Junior Digest

June 08,2022:Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has risen the benchmark lending rate by half a percentage point to 4.90 per cent on Wednesday. The top bank has decided unanimously to keep the policy stance of ‘withdrawal of accommodation.’

“The MPC unanimously decided to raise the rates on the back of inflationary pressures and higher supply shocks,” said RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das.

Inflation is likely to remain above 6 per cent in the first three-quarters of the current fiscal. “Our steps will be calibrated, focussed on bringing down inflation to the target level,” he said.
Last month, in its off-cycle monetary policy review the central bank hiked the policy repo rate by 40 basis points or 0.40 per cent to 4.4 per cent. This was the first increase in the policy repo rate in nearly two years. The repo rate is the interest rate at which the RBI lends short-term funds to banks.
Inflation has been above the RBI’s 2-6 per cent target band since the beginning of this year. As per the latest available data, India’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) based inflation surged to an eight-year high of 7.79 per cent in April. It has been above 6 per cent since January 2022.

In April, the RBI revised upward the inflation forecast for the current financial year to 5.7 per cent from its earlier projection of 4.5 per cent announced in February.

June 3,2022:In a tweet on Friday morning, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath wrote, “Under the guidance of respected PM Narendra Modi ji, ‘New India of New Uttar Pradesh’ has become the best destination in the country for investment. The enthusiasm of investors towards Ground Breaking Ceremony 3.0 is direct proof of this. This ceremony is going to give flight to the aspirations of ‘New Uttar Pradesh’.”

At around 11 AM, Prime Minister will reach Indira Gandhi Pratishthan, Lucknow where he will attend the Ground Breaking Ceremony @3.0 of the UP Investors Summit, the Prime Minister’s office informed.

At around 1:45 PM, Prime Minister will reach Paraunkh village, Kanpur, where he will accompany President Ram Nath Kovind to visit Pathri Mata Mandir.

Thereafter, at around 2 PM, they will visit Dr BR Ambedkar Bhawan, which will be followed by a visit to Milan Kendra at 2:15 PM.

The Kendra is the ancestral house of the President that was donated for public use and converted into a community centre (Milan Kendra). Subsequently, they will attend a public function at Paraunkh village at 2:30 PM.

During the Ground Breaking Ceremony, Prime Minister will lay the foundation stone of 1,406 projects worth more than Rs 80,000 crores.

The projects encompass diverse sectors like Agriculture and Allied, IT and Electronics, MSME, Manufacturing, Renewable Energy, Pharma, Tourism, Defence and Aerospace, Handloom and Textiles etc.

The ceremony will be attended by top industry leaders of the country.

The UP Investors Summit 2018 was held on February 21st -22nd, 2018, with the first Ground Breaking Ceremony being held on July 29, 2018, and the second Ground Breaking Ceremony on July 28, 2019.

During the first Ground Breaking Ceremony, the foundation of 81 projects worth more than Rs 61,500 crore was laid, while in the second Ground Breaking Ceremony, the foundation of 290 projects with investments of more than Rs 67,000 crore was laid.

Ahmedabad,June 11,2022: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said many sectors remained unexplored in the country in the past due to lack of conducive policies.
Amit Shah was speaking at the launch of headquarters of the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) in Bopal area of Ahmedabad. It was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“We are celebrating 75 years of our Independence. I want to say that governments before 2014 did not pay much attention to policy making. In the absence of conducive policies, many sectors remained unexplored or remained out of the reach of the people as well as technocrats,” said Amit Shah in his address before PM Modi’s speech.

“The biggest change Modiji brought after becoming PM was formulating new policies and launching government programmes around those policies. This change created new opportunities for our sectors, and space is one of those sectors,” said Amit Shah.
He said new policies formulated by the government under PM Modi have also opened the Indian market and created a platform for the youth, adding that IN-SPACe will become a medium to realise numerous possibilities in the space sector.

“We have achieved a huge milestone with the launch of IN-SPACe today. This will help us in utilizing all those technologies which were created by ISRO till now. It was Modiji who came up with this idea of creating an ecosystem wherein private players and startups also play an important role,” said Amit Shah.

He expressed confidence that IN-SPACe will become a platform to give opportunity as well assistance to the private sector talents.

June 11,2022:Security concerns raised by Turkey in its opposition to Finland and Sweden joining NATO are legitimate, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said during a visit to Finland.

Sweden and Finland applied to join the Western military alliance last month, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But they have faced opposition from Turkey, which has accused them of supporting and harbouring Kurdish militants and other groups that Ankara deems “terrorists”.

