THE Paris Agreement (PA) had mandated a periodic five-yearly cycle of assessments of climate action called the Global Stocktake (GST) starting in 2023. GST is a process involving both country parties i.e., governments, as well as non-party stakeholders to review progress made on the different actions agreed upon in the international negotiations under the aegis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to tackle the greatest crisis to confront humankind, namely climate change.

AS one of the outcomes of the recently concluded G20 Summit in New Delhi, a new Biofuels Alliance was announced, with India, Brazil, the US and other countries taking the lead towards a programme of action aiming to increase the uptake of sustainable biofuels especially in the transport sector.  Here in India, much has been made of this initiative as another triumph showcasing the growing global leadership of the present government, and also as a step towards a big push to India’s already sizeable and ambitious biofuels programme.  The impression is that this new global alliance would work

THE chip wars between the US and China show no sign of abating as the US tries to stop the flow of advanced chips – sub 7 nm chips, graphical processor units (GPUs), 5G chipsets – and the lithographic machines that manufacture such chips. The US had started with sanctions that made it impossible for Huawei to manufacture its top-of-the-range processors at the heart of the 5G mobile phones. The US had then progressively widened the sanctions to advanced chip manufacturing lithographic machines and high-end computing processors, the GPUs from Nvidia.

SUDDENLY it feels as if every space-faring nation is heading to the moon! India’s Chandrayaan-3 will hopefully succeed in executing a soft landing on September 23. In a rather sudden decision, the long-postponed Russian Luna 25 mission, also for soft landing of a lander, was given the green signal and launched on August 10 on a direct path to the moon, slated to land any day between August 21 and 23.

On the occasion of Hiroshima Day, we publish an extract from ‘The Meaning of Hiroshima Nagasaki’ written by ND JayaprakashIN July 1939, Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist and a refugee in US, had sought the help of Einstein to persuade the US administration headed by President Roosevelt, to construct an atomic bomb as a counter to an identical programme that, it was then suspected, Nazi Germany had embarked upon.