In a majority of OECD countries, GDP growth over the past three decades has been associated with growing income disparities.

This document describes and discusses a new supply side framework that quantifies the impact of structural reforms on per capita income in OECD countries.

The Portuguese economy is gradually recovering from a deep recession thanks to a broad structural reform agenda that has led to rising economic growth, falling unemployment and remarkable progress in export performance.

Wales should continue its efforts to reform the curriculum and raise the standards of teaching in order to improve the quality and equity of its school system, according to a new OECD report.

How Wales can ensure the successful implementation of its reforms (OECD Education Today Blog)

In most countries with available data, public educational institutions charge different tuition fees for national and foreign students enrolled in the same programme. In Australia, Austria, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, foreign students pay on average about twice or more the tuition fees charged to national students.

Full and effective implementation of recent reforms, including the Jobs Act and the Good Schools reform, would help boost growth in Italy by improving people’s skills and ensuring their more effective use across the country, according to a new OECD report.

The Netherlands is gradually emerging from a double-dip recession with strengthened public finances and reforms on track to improve the labour and housing markets and the health care and pension systems. These reforms are paying off, says the OECD. Growth is expected to reach 1% this year and 1.3% in 2015.

Japan must make revitalising growth its number one priority with reforms to boost productivity and encourage more women and older people into jobs to compensate for its rapidly shrinking labour force, according to the OECD.

1. As States Race to Woo MNCs Shifting Out of China With Labour Reforms, Will Beaureacuracy Rise to Occasion...  Todaynewspaper
2. View: The unbearable lightness of these labour reforms  Economic Times
3. Watch | UP Labour Law Ordinance: 'An Attempt at Labour Exploitation, India Pushed Back to 19th Century'  The Wire
4. Covid-19: Yogi Adityanath Attempts Reforms, Delivers Regulatory Chaos in UP  News18
5. Ease labour laws now: UP gets it right, but relaxation must become permanent  The Financial Express
6. View Full coverage on Google News

Receipts from residential purchases fell 10 per cent in 2018/19 to £8.4billion compared with the previous year. This is the biggest fall since house prices collapsed during credit crunch in 2008.

The West Bengal Health Department on Saturday formed teams to support surveillance and monitoring of treatment at five hospitals treating COVID-19 patients in the city. The team members will pay regular visits to these hospitals and send reports to the department, the state government said in an order. The department has also set up a dedicated help line for issues regarding the non-availability of PPEs and other supplies. The feedback and suggestions will be duly recorded and acted upon by the state government for appropriate remedial measures, the order said. The West Bengal government has also constituted a team for guidance on containment activities in different districts of the state.

The central government's own figures indicate that many as two-thirds of those eligible for secondary education remain outside the school system today. A Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) committee estimates that 88,562 additional classrooms will be required in 2007-08 and over 1.3 lakh additional teachers. Deepa A reports.

Amidst this anomalous global pandemic, as the whole world wars against a sinuously strong, mutating virus what has metamorphosed is the human spirit. Whether it is a housewife who files her first writ petition to...

The state health department has also set up a dedicated helpline for issues regarding the non-availability of PPEs and other supplies.

The Government of India decided to extend the lockdown again for two weeks after May 3 due to the full play of Novel Coronavirus (COVID 19). To avoid academic loss and take appropriate measures for the future of students, Prime Minister

China's central bank said on Sunday it will make prudent monetary policy more flexible and step up counter-cyclical adjustments to support the real economy and fend off financial risks.

Archives, Room Use Only - TK5262.V35 1894

Archives, Room Use Only - TK5264.J76 1913

Archives, Room Use Only - VK381.B76 1917

Fed up of waiting to be accommodated on trains or buses for their home states, a fresh sea of migrant labourers took to the Eastern Express Highway (EEH) on Saturday in a bid to cover the arduous journey on foot. Some labourers said they had no roof over their heads in Mumbai and would sometimes go to bed on the pavement on an empty stomach. The groups comprised daily wagers, masons, carpenters and restaurant staffers.

Mixed response to State Govt move on labour reforms

Mumbai: Filled travel forms week ago, can’t wait, say fresh migrants on Eastern Express Highway

The team members will pay regular visits to these hospitals and send reports to the department, the state government said in an order.

