,000 fake accounts,” he said.

In German election, the company developed a new playbook for working with the local election commission on share information on threats it received, he said.

“We have more work to do here and we’re going to continue working very hard to defend against them. There’s the Mexican presidential election, there are big elections in India and Brazil as well as in Pakistan and Hungary and a number of other countries and the US midterms, of course,” he said.

The Facebook CEO pointed out three different types of activity that required different strategies for fighting.

Economic actors, who are basically spammers; the second are governments trying to interfere in elections, and then the third is just polarisation and sometimes lack of truthfulness in what you’ve described as the media, he said.

“If we just make it so that the economics stop working for them then they’ll move on to something else. I mean, these are literally the same type of people who had been sending you Viagra e-mails in the ’90s. We can attack it on both sides. on the revenue side, we make it so that they can’t run the Facebook ad network,” he said.

The second category are the national security type issues, Mark Zuckerberg said, adding that is the Russian election interference.

“In order to solve that, what we need to do is to identify these bad actors…What we need to do is to just track that really carefully in order to just be able to remove it from Facebook entirely,” he said.

COMMENTSMark Zuckerberg alleged that some media organisations that are sanctioned news outlets in Russia when investigated closely over time, clearly come out as organisations completely owned, controlled and operated by the IRA.

“So we take them down and treat that as a security issue,” he said.

Monday’s trip marked SpaceX’s 14th resupply mission for NASA under a $1.6 billion contract.

SpaceX blasted off a load of supplies Monday for the International Space Station aboard a rocket and a cargo ship that have both flown before, marking the second such flight for the California-based company.

“Falcon 9 is on its way,” a SpaceX commentator said as the white rocket surged skyward over Cape Canaveral, Florida at 4:30 pm.

SpaceX’s Jessica Jensen, director of Dragon mission management, said the booster had previously launched in August 2017, and the Dragon flew to the space station in April 2016.

SpaceX’s first such double-recycle resupply mission for NASA flew to the orbiting outpost in December 2017.

The effort is part of SpaceX’s mission to lower the cost of space flight by re-using costly, multimillion-dollar components that typically have been discarded into the ocean after each launch.

“What is really neat about this is it is becoming the norm,” Jensen said.

Monday’s trip marked SpaceX’s 14th resupply mission for NASA under a $1.6 billion contract that aims to guarantee much-needed supplies and equipment to the astronauts living in orbit.

The capsule is packed with about 5,800 pounds (2,600Kg) of food and science experiments, including one to study thunderstorms and another to test drug development in space.

The cargo ship is scheduled to latch onto the space station early Wednesday, and will stay in orbit for about a month before returning to Earth.

Motherson Sumi (MSS), via its 51% owned subsidiary SMRPBV, has executed the transaction documents for the proposed acquisition of Reydel Automotive (Reydel; all cash deal). Prima facie, the deal is favorable as: (a) businesses & customer profiles of both companies are complementary. In fact, the acquisition will bolster MSS’ capabilities; (b) valuations at ~0.1x CY17E EV/sales & ~2x CY17E EV/EBIDT (~5-6x for SMRPBV) render it value accretive (similar to SMR in 2009) given RoCE of ~25%; and (c) capex needs of ~USD30mn indicates adequate FCF. We revise down FY20E EPS ~4% to INR15.3 to factor in lower growth across business. However, we upgrade to ‘BUY’ post the recent stock price correction with revised TP of INR375 (earlier INR 404).

Reydel buy: Key takeaways:

· Reydel a strategic fit: The acquisition provides MSS access to a diverse set of capabilities (versus SMP) in similar line of products (cockpit modules, instrument & door panels, consoles, etc). Also, it widens its customer base. Post the acquisition, revenue share from Renault/PSA to rise to 8%/5% from 5%/1% currently. Similarly, MSS will gain access to Indonesia, Croatia, Philippines, Morocco and Argentina where currently it has limited presence.

· Valuations attractive: At USD201mn, Reydel will be acquired at attractive valuation of EV/sales of ~0.1x and EV/EBIDT of ~2x (EBIDT of USD68mn, net cash at USD53mn). Management indicated that Reydel’s capex need will be well funded by its operations. Ample cross leverage opportunities for MSS and Reydel on best practices, accessing new locations and new platforms. Management indicated that it has been mulling the Reydel buy since a year and has the support of all the latter’s customers.

Outlook and valuations: Well placed; upgrade to ‘BUY’

We like MSS’ strong India franchise (~65% market share; >50% RoCE) as well as SMR (~25% market share; >40% RoCE). We expect SMP to also follow this trajectory driven by revenue traction and lower capex. We estimate 28% FY18-20E EPS CAGR. Post the recent correction, we upgrade to ‘BUY’ from HOLD with TP of INR375 (India business 30x, SMR: 20x, SMP/PKC: 18x FY20E PER). At CMP, the stock trades at 21x FY20E PER.

Oxfam India on Monday announced the appointment of Amitabh Behar as Chief Executive Officer of the organisation that fights against inequality, poverty and injustice and is involved in humanitarian work in the country.

Behar succeeds Nisha Agrawal, who was the founding CEO of Oxfam India and headed the organisation since March 2008.

Behar, a former Executive Director of National Foundation for India, is an expert on people-centred advocacy and chairs organisational boards of Amnesty International India, Navsarjan and Yuva. He has an M.Phil in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

An Oxfam statement said he was selected after an “extensive and transparent process, led by the board chair of Oxfam India Kiran Karnik, with the help of a prominent executive search firm”.

“I welcome Amitabh as the new CEO of Oxfam India. In an outstanding field of candidates, Amitabh stood out as exemplifying Oxfam’s values and ambitions. He brings grass-roots knowledge, passion and clear vision coupled with his commitment to social justice, and leadership, which has inspired many,” Karnik said.

The CBI has registered a preliminary enquiry against Deepak Kochhar, husband of ICICI bank MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar, officials of the Videocon group and others to determine whether any wrongdoing was involved in the sanctioning of a Rs 3,250 crore loan to the Videocon Group by the ICICI Bank Ltd as part of a consortium of banks in 2012.

CBI sources said that Chanda Kochhar, against whom conflict of interest questions have been raised, has not been named in the PE as of now.

They said that Deepak Kochhar will soon be called for questioning along with some bank officials. These officials are also likely to include from the banks which were part of the consortium that lent money to the Videocon group.

The CBI action comes in the wake of the news reports raising questions about Videocon Chairman Venugopal Dhoot allegedly providing crores of rupees to a firm promoted by Deepak Kochhar and two relatives six months after his group got the Rs 3,250 crore loan from ICICI Bank.

The said amount was part of a loan of RS 40,000 crores which Videocon received from a consortium of 20 banks led by State Bank of India (SBI).

A PE is conducted to determine if there is enough evidence of wrongdoing for a case to be taken up for detailed investigation. If sufficient evidence suggests that a cognizable offence has been committed, then the PE is converted into a regular case or First Information Report (FIR).

The source said that the agency has collected documents related to the loan given to Videocon group in 2012.