A very good evening aspirants welcome to the hindi news analysis by shankar eyes academy for the date 20th of july 2021 these are the list of news articles taken for today's discussion they have been provided along with these articles page numbers in different editions of hindi newspaper today let us start our analysis with this editorial article which is a part of the international relations section of our syllabus so this article is important in the sense that it analyzes how a country is gaining prominence in its region and here we are talking about the country egypt and this editorial article is written by a former indian ambassador here author throws light on the role of egyptian diplomacy in asserting its diverse interests in the region so let us have a comprehensive analysis on how egypt is gaining prominence in the west asian affairs the syllabus relevant to this discussion is given here for your reference so let us start the discussion by first knowing about the strategic location of egypt see egypt is a country that is located in the northeastern corner of africa its capital is caro it is bordered by libia sudan and it even borders israel in its northeast see egypt's strategic location has always made it a hub for the trade routes between africa europe and asia and this was further enhanced by the opening of sues kenal recently we saw that sues kenal connects the meridianian sea to the red sea and this kenal is managed by egyptian government through its sues kenal authority now apart from this if we talk about the topography of egypt it is dominated by the nile river and its official language is arabic so keeping these points in mind you should also know that egypt's first democratically elected government was overthrown in the year 2013 and at that time egypt was supported with a 12 billion aid package and this package was from saudi arabia united arab emirates and kuwait and further these festation deposits were also supplemented by grants for the import of petroleum products also and this valued for another 16 billion so you can assume that egypt has a cordial relation with these countries now before moving further you have to take look at this map and the places which have been marked because today we are going to deal with them in our discussion so when we take the west asian politics previously the politics was largely influenced by two major players they are the saudi arabia and united arab emirates they played an active role in syria yemen and libya and at that time the role of egypt in all these ventures was reluctant if even take the katar blockade which was initiated by saudi arabian uae in 2017 the role of egypt was not much intense see here you should remember that in 2017 saudi arabia led an arab transport blockade against katar this was done to punish katar for its ties with the radical islamist groups and through this saudi arabia wanted to pressurize katar and wanted it to reduce its diplomatic and economic relations with iran we all know that saudi arabia and iran are rivals but even in this scenario egypt allowed kataris to pass through the sues canal and katar also returned its favor like it did not make any effort to dilute its investments in egypt and it also did not make the egyptian workers in its country to return so even though egypt had a cordial relationship with saudi arabia katar also had a good relationship with egypt but in all these attempts saudi arabia and the united arab emirates could not achieve much of its intentions and there were failures in their military interventions also and the katar blockade was also a failure and this opened the space for egypt to regain the influence which it enjoyed traditionally in the arab councils this move of egypt was facilitated by its good and abled management of its economy if you see egyptian economic reforms from 2015 provided for a foreign exchange reserves of 40 billion u.s dollars by the year 2018 and there was also a growth rate of 5.6 percentage in 2019 and if we critically analyze the circumstances we can find that egypt has used its diplomacy to assert its diverse interests in a complex and conflictual region instead of making use of military force like saudi arabia so this was the past so what about the present times see author talks about the present times and most importantly author has noted about the important developments in west asia which were influenced by egypt see we saw that egypt was reluctant in the beginning but this neglecting attitude of egypt is now vanishing and now egypt is becoming active in the process of very engaging with its regional neighbors and it is adopting substantial economic and defense partnership agreements to serve this purpose so in this regard let us see certain examples of how egypt establishing its ties with its neighbors see recently egyptian diplomats and intelligence officers negotiated the end of 11 day israel-palestine conflict and in fact the new israeli government is looking forward to manage the turbulent instability of gaza with egypt likewise even turkey has announced that it is anxious to reopen its relations with egypt see before this turkey was not in so much good terms with egypt but now it has announced that it is ready to reopen its relations now apart from this egypt has also set up a new tripartite grouping this coalition is between egypt iraq and jordan and this coalition is viewed to be done with an intent to broaden their regional engagements and when we take egypt in particular it considers this partnership that is this tripartite partnership as an opportunity to move beyond its traditional dependence that it was having so long on saudi arabia and ua e so this coalition ensures that egypt will not be solely dependent on saudi arabian ua e and it also aims to assert egypt's own leadership in the region see the partners in this coalition are important because they constitute a near bordering land mass and they have a considerable domestic agricultural capacity and industrial capacity so in this context this coalition is looking for an extensive cooperation in energy connectivity and reconstruction areas and the membership in this coalition is open at present so it is said that even syria and lebanon are expected to join this group so in this way egypt is establishing its diplomacy in the west asian region but there are also certain challenges so now let us see these challenges and we will also see how egypt is tackling it see the principal challenge that egypt faces at present is with respect to the ethiopia's plan to construct a dam on the blue nile river this dam is the grand ethiopian renaissance dam ensured gerd see this dam has become a matter of concern for egypt because the waters of the nile river are the source of around 95 percentage of egyptian fresh water here you should also remember that blue nile is a tributary of nile river so at this juncture egypt fears that this dam project could restrict its access to fresh water and in fact egypt views this to be an existential threat so keeping this in mind egypt has begun to make a robust diplomatic engagements with this african neighborhood also for example it has made defense agreements with the countries around ethiopia because ethiopia is the only one which is threatening its existence and these countries include sudan, uganda, burundi, ravanda and kenya so egypt has signed defense agreements with these countries in order to safeguard its interests but if you take ethiopia it has also done the same thing as it has initiated its own diplomatic effort in the horn of africa it has done this by strengthening its ties with sumalia, erythria and south sudan but additionally egypt has also agreed to build a major dam and hydropower project in tanzania with the intent that it will compete with ethiopia in the export of power in the region so this dam was one of the major problems of egypt and it is handling it now now second problem is that egypt has a turbulent relation with turkey we already saw this see this turbulent relationship is now mainly due to the libyan peace process and the east mediterranean the problem is that in the east mediterranean region egypt along with the other littoral partners of mediterranean sea has delineated their energy claims in the sea and this delineation is in conflict with turkish claims so that is why in some areas turkey and egypt are not on the same lines but now turkey has announced that it is willing to reopen its relationship with egypt and apart from all of this we have the present situation of pandemic so far we saw that egypt's diplomacy has already placed it in the forefront of regional affairs but the present situation poses a challenge for this because of the emergence of novel coronavirus pandemic because this has led to rising of unemployment in egypt and the economy of egypt is also witnessing a slowed economic recovery so due to this the percentage of workers who are without adequate income has gone up to nearly 75 percentage and the poverty rates are two percentage higher than what it was in 2015 so all these recent economic crisis caused by the pandemic has created a major concern which is that this deterioration in the economy might compel egypt to seek assistance from its gulf allies such as how the arabia and united arab emirates but if egypt does this it would dilute its independent position in the regional affairs so let us wait and see how egypt handles the pandemic imposed economic crisis and if egypt successfully handles this crisis that too through its own ventures without engaging with saudi arabia and ua e then we can see that in the coming years egypt will become one of the major players in the west asian politics so these are some of the points that we need to know about the situation that is existing in the west asian countries and in the middle east now let us move to the next discussion now let us take up this news article which talks about the swiss alp mountains this topic is important from the geography part of our syllabus see the news is that the melting of glaciers due to