China sends crewed mission to complete Tiangong space station

• The trio blasted off in a Long March-2F rocket at 0814 IMT from the Jiuquan launch centre in north-western China’s Gobi desert, said broadcaster CCTV.
• The team is tasked with “completing in-orbit assembly and construction of the space station”, as well as “commissioning of equipment” and conducting scientific experiments.
• The spacecraft docked at the Tiangong station after about “seven hours of flight”.
• Tiangong, which means “heavenly palace”, is expected to become fully operational by the end of the year. The completed station will be similar to the Soviet Mir station that orbited Earth from the 1980s until 2001.
• China’s heavily promoted space programme has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the Moon.

75% of river monitoring stations report heavy metal pollution

• The report is an annual compendium of environment-development data and is derived from public sources. Of the 588 water quality stations monitored for pollution, total coliform and biochemical oxygen demand was high in 239 and 88 stations across 21 States — an indicator of poor wastewater treatment from industry, agriculture and domestic households.
• India dumps 72% of its sewage without treatment. Ten States do not treat their sewage at all, as per the Central Pollution Control Board.
• Over a third of India’s coastline that is spread across 6,907 km saw some degree of erosion between 1990 and 2018. West Bengal is the worst hit with over 60% of its shoreline under erosion.
• The reasons for coastal erosion include increase in frequency of cyclones and sea level rise and activities such as construction of harbours, beach mining and building of dams.
• While the global average of the Ocean Health Index, a measure that looks at how sustainably humans are exploiting ocean resources, has improved between 2012 and 2021, India’s score in the index has declined over the same period.

Project to track small fishing vessels pending since 26/11

• Despite pilot studies being conducted, the project, conceived in the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, remains stuck primarily due to two reasons.
• Fishermen don’t want to get tagged as they do not want any of their illegal activities recorded and they are sceptical that others will get to know of where there is good catch. Second is that fishing is a State subject and there are local politics involved.
• There is no legislation to force fishermen to install the transponders and efforts by the Ministry of Fisheries to table the Indian Marine Fisheries Bill, 2021 which covers this has repeatedly been delayed due to the opposition from the States and fishermen.
• The Quad grouping, comprising India, Australia, Japan and the U.S., announced at the Tokyo summit last month an ambitious Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) initiative to track “dark shipping” and to build a “faster, wider, and more accurate maritime picture of near-real-time activities in partners’ waters” integrating three critical regions in the Indo-Pacific.
• There are two main regulations globally on IUU fishing — the Cape Town Agreement (CTA) and the Agreement on Ports State Measures (PSMA) — and India is, so far, not a signatory to both agreements.
• The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is for bigger ships, which was made compulsory for all vessels above 20 metres after 26/11 by the National Committee on Strengthening Maritime and Coastal Security (NCSMCS).

India achieved 10% ethanol blending target in petrol months ahead of schedule: PM Modi

• This, he claimed, had led to a reduction of 27 lakh tonnes of carbon emissions and saved foreign exchange worth ₹41,000 crore. Farmers earned ₹40,600 crore in the past eight years due to increase in ethanol blending, Mr. Modi said.
• Last June, Mr. Modi made public the “Road map for ethanol blending in India, 2020-25”, which laid out a pathway for achieving 20% ethanol blending by 2025-26.
• The 10% blending target was to be achieved in November 2022.

India bangladesh joint military exercise “ex sampriti-x”

• Exercise SAMPRITI is an important bilateral defence cooperation endeavour conducted alternately by both countries which aims to strengthen and widen the aspects of interoperability and cooperation between both the armies.
• During the joint military exercise Ex SAMPRITI-X, armies of both the Nations will share expertise in multiple simulated scenarios of Counter Terrorism, Humanitarian Assistance & Disaster Relief and UN Peacekeeping Force under UN mandate.

World’s first fishing cat census done in Chilika

• About twice the size of a typical house cat, the fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) is a feline known to even dive to catch fish. Wetlands are the favorite habitats of the fishing cat.
• They are found in 10 Asian countries but have stayed undetected in Vietnam and Java since the last decade or so.
• In India, fishing cats are mainly found in the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, on the foothills of the Himalayas along the Ganga and Brahmaputra river valleys and in the Western Ghats.
• The globally threatened cats are found in wetlands in major South and Southeast Asian river basins starting from the Indus in Pakistan till the Mekong in Vietnam and in Sri Lanka and Java.
• The fishing cat is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) lists the fishing cat on Appendix II part of Article IV of CITES. In India, the fishing cat is included in Schedule I of the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972

May sees worst FPI sell-off in over two years at Rs 44000 crore

• Foreign portfolio investors are those that invest funds in markets outside of their home turf.
• Their investments typically include equities, bonds and mutual funds.
• They are generally not active shareholders and do not exert any control over the companies whose shares they hold. The passive nature of their investment also allows them to enter or exit a stock at will and with ease.
• Promise of attractive returns on the back of economic growth draws investors including FPIs into a country’s markets.

What impact does an FPI sell-off have

• When FPIs sell their holdings and repatriate funds back to their home markets, the local currency takes a beating. As supply of the rupee in the market rises, its value declines.
• Their selling actions have triggered a significant decline in benchmark indices resulting in a drop in market capitalisation of companies.

stagflation impacting markets

• The most difficult problem for policymakers is when inflation runs high even as economic output either stagnates or, worse, shrinks. The slowdown in economic activity, in turn, leads businesses to shed jobs and the resultant situation is termed as ‘stagflation’.
• One of the classic instances when most economies including the U.S. faced ‘stagflation’ was during the ‘oil shock’ of the early 1970s when an embargo led by the oil producers’ cartel OPEC caused the price of crude to almost quadruple in a period of just under six months.
• While the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the curbs imposed to contain the spread of the virus caused the first major recent economic slowdown worldwide, the subsequent fiscal and monetary measures taken to address the downturn, including substantial increases in liquidity in most of the advanced economies, fuelled a sharp upsurge in inflation.
• The ongoing war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion of its southern neighbour and the consequent Western sanctions on Moscow have caused a fresh and as yet hard-to-quantify ‘supply shock’.