Junior Digest

Jeddah [Saudi Arabia], March 4 ,2023: Saudi Arabia is set to introduce yoga in its universities due to its significance for mental and physical health, reported Arab News.
Several agreements will be signed with major universities in Saudi Arabia to support and promote yoga over the next few months, according to Saudi Yoga Committee President Nouf Al-Marwaai.

During her participation in the fourth session, titled “Development and Promotion of New Sports Games in Universities,” Al-Marwaai explained that the committee was striving hard to introduce yoga to universities, emphasizing the importance of practising it for health and wellness, reported Arab News.

“Yoga gives its practitioners many health benefits (for) both physical and mental well-being,” she said, adding, “one of the most important pillars of achieving Vision 2030 is to enhance participation in sports activities, and to achieve sports excellence locally, continentally, and internationally.”
She added that yoga is not just meditation and relaxation as some might believe, but “includes Asana posture practice, Pranayamas breathing techniques, Bandhas muscle control (and) then comes Dhayan and Yoga Nidra meditation and relaxation”.
She added that the committee “aims to discover the talents of distinguished yoga practitioners in all types of yoga in general or Yogasana sports, to hone their talents, and support them to participate and represent the Kingdom in local and international tournaments”.
The announcement was recently made in Riyadh during a forum titled ‘The Role of University Sports in Supporting the Kingdom’s Vision in Sports’, organised by the Saudi Universities Sports Federation in cooperation with the Ministry of Education.
A number of experts and international leaders in university sports, led by the president of the International Universities Sports Federation, Leonz Eder, and Paulo Ferreira, director general of the International University Sports Federation, attended the event, reported Arab News.

Taipei, Taiwan,Feb 28,2023: At opposite ends of Southeast Asia, researchers Pornampai Narenpitak and Heri Kuswanto are both working on the same problem: Is it possible to mimic the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions to halt global warming?

Using computer modelling and analysis, Narenpitak and Kuswanto are separately studying whether shooting large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the earth’s stratosphere could have a similar effect on global temperatures as the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1815.

The eruption, the most powerful in recorded history, spewed an estimated 150 cubic kilometres (150,000 gigalitres) of exploded rock and ash into the air, causing global temperatures to fall as much as 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in what became known as the “year without a summer”.

Stratospheric aerosol injection is among a number of nascent – and controversial – technologies in the field of solar geoengineering (Solar Radiation Management-SRM) that have been touted as potential solutions to mitigating the effects of climate change.

Other proposed strategies include brightening marine clouds to reflect the sun or breaking up cirrus clouds that capture heat.

SRM is largely untested in the real world.

But in Asia, where many countries are juggling the demands of trying to keep the lights on despite outdated power infrastructure and striving for carbon neutrality, the concept is at the centre of a growing body of academic discussion and research.

Narenpita and Kuswanto, who are studying the use of the technology in their respective home countries of Thailand and Indonesia, believe that SRM at the very least merits further study.

“There’s a lot that we do not understand about the climate system itself, let alone SRM,” Narenpitak, a researcher at the National Science and Technology Development Agency in Bangkok, told Al Jazeera.

“And when I say ‘we’, I think it means everyone, from every region in the world, because eventually, the impacts will look differently for different countries. And to assess the impacts, I think it’s best to have people who understand the context of each country to do the analysis. We can’t make any informed decisions if we do not know about these things.”

Take Indonesia.

Kuswanto’s team at the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology in Surabaya, East Java found that while SRM could have positive effects in some parts of the country such as Sumatra and Kalimantan, it would lead to temperature rises elsewhere.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t yet done any more studies about what is the cause of these different results in Indonesia, but of course to improve it, we have to look at the climate systems and we need to study it more,” Kuswanto told Al Jazeera.

The two scientists, whose work is funded by the Degrees Initiative, an NGO focused on furthering SRM research and discussion in developing countries with funding from San Francisco-based Open Philanthropy, are neutral on whether SRM should be used to offset the effects of climate change, but they do share a sentiment shared by many researchers: it is better to know how the technology works, just in case.

Both are also careful to say that SRM is not an alternative or substitute for cutting carbon emissions, but should be seen as more of a supplemental technology.

“Even after we reduce carbon emissions, it takes several years for the carbon that has already been emitted into the atmosphere to be removed – its warming effect is still there,” Narenpitak said.

“There’s a time lag between when we can significantly reduce carbon emissions and when we will see the temperature stop rising. In that sense, SRM may be able to bring down the temperature.”

Climate scientists say that the world must keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5C (2.7F) to avoid some of the worst projected effects of climate change. Achieving that goal, however, appears to be increasingly unlikely.

In October, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of UN Climate Change, warned that countries’ decarbonisation efforts were still “nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required” to meet the 1.5C target.