climate change has created more than 1000 new lakes across the swiss alp mountains and this has dramatically altered the swiss alp landscapes and this event has happened at a quicker pace than expected so taking this opportunity let us discuss about the alps which are the stunning mountain range see they are the highest mountain range in europe and they're also really young compared to other mountain ranges of the world because they were formed approximately 65 million years ago only these mountain range stretch for 1200 kilometers see you should know that the alps are divided into western alps and the eastern alps and they're divided by the river rhein the western alps are the higher of the two alps regions and these western alps involve the countries of italy france and switzerland and the eastern alps belongs to austria germany italy lichenstein slovenia and switzerland so we can see that italy and switzerland both have the western as well as the eastern alps and the highest peak in the alps is the magnificent mont blanc which is of a 4808 meters high this mont blanc is located along the italian french border see here the term mont blanc actually means white mountain and this has been given the name of white mountain because it is covered in snow and ice throughout the year now you should also know that this alpine region that is the region through which the alps are spread across they have a strong cultural identity at present the alpine region is home to 14 million people and it has over 120 million annual visitors and the traditional culture of these people include farming cheese making and woodworking and these traditions even exists today in the alpine villages but most of the revenue of the alpine region comes from the tourism industry see the tourism industry in the alpine region began to grow in the early 20th century and it expanded greatly after the world war two and now it has become the dominant industry in the region this is because the alps are not only famous for its peaks but they are also famous for their clear alpine lakes some of the famous alpine lakes are lake janiva lake constants and lake gomo now because of these pristine lakes and peaks the alps are an extremely popular area for tourists and they attract over 100 million visitors every year so because of this the alpine countries also host an array of activities like trekking cycling mountain biking paragliding and rock climbing and because of this many winter olympic games have been hosted in the alpine countries in their alps such as they have been hosted in the swiss alp french alp italian austrian and german alps so these are some of the important facts that you need to know about the mountain range of alps now let us move on to the next discussion this discussion is based on this news article which talks about a recently released report and it was released by oxfam india this report is titled india inequality report 2021 india's unequal health care story so in this context let us discuss in brief about oxfam and then the highlights of the recent report the syllabus relevant to this discussion is given here for your reference see first let us see about the organization oxfam that has released this report you may think why we need to know about this organization see knowing about such organizations is important from prelims perspective previously also several questions have been asked in problems by the upsc for example a question was asked about amnesty international in the year 2015 so a similar question can be formed based on oxfam also so just know about this mostly these organizations appear in current affairs when they release any report or survey results regarding india now since oxfam has released the report let us know about it first see this oxfam is a non-profit organization it is working to support child education for empowering women and to fight against inequality across the world and this organization oxfam international it was formed in 1995 by a group of independent non-governmental organization that is by a group of NGOs they joined together as a confederation to maximize efficiency and to achieve greater impact so as to reduce global poverty and to reduce global injustice here should also know why the name oxfam it comes from the oxford committee for mind relief which was founded in britain in the year 1942 see this group campaigned for food supplies to be sent through an allied naval blockade and this was to be sent to the starving women and children in the anime occupied greece during the second world war so it is an organization that is existing since the second world war now note that currently the oxfam international secretariat is based in iroby in kenya and presently there are 21 member organizations of the oxfam international confederation and these member organizations are based in australia brazil canada columbia india south africa etc and the indian part of these member organizations is known as oxfam india which is a member of the global confederation of 20 oxfams across the world and it has been in india since 1951 and it first came to india to respond to the behar famine so remember this fact and then in 2008 oxfam india became an independent affiliate and an indian non-governmental organization and after that government of india registered oxfam india as a non-profit organization under the indian companies act of 2013 and it also has a fcra license that means it can receive foreign contributions so now let us discuss about the highlights of the report released by oxfam recently so remember this report is about inequality in india and it also has a special focus on healthcare so as per this report while india is one of the fastest growing economies in the world it is also one of the most unequal countries it says that inequality has been rising in india that too sharply for the last three decades and the most affected sections because of these widening gaps and rising inequalities are the women and children that is the vulnerable sections of our population so because of these existing inequalities many ordinary indians are not able to access to healthcare which they need and when they are able to spend for the healthcare it says that they are pushed into poverty because of it the report says almost 6.3 crore of people are being pushed into poverty because of healthcare costs every year here the healthcare costs which we are discussing is nothing but the out of the pocket expenditures that is we are spending from our pockets for our healthcare needs apart from this the report also highlights the disproportionate effect of the second wave of covid-19 on the rural india it mentions that by may 2021 one in every two cases was in rural india and in states like uttarpadesh and rajasthan more than 75 percentage of their cases were in rural areas only and this is the result of weak public healthcare system only we have already witnessed this in disastrous covid-19 second wave which has further exposed the weakness of our public healthcare system so based on this also the report notes that state governments that are having higher expenditure on health had lower confirmed cases of covid-19 and even certain states with higher expenditure also had higher recovery rate from covid and these states include orisha and goa etc so based on these findings the report concludes that more investment in public healthcare infrastructure is important now apart from the findings related to healthcare sector the report also highlights the impact of existing social inequalities on access to healthcare here by social inequalities we mean the class and caste differences that exist among the different communities and the difference that exists among religion among genders etc so as per the report the people who are belonging to the general category communities have better access to healthcare than that of the people who belong to the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities then when we take the difference in religion it mentions that people belonging to hindu religion have better access to healthcare as compared to the people belonging to muslim religion and when we talk about gender it notes that men have better access than that of women and if we compare the urban population rural population on a whole urban population has better access than that of a rural population so we can say that in our country people belonging to the general category and people belonging to the religion of hindu and especially men who are in the urban population are better off on most health determinants now the report also focuses on women's empowerment so in that way it talks about women's literacy also according to its findings women belonging to scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities lag behind the women who belong to general category communities it says that the difference is around 18.6 percentage and 27.9 percentage respectively and here also if we take the finding related to different religions female literacy among muslim women is lower than all religious groups it is said that female literacy among the muslims is around only 64.3 percentage but we have to remember that this inequality has been reducing over time then it also talks about the share of institutional deliveries in india see institutional delivery means the proportion of births that occur in healthcare facilities in that area this is also called as institutional birth and these institutional deliveries reduce the risk of maternal mortality and infant mortality so while discussing about the share of institutional deliveries in india the report has found that this has increased in the time period from 2005 6 to 2015 to 16 it has increased from 38.7 percentage to 78.9 percentage in this decade but it has also found that even inequalities persist in this area also it has been found that scheduled tribe households are 15 percentage below the general category households and muslim households are 12 percentage behind the hindu households and there is also a 35 percentage gap between the