Category Cities

What is the basic information about Libya country?

Though Libya’s economic future changed with the discovery of petroleum in the late 1950s, today it faces political turmoil.

Ranu Joardar

Libya is an oil-rich desert country, which in the past couple of years has become an important crossover for migrants intending to reach Europe. It is currently ranked 92 among the major economies. Let us know more about this North African country.

History

Historically, Libya was never heavily populated or a power centre. Before the discovery of oil in the late 1950s, the country was seen as poor in natural resources. It was mostly dependent upon foreign aid and imports for the maintenance of its economy.

The discovery of petroleum changed the fate of Libya. The country’s first productive oil well was struck in 1959 at Amal and Zelten, now known as Nasser. The country began exporting oil in 1961.

The first settlers of Libya were the Berbers during the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BC. The land was then home to the Phoenicians (an ancient Mediterranean civilisation). They established coastal trading posts in the 7th Century BC

The name ‘Libya’ was given by the Greeks when they occupied the eastern part of the country. The country was also once part of the Roman empire.

Around 700 AD, the Arabs came and introduced Islam to the area. From the 16th Century, the country was under the Ottoman Empire until Italy conquered it in 1912. The French and British took over Libya during the Second World War in 1943.

Libya finally gained its independence in 1951. However, it was ruled by monarchs till 1969 when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overthrew King Idris I.

Gaddafi controlled Libya until the 2011 revolution when he was killed. Despite achieving independence from autocratic rule, the country continues to rebuild its government.

Geography

The fourth-largest country in Africa is mostly a desert and most of its population lives along the coast and its immediate hinterland (region lying inland from a coast). The de facto capital, Tripoli, and Benghazi (second-largest city) are on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

Libya is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea, Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, and Egypt. As the country is part of the Sahara desert (the world’s largest hot desert), the country has no permanent rivers.

To access the water below the desert, the Great Man-Made River was constructed to deliver fresh water to the cities through a network of underground pipelines.

Flora and fauna

As the country’s coastal plains have high precipitation, these regions are home to herbaceous vegetation and annual grasses such as asphodel (a herb of the lily family).

The north of Akhdar mountains is covered with a dense forest of juniper and lentisc. Though the semiarid regions lack vegetation, the most commonly found plants here include saltwort (a plant used in making soda ash), spurge flax (a shrubby plant), goosefoot.

Asida is a popular traditional dish served in Libya during celebrations such as births or Eid. Wormwood, and asphodel.

The country is home to wild animals like desert rodents (desert hare and the jerboa), hyenas, foxes (fennec and the red fox), jackals, skunks, gazelles, and wildcats. Its largest national park, El Kouf National Park, is known for its sand dunes, wetlands, and hilly terrain.

The country’s native birds include wild ringdove, partridge, lark, and prairie hen.

People

About 97% of the country’s population consists of the Berber and Arab ethnic groups. Most Libyans speak Arabic, which is the country’s official language. At the beginning of the 21st Century, the country saw a rise in the number of foreign migrant workers, mainly from sub-Saharan African countries. About 25% population live either in Tripoli or Benghazi and the rest live near desert oases, where they can access water.

The country is famous for its weaving, embroidery, and metal engraving. Traditional Libyan food is a blend of North African.  Berber,  and Mediterranean cuisines. Couscous, lamb, dates, and olives feature heavily in the Libyan cuisine

Politics

Following independence, Libya was ruled by monarchs. After overthrowing King Idris I in 1969 and suspending the constitution in a military coup, the country turned into an authoritarian state. Till 1977, Libya was ruled by a 12-member Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) with Colonel Gaddafi as secretary-general. Though he resigned from the post in 1979, he continued to be the de facto ruler of the country and head of the revolution until he was killed during the 2011 revolution.

Since 2014, the country has had competing political and military factions fighting for power. Though the two sides signed a permanent ceasefire in 2020, political rivalries continue leaving the country in a turmoil. Currently, the Prime Minister of Libya is Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, leader of the Government of National Unity (GNU).

