NEWS 1: As death toll crosses 50,000, Israel orders evacuation of southern Gaza

GS 2 INTERNATIONAL RELATION (India and its Neighborhood- Relations.)

• Strikes across the southern Gaza Strip kill at least 26 people, including a Hamas political leader and several women and children;
• Israel’s Cabinet approves plan to set up a new body tasked with advancing ‘voluntary departure’ of Palestinians
• More than 50,000 Palestinians have now been killed in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the territory’s Health Ministry said
• the new body would be “subject to Israeli and international law” and coordinate “passage by land, sea and air to the destination countries

ISRAEL- PALESTINE THE TERRITORIAL MAP

• West Bank – The West Bank is located to the west of the Jordan River. It is a landlocked territory, bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel to the south, west and north.
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• The Gaza Strip – It is a small boot-shaped territory along the Mediterranean coast between Egypt and Israel.
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• Golan Heights – The Golan Heights is a strategic plateau that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 war. Israel effectively annexed the territory in 1981.
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• The Sinai Peninsula – It is a peninsula in Egypt, and the only part of the country located in Asia.
• It is between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Red Sea to the south, and is a land bridge between Asia and Africa.

NEWS 2: India imposes anti-dumping duty on five products from China for up to five years

GS-3 ECONOMYIndian Economy and issues relating to Planning

• These duties were imposed as these products — soft ferrite cores, a certain thickness of vacuum insulated flask, aluminium foil, trichloro isocyanuric acid, and poly vinyl chloride paste resin — were exported to India from China at below normal prices
• In separate notifications, the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, Department of Revenue, said that the duty imposed “shall be levied for a period of five years” on imports of soft ferrite cores, the flasks, and the acid.
• The anti-dumping duty of up to $873 per tonne was imposed provisionally on aluminium foil for six months.

Anti-Dumping Duty:

• It is a protectionist tariff that a domestic government imposes on foreign imports that it believes are priced below fair market value.
• Dumping is a process wherein a company exports a product at a price that is significantly lower than the price it normally charges in its home (or its domestic) market.
• The duty is priced in an amount that equals the difference between the normal costs of the products in the importing country and the market value of similar goods in the exporting country or other countries that produce similar products.
• It is imposed to protect local businesses and markets from unfair competition by foreign imports.
• Thus, the purpose of anti-dumping duty is to rectify the trade distortive effect of dumping and re-establish fair trade
• The use of anti-dumping measures as an instrument of fair competition is permitted by the World Trade Organization (WTO).
• The WTO allows the government of the affected country to take legal action against the dumping country as long as there is evidence of genuine material injury to industries in the domestic market.
• The government must show that dumping took place, the extent of the dumping in terms of costs, and the injury or threat to cause injury to the domestic market.
• While the intention of anti-dumping duties is to protect local businesses and markets, these tariffs can also lead to higher prices for domestic consumers.
• In India, the Ministry of Finance makes the final decision on whether to impose anti-dumping duties.

ountervailing duty (CVD)

• It is a specific form of duty that the government imposes to protect domestic producers by countering the negative impact of import subsidies.
• CVD is thus an import tax by the importing country on imported products.
• The duty nullifies and eliminates the price advantage enjoyed by an imported product.
• The WTO permits the imposition of CVD by its member countries.

Countervailing duty v/s Anti-dumping duty:

• Anti-dumping duty is imposed to prevent low-priced foreign goods from damaging the local market. On the other hand, CVD will apply to foreign products that have enjoyed government subsidies, which eventually leads to very low prices.
• While the anti-dumping duty amount depends on the margin of dumping, the CVD amount will completely depend on the subsidy value of the foreign goods.

NEWS 3 : Human creativity will retain potential despite AI disruption

GS-3 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYAwareness in the fields of IT

• The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in the media space, will remain in the long term human-led rather than machineled
• despite apprehensions that automation may take over, according to Shashi Shekhar Vempati, co-founder of A4India.org and Chairperson of the Apex Advisory Committee at the Department of Science and Technology
• as far as Indian IT industry was concerned, the biggest impact of automation would be felt in low-level tasks, including testing, quality assurance, and so on, and with software code generation using AI becoming better, even software development would, to a large extent, get automated.
• As AI use cases become more and more specialised, requiring deep domain knowledge, these value-added data services will be the natural evolution for Indian IT, building on earlier cycles of ITO (IT outsourcing), BPO (business process outsourcing) and KPO (knowledge process outsourcing),

India’s primary focus

• India’s primary AI focus has been on overcoming the language barrier,
• The Mann ki Baat corpus, which is a highly reliable and accurate corpus of text and audio in multiple Indian languages and dialects, was the basis for many of the early efforts focused on Indian models for AI
• Bhashini by the MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), which PM Modi has used for his speeches during the 2024 elections, stands out
• Anuvadini by the AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) is being used to translate textbooks across schools and universities using AI
• AI4Bharat at IIT-Madras has released a wide range of models and datasets based on Indian languages, encompassing text and voice
• Sarvam AI, incubated out of IIT-Madras, has been roped in by the UIDAI (Unique Identi- cation Authority of India) for a range of use cases
• mVaak out of IIT-Kanpur has built an audio/voice model leveraging DD (Doordarshan), AIR (All India Radio) archives for a range of use cases
• Pienomial in Pune, which has a knowledge model for the life sciences industry aiding highly reliable research
• Innoplexus, also out of Pune, that has amassed an array of patents in AI-led drug discovery

NEWS:Not the only path: Military approach to Maoists leads to tribal repression

GS-3 INTERNAL SECURITY (Left-Wing Extremism, Insurgency)

Recent Operations & Maoist Decline

• 30 Maoists killed in Chhattisgarh; total 100+ in 2025.
• Maoists weakened; now limited to forest areas, with reduced public support.

Concerns Over Militaristic Strategy

• Pure military approach risks tribal alienation, repression.
• Salwa Judum campaign criticized for human rights violations.
• Repression fosters sympathy for Maoists among tribals.
• Salwa Judum (meaning “peace march” in the Gondi language) was a militia that was mobilised and deployed as part of counterinsurgency operations in Chhattisgarh,
• India, aimed at countering Naxalite activities in the region.
• The militia, consisting of local tribal youth, received support and training from the Chhattisgarh state government.
• It was outlawed and banned by a Supreme Court court order but continues to exist in the form of armed auxiliary forces, District Reserve Groups, and other vigilante groups