Whether SRM should even be considered as a solution is still up for debate. The technology was absent from the UN Environment Programme’s 2022 Emissions Gap Report, which included different strategies for climate mitigation.

Much of the major funding for SRM has been concentrated in the United States after a five-year research project by China’s Beijing Normal University, Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences came to an end in 2019, although researchers concluded China should keep pushing towards a global agreement on SRM.

This trend is set to continue after the US 2022 Appropriations Act authorised funding for a five-year project by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to examine how to study SRM on a national scale – setting down goals, concerns, funding needs and which agencies would actually oversee this work.

Testing SRM beyond computer modelling, however, is deeply controversial because of the unknown effects and unpredictability of shooting chemicals into the stratosphere.

Since SRM involves shooting chemicals into the atmosphere 20-30km (12.4-18.6 miles) above the earth’s surface, the deployment of the technology by one country could affect weather patterns in other parts of the world.

Govindasamy Bala, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science’s Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, found in experiments using computer models that the effects of aerosol injections can vary depending on the latitude at which the injections are carried out.

One climate model predicted, for example, different effects on monsoon rains depending on the hemisphere: aerosols injected at 15 degrees north reduced monsoon rain in the Northern Hemisphere and increased rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa.

Other research has shown different effects on hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean compared with typhoons and cyclones elsewhere.

“I think the only conclusion we have right now is if we do stratospheric aerosol injection, it has the ability to reduce global warming. We know it will work, but it will also have side effects and unequal impacts,” Bala told Al Jazeera.

“If we can do this, it means humans can control the climate, right? We have the ability to control climate but the more difficult question is who will decide?”

Such concerns were among the reasons Sweden’s Space Agency in 2021 cancelled a joint project with Harvard University to carry out a landmark technical test of SRM in the Arctic Circle using a high-altitude balloon following public outcry, most notably from Indigenous Saami people living in the region.

The SCoPEx project had been intended as a dry run for navigating a 600kg (1,323 pounds) payload at more than twice the height of a commercial aircraft.

Some climate activists have also raised concerns about moral hazard, arguing the technology could weaken countries’ commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions and give companies licence to keep polluting.

Meanwhile, there are outstanding questions about how the technology would be regulated given the global implications of unilateral action, especially by large countries such as the United States and China.

“The benefits itself [of SRM] can be questioned in the sense that, do we need this when we have other means like mitigation, which is something that we need to push for at this stage,” Dhanasree Jayaram, a research fellow at Earth System Governance and assistant professor at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education’s Centre for Climate Studies in India, told Al Jazeera.

“Does it actually sideline, for instance, research investments and other resources that need to actually go into mitigation? Is this a distraction from the real requirements of climate governance?”

SRM raises geopolitical questions, as well, Jayaram said, as developing countries struggle with their own energy transitions. They could also feel pressure to join the SRM “bandwagon” to ensure they can still have a seat at the table, she said.

While such questions preoccupy academia, some of SRM’s most enthusiastic champions have emerged in Silicon Valley.

Make Sunsets, a two-person team based between the US and Mexico, is preparing to carry out micro SRM experiments with Amazon-bought weather balloons, helium and small amounts of sulphur dioxide. Their long-term goal is to use the balloons to sell cooling credits to private companies.

“Our theory is basically that companies can only meet their net [carbon] zero goals if they resort to things like our measure, because it’s so much more cost-effective,” Make Sunsets founder Luke Iseman told Al Jazeera.

“We can issue a whole lot of these cooling credits, and we don’t wait around for 20 years to see if these trees grow, we actually put this up into the air and can see an impact within several years.”

Make Sunsets has hit a number of snags since its launch in October 2022.

Only a handful of individuals have bought credits so far, according to Iseman.

More seriously, flights were grounded in Mexico after the government there banned the company from carrying out experiments following a number of balloon launches on the Baja Peninsula, citing potential environmental damage.

Last week, Make Sunsets announced it had carried out the launches of three balloons containing small amounts of sulfur dioxides in the US state of Nevada.

SRM researchers such as John Moore, however, argue that the world needs to get a grasp of how the technology could work as soon as possible, rather than finding out later during a global emergency.

“What people tend to be worried about is that people will, in a sense, panic and go for the geoengineering option, suddenly because some terrible catastrophe due to climate change is happening somewhere. And then people try to launch balloons or spray aerosols into the stratosphere,” Moore, a research professor at the University of Lapland’s Arctic Center in Finland and leader of China’s five-year SRM project, told Al Jazeera.

This is particularly true, Moore said, for the countries that are feeling the harshest effects of climate change despite contributing historically fewer greenhouse gases.

“I know there are some people that are quite high profile that say doing any research on solar geoengineering is bad because of this moral hazard argument, and I completely disagree with that,” he said.

“Fundamentally, I think that we actually have a duty to people in the developing world, that have not contributed to greenhouse gas emissions, who are already suffering disproportionate damage because of climate change impacts.”