Libya Revolt of 2011

On February 15, 2011, anti-government protests were held in Benghazi after the arrest of human rights lawyer Fethi Tarbel. The protesters demanded the resignation of Gaddafi and the release of political prisoners. The protests gained momentum despite the Libyan security forces using lethal force against demonstrators. Soon, international pressure for Gaddafi to step down increased and sanctions against the regime were imposed by the UN Security Council. On October 20, Gaddafi was killed by rebel fighters in his hometown.

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What makes country Georgia special?

Georgia is a country located at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is part of the Caucasus region, bound by the Black Sea, with Russia. Armenia, and Azerbaijan as its neighbouring countries. Even though it is quite small, the country has a lot to offer. It boasts of ancient cities, vibrant culture, and breathtaking landscapes. It is also referred to as ‘Sakartvelo’, as Georgians call themselves Kartavelians- meaning “land where Kartavelis Live”.

The Georgian kingdom has been under the hegemony of various regional powers, including the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire, and various dynasties of Persia. It was later invaded and annexed by the Soviet Union until the country got its independence in the early 1990s. Tbilisi is the current capital and largest city. It gets its name from an old Georgian word “tbili” which means “warm”. This old town features narrow streets and a variety of architectural styles, reflecting the influences of the various empires. making it feel like a journey through time. Most of the architecture consists of churches. monasteries with fine metalwork representing the Byzantine style

Georgian is the official language spoken, which is one of the oldest languages in the world. Strongly influenced by the Greek and Persian, Georgian evolved around 5th century. The interesting fact about the language is that it does not use gender or capital letters. It has 33 alphabets, with many dialects. Other Caucasian languages are also spoken in minority.

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What are the unique hiking trails in the world?

Today, let us learn about six unique trails in the world, some of which might involve treading grand old staircases or trundling down the steps in the wilderness.

BRAMANTE STAIRCASE, VATICAN CITY

Think about the structure of the DNA. Now imagine a staircase like that. That’s how the Bramante Staircase in Vatican Museums in Vatican City, looks like. It was an architectural wonder during that time and continues to remain so even now with its unique double helix shape. The spiralling staircase was designed by the famous architect of Tuscany Donato Bramante. The staircase was designed to link the Belvedere Palace to the streets of Rome. In fact, there are two staircases with the same name in the Vatican Museums. The one under our purview is the original Bramante Staircase which was built in 1505. The modem one based on the original was built in 1932.

MACHU PICCHU, PERU

Thousands of steps will take you through a trail of an ancient civilisation. The Machu Picchu mountain trail leads you to the ruins of the Incan civilisation. The 43km Inca trail replete with archeological sites is unique. It leads to a stone citadel comprising living quarters of Inca royalty, ritualistic and sacrificial areas, and an elaborate irrigation system. It is believed that the citadel was built for Inca ruler Pachacuti who ruled from 1438 until his death.

THE VESSEL NEW YORK CITY, U.S.

Located in Manhattan’s Midtown West, the Vessel is often called “New York’s Staircase”. A 46-metre high, steel and glass building that offers a bird’s eye view of the city, this spiral staircase sits as a centrepiece of the Hudson Yards (an urban development project) and is a 16-floor circular stairway structure with around 2500 steps. There is a labyrinth of 154 intricately interconnecting flights of stairs and the structure looks more like an art installation.

NONGRIAT DOUBLE-DECKER ROOT BRIDGE, MEGHALAYA, INDIA

In the forests of Meghalaya, there is an ancient, living bridge. It is the double-decker root bridge of Nongriat village in Meghalaya. The root bridges are made by weaving together the secondary roots of the rubber fig tree by Khasi villagers. And to visit this bridge, one will have to embark on a climb down from the village of Tyrna. It will take you some 3000 steps to reach here.

