The dreadful sound of gunfire signals the tragic loss of parents for many children caught in armed conflicts. Both sides in these clashes are eager to secure victory, often without considering the lives and futures of innocent children. Their focus remains solely on defeating each other. In reality, everyone must recognize that children—innocent and uninvolved in the fighting — are the ones who truly lose their future. Ultimately, the fate of these children reflects the future of the states involved.
Actually, 2024 was a year marked by the outbreak of wars and armed conflicts across the world. These conflicts left millions of people homeless and led to a rise in crime and violence. Wars and armed conflicts, indeed, posed a serious threat to global peace and stability.

Those orphans suffering from the nightmares of armed conflicts are certain to face various challenges, including mental trauma, poverty, and lack of access to basic needs such as education and healthcare services. These children are often unable to enjoy their rights fully. While some are under the care of orphanages, others live with surviving family members. However, as their lives are filled with hardship, they frequently suffer from malnutrition, exposure to serious diseases, and other unexpected difficulties.

Although conflicts arise from various causes, the United Nations often misses opportunities to mediate and resolve them. Armed conflicts occur mostly in Asia and Africa, as well as in other regions of the world, and show little sign of ending. These conflicts contribute to shifting power dynamics and changing geopolitics globally.
Generally, wars and armed conflicts do not benefit any country. Prolonged armed conflicts lead to a growing number of orphans day by day, as many children lose their parents and family members in the violence. In addition, some children become orphans due to abandonment for various reasons. Without anyone to care for them, these children often end up facing the harsh and difficult life of war refugees. According to UNICEF estimates, there are approximately 2.2 billion children worldwide, around 150 million of whom are orphans due to armed conflicts and political crises. Among them, about 17.6 million have lost both parents.
Those orphans suffering from the nightmares of armed conflicts are certain to face various challenges, including mental trauma, poverty, and lack of access to basic needs such as education and healthcare services. These children are often unable to enjoy their rights fully. While some are under the care of orphanages, others live with surviving family members. However, as their lives are filled with hardship, they frequently suffer from malnutrition, exposure to serious diseases, and other unexpected difficulties.
Armed conflicts, wars, racial instability, and intense rivalries among countries often result in a generation of orphans. Losing parents due to armed conflicts is a profound tragedy. Therefore, everyone should show loving-kindness and compassion to these orphans, helping them regain their physical and mental strength — the greatest gift we can offer.

Ref: GNLM

Photo: MDPI

PREDICTIONS of imminent AI-driven mass unemployment are likely overblown, but employers will seek workers with different skills as the technology matures, a top executive at global recruiter ManpowerGroup told AFP at Paris’s Vivatech trade fair.
The world’s third-largest staffing firm by revenue ran a startup contest at Vivatech in which one of the contenders was building systems to hire out customizable autonomous AI “agents”, rather than humans.
Their service was reminiscent of a warning last month from Dario Amodei, head of American AI giant Anthropic, that the technology could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.
For ManpowerGroup, AI agents are “certainly not going to become our core business any time soon,” the company’s Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said.
“If history shows us one thing, it’s most of these forecasts are wrong.” An International Labour Organization (ILO) report published in May found that around “one in four workers across the world are in an occupation with some degree of exposure” to generative AI models’ capabilities.
“Few jobs are currently at high risk of full automation,” the ILO added. But the UN body also highlighted “rapid expansion of AI capabilities since our previous study” in 2023, including the emergence of “agentic” models more able to act autonomously or semi-autonomously and use software like web browsers and email.
Soft skills
Chamorro-Premuzic predicted that the introduction of efficiency-enhancing AI tools would put pressure on workers, managers and firms to make the most of the time they will save.
“If what happens is that AI helps knowledge workers save 30, 40, maybe 50 per cent of their time, but that time is then wasted on social media, that’s not an increase in net output,” he said.
Adoption of AI could give workers “more time to do creative work” -- or impose “greater standardization of their roles and reduced autonomy,” the ILO said.
There’s general agreement that interpersonal skills and an entrepreneurial attitude will become more important for knowledge workers as their daily tasks shift towards corralling AIs.
Employers identified ethical judgement, customer service, team management and strategic thinking as top skills AI could not replace in a ManpowerGroup survey of over 40,000 employers across 42 countries published this week.

Source: The Global New Light of Myanmar

Renewable energy plays a key role in the journey to net zero carbon emissions, helping to reduce the demand for fossil fuels by providing cleaner sources of energy.

