General Awareness Updates – April 2010

Miscellaneous-1:

A U.S. congressional panel has voted to label as “genocide” the World War One-era massacre of Armenians by Turkish forces, despite pressure from the Obama administration and Turkey to drop the matter.

The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee to approve the non-binding resolution. It calls on President Barack Obama to ensure that U.S. policy formally refers to the massacre as genocide, putting him in a tight spot.

On the one side is NATO ally Turkey, which rejects calling the events genocide. On the other side is an important U.S. Armenian-American constituency and their backers in Congress ahead of Congressional elections in November.

Turkey had warned its ties with the United States would be damaged and Ankara’s efforts to normalise relations with Armenia could be harmed if the resolution were approved. Turkey and Armenia signed a protocol last year to normalise relations but it has yet to pass through the parliament of either country.

Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman forces but denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounted to genocide — a term employed by many Western historians and some foreign parliaments.

The vote triggered an immediate condemnation from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who recalled Turkey’s ambassador to Washington for consultations. Mr. Erdogan said he worried the measure would harm Turkish-U.S. ties and efforts by Muslim Turkey and Christian Armenia to end a century of hostility.

The vote put Mr. Obama in a tight spot between his desire to maintain good relations with Turkey, a Muslim but secular democracy that plays a vital role for U.S. interests from Iran to Afghanistan to the Middle East.

India’s new Advanced Air Defence (AAD) interceptor missile, capable of destroying hostile missiles, encountered coordination problem and failed to take off during a planned launch from the Integrated Test Range at Wheeler Island off Orissa coast, in the second week of March. The trial is aimed at developing a multi-layer Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system.

Though Prithvi - the target missile - was test-fired from a mobile launcher from ITR’s launch Complex-3 at Chandipur-on-Sea, the interceptor missile failed to blast off.

Wheeler’s Island is located about 70km across the sea from Chandipur and the AAD missile was to intercept the target at an altitude of 15 to 20km over the sea. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) had already test-fired the interceptor missile thrice in November 2006, December 2007, and March 2009 from the Wheeler Island.

The seven metre AAD interceptor is a single stage solid rocket-propelled guided missile equipped with an inertial navigation system, a hi-tech computer and an electro-mechanical activator totally under command by the data uplinked from the ground based radar.

The missile has its own mobile launcher, secure data link for interception, independent tracking and homing capabilities and its own radar.

The European Commission has approved the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) potatoes. This is the first approval of GM foods in Europe for 12 years. The Amflora potato is developed by the German chemical giant BASF but it would be used only for industrial use, including animal feed. The first GM crop authorized in Europe was MON810, a strain of GM maize of Monsanto in 1998.