clataffairs

Ebrahim Raisi has been declared the winner of Iran's 13th presidential elections. Iran’s president oversees the civilian arm of the country’s government.  The president sets domestic policy. THE CONTROVERSIAL ELECTIONS The reformists, a powerful constituency, have pushed for gradual reforms by rallying behind leaders like Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani, the conservatives always pushed back. There were allegations that the June 18 election was rigged in favour of Mr. Raisi even before the first ballot was cast. The Guardian Council, which vets potential candidates, had rejected almost all major reformists, leaving him the only prominent figure on the ballot.  This led to opposition activists calling for an election boycott, which seems to have had an impact on the voting — the turnout was 48.8%, an all­-time low. A significant number of people did not cast their votes this time because they believe that the elections are rigged and do not trust the election watchdog calle...

The UN General Assembly adopted the draft resolution 'The situation in Myanmar' with 119 Member States voting in favour, including Myanmar. The diplomat Kyaw Moe Tun is still recognized by the United Nations as Myanmar’s ambassador, although he was pushed out and charged with treason by his country’s military leaders. 36 nations abstained, including Myanmar's neighbours - India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Laos, Nepal and Thailand, Russia also abstained.  Belarus was the sole country voting against it. THE RESOLUTION The resolution was introduced by Liechtenstein, whose representative warned that there is a “real and present danger of a full-fledged civil war” in Myanmar.  It is non-binding resolution condemning the military regime in Myanmar. The resolution expressed "grave concern" at the February 1 coup and called upon Myanmar's military junta to immediately and unconditionally release President Win Myint, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and other governme...

Scientists around the world and in India are concerned about ‘Delta plus’, an emerging form of the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus.  This variant allows the virus to “escape” antibodies in recently approved treatment regimes.  WHAT IS DELTA PLUS VARIANT? Formally known as AY.1 or B.1.617.2.1, it’s a variant of Delta (B.1.617.2), which was first identified in India. It has an additional mutation called K417N, which has previously been identified in the Beta variant (first found in South Africa) and the Gamma variant (first detected in Brazil). The K417N, along with another mutation called K417T, is a mutation in the spike protein of the novel coronavirus. These variants are characterized as being highly infectious and may reduce the potency of vaccines.  WHY THE CONCERN? The Delta variant is now regarded as the most prevalent one in India, comprising nearly 31% of the 21,000 community samples processed until late May.  This variant has significant differen...

The Supreme Court issued notice on Delhi Police appeals against the Delhi High Court order granting bail to student-activists Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Asif Iqbal Tanha.  They were booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, in a Northeast Delhi riots conspiracy case. SC declined to interfere with the bail order, but the bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and V Ramasubramanian said “in a bail application, a 100-page judgment discussing all laws is surprising us” and “can have pan-India ramification”. It directed that the judgment shall not be treated as a precedent and may not be relied upon by any of the parties in any of the proceedings. HC RULING The court reasoned that “the more stringent a penal provision, the more strictly it must be construed”.  By doing so, it raised the bar for the State to book an individual for terrorism under the UAPA. The three orders by Justices Siddharth Mridul and Anup Jairam Bhambhani. The court held that the phrase ‘te...

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded their summit meeting at Geneva, Switzerland.  This is the first such bilateral meeting after Donald Trump and Putin met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018.  NEW START TREATY   Putin said he and Biden agreed to begin negotiations on nuclear talks to potentially replace the New START treaty limiting nuclear weapons after it expires in 2026.  It is a treaty between the America and the Russia for further reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms.  It came into force on 5th February, 2011 and successor to the START framework of 1991. Washington broke off talks with Moscow in 2014 in response to Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea and its military intervention in support of separatists in eastern Ukraine.  Talks resumed in 2017 but gained little traction and failed to produce an agreement on extending the New START treaty during the Trump administration. RETURN OF AMBASSADOR...

The first ever 'green fungus' case has been detected in the country.  A 34-year-old Covid-19 survivor was diagnosed with green fungus infection in Madhya Pradesh's Indore. Green fungus, also known as 'Aspergillosis’ (in lungs, sinuses), includes high fever and nose bleeding.  Aspergillosis is an infection caused by Aspergillus, a common mold that lives indoors and outdoors. People with low or weak immune systems or lung diseases are at a higher risk of developing health problems due to Aspergillus. Aspergillosis is not contagious, it cannot spread from one person to another or from animals to humans.

