Junior Digest

Aug 30,2022:The United Nations has appealed for $160m to help Pakistan following “epochal” rains and flooding that have killed more than 1,100 people, affected 33 million others, and destroyed homes, businesses, infrastructure and crops.

Torrential rain has triggered flash floods that have crashed down from northern mountains, wrecking buildings and bridges and washing away roads and crops.

Colossal volumes of water are pouring into the Indus river, which flows down the middle of Pakistan from its northern peaks to southern plains, bringing flooding along its length.

“Pakistan is awash in suffering,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday in a video message to launch the appeal in Islamabad and Geneva.

“The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids – the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding,” Guterres said.

Colossal volumes of water are pouring into the Indus river, which flows down the middle of Pakistan from its northern peaks to southern plains, bringing flooding along its length.

“Pakistan is awash in suffering,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday in a video message to launch the appeal in Islamabad and Geneva.

Pakistan estimates the floods have affected more than 33 million people, or more than 15 percent of its 220 million population.

The UN chief said the scale of the country’s needs required the world’s collective and prioritised attention.

Guterres also said Pakistan’s flooding was a signal to the world to step up action against climate change.

Aug 30,2022:The last of his people, a Brazilian Indigenous man known only as “the man of the hole”, has been found dead, decades after the rest of his uncontacted tribe were killed off by ranchers and illegal miners, officials said.

The man — whose real name was never known to the outside world — was found in a hammock in a hut in the Tanaru Indigenous territory in Rondonia state on the border with Bolivia on August 23, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) said in a statement. He had been living in complete isolation for 26 years.
Since losing everyone he knew, the man had refused all contact with the outside world and supported himself by hunting and raising crops. His nickname derived from his habit of digging deep holes inside the huts he built, possibly to trap animals but also to hide inside.

He lived in an Indigenous territory surrounded by vast cattle ranches and under constant threat from illegal miners and loggers in one of the most dangerous parts of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, according to Survival International.
Authorities in Brazil did not comment on the cause of the man’s death, nor his age, but said “there were no signs of violence or struggle”.

They also found no evidence of the presence of anyone else in his home or around it.

“Everything indicates that the death was from natural causes,” said FUNAI, a government agency under the justice ministry that handles Indigenous affairs.

Local media reported that the man’s body had been covered in macaw feathers, prompting one expert to speculate that he had known he was about to die.
The man was believed to have been alone since the remaining members of his small tribe were killed in the mid-1990s by illegal loggers and miners seeking to exploit the tribal area.

Rights groups said that the majority of the tribe had been killed in the 1970s when ranchers moved into the area, cutting down the forest and attacking the inhabitants.

Aug 29,2022:An engine problem forced NASA on Monday to postpone for at least four days the debut launch of the colossal rocketship it hopes will one day fly astronauts back to the moon, more than a half-century after Apollo’s last lunar mission. The U.S. space agency cited a problem on one of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s main engines, as launch teams began a test that would have cooled the engines for liftoff. One of them would not cool as expected.

The delay was called at 08:35 a.m. EDT (1235 GMT), two minutes after the targeted launch time, as the 32-story-tall, rocket and its Orion capsule awaited liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission, dubbed Artemis I, calls for a six-week, uncrewed test flight of Orion around the moon and back to Earth for a splashdown in the Pacific.

NASA did not give a new launch date for the two-stage rocket but said its first available opportunity was Friday, Sept. 2. Whether the agency sticks with that date depends on how quickly engineers can resolve the engine issue. The subsequent launch opportunity is Monday, Sept. 5.

Late-hour launch delays are routine in the space business, and Monday’s postponement was not an indication of a major setback for NASA or its primary contractors, Boeing Co for SLS and Lockheed Martin Corp for Orion. “We don’t launch until it’s right,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said in a webcast interview just after the liftoff was scrubbed. “It’s just illustrative that this is a very complicated machine, a very complicated system, and all those things have to work. And you don’t want to light the candle until it’s ready to go.”

Still, the delay was a disappointment to thousands of spectators who had gathered on the shores around Cape Canaveral, with binoculars in hand. Vice President Kamala Harris had just arrived at the space center, joining a throng of dignitaries and invited guests attending the event, shortly before the scrub was called.

KYIV,Aug29,2022: The Ukrainian military on Monday started a long-awaited counter-offensive against Russian forces in the country’s south, its southern command said on Monday.