But as the world derives an increasing amount of its electricity from these renewable energy sources, there’s a growing need for technologies that can capture and store it.

Why does renewable energy need to be stored?

Renewable energy generation mainly relies on naturally-occurring factors – hydroelectric power is dependent on seasonal river flows, solar power on the amount of daylight, wind power on the consistency of the wind – meaning that the amounts being generated will be intermittent.

Similarly, the demand for energy isn’t constant either, as people generally tend to use different amounts of energy at different times of the day and the year.

How would storing renewable energy help to reach net zero?

Unlike fossil fuels, renewable energy creates clean power without producing greenhouse gases (GHGs) as a waste product. By storing and using renewable energy, the system as a whole can rely less on energy sourced from the more greenhouse-gas emitting fuels like coal, natural gas or oil.

What are other benefits of storing renewable energy?

A key benefit of being able to store this energy is that it helps to prevent renewable resources from going to waste.

There are times when the amount of electricity being generated by renewables can exceed the amount that’s needed at the time. When this happens, some renewable generators may need to curtail their outputs in order to help the system remain ‘balanced’ – i.e. when electricity supply meets demand – meaning that an opportunity to generate clean electricity has essentially gone to waste. 

What technologies are used for renewable energy storage?

Energy storage technologies work by converting renewable energy to and from another form of energy.

These are some of the different technologies used to store electrical energy that’s produced from renewable sources:
 

1. Pumped hydroelectricity energy storage

Pumped hydroelectric energy storage, or pumped hydro, stores energy in the form of gravitational potential energy of water. When demand is low, surplus electricity from the grid is used to pump water up into an elevated reservoir. When demand increases, the water is released to flow down through turbines to a lower reservoir, producing hydroelectric power for the grid as it does so. 

2. Electrochemical battery energy storage

Electrochemical batteries store energy by separating positive and negative charges in rechargeable cells. Different types of electrochemical battery storage technology include:

• Lithium-ion battery storage
  
  Government and developers are investing substantially in the creation of huge lithium-ion batteries to store energy for times when supply outstrips demand. Lithium battery technologies are diverse to address custom needs for flexibility, modularity, and size, as well as being relatively inexpensive. However these batteries do degrade over time and present unique fire management challenges.
  
  The world’s largest battery energy storage system so far is Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California. The first 300-megawatt lithium-ion battery – comprising 4,500 stacked battery racks – became operational at the facility in January 2021.
   
• Flow battery storage
  
  Flow batteries’ cells consist of two charged liquids separated by a membrane. Surplus electrical energy is used to ‘reduce’ the liquid charge state of one and ‘oxidise’ that of the other to efficiently store energy. The process is then reversed to recover electricity with low loss.
  
  This flowing reduction-oxidation operation – known as ‘redox flow’ – allows the batteries to store large amounts of energy for long durations and be cycled many times without degradation. However, they do have a relatively large project footprint. 

3. Thermal and Phase Transition energy storage

While not limited to renewable energy, storing excess energy as heat for the longer term is a huge opportunity for industry, where most of the process heat that’s used in food and drink, textiles or pharmaceuticals comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

Liquifying rock or superheating sand and water mixtures can be used to store thermal energy. Thermal energy storage technologies include:

• Liquid-to-air transition energy storage
  
  Surplus grid electricity is used to chill ambient air to the point that it liquifies. This ‘liquid air’ is then turned back into gas by exposing it to ambient air or using waste heat to harvest electricity from the system. The expanding gas can then be used to power turbines, creating electricity as needed.
   
• Thermal sand batteries
  
  Finnish researchers have developed and installed the world’s first fully working ‘sand battery’, which can store power for months at a time. Using low-grade sand, the device is charged up with heat made from cheap electricity from solar or wind. The sand stores the heat at around 500°C, which can then warm homes in winter when energy is more expensive.
   

4. Mechanical energy storage

This type of energy storage converts the potential energy of highly compressed gases, elevated heavy masses or rapidly rotating kinetic equipment.

Different types of mechanical energy storage technology include:

• Compressed air energy storage
  
  Compressed air energy storage has been around since the 1870s as an option to deliver energy to cities and industries on demand. The process involves using surplus electricity to compress air, which can then be decompressed and passed through a turbine to generate electricity when needed.

   

• Gravity storage
  
  A ‘gravity battery’ works by using excess electrical energy from the grid to raise a mass, such as a block of concrete, generating gravitational potential energy. When electrical energy is required, the mass is lowered, converting this potential energy into power through an electric generator.
  
  Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is a type of gravity storage, since the water is released from a higher elevation to produce energy.
   
• Flywheel energy storage
  
  Flywheel energy storage devices turn surplus electrical energy into kinetic energy in the form of heavy high-velocity spinning wheels. To avoid energy losses, the wheels are kept in a frictionless vacuum by a magnetic field, allowing the spinning to be managed in a way that creates electricity when required.
  
   
• Pumped heat electrical storage
  
  Pumped heat storage uses surplus electricity to power a heat pump that transports heat from a ‘cold store’ to a ‘hot store’ - similar to how a refrigerator works. The heat pump can then be switched to recover the energy, taking it from the hot store and placing it in the cold store. This produces mechanical work, which is used to power a generator.
   

5. Hydrogen electrolysis

Hydrogen electrolysis produces hydrogen gas by passing surplus electrical current through a chemical solution. This hydrogen gas is then compressed to be stored in underground tanks. When needed, this process can be reversed to produce electricity from the stored hydrogen.

Hydrogen can be physically stored as either a gas or liquid and even adhered directly to solids. As a gas, hydrogen storage requires high-pressure tanks, while liquid hydrogen requires storage at cryogenic temperatures to prevent it boiling back into a gas. Hydrogen may also be stored on the surface of solid materials (known as adsorption), or within them (known as absorption).

Ref : National Grid

INSIDE a smart greenhouse in Chengdu, the capital of southwest China’s Sichuan Province, two robots, swiftly zipping through ridges between fields, were taking patrol training. With their high-definition cameras, these robots can snap real-time shots of crops’ growth and send images straight to the cloud.
“After integrating with the DeepSeek large model, our team trained the robots through tens of thousands of images to improve their pest identification accuracy, which has exceeded 80 per cent,” said Wu Yuanqing, the robots’ developer.
Once the accuracy is improved, these robots can help farmers increase their decision-making precision in planting and efficiency of agricultural production, Wu added.
The rise of AI-powered agriculture in China highlights the government’s continued efforts to modernize its agricultural sector to accelerate rural revitalization, which profoundly impacts the lives of over 460 million people in rural areas.
The Chinese government has introduced multiple policies to promote smart agriculture development for years. In this document for 2025, Chinese policymakers have, for the first time, identified the development of “new quality productive forces in agriculture” as a top priority.
The document underscores the need to increase support for smart agriculture and calls for expanding the use of technologies such as AI, big data and low-altitude systems in agricultural production.
Maoming, a well-known lychee-growing city in south China’s Guangdong Province, is a premium example of how age-old practices meet with cutting-edge technologies to create a smarter, more efficient, precision-driven local industry.
In February, the city completed deploying the DeepSeek model into its local AI assistant platform, integrating more than five million data points, including a lychee disease prevention database and detailed local meteorological records.
So far, 69 sets of 5G-powered Internet of Things sensors have been installed across 20 lychee-growing towns in Maoming, according to Xu Hong, an official with Maoming’s agricultural and rural affairs bureau. These facilities monitor everything from soil moisture to air temperature, generating real-time insights that allow farmers to anticipate and mitigate risks before adverse weather takes a toll.
Farmers in Maoming also dived into learning and applying AI technologies in lychee cultivation. Zhang Xianfeng, a local farmer, has recently turned to an AI-powered assistant for guidance as persistent wet and chilly weather threatened Zhang’s lychee. Within seconds, the system provided a tailored management plan for her.
“In the past, we relied entirely on experience to determine the flowering period of crops. Fertilizers were applied by instinct, and we often reacted too late to disease outbreaks,” Zhang said. “Now, solutions provided by AI help us tackle these challenges immediately and accurately.” — Xinhua

Source: The Global New Light of Myanmar

Russia and Myanmar closely cooperate in the energy area and they are addressing expansion of this partnership, through projects in the sector of renewable energy among other things, Russian President Vladimir Putin said following talks with Prime Minister of Myanmar Min Aung Hlaing.

"Energy is a strategic area of bilateral cooperation. Russia reliably provides required energy resources to the republic. Last year more than 90% of oil was supplied to the market of Myanmar from Russia. We are developing possibilities to cooperate in the energy sector in other areas as well, including in the use of renewable resources of energy," Putin said.

