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- The photograph of a little girl crying as she and her mother are taken into custody by US border officials has won the prestigious World Press Photo Award.
- Judges said veteran Getty photographer John Moore's picture taken after Honduran mother Sandra Sanchez and her daughter Yanela illegally crossed the US-Mexican border last year showed "a different kind of violence that is psychological".
- The picture of the wailing toddler was published world-wide and caused a public outcry about Washington's controversial policy to separate thousands of migrants from their children.
- US Customs and Border Protection officials later said Yanela and her mom were not among those separated, but the public furore "resulted in President Donald Trump reversing the policy in June last year," the judges said.
- Moore was taking pictures of US Border Patrol agents on a moonless night in the Rio Grande Valley on June 12 last year when they came across a group of people who tried to cross the border.
- As officials took their names, Moore said he spotted Sandra Sanchez and her toddler who started wailing when her mom put her down to be searched.
- Judges chose Dutch-Swedish photographer Pieter Ten Hoopen's images of the 2018 mass-migrant caravan to the US border as its winner in the "World Press Photo Story of the Year Award".
- Ten Hoopen's pictures, which show families and children as they made their way from Honduras in mid-October to the US border "showed a high sense of dignity," one of the judges said.
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- An Israeli spacecraft has lost contact with Earth and crashed just moments before it was to land on the moon, failing in an ambitious attempt to make history as the first privately funded lunar mission.
- The spacecraft lost communication with ground control late 11th April as it was making its final descent to the moon.Moments later, the mission was declared a failure.
- "We definitely crashed on surface of moon," said Opher Doron, general manager of the space division of Israel Aerospace Industries.
- He said the spacecraft was in pieces scattered at the planned landing site. Doron said that the spacecraft's engine turned off shortly before landing. By the time power was restored, he said the craft was moving too fast to land safely. Scientists were still trying to figure out the cause of the failure.
- "One of the inertial measurement units failed. And that caused an unfortunate chain of events we're not sure about," he said. "The engine was turned off. The engine was stopped and the spacecraft crashed. That's all we know."
- The mishap occurred in front of a packed audience that included Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was broadcast live on national television.
- The small robotic spacecraft, built by the non-profit SpaceIL and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, had hoped to match a feat that has only been achieved by the national space agencies of three countries: US, Russia and China.
- President Reuven Rivlin hosted dozens of youngsters at his official residence. The children, some wearing white spacesuits, appeared confused as the crash unfolded.
- "We are full of admiration for the wonderful people who brought the spacecraft to the moon," Rivlin said.
- "True, not as we had hoped, but we will succeed in the end." The failure was a disappointing ending to a 6.5 million kilometer (4 million mile) lunar voyage, almost unprecedented in length, that was designed to conserve fuel and reduce price.
- The spacecraft hitched a ride on the SpaceX Falcon rocket, launched from Florida in February.
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- To identify, demarcate wetlands and restore the degraded wetlands through suitable livelihood programmes
- In a major attempt to build resilience against the impact of climate change, the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have joined together to map, validate and protect smaller wetlands in the coastal region aimed at restoring them through coastal livelihood programmes.
- An MoU was signed between the CMFRI and the Space Applications Centre (SAC) of ISRO to develop a mobile app and a centralised web portal with a complete database of wetlands that are smaller than 2.25 hectares in the country.
- Such smaller wetlands cover an area of more than five lakh hectares across the country, while Kerala having as many as 2,592 smaller wetlands.
- As per the MoU, the two scientific institutes aim to identify and demarcate wetlands and restore the degraded wetlands through suitable livelihood options like coastal aquaculture.
- The app will be used for real-time monitoring of the wetlands and giving advisories to stakeholders and coastal people.
- The collaborative move is part of a national framework for fisheries and wetlands recently developed by the National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) project of CMFRI.
- The NICRA project aims to find ways and means to mitigate the impact of climate change in marine fisheries and coastal region.
- According to the MoU, the National Wetland Atlas, already developed by the SAC, will be updated with real-time data of physical, chemical and biological parameters of the wetlands to be provided by the CMFRI.
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