Command spokesperson Natalia Humeniuk confirmed the offensive in a news briefing and said it included the Kherson region.

Ukraine has regularly stated its intention to retake its south, and in particular the city of Kherson, the only regional capital that Russia has been able to capture from Ukraine since it invaded six months ago.

The region lies north of the Russian-held Crimean peninsula and has coasts on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

Humeniuk said at the briefing that recent strikes on Russia’s southern logistical routes had “unquestionably weakened the enemy”. More than 10 Russian ammunition dumps had been hit over the last weeks.

However, she declined to be drawn into giving more details about the new offensive.

Russia’s forces in the south are “rather powerful” and have been built up over a long time, she told the briefing.

“The counter-offensive is already ongoing for a while (in the sense of) exhausting the enemy and not giving him an opportunity to advance,” Humeniuk told public broadcaster Suspilne, adding that the offensive phase of this had begun on Monday.

Aug 28,2022:Election for the post of Congress President will be be held on 17 October, with the counting to be done on 19 October, announced the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s highest decision-making body on Sunday, 28 August.

The CWC held a virtual meeting to approve the exact schedule of dates for the election of the Congress president.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi joined the meeting virtually from abroad as she is travelling for medical check-ups.

SRINAGAR, Aug 30,2022: Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister and National Conference President Dr Farooq Abdullah says restoration of Article 370 and 35A to the erstwhile state is not easy unless all political parties and people unite to fight for it.
“It is not easy to get the Article 370 and 35A restored to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. We have already approached the Supreme Court and are waiting for the day when they will constitute a bench and hear the petition,” Abdullah said in an interview with a media channel on Tuesday.
He said: “The restoration of Article 370 and 35 A will not come from the sky…we all have to struggle for that together. I hope the day will come and Article 370 will be restored again with dignity and honor.”
He alleged that the central government has unconstitutionally turned a state into a union territory without approaching the people here.

Aug 26,2022:Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on Friday resigned from all positions including primary membership of the Party.

The resignation comes a few days after the leader resigned from the position of chairman of the campaign committee and from the political affairs committee of Jammu and Kashmir Congress hours after his appointment citing health reasons.

“The Indian National Congress has lost both the will and the ability under the tutelage of the conterie that runs the AICC to fight for what is right for India,” wrote Azad in his resignation letter to Sonia Gandhi.

In a five-page long resignation later, he wrote, “It is therefore with great regret and an extremely leaden heart that I have decided to sever my half-a century-old association with the Indian National Congress.”

Aug 29,2022:Angola’s electoral commission on Monday declared the ruling MPLA, in power for nearly five decades since independence, the winner of last week’s national election, handing President Joao Lourenco a second term. The election commission gave the ex-Marxist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) a 51.17% majority after all votes were counted. Its longtime opponent, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, got 43.95%, its best result ever.

Fewer than half of Angola’s registered voters turned out for Wednesday’s election, which despite being the closest fought yet, extends the rule of MPLA that has ruled since independence from Portugal in 1975 and defeated UNITA in a long civil war. UNITA leader Adalberto Costa Junior has rejected the results, citing discrepancies between the commission’s count and the main opposition coalition’s own tally.
He did not immediately respond to the final results announcement. Analysts fear any dispute could ignite mass street protests and possible violence among a poor and frustrated youth who voted for Junior.

SARAJEVO,Aug 29,2022:Slovenian President Borut Pahor said on Monday that countries in the Western Balkans were at risk of instability because of the war in Ukraine and called for a swift accession for Bosnia into the European Union and the NATO alliance.

Pahor told a forum that Brussels must reach a consensus to integrate the Western Balkans and should convince Serbia to choose the EU path over its alliance with China and Russia, a move that he said would benefit Bosnia and Kosovo.

“We don’t want another Iron Curtain in Europe,” Slovenian Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon also told the Bled Strategic Forum in Slovenia, saying a decades-old process to unite Europe had been halted by the Ukraine conflict and many European countries did not have the capacity to cope with fallout from the crisis.

COLOMBO, Aug 30,2022: Crisis-hit Sri Lanka unveiled fresh measures on Tuesday in an interim budget aimed at clinching a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund, talks for which, the president said, had reached the “final stage”.

The budget revised up the island nation’s deficit projection for 2022 to 9.8% of the gross domestic product from 8.8% earlier, while outlining a slide in tax revenue and a sharp net increase in expenditure.

