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Will it be the next geopolitical battleground or remain the common heritage of humankind? A retired Rear Admiral of the Chinese PLA Navy, Yin Zhuo, caused a major stir in March 2010, when in a speech to the Chinese Peoples' Political Consultative Conference, he declared: “The Arctic belongs to all the people around the world as no nation has sovereignty over it.” China, he said, must also have a share of the region's resources. Resources, reserves The five nations which ring the Arctic Ocean, namely the U.S. Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia, disagree, though they themselves have competing territorial claims. The stakes are enormous: The Arctic Circle encloses 21 million square kilometres of land and 13 million sq.km of mostly ice-bound seas. By way of comparison, India's total land area is 3.3 million sq.km. It is estimated that the region may hold over 40 per cent of the current global reserves of oil and gas. There may also be significant reserves of co...

Date : January 30, 2012 The Reserve Bank of India's third quarter review of monetary policy was devoid of major surprises. The only change in monetary policy instruments — a cut in the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) by 0.50 percentage point to 5.5 per cent — was largely expected. The move will release Rs.32,000 crore of funds impounded from banks, almost immediately. The key policy interest rate, the repo rate, remains unchanged at 8.5 per cent. Consequently, the reverse repo stays at 7.5 per cent and the marginal standing facility at 9.5 per cent. A cut in the repo rate would have more definitely indicated a downward shift in the monetary stance but the RBI has argued that the CRR reduction is the best it could do under the prevailing circumstances and ought to be interpreted as a signal for a softer monetary policy regime. According to the RBI, the CRR is a policy instrument with liquidity dimension. Its reduction will bring down the cost of money for banks and have a...

Date : January 30, 2012 In yet another move to get information about black money stashed away abroad, India has signed the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, a multilateral agreement that promotes international cooperation while respecting the rights of taxpayers. This will send a strong signal that India and the other 31 signatory countries have joined hands to ensure that individuals and multinational enterprises pay the right amount of tax, at the right time and in the right place. The Convention provides for administrative cooperation among the parties in the assessment and collection of taxes, with a view to combating tax avoidance and evasion, according to a statement by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) here. With taxpayers increasingly operating on a global basis, tax authorities are moving from bilateral to multilateral cooperation and from exchange of information on request to other forms of co...

What makes SOPA and PIPA especially toxic is the threat they pose to all dimensions of a website's existence - physical presence, findability and revenue stream. With 4.5 million signatures on a Google petition and one million messages sent to the United States Congress via the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in a single day, January 18, advocates of a free Internet have mounted a determined bid to stall new legislation that can chill free speech. The global chorus against two Bills that are winding their way through the American legal system is growing. The two draft laws in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, now known around the world by the acronyms SOPA and PIPA (for Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act), have raised a storm on the Internet. They are seen as updated versions of the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act” (COICA) which could not make progress in the Senate earlier. In a small victory for opponents, key movers of the Bil...