The process of registration of pilgrims for Shri Amarnathji Yatra 2017 is starting from tomorrow. Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board chaired by the Governor, Jammu and Kashmir has issued following procedure for registration of yatris through bank:-
When I was first elected to the Commons I was Chairman of a large quoted industrial group of companies. In our ownership was an important part of the UK’s ceramic tile industry. The Group owned Johnsons Tiles, and Maws. We manufactured wall and floor tile. Even then we had competitive problems with the rest of the EU. Italian gas was considerably cheaper than UK gas, I was told, giving the successful Italian competitors an edge. In more recent years the extra costs of ever dearer energy has become a bigger problem for the UK ceramics industry, like other heavy energy using businesses.
It was also true then, and now, that there was one thing even more important to a successful ceramics company than affordable energy to fire the kilns. A growing business needs great designers, great commercial artists, great marketing to put before the architects, the house specifiers, domestic consumers and the design consultants styles, colours and finishes they want to buy. UK ceramics has numerous great names and brands from the past. Maws were famous for their Victorian encaustic tiles which graced many a home and grand public building. Wedgwood was perhaps the greatest potter of all time, with his long career of new glazes, shapes and textures, and his ability to recreate the best of the past in a modern idiom. In the last century Clarice Cliff, Susie Cooper and others launched homeware ranges that excited the imagination and became classics in their turn.
When I worked with managers over how to extend and improve our tiling range, my first reaction was to fall back on the old pattern books which we still had amidst the company’s intellectual property. All those Georgian, Victorian and early twentieth century homes might want modern versions of the tiles the factories had made when the homes were first new. Some of the glazes, shapes and designs from the Victorian, Art Nouveau and Art deco periods were particularly fine. I also asked the business to contact design Colleges to see what was stirring and if they wanted to collaborate.
The UK industry needed to automate more of its plants, drive down kiln transit times, and get better at recycling and controlling heat use. Over the years since I left much of this has come to pass.
Today, in the wake of the Stoke by election, the government should ask itself what more can be done to encourage a larger and more vibrant ceramics industry in the Potteries. Emma Bridgewater has shown that a modern entrepreneur with design flair can still establish a decent business here. Moorcroft, Waterford Wedgwood, Wade and Steelite also show what can still be done. Government does need to address the issue of dear energy for this industry and others. It can also help establish the talent pool and the possible collaborations between our Commercial Design schools and the industries that need those skills.
1 March 2017 – The United Nations agency leading the world’s HIV/AIDS response is urging everyone to ‘make some noise’ for zero discrimination in healthcare settings.
“Healthcare settings should be safe and supportive environments. It is unacceptable that discrimination is inhibiting access to care today,” said Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in his message for Zero Discrimination Day.
“Eliminating discrimination in health-care settings is critical, and we must demand that it become a reality,” Mr. Sidibé added.
The right to health is a fundamental human right that includes access to affordable, timely and quality health-care services for all, yet discrimination remains widespread in health-care settings, creating a serious barrier to access to HIV services.
Data from 50 countries from the People Living with HIV Stigma Index cited by UNAIDS show that one in eight people living with HIV report being denied health care.
Around 60 per cent of European Union/European Economic Area countries report that stigma and discrimination among health-care professionals remains a barrier to the provision of adequate HIV prevention services for men who have sex with men and people who inject drugs.
Each year on 1 March, the world marks Zero Discrimination Day “to highlight how everyone can be part of the transformation and take a stand for a fair and just society,” according to the press release.
“Everyone has the right to be treated with respect, to live free from discrimination, coercion and abuse,” said Mr. Sidibé.
“Discrimination doesn’t just hurt individuals it hurts everyone, whereas welcoming and embracing diversity in all its forms brings benefits for all.”
[unable to retrieve full-text content]After sending a probe to Mars in 2020, China plans to explore three asteroids and land on one of them to conduct scientific research, according to a Chinese asteroid research expert.
Experts and academics are calling for greater policing of schools and for regulations to be drafted to prevent abuse, after claims that teachers in Beijing and Shanghai sexually assaulted students during periods of private tuition.
The attacks attracted widespread public attention and triggered debate about how parents, schools and society in general should protect children.
In January, a junior middle school teacher in Beijing was detained on suspicion of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old female student. The teacher, who previously taught the student math at school, was hired by the family in September 2015 to provide private tuition.
The student claims that the first assault occurred in April last year, followed by more attacks in July, August and December. The teacher is also alleged to have intimidated the student to prevent her from telling anyone about the incidents.
In December, the teacher was caught sexually assaulting the student by a surveillance camera the father had installed at his daughter’s insistence. Once he had seen the footage, the father reported the matter to the police, who are investigating the allegations.
The teacher, who charged 700 yuan ($102) for each hour’s tuition, had been paid more than 160,000 yuan during the previous 14 months.
“If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed that a teacher from a well-known school could have done this,” said the girl’s father, quoted by The Mirror.
In a similar incident, a teacher at a private junior middle school in Shanghai was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for sexually assaulting and intimidating a female junior school student during private tuition sessions at his home.
There are no official statistics about teacher-student abuse, but in 2015, the Supreme People’s Court told media in Gansu province that the nation’s courts heard 7,145 cases of child sexual abuse between 2012 and 2014.
Inadequate protection
Xi Xiaohua, executive director of the Beijing Youth Social Work Research Institute, which is affiliated to the Capital Normal University, said the fact that the incidents happened in large cities was “shocking” and “harrowing”. However, she said the parents of the girl in the Beijing incident should bear some of the blame because they left their daughter alone with an adult male.
Yao Jianlong, a professor of law and the director of the school of criminal justice at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, agreed with Xi’s stance.
“The absence of a parent or guardian is especially dangerous for children, which explains why more sexual assaults on students are found among ‘left-behind’ children,” he said, referring to children whose parents have moved from their hometown in search of work in cities and towns, leaving the children at home.
In the Beijing incident, Yao said the father, who believed the teacher he had hired at great cost was above suspicion, had been unable to identify the potential threat to the child’s safety.
The consequence was that when his daughter told him she no longer wanted to be tutored by the teacher, instead of questioning the man, the father thought the fault lay with his daughter. The father’s failure to act left the girl open to more abuse, according to Yao, who conducts research into the sexual assault of children by adults.
“Parents should never leave young children alone with adults. They should be cautious all the time to ensure that there are no blind spots in the guardianship of children－boys or girls,” he said, adding that boys are also vulnerable to sexual assault.
Xi said children should learn about the dangers of sexual assault and learn techniques to avoid possible threats.
“Our center has provided a lot of self-protection courses for children at schools and communities in Beijing. We explain to the children what constitutes sexual assault, the signs to look for, and how to deal with it,” said Xi, who has spent many years working to raise awareness of the problem among parents and children.
She and her colleagues have long advocated the inclusion of such courses in the school curriculum, but they are a low priority in China’s exam-oriented education system: “Under such circumstances, the onus is on the parents to teach their children how to protect themselves.”
That’s easier said than done, according to Yao. “Chinese parents, including some well-educated people like myself, are too shy to talk about these things. Even when sometimes I want to talk to my son about this, I don’t know how to open the conversation. This situation also needs to change,” he said.