Unveiling the measures in parliament, President Ranil Wickremesinghe added that the government would aim to rein in inflation and introduce legislation to bolster central bank independence.

The country of 22 million is battling its worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1948. Wickremesinghe, who took over as president last month, is pushing to adopt fiscal consolidation measures agreed with the IMF.

Aug 30,2022:A batch of pleas relating to the riots in the state was pending in the apex court; however, the court said that the cases have now become “infructuous with [the] passage of time.”

The court also pointed out that the trials in eight of nine cases have been concluded, and that the final arguments are currently on-going in the final one in the trial court in Naroda Gaon, Gujarat.
The 2002 Gujarat riots was a three-day period of inter-communal violence in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The burning of a train in Godhra on February 27, 2002, which caused the deaths of 58 Hindu pilgrims and karsevaks returning from Ayodhya, is cited as having instigated the violence.

Following the initial riot incidents, there were further outbreaks of violence in Ahmedabad for three months; statewide, there were further outbreaks of violence against the minority Muslim population of Gujarat for the next one year.

Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat and later Prime Minister of India, was accused of condoning the violence, as were police and government officials who allegedly directed the rioters and gave lists of Muslim-owned properties to them.

In 2012, Modi was cleared of complicity in the violence by Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court of India. The SIT also rejected claims that the state government had not done enough to prevent the riots.

The Muslim community was reported to have reacted with anger and disbelief. In July 2013, allegations were made that the SIT had suppressed evidence.

That December, a court upheld the earlier SIT report and rejected a petition seeking Modi’s prosecution.

In April 2014, the Supreme Court expressed satisfaction over the SIT’s investigations in nine cases related to the violence, and rejected a plea contesting the SIT report as “baseless”.

Aug 30,2022:Citing the death of the petitioner, the Supreme Court has closed a case involving contempt of court against late former UP chief minister Kalyan Singh in the Babri Masjid demolition issue.
The court notes that with the passage of time and in view of the 2019 Ayodhya verdict, the matter does not survive.

Only the contempt matter against Kalyan Singh and others was initiated because the UP government allowed the Rath Yatra and the Babri demolition, despite the assurance of security by the government.

Only these matters have been closed by the Supreme Court since it has been more than 30 years and the petitioner and the former chief minister are dead.

Other cases arising out of the demolition are not affected.

Aug 27,2022:Meta’s Facebook has in-principle agreed to settle a lawsuit in the San Francisco federal court seeking damages for letting third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, access the private data of users, a court filing showed.
The financial terms were not disclosed in the filing on Friday that asked the judge to put the class action suit on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook finalize a written settlement.

The four-year-old lawsuit alleged that Facebook violated consumer privacy laws by sharing personal data of users with third parties such as the now-defunct British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook has said its privacy practices are consistent with its disclosures and “do not support any legal claims”.

Facebook and its lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did not immediately respond to a request for more details regarding the settlement.

Of the two law firms representing the plaintiffs, Keller Rohrback did not comment while Bleichmar Fonti & Auld declined to comment.

Aug 26,2022:Suspended Thai leader Prayuth Chan-ocha said on social media he will continue in his role as defence minister, in his first direct address to the public since a court ordered him to cease his duties as prime minister while it reviews his term limit. Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan is serving as acting prime minister of Southeast Asia’s second-biggest economy.
The Constitutional Court on Wednesday decided to hear a petition brought by the main opposition party arguing that Prayuth’s years spent as the chief of a military junta after he took power in a 2014 coup, should count toward his overall time in office. The constitution stipulates a term limit of eight years for the prime minister.

It remains unclear when the court will deliver a decision on the review. The controversy over Prayuth’s term limit is the latest eposide in nearly two decades of intermittent political turmoil, including two coups and violent protests, stemming from opposition to military involvement in politics and demands for greater representation as political awareness grows.

Tashkent,Aug25,2022: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Wednesday called upon Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to unitedly fight against terrorism and eliminate the menace in all its forms.

Addressing the SCO Defence Ministers’ meeting here, the Minister asserted that “terrorism in any form, including cross-border terrorism, committed by anyone and for whatever purpose, is a crime against humanity.”
Rajnath Singh voiced India’s full support to a peaceful, secure & stable Afghanistan, while emphasising to respect its sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, national unity and non-interference in internal affairs.
He underlined the importance of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions in this regard.
He stressed on the need to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan and safeguard their fundamental rights.

