IASTODAY DAILY CAPSULES -General Studies-01

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Early environmental exposures affect blood pressure in children: Study

News

• A new study looked at multiple factors that act together to affect the blood pressure in childhood, beginning in utero.

Factors that may affect BP in children

• The actual building and its surroundings where the mother lived during pregnancy
• Outdoor temperature, intake of fish, and chemical exposure during pregnancy

Findings

• According to the study four environmental factors affected blood pressure in the children studied: the actual building and its surroundings where the mother lived while she was pregnant; outdoor temperature; intake of fish during pregnancy and chemical exposure during pregnancy.
• The team of researchers found that early life exposure to factors such as air pollution, natural spaces, lifestyle, chemicals in the environment, noise levels, and the built-up surroundings may affect blood pressure in children. The researchers evaluated 89 prenatal maternal exposures and 128 postnatal child exposures for the study.
• Babies with low birth weight have an increased risk of developing non-communicable diseases in their adulthood. The need of the hour is to ensure that the mother is adequately nourished during pregnancy so that a healthy baby is born.

Risk factors

• Apart from cardiovascular health problems in women as a result of pregnancy-related lifestyles, including obesity, drinking and smoking, it is also true that the unborn child may be predisposed to develop high blood pressure in response to these risk factors.
• The child is bound to have the same risks as those faced by the mother during pregnancy.
• Hypertension is a known risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and it is important that all precautions are taken to keep your blood pressure under control.

IASTODAY DAILY CAPSULES -General Studies-02

Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh to have a common high court

News

• The Union Territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh will have a common high court, State Judicial Academy’s Director said.

Common high court

• State Judicial Academy’s Director said 108 Central laws would be applicable for the two UTs while 164 State laws would be repealed and 166 State laws will continue to be applicable.
• The Centre on August 5 nullified Article 370 of the Constitution, revoking the special status of the state.
• Parliament approved the resolution in this regard and also passed the bill on the bifurcation of the State into two UTs.
• State Judicial Academy’s Director said the legislative Assembly will be formed in J&K as UT but there will be no legislative Assembly in the Union Territory of Ladakh as it will be directly controlled by the Union government.
• There will be a common High Court for the UTs of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Existing law and procedure for practice in the high court will remain the same.

UN human rights chief asks India, Pakistan to respect and protect rights of Kashmiris

News

• UN Human Rights chief Michelle Bachelet asked India and Pakistan to ensure that the human rights of the Kashmiri people are respected and protected, amid tensions between the two neighbours after New Delhi abrogated the special status of Jammu and Kashmir.

Tensions between India and Pakistan

• UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, also asked India to ensure that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) verification in Assam does not leave the people Stateless.
• On Kashmir, UN High Commissioner office continues to receive reports on the human rights situation on both sides of the Line of Control.
• Tensions between India and Pakistan spiked after India abrogated provisions of Article 370 of the Constitution to withdraw Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and bifurcated it into two Union Territories, evoking strong reactions from Pakistan.
• Asserting that abrogation of Article 370 was its internal matter, India has strongly criticised Pakistan for making “irresponsible statements” and provocative anti-India rhetoric over issues internal to it.
• UN High Commissioner also said the recent NRC verification process in Assam has caused great uncertainty and anxiety, with some 9 million people excluded from the final list.
• UN High Commissioner appealed to the Indian government to ensure due process during the appeals process, prevent deportation or detention, and ensure people are protected from Statelessness.
• India says updating of the NRC is a statutory, transparent, legal process mandated by the Supreme Court of India. It maintains that the exclusion from the NRC has no implication on the rights of an individual resident in Assam.

Centre asks States to identify accident-prone spots

News

• The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has issued new guidelines to State governments for identifying accident black spots on national highways and rectifying them and has urged them to give “special attention in a strictly time-bound manner” to the issue.

Accident black spots

• The guidelines detail the process for inspecting the spots, framing a proposal and obtaining sanctions for rectifying them and suggest a timeline for submitting an inspection report and completing the civil works.
• Based on site inspection, preliminary survey etc the type of interventions required may be identified and accordingly the action for taking corrective measures i.e. short-term measures and long-term measures may be initiated at the regional office level.
• A black spot is defined as a stretch of not more than 500 metres in length where five accidents have taken place or where 10 fatalities have happened in the last three years.
• Once the correction has been made, authorities will also monitor whether accidents have declined.
• Recently, Minister for Road Transport and Highways said the government had prepared a ₹14,000-crore plan to identify black spots.
• The Ministry has reached out to the World Bank for funds after approval from the Ministry of Finance.