“These are legitimate concerns. This is about terrorism, it’s about weapons exports,” Stoltenberg told a joint news conference on Sunday with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto in Naantali, Finland.

Stoltenberg said Turkey was a key NATO ally due to its strategic location on the Black Sea between Europe and the Middle East, and he cited the support Ankara has provided to Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24.

“We have to remember and understand that no NATO ally has suffered more terrorist attacks than Turkiye,” Stoltenberg said, using the Turkish word for the country’s name, as preferred by Turkey and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Stoltenberg and Niinisto said talks with Turkey would continue, but gave no indication of progress in the negotiations.

He also said that a NATO meeting in Madrid at the end of June was “never a deadline” for Finland and Sweden to be accepted as members of the military alliance.

After decades of military non-alignment, Russia’s war in Ukraine has pushed Finland and Sweden to apply to join NATO.

Erdogan, however, accuses the Nordic nations of supporting Kurdish militants deemed by Turkey to be “terrorists” and has vetoed against their entry into the 30-member alliance.
Demands from Ankara to Helsinki and Stockholm include lifting restrictions on arms exports to Turkey and extraditing members of certain Kurdish organisations that are opposed to Erdogan’s government.
In the past weeks, the NATO chief has been working to resolve the dispute.

June7,2022: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has survived a confidence vote that could have seen him removed from power.

Despite profound discontent within his ruling Conservative Party, Johnson won a vote of confidence on Monday by 211 to 148 votes.
Winning the vote means there cannot be another leadership challenge for a year, but the rebellion of his Conservative Party legislators has dealt a serious blow to his authority.

Johnson put a positive spin on surviving the confidence vote, saying his “convincing” and “decisive” victory would now enable the country to move on.

“I think it’s a convincing result, a decisive result and what it means is that as a government we can move on and focus on the stuff that I think really matters to people,” he told reporters.

The confidence vote was triggered on Monday when party official Graham Brady said he had received letters calling for a no-confidence vote in Johnson from at least 54 Conservative Party members of parliament – enough to trigger the measure under party rules.

Johnson needed to win the backing of a simple majority of the 359 Conservative legislators in the parliament of the United Kingdom to remain in power. If Johnson had failed to secure that majority, the party would have been forced to choose a new leader who would also have become the next prime minister.

June 08,2022:In a surprising result for an ongoing medical trial, 12 rectal cancer patients were completely healed of the disease after taking a drug for six months. The patients underwent a series of medical exams — physical exam, endoscopy, bioscopy, PET scans, and MRI scans — and none of the reports showed any signs of the tumour.

The findings were published in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. The paper lists the names of 32 authors.

The initial purpose of this study was listed to find out whether the study drug, TSR-042 (commonly called dostarlimab), followed by standard chemoradiotherapy and standard surgery is an effective treatment for advanced deficient MisMatch Repair (dMMR) solid tumours.

The medical trial was supported by the Simon and Eve Colin Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline, Stand Up to Cancer, Swim Across America, and the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

Participants of the trial with mismatch repair-deficient stage II or III rectal adenocarcinoma were given the drug every three weeks, for six months. According to the initial plan, the treatment was to be followed by standard chemotherapy and surgery, and patients who had a clinical complete response would proceed without both. After at least six months of follow-up, all 12 patients showed a clinical complete response with no signs of the tumour.

At the time of publication of the paper (June 5, 2022), no patients had received chemoradiotherapy or undergone surgery, and no cases of progression or recurrence had been reported during follow-up that ranged from six to 25 months.

Another notable highlight of the trial is that none of the participants reported significant severe side effects. According to The New York Times, around 3-5% of patients who take checkpoint inhibitors (like dostarlimab) show severe complications. The absence of significant side effects shows that they “either they did not treat enough patients or, somehow, these cancers are just plain different,” Dr. Alan P. Venook, a colorectal cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study, was quoted as saying.

June 09,2022:Algeria is “immediately” suspending a two-decades-old friendship treaty with Spain after Madrid reversed decades of neutrality in the Western Sahara dispute.

It was the latest blow to increasingly fragile relations between Algiers and Madrid, which depends on Algeria for its natural gas supply.
“Algeria has decided to immediately suspend the treaty of friendship, good neighbourliness and cooperation” signed with Madrid in 2002, the president’s office said in a statement on Wednesday.

Spain’s government said it regretted Algeria’s decision and reaffirmed its commitment to the friendship treaty.

“The Spanish government regards Algeria as a friendly neighbour country and restates its complete readiness to keep and develop the special cooperation relationship between our two countries, to the benefit of the people of both,” a Spanish foreign ministry statement said.