Expressing India’s concern on the situation in Ukraine, the Minister stated that New Delhi supports talks between Russia and Ukraine to resolve this crisis.

Aug 26,2022:NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first-ever clear evidence of the presence of carbon dioxide in a distant planet’s atmosphere. The planet named WASP-39b is orbiting a Sun-like star and is around 700 light years away from us and was originally discovered back in 2011.

The latest discovery gives insights into the planet’s composition and findings from the study were published in the Nature science journal. Previously, NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have revealed the presence of water vapour, sodium, and potassium in the planet’s atmosphere.

According to NASA, WASP-39b is a hot gas giant similar to Jupiter in our solar system. But its mass is the same as that of Saturn, and it has a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter’s. NASA notes that this is an extremely hot planet with temperatures of around 900 degrees Celsius, which also contributes to its puffiness. It orbits its star very closely, and it completes one revolution around its sun in just four Earth days. So yes, four days would be one a year on this particular planet.

Aug 30,2022:The UN humanitarian chief has urged donors to restore funding for development in Afghanistan that was frozen when the Taliban took over a year ago, warning that six million people were at risk of famine.

Martin Griffiths told the United Nations Security Council that Afghanistan faces multiple crises – humanitarian, economic, climate, hunger and financial – and that donors should immediately provide $770m to help Afghans survive the coming colder months.
Conflict, poverty, climate shocks and food insecurity “have long been a sad reality” in Afghanistan, but he said what makes the current situation “so critical” is the halt to large-scale development aid.

More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people need humanitarian help and six million are at risk of famine. More than a million children are “estimated to be suffering from the most severe, life-threatening form of malnutrition” and could die without proper treatment, he said.

“Afghanistan’s de facto authorities must also do their part. Bureaucratic interferences and procedures slow down humanitarian assistance when it is needed most. Female humanitarian aid workers … must be allowed to work unhindered and securely. And girls must be allowed to continue their education,” he said.

Aug 29,2022:Russian forces have pounded Ukrainian towns across the river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, officials said, while reports of shelling around the facility fuelled fears of a radiation disaster.

Captured by Russian troops in March but run by Ukrainian staff, Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, has been a major hotspot in the six-month conflict with both sides trading blame for recent shelling near the plant.

Russian forces fired at Enerhodar, the city where the plant is located, the chief of staff of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said late on Sunday on his Telegram channel alongside a video of fire fighters dousing burning cars.
Russian forces also kept up their shelling in the Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the east, officials there said.

Aug 28,2022:As India is set to welcome the first phase of 5G services, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made another announcement which states that by the end of this decade, the country will be launching a 6G network. Through the mode of video conferencing, PM Modi announced the 6G Network, during his speech at the Smart India Hackathon 2022 Grand finale.

“Youth can provide fresh ideas for promoting drone technology application in the medical and agricultural fields. By the end of this decade, we hope to introduce 6G. The government supports Indian gaming and Entertainment solutions as well. All young people should benefit from the government’s investments, Prime Minister Modi stated”.
The government has promises to roll out the latest 5G technology soon in India which will be accessible and inexpensive too. The rollout is expected to happen by October this year, as per the Union Minister of IT Ashwani Vaishnav, who stated as much during a news briefing earlier in the day.

“The industry has already started hiring for 5G infrastructure, and within two to three years, 5G services will be available everywhere in the nation”. We have asked the market to make 5G prices reasonable. We have the lowest mobile service fee in the entire world. We will receive top-notch 5G services,” according to Vaishnav.
5G will first be rolled out in 13 major cities of the countries on a trial basis. These cities are Delhi, Kolkata, Gurugram, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Jamnagar, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Gandhi Nagar and Lucknow.

Islamabad, Pakistan,Aug 27,2022:The Pakistan government has declared devastating floods a “national emergency” after nearly 1,000 people died and more than 30 million are without shelter as monsoon rains continue to lash the South Asian nation.

At least 937 people have died since mid-June, including 343 children, according to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), with large swaths of the southwestern province of Balochistan remaining submerged, bringing back the memory of the devastating 2010 floods.
More than half of the casualties are from Balochistan and southern Sindh province where 234 and 306 people died respectively amid record rains that have affected half a million houses across the country.