Twitter has lost legal protection in India over its failure to appoint statutory officers in line with the new IT rules.  The microblogging platform lost legal indemnity in India after it failed to comply with new social media rules which required it to appoint key officers in India.  Twitter, however, said it had complied with the Indian government’s new IT rules and appointed an interim Chief Compliance Officer. THE LEGAL COVER An 'intermediary' status gives social media platforms immunity from liabilities over any third-party data hosted by them.  The implications of losing legal cover or status as a social media intermediary are serious.  Twitter would remain exposed to the provisions of law and not enjoy legal immunity as an intermediary and be liable like a publisher for objectionable content. With the legal cover provided by Section 79 of the Information Technology (IT) Act gone, Twitter employees starting from its head in India will be held liable fo...

Naftali Bennett was sworn in as Israel's new prime minister, after winning a confidence vote with the narrowest of margins, just 60 votes to 59.  His victory ends a 12-year grip on power by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving leader.  THE COALITION Under a coalition deal, Bennett will be replaced as prime minister by centrist Yair Lapid in 2023, who will serve as Foreign Minister for the time being. His party is the biggest in the coalition but he agreed to share power with Bennett to secure a parliamentary majority. Benny Gantz is the defence minister. The eight-party coalition has 62 MKs among themselves. NAFTALI BENETT After four elections in two years, Bennett's incoming government breaks a long political deadlock and ushers in the most diverse coalition Israel has ever seen, including the first Arab party to serve in the government.  In his speech before the Knesset confidence vote, Bennett celebrated the diversity and warned...

The Indian Prime Minister addressed the 47th G7 Summit 2021 through video conferencing. Earlier, the Finance Ministers from the G7 nations reached a landmark accord setting a Global Minimum Corporate Tax Rate (GMCTR). This year’s summit was hosted by the UK.  The theme was ‘Build Back Better. The last G-7 summit was in France in 2019, with last year’s event in the US canceled due to the pandemic.  4 PRIORITIES BY UK The UK has outlined four priority areas for its presidency this year: Leading the global recovery from coronavirus while strengthening resilience against future pandemics, Promoting future prosperity by championing free and fair trade, Tackling climate change and preserving the planet's biodiversity, Championing shared values and open societies. BUILD BACK BETTER FOR THE WORLD PROJECT It is aimed squarely at competing with China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. BRI was joined by G7 member Italy, in 2019. The G-7 project will collectively c...

The government declared that from June 21, vaccines for everyone above the age of 18 years would be procured by the Central government and distributed free to the States.  This ended the month-­old controversial system of States being asked to procure vaccines for the 18-­44 years age group at prices announced by domestic manufacturers and import vaccines through open tenders.  The Centre’s announcement came after the Supreme Court on May 31 held that the Union government’s policy of not providing free vaccines to those in the 18­-44 years age bracket was prima facie “arbitrary and irrational”. THE NEW POLICY Under the latest policy, the Centre said it will procure up to 75% of the doses of vaccines from manufacturers. Private institutions can procure the remaining 25% of doses. Fresh orders for 44 crore doses of Covishield and Covaxin had been placed by the Union government.  In addition, it also placed an order for 30 crore doses of a protein sub­unit vaccine produced b...

Following NASA’s footsteps,  European Space Agency (ESA) announced a new mission- EnVision mission to Venus. The mission will have contributions from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It is likely to be launched sometime in the 2030s.  Once launched on an Ariane 6 rocket, the spacecraft will take about 15 months to reach Venus. It will take 16 more months to achieve orbit circularisation. AIM The mission will carry a range of instruments to study the planet’s atmosphere and surface, monitor trace gases in the atmosphere and analyse its surface composition. At the core of the ESA’s mission is the question of how Earth and Venus evolved so differently from each other considering that they are roughly of the same size and composition.  EnVision will follow another ESA-led mission to Venus called ‘Venus Express’ (2005-2014) that focussed on atmospheric research and pointed to volcanic hotspots on the planet’s surface.          ...