The Algerian statement said Spain was abusing its role as an “administrating power” in Western Sahara until the United Nations sorts out the decades-old situation over the status of the vast, mineral-rich territory.

It is, therefore, “contributing directly to the degradation of the situation in the Western Sahara and the region”, the president’s office said.
Wednesday’s move reflects Spain’s complex challenge of balancing relations with archrivals Morocco and Algeria, which in August last year broke off diplomatic ties with Rabat over “hostile acts”.
Morocco controls 80 percent of the Western Sahara.

The rest is held by the Algerian-backed Polisario movement, which fought a 15-year war with Morocco after Spanish forces withdrew in 1975 and demands a referendum on independence.
Morocco has offered limited autonomy but insists the phosphate and fisheries-rich territory must remain under its sovereignty.

Spain officially endorsed that position in March to help resolve a year-long diplomatic dispute after it admitted the Polisario’s leader Ibrahim Ait Ghali to be treated for COVID-19.

New Delhi,June 04,2022: Union Minister of State for Education Annapurna Devi on 3 June accused the Delhi government of doing less work and more publicity in the field of education.

The minister said the National Achievement Survey (NAS) is not a high-stake exam, but it was matter of great satisfaction that it has induced competency-based teaching-learning process in the country.

The comments by the MoS came after Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the NAS was shifting along the same lines of the traditional examination process where getting high scores has become the priority of state education departments.

Sisodia made the comments at the National Education Minister’s Conference in Gujarat which concluded on 2 June.

“The problem of the Delhi government is that it does less work and more publicity, especially in the field of education. Self-indulgence is an incurable disease from which it is afflicted. Dust is on their face and mirror is being blamed,” Devi tweeted in Hindi.
The minister pointed out that the recently released findings of the NAS 2021 showed Delhi to be lagging behind the national average in all subjects at the primary level and that the performance has come down as compared to the NAS 2017 results.

“NAS is not an exam or a test. It is a survey to arrive at the Granth of the educational system. All children don’t take this survey. Out of approximately eight to 10 crore in classes 3, 5, 8, 10, only 34 lakh were randomly sampled. The test is scientifically designed and items of questions are based on learning outcomes. No advance preparation can be done for this survey as this is not content-based or rote-based.

“It is not an examination of the individual student but the evaluation of the process of transaction of education at the district, state and national level. A scientifically worked out sample size cannot be trained to have temporary achievement enhancement and therefore in the present form, NAS cannot change into a high-stake examination,” she added.

WELLINGTON, June 8,2022: New Zealand on Wednesday released a draft plan to put a price on agricultural emissions in a bid to tackle one of the country’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases, belching sheep and cattle.

The proposal would make New Zealand, a large agricultural exporter, the first country to have farmers pay for emissions from livestock, the Ministry for Environment said.

New Zealand, home to 5 million people, has about 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep.
Nearly half its total greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, mainly methane, but agricultural emissions have previously been exempted from the country’s emissions trading scheme, drawing criticism of the government’s commitment to stop global warming.

Under the draft plan, put together by government and farm community representatives, farmers will have to pay for their gas emissions from 2025. Short-and long-lived farm gas will be priced separately, although a single measure to calculate their volume will be used.
“There is no question that we need to cut the amount of methane we are putting into the atmosphere, and an effective emissions pricing system for agriculture will play a key part in how we achieve that,” Climate Change Minister James Shaw said.

The proposal includes incentives for farmers who reduce emissions through feed additives, while on-farm forestry can be used to offset emissions. Revenue from the scheme will be invested in research, development and advisory services for farmers.
“Our recommendations enable sustainable food and fibre production for future generations while playing a fair part in meeting our country’s climate commitments,” said Michael Ahie, chair of the primary sector partnership, He Waka Eke Noa.

The proposal would potentially be the biggest regulatory disruption to farming since the removal of agricultural subsidies in the 1980s, said Susan Kilsby, agricultural economist at ANZ Bank.

A final decision on the scheme is expected in December.

BUENOS AIRES,June 04,2022: Thousands of people marched against femicide and gender violence in Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires Friday afternoon, as part of a movement now in its seventh year called Ni Una Menos, or “Not One Woman Less.”
The march was held in the center of the capital, culminating at the National Congress, where protesters lit candles to remember victims of gender-based violence. Marchers held banners that read “We want to stay alive” while others featured photographs of femicide victims.

According to the Women’s Office of the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice, an average of one femicide was recorded every 35 hours in the country last year, with 81% of those killed classified as victims of domestic violence.

“Many women who ended up murdered had (made claims) with the police and had lodged previous complaints in the Ministry (for Women). They still ended up murdered,” Marina Perez, a 50-year-old railway worker, said.
“There is still no immediate answer to the violence,” she added.

