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• Found in Jamnagar & Dwarka districts constituting the Halar region in Saurashtra, Gujarat.
•  The average Halari donkey is white in colour, and is larger and more resilient than other donkey breeds.
• They have a strong build and are large (close to horses).
• These donkeys are very docile in temperament and are used as pack animals during pastoralist migration and for transportation as donkey cart.
• It is an important domestic animal in the semi-arid landscape of Jamnagar and Dwarka districts in Gujarat’s Saurashtra region.
• Halari donkey milk is known for its sweetness. Milk powder made from it can fetch upwards of ₹7,000 a kg in the international market, and is used for cosmetic purposes.

• Abhujmad is a hilly forest area spread over 4,000 square kilometers in Chhattisgarh.

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• After a dispute running for more than 50 years, the United Kingdom will finally hand back the Chagos Islands, an archipelago located in the Indian Ocean, to the southeast African island country of Mauritius.
• As part of an agreement, the governments of the UK and Mauritius jointly announced that full sovereignty of the Chagos, a remote group of more than 60 islands, would again belong to Mauritius in exchange for guarantees that a United States military base could continue operating there for the next 99 years.
•  Mauritius is “free” to legally resettle the islands of the Chagos, excluding Diego Garcia, the largest and most southerly island, home to a US military base, and the only one that has remained inhabited since the 1970s.
• The UK also pledged to provide a financial support package to Mauritius to support its economy.
• The UK will also set up a trust fund to support the descendants of the 1,500 Chagossians who were forcefully evicted from the islands between the 1960s and 1970s.
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• The French were the first to colonise Mauritius along with the Chagos Islands in 1715. 
• However, the UK took control of the region in 1814 after the fall of France’s Napoleon Bonaparte and the subsequent ceding of French overseas territories to conquering nations.
• In 1965, when Mauritius was pushing for independence, the UK conditioned the nation’s freedom on its relinquishing of Chagos. The UK detached the islands to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Three years later, in 1968, Mauritius gained independence from the UK.
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• The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in February 2019 issued a non-binding advisory opinion in favour of Mauritius.It stated that the UK had wrongfully forced the inhabitants of the island to leave to make way for a US airbase and, hence, should give up its control of Chagos.

• Switzerland and Italy have decided to redefine a portion of their territorial boundaries due to melting Alpine glaciers caused by anthropogenic climate change.
• Large areas of the boundary between Italy and Switzerland are marked by “the watershed or ridge lines of glaciers, firn, or perpetual snow,” according to the Swiss authorities. However, as global warming accelerates glacial melting, these ridge lines shift, disrupting the existing border.
• The border between the two countries is being redrawn beneath the renowned Matterhorn, one of Europe’s tallest peaks that has long drawn alpinists and mountaineers.
•  Switzerland and Italy have agreed on revisions to the Plateau Rosa, Carrel refuge, and Gobba di Rollin landmarks. This is where Switzerland’s Zermatt region meets Italy’s Aosta valley. The region is home to various ski resorts, which contribute to both countries’ economies.

1. Quantum mechanics
2. Weather forecasting
3. Oil and gas exploration
4. Data analytics and big data

All of the above are applications of the supercomputers.

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Features of Supercomputers

• Multiple CPUs: Supercomputers incorporate more than one CPU.
  • Each CPU contains circuits for interpreting program instructions and executing arithmetic and logic operations.
• Speed: These computers can support the high computation speed of CPUs.
• Storage: It has a very high storage capacity. Rapid retrieval of stored data and instructions is crucial to support high computational speed.
• Vector Arithmetic: By using Vector Arithmetic, they can operate on pairs of lists of numbers rather than on mere pairs of numbers.
• Multi-Users: A supercomputer allows multiple users to access supercomputing simultaneously.

• Supercomputing is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Petaflops are a measure of a computer’s processing speed equal to a thousand trillion flops. And a 1-petaflop computer system can perform one quadrillion (1015) flops.

Supercomputing vs. High-Performance Computing (HPC)

• While supercomputing typically refers to the process of complex and large calculations used by supercomputers, high-performance computing (HPC) is the use of multiple supercomputers to process complex and large calculations. Both terms are often used interchangeably.