Junior Digest

Sept 04,2022:Bangladesh prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will inaugurate the eighth Bangladesh-China Friendship Bridge in Pirojpur on September 4.
Construction work began on October 20, 2018, at Bekutia point on Barishal-Pirojpur-Khulna road. It was completed within the stipulated time.The bridge is of 1,500 metres in length and it has 495 viaducts at both ends. The cost of the project is Tk 894 crore. China provided Tk 654.79 crore as grant.

Sept 04,2022:The European Union condemned on Sunday the sentencing of Myanmar’s deposed former leader Aung San Suu Kyi to jail with hard labour, after she was found guilty of electoral fraud. A source familiar with the proceedings told Reuters on Friday that Suu Kyi had been found guilty and sentenced to three years in jail with hard labour. Her lawyers gave the same information to the BBC.
The Nobel laureate and figurehead of Myanmar’s opposition to decades of military rule has been detained since a coup early last year and had already been sentenced to more than 17 years in prison. She denies all the allegations against her.

Sept 03,2022:Russia laid to rest the last leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev in a Moscow ceremony but without the fanfare of a state funeral and with the glaring absence of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Gorbachev, the Soviet leader beloved of the West, lived long enough to see all the reforms he had championed in Russia undone. He was buried on Saturday without state honours or the presence of Putin.
Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday aged 91, has been granted a public funeral: Muscovites were able to view his coffin in the imposing Hall of Columns, within sight of the Kremlin, where previous Soviet leaders have been mourned.

But Putin, a longtime KGB intelligence officer who called the Soviet Union’s collapse a “geopolitical catastrophe”, denied Gorbachev a full state funeral ceremony. Putin also said he was too busy to attend.

In power between 1985 and 1991, Gorbachev sought to transform the Soviet Union with democratic reforms.

In Russia, many blame him for letting go of the Soviet empire and with it the country’s position as a global power.

‘Gorby’
Gorbachev became a hero in the West – where he was affectionately known as “Gorby” – for allowing Eastern Europe to shake off more than four decades of Soviet communist control.

He also let East and West Germany reunite, and forged arms control treaties with the United States, which lifted the “Iron Curtain” and ended the Cold War.

His achievements were recognised with the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

But when the 15 Soviet republics seized on the same freedoms to demand their independence, Gorbachev was powerless to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, six years after he had become its leader.
For that, and the economic chaos that his “perestroika” liberalisation programme unleashed, many Russians could not forgive him.

Western heads of state and government leaders who would certainly have come for the funeral will also be absent, kept away by the chasm in East-West relations that has been opened up by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban traveled to Moscow for the funeral to pay his respects and was accompanied by a delegation. There were no plans for Orban to meet Putin.

Sept 03,2022:After 52 days of self-exile, former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Friday, 2 September, returned to Sri Lanka weeks after he unceremoniously fled the nation amid unrest over severe economic crisis, reports said.

Rajapaksa had fled to Singapore and then gone to Thailand in July as huge mobs of protesters took over the presidential palace. While in Singapore, he appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe as his successor, who later won the trust vote in the Assembly to be officially appointed president.

Islamabad,Sept 01,2022: Pakistan health officials have warned of large-scale outbreaks of disease in the aftermath of flooding that displaced millions of people.
Authorities fear spread of waterborne diseases after the floods killed almost 1,200 people since June.

More than 880 clinics have been damaged, according to the World Health Organization, which has allocated $10 million to emergency health relief efforts in the South Asian nation.

He said the threat of waterborne diseases meant access to health services and disease monitoring and controls were a “key priority”.

Arif Jabbar Khan, director of WaterAid Pakistan, visited the worst-affected Sindh province and said there was a severe risk of diarrhoea and dysentery because of the lack of clean water.
Over 33 million people have been affected by the floods, which have contaminated water sources and left latrines unusable.
The UN and Pakistan have asked for $160m to provide emergency support to 5 million people, including food, water, sanitation and shelter.

WASHINGTON DC, USA,Sept 03,2022: US President Joe Biden will host leaders of Pacific Island nations at a September 28 to 29 gathering in Washington, the White House said on Friday, September 2, the latest US effort to step up ties with the region increasingly courted by China.