By evening, the lights illuminating the Argentine parliament lit up in pink in solidarity.

“What happens to us here is that justice is slow and it’s patriarchal,” said Alejandra Lume, a 58-year-old Argentine woman who carried a sign that read “Old women are also killed.”

“Despite the many complaints they make, women are often not listened to, they are not cared for and in general those who die, die after having made many complaints,” said Lume, surrounded by the sound of women singing and the beat of drums.

June 3,2022:In an emotional speech broadcast live on national television, United States President Joe Biden has called on lawmakers to pass legislation to curb gun violence in the country, a week after 19 children were shot dead by a gunman in their school.

Biden proposed a number of laws, including a ban on assault weapons, which was allowed to lapse under a Republican administration in 2004. Other proposals included a limit on high capacity magazines, secure storage laws, “red flag” laws, universal background checks and the removal of protection laws for gun manufacturers.

“It’s time to act,” Biden said from the White House. “For the children we have lost. For the children we can save. For the nation we love. Let’s meet the moment. It’s time to act.”

The impassioned speech, broadcast during primetime in the US, followed a series of mass shootings across the country in which gunmen have targeted Black people in Buffalo, schoolchildren in Uvalde and doctors in Tulsa.

Peppering his speech with declarations of “enough”, Biden said too many places in the US had become “killing fields”, and urged Republicans in the Senate to back changes to legislation that would make the country safer for everyone.

Alluding to the mid-term elections later this year, he said gun control was a matter of “common sense” and stressed that the Second Amendment, which gun proponents use to curb regulation, was not absolute.

Jason Nichols, a social and political analyst, at the University of Maryland, told Al Jazeera that while he did not expect Republicans to commit to a ban on assault weapons, the November polls might encourage them to adopt some of Biden’s other proposals.

Republicans and some Democrats have blocked tougher gun regulation even after horrific mass shootings such as the murder of 20 young children at a primary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut in 2012.

KYIV, June 11,2022: Ukraine sought more help from the West on Friday, pleading for faster deliveries of weapons to hold off better-armed Russian forces and for humanitarian support to combat deadly diseases.

In Sievierodonetsk, the small city that has become the focus of Russia’s advance in eastern Ukraine and one of the bloodiest flashpoints in a war well into its fourth month, further heavy fighting was reported.

To the south, the mayor of Mariupol – reduced to ruins by a Russian siege – said sanitation systems were broken and corpses were rotting in the streets.
“There is an outbreak of dysentery and cholera … The war which took over 20,000 residents … unfortunately, with these infection outbreaks, will claim thousands more Mariupolites,” he told national television.

He called on the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to work on establishing a humanitarian corridor to allow remaining residents to leave the city, which is now under Russian control.

In a snapshot of the war’s wider impact, the U.N.’s food agency said reduced exports of wheat and other food commodities from Ukraine and Russia could inflict chronic hunger on up to 19 million more people globally over the next year.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for Ukraine to be incorporated as a part of the West, with binding guarantees for its protection.

Asking the EU to accept Ukraine as a membership candidate, he told a conference in Copenhagen by videolink: “The European Union can take a historic step that will prove that words about the people of Ukraine belonging to the European family are not just words.”

June 09,2022:China and Russia have accused the United States of stoking tensions on the Korean Peninsula during a landmark meeting held to explain their decisions to veto new global sanctions over Pyongyang’s renewed ballistic missile launches.

Zhang Jun, China’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the General Assembly on Wednesday that tension on the peninsula has “developed to what it is today, primarily due to the flip flop of US policies”.
He pushed Washington to take action and made a plea for the sanctions to be lifted.

“There are many things that the US can do, such as easing sanctions on [North Korea] in certain areas, and ending joint military exercises [with South Korea]. The key is to take actions, not just talk about its readiness for dialogue with no preconditions,” said Zhang.

Moscow’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Anna Evstigneeva, also called for sanctions to be lifted.

North Korea needs more humanitarian aid and the West should stop blaming Pyongyang for tensions, she said.

The Wednesday session of the 193-member UN General Assembly was the first at which permanent members of the Security Council had to explain their use of the veto, a step required under a resolution adopted by the global body on April 26.

China and Russia’s vetoes on North Korea last month publicly split the UN Security Council for the first time since it started punishing Pyongyang with sanctions in 2006.

Speaking for the US, Deputy Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis dismissed China and Russia’s accusations and questioned whether Beijing and Moscow had elevated their “no limits” strategic partnership above global security by vetoing North Korea sanctions.