poorest and richest 20 percentage of the population so these are some of the facts that you can note from this oxfam report you can mention these data and findings in your main sansa writing especially in your essay paper when there is a topic in the social justice area so now let us move on to the next discussion this discussion is based on this opiate article see if you remember yesterday we saw about pegasus we saw how government is using pegasus to keep a watch on its own citizens by hacking into their phones because it is a spyware see here what the government is doing is called as surveillance all surveillance is not wrong because surveillance is an integral part of security paradigm but what is wrong is the intrusive and uninformed surveillance these are bad a surveillance that is not legally sanctioned is bad and this is a direct violation of right to privacy and right to free speech which are the fundamental rights so such surveillance by government is what is contentious here now all this issue started when many pegasus project report was released by the wire the wire is a news reporting organization and it has released many reports on this pegasus project as per these reports over 300 verified Indian mobile telephone numbers were targeted using this pegasus spyware if you remember it is made by an Israeli firm and these 300 verified Indian mobile telephone numbers belongs to ministers opposition leaders journalists legal community businessmen government officials scientists rights activists and many others and this was even later confirmed with more specificities by the amnesty international which is another organization so this through a light on the surveillance that is carried on by the government on its own citizenry and this orbit article is an analysis on that only where the authors discuss about the implications of such surveillance so let us see these aspects now the syllabus relevant to this discussion is given here for your reference so let us discuss the implications one by one first of all the reports point out that most of the targeted individuals are journalists or dissidents who have criticized the government so the report points out that there is a targeted trend on these individuals so this can have an effect on the free speech we know that journalism cannot survive without free speech another implication is that government is justifying its move so it is taking refuge under the indian telegraph act of 1885 and even the information technology act of 2000 especially the section 69 of the information technology act and even the interception rules of 2009 taking examples of these acts government is justifying that it has authority to do so see you should know that these legislations and rules are more opaque than the telegraph act because both these statutes provide way for surveillance but almost there is no protection to the one who is surveilled we should also remember that already these two acts have been criticized for being opaque and intrusive and on top of this now they're using these acts to justify the use of pegasus spyware and this is a little too much because there is no provision which provides for it even the opaque laws don't provide for surveillance in fact hacking of computer resources including mobile phones and apps is a criminal offense under the it act but yet government is indulging in such acts and third implication is that such surveillance power under one arm of government threatens the separation of powers see the judiciary can be the only authority that can effectively oversee and curtail such powers be misused here we want to ensure the checks and balances but these laws that we saw earlier provides no scope for an individual who is subjected to the surveillance to approach a court of law there is no provision to approach either prior to such surveillance or during or even after such acts of surveillance so judicial role also has been minimized so these are some of the broad implications of surveillance in essence we can say that existence of a surveillance system especially the one which is not justified under any law impacts the right to privacy under article 21 if you remember in the case put us for me versus union of india 2017 case law supreme court reiterated that right to privacy is a fundamental right under article 21 apart from this surveillance systems also impacts the exercise of freedom of speech and personal liberty under article 19 of indian constitution so beyond these implications and impacts such mass surveillance also carries the risk of concentration of powers with the executive because now they can know who is against them and who is in favor of them so let us hope that judiciary intervenes and takes proper actions against this misuse of surveillance these are some of the points that you can take note from this opi article now let us move on to the next discussion our next discussion is based on this news article which talks about the proposed immigration bill of 2021 this bill has been proposed by the ministry of external affairs it is believed that this bill would be tabled in the current monsoon session of the parliament so in this context let us discuss in brief about this bill first note that this bill is proposed to replace the immigration act of 1983 there are two main works regarding immigration one is the immigration of indian citizens from india to other countries for employment and second is the return of immigrants to india now these two works are the responsibility of the ministry of external affairs see so far the provisions of the immigration act of 1983 governs the immigration from india it also provides the regulatory framework for immigration of indian workers for contractual overseas employment and it also aims to safeguard their interests and ensure their welfare now this act had its genesis in the 1979 supreme court judgment in the case law kanga and others versus union of india case in this case supreme court ruled that immigration should be regulated on the basis of guidelines inaugurated so based on this judgment parliament enacted the 1983 immigration act now since the act was enacted the protection of immigrants and their interests has become the duty of the office of the protector general of immigrants for in short pge see this office of pge functions under the ministry of external affairs and the act makes it mandatory for the registration of recruiting agents with the pge so these are the important facts that you need to know about immigration act of 1983 now let us see some of the important provisions of the draft immigration bill of 2021 this draft bill seeks to create two authorities one is the bureau of immigration policy and planning ensured b e pp and the other one is the bureau of immigration administration that is b e a now among these the b e pp will consist of a chief of immigration policy officer and other officers now here the chief will be an officer nor below the rank of a joint secretary to the government of india now this b e pp will formulate effective policies through periodic assessment it will also undertake consultation with relevance stakeholders and it will carry out analysis with regard to immigration and allied matters now next is the b e a the bureau of immigration administration this bureau would implement the provisions of this act and it will also ensure the welfare and protection of the immigrants and this b e a will also consist of a chief immigration officer and other officers and here also the chief immigration officer shall be an officer not below the rank of a joint secretary to the government of india now one of the important provisions of this act is that it proposes to set up immigration checkpoints now the aim of these immigration checkpoints is to prevent the contravention of the provisions of this act or the rules which will be made under this act now the in charge of this check post will be an officer of the central government or state government who will be appointed by the center and note that this officer in charge of the immigration check post will be under the general control and supervision of the chief immigration officer of the bureau of immigration administration so once this bill will be enacted it will become a crucial legislation for the non-resident indians because the provisions of this bill covers labour migration and exploitation it covers remittances student mobility and even human trafficking so we'll take some other day to discuss these provisions of the bill today we saw some brief introduction about the bill and also about the 1983 immigration act now let us move on to the next discussion now let us take up this news article which talks about oil seats see according to today's news this year there has been an interval or lull in the monsoon especially after the june 23rd period this interval has resulted in a 32 percent rainfall deficit so this will push the farmers into changing their kharif crop patterns this change in cropping pattern will be predominant in the northwest and central part of india because these are the areas that will experience a rainfall deficit of 55 percentage so farmers may be forced to move from oil seeds such as soybean and groundnut to the crops which have lower water requirements and these include crops such as cotton and maize so this is the gist of today's news so taking this opportunity let us see about oil seeds today we'll see about a lower water requirement crops such as cotton and maize some other day see the oil crops are the second most important determinant of agricultural economy so it is very important from the exam perspective the first important determinant is the cereals and next comes the oil seeds now during the 1990s india attained self-sufficiency in oil seeds and this happened through yellow revolution see this yellow revolution was launched in 1986 to increase the production of edible oil seeds in the country and the purpose of this revolution was to meet the domestic demand and to achieve self-reliance and the father of this yellow revolution