The summit will reflect the United States’ “broadening and deepening cooperation on key issues such as climate change, pandemic response, economic recovery, maritime security, environmental protection, and advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific,” the White House said in a statement.

An administration official told Reuters the White House had invited 12 Pacific Islands countries, including the Solomon Islands, which in April struck a security pact with China, heightening Washington’s concern about Beijing’s growing influence.

The Solomon Islands, which switched its ties to Beijing from Chinese-claimed Taiwan in 2019, is a focal point in the escalating competition between China and the United States in the strategically vital region.

The Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji were also invited, as well as the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, and Tuvalu, which Taiwan counts among its 14 diplomatic allies.

The White House did not provide details on which countries had confirmed attendance for the summit, which had been signaled as a priority by US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman during a trip to the region in August.

Sept 01,2022: Former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the last of the titans in Russia who sought economic reforms through his famous ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (reconstruction), died in a hospital on 31,August in Moscow. He was 91.

Gorbachev, an unquestioned titan who embarked on a path of radical reform that brought about the end of the Cold War, reversed the direction of the nuclear arms race and relaxed Communist Party controls in hopes of rescuing the faltering Soviet state but instead propelled it toward collapse, has died in Moscow. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1990 which he shared with the US President then.
Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union and is for many the man who restored democracy to many European countries under communist rule.
Mikhail Gorbachev was credited as being the man who thawed the Cold War between the Soviet and American blocks. Lauded as a hero in the West and the rest of the world for ending the Cold War, Gorbachev’s domestic policies weren’t viewed very kindly back home. It was seen that his rule precipitated the Soviet collapse.

Between 1985 and 1990, Gorbachev showed that he was a different kind of leader. First, he recognized that the U.S.-Soviet arms race was futile. In 1986, Gorbachev put forward the idea of a nuclear-free world, which resulted in the Soviet-American dialogue on nuclear disarmament and the signing of a treaty on the liquidation of medium and shorter range missiles. The two opposing sides decided to destroy a whole class of weapons that could have triggered a nuclear war. This decision was followed by negotiations on strategic offensive arms reductions, cuts in conventional weapons and a ban on chemical, bacteriological and biological weapons. Gorbachev’s dialogue with Ronald Reagan on security matters was not merely an admission that the Soviet Union was no longer able to compete with the United States in the nuclear arms race; a different Soviet leader could have continued playing dangerous games with the Americans for much longer. Gorbachev decided voluntarily to renounce the maintenance of the nuclear threat as a way of propping up the Soviet system.

Gorbachev’s second great departure from his predecessors was his conviction that every nation was entitled to choose its government, a belief that was crucial in his decision to release Eastern Europe from the Soviet grip. When revolutions swept across East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, their leaders made frantic calls to the Kremlin pleading for help, but Gorbachev responded with a firm “No.” Soviet troops were still stationed in these Eastern bloc countries, but Gorbachev did not want a repeat of the Prague Spring. His actions were crucial in reunifying the German people and returning the former Soviet satellites into the European fold. Gorbachev buried the world communist system, marking the end of the Cold War and confrontation between two hostile systems vying for world leadership.

Having renounced the Communist Party’s monopoly and opened the floodgates for the freedom of expression, Gorbachev accelerated the disintegration of the Soviet Union. True, he had hoped to preserve the country as a community of allied states, but national republics were distancing themselves from Moscow much too quickly and strongly for disintegration to be stopped. Gorbachev let the Soviet Union evaporate and, probably without intending to, turned out to be a great reformer.

The former Soviet president comes across as a dramatic personality first and foremost because after starting the country’s great transformation, he did not carry it through all the way to the end.

He was the first man in Russian history to have left the Kremlin without clinging to power.

But this is not unusual. History does not know of any reformer who managed to destroy an established system and build a new one in its place. Reformers sacrifice their popularity when they start to dismantle the old way of life, and this is true for Gorbachev. Even today, his name evokes mixed feelings in Russia. No society has ever perceived reformers as heroes during their lifetime. Great politicians are recognized for their achievements only when they pass into eternity.

