6th India-Vietnam Army Exercise VINBAX starts off in Hanoi.

About VINBAX

• It is a bilateral army exercise between India and Vietnam aimed at enhancing interoperability and sharing best practices in UN peace-keeping operations.

David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh.

• It was his sixth work of fiction, and he became the first Hungarian-British author to win the award.

About Booker Prize

• Genesis: Established in 1969 in the United Kingdom.
• Aim: To honor the best English language fiction published in the UK or Ireland each year.
• Reward: Winner receives £50,000 and shortlisted authors get £2,500 each.

Note: International Booker Prize is different from Booker Prize, which celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

Altermagnetism emerges as a new class of magnetic order having properties of both ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.

• Ferromagnets (like fridge magnets) have all tiny atomic magnets pointing the same way, creating a strong, external magnetic field.
• Antiferromagnets have atoms whose magnetic directions point in alternating directions, cancelling each other and producing no net magnetic field.
• Just like antiferromagnets, it does not produce a net magnetic field, but its internal electronic structure is like ferromagnets, creating strong spin polarization.

Germanwatch releases Climate Risk Index (CRI) 2026.

• It ranks countries based on the human and economic toll of extreme weather events, highlighting the urgency for stronger climate resilience.

About Climate Risk Index (CRI)

• Genesis: Introduced in 2006 as an annual global climate impact index.
• Key Findings: 
  • Between 1995 and 2024, 9,700 extreme weather events caused over 8 lakh deaths and $ 4.5 trillion in damages.
  • India  ranked 15^th in CRI Rank 2024 and 9^th in CRI Rank 1995-2024.
  • India faced nearly 430 extreme weather events in three decades, causing $ 170 billion losses and 1.3 billion affected.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issued a public advisory warning investors against investing in ‘Digital Gold’ or ‘E-Gold’ products offered via various online platforms, clarifying that such products do not fall under SEBI’s regulatory framework.

About Digital Gold

• Digital gold refers to buying gold without physically possessing the precious metal. 
• The price of digital gold is linked to that of physical gold.
• Digital gold is created using blockchain technology and allows investors to buy, sell and store gold electronically.
• These products are neither notified as securities nor regulated as commodity derivatives.

WHO report calls for bold financing and equitable access strategies to ensure novel tuberculosis (TB) vaccines reach adolescents and adults in high-burden countries.  

• Despite TB’s devasting global impact, no new vaccines have been licensed in over a century. 
• Presently available Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine offers protection against the consequences of TB for infants and young children but it offers only limited and variable protection against pulmonary TB in adolescence and adulthood. 
• WHO established the TB vaccine accelerator Council in 2023 to facilitate the development, testing, authorization, and use of new TB vaccines.