TIGER & TURTLE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, GERMANY

Some of you must have been on a roller coaster ride. What if we told you there was a structure that looked like a roller coaster and you could walk on it? The Tiger & Turtle Magic Mountain is a tangled structure designed by German artists Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth. One can walk through these many loops and get rewarded with magnificent views of the countryside of Duisburg, Germany.

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Ecuador: Complex legacy of indigenous, colonial pasts

Named after Equator, the country was colonised by the Inca and Spanish empires before achieving independence in 1833. It has also been a part of several key scientific expeditions.

Ranu Joardar

Ecuador is located in northwestern South America. It is one of the most environmentally diverse countries and has even contributed to the environmental sciences such as establishing basic theories of modem geography and evolutionary biology.

Geography

Ecuador is named after Equator, which is the imaginary line around the Earth. While the Equator divides the country in two, most parts of it lie in the Southern Hemisphere. The country is bordered by Colombia and Peru. Andes Mountains are the backbone of the country; the Oriente in the east of the Andes is rich in oil Cotopaxi in the Andes is the highest active volcano in the world.

The Galapagos Islands, which lie 900 km west of Ecuador, are home to unique reptiles, birds, and plants. In the Costa or coastal plain region, most of the bananas in the world are grown.

Though Mount Everest's peak is the highest altitude above sea level, Ecuadors Mount Chimborazo is the highest point above Earth's centre. It is located at a degree south of the Equator where Earth's bulge is greatest. Despite having a height of only about 20.702 feet, it is the closest point on Earth to the stars.

History

Ecuador is a mixture of indigenous and colonial pasts. Most parts of the country were part of the Inca empire, the largest political unit of pre-Columbian America, Peru-centred Inca Empire in the 15th Century. A century later, it became a Spanish colony and remained under its rule for 300 years. The country gained independence from Spain in 1822.

However, the country's history dates back to long before even the Inca conquest. Pottery figurines and containers dating from 3000 to 2500 BC have been discovered, which makes them one of the earliest ceramics in the New World. By the 1400s,

Ecuador was divided among warring chiefdoms. Though the country had sophisticated raised-field cultivation systems and trade networks, it lacked cities and States until after the Inca conquest.

Flora and fauna

The wet lowlands of the Oriente and the northern and southeastern parts of the Costa are covered with tropical rainforests. Balsa trees, found in the Guayas River valley, are heavily exploited for their light wood. Meanwhile, the cinchona trees in the eastern forest have been a valuable source of quinine (medications to treat malaria) before its synthetic equivalents.

The rainforest is home to a wide variety of monkeys and carnivorous mammals such as jaguars, ocelots, foxes, weasels, otters, skunks, raccoons, coatis, and kinkajous. Besides, tapir, deer, and peccary are also found in the region. The region is home to about 1,500 species of birds such as condors, hummingbirds, blue-footed boobies, and parrots.

People and culture

The ethnic population includes several indigenous language-speaking people and highland and lowland Spanish-speaking mestizos (people of mixed indigenous and European descent). Most people describe themselves as mestizo.

The population also includes descendants of Africans and more-recent immigrants from countries such as Lebanon, China, Korea, Japan, Italy, and Germany.

Though Spanish is the official language, there are dialectal differences between Sierra and Costa Spanish. Sierra Spanish is influenced by Quichua. Quichua and Shuar (both of which are official intercultural languages) as well as other ancestral languages are spoken by the indigenous people.

Interestingly, people here identify more with their region or village than with the country. It can be said that the country may be divided into a dozen major folk-cultural regions such as norteno mestizo, northern Quechua, Esmeraldeno blacks, Shuar (Jivaro), and Amazonian Quechua.

Their holidays are associated with particular foods or drinks, and music. During Easter, the popular food, especially in the mountain highlands, is fanesca, which is a traditional Ecuadorian soup made with grains, vegetables, and hard-boiled eggs. Chilli sauce is part of most meals. In the coastal regions, the popular food is seviche, which is made with shrimp or shellfish or even mushrooms pickled with lemon juice, cilantro, and onions.

