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- President Mauricio Macri has asked the International Monetary Fund for an early release of funds from a $50 billion deal with the IMF to ease concerns that Argentina will not be able to meet its debt obligations for 2019.
- Macri said in a televised address 29 August that Argentina has agreed with the IMF "to advance all necessary funds to guarantee compliance with next year's financial program."
- Macri said that in the past week there have been "expressions of a lack of trust in the markets" about Argentina. He said the decision seeks to dispel any uncertainty, but he did not specify the amount or when the funds will be released.
- Argentina was forced to strike a deal with the IMF earlier this year after a sharp depreciation of its currency and a run on the peso.
- The three year stand-by financing deal is aimed at strengthening the South American country's weak economy and helping it fight inflation, which at 30 per cent per year, is one of the highest in the world.
- The Argentine currency fell again on Wednesday to close at an all-time low of 34.2 pesos per US dollar.
- The IMF said in a statement that it will "revise the government's economic plan with a focus on better insulating Argentina from the recent shifts in global financial markets, including through stronger monetary and fiscal policies and a deepening of efforts to support the most vulnerable in society."
- The international lender has admitted that it had a made a string of mistakes that contributed to Argentina's economic implosion.
- A 2004 report by the IMF's internal audit unit concluded it failed to provide enough oversight, overestimated growth and the success of economic reforms, while it continued to lend Argentina money when its debt burden had turned unsustainable.
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- NASA scientists peering deep inside Jupiter's Great Red Spot a storm that has been raging on the planet for over 350 years have detected signs of water above the planet's deepest clouds
- The pressure of the water combined with their measurements of another oxygen-bearing gas, carbon monoxide, imply that Jupiter has two to nine times more oxygen than the Sun, researchers said.
- The findings, published in the Astronomical Journal, support theoretical and computer-simulation models that have predicted abundant water on Jupiter.
- The revelation was stirring given that the team's experiment could have easily failed. The Great Red Spot is full of dense clouds, which makes it hard for electromagnetic energy to escape and teach astronomers anything about the chemistry within.
- "It turns out they're not so thick that they block our ability to see deeply," said Gordon L Bjoraker, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
- The data collected will supplement the information NASA's Juno spacecraft is gathering as it circles the planet from north to south once every 53 days. Among other things, Juno is looking for water with its own infrared spectrometer and with a microwave radiometer that can probe deeper than anyone has seen to 100 bars, or 100 times the atmospheric pressure at Earth's surface.
- Juno is the latest spacecraft tasked with finding water, likely in gas form, on this giant gaseous planet. Jupiter is thought to be the first planet to have formed by siphoning the elements left over from the formation of the Sun as our star coalesced from an amorphous nebula into the fiery ball of gases we see 30 August
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- To promote a culture of innovation and research in higher education, the Union government has introduced Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements (ARRIA), Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar announcement on 30 August
- He made the announcement at the inauguration of an innovation cell at the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) in New Delhi.
- "India lacks innovation. It is a challenge for us to innovate, innovation will make our country prosper. New thinking must be encouraged and every college must have an innovation cell," he said.
- Named after former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ARIIA will rank educational institutions for innovation output based on all major indicators and parameters used globally," he added.
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- In an effort to clean the Ganges, Germany is providing a soft loan of euro 120 million (Rs 990 crore approximately) to India to strengthen sewage water treatment infrastructure in Uttarakhand, Charge d'Affaires Jasper Wieck said 30 August
- Elaborating on the work done by the German Embassy, Wieck said the project would focus on extension and replacement of sewerage system (around 360 kilometres) including complete house connection, construction of sewage treatment plants of around 15 million litres per day (mld).
- The initiative also includes construction of 13 sewage pumping stations."The purpose of the project is to reduce the inflow of untreated waste water in River Ganga and, thus, to improve the water quality of the river," Wieck said.
- In 2015, the German government to India committed an interest subsidised loan of up to euro 120 million through German Development Bank KfW for financing investments such as construction of sewerage network and sewage treatment plants.
- He added that the German development agency GIZ has prepared a 'Ganga Box', aimed to target schools-going children and inform them about the river.
