Current Affairs for BANK, IBPS Exams - 13 July 2022

::National::

Modi govt blasts ‘experts' over Ashokan Lions criticism: ‘sense of proportion…’

Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri defended the depiction of the national emblem cast atop the new Parliament building after the opposition parties' criticism of the alleged ferocious makeover. In a series of tweets, the housing and urban affairs minister asserted that there would not be any difference between the original Sarnath emblem and the one installed on the new Parliament building if the former is scaled up or the latter is reduced to the original size.
Providing a “sense of proportion and perspective”, Puri said that the Sarnath emblem is 1.6m tall while the latest depiction is 6.5m. He argued that an exact replica of the original, if placed on the new building, would be barely visible beyond the peripheral rail. The minister stressed the need to appreciate the impact of “angle, height & scale when comparing the two structures.”
“The 'experts' should also know that the original placed in Sarnath is at ground level while the new emblem is at a height of 33 mtrs from ground,” he added. “If one looks at the Sarnath emblem from below it would look as calm or angry as the one being discussed.”
Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said the government should check whether the national emblem of Parliament represents "the statue of Great Sarnath" or "is a distorted version of GIR lion". "Please check it and if it needs, mend the same," he said in a tweet.
Trinamool Congress MP Jawahar Sircar said the depiction of Ashokan lions is " unnecessarily aggressive and disproportionate".
A former senior official of the Archaeological Survey of India said that the depiction of lions in the national emblem is a "good copy" of Sarnath Lion Capital of Ashoka, reported ANI.

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::International::

Sri Lanka on tenterhooks as President flees to Male

After President Gotabaya Rajapaksa did the “Ashraf Ghani” act and fled to Male leaving the island nation in economic chaos, more violence is feared in Sri Lanka today as Left-backed protestors will mount more pressure on streets to bring about a political change.
While there are six candidates in the reckoning for the post of Sri Lankan president through Parliament vote on July 19, none of them have a majority or even the will to take on the leadership of the troubled nation. The worst-case scenario will be if former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is considered very close to the disgraced Rajapaksas, becomes a consensus candidate as he apparently has the backing of the West.
Even as Sri Lanka today is a bankrupt nation with food and fuel crisis, Gotabaya spent his entire Tuesday trying to secure a visa to United States but to no avail. Gotabaya had renounced his US citizenship to become President of Sri Lanka. He even tried to send feelers to India but, again, to no avail as New Delhi is with the people of Sri Lanka.
It is understood that Gotabaya, despite international counsel to stay put, left with family in the dead of Tuesday night and reached Male after an hour flight in a Sri Lankan Air Force medium lift Russian AN-32 plane.
He was received by Speaker Mohammed Nasheed, who himself had fled to Sri Lanka in 2012, at the airport as Gotabaya is officially still the President of Sri Lanka. He is said to have sent a letter of his resignation as President to the Parliament Speaker before he left Colombo. The Speaker is also close to the Rajapaksas.

::Economy::

Global energy crisis hastening end of fossil fuel dominance, says India

The global energy crisis is accelerating a shift to renewable sources and hastening the end of the dominance of fossil fuels, according to India’s Power and Renewable Energy Minister Raj Kumar Singh.
Renewables paired with energy storage are now cheaper than coal after the fuel’s price surged in recent months, while fossil sources are also experiencing a lack of investment in new production, Singh said Wednesday in a speech at the Sydney Energy Forum.
“This will actually hasten the energy transition,” Singh said. “Once you have round-the-clock renewables, that’s renewables plus storage, that are viable, then that’s the end of the story for fossil fuels.”
Turmoil in the global energy sector that’s triggered shortages in some nations and sent power and fuel prices soaring has multiple causes, and is not only the result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Singh.
The energy crisis began about half a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with shortages of coal, natural gas and then oil as a result of “preemptive underinvestment,” Daniel Yergin, vice chairman at S&P Global Inc., said at the conference.
“The next few months could get far worse,” Yergin said. “Partly because markets are so tight” and also because Vladimir Putin seeks to use natural gas as a weapon to create economic hardship, strengthen populist parties and weaken the alliance against his invasion of Ukraine, he said.