The country is a favourite tourist destination for its jazz, poetry readings, folk music, and arena rock concerts.

There are numerous architectural masterpieces in Ecuador such as the large tolas (pre-Inca ramp mounds) of the northern highlands, those protected at the Cochasqui archaeological park: the Inca stone walls of Ingapirca near Canar; the great colonial churches of Quito (especially San Francisco and La Compania) with their paintings and gilt wood carving. The old urban centre of Quito was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978, as was that of Cuenca in 1999.

Football is Ecuador's national sport. Their other fovourite sports include basketball and volleyball.

Scientific marvels

The first scientific expedition to measure the Earth's circumference, led by Charles-Marie de La Condamine of France, was in Ecuador. Renowned naturalists Alexander von Humboldt of Prussia and Charles Darwin of England conducted research in Ecuador to establish basic theories of modern geography, ecology, and evolutionary biology.

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What is the secret behind Roman concrete?

Researchers have solved a long-standing riddle to explain why Roman concrete is so durable.

There’s no denying that the ancient Romans were masters of engineering. They constructed vast networks of roads, ducts, ports, and buildings, whose remains have survived for two millennia. Rome’s famous Pantheon, which has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, has stood the test of time for nearly 2,000 years and remains intact.

All this is in stark contrast to modern concrete structures that have crumbled after just a few decades. While researchers have spent decades trying to figure out the secrets behind this ultra-durable ancient construction material, a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and labs in Italy and Switzerland has made some progress. Their findings were published in the journal Science Advances in January 2023.

Role of lime clasts

Close examination of these ancient samples revealed that they contain small, distinctive, bright white mineral features, recognised as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. Referred to as “lime clasts”, these white chunks originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix.

While these lime clasts have previously been disregarded as evidence of sloppy mixing practices or even poor-quality raw materials, this study suggests that it was these lime clasts that gave the concrete self-healing capabilities that were unrecognised so far.

Quicklime’s effect

Researchers wondered if the Romans directly used lime in its more reactive form, quicklime, rather than slaked lime (calcium oxide mixed with water). Studying the samples showed certain inclusions and clues that these would have formed at extreme temperatures. This bode well for their hypothesis as extreme temperatures are expected from exothermic reactions produced by using quicklime, as opposed to, or in addition to, the slaked lime in the mixture. The team concluded that hot-mixing played a pivotal role in the super-durable nature of the concrete.

To prove that this is the case, the team then created samples of hot-mixed concrete that incorporated both modern and ancient formulations. These were then deliberately cracked and water was made to run through the cracks.

The self-healing nature of concrete thus created meant that the cracks completely healed within two weeks due to the reaction with water and water could no longer flow. In the case of an identical slab of concrete made without quicklime, it never healed and the water kept flowing.

The success of these tests have prompted the team to try and commercialise their modified cement material. The extended lifespan of these concrete forms can help reduce the environmental impact of cement production, which currently accounts for nearly 8% of global greenhouse emissions.

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Indonesia: the nation of 17,500 islands

The world’s largest island complex, which has been inhabited for about 1.7 million years, is now home to more than 300 different ethnic groups

Ranu Joardar

Indonesia is an archipelago comprising the Greater Sunda Islands of Sumatra (Sumatera), Java (Jawa), the southern extent of Borneo (Kalimantan), and Celebes (Sulawesi); the Lesser Sunda Islands (Nusa Tenggara) of Bali and a chain of islands that runs eastward through Timor, the Moluccas (Maluku) between Celebes and the island of New Guinea; and the western extent of New Guinea (generally known as Papua).

Indonesia is the largest and most populous country in Southeast Asia. The country is one of the founding members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which aims to accelerate economic growth, social progress, and cultural development and promote peace and security in Southeast Asia.

