Beijing is deploying cognitive tools like simulated audio visuals against Taiwan to demonstrate its ability to fight and win a future war.

Grey Zone Warfare:

• Grey Zone Warfare is a new, emerging battlefield-centric concept defined as the use of coercive measures to exploit the operational space between peace and war.
• These measures deliberately stay below a threshold so as not to prompt a conventional military response to alter the status quo, which otherwise would have been attracted.
• Origin: Its beginning is attributed to the Cold War era from 1945 when the development of nuclear weapons meant direct conflicts had to be restrained as the cost of conventional conflict had grown too steep and the risk of escalation too profound.
• Methods: Grey Zone Warfare is characterized by subthreshold activities, including kinetic and non-kinetic methods by conventional military force and irregular proxies.
• Kinetic: It is the use of proxies for on-ground action or change of territorial status quo through coercion or militarisation of disputed features.
• Example: China’s action in the South China Sea or Russia’s invasion of Crimea
• Non-kinetic: These are provocative activities ranging from nefarious economic activities, influence operations, and cyberattacks to mercenary operations, assassinations, disinformation campaigns, economic actions such as debt traps and sanctions, election meddling, etc.

Prime Objective:

• Escalation Bait: The aggressor country’s small actions could be designed as bait for the other party to escalate, which would then give the aggressor a free hand to respond in kind, legitimized as a form of self-defense.
• Projection of strength: The countries often show off their abilities. They also aim to normalise disputed territorial claims by repeatedly marking a presence in those regions.

Techniques Used by China against Taiwan

• Cognitive Warfare: The People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command (PLA ETC) Weibo account recently released a 3D animation video depicting an invasion scenario of Taiwan’s areas in Taipei and Kaohsiung with land warship-based ballistic missile launchers.
• Sustained Military Pressure: China has maintained sustained pressure on Taiwan’s defense and Intelligence forces since 2020, with daily sorties conducted by PLA fighter jets, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), strategic fighters, and early warning aircraft inducing wear-out within Taiwanese forces.
• Intelligence Gathering: The UAVs are deployed to conduct intelligence work in the areas surrounding the island.
• Ideological and Psychological Warfare: Beijing often pushes narratives within Taiwanese territory that thrust ideological choices upon its citizens by initiating public discussions on social media and garnering attention for the Chinese cause.
• Economic warfare: China has taken coercive economic measures, leveraging the cross-strait trade and business interdependence to seek concessions.
• Example: China has unilaterally suspended the preferential tax rates for chemical imports from Taiwan, granted under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), as a retaliation against Mr. Lai’s propagation of “separatist” sentiments.

The EU’s recently passed EU AI Act, which will be rolled out in phases over the next two years, has ignited a battle over data transparency.

New AI Rules of European Union:

• Template: The EU’s AI Office plans to release a template for organisations to provide “detailed summaries” of the content/ data used by organisations who deploy general-purpose AI models, such as ChatGPT, to train their AI models following a consultation with stakeholders.
• Objective: To ensure an appropriate balance between the legitimate need to protect trade secrets and, on the other hand, the protection of privacy and creators’ rights over their content, including copyright holders’ rights to exercise their rights under Union law.
• Datasets as Trade Secret: AI companies are highly resistant to revealing what their models have been trained on, describing the information as a trade secret that would give competitors an unfair advantage if made public.
• Ethically Sourced Content: Technology companies have signed a flurry of content-licensing deals with media outlets and websites.
• Example: OpenAI signed deals with the Financial Times and The Atlantic, while Google struck deals with NewsCorp (NWSA.O), opening a new tab social media site Reddit.

Need for Transparency Rules:

• Breach of copyright: In the past few years, a few big tech companies, including Google, OpenAI, and Stability AI, have faced lawsuits from creators claiming their content was improperly used to train their models.
• Ensure fair remuneration: There is a growing call for tech companies to pay fairly, the copyrights holders for data used by them to train their AI models.
• Right of consent and privacy: Every creator should have the right to know if their work, songs, voice, art, or science was used in training the algorithm.
• Example: OpenAI has faced backlash for featuring an AI-generated voice described as “eerily similar” to her own by actress Scarlett Johansson in a public demonstration of the newest version of ChatGPT.

Artificial Intelligence?

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems capable of performing tasks that historically required human intelligence, such as recognizing speech, making decisions, and identifying patterns.
• Umbrella term: It encompasses a wide variety of technologies, including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP).
• Concerns: privacy, system bias, and violation of intellectual property rights.

