Dr M Khalid's global village blog

On one hand, China's 5.6% GDP comes from exports to Europe. On the other hand,   Chinese investment is pouring into Europe. It's one reason why Premier Li Keqiang, during a visit to Brussels this week, called for a strong euro and united Europe as the region grapples with the latest chapter in the  Greek   debt saga. From Cyprus to Sweden and almost most everywhere in between, Chinese companies are buying European assets like never before. Europe is increasingly popular for China's corporate titans as they shift from buying in resource-rich developing countries to advanced economies. Here are the numbers: Annual investment by Chinese companies into European Union member states has surged from around zero in the mid 2000s to 14 billion euro in 2014, according to a new report by Rhodium Group and the Mercator Institute for China Studies. And it's set to grow as China -- with almost $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves and $21 trillion in  savi...

From the Indian express: It's 15 days after their strike ended, and the 32-year-old is back at work at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, located on the bustling Baba Kharak Singh Marg in Central Delhi. The hospital gets around 20 lakh patients annually in OPD, 5 lakh in emergency, and the PG resident in surgery is among its 1,000-odd resident doctors, including non-academic junior residents. Today Dr M's (name withheld to protect his identity) duty begins in the surgical emergency, and he arrives at 8.50 am, bolstered for the next 36 hours that will follow with a change of shirt, his copy of the Sabiston Textbook of Surgery, three packets of glucose biscuits, eight bananas and two bottles of water. Dr M is happy today. He has had five continuous hours of sleep. There are 45 patients in the surgical emergency ward, sharing a total of 20 beds. Two beds are empty — left for patients who may show up with grave emergencies. Two to three patients share most of the occupied beds; a couple o...

Google apologised after an identification program in its new photo app put a "gorillas" label on a picture of a black couple. "We're appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened," a Google representative said late Wednesday in an email to AFP. "We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing." Google apologized and went to work fixing the problem earlier in the week after the offensive blunder was pointed out in a Twitter message from @JackyAlcine. "Google Photos, y'all (messed) up," Jacky Alcine said in a series of emphatic messages. "My friend's not a gorilla." OVERHAULED PHOTO APP Google released its overhauled photo app for smartphones in May, touting it as a major advancement in sorting, organizing, and handling pictures. Google engineer Yonatan Zunger put the blame for the labelling on the artificial intelligence software designed to let machines learn how to recognise places, people and...

Athens/Paris/Berlin:  It was a small room with a plain wooden table a few feet wide. The Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras sat on one side, along with a translator and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. On the other sat president Francois Hollande of France; around were a handful of officials. In this modest Brussels setting last Friday morning, key players in the great Greek debt drama tried to avert a meltdown that could threaten the future of the euro and even the European Union (EU). Merkel and Hollande made a final offer of billions of euros in aid for bankrupt Greece—if Tsipras would sign up to economic reforms demanded by his country’s creditors. The participants looked tired, their body language was stiff. The meeting did not last long. Tsipras, according to Greek officials close to the negotiations, had already decided to call an emergency meeting of his cabinet in Athens for that evening. Even as he spoke with Merkel and Hollande, he was preparing to hand th...

The below images are false coloured to enable appreciation of the structures. A false-color scanning electron micrograph of a marine diatom undergoing cell division. The two thecae of this diatom are gettong separated. ------------- A false-colour scanning electron micrograph of pollen grains from a cucumber plant ----------- Scanning electron microscope image of pollen grains from a variety of common plants: sunflower, morning glory, prairie hollyhock, oriental lily, evening primrose and castor bean. ----------- A false - colour scanning electron micrograph of grass pollen grains, a major cause of  hay fever. ------------ Fly foot gets  a  grip  with  sticky hairs  and with  claws shaped like  a  set  of  bull's horns . In the  false - color scanning electron micrograph , the  footpads  of a syrphid fly quite sililar to the commmon fly. ...

Mumbai:  Bengaluru-based YoungMonk Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which owns peer-to-peer used cars marketplace, Zoomo, has raised $5 million in a Series A or first institutional round of funding from private equity firm SAIF Partners, said two people familiar with the development. This follows the $1 million seed round that company raised from SAIF last December. Founded in July last year by Arnav Kumar, Himangshu Hazarika and Aniket Behera, the company will use the funds to develop its technology platform and expand to seven new cities. It currently has a presence in Bengaluru and Mumbai and will launch operations in Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad and Chandigarh by the year end, said one of the two people mentioned earlier. "The new car market in India is 2.5 million units (annual). The used car market would be between 3 million and 3.5 million units and is expected to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 20%," said Anil Joshi, partner with venture capital firm Unicorn Ventures....

Startups are taking e-commerce to small towns by partnering with mom-and-pop stores to set up kiosks with product catalogues. Customers get the shopkeeper to order products they normally do not have access to. It's online shopping, offline At Nisha Textiles, a 1,200-sqft two-storeyed apparel store in Cherupuzha, a small town in Kannur district of north Kerala, a queue of customers waits for a turn to shop on a device in a kiosk. The kiosk has a catalogue of products, such as gadgets and apparel, which are not available in the town but the tech-savvy shopkeeper will order for them online. "At first, people check out the kiosk as they are curious. Then they realize that a lot of products are easily available," says Rahul V S, the 28-year-old shop owner. The kiosk in his four-decade-old shop is powered by StoreKing, a startup that enables shopkeepers in small towns help their customers buy products they normally would not have access to. These kiosks remove hurdles to online...