is san pitroda but remember that the initial success of this yellow revolution could not be sustained beyond a short period this is because even though india was one of the largest oil seed crops producing countries in the world even today india is one of the largest importers of vegetable oil this is because there has been a tremendous increase in the vegetable oil consumption in the recent years they are consumed as part of edible usage as well as in the industrial usages so this has created a gap in the demand and supply which has resulted in the huge imports of vegetable oils so in this context we need to know what are the oil seeds in india there are nine oil seeds which are the primary source of vegetable oils they are groundnut, rape seed and mustard, soybean, sunflower, sesame, safflower, Niger, castor and linseed and among these the edible oil seeds are the groundnut, rape seed and mustard, soybean, sunflower, sesame, safflower and Niger and the castor and linseed are non-edible oil seeds so these are the primary source of vegetable oils now among these soybean, groundnut, rape seed and mustard they contribute to more than 88 percentage of total oil seeds production so remember these facts are important from prelim's perspective now coming to the secondary sources of vegetable oil you should remember that other than these crops vegetable oil can also be harnessed from the secondary sources like cotton seed, rice bran, coconut, tree bone oil seeds and oil palm so these are a few facts about oil seeds and about yellow revolution now let us move on to the next discussion our last discussion for the day is based on the snippet article it talks about the draft indian marine fisheries bill of 2021 see the news is that fishermen are against this bill and they blame that the central government was attempting to pass this bill without discussing its provisions with these stakeholders that is without discussing it with the fishermen with the chief ministers of the coastal states etc so today let us have a brief discussion about this bill because the bill text is not available yet see among the bills that might be passed in this session of parliament this is also one of the bills and this bill aims to repeal the maritime zones of india act of 1991 the full name of this act is maritime zones of india regulation of fishing by foreign vessels act of 1981 now this indian marine fisheries bill aims to replace this and the key objective of this bill is to provide for the sustainable development of fisheries resources in the exclusive economic zone of india apart from this the bill also aims to promote the livelihoods of small-scale fishermen and artisanal fishermen now at present fishermen are seeking for an immediate withdrawal of this bill it is because the bill aims to demarcate territorial waters and it also imposes certain fines see it is said that a fine will be imposed on those who cross the international maritime boundary line so because of this fishermen claim that the bill is a legislation which is against them and especially this provision of imposing a penalty is viewed as infringing upon their right to venture into the sea the major grievance is that fishermen were asking for assistance from the governments but now they feel that this bill is totally out of its purpose because fishermen were asking for subsidies in diesel and they were asking for better infrastructures and they were also asking for a fair price for their catch but rather than doing all these which were asked by the fishermen now the government is planning to impose penalties for crossing the international maritime boundary line and that is why this bill is seen as anti-fishermen in nature but as usual government has a different argument for this it is justifying the bill saying that this fine is being imposed only with the intention to protect the fishermen so let us wait and see what are the other arguments given by the government for imposing such a fine and we will see about other provisions of the bill once the text is available so now let us move on to the next discussion which is the practice questions discussion now this first question asks which of the following are the primary sources of edible oils mustard, groundnut, coconut, oil, palm, soybean select the correct answer from the code given below during discussion we saw that there are primary sources of edible oils and we also have some secondary sources so from the given options even if you are not sure about oil, palm, soybean, mustard, groundnut you can easily say that coconut is not a primary source so if you remove three from the options you can easily arrive at the correct answer which is option b 1 2 and 5 see the primary sources of edible oils are soybean, rape seed and mustard, groundnut, sunflower, safflower and Niger and the secondary sources are oil, palm, coconut, rice bran, cotton seeds and tree bone oil seeds so the correct answer is option b now this next question is about protector general of emigrants the question asks consider the following statements regarding the office of protector general of emigrants first statement it is the authority responsible for protecting the interest of Indian workers going abroad this statement is correct this is the crucial function of this office second statement it functions under the ministry of home affairs this statement is incorrect because it functions under the ministry of external affairs so this statement is incorrect now the third statement is it shows registration certificate to the recruiting agents for overseas manpower exporting business this statement is also correct PG is the registering authority for this purpose here the question asks for the correct statements so the correct answer is option b 1 and 3 only now this next question is based on alps mountain range the question asks the majestic alps mountain range stretch among which of the following countries Germany Austria Slovenia Spain France so remember that Spain is not a part of alps so it should not be in the answer which means four should not be in answer we can eliminate option a and d now from the given options one two and five are correct and Slovenia which is in three is also correct it belongs to alps mountain region see if you take the country wise distribution you should know that alps form a part of France Italy Switzerland Germany Austria Slovenia Croatia Bosnia and Herzegovina Montenegro Serbia and then Albania so the correct answer is option c so with this question now let us take up a few main questions these three questions are framed based on today's discussion you can answer these questions and post the answer in the comment section for peer review with this we come to the end of today's indian news analysis and practice questions discussion session if you like this video don't forget to like comment and share and do subscribe to shankar eyes academy youtube channel for more updates related to civil service examination preparation thank you


All right, everyone, next up in our handstand prep progression, if maybe you tried the sprinter lunge hold and it feels ridiculously easy, why don't you throw in some movements? So from here, I'm setting up in the same spot.  So I'm even coming off of this foot as much as I can, ooh baby, it's a little uncomfortable. And I'm trying to get a nice stretch to the back of this leg. That will help pull my hips underneath me, it'll help loosen up my upper back and make sure that I'm keeping contact with my wrist here in the ground. But even as I pick my leg up, you see my wrist is actually bending more and so that is, it's a great thing for prepping for the handstand because I can do this, I can increase mobility here, I can drive the practice of mobility in the wrist, but I can do it without loading the body so much. So this is a great stepping stone to doing something more like a pike before we get into the full on handstand. So that is the Sprinter Lunge with Hip Lift.


Hi everyone, I'm Joe for JaspeysCaseBreaks.com coming at you with 2019, 2020, Penini, Mose, basketball, pack break number 72, fast break edition, and the final eight spots of that basketball mixer being given away. So at the end of the break, we'll do the break first, as always, at the end of the break, we'll re-randomize your names, and the top eight names after whatever the new dice roll is will be in the mixer, which is coming up right after this. We thanks to these folks, there are the teams right there, thanks to the teams, let's roll it, let's randomize it, six and a one seven times for the break, one, two, three, four, and seven and final time. After seven times, we've got Rick Serrano down to George Cobb, six and a one seven times for the teams, and seven and final time. After seven, we've got the San Antonio Spurs down to the OKC Thunder. All right, here's the first half of the list right there, Jinyin with the Pelicans, and Oliver, Grizzlies, could be a surprise in the fast break pack, who knows, and there's everybody else right there. All right, no trade windows for stuff like this, so let's just print and rip, and there's the mixer right back there with a chance to win that, and it'll be coming up after we do this little pack break, give away those final spots, there's the final printout right here. All right, nothing earth shattering there, but let's see who wins those spots, that's the whole point of this. From Breonna down to Adam, let's get everybody's name in there, let's roll it, let's randomize it, it's going to be top eight after five times, three and a two. Top eight after five, one, two, three, four, and fifth and final time. After five times, big thanks to all of these folks right here, I appreciate you getting in. We'll get them next time, and congrats to Breonna, spot eight, and above, Rick, Kevin, Matthew, Steven, George, Zach, and Ryan S, there you go, congrats to the top eight right there, you're in the mixer. Thanks for watching everybody, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com, I'll see you next time for the next one, bye-bye.