Source: Al Jazeera

Feb 25,2023:The number of people killed by the earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria earlier this month has now passed 50,000, according to the latest figures from both countries.

In Turkey alone, 44,218 people died as a result of the earthquakes, the country’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said on Friday, while the latest announced death toll in Syria was 5,914.

The first earthquake on February 6 that hit southeastern Turkey and northern Syria measured a magnitude of 7.7 and a second, a little later, measured 7.6. The region has been rocked by more than 9,000 aftershocks since, according to the AFAD.

Nearly 240,000 rescue workers, including volunteers, continue to work in the 11 quake-hit provinces in Turkey. Some of the areas affected by the quakes were initially difficult to access but recovery efforts continue and casualty numbers are rising as they progress.

There have been no reports of survivors being rescued in recent days.

Nearly 530,000 people have been evacuated from the disaster area in Turkey alone and the Turkish government has said that 173,000 buildings have so far been recorded as collapsed or severely damaged, with more than 1.9 million people taking refuge in temporary shelters or hotels and public facilities.

Some 20 million people in Turkey have been affected by the quake, while the United Nations estimates 8.8 million people have been affected in Syria. Less information has come from Syria where many people were already living in precarious conditions after years of civil war.

Many survivors have left the parts of southern Turkey hit by the quake or have been settled in tents, container homes and other government-sponsored accommodation.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pledged to rebuild homes within a year, although experts have said the authorities should put safety before speed.

Some buildings that were meant to withstand tremors crumbled in the latest earthquakes.

New York [US], February 24,2023:India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ruchira Kamboj, on Thursday said India remains committed to multilateralism while reiterating calls for dialogue and diplomacy. She made the statement after India abstained from voting on a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on the need to reach a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.
“India remains steadfastly committed to multilateralism and upholds the principles of the UN Charter. We will always call for dialogue and diplomacy as the only viable way out. While we take note of the stated objective of today’s Resolution, given its inherent limitations in reaching our desired goal of securing lasting peace, we are constrained to abstain,” Kamboj said.

Kamboj added that India’s approach to the Ukraine conflict will continue to be people-centric. She stated that India continues to provide both humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and economic support to neighbours in the Global South.
She noted that reports from the ground reveal a complex scenario, with the conflict between the two nations intensifying on several fronts. Notably, 141 nations voted in favour of the resolution, while 32, including China and India, abstained, and seven voted against it at the UNGA.

Mar 03,2023: Ukraine has ordered the mandatory evacuation of vulnerable residents from the front-line city of Kupiansk and adjacent northeastern territories as fears mount Russia will retake the key city and rail hub.

“Mandatory evacuation of families with children and residents with limited mobility began in Kupiansk community,” the Kharkiv regional military administration said on its website on Friday.

“The decision was made … taking into account the unstable security situation due to constant shelling of the territory of the community by Russian troops,” it added.

Ukraine made rapid gains in the northeastern Kharkiv region late last year, driving deep into Russian lines, but its forces have been on the defensive for three months.

In September, Russian troops retreated from key cities in the Kharkiv region, including Kupiansk.

The city has been an important rail centre used by Russia since it took control after its February 24 invasion.

Washington [US]Feb 28,2023:The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday (local time) confirmed that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China.
“FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed that the Bureau has assessed that the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China,” tweeted the FBI.

This development comes after new intelligence had prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the novel coronavirus pandemic, reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan… I will just make the observation that the Chinese government… has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing,” said FBI chief.
The update, which is less than five pages, wasn’t requested by the Congress. But lawmakers, particularly House and Senate Republicans, have been pursuing their own investigations into the origins of the pandemic and are pressing the Biden administration and the intelligence community for more information.
The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, reported WSJ.
The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of US national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
The Energy Department’s insights come from its network of national laboratories, some of which conduct biological research, rather than more traditional forms of intelligence like spy networks or communications intercepts.
The novel coronavirus first circulated in Wuhan, China, no later than November 2019, according to the US 2021 intelligence report. The pandemic’s origin has been the subject of vigorous debate among academics, intelligence experts and lawmakers.
The emergence of the pandemic heightened tensions between the US and China, which US officials alleged was withholding information about the outbreak. It also led to a spirited and at times partisan debate in the US about its origin.
China, which has placed limits on investigations by the World Health Organisation (WHO), has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of its labs and has suggested it emerged outside China.
The Chinese government didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether there has been any change in its views on the origins of Covid-19.
However, the fact that Wuhan is the center of China’s extensive coronavirus research, has led some scientists and US officials to argue that a lab leak is the best explanation for the pandemic’s origin.
Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002.
They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.