Fugitive jeweller Mehul Choksi, key accused in the Rs-13,000-crore PNB loan fraud case, was arrested in Dominica.  He illegally entered the country from Antigua, where he had been staying since 2018.   Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said fugitive diamond merchant Mehul Choksi remains in the custody of Dominican authorities with certain legal proceedings underway, and asserted that all efforts will continue to be made to bring back fugitives to face justice in India.  Antiguan PM Gaston Brown has told media that Choksi can be deported to India from Dominica itself,  Choksi’s lawyers have argued that he cannot be sent back to India as he is not an Indian citizen anymore.  Choksi acquired Antiguan citizenship in 2017, just over a month before he fled India in January 2018, and has even surrendered his Indian passport. According to Section 9 of the Indian Citizenship Act, 1955, any Indian citizen who acquires foreign citizenship ceases to be an Indian citiz...

Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid of the Maldives has won an election as the next president of the United Nations General Assembly, succeeding Turkey’s Volkan Bozkir. Shahid pledged to push for equal access to coronavirus vaccines, a stronger and greener economic recovery and stepped-up efforts to tackle climate change.  He defeated a former Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul. MAIN ORGANS OF THE UN   General Assembly  Security Council.  Economic and Social Council  Trusteeship Council  International Court of Justice  Secretariat. UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN). It serves as the main deliberative, policy-making, and representative organ of the UN.  It was formed in 1945 (first session in 1946). Voting in the General Assembly on certain important questions—namely recommendations on peace and security; budgetary concerns; and the election, admission, suspe...

El Salvador, a small coastal country in Central America, became the first in the world to make Bitcoin, a digital currency, legal. Bukele’s New Ideas party enjoys a supermajority in the El Salvadorian legislature, and thus the El Salvador Parliament approved the move by a supermajority of 62 out of 84. President Nayib Bukele, however, clarified that the dollar will continue to remain the dominant currency in the country and Bitcoin would exist side by side. El Salvador has not had its own monetary policy since 2001, when a right-wing government made the US dollar the official currency. WHY BITCOIN AS AN OFFICIAL TENDER? El Salvador depends heavily on remittances sent by Salvadorians from abroad.  Around a quarter of the country’s citizens live in the US, and in 2020 they sent home more than $6 billion in remittances despite the pandemic– making up more than 20% of the GDP. Addressing the issue, Bukele said that currently “a big chunk of those 6 billion dollars is lost to inte...

The government has booked 30 crore doses of Hyderabad-based Biological-E's Covid vaccine, which is still in clinical trials.  The Health Ministry will make an advance payment of ₹ 1,500 crore to the company for what will be the second made-in-India vaccine to be used in the country after Bharat Biotech's Covaxin.  CORBEVAX Corbevax is a “recombinant protein sub-unit” vaccine, which means it is made up of a specific part of SARS-CoV-2 — the spike protein on the virus’s surface.  The spike protein allows the virus to enter the cells in the body so that it can replicate and cause disease.  However, when this protein alone is given to the body, it is not expected to be harmful as the rest of the virus is absent.  The body is expected to develop an immune response against the injected spike protein.  Therefore, when the real virus attempts to infect the body, it will already have an immune response ready that will make it unlikely for the person to fall...

The Group of Seven (G7) countries have backed the proposal to impose a common global corporate tax. It would be aimed at preventing multinational businesses from evading taxes and also squeeze the havens which attract tax evaders due to the low-rate jurisdictions.  The consensus to adopt a common tax rate was reached at the G7 finance ministers' meeting held in Buckingham (London) on June 5.  THE PROPOSAL The tax proposal endorsed by the US, the UK, France and other G7 countries has two parts.  The main part of the proposal states that countries around the world should tax their home companies' overseas profits at a rate of at least 15%.  The companies have multiple branches spread across various jurisdictions, they transfer the bulk of their profit in accounts set up in countries that offer the lowest tax rate.  Often, these tax havens are the Caribbean Islands such as Bahamas or British Virgin Islands, or at times, countries like Ireland where the corp...