Very few people can say that they have been in the White House Situation Room. You now join their ranks. Yeah, that's going to cause problems. I think we should go with number one because we do not want to involve NATO. If you're going to do that, should we just say that Vice President is going to come to the Situation Room? Because they're environmentalists. No, they're sourced out if it's true. Don't write that. I need the name. The Situation Room Experience is a modern fictional foreign policy crisis simulation. Students are assigned one of 40 unique roles and then they are thrown into a crisis. But this isn't a classroom. The students are in charge. They make decisions that change the outcome of the crisis. The second option is definitely not an option. Whoever let that out, I don't think that's true. Students are driven by the mission of their characters that they take on. Students are inundated with content just like we are in our information age. Students see to compare and verify all of the sources they're receiving. The fun part is that the students are so deeply engaged in their experience, they don't actually even realize that they're in a teaching and learning environment. Oh, I should contact another one. I'm going to contact the security officer. What was the name that they posted? Yeah, I'm just letting you guys know. Likely a complex with a suspect. Okay, everyone, except for the secretary, say out here now.


Okay, I was asked to address the topic of ancestral diversity. So this will be a little bit of a change of pace from the last couple of talks. What I'll be addressing this afternoon is, first, a little bit of background on human genetic variation, essentially how we've been thinking about human genetic variation over the last, well, really, several decades and what the general patterns look like. And then I'll talk about how sequencing, just in the last couple of years, has changed some of these views and how in turn that affects and pertains to some of the questions that we've been discussing over the last day. So one of the most basic questions we can ask is, how is genetic variation distributed among populations? And here we'll use a convenient, not always the best or most appropriate, but a convenient unit of subdivision, and that's the major continents. And what we see is for a variety of different kinds of genetic systems, whether they're short tandem repeats, the old restriction site, polymorphisms, mobile elements, or SNP data here, if we look at the apportionment of variation, most of it occurs between individuals within these major populations, and only a relatively small proportion, typically 10 to 12%, is due to differences between populations at that level, and that's very consistent across different kinds of genetic systems. Now we can, to put that in perspective, compare that with, say, skin pigmentation, which varies a great deal among continents and has been subjected to a lot of natural selection, where the great majority of variation actually is found between continental populations. Another way of looking at this is for SNPs from a 250K chip to ask what proportion of the minor alleles are shared among populations, and we can see that the great majority typically are, and the only continent that has very many population-specific SNPs, 7%, is Africa. Now another way of looking at this variation is to map it out on a tree that looks like this, and of course these trees can be misleading to some people because they're sometimes interpreted as meaning that populations split and then had no subsequent contact, and of course as humans there's always been subsequent contact, but it's a convenient way of showing how similar populations are to one another, and what we see is that populations do tend to group according to their geographic location, and that's really quite consistent across many different kinds of studies, and in fact with a completely different data set, the Human Genome Diversity Project data set, we see again the same pattern, both for SNPs and for a smaller number of copy number variants, and I can't resist pointing out that this has been known for a while. This is a review published 20 years ago based on data generated in the 70s and 80s, blood groups and protein polymorphisms, and it's interesting that with just 29 of those loci you see very much the same pattern, so you really don't need that many loci to get the basic pattern of interpopulation genetic variation, but one thing that our high density SNP data allows us to do is to construct haplotypes, groups of closely linked polymorphisms, and to ask how haplotype diversity changes as we go from Africa to Central Asia to Europe to Polynesia and to the Americas, and you can see that there's a substantial reduction of haplotype diversity as we sample populations further and further away from Africa, and that's an indication of sort of a serial founder effect as human populations left Africa, and all of this is, all of this data I've shown you is consistent with a recent African origin of anodine populations. Now one interesting question I can't help but at least mention is what happened as humans went out of Africa and they encountered other groups? Well they acted like typical humans, they exchanged DNA. A consequence of that is that for non-Africans today we see about 1 to 4 percent contribution in their DNA of their Neanderthal ancestors. So we can, another thing we can do with the high density data is to look not at populations which are always somewhat artificial in one way or another, but we can look at individuals. So on this two-dimensional display of genetic relationships, it's a principal components analysis, each dot is an individual, and what's rather remarkable about this is that you can see that this sort of reconstructs a map of Eurasia, again showing the correlation between genetic similarity and geographic location. But another thing that it shows is that there is overlap among populations in terms of their membership. So populations, while they do tell us something about people, they are not by any means perfect categories. So the microarray-based SNPs as we see do portray population relationships pretty accurately, but they are biased. They were typically selected for high frequency and diversity in Europeans, whereas complete DNA sequences are essentially unbiased, and of course they include a lot of information about not just common, but also rare variants. This plot that Andy Clark generated now a few years ago from some of the early sequence data shows the effect of that bias on allele counts. So this is the proportion of SNPs at each allele count, and what you can see is that for the SNP-based hat map results, there's a real deficiency relative to sequence data in the low-frequency alleles. It's also interesting that compared to what's called equilibrium, we see excess rare alleles in the sequence data from Perligen and NIHS, and what that is is a signature of rapid human population growth fairly recently, and that was mentioned in the Tennyson paper that was handed out to everyone. And the way to think about this is that when rare alleles arise, if you have a stationary population or a small population, a lot of the time they're lost due to genetic drift. But if you have a rapidly growing population, they tend to be retained. If you're transmitting an allele to, let's say, 10 offspring, you're more likely to do so than if you're transmitting to only two offspring. So let's take a look at some of the sequence data and how they are displayed, again, in a network diagram. So this is some analysis that a graduate student of mine did, Wilford Woo. So these are individuals. They've been completely sequenced by complete genomics, 54 individuals. So each of these tips is an individual from a specific location. So here are the 1000 Genomes Yorubens, the Luya from Kenya, Chinese, Japanese. These are samples from Mexico. These are the Utah SEF samples, Tuscan, Puerto Rican, and Gujarati Indians, so that, again, with the sequence data, as with the STIP data, we can see groupings of individuals. Now, not everyone falls easily into those groups. Most of these samples are African American that fall outside this cluster and sort of in between the two groups, non-African and African, reflecting their population history. Now, another thing that Wilford did was to compare sequence results