Challenges:

• The Data transparency rules have the potential to hinder the European AI startups’ competitiveness.
• Affect Europe’s AI ecosystem: The rules can result in the shift of the AI ecosystem from Europe to other countries and Europe can be reduced into becoming a consumer of American and Chinese products.
• Bad Regulation: Pre Mature regulation of emerging Technologies like AI can hinder innovation in the sector running the risk of regulating technologies that haven’t been mastered, or regulating them badly because it has not been mastered.
• Widespread Implication: The rules will have big implications for smaller AI startups and big tech companies like Google (GOOGL.O), and Meta (META.O), which have put the technology at the centre of their future operations.

Way Forward

• Awareness of Rights: People should have the awareness that they are communicating or interacting  with an AI system as well as duly informing users of the capabilities and limitations of that AI system and affected persons about their rights.
• Traceability: AI systems shall be developed and used in a way that allows appropriate traceability and explainability  in case of any wrong and harmful information.
• Transparency: The technical infrastructure of AI systems should be transparent in their functioning so that users can understand the process and logic behind the decisions made.
• This includes providing an explanation of how an AI system arrived at its decisions, as well as information on the data used to train the system and the accuracy of the system.

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change reported a significant decrease in atmospheric hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) five years before the target year.

Key Findings On Ozone-depleting HCFCs

• The study is titled as “A decrease in radiative forcing and equivalent effective chlorine from hydrochlorofluorocarbons”
• Peaking of Emissions: HCFC emissions peaked in 2021, five years earlier than anticipated in 2026.

Ozone-depleting HCFCs-

• Impact of HCFCs: Their impact on the Earth’s energy balance (known as radiative forcing) and the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere (called equivalent effective chlorine) have decreased since 2021, five years earlier than expected.
• The global direct radiative forcing from HCFCs: It decreased to 61.28 milliWatt per square metre (mW m−2) in 2023 down from 61.67 mW m−2 in 2022.
• The equivalent effective chlorine (EECl) of HCFCs decreased to 319.33 one part per trillion (ppt) in 2023 from 321.35 ppt in 2022.
• Future Projection: The HCFCs will return to their 1980 values in 2082 for radiative forcing and in 2087 for the EECI, as projected by the research.
• HCFC-22: It is the most abundant HCFC in the atmosphere with a global warming potential 1,910 times that of carbon dioxide on a 100 year time horizon. It has witnessed the most significant decline resulting in a drop in the radiative forcing and EECI between 2021 and 2023.
• HCFC-22 usage: It is used as a refrigerant in a variety of applications, including unitary air conditioners, cold storage, retail food refrigeration, chillers, and industrial process refrigeration.

Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs):

• HCFCs are compounds containing carbon, hydrogen, chlorine and fluorine and are viewed as acceptable temporary alternatives to chlorofluorocarbons.
• The HCFCs have shorter atmospheric lifetimes than CFCs and deliver less reactive chlorine to the stratosphere where the “ozone layer” is found.
• Application: They are used in the foam, refrigeration, and air conditioning sectors
• International Legislation: It mandates production caps for HCFCs; production is prohibited after 2020 in developed countries and 2030 in developing countries.
• Other HCFCs: A minor decline was also observed in HCFC-141b (the second most abundant) from 24.63 ppt in 2022 to 24.51 ppt in 2023.
• The third most prevalent, HCFC-142b, has been progressively declining since 2017.
• India is ahead of eliminating HCFCs in new equipment manufacturing, as claimed by the government in a report released during the COP28 to UNFCCC held in Dubai 2023.
• The Role of Montreal Protocol in curbing HCFC emissions.
• The Copenhagen (1992) and Beijing (1999) Amendments to the Montreal Protocol mandates the phase-out of HCFC production and usage.
• Phase out Target: The production of HCFCs is currently being phased out globally, with a completion date slated for 2040.
• Role: The Montreal Protocol enforced strict controls and promoted the adoption of ozone-friendly alternatives, curbing the release and levels of HCFCs into the atmosphere.

Global-Warming Potential (GWP):

• GWP is a term used to describe the relative potency, molecule for molecule, of a greenhouse gas, taking account of how long it remains active in the atmosphere.
• Objective: The measure was developed to allow comparisons of the global warming impacts of different gases. The larger the GWP of a gas, the more it warms the Earth as compared to CO2 over that time period
• Specifically, it is a measure of how much energy the emissions of 1 ton of a gas will absorb over a given period of time, relative to the emissions of 1 ton of carbon dioxide (CO2).
• The global-warming potentials (GWPs) are calculated over 100 years.
• Carbon dioxide is taken as the gas of reference and given a 100-year GWP of 1.
• Significance: GWPs provide a common unit of measure, which allows analysts to add up emissions estimates of different gases (e.g., to compile a national GHG inventory), and allows policymakers to compare emissions reduction opportunities across sectors and gases.