The committee shall submit its final reports to the government within three months time and also submit an interim report

The non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs mefenamic acid (MFA) and tolfenamic acid (TFA) have a close resemblance in their molecular scaffold, whereby a methyl group in MFA is substituted by a chloro group in TFA. The present study demonstrates the isomorphous nature of these compounds in a series of their multicomponent solids. Furthermore, the unique nature of MFA and TFA has been demonstrated while excavating their alternate solid forms in that, by varying the drug (MFA or TFA) to coformer [4-di­methyl­amino­pyridine (DMAP)] stoichiometric ratio, both drugs have produced three different types of multicomponent crystals, viz. salt (1:1; API to coformer ratio), salt hydrate (1:1:1) and cocrystal salt (2:1). Interestingly, as anticipated from the close similarity of TFA and MFA structures, these multicomponent solids have shown an isomorphous relation. A thorough characterization and structural investigation of the new multicomponent forms of MFA and TFA revealed their similarity in terms of space group and structural packing with isomorphic nature among the pairs. Herein, the experimental results are generalized in a broader perspective for predictably identifying any possible new forms of comparable compounds by mapping their crystal structure landscapes. The utility of such an approach is evident from the identification of polymorph VI of TFA from hetero-seeding with isomorphous MFA form I from acetone–methanol (1:1) solution. That aside, a pseudopolymorph of TFA with di­methyl­formamide (DMF) was obtained, which also has some structural similarity to that of the solvate MFA:DMF. These new isostructural pairs are discussed in the context of solid form screening using structural landscape similarity.

Copper-containing nitrite reductases (CuNiRs) are found in all three kingdoms of life and play a major role in the denitrification branch of the global nitro­gen cycle where nitrate is used in place of di­oxy­gen as an electron acceptor in respiratory energy metabolism. Several C- and N-terminal redox domain tethered CuNiRs have been identified and structurally characterized during the last decade. Our understanding of the role of tethered domains in these new classes of three-domain CuNiRs, where an extra cytochrome or cupredoxin domain is tethered to the catalytic two-domain CuNiRs, has remained limited. This is further compounded by a complete lack of substrate-bound structures for these tethered CuNiRs. There is still no substrate-bound structure for any of the as-isolated wild-type tethered enzymes. Here, structures of nitrite and product-bound states from a nitrite-soaked crystal of the N-terminal cupredoxin-tethered enzyme from the Hyphomicrobium denitrificans strain 1NES1 (Hd1NES1NiR) are provided. These, together with the as-isolated structure of the same species, provide clear evidence for the role of the N-terminal peptide bearing the conserved His27 in water-mediated anchoring of the substrate at the catalytic T2Cu site. Our data indicate a more complex role of tethering than the intuitive advantage for a partner-protein electron-transfer complex by narrowing the conformational search in such a combined system.

In the structural biology of bacterial substrate-binding proteins (SBPs), a growing number of comparisons between substrate-bound and substrate-free forms of metal atom-binding (cluster A-I) SBPs have revealed minimal structural differences between forms. These observations contrast with SBPs that bind substrates such as amino acids or nucleic acids and may undergo >60° rigid-body rotations. Substrate transfer in these SBPs is described by a Venus flytrap model, although this model may not apply to all SBPs. In this report, structures are presented of substrate-free (apo) and reconstituted substrate-bound (holo) YfeA, a polyspecific cluster A-I SBP from Yersinia pestis. It is demonstrated that an apo cluster A-I SBP can be purified by fractionation when co-expressed with its cognate transporter, adding an alternative strategy to the mutagenesis or biochemical treatment used to generate other apo cluster A-I SBPs. The apo YfeA structure contains 111 disordered protein atoms in a mobile helix located in the flexible carboxy-terminal lobe. Metal binding triggers a 15-fold reduction in the solvent-accessible surface area of the metal-binding site and reordering of the 111 protein atoms in the mobile helix. The flexible lobe undergoes a 13.6° rigid-body rotation that is driven by a spring-hammer metal-binding mechanism. This asymmetric rigid-body rotation may be unique to metal atom-binding SBPs (i.e. clusters A-I, A-II and D-IV).

The number and diversity of tectonic landforms in our solar system “is truly remarkable,” Watters and Schultz write. Photographs of these structures have stimulated a range of scholarly investigations.

The post Book Review: Planetary Tectonics examines otherworldly landforms appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Appendices B4 and B5 of Cayron [Acta Cryst. (2019), A75, 411–437] contain equations involving the point group and the metric tensor in which the equality symbol should be substituted by the inclusion symbol.

The Encyclopedia of Life is an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered. The Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library joined together to initiate the project, bringing together species and software experts from across the world. Lean more at www.eol.org

The post The Encyclopedia of Life is a global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants and other life forms on Earth appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

This work presents a technique for extracting the detailed shape of peaks with extended, overlapping tails in an X-ray powder diffraction pattern. The application discussed here concerns crystallite size broadening, though the technique can be applied to spectra of any origin and without regard to how the profiles are to be subsequently analyzed. Historically, the extraction of profile shapes has been difficult due to the complexity of determining the background under the peak, resulting in an offset of the low-frequency components of the Fourier transform of the peak known as the `hook' problem. The use of a carefully considered statistical weighting function in a non-linear least-squares fit, followed by summing the residuals from such a fit with the fit itself, allows one to extract the full shape of an isolated peak, without contributions from either the background or adjacent peaks. The extracted shape, consisting of the fit function recombined with the residuals, is not dependent on any specific shape model. The application of this to analysis of microstructure is performed independently of global parametric models, which would reduce the number of refined parameters; therefore the technique requires high-quality data to produce results of interest. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by extraction of Fourier transforms of peaks from two sets of size-broadened materials with two differing pieces of equipment.

