Junior Digest

New Delhi, Sep 30,2024: Actor Mithun Chakraborty will receive the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on Monday.

The announcement was made by Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Railways, Information Technology and Information Broadcasting, in his post on X.

He wrote, “Mithun Da’s remarkable cinematic journey continues to inspire generations! Honoured to announce that the Dadasaheb Phalke Selection Jury has decided to confer this award on legendary actor Shri Mithun Chakraborty Ji for his distinguished contribution to Indian cinema.

He further added that the award will be presented to Mithun Da by the hands of President Droupadi Murmu at the 70th National Film Awards ceremony on October 8, 2024.

Mithun has also made a significant impact in politics. He joined the Rajya Sabha in 2014 as a Trinamool Congress nominee but resigned two years later. In 2021, he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of the West Bengal assembly polls.

New Delhi, Oct 5,2024: Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) successfully conducted three flight-tests of the 4th Generation, technically-advanced miniaturised Very Short Range Air Defence System (VSHORADS) at the Pokhran Field Firing Ranges in Rajasthan.

The tests were carried out against high speed targets, demonstrating very critical parameters of maximum range and maximum altitude interception, a Defence Ministry statement said on Saturday.

The flight-tests were conducted on October 3rd and 4th.

These development trials showcased repeatability of hit-to-kill capability of the weapon system in various target engagement scenarios covering approaching, receding and crossing modes.

The development of VSHORADS missiles has been completed and two production agencies have been engaged in the Development cum Production Partner (DcPP) mode.

In these trials, the missiles realised through DcPPs have been successfully used, thus paving the way for early user trials and production in a short time span in line with the Government’s vision of ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’.

VSHORADS is a Man Portable Air Defence System designed and developed indigenously by Research Centre Imarat (RCI) in collaboration with other DRDO laboratories and DcPPs.

The three Services have been associated with the project right from the beginning and participated during the developmental trials.

Meanwhile, Defence Minster Rajnath Singh has congratulated DRDO, Armed Forces and the Industry involved in the successful development trials.

This new missile equipped with modern technologies will give further technological boost to the Armed Forces against aerial threats, he said.

Secretary, Department of Defence R&D and Chairman DRDO, Samir V Kamat also congratulated the DRDO team, industry partners and users for the successful flight-tests.

Sept 24,2024: The Karnataka High Court on Tuesday dismissed a petition filed by Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah against an approval granted by Governor Thawar Chand Gehlot to three private individuals to file cases of corruption against him over a land grant to his wife by the Mysore Urban Development Authority (MUDA).

Justice M Nagaprasanna ruled that the Governor’s August 16 order to grant sanction for filing of cases against Siddaramaiah does not suffer from lack of application of mind. The high court pointed out that the reasons for granting the sanction had been detailed in the files of the Governor and did not have to be brought into the final sanction order.

“No fault can be found with the Governor exercising independent discretion to pass the impugned order. It would suffice if the reasons were recorded in the file of the decision-making authority particularly of the high office and those reasons succinctly formed part of the impugned order. A caveat is that reasons must be in the file,” Justice Nagaprasanna said in a summary of findings while dismissing Siddaramaiah’s petition.

“Reasons for the first time cannot be brought before the constitutional court by way of objections. The gubernatorial order nowhere suffers from the want of application of mind. It is not a case of not even a semblance of application of mind by the Governor but the abundance of application of mind,” Justice Nagaprasanna stated.

The “grant of an opportunity for hearing prior to grant of approval under Section 17 A [of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988] is not mandatory if the authority chooses to do so it is open to it,” the HC said.

Oct 1,2024: Israel said it launched a ‘limited’ ground incursion into southern Lebanon and Hezbollah said it fired a barrage of missiles into Israel.Three civilians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Damascus.
Countries including Britain and Spain warned of the risk of escalation.
Israeli forces have been carrying out raids into southern Lebanon for months, uncovering Hezbollah tunnels and weapon caches under homes and uncovering invasion plans by the group, the Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said on Tuesday.
The spokesperson said the details are being declassified for the first time, hours after Israel officially announced a ground operation against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Dozens of such operations had uncovered detailed plans by Hezbollah to enter Israel and carry out an attack similar to the one led by the Palestinian militant group Hamas in southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year.

The findings and evidence discovered under homes in villages in southern Lebanon during the raids will be presented to the international community, Hagari said. He presented videos from soldiers’ body-cameras and maps.
No country has activated a large-scale military evacuation yet, though some are chartering aircraft to assist in their nationals leaving as Beirut airport remains open.
Cyprus, the closest European Union member state to the Middle East, is a likely hub, having processed around 60,000 people fleeing the Hezbollah-Israel war in 2006. Neighbouring Turkey has offered facilities as well.

JERUSALEM/BEIRUT, Sept 28,2024: Israel killed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a powerful airstrike in Beirut, dealing a heavy blow to the Iran-backed group as it reels from an escalating campaign of Israeli attacks.
The Israeli military said on Saturday it had eliminated Nasrallah in the strike on the group’s central command headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday. Hezbollah confirmed he had been killed, without saying how.