Feb 23,2023:In a year, thousands of Ukrainian civilians and troops on both sides have been killed in Russia’s war, and tensions between Moscow and the West have risen to an all-time high.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin defended the invasion he ordered on February 24, 2022, as his United States counterpart Joe Biden was in Poland, rallying support for Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bemoaned a Russian attack in Kherson, carried out as Putin made his fiery state of the nation speech.

Friday marks the first anniversary of the war the world had feared. Peace seems a distant prospect.

A year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked the largest conflict in Europe since World War II, the repercussions continue to reverberate around the world. Not only has the war in Ukraine set off a geopolitical realignment, but it has caused economic hardship far from the epicenter of the fighting.

The Feb. 24, 2022, invasion has touched off a refugee crisis, as Ukrainians flee the conflict in their homeland and many Russian men seek to avoid conscription. Meanwhile, it has spurred a process toward expanding NATO, with Finland and Sweden pursuing membership after decades of official neutrality.

Ukraine and Russia are key exporters of wheat, barley, corn and cooking oil, particularly to African and Middle Eastern countries. Turkey and the United Nations brokered a deal last summer to allow Ukrainian grain to pass through Black Sea ports, but Russia is reportedly still hindering shipments. Russia is also a major producer of fertilizer and petroleum. Disruptions to the flow of these goods are compounding other supply chain and climate challenges, driving up food and gas prices and causing shortages in places such as Chad, Tunisia and Sri Lanka.

More than 8 million refugees have fled Ukraine in what the World Health Organization describes as “the largest movement of people in the European Region since the Second World War.” Many have been involuntarily relocated by Russia. Others have put a strain on resources, as well as schools and hospitals, in Poland and Germany.

A 21st century war in Europe — led by a nuclear power — is pushing the world toward realignment. It has rattled NATO, the European Union and the U.N., forcing countries to take sides in ways that have led to escalating tensions and diplomatic shifts. For example, Turkey, despite being a NATO member, has increased trade with Russia since the start of the war and has thrown up objections to allowing Sweden and Finland into the alliance.

Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of oil and fuel. European countries have banned the Russian oil, gas and diesel they relied on, which initially caused a steep spike in prices. However, moves by European nations to lock in alternative sources, along with conservation efforts and a mild winter, have largely alleviated those price hikes. Now prices have returned to pre-invasion levels.

ussia has more nuclear weapons than any other country. Its attack on Ukraine has notably reenergized NATO, with the U.S. and other member states funneling tens of billions of dollars worth of military equipment into Ukraine. Early weapons deliveries included anti-tank rockets such as the U.S.-made Javelin. In the latest moves, the U.S., Germany and Britain have promised to provide state-of-the-art tanks.

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Mar 04,2023:The World Health Organization has urged all countries to reveal what they know about the origins of COVID-19 following claims by the United States that the virus was likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory and which has led to furious denials from Beijing.

US Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray told Fox News this week that the FBI had assessed the source of the COVID-19 pandemic was “most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan”, the Chinese city that hosts a virus research laboratory and was the location of the first COVID infections in late 2019.

“If any country has information about the origins of the pandemic, it’s essential for that information to be shared with WHO and the international scientific community,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday.

“Not so as to apportion blame but to advance our understanding of how this pandemic started, so we can prevent, prepare for and respond to future epidemics and pandemics,” the WHO chief said.

The WHO has not abandoned efforts to identify the source of the pandemic, he said.

“WHO continues to call for [China] to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results. To that effect, I have written to, and spoken with, high-level Chinese leaders on multiple occasions, as recently as just a few weeks ago.”

The WHO chief also said that “all hypotheses on the origins of the virus remain on the table”.

Chinese officials have angrily denied the FBI’s claim of their country being the origin of the pandemic, calling it a smear campaign against Beijing.

Wray also told Fox News television that China had thwarted efforts to identify the origin of the virus.

“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government … has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing,” Wray said.

Politicisation of the search to identify the origin of the virus was making the scientific work harder and the world less safe as a result, Tedros added.

Tedros said there was a moral imperative to find out how the pandemic started, for the sake of the millions who lost their lives to COVID-19 and those living with long COVID.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, said the organisation had reached out to the US mission in Geneva for more information regarding the FBI chief’s claims.

So far, however, they did not have access to the data on which the US reports were based, said Van Kerkhove, who is an infectious disease epidemiologist.

“It remains vital that that information is shared”, to help move the scientific studies forward, she added.

China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said last week that Beijing had been transparent in the search for the origin of the virus. She countered that the US should look to its own biological laboratories scattered across the world when searching for the virus’s source.

“It is the US who should respond to the world’s questions and concerns over Fort Detrick and its military and biological labs across the world,” Mao said.

“By politicising the issue, the US will not succeed in discrediting China. Instead, it will only hurt the US’s own credibility.”

As of February 21, there have been more than 757 million virus infections and 6.85 million related deaths, according to the WHO’s global COVID-19 trackers. The WHO also acknowledges that the true death toll is far higher.