Widespread reforms are needed to ensure that all children are equipped with the skills and instruction they need to learn to read, according to a new report from a committee of the National Research Council.

Legal responses to juvenile offending should be grounded in scientific knowledge about adolescent development and tailored to an individual offenders needs and social environment, says a new report from the National Research Council.

The best indicator of whether a disabled adult who receives Social Security benefits is capable of managing his or her benefits is evidence of real-world performance of meeting his or her own basic needs, rather than an office-based assessment of financial competence, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine calls for a series of substantial reforms to strengthen the U.S. biomedical research system for the next generation of scientists.

The Census Bureau says it will continue its relaunch of limited field operations for the 2020 census next week in some rural communities in nine states.; Credit: Matt Rourke/AP

The Census Bureau says it is continuing the gradual relaunch of limited field operations for the 2020 census next week in nine states where the coronavirus pandemic forced the hand-delivery of paper forms in rural areas to be suspended in mid-March.

On May 13, some local census offices in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington are scheduled to restart that fieldwork, according to an updated schedule the bureau published on its website Friday.

All workers are expected to be trained in CDC guidance in preventing the spread of COVID-19, and besides a new reusable face mask for every 10 days worked and a pair of gloves for each work day, the bureau has ordered 2 ounces of hand sanitizer for each census worker conducting field operations, the bureau tells NPR in an email.

The announcement means more households that receive their mail at post office boxes or drop points are expected to find paper questionnaires left outside their front doors soon. In areas where access to the online census form at my2020census.gov can be spotty, paper forms help ensure that all homes can participate in the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident.

The results are used to determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets through 2030. They also guide the redrawing of voting districts and the distribution of an estimated $1.5 trillion a year in federal funding for schools, roads and other public services in local communities.

The Census Bureau also announced on Friday that fingerprinting for newly hired census workers will pick up again next week in and around Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Pittsburgh. With responses from close to 86 million households bringing the national self-response rate to just over 58% as of Thursday, the federal government is relying on staffing up with enough door knockers to complete the count. They're currently scheduled to make in-person visits to unresponsive homes starting in August.

Last month, Census Bureau officials asked Congress to consider pushing back the legal deadlines for delivering census data used to reapportion House seats and reshape voting maps by four months because of the delays brought on by the coronavirus.

In a letter to U.S. Senate leaders released on Friday, more than a dozen Democratic senators led by Brian Schatz of Hawaii are calling for the next COVID-19 relief package to include more funding and requirements for the Census Bureau "to keep both field workers and the public safe while conducting this constitutionally required enumeration."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

With the latest deal, Jio Platforms is set to net a combined Rs 60,596 crore for the unit of Reliance Industries which comprises mainly its telecom business under Reliance Jio Infocomm

A new study has found evidence for lung toxicity of different forms of ‘cellulose nanocrystals’ (CNCs) in mice. The study suggests that physical characteristics, such as length, of the CNC relates to the type of effect it has on the lung. These nanosized crystals, made from plant-derived materials, are increasingly being used in novel applications, such as cleaning up oil spills in water and flexible electronic displays, and consumer products, which raises concerns about their potential health impacts.

‘Safe harbour protection’ only if intermediaries facilitate and not modify such content, including ads

The alliance aims to help clients provide enterprise end users with exceptional data control across multiple data sources.

Various industry associations flagged concerns related to salaries, labour and liquidity, and sought structural reforms to be instituted at the earliest

NPCI consecutively reported dismal figures for April 2020 for its UPI, IMPS, NETC and Bharat BillPay platforms – as AePS emerges as an outlier.

With the latest deal, Jio Platforms is set to net a combined Rs 60,596 crore for the unit of Reliance Industries which comprises mainly its telecom business under Reliance Jio Infocomm

Reforms to reduce discards of over-quota fish catches are generally predicted to have positive effects on marine ecosystems and biodiversity. Although concerns have been raised over the impacts of the changes on scavenging seabirds who feed upon discarded fish, new research on gannets indicates that, while they often forage near fishing vessels, more than half their time is spent foraging 'naturally' in the open sea.

A new study finds the area around the former Fukushima power plant teeming with life.

The gaping 260-foot-wide hole was spotted in an area of Siberia known as "the end of the world."