History

Formerly known as the Dutch East Indies or the Netherlands East Indies, the name ‘Indonesia’ was used as early as 1884 by a German geographer. It is believed that the name has derived from the Greek word ‘indos’, meaning ‘India’, and ‘nesos’, meaning ‘island’.

While records of foreign trade begin only in the early centuries, it is widely believed that people from the Indonesian archipelago were sailing to other parts of Asia much earlier. According to Roman historian Pliny the Elder’s encyclopaedic scientific work Natural History, the Indonesians used to trade with the east coast of Africa in the 1st Century AD.

The Indonesian written and oral sources suggest that the origins of kingdoms along the coasts of the Java Sea were related to the success of local heroes in using foreign trading treasure to their advantage.

Geography

Indonesia comprises about 17,500 islands, of which more than 7,000 are uninhabited. The Equator crosses Sumatra at its centre.

The remains of Homo erectus (originally known as Pithecanthropus or Java man) have revealed that the Java island was already inhabited about 1.7 million years ago, the time when most of the western archipelago was linked by land bridges. These bridges submerged about 6,000 years ago due to rapid postglacial rise in sea level.

Most of the Indonesian islands are densely forested volcanic mountains in the interior that slope down to coastal plains covered with thick alluvial swamps. These swamps dissolve into shallow seas and coral reefs. Underneath this surface is the junction of three major sections of the Earth’s crust.

Flora and fauna

The vegetation in Indonesia is similar to that of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea. It is home to about 40,000 species of flowering plants, including 5,000 species of orchids and Rafflesiaceae (the world’s largest flower).

There are over 3,000 tree species such as durian, sandalwood, and costly timber varieties such as teak and ironwood.

Here, mangrove forests can be seen in salty or brackish water along muddy shores. Most mangrove swamps are along the shallow seas in eastern Sumatra, southern Kalimantan, and the southeastern segment of western New Guinea.

Some of the islands of the archipelago are home to endemic species such as the Javanese peacock, Sumatran drongo, proboscis monkey in Kalimantan, and babirusa and tamarau in Celebes.

Most of the Javanese rhinoceroses can only be found on the western tip of Java. This species is one of the world’s most highly protected forms of wildlife. Another such endangered species is the orangutan. They are native to Borneo and Sumatra. To save the population from capture and slaughter, several orangutan rehabilitation centres and programmes have been established. These organisations also train orangutans who have been held captive to return to the wild.

People

Indonesia has been the middle point of two population groups – Asians in the west and Melanesians (indigenous peoples of Pacific Islands known as Melanesia) in the east.

Though the majority of the population is related to those from eastern Asia, there has been an influx of and mixing with Arabs, Indians, and Europeans in past centuries.

The eastern islands are dominated by people of Melanesian origin.

The country has more than 300 different ethnic groups, resulting in twice as many distinct languages and most of the major world religions.

Meanwhile, Bali, whose local religious practices are influenced by both Hinduism and Buddhism, has customs that are different from that of other parts of Indonesia.

About half of the country’s population lives in rural areas. Java, Madura, and Bali have a systemised rural structure that is based most on wet-rice cultivation (cultivating rice by planting on dry land then transferring the seedlings to a flooded field, and draining the field before harvesting).

Indonesia’s five largest cities are Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Bekasi, and Medan. They are considered metropolitan areas as they have the most number of government, financial, and business offices.

Government

After the Japanese invasion (1942-45) during World War II, statesman Sukarno declared Indonesia’s independence in 1945 (though the Netherlands retained a large portion of the region).

However, the struggle for independence continued till 1949 when the Dutch officially recognised Indonesian Sovereignty. Sukarno became the country’s first President in 1949.

Till 2002, both the President and the Prime Minister were elected for a period of five years by the People’s Consultative Assembly. Since 2004, both leaders are being directly elected.

On August 8, 1967, five leaders – the Foreign Ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand- established the ASEAN.

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