Mikhail Gorbachev, however, has become a monument in his lifetime. Gorbachev is history. As Thomas Carlyle said: “The history of the world is but a biography of great men.” Having assured himself a place in eternity, he remains a remarkable man with a larger-than-life personality.
Gorbachev, was a strong votary of deeper strategic ties between Moscow and New Delhi, particularly in the areas of defence and economic engagement. He visited India in 1986 as well as in 1988.
Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union and is for many the man who restored democracy to many European countries under communist rule

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine, Sept 3,2022: As UN inspectors sought to avert a nuclear disaster on Ukraine’s frontline, the West and Russia wounded each other’s economies, with Moscow keeping its main gas pipeline to Germany shut on Saturday while threatened with price caps on oil exports.

Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom (GAZP.MM) blamed a technical fault in the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for the delay on Friday. But the high-level manoeuvres in energy politics were seen as an extension of the war, and the ramifications would be felt far beyond Ukraine.
The announcements came as Moscow and Kyiv traded blame over their actions at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, where U.N. inspectors arrived on Thursday on a mission to help avert a catastrophe.

Vladimir Rogov, a pro-Russian official in the Zaporizhzhia region, said Ukrainian forces had shelled Europe’s largest nuclear plant several times overnight and the main power line to the station had been downed, forcing it to use reserve power sources, as occurred last week.

Sept 02,2022:A mammoth shipbuilding effort that was on for the last 13 years at Cochin Shipyard, along with years of planning, designing and execution by the Indian Navy, attained a key milestone when India’s first Indigenous Aircraft Carrier (IAC-1) was commissioned as Indian Naval Ship (INS) Vikrant on Friday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the commissioning ceremony which was held at the Cochin Shipyard Limited in Kochi on Friday morning where he also unveiled the new Naval Ensign or Nishaan.
In his address, PM Modi said, “Today, INS Vikrant has filled the country with a new confidence. It’s a symbol of India’s hard work, ingenuity, influence and commitment. It’s a symbol of indigenous strength, research and skill.” He said women officers will also be posted on INS Vikrant underlining their increasing role in the armed forces. He added that all branches of the Navy are now inducting women officers.
A chunk of trials, especially that of the Aviation Facility Complex, are yet to happen before the warship is fully operational. INS Vikrant puts India in the select group of nations that are capable of designing and constructing aircraft carriers. The commissioning is seen as a boost to the present government’s Atmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India initiatives that are centred around indigenous manufacturing and reducing import dependencies. It is also expected to propel the Navy’s demand for a second indigenous carrier which it has been making for the last few years.

IAC-1, now INS Vikrant, has been designed by the Warship Design Bureau, earlier known as the Directorate of Naval Design which is the Indian Navy’s in-house design organisation, and constructed by the Cochin Shipyard Limited (CSL), a public sector shipyard under the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways.

Sept 02,2022:President Joe Biden, in a rare prime-time speech, condemned Donald Trump and his “MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republicans” as he urged the nation to unite against threats to American democracy.

“This is where the United States Constitution was written and debated,” Biden said. “This is where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known.”

“But as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault,” he continued. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise. So, tonight, I’ve come to this place where it all began, to speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face, about the power we have in our hands to meet these threats and about the incredible future that lies in front of us if only we choose it.”
The president mentioned his Oval Office predecessor by name as he assailed Republicans who refuse to accept the 2020 election results, defend those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 or want to strip away abortion rights and other privacy concerns.
Biden made a distinction between the so-called MAGA Republicans and other conservatives, stating “not every Republican embraces that extreme ideology.”

Sept 01,2022:Investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have arrived at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the Russian-controlled town of Enerhodar on Thursday, amid “increased military activity in the area” and following several delays.
Ukraine has accused Russia of shelling Enerhodar, as well as the agreed upon route of the UN team. Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry has accused Ukrainian “saboteurs” of trying to seize the plant.
The Kremlin has denounced the decision by EU foreign ministers to suspend a 2007 visa facilitation deal with Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, which will make visas for Russians traveling to the bloc more expensive, while extending processing times.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned of possible countermeasures.