• Australian Museum has won the Climate Smart Award 2022.
• SUNxMalta has partnered with Leading Cultural Destinations (LCD) since 2017 to present the Climate Smart Award as a distinct category in this ceremony.
• The award aims to publicly highlight and recognize the central role Museums and Public Art Projects play in Climate education and to focus attention on establishments that have risen to the challenge of advocating sustainable change, teaching and explaining existential Climate change.
• The last Climate Smart Award winner in 2020 was the KlimaHaus Bremerhaven 8° Ost in Germany.

• Colombia’s presidency has been won by Gustavo Petro, a former rebel warrior who has pledged significant social and economic transformation.
• Petro became Colombia’s first left-wing President.

About Gustavo Petro:

• Decades earlier, Petro was a part of the urban guerrilla outfit known as M-19. Established in 1970, the M-19 sought to gain power through violence following claims of fraud in that year’s elections.
• Petro, who spent time in jail for illegal arms possession, joined the urban military group at the age of 17, and was among the many university students and artists who fought against the government.
• The M-19 was demobilised in 1990 in what is considered a historic success in Colombia’s long history of conflict. The group metamorphosed into a political party, and aided in the rewriting of the constitution.
• For almost a half century from 1964, a violent Marxist-Leninist insurgency led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC in Spanish — raged in the country.
• Despite his early revolutionary actions, the President elect has spent many years in Colombia’s Parliament, having served in the lower house, the Chamber of Representatives, from 1991-94 and then from 1998-2006, before entering the Senate where he served until 2010, and then again from 2018 onward. In between, Petro was Mayor of the capital city of Bogota from 2012 to 2015.

• The 2021 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Education will be awarded to the “Initiatives for Inclusive and Accessible Education during COVID-19” implemented by the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), a constituent unit of the NCERT.
• The UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICT in Education recognises innovative approaches in leveraging new technologies to expand educational and lifelong learning opportunities for all, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Goal 4 on education.
• The CIET was proactive in taking learning to the doorsteps of the children through use of DTH TV channels and radio stations, including community radio stations under the PM eVidya programme.
• The PM eVIDYA programme was initiated by the Ministry in May 2020 which unifies all efforts related to digital, online, on-air education to enable multi-mode access for imparting education by using technology to minimise learning losses.
• One of the major initiatives of PM eVidya is 12 eVidya TV Channels based on the line of One Class-One Channel for Classes 1 to 12 to air educational content related to the respective classes.

• Prime Minister launch ‘Mukhyamantri Matrushakti Yojana’ which will focus on improving maternal and child health.
• Under the scheme every month, the pregnant and lactating mothers will be given 2 kg of chickpeas, 1 kg of tur dal, and 1 kg of edible oil will be given free of cost from the Anganwadi centers. An estimated 1.36 lakh women will benefit from the scheme.
• Rupees 120 crore is dedicated towards‘ Poshan Sudha Yojana’, which will be extended to all the tribal beneficiaries in the state.  It offers one nutritious meal a day to pregnant and lactating women.
• The schemes aim to intervene during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life, which is the period from conception till the time the child turns two.
• The objective is to reduce the number of newborns who are underweight at birth as well as to improve infant mortality and maternal mortality rates.

• According to the executing agency, the first phase of the Shimla Smart City project —Which will connect Vikas Nagar to Chhota Shimla through a network of lifts, foot overbridges and skywalk — will be completed by June-end.
• Ropeway and Rapid Transport System Development Corporation (RRTSDC) is executing the project.
• The three-phased project will comprise works of three lifts and three foot overbridges.
• The work on the second phase in terms of designs, etc, has begun.
• The next two phases will be completed in 18 months. Once the project is over, it will ease traffic on the steep, congested and busy Vikasnagar-Chhota Shimla road.
• Besides, the corporation is executing a few other major Smart City projects in the city, including a lift from Lakkar Bazar to the Mall Road and an escalator at Jakhu.

• The Enabling Women of Kamand Valley Society (EWOK) and IIT-Mandi are organising farmers of the surrounding areas into farmer producer companies (FPC) supported by NABARD.
• EWOK organises interactive sessions to bring all stakeholders together to address the issues faced by farmers of Mandi district regarding the cultivation of tagetes, a plant.
• The last session was held on June 7. They distributed seeds to 60 farmers.
• The CSIR IHBT has provided the oil extraction unit from Mission Aroma and IIT Mandi has provided land to install an oil extraction unit and other support.