WHO chief warns of rising infections, deaths from new Covid wave

The World Health Organization urged governments and health care systems to take steps to curb Covid-19 transmission as a fresh wave of infections moves across Europe and the US.
Sub-variants of the omicron strain are lifting case numbers and leading to further fatalities, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday. Tedros, as the head of the WHO is known, recommended the revival of protocols like mask-wearing to stop the spread.
“New waves of the virus demonstrate that Covid-19 is nowhere near over,” Tedros said, adding that he is “concerned about a rising trend of deaths.”
Europe is at the centre of a new wave of cases driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron sub-variants as people attend large gatherings and resume traveling after two years of staying close to home.
In England, an estimated 2.1 million people, or one in 25, tested positive in the final week of June, according to the Office for National Statistics. People can be infected even if they have had Covid previously, but vaccination does help to protect against serious illness.
The WHO is worried that even as cases rise again, surveillance of the virus and new potential variants is on the decline.
Tedros said that a WHO committee reiterated that Covid-19 remains a public health emergency of international concern -- the way the global health organization classifies a pandemic.
Noting that many governments are concerned about the BA.5 sub-lineage, particularly anecdotal evidence of the potential for re-infection, the WHO said there is no evidence so far that BA.5 is any more severe than previous omicron variants or that vaccines and approved treatments are not effective.

::Science and tech::

Nasa new images: Woman behind James Webb Space Telescope had an 'ugly cry'

Nasa has released 5 images so far: SMACS 0723, a distant galaxy cluster; WASP-96b, a giant gas planet and its cloud; Southern Ring Nebula, dance of a dying star; Stephan’s Quintet, five galaxies in a cosmic dance; Carina Nebula; nursery of baby stars.
As the new Nasa images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope have stunned the world, astrophysicist Jane Rigby, Webb's operations project scientist, shared her first reaction after seeing the first focussed images from the telescope. "Earlier than this, the first focussed images that we took where they were razor-sharp...that for me had the very emotional reaction like oh my goodness, it works. And it works better than we thought...personally, I went and had an ugly cry. What the engineers have done to build this thing is amazing," the scientist said.
The second image is of WASP-96b, a giant gas planet, located nearly 1,150 light years from Earth. This planet is about the size of Saturn and not a candidate for life elsewhere but a key target for astronomers. Instead of an image, the telescope used its infrared detectors to look at the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere. It showed water vapour in the super-hot planet’s atmosphere and even found the chemical spectrum of neon, showing clouds where astronomers thought there were none.
The third image is of the Southern Ring Nebula, also called eight-burst. The image shows the dance of a dying star, about 2,500 light-years away.
The fourth image is of Stephan’s Quintet, five galaxies in a cosmic dance that was first seen 225 years ago in the constellation Pegasus. It includes a black hole that scientists said showed material “swallowed by this sort of cosmic monster.”

::Sports::

Virat Kohli slides into dangerous territory

The alarming slide in Kohli’s performances has reached a point where his India spot looks in danger.
By its very nature, competitive sport lends itself to comparisons. When athletes are at their peak, we see how they stack up against their contemporaries and draw parallels with past greats. When they are down, struggling towards the latter stages of their careers, we tend to look at others who went through a similar slump and wonder whether this could be the end of the road for them.
In Kohli’s case — as is customary for the very best players —he’s also measured by the exalted standards he has set. That high benchmark, though, is becoming a distant memory with each passing innings.
After a disastrous 2014 tour of England, when he returned 134 runs in five Tests at an average of 13.4, his period of domination began on the tour of Australia that December when he hit 692 runs in four Tests with four hundreds.
For the next five years, Kohli exuded an air of invincibility; scoring centuries seemed like a routine day at work. It seems anything but straightforward now as a three-figure score has eluded him since his 139 in India’s first pink-ball Test against Bangladesh in November 2019. His Test average has nosedived from 63.64 during that five-year phase to 28.12 since December 2019.