Nasrallah’s death is a major blow to both Hezbollah and Iran, removing an influential ally who helped build Hezbollah into the linchpin of Tehran’s network of allied groups in the Arab world.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the killing of Nasrallah as a necessary step toward “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come.”

U.S. President Joe Biden described Nasrallah’s death as a measure of justice for what he called his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis and Lebanese, and said the U.S. fully supported Israel’s right to self-defence.

But when asked if an Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon was inevitable, Biden told reporters on Saturday: “It’s time for a ceasefire.”

A senior member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, deputy commander Abbas Nilforoushan, was also killed in the Israeli attacks in Beirut on Friday, Iranian media reported.

Sources told Reuters that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been moved to a secure location in Iran following Nasrallah’s killing.

Iran later called for a United Nations Security Council meeting on Israel’s actions in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region. It also warned against any attacks on its diplomatic facilities and representatives.

“Iran will not hesitate to exercise its inherent rights under international law to take every measure in defense of its vital national and security interests,” Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani, said in a letter to the 15-member council.

Israeli strikes in Lebanon killed 33 people and wounded 195 others on Saturday, the Lebanese health ministry said.

More than 1,000 people have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded as a result of Israeli attacks in the past two weeks, the health ministry said, and about one million Lebanese have been displaced by the strikes, including hundreds of thousands since Friday, Nasser Yassin, the minister coordinating the government’s crisis response, told Reuters on Saturday.

Israel said it killed a senior Hezbollah intelligence official in a strike on southern Beirut, naming him as Hassan Khalil Yassin. Hezbollah has made no mention of this.

Hezbollah said in a statement that it would continue its battle against Israel “in support of Gaza and Palestine, and in defence of Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people”.

Iran’s Khamenei said Nasrallah’s death would be avenged and his path in fighting Israel would be pursued by other militants.

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said his country was facing the threat of danger, without mentioning the death of Nasrallah. His office later announced three days of mourning for the Hezbollah chief.

Hezbollah and Israel have been fighting a conflict in parallel with Israel’s war against the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza since Hamas’ attack on Israel last Oct. 7, in a cross-border confrontation that has sharply escalated in recent days.
The Israeli military said Nasrallah was eliminated in a “targeted strike” on the group’s underground headquarters below a residential building in Dahiyeh – a Hezbollah-controlled southern suburb of Beirut. It said he was killed along with senior Hezbollah official Ali Karaki and other commanders.

Nasrallah’s death is by far the largest blow in a traumatic fortnight for Hezbollah, starting with a deadly strike on thousands of communications devices used by its members.
Days later, Israel significantly ramped up airstrikes in Lebanon, killing several top Hezbollah commanders and hundreds of other people across wide areas of the country.

Sept 23,2024: Sri Lanka’s new president Anura Kumara Dissanayake has been sworn into office, promising “clean” politics as the country recovers from its worst economic crisis.

The left-leaning Dissanayake has cast himself as a disruptor of the status quo, and analysts see his victory as a rejection of corruption and cronyism that has long plagued the country.

Saturday’s election was the first since 2022, when discontent over the economy fuelled mass protests and chased former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power.

“We need to establish a new clean political culture,” he said. “I commit to achieving this. We will do the utmost to win back the people’s respect and trust in the political system.”

The 55-year-old, who is familiarly known as AKD, told Sri Lankans that “democracy doesn’t end with voting in a leader”.

“We need to strengthen democracy. I pledge to do my utmost to safeguard democracy,” he said.

“I have said before that I am not a magician – I am an ordinary citizen. There are things I know and don’t know. My aim is to gather those with the knowledge and skills to help lift this country.”

Dissanayake received a Buddhist blessing at the end of his speech. Representatives of Sri Lanka’s other main religions – Islam, Hinduism and Christianity – were also present during the oath-taking, highlighting the new president’s emphasis on diversity.

In a statement on the eve of the ceremony, Dissanayake said the “unity of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and all Sri Lankans is the bedrock of this new beginning”.

During the campaign, Dissanayake promised voters good governance and tough anti-corruption measures.

He has promised to develop Sri Lanka’s manufacturing, agriculture and IT sectors. He has also committed to continuing the deal struck with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail Sri Lanka out of the economic crisis while reducing the impact of its austerity measures on the country’s poorest.

Sri Lankan Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena resigned before Dissanayake was sworn in, paving the way for the dissolution of parliament.

In an earlier interview with BBC Sinhala, Dissanayake signalled that he would dissolve parliament soon after being elected.

“There is no point continuing with a parliament that is not in line with what the people want,” he said at the time.

Dissanayake won after the counting stretched into a second round on Sunday, as no candidate was able to win more than 50% of the total votes in the first round.

Once the second and third-choice votes for president had been tallied, the Election Commission said Dissanayake had won with a total of 5,740,179 votes.

Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa came in second at 4,530,902. Outgoing President Ranil Wickremesinghe got 2,299,767 during the first round of counting and was excluded from the second round.

Kigali [Rwanda], October 1,2024: Highly contagious Marburg virus spreads across Rwanda, resulting in over 300 infection cases and eight deaths across the country.
According to Al Jazeera, the country declared an outbreak of the virus which presently has no authorised vaccine or treatment. The virus has affected seven out of the 30 districts in the country.
Health minister of Rwanda, Sabin Nsanzimana said that the country is “intensifying contact tracing and testing to help stop the spread.” Rwandan authorities are intensifying outbreak control efforts to prevent the virus which has infected the country for the first time.
WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus informed on the social media platform X that the World Health Organization (WHO) is scaling up its support and working with the Rwandan authorities to help stop the spread of the virus.
Marburg outbreak has been reported across African countries like Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, and South Africa according to the WHO.

According to the WHO’s Rwanda Office, emergency medical supplies are being readied to curb the virus and a consignment of infection prevention and control supplies is being prepared for delivery to the Rwandan capital city Kigali in the coming days from WHO’s Emergency Response Hub in Nairobi, Kenya.
The rare virus was first identified in 1967 after it caused an outbreak of disease in the laboratories across Marburg, Germany, and Belgrade, Serbia when people died after being exposed to the virus while researching on monkeys.
The virus is transmitted to people from fruit bats and spreads among humans through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people, surfaces and materials.
According to WHO, symptoms of Marburg virus include fever, muscle pains, diarrhoea, vomiting and, in some cases, death through extreme blood loss.
The virus causes hemorrhagic fever and has a fatality ratio of up to 88%. It is in the same family as the virus that causes Ebola virus disease.

London,Oct 3,2024: The UK has announced it is giving up sovereignty of a remote but strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean after more than half a century.

The deal – reached after years of negotiations – will see the UK hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move.

This includes the tropical atoll of Diego Garcia, used by the US government as a military base for its navy ships and long-range bomber aircraft.

The announcement, made in a joint statement by the British and Mauritian Prime Ministers on Thursday, ends decades of often fractious negotiations between the two countries over the islands.

The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia.

The deal is still subject to finalisation of a treaty but both sides have vowed to complete this as quickly as possible.

“Under the terms of this treaty the United Kingdom will agree that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia,” the statement from UK PM Keir Starmer and Mauritius PM Pravind Jugnauth read.

“At the same time, both our countries are committed to the need…to ensure the long-term, secure and effective operation of the existing base on Diego Garcia which plays a vital role in regional and global security.”

The treaty will also “address wrongs of the past and demonstrate the commitment of both parties to support the welfare of Chagossians”, the statement read.

Mauritius will now be able to bring in a programme of resettlement on the Chagos Islands – excepting the military base island of Diego Garcia.
In recent years, the UK has faced rising diplomatic isolation over its claim to what it refers to as the British Indian Ocean Territory, with various United Nations bodies, including its top court and general assembly, overwhelmingly siding with Mauritius and demanding the UK surrender what some have called its “last colony in Africa”.

The government of Mauritius has long argued that it was illegally forced to give the Chagos Islands away in return for its own independence from the UK in 1968.

At the time, the British government had already negotiated a secret deal with the US, agreeing to lease it the largest atoll, Diego Garcia, for use as a military base.

Britain later apologised for forcibly removing more than 1,000 islanders from the entire archipelago and promised to hand the islands to Mauritius when they were no longer needed for strategic purposes.

But until very recently, the UK insisted that Mauritius itself had no legitimate claim to the islands.

For decades, the tiny island nation of Mauritius struggled to win any serious international support on the issue.

A handful of Chagos islanders, who’d been forced to abandon their homes in the late 1960s and early 70s, repeatedly took the British government to court.

But it was only recently that international opinion began to shift.

For a start, African nations began to speak with one voice on the issue, pushing the UK hard on the issue of decolonialisation.

Then Brexit left many European nations reluctant to continue backing the UK’s stance in international forums.

The Mauritian government went on the attack, accusing the UK government of verbal threats.

And the Mauritians began to wage an increasingly sophisticated campaign – at the UN, in courts, and in the media – even landing and planting a flag on the archipelago without British authorisation.

The negotiations that brought about Thursday’s deal began years before Sir Keir Starmer became prime minister.

But the timing of this breakthrough reflects a growing sense of urgency in international affairs, not least regarding Ukraine, with the UK keen to remove the Chagos issue as an obstacle to winning more global support, particularly from African nations, with the prospect of a second Trump presidency looming.

The Chagos islanders themselves – some in Mauritius and the Seychelles, but others living in Crawley – do not speak with one voice on the fate of their homeland.

Some are determined to return to live on the isolated islands, some are more focused on their rights and status in the UK, while others argue that the Chagos archipelago’s status should not be resolved by outsiders.

