The Strangest Mobile Gadgets Never Made

We sure love our mobile gadgets, even those that never saw the light of day. It’s enough to get us pumped up to see the concepts that designers have come up with in the mobile gear space. Technologizer has rounded up 21 of the weirdest mobile gadgets from Google Patents and laid them out for our amazement. There’s the laptop with the integrated dot matrix printer and another with a detachable screen for putting it on a projector to make presentations. These never-produced gadgets are enough to bring tears to a geek’s eyes. OK, not really.

Who regulates whom in the financial world?

The importance of regulations and regulators would have been very clear by now. Especially after the Satyam saga. Regulators are the good people who know who should run in which way. If there is a deviation it is the regulators job to tell so and advise corrective action.

The external auditors for Satyam are PWC. It is the job of the auditors of PWC to actually check all the bank deposits and other instruments mentioned on the balance sheet. Since they haven’t done their job very well India has got its biggest corporate fraud. In the case of auditors, Institute of Chartered accounts in India (ICAI) is the governing body of all the chartered accountants in India. It becomes the job of ICAI in this case to put the auditors of PWC in the right place.

Another biggest regulatory body in the financial markets is Securities and exchange Board in India (SEBI). It has to step into action every now and then. Be it the ipo allocation fraud or the pledging of shares or the price-sensitive rumours. SEBI is the watchdog. If it lapses then the hell will break loose, literally.

There is a governing agency for all the practitioners in the financial world. Here I am listing down the entity and its governing agency.

ENTITY	REGULATOR
BANKS - ISSUE COLLECTION	SEBI
CREDIT RATING AGENCIES	SEBI
CUSTODIAL SERVICES	SEBI
DEBENTURE TRUSTEES	SEBI
DEPOSITORIES	SEBI
DEPOSITORY PARTICIPANTS	SEBI
FOREIGN BROKERS	SEBI
FOREIGN DEBT FUNDS	SEBI
FOREIGN INVESTMENT INSTITUTIONS	SEBI
INVESTMENT BANKERS	SEBI
INVESTOR ASSOCIATIONS	SEBI
MUTUAL FUNDS & ASSET MANAGEMENT COMPANIES	SEBI
PLANTATION COMPANIES	SEBI
PORTFOLIO MANAGERS	SEBI
REGISTRARS & SHARE TRANSFER AGENTS	SEBI
STOCK BROKERS	SEBI
STOCK EXCHANGES	SEBI
SUB-BROKERS	SEBI
VENTURE CAPITAL FUNDS	SEBI
BANKS	RBI
CHIT FUNDS	RBI
NBFCs	RBI
PRIMARY DEALERS	RBI
CO-OPERATIVE BANKS	RBI
INSURANCE BROKERS/ AGENTS	IRDA
INSURANCE COMPANIES	IRDA
AUDITORS	ICAI/CAG
COMPANIES - ALL	MCA/ROC
COMPANIES - LISTED	MCA/ROC/SEBI/SE
COMPANY SECRETARIES	ICSI
MUTUAL FUND BROKERS/ AGENTS	AMFI/SEBI
NEWSPAPERS & MAGAZINES	PCI
RADIO	MIB
TV	MIB
SOLICITORS & LEGAL ADVISORS	BCI

 

As you can see, SEBI is the regulator body for all the happenings in the stock market world. RBI is the regulatory body for all the banks, co-operative banks and the non-banking financial institutions.  (Source : IEPF)

*image credit

The Dirty Thirty. A Reprised Dirty Dozen… 30 Bad Boy *Chemicals* *...*

Banned by EU. Health concerns: Linked to the development of Alzheimer's Disease; may be linked to breast cancer; probable neurotoxin; possible nervous system, respiratory, and developmental toxin. 2. CHEMICAL: BENZYL ACETATE .... Health concerns: Alters skin structure, allowing other chemicals to penetrate deep into the skin and increasing the amounts of other chemicals that reach the bloodstream; animal studies show reproductive effects, positive mutation results, ...

Caselaw on Free Movement of Goods

The EC Commission has published a magnificent compendium of the case law of the Court of Justice on the free movement of goods.

You can download it in pdf here.

Of course, it is very descriptive and contains little or no commentary but it is a very useful source of references.

Highly recommended.

rajnish

A Series: China's Trade Offensive
China's Coming Of Age In The WTO War
Tina  Wang, 04.20.09, 10:00 PM ET

HONG KONG -- Gone are the days when China shied away from launching suits against other countries before the World Trade Organization's top court. Facing a distressed export sector and rising protectionism amid the global economic crisis, the Chinese government will get more comfortable and aggressive about lodging WTO complaints against the U.S., scholars and lawyers say.

This entailed a massive attitude shift for Beijing, from seeing WTO disputes as a failure of bilateral diplomacy to wielding the WTO dispute settlement mechanism as an extremely useful, and necessary, instrument of foreign trade policy. For Beijing, a more mature role as WTO plaintiff is also part and parcel of its growing assertiveness in the global economic order this year.