About the World Airport Awards:

• The World Airport Awards are the most prestigious accolades for the airport industry, voted by customers in the largest, annual global airport customer satisfaction survey.
• They are regarded as the quality benchmark for the world airport industry, assessing customer service and facilities across over 550 airports.
• The survey and awards are independent of any airport control, influence or input. Analysis of the results shows a close correlation to customer numbers using the airports during 2021, a time when varying travel conditions remained in place across many global regions, and with air travel quickly returning across most of the world, more normal times are coming back.

KEY POINTS:

• Qatar’s Hamad International Airport has been named the World’s Best Airport for the second year running.
• The announcement took place at the Skytrax 2022 World Airport Awards, held at Passenger Terminal EXPO in Paris, France.

International Yoga Day: History

• The United Nations General Assembly had declared June 21 as the International Day of Yoga in 2014 at the initiative of India with the support of 177 countries.
• The idea of International Day of Yoga was first proposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his speech at United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on 27th September 2014.
• International Day of Yoga is celebrated worldwide on 21st June since   This year, the 8th edition of the International Day of Yoga will be observed.
• The theme of International Yoga Day 2022 is ‘Yoga for Humanity’ across the world with great enthusiasm.

KEY POINTS:

• Russia has become China’s biggest supplier of oil as the country sold discounted crude to Beijing amid sanctions over the Ukraine war.
• Imports of Russian oil rose by 55 per cent from a year earlier to a record level in May, displacing Saudi Arabia as China’s biggest provider.
• China has ramped up purchases of Russian oil despite demand dampened by Covid curbs and a slowing economy.
• Chinese companies, including state refining giant Sinopec and state-run Zhenhua Oil, have increased their purchases of Russian crude in recent months after being offered heavy discounts.
• The imports into China, which include supplies pumped through the East Siberia Pacific Ocean pipeline and shipments by sea, totalled nearly 8.42m tonnes last month.
• That pushed Saudi Arabia – formerly China’s biggest source of crude oil – into second place with 7.82m tonnes.
• Russia earned almost $100 billion in revenue from fossil fuel exports in the first 100 days of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, despite a fall in exports in May.
• The European Union made up 61 per cent of these imports, worth approximately $59 billion.

According to the researchers:

• They have developed an innovative treatment that may defeat the virus with a one-time injection, with the potential of bringing about tremendous improvement in the patients’ condition.
• When the engineered B cells encounter the virus, the virus stimulates and encourages them to divide, so they are utilizing the very cause of the disease to combat it.
• Furthermore, if the virus changes, the B cells will also change accordingly in order to combat it, so they have created the first medication ever that can evolve in the body and defeat viruses in ‘arms race’.

KEY POINTS:

• A new study from Tel Aviv University offers a unique treatment for AIDS — a vaccine or a one-time treatment for patients with HIV.
• The study examined the engineering of type B white blood cells in the patient’s body so as to secrete anti-HIV antibodies in response to the virus.
• They had been able to engineer B cells outside of the body, and in this study, they were the first to do this in the body and to make these cells generate desired antibodies.
• The genetic engineering is done with viral carriers derived from viruses that were engineered so as not to cause damage but only to bring the gene coded for the antibody into the B cells in the body.
• They have been able to accurately introduce the antibodies into a desired site in the B cell genome.
• All model animals who had been administered the treatment responded and had high quantities of the desired antibody in their blood.
• They produced the antibody from the blood and made sure it was actually effective in neutralizing the HIV virus in the lab dish.
• The genetic editing was done with CRISPR, a technology based on a bacterial immune system against viruses.
• CRISPR to direct the introduction of genes into desired sites along with the capabilities of viral carriers to bring desired genes to desired cells. Thus, it helps to engineer the B cells inside the patient’s body.
• They use two viral carriers of the AAV family, one carrier codes for the desired antibody and the second carrier codes the CRISPR system.
• When the CRISPR cuts in the desired site in the genome of the B cells it directs the introduction of the desired gene: the gene coding for the antibody against the HIV virus, which causes AIDS.
• Currently, the researchers explain, there is no genetic treatment for AIDS, so the research opportunities are vast.