Controversial agriculture laws that saw farmers across India protesting for over a year are going to be rolled back, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unexpectedly announced.
“I want to tell the country that we have decided to repeal the three farm laws,” Modi said in a televised address on Friday, which local media described as “stunning.”
The Indian parliament will complete the constitutional process of repealing the agricultural legislation in late November, he added.
However, the PM again defended the divisive legislation, saying that the reform of the sector, which accounts for some 15% of India’s $2.7 trillion economy, was actually aimed at supporting the country’s small farmers.
Whatever I did was for farmers. What I am doing is for the country.
“Maybe something was lacking in our efforts, which is why we couldn’t convince some farmers about the laws,” Modi acknowledged.
The laws, which were introduced last September, allowed farmers to sell their crops outside of the government-regulated wholesale markets, in which they were guaranteed a minimum price.
The government argued that it would see them earning more, but growers feared that that move would, on the contrary, cause a drop in prices and make them hostages to large corporations.
Thousands of farmers joined the protests against what they called “black laws,” and some rallies turned violent. A year later, many demonstrators remain camped along roads outside the capital New Delhi.
And the farmers aren’t planning on going home just yet, with one of their leaders saying on Twitter: “We will wait for parliament to repeal the laws.”
Modi’s concession to the protesters may have been unexpected, but it comes several months ahead of elections in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, as well as two other northern states with large rural populations.
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Objects, including spacecraft, could pierce through the universe using several black holes as a ‘shortcut’, a new study suggests.
The new theory posited by French physicist Pascal Koiran marks a break from earlier research in the field of black hole studies. Previously, it was thought that a so-called ‘wormhole’ composed of two black holes would be prone to instantly collapse, thus making it impossible for an object to successfully travel all the way from one side and out the other. However, by employing different metrics, the French scientist’s new model has arrived at a very different conclusion: “We show that the particle reaches the wormhole throat for a finite value t′1 of the time marker t′.” In essence, that means an object, for instance, a spacecraft, could pass through this wormhole portal intact and reach some far-away region of the universe, taking far less time than would be needed if traveling conventionally.
The study in its entirety will see the light of day in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Modern Physics D, though an abstract has been available since early October.
Yet, there are too many ifs as to whether this purely theoretical model has any bearing on the way the universe actually works. For starters, to create such a time-and-space tunnel you would need a regular black hole and a so-called white hole, which is essentially a black hole in reverse. While black holes never let anything out, their ‘twins’ never let anything in. So, according to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and Nathan Rosen’s additions to it, if you were to connect the two, they would make up a bridge across time and space. However, if the laws postulated by another branch of physics, thermodynamics, are anything to go by, such a construct would be highly unstable. Perhaps more importantly, the very existence of white holes has yet to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. At present, they remain a pure theorization, thus putting any talk of space-and-time portals on rather shaky ground.
Some voters in Germany’s capital, Berlin, may have to re-cast their ballots after the country’s federal election czar filed an official complaint over irregularities in a parliamentary vote held two months ago.
The election – which saw Berliners decide the makeup of the German parliament, the Bundestag, as well as select city representatives – was marred by irregularities at numerous polling stations, according to the official, Georg Thiel.
Among the most common problems were ballot shortages and long lines, with waiting times of up to two hours. In some cases, voters were also seen casting their ballots past a 6pm cutoff – the time when all polling stations were supposed to have closed. Thiel, who was tasked with overseeing elections at federal level, saw all of the above as reason enough to raise an objection in the German capital, local media reported on Friday.
Thiel identified six Berlin constituencies where irregularities were allegedly rampant, potentially setting the stage for a re-do election in the city.
It is now up to a special Bundestag committee to examine Thiel’s complaint and see if the reported violations ran afoul of German law or electoral procedures. For the vote to be repeated, however, at least one of those violations would have to be deemed serious enough to have affected the distribution of seats in the Bundestag.
The September 26 election saw outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives take a historic beating, with the Social Democrats coming out on top. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) has been engaged in coalition talks with the Greens and the Free Democratic Party ever since, with the trio expected to announce a preliminary deal as early as next week.
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