The new joint statement confirms the key principles of the partnership between the two countries, the president stressed. "The issue is about further deepening of cooperation in the area of trade and investment. Last year trade turnover added around 40% and roughly amounted to $2 bln. We are ready to address expansion of mutually beneficial trade," he added.

Source: TASS

IN the marbled halls of a luxury hotel, leading experts are discussing a new approach to an age-old problem: how to make it rain in the UAE, the wealthy Gulf state that lies in one of the world’s biggest deserts.
Decades of work and millions of dollars have been ploughed into easing endless drought in the oil-rich UAE, whose mainly expatriate population is soaring undeterred by a dry, hostile climate and hairdryer summer heat.
Despite the United Arab Emirates’ best efforts, rainfall remains rare.
But at last month’s International Rain Enhancement Forum in Abu Dhabi officials held out a new hope: harnessing artificial intelligence to wring more moisture out of often cloudless skies.
Among the initiatives is an AI system to improve cloud seeding, the practice of using planes to fire salt or other chemicals into clouds to increase rain.
“It’s pretty much finished,” said Luca Delle Monache, deputy director of the Centre for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
“We’re doing the final touches.” However, Delle Monache conceded that AI was not a “silver bullet” for the UAE, which like other countries has pursued cloud seeding for decades.
Cloud seeding works by increasing the size of droplets, which then fall as rain. It’s estimated to increase rainfall by 10-15 per cent, Delle Monache said.
But it only works with certain types of puffy, cumulus clouds, and can even suppress rainfall if not done properly.
“You’ve got to do it in the right place at the right time. That’s why we use artificial intelligence,” he added.
Prayers, applause The three-year project, funded with $1.5 million from the UAE’s rain enhancement programme, feeds satellite, radar and weather data into an algorithm that predicts where seedable clouds will form in the next six hours.
It promises to advance the current method where cloud-seeding flights are directed by experts studying satellite images. Hundreds of such flights occur annually in the UAE.

KEY POINTS:

• An AI system predicts seedable clouds, aiming to improve the precision of cloud-seeding flights.
• Experts caution that AI is not a perfect solution, as data limitations and the need for human judgment remain critical.
• Rain, a rare occurrence, even artificial rain, is considered a novelty, and when it does occur, it can cause significant flooding.
• The UAE’s substantial investment in rain enhancement reflects its commitment to overcoming water scarcity.

Source: The Global New Light of Myanmar

AN ABANDONED lifeguard cabin, a rusty pier and mangled umbrellas are all that is left of Ein Gedi, once Israel’s flagship beach drawing international tourists to float in the world-famous waters of the Dead Sea.
Now, this lush desert oasis at the lowest point on Earth sits in ruins beside the shrinking sea, whose highly salty waters are rapidly retreating due to industrial use and climate change, which is accelerating their natural evaporation.
The beach has been closed to the public for five years, mainly due to the appearance of dangerous sinkholes, but also because the dramatic recession of the sea’s level has made it tricky to reach its therapeutic waters, known for extraordinary buoyancy that lets bathers float effortlessly.
The increasingly exposed shoreline and the sinkholes, caused by a flow of freshwater dissolving layers of salt beneath the Earth’s surface, are not new.
In fact, the Dead Sea, nestled where Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian territory meet, has famously been dying for years. Now, with war raging in the Middle East, efforts to tackle this ever-worsening ecological disaster appear to have dissolved too.
“Regional cooperation is the key... to saving the Dead Sea,” said Nadav Tal, a hydrologist and water officer for the Israel office of Eco-Peace, a regional environmental nonprofit that has long advocated for finding a solution.
“Because we are living in a conflict area, there is an obstacle,” he said, describing how the sea has been declining more than one metre (three feet) per year since the 1960s.

‘Ecological disaster’ 

The evaporation of the salty waters in a time of rapid climate change and in a place where summer temperatures can reach upward of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) has been exacerbated by decades of water diversions from the sea’s main source -- the Jordan River -- as well as various tributaries that begin in Lebanon and Syria.
The water is also being pumped out by local factories extracting natural minerals -- potash, bromine, sodium chloride, magnesia, magnesium chloride and metal magnesium -- to sell to markets across the world.
“The consequences of this water diversion is what we see around us,” Tal told AFP, pointing to a nearby pier that was once submerged in water but now stands firmly on dry land.
“It is an ecological disaster,” he emphasised, adding that “the declining of the Dead Sea is a disaster for Israeli tourism”.
The only remaining Israeli resorts are on the man-made evaporation ponds south of the surviving Dead Sea itself. Recently, 22-year-old Yael and her friend Noa were looking for a place to dip their toes into the soothing waters.
Relaxing beside one of the water-filled sinkholes, Yael recalled how her parents once enjoyed going to a public beach near here. “It was like their beach on the Dead Sea, and nowadays you pass by there and it looks like, I don’t know... a shipwreck,” she told AFP.
“It’s hallucinatory, the destruction caused by this thing (the drying up of the sea), and it’s just such a special landscape.”