A backlash from some voices in the UK can be expected, even though successive Conservative and Labour prime ministers have both been working towards the same broad goal.

But there can be no doubting the historic significance of this moment.

Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its vast global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally.

The remaining British overseas territories are: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Turks and Caicos Islands.

Sept 19,2024: The use of pagers and walkie-talkies in back-to-back coordinated explosions in Lebanon has drawn scrutiny to the security of global supply chains and their vulnerability to tampering by governments or other actors.

The utilisation of thousands of electronic devices in the apparent attacks, which are widely believed to have been orchestrated by Israel as part of an operation targeting Lebanon’s armed group Hezbollah, has raised the spectre of everyday communications equipment being weaponised in the future.

Tech companies are likely to see the attacks as a powerful reminder of the importance of securing their supply chains, while the general public’s trust in technology may also take a hit, tech industry and supply chain analysts told Al Jazeera.

“Every company that makes or sells physical devices will be worrying about the integrity of their supply chain,” said James Grimmelmann, Tessler Family professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School in the United States.

“They are likely to consider adding additional safeguards and verifications so that they can better detect and prevent moves like this.”

While Israel has been implicated in assassinations using tampered communications devices before – including the 1996 killing of Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash via an explosives-rigged mobile phone – the scale of the attacks, involving thousands of simultaneous detonations, was unprecedented.
At least 32 people were killed and more than 3,100 were injured in the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday, including Hezbollah members and civilians, according to Lebanese authorities.
Erosion of public trust
Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in the US, described the attacks as a potential watershed for the public’s trust in their electronic devices.

“Somehow thousands of devices were turned into weapons without anyone noticing it. How widespread are these explosive devices? How did the explosives get into the devices or the device supply chains? This attack raises terrifying questions that were never even considered before,” Green said.

Mariarosaria Taddeo, a professor of digital ethics and defence technologies at University of Oxford, said the attacks set a concerning precedent as they involved interference with the supply chain “not for a specific act of sabotage but for a distributed, highly impactful attack”.

“This scenario has been considered by experts but less so by state actors. If something good comes out of them, this is going to a public debate on control of the supply chain, strategic autonomy over digital assets, and digital sovereignty,” Taddeo said.

While it is unclear exactly how the pagers and walkie-talkies were turned into explosive devices, Lebanese and US officials have told multiple media outlets that Israeli intelligence booby-trapped the devices with explosive materials.

Israel has not commented to either confirm or deny responsibility.

Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, whose brand of pagers were used in the attacks, on Wednesday denied manufacturing the deadly devices, saying they had been made under licence by a company called BAC.

Gold Apollo’s CEO Hsu Ching-kuang told US radio NPR that BAC had paid his company through a Middle Eastern bank account that was blocked at least once by his firm’s Taiwanese bank.

BAC, which is based in Hungary’s capital Budapest, has not responded to requests for comment.

On Thursday, The New York Times, citing three unnamed intelligence officials, reported that BAC was an Israeli front set up to manufacture the explosive pagers.

Icom, a radio equipment maker based in Japan, said it had stopped producing the model of radios reportedly used in the attacks about 10 years ago.

“It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” Icom said in a statement.

“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company.”

Chennai, Oct 2,2024: In a significant breakthrough, the Vikram Lander and the Pragyan Rover onboard India’s third Moon Mission Chandrayaan-3 has discovered buried crater on the Moon.

In an update, ISRO said in a study published in peer-reviewed journal Icarus, scientists from PRL and ISRO have shown that Indian Lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 landed within a buried impact crater.
The crater is around 160 km in size, 4.4 km deep, and likely to be older than the South Pole Atkin (SPA) basin.
This is revealed based on analysis of images obtained by Navigation Cameras on Chandrayaan-3 Pragyan rover and Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter’s Optical High Resolution Camera.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission with the Vikram Lander and the Pragyan Rover landed in the high latitude highland region near the south pole of the Moon.
The landing site is located 350 km from the SPA basin rim, an ancient and the largest impact basin in the Solar System.
This landing site has undergone the complex emplacement sequence of SPA basin ejecta followed by the nearby and distant impact basins and complex crater ejecta materials.

“We found that the SPA basin is the major contributor, which deposited nearly 1400 m of ejecta materials, and 11 other basins deposited 580 m of ejecta. The other complex craters contributed up to 90 m of ejecta”, the Scientists said.

Meanwhile, secondary craters of a few km’s in diameter located adjacent to the Vikram lander contributed to 0.5 m ejecta, which are crucial target materials for the Pragyan rover insitu analysis.

The Pragyan rover Navcam and Optical High Resolution Camera images gave the first clue about the linear, distal ejecta rays or groove-like structures possibly formed due to the distant impacts deposited at the Chandrayaan-3 landing site.

Pragyan rover images revealed the landing site is devoid of greater then 1 m boulders along the traverse, which reveals typical highland terrain.
The regional exploration around the Chandrayaan-3 landing site revealed a near semi-circular like structure, with highly degraded in nature. This semi-circular structure encompassed the Statio Shiv Shakti (yellow star).

