Ten relevant news updates from across the world, useful for examinations
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Headlines - 17 - 07 - 2021
- Education - School Innovation Ambassador Training Program - Union Education Minister and Tribal Affairs Minister jointly launched the ‘School Innovation Ambassador Training Program’ for 50,000 school teachers. It is an innovative training program for school teachers, with the goal of training 50,000 school teachers on Innovation, Entrepreneurship, IPR, Design Thinking, Product development, Idea generation etc. The training will be delivered in online mode only. It is designed by the Innovation Cell of the Ministry of Education and AICTE. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is a statutory body established by AICTE Act, 1987 for proper planning and co-ordinated development of a technical education system throughout the country and regulation & proper maintenance of norms and standards in the technical education system.
- Environment Ecology and Climate Change - Flooding and deaths in Europe - By July 17th, the death toll from flooding in Belgium and Germany rose to more than 150, with hundreds missing. Emergency services in the Netherlands remain on high alert as swelling rivers threaten homes in the south. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said the floods are evidence of the need to act faster on climate change. Technicals: The low-pressure region began forming on July 11th over the area where Germany meets Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Hundreds of kilometres wide and puffed up by heat—in the Netherlands, it had been the hottest June since 1901—it sucked in moisture from lakes and wet soil all across central Europe. Then it sat there for days, disgorging colossal quantities of rain. Some regions got over 90mm of precipitation on July 13th and a further 70mm or more the next day. Reservoirs filled, sewer systems saturated and streams jumped their banks. Soon entire towns were underwater. Across Germany’s north-western states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, bridges, cars and houses were swept away. Germans called it a "Jahrhundertflut", a once-in-a-century flood.
- Science and Technology - Cloud computing by Google in India - Google Cloud announced expanding its footprint in India with its second ‘Cloud Region’ in the country, located in Delhi-NCR. With this, Google Cloud customers operating in India will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”). It is the pool of shared resources such as networks, servers, storage, applications, and services that can be provided to the consumer rather than the consumer managing them on her own which is costly and time-consuming. Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centres, companies or individuals can rent access to storage (or application or services) from a cloud service provider.
- World Politics - Biden attacks Facebook - Joe Biden and Facebook engaged in a testy spat about misinformation, as America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention described a surging covid-19 caseload with 99.5% of new patients unvaccinated. The president blamed Facebook and other social-media platforms for “killing people” by failing to combat misinformation about vaccines. Facebook rejected “accusations which aren’t supported by the facts”. The social media giant has been at the centre of many controversies worldwide, not the least in America itself, and was accused of having being used by Russian agents to push the candidature of Donald Trump in 2016.
- Environment Ecology and Climate Change - Amazon forests no more a carbon sink - The Amazon forests in South America, the largest tropical forests in the world, have started emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) instead of absorbing carbon emissions. Covering over 6 million square kilometres, it is nearly twice the size of India. The Amazon rainforests cover about 80 per cent of the basin, and is home to nearly a fifth of the world’s land species and about 30 million people including hundreds of indigenous groups and several isolated tribes. The basin produces about 20% of the world’s flow of freshwater into the oceans. Over the last few years, the forest faced many threats including fires (doubled since 2013), as farmers burnt their land to clear it for the next crop. In 2019, fires in the Amazon were visible from space. Then there's deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon (which is two-thirds of the area of the rainforest), started in the 1970s and 1980s when large-scale forest conversion for cattle ranching and soy cultivation began. Amazon is now teetering on the edge of functional destruction.
- Social Issues - World Emoji Day - July 17th was declared the World Emoji Day, by Emojipedia, a reference website for the Japanese picture-characters. Since the first in 2014, July 17th each year has seen a flurry of announcements. This year Unicode Consortium, which approves emojis, unveiled some new icons, including a pregnant man and a multi-racial handshake. Scientists have joined the bandwagon, publishing an empirical analysis of global emoji use in Online Social Networks and Media, a journal. Researchers crunched the emojis from tens of millions of tweets in 30 languages. Despite cultural anomalies, emojis are strikingly universal and easily traverse language barriers. Surely that is cause for a partying face.