Call for joint effort

Although some efforts have been made to address the Dead Sea disaster, including past agreements signed by Israel and Jordan, the wars raging in Gaza and beyond have brought regional tensions to an all-time high, meaning tackling cross-border environmental issues is no longer a priority for governments in the region.
At Israel’s environment ministry, Ohad Carny has been working on the issue for years. He said the government was looking into several solutions, including building a desalination facility and forging a canal from either the north or the south to address the general water shortages in the region, including the Dead Sea.
“It doesn’t make economic or environmental sense to desalinate water and bring it directly to the Dead Sea, because then it’s a waste of drinking water and the region needs desperately more drinking water and more water for agriculture,” he said.
Carny said that while his focus was on the Israeli side, “we are hoping for collaborations”.- AFP

Source: The Global New Light of Myanmar

If we want to rely on nuclear fusion to power the world's homes, the first step is making reactors that can run as hot and as long as possible. 

Now, China's 'artificial sun' reactor – officially called 'Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak' (EAST) – has set a new world record, bringing the goal of limitless clean energy ever closer. 

The reactor, located in Hefei in Anhui province, generated a steady loop of plasma for 1,066 seconds at 180million°F (100million°C) – seven times hotter than the sun's core.

 It surpasses the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023.

 EAST could be a precursor to the first ever fusion power plants that supply power directly to the grid and electricity to people's homes.

 These power plants could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power-generation sector by diverting away from the use of fossil fuels like coal and gas. Fusion differs from fission (the technique currently used in nuclear power plants), because the former fuses two atomic nuclei instead of splitting one (fission). 

Unlike fission, fusion carries no risk of catastrophic nuclear accidents – like that seen in Fukushima in Japan in 2011 – and produces far less radioactive waste than current power plants, its exponents say. 

China's 'artificial sun' is operated by the Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) at Hefei Institutes of Physical Science on behalf of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 The new world record, achieved on Monday, marks a critical step toward a functional fusion reactor, according to ASIPP director Professor Song Yuntao. 

'A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is essential for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants,' he said. 

Global scientists have worked for more than 70 years on trying to achieve this feat, according to a release from State Council Information Office, central propaganda department of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. 

Gong Xianzu, head of the division of EAST physics and experimental operations, said they have upgraded several EAST systems since the last round of experiments. 

For example, the heating system, which previously operated at the equivalent of nearly 70,000 household microwave ovens, has now doubled its power output. 

'The ultimate goal of an artificial sun is to create nuclear fusion like the sun, providing humanity with an endless, clean energy source,' the release says. 

Fusion – generally considered the holy grail of energy – could also enable 'space exploration beyond the solar system', by providing rockets with more powerful propulsion systems. 

At the heart of EAST and other fusion reactors around the world is a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped device initially conceptualised in the 1950s by Soviet physicists.

 Inside, under the influence of extreme heat and pressure, gaseous hydrogen fuel becomes a plasma – a hot, electrically charged gas. 

Plasma is often referred to as the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas, and comprises over 99 per cent of the visible universe, including most of our sun. 

In the tokamak, the plasma is trapped and pressurised by magnetic fields until the energised plasma particles start to collide. 

As the particles fuse into helium, they release enormous amounts of energy, mimicking the process that occurs naturally in the centre of stars like our sun. The only by-products of fusion reactions are small amounts of helium, an inert gas which can be safely released without harming the environment.

 As a result, fusion reactors have long been touted as the best clean energy source – although the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists claims they are 'far from perfect'. 

As yet, the energy input required to produce the temperatures and pressures that enable significant fusion reactions in hydrogen isotopes don't justify the fusion energy that's actually being generated, the nonprofit organization points out. 

It's worth bearing in mind that EAST, as the name suggests, is China's 'experimental' reactor project – and may yet pave the way for the first nuclear fusion power plants. 

Chinese experts say: 'The mission of the EAST project is to develop an advanced fully superconducting tokamak so as to establish solid scientific and technological bases for the future continuous operation of tokamak fusion devices.' 