in the complete genomics data, and 34 of those individuals were also sequenced as part of the 1000 Genomes Project. So you can see that there are two tips for each of those individuals representing the two different sequencing results, and there are some differences. The individuals do group with themselves, as you can see here, but on average, the between platform difference is about 348,000 variants, reflecting in part differences in depth of coverage, as well as differences inherent to the platforms. So some interesting interplatform heterogeneity. So here's a way in which sequencing data really differ from the earlier SNP data, that is the earlier microarray data, and that is that they're much more likely to be, those SNPs are much more likely to be population specific. So here's a plot showing overlap among major populations for essentially mostly common SNPs identified earlier in DB SNP, where you see, as I mentioned before, a lot of overlap among populations, that is most variation is shared, whereas for the rarer SNPs identified now by sequencing, we see much, much less overlap. Most of these SNPs are in fact population specific rather than being shared, and in part that reflects the fact that here, the average allele frequency difference is around 15%. There's a lot of latitude for variation and sharing. So we can understand this by looking at this graph, and I won't take you through this equation, but it's a simple way of estimating the age of a SNP allele based on its frequency and an estimate of effective population size. And so you can see that as the frequency gets larger, we estimate the age of the allele to be greater. And for an allele whose frequency is about 5%, the age is estimated to be roughly 150,000 years. So it's been around for a long time before the out of Africa event likely to be shared among many populations. Whereas for an allele that has a frequency of 1%, the age is much smaller, post out of Africa, more likely to be population specific. So this gives us a way of understanding those results. Now with the rare variants, the many rare variants that we see in sequencing data, we can ask the question, well, each time we sequence a genome, how many new variants do we see? This is work published a couple years ago from David Goldstein's group showing that the number declines down to something over 100,000. We've extended that with 1,000 genomes data to 200 individuals, and you can see that it declines, continues to decline, but very slowly to around 100,000 novel variants for whole genome data each time a new person is sequenced. Now we can also compare this between populations, which is kind of interesting. European versus European is shown here, and we see a lot more novel variants when we're comparing individuals between populations, like European versus African, as opposed to within, telling us that we're going to see a lot more what appear to be novel variants if we're comparing two populations with different history. Less so for populations from the same continent, so these are Tuscans, Great Britain, Finns, and so forth, but still some difference in the rate of decay, the rate of fall off for within population versus between population comparisons. And what that suggests is that if we use the wrong reference population in inappropriately matched reference population, we're going to see a lot of potentially false positives. And this is an exercise that we published in our vast paper last year outlining a methodology for finding disease causing loci. What we did was compared 30 individuals who were of European ancestry, they were our disease cases with mixtures of controls of Europeans and Africans. And what you see is that if the control population is mostly matched, we found very few of what would be false positives because there was no actual disease here. We shouldn't see any signals, but once we start getting a larger portion of non-European individuals in our control sample, we get hundreds, even over a thousand false positive results. So in this rather extreme example, it's telling us that if we don't properly match our case and control samples when we're looking for rare variants, we're going to have hundreds and hundreds, if not more, of false positives. Now, the last thing that I wanted to mention just briefly, because the issue of power has come up a number of times here, this is a comparison that Chad Huff has done. This work is about to be published where we are looking for a disease-causing gene in a multi-generational pedigree using VAST. What this shows is that the power using sequence data to get genome-wide significance, so this is the genome-wide significance level, is about the same as a traditional LOD score of three in a family if we're using 450 control genomes. But if we simply increase that, this is a simulation, if we increase that to 4,500 control genomes, we can get genome-wide significance with sequence data, where we incorporate functional data and other things, with a LOD score less than two. In other words, having a large sample of controls, which helps us to identify which alleles are truly rare, substantially increases our power. So to conclude, I see I'm right at 15 minutes here, what we do see from sequence data now is that there are a lot more population-specific rare alleles, that certainly implies that we'll need more sequencing and more populations. But I think to help guide that, one of the things we need to do is to conduct experiments essentially to determine how closely do we need to match case and control populations to minimize false positives? What FST level, for example, would be small enough so that we can minimize the number of false positives without sequencing too many different populations? And I think this is work that needs to be done now that we're getting more and more sequence data from more and more populations. Thanks. Great. Thank you. Discussion? Go ahead, Derek. Large cohorts, thank you, sorry. Large cohorts that we're not going to be identifying a priori, you know, cases and be able to match to control. So do you think in the absence of the ability to truly match, and I'm taking you literally, we'll be able to, in a post-hoc way, adjust for differences in substructure using some method as opposed to matching a priori? Well, I'm sure that some of the same kinds of methods that have been used to do genome-wide control in GWAS could be applied as well with sequence data. I haven't thought about that too much, but it should be possible to do those kinds of adjustments. There's always some loss of power when you do that, but I should think that would be possible. Just for local structure or adjust for, just on average, this person, sort of an average, either PCs or FST. By local structure? Around the gene. Just in that local genomic region. I would think you'd still want to do it genome-wide, but I'm curious as to why you're thinking you might restrict to just around the gene. Maybe I could just ask the question a different way. If I'm studying a rare adverse drug reaction in Tuscany, can I use Estonians as my controls? Or do I have to use Tuscans as my controls? I think that's one of the things that we need to establish. That's why I said I think we need to do these experiments to figure out what level of differentiation will produce a given level of false positives. I don't think for sequence data we know that yet. But I think it's pretty clear you don't want to use Estonians as controls. I'm trying to stay within the Caucasian super family, but Tuscans and mid France or something. There'll be lots of rare sequence variants at which Tuscans are different from Estonians. Actually there'll be reasonable levels of sequence variants at which they'll be different from people who live in southern Italy. I think you need to figure it out. The question is really what the local context is. I think that question was just asked of you a second ago, Lynn, and I would raise that question whether if you were interested in a particular drug reaction, could you look in the Estonians locally at that part of chromosome 4, if you saw that there was shared haplotypes in similar structure there, would that permit you to do it? So there may be a bit of gradation there, but I think you know that the question of the difference between sort of globally doing this and looking more locally, because there may be some regions in which