The Montreal Protocol:

• About: It was signed in 1987 and is a global agreement to protect the stratospheric ozone layer by phasing out the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances (ODS) by eliminating the production and consumption of ODSs like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons.
• ODS are substances commonly used in products such as refrigerators, air conditioners, fire extinguishers, and aerosols.
• The worldwide production of CFCs has been prohibited since 2010.
• HCFCs were a replacement of CFCs but they were found to have a strong greenhouse gas potential and an ODSs.
• Hydrofluorocarbons (HFC): They have become a substitute for HCFCs. They are non-ozone depleting substances (ODS), but have high Global Warming Potential (GWP).
• The Kigali Amendment to Montreal Protocol 2016: It introduces strict restrictions on the  manufacture and consumption of HFCs.
• Global Cooling Pledge and the Paris Agreement: Pledges have been made to cut HFC emissions, whose radiative force impact is rising in spite of the controls.

Recently, International Fatty Liver Day 2024 was celebrated as in the month of June.

International Fatty Liver Day 2024:

• Theme for International Fatty Liver Day 2024 – ‘Act Now, Screen Today‘.
• This special day highlights a fatty liver disease that impacts about 1 in 4 people worldwide.

Fatty Liver Disease:

• Fatty liver disease occurs when fat accumulates in the liver.
• The liver is the largest organ inside the body.
• It is closely connected to metabolic health, cardiac health, and cancer risk.
• Impact of fat: Excessive fat in the liver can lead to inflammation, causing damage and scarring.
• In severe situations, this scarring can result in liver failure.

Incidence of Fatty Liver Disease in India:

• According to an AIIMS study, In India, Around 38% of Indians have fatty liver or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
• In another AIIMS study, there were reports of 67 per cent deaths among patients with antituberculosis drug-related acute liver failure.
• This disease is affecting nearly 35 per cent of the children too.
• Reclassification: The condition is now known as ‘Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease’ (MASLD).
• Global Prevalence: This disease affects 25-30% of the global population.
• MASLD is closely linked to obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and abnormal cholesterol levels.
• India’s Statistics: In 2022, a study showed that 38.6% of Indian adults and 36% of obese children had fatty liver.
• There are two types of this disease.
• Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD): It affects individuals who consume little to no alcohol.
• Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (Alcoholic Steatohepatitis): This disease arises when Fat builds up due to excessive alcohol consumption.

Risk Factors for Fatty Liver Disease

• Obesity: Being overweight, especially around the abdomen, raises the risk of fatty liver disease.
• Type 2 Diabetes and Insulin Resistance: People with diabetes or pre-diabetes are more prone to developing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
• Insulin Production: Excess glucose leads to high insulin levels, causing insulin resistance.
• Fat Storage: Insulin resistance promotes the storage of fatty acids in the liver, leading to fatty liver disease.

High Blood Cholesterol and Triglycerides

• Blood Lipids: Elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels can lead to fatty liver.
• Genetic Factors: Some individuals may have a genetic tendency to develop fatty liver.
• Disease Progression: Over time, fatty liver can develop into steatohepatitis and cirrhosis, which may require a liver transplant.

President Murmu has rejected a mercy petition filed by Pakistani national Mohammed Arif who was sentenced to death for the December 22, 2000 terrorist attack at the Red Fort in which three people including two Army jawans were killed.

• The court has reaffirmed the “rarest of rare” standard in several decisions.
• The Report of the 262nd Law Commission, published in 2015, recommended the “absolute abolition” of the death penalty “for all crimes other than terrorism-related offences and waging war”

Constituional Provisions:

• Article 21 (Right to Life and Personal Liberty) guarantees the right to life and personal liberty.
• Any deprivation of this right must follow the procedure established by law.
• Article 72 and Article 161 provide the President and Governors with the power to grant pardons, reprieves, respites, or remissions of punishment or to suspend, remit, or commute the sentence of any person convicted of any offence.

Judicial Principles:

• Rarest of the Rare Doctrine: Established in the landmark case of Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980), the Supreme Court of India held that the death penalty should only be awarded in the "rarest of the rare" cases, where the alternative option is unquestionably foreclosed.
• Proportionality and Balancing Aggravating and Mitigating Circumstances: Courts must weigh aggravating circumstances (such as the nature and gravity of the crime) against mitigating circumstances (such as the socio-economic background, age, or mental condition of the offender) before deciding on the death penalty.
• Judicial Review and Confirmation: The death sentence pronounced by a trial court must be confirmed by the High Court.
• Further, the Supreme Court can review the case, and there are provisions for mercy petitions to the President and Governors.

Statutory Provisions:

• Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860: Specifies offences that are punishable by death, including murder (Section 302), treason (Section 121), terrorism-related offences (Section 121A), and others.
• Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), 1973: Provides procedural safeguards for the accused in death penalty cases, such as the requirement for the sentence to be confirmed by a higher court (Section 366) and the right to appeal (Section 374).
• Special Laws: Certain special legislation, such as the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS), and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), also prescribe the death penalty for specific crimes.