Of course there are already nuclear power plants around the world, but they use nuclear fission, which has the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei, some of which are radioactive for millions of years. 

Fusion, on the other hand, does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste but instead helium, which is an inert gas. Fusion fuel is made up of deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, giving scientists hopes of 'unlimited energy'. 

The Chinese team plan to use the nuclear fusion reactor in collaboration with scientists in France working on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). 

The Provence-based ITER project is expected to begin delivering power in 2035, and will become the world's biggest reactor once completed. 

Mail Online

Source: Myawady Daily Newspaper

China on Friday defended its plan to build the world's largest dam on the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, saying the project will not negatively affect lower riparian states and that safety issues have been addressed through decades of studies.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning played down apprehensions about the massive project to dam the Brahmaputra River, which is called Yarlung Zangbo in Tibet. The project estimated to cost around $ 137 billion is located in the ecologically fragile Himalayan region, along a tectonic plate boundary where earthquakes occur frequently.

Mao said China carried out in-depth studies for decades and took safeguard measures.

China has always been responsible for the development of cross-border rivers, Mao told a media briefing here in response to a question on the concerns related to the dam. She said the hydropower development there has been studied in depth for decades, and safeguard measures have been taken to ensure the project's security and ecological environment protection.

The project will not negatively affect the lower reaches, she said referring to the concerns in India and Bangladesh which are the lower riparian states.

China will continue to maintain communication with countries at the lower reaches through existing channels and step up cooperation on disaster prevention and relief for the benefit of the people by the river," she said.

She said China's hydropower development in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River aims to speed up the development of clean energy and respond to climate change and extreme hydrological disasters. 

China on Wednesday approved the construction of the world's largest dam, stated to be the planet's biggest infra project on the Brahmaputra River in Tibet close to the Indian border, raising concerns in India and Bangladesh.

The hydropower project will be built in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River, the Tibetan name for the Brahmaputra River, an official statement here said.

The dam will be built at a huge gorge in the Himalayan reaches where the Brahmaputra River makes a huge U-turn to flow into Arunachal Pradesh and then to-Bangladesh.

Mao said China's hydropower development in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River aims to speed up the development of clean energy and respond to climate change and extreme hydrological disasters.

The total investment in the dam could exceed one trillion yuan ($ 137 billion), which would dwarf any other single infrastructure project on the planet, including China's own. Three Gorges Dam which is regarded as the largest in the world, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Thursday.

China has already operationalised the $1.5 billion Zam Hydropower Station, the largest in Tibet in 2015.

The Brahmaputra dam was part of the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025) and National Economic and Social Development and the Long -Range Objectives Through the Year 2035 adopted by Plenum, a key policy body of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2020.

Concerns arose in India as the dam besides empowering China to control the water flow could enable Beijing to release large amounts of water flooding border areas in times of hostilities because of its size and scale.

India too is building a dam over Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh.

India and China established the Expert Level Mechanism (ELM) in 2006 to discuss various issues related to trans-border rivers under which China provides India with hydrological information on the Brahmaputra and Sutlej Rivers during the flood seasons.

Data sharing of trans-border rivers figured in the talks between India, China Special Representatives (SRs) for border questions which NSA Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held here on December 18.

The SRs provided positive directions for cross-border cooperation and exchanges including data sharing on trans-border rivers, a statement by the Ministry of External Affairs said.

The Brahmaputra Dam presents enormous engineering challenges as the project site is located along a tectonic plate boundary where earthquakes occur.

The Tibetan plateau, regarded as the roof of the world, frequently experiences earthquakes as it is located over the tectonic plates.

Source: Indian Defence Research Wing

https://idrw.org/wont-affect-lower-reaches-china-defends-plan-to-build-dam-on-brahmaputra/

THE China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) unveiled the exterior design of the country’s moon-landing spacesuit for the first time on Saturday, soliciting its name from the public.

Displayed on the third Spacesuit Technology Forum hosted by the China Astronaut Research and Training Centre in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality, the white moon-landing spacesuit is decorated with red stripes.

The new lunar spacesuit features design elements inspired by Dunhuang art and rocket flames, providing protection against the lunar environment. Equipped with a multifunctional control panel, flexible gloves, and a panoramic visor, it allows astronauts to perform various movements. Developed since 2020, it signifies key technological advancements in China’s manned lunar exploration, with a planned lunar landing by 2030. — Xinhua