Further detailed geomorphological and topographical analysis revealed that the semi-circular structure is a heavily degraded crater structure or a buried impact crater with a diameter of 160 km.
This semi-circular structure was highly degraded due to the mantling of thick ejecta deposits from the SPA basin and followed by many other complex craters throughout the geological history of the Moon.
This buried crater is one of the oldest crater on the Moon, and the Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander and Pragyan rover landed and roved within this buried crater, which is hosting the SPA basin ejecta material and some of the most deeply excavated materials on the Moon.

Kathmandu, Sep 30,2024: Nepal’s hydropower plants and irrigation facilities were badly damaged in floods and landslides triggered by incessant rainfalls in recent days, with an estimated initial loss of 4.35 billion Nepali rupees (32.6 million U.S. dollars).

Addressing a press meeting on Sunday, officials at Nepal’s Ministry for Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation said that disasters spelt by continuous rains on Friday and Saturday had caused an estimated loss of 3 billion rupees (22.5 million dollars) to hydropower and transmission projects, while river control and irrigation projects suffered an estimated loss of 1.35 billion rupees (10.1 million dollars).

According to the officials, floods had damaged 11 operating hydropower plants with a combined generation capacity of 625.96MW and forced other operating plants to shut down. As a result, 1,100MW in generation capacity was halted, nearly one-third of the total capacity of the country’s operating power plants.

Fifteen hydropower plants under construction were damaged as well, it was noted.

As power plants and transmission lines were damaged, power supply in different parts of the country has been disrupted.

“Managing enough power for the country in the upcoming winter could be challenging as it takes time to maintain and repair the damaged power plants,” said Kul Man Ghising, managing director of Nepal Electricity Authority.

Nepal produces surplus hydropower during the monsoon season, but in the dry season it generates around one-third of the power.

Meanwhile, the death toll from floods and landslides hit 170 by Sunday evening, the Home Ministry said in a statement. Furthermore, 111 were injured and 42 others missing, the ministry said, noting that about 4,000 victims had been rescued.

The Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement that 47 of 80 national highways in Nepal had remained obstructed.

Nobel Prize in Medicine 2024: The Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2024 has been awarded to American scientists for the discovery of micro RNA. The awarding institution announced on Monday that scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of micro RNA and its role in gene regulation. They will receive a prize amount of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million). As every year, the Medicine Prize is the first Nobel Prize, which is the most prestigious award in the fields of Medicine, Literature, and Peace, and the remaining five prizes will be announced in the coming days.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2024 has been awarded to American scientists for the discovery of micro RNA. The awarding institution announced on Monday that scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of micro RNA and its role in gene regulation. They will receive a prize amount of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million). Every year, the Medicine Prize is the first Nobel Prize, which is the most prestigious award in the fields of Medicine, Literature, and Peace, and the remaining five prizes will be announced in the coming days.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded since 1901 to recognize achievements in the fields of Medicine, Literature, and Peace, while Economics was added later. Different institutions award prizes in various fields, with the Peace Prize being the only one awarded in Oslo instead of Stockholm. Notably, last year’s Medicine Prize was awarded to Hungarian scientist Katalin Kariko and American colleague Drew Weissman for their discoveries that paved the way for COVID-19 vaccines, which helped control the pandemic.

Colombo, Sep 21,2024: Around 20 percent votes were cast in the first three hours in most of the districts as Sri Lankans exercised their democratic rights to elect a new president on Saturday.

According to the Returning Officers, Polonnaruwa district recorded the highest voter turnout of 35 percent while the polling figure was the lowest – 10 percent – in Jaffna. In capital Colombo, 20 percent of votes were cast till 10 am local time, the Daily Mirror newspaper reported.

The voting started at 7 am with the people of the tiny island nation, grappling with a serious economic crisis, looking to elect a head of state for the next five years.

A record 38 candidates, including incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe, are vying for the country’s highest office in the first election since the economic catastrophe a little more than two years back threw Sri Lanka into political turmoil.

The then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had to flee abroad in July 2022 as the country saw an unprecedented food and fuel scarcity and defaulted on its loans.

Wickremesinghe, who has been steering the country since then, is contesting as an independent candidate.

The other formidable contenders are Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is representing the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance and Sajith Premadasa of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) party. Namak Rajapaksa, son of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, is also in fray.

According to the news portal EconomyNext, 17.1 million of the country’s 22 million population are eligible to vote and the results are expected to be declared by Sunday if the counting process goes smoothly, Election Commission officials have said.

As per the polling system, voters rank up to three candidates in order of their preference on a ballot paper, with a contestant needing to obtain 50 percent of first preference votes to win.

If none of the rivals reach the magic figure of 50 percent of polled votes, a second round of voting will be held between the top two candidates from the opening round after eliminating the other contestants.