- Vikarant Tyagi, a project coordinator with GIZ, said the concept 'Ganga book' was planned on the lines of 'Danube Book' when the cleaning of the European river was undertaken.
- The Ganga book would have information mythological, socio-cultural, economic importance about the river and suggestions to avoid pollution, like not dumping plastic in the water body.
- "The aim is to bring change in the behaviour of people towards the river. We have piloted this projected in a government school in Uttarakhand and plan to do replicate it across the state," Tyagi said.
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- Nasa is set to launch the most advanced laser instrument of its kind in to the space next month, to measure the changes in the heights of Earth's polar ice in unprecedented detail.
- The Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) will measure the average annual elevation change of land ice covering Greenland and Antarctica to within the width of a pencil, capturing 60,000 measurements every second.
- "The new observational technologies of ICESat-2 - a top recommendation of the scientific community in Nasa's first Earth science decadal survey - will advance our knowledge of how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contribute to sea level rise," said Michael Freilich, from Nasa's Science Mission Directorate in the US.
- ICESat-2 - which is scheduled to be launched on September 12 - represents a major technological leap in our ability to measure changes in ice height.
- Its Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) measures height by timing how long it takes individual light photons to travel from the spacecraft to Earth and back.
- "ATLAS required us to develop new technologies to get the measurements needed by scientists to advance the research," said Doug McLennan, ICESat-2 project manager at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center.
- ATLAS will fire 10,000 times each second, sending hundreds of trillions of photons to the ground in six beams of green light.
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- Basmati grown in Punjab this year is likely to witness a major reduction in use of pesticides and fungicides that lead to rejection of export consignments from India. Alarmed by hurdles in export of rice from India, the state government is reaching out to farmers through Gurugwaras, public meetings and social media to dissuade use of Acephate, Cabandazim, Thiamethoxam, Tricyclazole and Triazophos chemicals responsible for higher residue level in rice.
- There will be significant decline in use of hazardous chemicals in rice this year that cause hurdles in exports,” KS Pannu, Commissioner Food and Drug Administration Punjab told ET. “Any adverse effect on export of rice will have adverse effect on Rs 50,000 crore business in India and hit hard economy of the state,” he said. He maintained that an exhaustive awareness campaign is underway by joining hand with pesticide dealers, commission agents farmers and rice industry.
- Punjab Agriculture University has already recommended alternatives to these five pesticides and fungicides. This season, Punjab, is expected to harvest a record output of rice. But stricter pesticide residue norms in global markets are posing hurdles to rice from the country.
- As per study of Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), over 400 refusals have been recorded of exports from India owing to presence of higher than approved level of pesticides residue. “But banning these chemicals is beyond the purview of state government as they are registered with the Central Insecticides Board and Registration Committee, ” Pannu said.
- In paddy, much of the pesticide and chemical is used in September and October. Dealers meetings are being held at district level as well as block level to dissuade them from selling these chemicals. “Posters are doting dealers markets across rice growing districts to aware farmers of harm caused by these chemicals,” an official of Punjab agriculture department said.
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- Wipro, India’s third largest software services company, has joined the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) to drive blockchain technology adoption in the transportation Industry. The company that it intends to use this platform to help ideate platform-agnostic blockchain standards for the logistics and transportation industry.
- BiTA, founded in 2017 by experienced tech and transportation executives as a forum for development of blockchain standards and providing educational resources for transportation sector, has members such as FedEx, Uber Freight, Daimler, Bridgestone, Logiflex, Blockarray, Google, SAp, Salesforce among others.
- The group provides a platform to develop and embrace common frameworks and standards using which industry participants can build innovative blockchain applications.
- Wipro, which helps global organizations in their blockchain adoption journey through its comprehensive suite of offerings, will focus on driving the design and development of production-grade blockchain solutions for industry use cases, leveraging its strong portfolio of patents and IPs, pre-built frameworks, and other assets, said the company in a statement.
- “We look forward to working closely with Wipro’s blockchain experts to drive enterprise scale blockchain adoption for global transportation organizations, specifically around use cases such as supply chain traceability, trade finance, provenance, fraud detection and compliance management,” Craig Fuller, managing director, BiTA, was quoted in the Wipro statement.
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