"It looks as if China's WTO trade disputes are becoming a healthy part of its foreign trade policy," said Chin Leng Lim, an international law professor and associate dean at the University of Hong Kong. "If I were Claire Reade [the chief counsel for China trade enforcement at the U.S. Trade Representative's Office], I'd be pretty worried, because China's now the one doing the suing too."

In Pictures: China's Coming Of Age In The WTO War

On Friday, China filed a WTO complaint against the U.S. for effectively blocking chicken imports from China on health concerns. In January, the WTO, for the first time ever, created an expert panel to decide a suit that was initiated by China, which accused the U.S. of illegally levying duties against Chinese steel pipes, off-road tires and laminated woven sacks. "The Chinese government is becoming increasingly confident in handling WTO-related disputes," said Wang Jiangyu, a legal and trade scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

For Beijing, this is no small shift in both mentality and strategy. For years after China joined the WTO in 2001, the government preferred foreign diplomacy and bilateral negotiation over starting a legal dispute, said Liu Jingdong, vice-director of international economic law at the government think tank Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Taking the extraordinary step of suing another country meant that its diplomacy was a failure, said Liu, who has worked closely with the Ministry of Commerce and other government officials on global trade matters.

"It takes a cultural switch for an East Asian country to conduct diplomacy by going to court," Lim said. "By and large, East Asian countries don't like to sue other countries. It is a massive effort for them to switch that mode of thinking."

In the early years, China caved quickly when it found itself threatened with a lawsuit by the U.S. and E.U., researchers say. For example, in 2004, China immediately settled a WTO complaint by the U.S. that China illegally helped domestic semiconductor makers by taxing imports of integrated circuits. That was the first WTO dispute that China had to fend off. China then settled in two other major cases, involving its coke exports to the E.U. and Chinese anti-dumping duties on U.S. kraft linerboard, from 2004 to 2006. "People were getting the impression that China simply didn't want to litigate," Lim said.

The government was facing the WTO's "power to review our internal affairs, our statutes," Liu said. And that made Beijing "very unhappy" with trade complaints initiated against China, to which it responded with radical rhetoric, rather than legal engagement, Wang said. Beijing's attitude was, "this is all just absurd. We're not going to mess with it," said Steven Dickinson, a Qingdao-based partner at Harris Moure who has worked in Chinese law for 30 years.

But a turning point came with the crucial auto-parts case, which China lost in September to the U.S., E.U. and Canada, observers say. That was China's first major defeat. The WTO ruled that China illegally taxed foreign imports of car parts for automakers assembling vehicles in China. "People were wondering why this case was being fought to the bitter end," Lim said. China did not settle during the formal consultation period, in which countries negotiate and try to resolve the matter, that occurs after parties lodge a trade complaint with the WTO. China lost the case when the WTO created an expert panel to make a ruling. China then appealed to the WTO's top court, the appellate body that rotates judges from member countries, and lost as well.

China also fought hard in intellectual property rights. It vigorously defended against the U.S. anti-piracy complaint, which charged that Chinese law was not harsh enough on counterfeiting. In January, the WTO eventually handed out a mixed decision: It agreed with the U.S. that China must protect copyrighted content banned by state censors and had to provide criminal penalties on piracy. But it sided with China, saying that China's criminal penalties for piracy were not too weak. China has switched from taking a radical tune to making more confident arguments based on the rhetoric of WTO rules, Wang said.

Why has China made this about-face? There are various speculations. Beijing's cultural attitude may have changed, as a new generation of government officials saw the WTO dispute resolution process as a technical instrument, rather than a hegemony of the Western legal system. China may have needed time to become more comfortable with using WTO suits to its economic advantage, realizing that it should not give up on cases where a lot is at stake, particularly amid the global demand slump. "China has gotten a lot of benefits from the WTO system," and it should press its legal rights before the WTO as well, said Liu. "Especially in the environment of economic crisis, if we fail to use them, we incur a great loss."

"China's thinking, 'wait a second, it can go both ways. Instead of purely defending against claims against us, we can make our own claims.' That's a new attitude, and a proper attitude," Dickinson said. Another export powerhouse, Japan, went through a similar experience in the 1980s. Its exports faced barriers all around the world, and it had to learn how to litigate, Lim and Dickinson added.

As evidenced by its assertiveness in the G-20 summit, China also wants to show that it is a leader within the international economic order, that it will play by the existing rules and institutions, and that it can play it well.

Facing plunging exports, powerful state-owned companies, too, are putting strong pressure on Beijing to advance their interests or voice their trade complaints. It is no coincidence that the first WTO suit launched by China this year to reach a WTO expert panel protects the country's giant steelmakers, which have been squeezed by the global economic crisis.

In Pictures: China's Coming Of Age In The WTO War

Next part in the series: With the U.S. and China plunging headlong into massive stimulus measures that affect export sectors, both sides will have plenty of bones to pick with each other. Facing more WTO disputes on the horizon, Chinese legal capacity is not as strong or experienced at the laborious, costly WTO cases as are the powerful Washington law firms. For now, Beijing has settled for hiring foreign lawyers to work with its own, but China's law firms are racing to build up their WTO practices. And Chinese lawyers are racing to advise the country's industries and local governments on WTO cases and issues that will impact them.