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on May 31 wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that her government cannot release Chief Secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay who has been asked to report to the Centre in what she called a "unilateral order". Bandyopadhyay, at the centre of fresh flashpoint between Mamata Banerjee and Centre, was to report to Delhi at 10 am but the CM said that he will stay and continue to manage her state's COVID-19 crisis.  On May 28, the Centre’s Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) under Ministry of Personnel had issued an order recalling Bandyopadhyay and directed him to report by 10 am on May 31. Bandyopadhyay was served a show­ cause notice by the Union Home Ministry under Section 51 of the Disaster Management (DM) Act, 2005. The Section pertains to “punishment for obstruction” for refusal to comply with a direction given by the Central government. RECALL OF CHIEF SECRETARY The DoPT order said that the ACC has approved Mr. Bandyopadhyay’...

A 41-year-old man in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu has been confirmed as the first human case of infection with a rare strain of bird flu known as H10N3.  The man is a resident of the city of Zhenjiang. WHAT IS INFLUENZA? Influenza — also known as the flu — is a contagious viral infection that attacks your respiratory system.  Influenza viruses that infect humans can be classified into three main groups: A, B, and C.  Type A influenza infection can be serious and cause widespread outbreaks and disease. INFLUENZA A The influenza A virus has two proteins on its surface – hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). Both H & N have 18 and 11 different subtypes respectively, leading to different combinations such as H3N2 and H7N9.  There are some strains which only infect birds, while others can infect birds as well as mammals such as pigs, dogs, horses and also humans. Influenza have many strains as Influenza A virus mutates constantly.  This is be...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced two new robotic missions to Venus: DaVinci Plus and Veritas.  Both missions are part of the space agency’s Discovery Program.  The program began in 1992 to give scientists the chance to launch some missions that use fewer resources and have shorter developmental times.  The two selections are a part of the ninth Discovery Program and were made from proposals submitted in 2019. Taken together, both missions are expected to tell scientists more about the planet’s thick cloud cover and the volcanoes on its surface. DAVINCI+ DaVinci Plus will be the first of the two. DAVINCI+ is short for ‘Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging’ It will try to understand Venus’ composition to see how the planet formed and evolved. This mission also consists of a descent sphere that will pass through the planet’s thick atmosphere and make observations and take measurements of noble gases and ...

WhatsApp moved the Delhi High Court against the IT Rules . It argued specifically against Rule 4(2) that mandates that a “significant social media intermediary providing services primarily in the nature of messaging shall enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource as may be required by a judicial order.  A “significant social media intermediary” is one with more than 50 lakh registered users. ARGUMENTS OF THE GOVERNMENT A release by the Ministry of Electronics and IT has said that the traceability measure will be used by law enforcement as the “last resort” and will come by only in specific situations, such as “for the purposes of prevention, detection, investigation, prosecution or punishment of an offence related to the sovereignty and integrity of India... or child sexual abuse material, punishable with imprisonment....” The assertion suggests that this requirement is in line with the Puttaswamy judgment that clarified tha...

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced a new naming system that it devised for so-called variants of interest and variants of concern, the forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with important mutations.  HOW AND WHY? Each variant will be given a name from the Greek alphabet, in a bid to both simplify the public discussion and to strip some of the stigma from the emergence of new variants.  A country may be more willing to report it has found a new variant if it knows the new version of the virus will be identified as Rho or Sigma, rather than with the country’s name, Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s coronavirus lead, said. A plan to simplify the nomenclature of the variants has been in the works for several months, led by the WHO’s Virus Evolution Working Group. THE NAMES Letters of the Greek alphabet to refer to the variants.  Under the new scheme, B.1.1.7, the variant first identified in Britain, will be known as Alpha. B.1.351 (South Africa): Beta.  P.1 (Brazil...

There are two theories on the origins of virus— the virus could have been accidentally released from a laboratory or it was the result of a spillover from some animal species to humans.  More and more people and countries after countries are refusing to believe in the theory of natural origin of Covid-19. The Director ­General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom  Ghebreyesus, has also acknowledged that more work needs to be done on the lab leak theory. However, a WHO team that visited Wuhan thought a leak to be the least likely hypothesis.   WHY THE DEBATE RISING AGAIN? WHO’s governing forum, the World Health Assembly, mandated the Director­ General in May 2020 to conduct an inquiry into the origin of SARS­CoV­2. A joint probe was carried out by WHO and China in January-February 2021.  Since ther...