Oct 9,2024: The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, as announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden on Tuesday.
This year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics have used physics tools to develop methods that form the basis of today’s powerful machine learning, said the official announcement.
John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can automatically find properties in data, allowing it to identify specific elements in pictures.
This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created a structure that can store and reconstruct information. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can independently discover properties in data and which has become important for the large artificial neural networks now in use.
They used physics to find patterns in information
Many people have experienced how computers can translate between languages, interpret images and even conduct reasonable conversations. What is perhaps less well known is that this type of technology has long been important for research, including the sorting and analysis of vast amounts of data. The development of machine learning has exploded over the past fifteen to twenty years and utilises a structure called an artificial neural network. Nowadays, when we talk about artificial intelligence, this is often the type of technology we mean.

Although computers cannot think, machines can now mimic functions such as memory and learning. This year’s laureates in physics have helped make this possible. Using fundamental concepts and methods from physics, they have developed technologies that use structures in networks to process information.

Machine learning differs from traditional software, which works like a type of recipe. The software receives data, which is processed according to a clear description and produces the results, much like when someone collects ingredients and processes them by following a recipe, producing a cake. Instead of this, in machine learning the computer learns by example, enabling it to tackle problems that are too vague and complicated to be managed by step by step instructions. One example is interpreting a picture to identify the objects in it.
Mimics the brain

An artificial neural network processes information using the entire network structure. The inspiration initially came from the desire to understand how the brain works. In the 1940s, researchers had started to reason around the mathematics that underlies the brain’s network of neurons and synapses. Another piece of the puzzle came from psychology, thanks to neuroscientist Donald Hebb’s hypothesis about how learning occurs because connections between neurons are reinforced when they work together.

Later, these ideas were followed by attempts to recreate how the brain’s network functions by building artificial neural networks as computer simulations. In these, the brain’s neurons are mimicked by nodes that are given different values, and the synapses are represented by connections between the nodes that can be made stronger or weaker. Donald Hebb’s hypothesis is still used as one of the basic rules for updating artificial networks through a process called training.
At the end of the 1960s, some discouraging theoretical results caused many researchers to suspect that these neural networks would never be of any real use. However, interest in artificial neural networks was reawakened in the 1980s, when several important ideas made an impact, including work by this year’s laureates.
Associative memory

Imagine that you are trying to remember a fairly unusual word that you rarely use, such as one for that sloping floor often found in cinemas and lecture halls. You search your memory. It’s something like ramp… perhaps rad…ial? No, not that. Rake, that’s it!

This process of searching through similar words to find the right one is reminiscent of the associative memory that the physicist John Hopfield discovered in 1982. The Hopfield network can store patterns and has a method for recreating them. When the network is given an incomplete or slightly distorted pattern, the method can find the stored pattern that is most similar.

Hopfield had previously used his background in physics to explore theoretical problems in molecular biology. When he was invited to a meeting about neuroscience he encountered research into the structure of the brain. He was fascinated by what he learned and started to think about the dynamics of simple neural networks. When neurons act together, they can give rise to new and powerful characteristics that are not apparent to someone who only looks at the network’s separate components.

In 1980, Hopfield left his position at Princeton University, where his research interests had taken him outside the areas in which his colleagues in physics worked, and moved across the continent. He had accepted the offer of a professorship in chemistry and biology at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena, southern California. There, he had access to computer resources that he could use for free experimentation and to develop his ideas about neural networks.

However, he did not abandon his foundation in physics, where he found inspiration for his under­standing of how systems with many small components that work together can give rise to new and interesting phenomena. He particularly benefitted from having learned about magnetic materials that have special characteristics thanks to their atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The spins of neighbouring atoms affect each other; this can allow domains to form with spin in the same direction. He was able to make a model network with nodes and connections by using the physics that describes how materials develop when spins influence each other.
The network saves images in a landscape

The network that Hopfield built has nodes that are all joined together via connections of different strengths. Each node can store an individual value – in Hopfield’s first work this could either be 0 or 1, like the pixels in a black and white picture.

Hopfield described the overall state of the network with a property that is equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics; the energy is calculated using a formula that uses all the values of the nodes and all the strengths of the connections between them. The Hopfield network is programmed by an image being fed to the nodes, which are given the value of black (0) or white (1). The network’s connections are then adjusted using the energy formula, so that the saved image gets low energy. When another pattern is fed into the network, there is a rule for going through the nodes one by one and checking whether the network has lower energy if the value of that node is changed. If it turns out that energy is reduced if a black pixel is white instead, it changes colour. This procedure continues until it is impossible to find any further improvements. When this point is reached, the network has often reproduced the original image on which it was trained.

This may not appear so remarkable if you only save one pattern. Perhaps you are wondering why you don’t just save the image itself and compare it to another image being tested, but Hopfield’s method is special because several pictures can be saved at the same time and the network can usually differentiate between them.