- Polity and Constitution - J&L LG sacks terror-linked suspected govt. servants - The Lt. Governor of J&K Manoj Sinha dismissed 11 Jammu and Kashmir government employees for alleged terror links under provisions of Article 311(2)(c) of the Constitution. These include two sons of Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin. The Article 311 of the Constitution deals with ‘Dismissal, removal or reduction in rank of persons employed in civil capacities under the Union or a State’. Under Article 311(2), no civil servant can be "dismissed or removed or reduced in rank except after an inquiry in which he has been informed of the charges and given a reasonable opportunity of being heard in respect of those charges". Subsection (c) of the provision, however, says this clause shall not apply “where the President or the Governor, as the case may be, is satisfied that in the interest of the security of the State it is not expedient to hold such inquiry”. The safeguard of an inquiry also does not apply in cases of conviction on a criminal charge [311(2)(a)], or “where the authority…is satisfied that for some reason, to be recorded by that authority in writing, it is not reasonably practicable to hold such inquiry”. [311(2)(b)].
- World Politics - Indian projets in Afghanistan - As the Taliban push ahead with military offensives across Afghanistan, preparing to take over after the exit of US and NATO forces, India may be left with little choice but to exit fully. The 42MW Salma Dam in Herat province was inaugurated in 2016 and is known as the Afghan-India Friendship Dam. The other high-profile project was the 218-km Zaranj-Delaram highway built by the Border Roads Organisation. Zaranj is located close to Afghanistan’s border with Iran. The Afghan Parliament in Kabul was built by India at $90 million, and opened in 2015. A block in the building is named after former PM AB Vajpayee. In 2016, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Prime Minister Modi inaugurated the restored Stor Palace in Kabul, originally built in the late 19th century, and which was the setting for the 1919 Rawalpindi Agreement by which Afghanistan became an independent country. At the Geneva Conference in November, India announced that it had concluded with Afghanistan an agreement for the construction of the Shatoot Dam in Kabul district, which would provide safe drinking water to 2 million residents. Last year, India pledged $1 million for another Aga Khan heritage project, the restoration of the Bala Hissar Fort south of Kabul, whose origins go back to the 6th century. Bala Hissar went on to become a significant Mughal fort, parts of it were rebuilt by Jahangir, and it was used as a residence by Shah Jahan.
- Science and Technolgy - NASA trying to fix Hubble's trouble - NASA plans to fix a glitch that has stopped the Hubble space telescope from being used for science work for more many days. The malfunction has been described as the most serious problem in a decade to face the legendary observatory, which is currently running in “safe mode”. The Hubble, launched in 1990, and named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, is the first major optical telescope to be placed in space and has made groundbreaking discoveries in the field of astronomy since its launch. The launch and deployment of Hubble in April 1990 is said to be the “most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo’s telescope.” It is larger than a school bus in size, has a 7.9 feet mirror, and captures stunning images of deep space playing a major role in helping astronomers understand the universe by observing the most distant stars, galaxies and planets.
- Science and Technology - Massive science museum in Shanghai - At 4,20,000 square feet (39,000 square metres) — more than five times the size of a British Football Association pitch — Shanghai's new museum dedicated to astronomy, is the world's largest. The building’s designers, Ennead Architects, eschewed straight edges and right angles. Instead the American firm deployed arcing lines meant to evoke the constant movement of the cosmos. The museum features a sphere housing a planetarium, and an inverted dome offering visitors a panorama of the sky. According to the project’s main architect, the design was inspired by the as-yet unsolved question of how to calculate the motion of more than two celestial bodies based on the gravitational attraction between them. Geopolitics undoubtedly played a part as well. China and America have been engaged in a new space race as part of their great-power rivalry. The unprecedented museum is ostensibly the latest show of China’s determination to win.
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