you do have more conservation and less admixture, you know, and there are some groups that are looking at this with respect to like p53 mutations and the like that have been very interesting in being able to capture and see a consistency across what otherwise looked like very disparate populations within the European set. So if you look at cases from one region, Tuscany and controls from Estonia, or I suspect even southern Italy, and the signal you're looking for is a rare variant that differs between the cases and the controls, you'll never know whether it's because of the fact that the cases and controls or because they're from different regions. I think we need to be really careful. Yeah, I think we're probably thinking in terms of the haplotypes we can look at with say SNP data, where you can sort of trace the origin of that region of a chromosome in an individual, but with rare variants, that variant may substantially postate the rest of the variation on the haplotype. The follow-up of that is then we really can't, it makes it all the more difficult to use rare variants in any way to adjust like you would use in eigenvectors and the like for sort of genomic controls. Is that what I'm hearing? Because there are people who are advocating and also refuting that particular position saying that could you use rare variants to and develop eigenvectors? I'm not sure you can globally, but the question is the local questions that are different, but globally I think that that's really going to be very problematic. So Judy. Yeah, just a couple points. One is kind of the correction for the local differences. Wouldn't that be more relevant for a recently ad-bix population as opposed to comparing different clades of European ancestry individuals? That's kind of one point or question. And a second point is that a priori, the point you made earlier of using the same approaches as we used in GWAS to correct for population substructure, it seems a common variance, but then using additional principal component accesses in just one or two or three or four would probably serve as well as anything as we can to try to correct for population substructure. Just your comments on that. Certainly you could use the additional principal components out to as many dimensions as sort of makes sense given the structure of the data for recently ad-mixed populations. An interesting question how you would construct appropriate controls, but I could imagine constructing control datasets comprising the ancestral groups, say two groups for that ad-mixed population. And that could be, I think, determined fairly well. And then you've got rare variance from both of those sources so that you would have at least an approximately appropriate background. I think Rory had one, and then Stephen. You make a very urgent case for having the cases and the controls from the same population when you're trying to look at rare variance. But if you have the cases and the controls from the same population, do you need to have studies in many different populations in order to find rare variance that are related to disease, or would just having a few actually allow you? So should we be focusing on a few large studies rather than having lots of studies in order to have different populations? I think the sample size issue is going to be important. And so I think my own inclination would be more toward fewer larger samples rather than many, many small samples. Stephen and then Chris. I just wanted to ask a question from Lynn. It's sort of come up and that's the question of like a mold-like analysis. I mean, raising this issue of recent admixture. You know, people have tried to use, I mean, they've successfully in selected places done this with microsatellites and to a degree with SNPs. The question is, as we get to these rare variances, is this an opportunity that's going to, in your mind, go away? Or could it become a powerful way to identify these things if indeed you had sufficient number of cases and controls from two different populations and then that had a difference in incidence of a particular disease? You think there is space for that or is that going to go away? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, there's a literature going back some time on the power of rare variance to essentially trace migration movements and that I think would include admixture movements or admixture events. So I think rare variants might be especially powerful in that context. Quick question. So there's rare variants and there's, you know, singletons that in aggregate can lead to disease we think we're hypothesizing. And is there evidence for population stratification of a burden of variants in a gene? And would that potentially be a protection if in fact that is leading to diseases or disease traits against this phenomenon of different populations? It's an interesting question. Certainly if there's, I have to think about that, but if there's been, well, one thing that could have an influence on that pattern would be positive selection with hitchhiking of nearby variants. So you could get clusters of variants that elsewhere would be rare, but could be selected to rather high frequency in a specific population, just as a result of a selective event. So that's one way in which that could occur. So you'd have a suite of variants that would be in strong linkage to sequalibring with each other as a result of genetic hitchhiking. Is that Maynard and then Daniel. I think this is going to be an extremely important issue for a variety of reasons. There's been a sort of focus on the ability to extract genotype phenotype correlations without air. But there are of course, larger social issues on the table. And I just like to emphasize the point that I think, particularly in the United States, that as really a kind of point of attitude and policy that we should embrace our sort of mongrel background and not attempt to finesse this problem by injecting notions of ancestral purity into our sort of basic way of sampling the population and so forth. You know, we're going to be dealing with a highly admixt population. It will have some advantages and some disadvantages compared to Iceland or wherever. But it's our population. And I think this is the way we should tackle it. The problems are quite difficult, but I think that they will look different when we start having all genome data on a million people. And I just would like to encourage young theoreticians to tackle them. I mean, in principle, each little sort of segment of the genome there, of course, are major difficulties defining the boundaries of this segment, which differ from every genome to every other genome. But nonetheless, in principle, each has its own phylogenetic tree. And I think that the long-term theoretical path here is going to be to construct those trees. And that this is the way that the reference genome problem will be ultimately attacked is that every little segment of my genome or each of my genomes will have its own reference genome. And I think this is a solvable problem with enough data. And I think for this variety of reasons that I mentioned that we should, it should stay high on the agenda. Well, Maynard, I couldn't couldn't agree with you more about the importance of disabusing people of any notions of any population having any kind of quote, pure purity. It's one thing that genetics teaches us is that there is no such thing. Okay, one last question, Daniel. I think so, one of the things we see in looking at our exams from Finnish individuals is the effects of the bottleneck which have taken a number of variants that are very rare in the European population in general and bump them up to a higher frequency in Finland. I was wondering if you could comment then on the on the benefits potential benefits of looking in these bottlenecked populations, given that many of these sort of rare potentially very deleterious variants may be found at a higher frequency in populations like the fins or the armish or other other populations here in the US. Well, I think you've, you've stated the advantage very well, Dan, that you know, that increases the potential signal, not to mention at least some, although I think it's fairly marginal decrease in general heterogeneity in the population. So, you know, I see those as potentially quite advantageous populations in the in for these kinds of analyses. Thank you.