Hopfield likened searching the network for a saved state to rolling a ball through a landscape of peaks and valleys, with friction that slows its movement. If the ball is dropped in a particular location, it will roll into the nearest valley and stop there. If the network is given a pattern that is close to one of the saved patterns it will, in the same way, keep moving forward until it ends up at the bottom of a valley in the energy landscape, thus finding the closest pattern in its memory.

The Hopfield network can be used to recreate data that contains noise or which has been partially erased.

Hopfield and others have continued to develop the details of how the Hopfield network functions, including nodes that can store any value, not just zero or one. If you think about nodes as pixels in a picture, they can have different colours, not just black or white. Improved methods have made it possible to save more pictures and to differentiate between them even when they are quite similar. It is just as possible to identify or reconstruct any information at all, provided it is built from many data points.
Classification using nineteenth-century physics

Remembering an image is one thing, but interpreting what it depicts requires a little more.

Even very young children can point at different animals and confidently say whether it is a dog, a cat, or a squirrel. They might get it wrong occasionally, but fairly soon they are correct almost all the time. A child can learn this even without seeing any diagrams or explanations of concepts such as species or mammal. After encountering a few examples of each type of animal, the different categories fall into place in the child’s head. People learn to recognise a cat, or understand a word, or enter a room and notice that something has changed, by experiencing the environment around them.

When Hopfield published his article on associative memory, Geoffrey Hinton was working at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He had previously studied experimental psychology and artificial intelligence in England and Scotland and was wondering whether machines could learn to process patterns in a similar way to humans, finding their own categories for sorting and interpreting information. Along with his colleague, Terrence Sejnowski, Hinton started from the Hopfield network and expanded it to build something new, using ideas from statistical physics.

Statistical physics describes systems that are composed of many similar elements, such as molecules in a gas. It is difficult, or impossible, to track all the separate molecules in the gas, but it is possible to consider them collectively to determine the gas’ overarching properties like pressure or temperature. There are many potential ways for gas molecules to spread through its volume at individual speeds and still result in the same collective properties.

The states in which the individual components can jointly exist can be analysed using statistical physics, and the probability of them occurring calculated. Some states are more probable than others; this depends on the amount of available energy, which is described in an equation by the nineteenth-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Hinton’s network utilised that equation, and the method was published in 1985 under the striking name of the Boltzmann machine.
Recognising new examples of the same type

The Boltzmann machine is commonly used with two different types of nodes. Information is fed to one group, which are called visible nodes. The other nodes form a hidden layer. The hidden nodes’ values and connections also contribute to the energy of the network as a whole.

The machine is run by applying a rule for updating the values of the nodes one at a time. Eventually the machine will enter a state in which the nodes’ pattern can change, but the properties of the network as a whole remain the same. Each possible pattern will then have a specific probability that is determined by the network’s energy according to Boltzmann’s equation. When the machine stops it has created a new pattern, which makes the Boltzmann machine an early example of a generative model.

The Boltzmann machine can learn – not from instructions, but from being given examples. It is trained by updating the values in the network’s connections so that the example patterns, which were fed to the visible nodes when it was trained, have the highest possible probability of occurring when the machine is run. If the same pattern is repeated several times during this training, the probability for this pattern is even higher. Training also affects the probability of outputting new patterns that resemble the examples on which the machine was trained.

A trained Boltzmann machine can recognise familiar traits in information it has not previously seen. Imagine meeting a friend’s sibling, and you can immediately see that they must be related. In a similar way, the Boltzmann machine can recognise an entirely new example if it belongs to a category found in the training material, and differentiate it from material that is dissimilar.

In its original form, the Boltzmann machine is fairly inefficient and takes a long time to find solutions. Things become more interesting when it is developed in various ways, which Hinton has continued to explore. Later versions have been thinned out, as the connections between some of the units have been removed. It turns out that this may make the machine more efficient.

During the 1990s, many researchers lost interest in artificial neural networks, but Hinton was one of those who continued to work in the field. He also helped start the new explosion of exciting results; in 2006 he and his colleagues Simon Osindero, Yee Whye Teh and Ruslan Salakhutdinov developed a method for pretraining a network with a series of Boltzmann machines in layers, one on top of the other. This pretraining gave the connections in the network a better starting point, which optimised its training to recognise elements in pictures.

The Boltzmann machine is often used as part of a larger network. For example, it can be used to recommend films or television series based on the viewer’s preferences.
Machine learning – today and tomorrow

Thanks to their work from the 1980s and onward, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton have helped lay the foundation for the machine learning revolution that started around 2010.

The development we are now witnessing has been made possible through access to the vast amounts of data that can be used to train networks, and through the enormous increase in computing power. Today’s artificial neural networks are often enormous and constructed from many layers. These are called deep neural networks and the way they are trained is called deep learning.

