Junior Digest

Mar 5,2022: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in Delhi on Thursday evening in the first highest-level visit between India and China after their ties came under severe strain following the border standoff in eastern Ladakh nearly two years ago.

Wang flew into New Delhi from Kabul on an unannounced visit and he is set to hold talks with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval on Friday morning.

It is learnt that the Chinese foreign minister’s visit is more to do with the geopolitical turmoil in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine than the bilateral ties.

Interestingly, there was no official word about Wang’s visit from either the Ministry of External Affairs or the Chinese government. Both sides kept the visit under wraps.

At the Friday talks, the Indian side is unlikely to shift focus from the military standoff in eastern Ladakh as it is expected to press for complete disengagement of troops from all the remaining friction points in the region.

The border issue is likely to figure extensively at the meeting between Wang and Doval as they have been serving as the Special Representatives (SR) for boundary talks between the two countries.

The Ukraine crisis is expected to be the other major issue at the talks. Unlike many other leading powers, India has not criticised Russia yet for its invasion of Ukraine and also abstained from voting at the UN platforms in condemning the Russian attack.

It is also not immediately clear whether the Indian side will facilitate a call on by Wang with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The visit also comes a day after India rejected as uncalled for Wang’s comments referring to Jammu and Kashmir at a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Islamabad.

Mar 26,2022: NASA declared that he number of confirmed exoplanets has just exceeded the 5,000 mark.The first planet to orbit a star outside our solar system was discovered on 21 Mar In 1995, almost 30 years back. The account is held by NASA’s Exoplanet Archive, which records the discoveries of these bodies that appear in peer-reviewed scientific articles that have been confirmed by multiple detection methods or analytical techniques. The “planetary odometer” surpassed 5,000 today thanks to the latest batch of 65 exoplanets added to the NASA archive. The first planet detected in a Sun-like star, in 1995, was 51 Pegasi b, located 50 light-years from Earth. It is a gas giant with half the mass of Jupiter in an extremely close orbit to its star, so its year lasts only four days. The people responsible for the discovery were the Swiss Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who in 2019 won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contribution to the understanding of the evolution of the universe and the place of the Earth in the cosmos The more than 5,000 planets found so far include small rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and “hot Jupiter” in scorchingly close orbits around their stars, NASA recalled. There are also so-called “Super-Earths”, which are possible rocky worlds larger than ours, and “mini-Neptunes”, as well as planets that orbit around two stars at once and others that continue to circle collapsed remains of dead stars. “It’s not just a number”, according to the scientific director of the archive and researcher at the NASA Institute of Exoplanet Sciences, Jessie Christiansen, because “each of them is a new world, a totally new planet” that he knows nothing about.

Mar 31,2022: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he had signed a decree saying foreign buyers must pay in roubles for Russian gas from April 1, and contracts would be halted if these payments were not made.

“In order to purchase Russian natural gas, they must open rouble accounts in Russian banks. It is from these accounts that payments will be made for gas delivered starting from tomorrow,” Putin said in televised remarks.
Russia supplies about a third of Europe’s gas, so energy is the most powerful lever at Putin’s disposal as he tries to hit back against sweeping Western sanctions over his invasion of Ukraine.
His decision to enforce rouble payments has boosted the Russian currency, which fell to historic lows after the February 24 invasion but has since recovered.

Western companies and governments have rejected the move as a breach of existing contracts, which are set in euros or dollars. France’s economy minister said France and Germany were preparing for a possible scenario that Russian gas flows could be halted – something that would plunge Europe into a full-blown energy crisis.

An order signed by Putin set out a mechanism for buyers to transfer foreign currency to a special account at a Russian bank, which would then send roubles back to the foreign buyer to make payment for the gas.

He said the switch was meant to strengthen Russia’s sovereignty, and it would stick to its obligations on all contracts.

WASHINGTON, March 24,2022: Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War Two then rose to become the first female U.S. secretary of state and, in her later years, a pop culture feminist icon, died on Wednesday at the age of 84.

Her family announced her death on Twitter and said she had died of cancer. Leaders, diplomats and academics remembered her as a trailblazer on the world stage.

Albright served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1993-1997 in U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration. He then nominated her to become the first female secretary of state and she served in that role from 1997-2001.

She was a tough-talking diplomat in an administration that hesitated to involve itself in the two biggest foreign policy crises of the 1990s – the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

During Clinton’s first term, many of his administration’s top foreign policy experts did not want to get involved because they vividly remembered how the United States became bogged down in Vietnam.

In 1995, Bosnian Serb soldiers overran three Moslem enclaves, Srebrenica, Gorazde and Zepa, and massacred more than 8,000 people.

The United States responded by working with NATO on airstrikes that forced an end to the war but only after it had been going on for three years.

Albright’s experience as a refugee prompted her to push for the United States to use its superpower clout. She wanted a “muscular internationalism,” said James O’Brien, a senior adviser to Albright during the Bosnian war.

Early in the Clinton administration, while she unsuccessfully advocated for a quicker, stronger response in Bosnia, Albright backed a U.N. war crimes tribunal that eventually put the architects of that war, including Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leaders, in jail, O’Brien said.

The painful lessons learned in Rwanda and Bosnia served the United States well in Kosovo, when Washington saw the more powerful Serbs begin a program of ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians. NATO responded with an 11-week campaign of air strikes in 1999 that extended to Belgrade.

Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani said on Wednesday she was “deeply shocked by the loss of Kosovo’s great friend,” adding that the intervention “gave us hope, when we did not have it.”

During efforts to press North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program, which were eventually unsuccessful, Albright traveled to Pyongyang in 2000 to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, becoming the highest ranking U.S. official to visit the secretive Communist-run country at the time.

SHANGHAI ,Mar 22,2022: Not a single country managed to meet the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) air quality standard in 2021, a survey of pollution data in 6,475 cities showed on Tuesday (March 22), and smog even rebounded in some regions after a Covid-19-related dip.

The WHO recommends that average annual readings of small and hazardous airborne particles known as PM2.5 should be no more than 5 micrograms per cubic metre after changing its guidelines last year, saying that even low concentrations caused significant health risks.

But only 3.4 per cent of the surveyed cities met the standard in 2021, according to data complied by IQAir, a Swiss pollution technology company that monitors air quality.
As many as 93 cities saw PM2.5 levels at 10 times the recommended level.

“There are a lot of countries that are making big strides in reduction,” said Ms Christi Schroeder, air quality science manager with IQAir.

“China started with some very big numbers and they are continuing to decrease over time. But there are also places in the world where it is getting significantly worse.”

India’s overall pollution levels worsened in 2021 and New Delhi remained the world’s most polluted capital, the data showed.

Bangladesh was the most polluted country, also unchanged from the previous year, while Chad ranked second after the African country’s data was included for the first time.

China, which has been waging war on pollution since 2014, fell to 22nd in the PM2.5 rankings in 2021, down from 14th place a year earlier, with average readings improving slightly over the year to 32.6 micrograms, IQAir said.

Hotan in the north-western region of Xinjiang was China’s worst performing city, with average PM2.5 readings of more than 100 micrograms, largely caused by sandstorms.

It fell to third on the list of the world’s most polluted cities after being overtaken by Bhiwadi and Ghaziabad, both in India.

Mar 21,2022: Pakistan’s parliament will convene on Friday to take up a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Imran Khan, the lower house speaker’s office said on Sunday, heightening fears of political turmoil in the country.

An alliance of opposition parties filed the motion against Khan earlier this month, saying he had lost his parliamentary majority after more than a dozen defections from his party.
Pakistan’s parliament will convene on Friday to take up a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Imran Khan, the lower house speaker’s office said on Sunday, heightening fears of political turmoil in the country.

Under the constitution, the speaker of the lower house of parliament is required to convene the session within 14 days of receiving the motion, a deadline which would fall on Monday.

But a statement from the speaker’s office said the date was pushed back several days because of a conference of Islamic countries in the capital Islamabad scheduled for March 23.
Without the coalition partners and the dissidents, Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, which has 155 seats in the lower house, would fall short of the 172 needed to retain power.

The joint opposition has a strength of nearly 163 but could build a majority if most of the defectors effectively join its ranks via a no-confidence vote.

The opposition accuses Khan of mismanaging the economy and foreign policy.

No Pakistani PM has ever completed a full term.

Mar 20,2022: The BJP central leadership on Sunday announced that N Biren Singh would remain the chief minister of Manipur. An official from the chief minister’s office said the oath-taking ceremony would be held on Monday.

Earlier in the day, Union Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman, who is the party’s central observer for the state, and her Cabinet colleague and co-observer Kiren Rijiju, arrived here from Delhi with Biren Singh, senior minister Th Biswajit Singh, and Assembly Speaker Yumnam Kemchand Singh. All three had been summoned to New Delhi the day before and were being seen as potential contenders to lead the state.
Following a meeting with the BJP’s state Legislature Party, Sitharaman said, “The newly elected MLAs of the BJP have unanimously chosen N Biren Singh as the leader of the Manipur Pradesh BJP Legislature Party.”

New Delhi, Mar 31,2022: The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down the 10.5 per cent reservation provided to Vanniyars, a Most Backward Community (MBC) in Tamil Nadu, in government jobs and admission to educational institutions saying there is no substantial basis for treating them differently.

A bench comprising Justices L Nageswara Rao and B R Gavai upheld the Madras High Court order which had quashed the reservation.

“We are of the opinion that there is no substantial basis for classifying Vanniakula Kshatriyas into one group to be treated differently from the remaining 115 communities within the MBC groups and, therefore, the 2021 Act is in violation of Articles 14, 15 and 16 of the Constitution. Therefore, we uphold the decision of the high court,” the bench said.

The top court said though caste can be the basis of internal reservation, it cannot be the sole basis.

The apex court had earlier refused to refer the matter to a larger bench saying that it was of the view that the issue does not need consideration by a larger bench.

“We are not inclined to the argument of referring the matter to a larger bench, you can start your arguments,” the bench said.

The top court had earlier agreed to examine the pleas and said admissions or appointments already made under the said quota will not be disturbed.

The apex court’s judgement came on a batch of petitions filed by the state of Tamil Nadu, Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), and others challenging the November 1, 2021 judgement of the high court quashing the reservation provided to Vanniyars, saying it was unconstitutional.

The high court had said the state government cannot come out with such a legislation providing reservation to Vanniyars without any quantifiable data on population.