Oct 08,2022:Human rights campaigners in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
Jailed human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organization Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties were announced as the 2022 winners at a ceremony in Oslo.
“This year’s laureates represent civil society in their home countries. They have for many years promoted the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens,” said Norwegian Nobel Committee Chair Berit Reiss-Andersen. “They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy,” she added.
The award comes as Russia wages war on Ukraine, in Europe’s biggest land conflict since World War II. Nominations for this year’s winner took place prior to the Kremlin’s invasion in late February, but it was widely speculated that the award may reflect the conflict.
This year’s winners are “neighbors and civil society [groups] with a joint understanding of the values that they want to promote,” committee chair Reiss-Andersen said.
Ales Bialiatski was one of the initiators of the democracy movement that emerged in Belarus in the mid-1980s. In 1996, he founded the Minsk-based human rights group “Viasna,” which advocates for political prisoners. He was himself detained in 2020 following protests against the re-election of Belarus’ strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin. He remains in jail without trial.
In a statement on its website, Viasna noted that this was Bialiastski’s sixth nomination for the award, and that he is the fourth winner to nave received the Nobel Peace Prize while in custody.
Memorial is a human rights group in Russia established by activists in the former Soviet Union in 1987, as a public history campaign to ensure that the victims of the Soviet regime would never be forgotten.
During the Chechen wars, Memorial gathered information on alleged war crimes committed by Russian and pro-Russian forces. The Russian supreme court liquidated Memorial in December 2021, just two months prior to the invasion of Ukraine, amid a broader crackdown on human rights groups and independent journalists.
The Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties has focused on documenting and identifying Russian war crimes in Ukraine since the war began. The center was established in 2007 to advance issues of democracy and human rights in Ukraine more broadly.
Not all were happy with the decision to split the prize, however. “Nobel Committee has an interesting understanding of word ‘peace’ if representatives of two countries that attacked a third one receive @NobelPrize together,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Twitter.
Bangkok, Oct 06,2022:Thirty-four people were killed in Thailand on Thursday in a mass shooting and knife attack at a day-care centre by a former policeman who killed his wife and child before shooting himself dead, reported Reuters citing officials.
The victims included 22 children as well as adults, police said in a statement. However, the motive behind his act is unclear, the report says. The ex-cop was discharged from the service for drug-related reasons, district official Jidapa Boonsom told the news agency.
About 30 children were at the centre when the gunman came in around lunchtime, he added.
Oct 05,2022:Mangalyaan, India’s first interplanetary mission, was designed to run for six months. The Rs. 450 crore mission, however, kept on going for nearly nine years.
Now, it seems that the spacecraft’s wild journey has come to an end. According to sources in the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) has run out of fuel.
The mission has gone quiet now.
Mangalyaan was launched in 2013. The spacecraft has been in Mars’ orbit for longer than imagined.
Now, sources in ISRO have told news agency PTI, “Right now, there is no fuel left. The satellite battery has drained.”
Although the space agency is yet to make an official remark, it seems that the end has come. “The link has been lost,” added the sources.
It seems that back-to-back eclipses, including one that lasted for seven-and-half hours, are the primary cause of Mangalyaan’s quiet death.
“The satellite battery is designed to handle eclipses of one hour and 40 minutes, a longer eclipse would drain the battery,” said an official.
ISRO has been trying to perform orbital maneuvers to take the spacecraft to a different orbit to avoid eclipses.
Mangalyaan was an example to the world in efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and longevity. “It has done its job and yielded significant scientific results,” the sources said.
MOM carried five instruments, including the Mars Color Camera (MCC), which took over 1,000 images and published a Mars Atlas.
It carried five payloads to collect data on surface geology, morphology, atmospheric processes, surface temperature, and atmospheric escape process.