Month: November 2025

South Africa has declared gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide a national disaster, following massive public protests, online campaigns, and mounting pressure from civil society. The announcement came on Friday after women across major cities staged symbolic 15-minute lie-downs to honour the 15 women killed every day in the country. The decision follows a fresh reassessment by the National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC) after earlier rejecting calls for disaster classification due to legal constraints. Women in Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and 12 other locations were urged to withdraw from the economy for a full day and lie down at midday to represent the daily toll of femicide. The demonstrations formed part of the G20 Women’s Shutdown organised by the advocacy group Women fo...

Tamil Nadu’s historic paddy harvest for 2024-25, driven by abundant Cauvery water and a sharp rise in cultivation, has spiralled into a major procurement crisis across delta districts. With 47.99 lakh tonnes of paddy already procured the highest ever recorded the state is struggling with overflowing purchase centres, moisture-damaged grain, transport bottlenecks and rising tensions between Chennai and New Delhi over quality norms. Chief Minister M K Stalin, who earlier hailed the year as a “record season”, has now written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging urgent relaxation of Fair Average Quality norms and an increase in the Centre’s procurement target for the state. The crisis comes just as the Northeast monsoon sets in, leaving thousands of farmers racing against rain and humidit...

India often celebrates its tiger conservation achievements as a global success story. With 58 tiger reserves across 18 states and over 70 per cent of the world’s remaining tigers, the country has crafted an image of triumph. Yet behind this image lies a quieter, more troubling reality the unresolved suffering of forest communities who have paid the price for this conservation model. The Hegemony Behind Conservation Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony helps explain how the state secures obedience not just through force, but by shaping public consent. Project Tiger embodies this idea. Over decades, through NGOs, bureaucracy, and media narratives, tiger protection has been framed not only as a national priority but a moral obligation. This narrative enjoys wide acceptance, even as i...

A bombing near the Red Fort in Delhi has forced India to confront a darker, more complex face of terrorism one that is now drawing highly educated individuals, including medical professionals, into its fold. This shift marks a disturbing transformation in India’s terror ecosystem, signalling that extremism is no longer confined to the margins but is seeping into sectors traditionally associated with stability, trust and social responsibility. The blast, occurring near one of the country’s most symbolic heritage sites, has sharpened concerns that terror networks are evolving faster than the systems designed to control them. Officials believe this trend widens the risk zone dramatically, embedding the threat deeper into the intellectual and economic arteries of the nation. India’s hist...

India has delivered a 70-metre modular bridge along with specialized launching equipment to Nepal, strengthening ongoing post-disaster reconstruction efforts after October’s devastating rains and landslides. The handover ceremony was held in Hetauda on November 20, where India’s Ambassador to Nepal formally transferred the complete bridge set to Nepal’s Minister of Physical Infrastructure and Transport. The modular bridge, provided on a grant basis, is part of a larger commitment by the Government of India to supply ten high-span bailey bridges requested by Nepal in the aftermath of severe rainfall that struck eastern regions last month. Valued at more than NPR 73 crore, these bridges are intended to swiftly restore disrupted road connectivity in vulnerable districts. The newly handed-o...

SAP SE has announced a major global collaboration with UNESCO to deploy an advanced AI-assisted disaster risk management system, EDiSON, in the Solomon Islands a nation highly vulnerable to cyclones, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and rising climate threats. The initiative, unveiled on Wednesday, marks a significant step toward making cutting-edge disaster resilience technology accessible to small island developing states. Developed by SAP Japan and INSPIRATION PLUS, a disaster-prevention venture from Oita University, EDiSON runs on the SAP Business Technology Platform and is designed to integrate real-time meteorological visuals, historical disaster data, and machine learning analytics. The platform uses SAP Business AI to generate predictive insights that can drastically improve early ...

Dras, Ladakh - Known primarily as the world second-coldest inhabited place, the ancient settlement of Dras in the Kargil district of Ladakh is finally emerging from the shadow of its extreme climate and strategic history to become a compelling new destination for travelers seeking raw mountain beauty and a powerful link to India's past. Perched at an altitude of approximately 3,230 meters 10,990 feet and often called the "Gateway to Ladakh," Dras is defined by dramatic seasonal shifts. A Land of Extreme Contrast and Resilience Winter in Dras is brutal, with temperatures plummeting below 40C one of the lowest recorded temperatures in an inhabited area outside of Russia’s Oymyakon. Life, however, endures with extraordinary resilience, characterized by the warmth of modest homestays...

New Delhi - The Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP), the national capital region's emergency framework for combating toxic air, is set for its fourth major revision in three years, raising serious concerns that constant tinkering is masking the system’s fundamental failure to act before pollution strikes. Experts warn that despite a significant 2022 redesign that intended to transform GRAP into a pre-emptive framework taking action based on air quality forecasts the plan consistently fails due to a combination of faulty forecasting and weak on-ground implementation. Pre-emptive Promise Undercut by Forecast Failures The core principle of the 2022 overhaul was to link emergency measures to Air Quality Index (AQI) forecasts, invoking severe restrictions at least three days in advance ...

Siberia - In a breakthrough that challenges long-held assumptions about the durability of biomolecules, scientists have successfully recovered and sequenced ancient Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) from the frozen remains of a woolly mammoth. The discovery, detailed in the journal Cell, provides an unprecedented molecular snapshot of an animal that lived nearly 40,000 years ago, offering a rare look into its cellular activity and final moments. The RNA was extracted from muscle tissue belonging to a juvenile male mammoth named Yuka, whose remarkably preserved carcass was found near the Laptev Sea coast in Siberian permafrost. RNA, which acts as a crucial messenger carrying instructions from DNA to create proteins, was previously thought to decay within minutes or hours of death, making its surviv...