News in Short

• Rajya Sabha MP from the Janata Dal(United) and industrialist Mahendra Prasad died at a private hospital. He was 81 years old.
• Mahendra Prasad was a seven-term Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar and was also elected to the Lok Sabha once.
• Mahendra Prasad was first elected to the Lok Sabha on a Congress ticket in 1980. He remained associated with the party for a long time and shifted his loyalties later as its fortunes declined in the state.

• Turkey urged Russia to drop “one-sided” demands and adopt a more constructive approach in its stand-off with Western powers and NATO over Ukraine.
• NATO member Turkey has irritated Moscow by supplying combat drones to Ukraine that Russia fears could be used by Kiev in its conflict with separatists in two eastern regions.
• But Turkey has also upset Washington and NATO by acquiring an advanced missile defence system from Russia that resulted in sanctions from the United States.

• VikramMisri, who was India’s envoy to China for almost three years till early this month, has been named the next deputy national security adviser.
• He will succeed Pankaj Saran, former Indian envoy to Russia and Bangladesh, who demits office on December 31.
• A 1989-batch IFS officer, Misri will bring in his foreign policy expertise to the post, and will report to National Security Adviser (NSA) AjitDoval. The other two deputy NSAs are Rajender Khanna and DattaPandsalgikar.

• Edward. O. Wilson, the U.S. scientist, professor and author whose study of insects earned him the nickname “Darwin’s natural heir”, has died at age 92.
• Wilson was an award-winning biologist and longtime Harvard University research professor, considered the world’s leading authority on ants and their behavior.
• While an entomologist early in his career, he broadened his scope immensely, studying not just insects but the social interactions of birds, mammals and humans, and he effectively established a new field of science known as sociobiology.
• He was the author of hundreds of scientific papers and more than 30 books, two of which won him Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction: 1978’s On Human Nature, and The Ants in 1990.

• Keri Hulme, the New Zealander whose 1984 novel The Bone People won the Man Booker Prize, has died. She was 74.
• Hulme worked as a tobacco picker, dropped out of law school and was a charity worker before becoming an unusual literary star when The Bone People, her first novel, won one of fiction’s greatest prizes.
• Hulme took almost 20 years to produce The Bone People which drew on her indigenous Maori and Scottish heritage, weaving themes of personal and cultural isolation.