Hey guys, welcome back to our channel. My name is Andrea with Food and Mentory Adventures in Food and I am here today with a quick fill-in haul from Aldi and I wanted to share what I picked up. So I'll start off over here with these house shoes. I have been wanting some house shoes for a very long time. They had these as a special in their Isle of Shame this week and they were $5.99. I didn't really care for this color but this is the only color that they had in my size. So I grabbed it and they seem pretty sturdy. We can see the soles of the shoes right here and they have a little cushion in there. So I'm excited to try these. And if they don't work out, they were only $5.99. So grab that. Also solve this pasta bake for cheese pasta bake and you add your own cheese. So you add Parmesan cheese to it and you add milk and then you bake it. It is German month or week at Aldi. I'm not sure which it is but I heard that these are really good. These are hard candies. They are imported from Germany, two pounds and this is a glass container that I plan to keep and reuse because it's really nice and big. You can't really tell on camera but the flavors that you get are lemon, orange, raspberry, grape and apple. So I'm excited to try these because I really like flavorful hard candy. Last time I was at Aldi, I saw these. They had a bunch of them but I didn't get them. And they had the lemon dunkers and they had the chocolate chip dunkers. I've never tried either one but Howard and I really like lemon stuff. So I'm hoping these are good. I grabbed the very last one that they had. In the frozen food section, I saw this three pepper blend. Excuse me. This one is just plain peppers and this one is peppers plus the onion. And I've never really been a big frozen pepper and onion person until the pandemic hit. And then I didn't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables and stuff like that because I was staying inside and I realized how important it was to have these things in the freezer. So that's why I picked them up because I think as it gets colder, I'm going to stay in more and not do as many grocery hauls. So I grabbed that. And then this is something new to me, this snack pack. And they had different ones. They had some savory ones with pretzels and a savory dip. But this one looked good. This is strawberry with little graham crackers and cream cheese. And here is what they look like. They're actually little graham crackers are about the size of a cheese it. Then you get a little container of the cream cheese dip. And I just got one because Howard's not a big fan of strawberries. Needed some cilantro for a recipe. Grabbed some of this. And I always say it wrong.  I've been wanting to try this for a very long time. I'm planning to use this as a dip. And then grab some hamburger buns for meals. I'm planning on making sloppy joes. And then Howard will probably grill some hamburgers. So Howard does not like just their regular 85 cent burger or hot dog buns. So I've never tried this before. So these were $1.99. I hope they're good. They're really thick, pretty heavy. The packaging looks a little cloudy. It's not steam or anything. It's just that's the way that the packaging looks. You can see there's flour or something on the bun. So anyway, pick that up. I've been hearing that these things are really good, these cookies. And they were only 95 cents. So I finally decided to give them a try today. I grabbed a couple of containers of whipping cream for recipes and for dinners. And then I saw these little Belden chocolate pumpkins. And they looked so cute to me. Try to get the glare off for you guys. And they were only $2 in something. And then on the back, it tells you what's inside of each of these little chocolates. So vanilla cream, salted caramel, coffee ganache, dark chocolate cream, and crispy milk chocolate cream. So sounded really good. And then their 100% cranberry juice was on sale for $2.15. I grabbed some avocado for Howard. Now these are really big avocados. And at Kroger and other places, they were selling them for $1.69. Now Aldi, these were $1.49. And Howard compared these to the ones that we have in the fridge. And these are significantly bigger and for cheaper. So that was a good deal. I needed a couple of cans of apple pie filling for a couple of recipes that I'm going to be doing. I recently bought some of these name brand ones not from Aldi for Harrison. And he's our nine month old and he actually likes them. So I was very excited about that. And so I didn't even realize that Aldi sold these. So I grabbed two for him, the only two flavors that they had. I grabbed an apple and then a banana and strawberry. The last thing that I picked up from Aldi was this bow tie pasta. I didn't know that I didn't have any bow tie pasta. And so I was kind of disappointed because this is a 12 ounce box. And all of the other boxes at Aldi, all their other pasta like penne, macaroni, they were either 16 ounces or 32 ounces. This is the only one that was 12 ounces. And it was the same price as the other ones. So I only grabbed one box because I plan on hopefully finding a better deal for bow tie pasta somewhere else. So anyway, this is it. This is all that I picked up for my quick filling haul. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, please give us a thumbs up that really helps our channel out a lot. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you guys next time.


I'm here with Ambassador, U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, Eric John. Eric, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Eric. This afternoon. Can you tell us a little bit about the outlook from Bangkok these days? You know, the headlines are sort of make everybody feel like it's a little rocky there, but what does it look like from the embassy? Well, I'd probably draw a line between political turbulence and political instability, and I think a lot of Americans, foreigners, might be confusing those two, and what you're probably going to see in the coming months is a continuance of political turbulence, which is okay. It's a democracy. I don't see this as political instability. I mean, you've got red shirts, yellow shirts, of course, but they're tip of the iceberg. But both sides of the aisle are pretty engaged democratically right now, and street demonstrations, sure, may be a little bit of violence. We hope not. It's not appropriate, but it's largely a very positive product of a democratic system. So this is sort of the democratization process, not pretty, but on the way in the right direction? Right. And, yeah, I mean, I know people will say, well, they've been at this for quite a few decades. How can they still be democratizing? But they're coming out of a coup. They're only two and a half years, less than two and a half years out of a coup.  All the institutional gears are clicking right now. So Thailand's one of our five treaty allies in Asia. How do you see the relationship from that prism as a treaty ally? Is it, we have it right, is it, where do you think it's going in terms of? Well, I think that the treaty alliance is vital to the United States and probably underappreciated. It's not, obviously, we don't have troops on the ground stationed there like we do in Japan and Korea. So it doesn't get those types of headlines. But if you look at what we do in partnership with Thailand, we have our largest multi-lateral training exercise in Asia there every year, Cobra Gold, with six, seven thousand troops this year from the United States. It was, you know, Thailand is the basis for us to be able to provide the humanitarian assistance that we did in the tsunami that we did to Cyclone Nargis in Burma. It's, you know, a great partner for force projection beyond Thailand. They're a great ally for live fire training, for military training. They're an outstanding ally. A lot has been talked about recently in Washington about the rise of China. And some say that China's influence in Thailand has really risen and maybe even, you know, at the expense of the United States. Do you think that's fair? What should we be watching for? Well, I think we should be aware that we have competition for affection of ties. And that's fine. You know, I think competition's good. I'm confident in our ability to be able to compete. But we do have to be aware that there is competition. I think that we, you know, need to be very aggressive in demonstrating our appreciation for Thailand. We are very good at working with them on a democratic partnership and reinforcing their democracy. And, you know, I think as we look at places to make the President's pledge on doubling our exports in five years, we need to be looking to allies like Thailand, democratic allies like Thailand. And if we do that, I think that we'll stand up and measure up very well to China's inroads. Thailand was the place where ASEAN was found in 1967. But it seems like they've sort of not had the bandwidth to really be a major player in ASEAN recently. Is that a fair observation? And do you see the ties sort of reasserting their central role in regional architecture at some point? They will. I mean, it's natural for Thailand to be at the center of ASEAN. And certainly over the last few years, they've been preoccupied with domestic politics, and that happens to a lot of people, a lot of countries. And I think it's okay, you know, they'll emerge, they really are going to emerge stronger as they go through this sort of introspective period domestically. And I'd rather have them doing that and then re-emerge stronger. But they've done their homework on ASEAN, but they certainly will remain one of the core members and a leader of ASEAN. Okay. Last question. The U.S. has revised its policy posture on Burma, and the jury's sort of out on what kind of results that will get. What are the ties telling you about their perspective on Burma, and what are their reaction towards the new U.S. policy? They, you know, the ties certainly welcome a dialogue. They want the U.S. to talk to Burma. More importantly, I would look at where the Obama administration and the opposite administration line up on Burma. And, you know, both Thailand and the United States want a well-governed, transparently-governed democratic Burma at the end of this process. Both Thailand and the United States, I think, have a healthy skepticism about the elections that are supposed to take place this year because the Burmese have done anything but transparent about it. And, you know, it's important that we continue a very healthy dialogue with Thailand about the developments in Burma, but I, you know, the ties aren't unrealistic and they're not overly optimistic, in my opinion, about where, you know, this process this year for Burma on elections and like us, I think, are maintaining a healthy skepticism on it. You know, I think the most important part for you Americans when they're looking at Thailand is to remember that, you know, they are, it's a vibrant democracy and it can be messy sometimes, but they're a very important economic partner. They're an important cultural partner historically. And, you know, you look at Thailand and you see a country that where on the individual and on the state level, they really want to be a close friend and partner of the United States. And it's, you know, that type of friendship is something we really should put a lot of value on. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.