A quick glance at Hopfield’s article on associative memory, from 1982, provides some perspective on this development. In it, he used a network with 30 nodes. If all the nodes are connected to each other, there are 435 connections. The nodes have their values, the connections have different strengths and, in total, there are fewer than 500 parameters to keep track of. He also tried a network with 100 nodes, but this was too complicated, given the computer he was using at the time. We can compare this to the large language models of today, which are built as networks that can contain more than one trillion parameters (one million millions).

Many researchers are now developing machine learning’s areas of application. Which will be the most viable remains to be seen, while there is also wide-ranging discussion on the ethical issues that surround the development and use of this technology.

Because physics has contributed tools for the development of machine learning, it is interesting to see how physics, as a research field, is also benefitting from artificial neural networks. Machine learning has long been used in areas we may be familiar with from previous Nobel Prizes in Physics. These include the use of machine learning to sift through and process the vast amounts of data necessary to discover the Higgs particle. Other applications include reducing noise in measurements of the gravitational waves from colliding black holes, or the search for exoplanets.

In recent years, this technology has also begun to be used when calculating and predicting the properties of molecules and materials – such as calculating protein molecules’ structure, which determines their function, or working out which new versions of a material may have the best properties for use in more efficient solar cells.

New Delhi, Oct 9,2024: Ratan Tata, veteran industrialist and the chairman emeritus of the Tata group, passed away at a Mumbai hospital late on Wednesday night.
He was 86.
Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran, in a statement, confirmed the death of Tata.
A pivotal figure in Indian industry, Ratan Tata’s leadership had transformed the Tata Group into a global powerhouse.
Born on December 28, 1937, Ratan Tata was the great-grandson of Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the Tata Group.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi condoled the death of Rata Tata and said, “Shri Ratan Tata Ji was a visionary business leader a compassionate soul and an extraordinary human being.”

“He provided stable leadership to one of India’s oldest and most prestigious business houses. At the same time, his contribution went far beyond the boardroom. He endeared himself to several people, thanks to his humility, kindness and an unwavering commitment to making our society better,” he wrote on twitter handle X.

Born in 1937 to a family of Parsis, an ethno-religious group of Persian descent in India who follow the Zoroastrian religion, Tata graduated from Cornell University where he studied architecture and structural engineering.

He returned to India in 1962 and joined the family firm, which was founded by Jamsetji Tata, Ratan Tata’s great grandfather, in 1868. He joined as an assistant and spent six months training at a company plant in Jamshedpur.

JRD Tata, who had led the group for over half a century, appointed Ratan Tata as his successor.

Ratan Tata took over as chairman in 1991, the same year India unleashed major economic reforms, including devaluing the rupee, to open its economy to the world. And as India looked increasingly outward, so did Tata.
The industrialist rose to global prominence with a series of high-profile international deals. In 2008, he famously oversaw Tata Motors’ purchase of British car brands Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford (F).

In 2000, the group acquired British firm Tetley, owner of one of the largest global tea brands, for $432 million. Seven years later, Tata Steel prevailed in a $12.1 billion battle for control of Corus, a British steel company.

Tata retired as group chairman in 2012 and was chairman emeritus of holding company Tata Sons before his death. Since stepping down from day-to-day duties, the businessman had been throwing himself into improving the lot of India’s many stray animals.
“I think the one thing the family has done is it created a lot of industries in the early days, prior to independence, which were national industries,” Tata told CNN’s Sara Sidner in a rare interview in 2011. “And then gave most of it away in philanthropic grants. And that’s been something that’s been carried on by their successors through the years.”
In 2008, the Indian government awarded him the Padma Vibhushan, the country’s second-highest civilian honour.

BEIRUT/JERUSALEM, Oct 4,2024: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Friday that Iran and its regional allies will not back down from Israel after an Israeli attack on Beirut that is thought to have targeted the heir apparent to Tehran-backed Hezbollah’s slain leader.

Iran raised the stakes when it fired missiles at Israel on Tuesday after its arch-foe assassinated Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah, a towering figure who turned the group into Lebanon’s most powerful military and political force with reach across the Middle East. Israel has vowed to respond.

“The resistance in the region will not back down even with the killing of its leaders,” Khamenei said in a rare appearance leading Friday prayers in Tehran, mentioning Nasrallah in his speech and calling its attack on Israel legal and legitimate.

He did not mention Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine, rumoured to be Nasrallah’s successor. Axios reporter Barak Ravid cited three Israeli officials as saying that Safieddine had been targeted in an underground bunker in Beirut overnight.

Safieddine’s fate was not clear, Ravid said on X.

Israel’s military declined comment and Hezbollah made no comment on Safieddine’s fate. His brother Sayyed Abdallah Safieddine, who is Hezbollah’s representative to Iran, attended Khamenei’s speech in Tehran.

Iran’s proxies in its “Axis of Resistance” — Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and armed groups in Iraq — have carried out attacks in the region in support of the Palestinians in the Gaza war. Khamenei said Afghanistan should join the “defence”.

Israel has assassinated leaders and commanders of Hezbollah and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group it has been seeking to wipe out in Gaza since its attack on Israel a year ago.