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The Dish: Sampling Today’s News - January 15, 2008
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pledged to quintuple India’s education budget to fund new science education programs. The plans proposes thirty new universities, forty three science and technology institutes, and some 66,000 technical and vocational schools. Scholarships for about one million schoolchildren will be made available for those pursing science degrees.
The European Commission has filed two new inquires into complaints that Microsoft is unfairly preventing competition by withholding interoperability information from developers and by bundling Internet Explorer with its operating system. The European Committee for Interoperable Systems filed the complaints with the backing of IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Nokia. Opera, whose eponymous web browser competes with Microsoft’s Explorer, filed its complaint separately.
Japan has announced a new five-year plan to boost cutting edge physics research and reiterated its commitment to the International Linear Collider. The decrease in U.S. and UK funding for the collider may mean the ILC will end up being built in Japan. This rubs salt in the wounds of some in the U.S. scientific community who are already reeling from large budget cuts in particle-physics and fusion research in the new omnibus spending bill. Science Progress recently covered R&D funding in the 2008 budget.
Terminally ill patients do not have a constitutional right to developmental drugs that have not yet been approved by the FDA. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on a DC Circuit court ruling in favor of the FDA’s restrictions on unproven drugs. The Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs and the Washington Legal Foundation sued the FDA in 2003, claiming that its policies moderating access to experimental drugs are unconstitutional.
The FCC’s wireless spectrum auction, scheduled for January 24, may be running into the ground before it even takes off. One of the wireless licenses available, the Block D license, would allow the highest bidder to build a network with national coverage. Because the license stipulates a public/private partnership granting the government access to the network for emergency responders, the Commission is offering the license with a discounted reserve bid. But Block D may have difficulty finding a buyer. The most likely bidder, Frontline Wireless, dropped out of the auction, and if the license for Block D does not sell, FCC officials may have to re-auction the license without the public safety conditions. It is hard to know what companies may bid for this license because the FCC has forbidden participants from discussing the auction and the deadline for joining the bidding has already passed.
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