IASTODAY DAILY CAPSULES -General Studies-03

Nilgiri tahr’s population up 27% in three years in TN

News

• Nilgiri tahr, sightings in the Mukurthi National Park have risen from 568 in 2018 to 612 this year.

Nilgiri tahr

• This was the second consecutive year that an increase in the population of the animal had been recorded in the park, meaning the population of the Nilgiri tahr, also known as the Nilgiri ibex, has risen by 132 since 2016.
• The almost 8% increase in the population of the iconic animal in 2019 follows a similarly significant increase in its population in 2018.
• There was a decrease in tahr numbers in 2017, when a population of only 438 was recorded, down from 480 in 2016.
• Efforts were being made to ensure that the 78-sq.km reserve, closed to tourists, remained relatively free of some of the species of invasive plants that had begun their incursion into other habitats, such as Scotch broom and gorse in Avalanche.
• The 275 hectares of cleared wattle plantations were ‘maintained’ in 2018, ensuring that these cleared areas remained free from new invasive wattle trees coming up from underground seed banks.

Parts of Wikipedia offline after ‘malicious’ attack

News

• Popular online reference website Wikipedia went down in several countries after the website was targeted by what it described as a “malicious attack”.

Cyber-attacks

• The server of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the site, suffered a “massive” Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
• DDoS attacks often involve legions of zombie computers machines infected with viruses and commanded to simultaneously visit a website.
• Such a massive onslaught of demand can overwhelm website computer servers, slowing service or knocking them offline.

Similar cyber-attacks have hammered other popular internet domains including Twitter, Facebook and Google in recent years.

Chandrayaan 2 orbiter ‘sights’ Vikram lander on moon

News

• The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has retrieved images and located the lander Vikram on the moon and is analysing them for a clear picture of the lander’s condition, it is learnt.

Lander Vikram

• At its descent onto the lunar surface, the lander lost contact with earth. It is believed to have deviated from its path, fallen silent, and probably crashed on moon.
• The pictures are among the early images sent later in the day by the main Chandrayaan 2 spacecraft, which continues to orbit the moon from pole to pole from a 100-km distance.
• The lander was spotted some distance away possibly about half a kilometre from its intended touchdown point.
• The originally chosen region was about 70° south of the lunar equator and about 600 km from the lunar south pole.
• The orbiter is fitted with a fine Orbiter High Resolution Camera of 30-cm resolution. A Terrain Mapping Camera-2 is another imager put among the orbiter’s eight payloads.

Chinese trawlers in southern Indian Ocean worry India

News

• There has been a huge increase in Chinese deep-sea fishing trawlers in the southern Indian Ocean far from the Chinese coast which has raised concerns in the government and the security establishment.

Chinese trawlers

• In the last four years, on an average at least 500 Chinese trawlers were present in the region and around 32,250 incidents per year were recorded.
• The trawlers were, however, not in India’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) but beyond. This includes trawlers from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
• Breaking this up further, there were 1,100 occurrences near Somalia and 1,500 occurrences near the Coast of Oman. Occurrences are recordings of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) aboard trawlers and ships recorded when they are activated.
• So a trawler can be recorded multiple times based on its AIS signature.
• The maritime movements in the region are tracked at the Navy’s Information Management and Analysis Centre (IMAC) at Gurugram, which is the single-point centre interlinking all the coastal radar chains and other inputs along the coastline.
• The AIS information comprises name, MMSI number, position, course, speed, last port visited, destination and so on. This information can be picked up through various AIS sensors including coastal AIS chains and satellite based receivers.
• To address this, the National Maritime Domain Awareness initiative aims to integrate fishing, ports, customs so that the database is available to everyone.

Hurricane Dorian: India announces $1 mln disaster relief aid for Bahamas

News

• India announced disaster relief aid of $1 million to help people in the Bahamas affected by Hurricane Dorian.

Hurricane Dorian

• The death toll from the calamity has risen to over 40 and is likely to increase even more, even as search and rescue teams are still trying to reach out to Bahamian communities isolated by floodwaters and debris in the wake of Hurricane Dorian.

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