Category Major Feats of Organisation

While reading news about any war-stricken country, you must have read about International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) giving aid to the victims. However, do you know what ICRC is?

Origin

ICRC, established in 1863, is an independent and neutral organisation that helps people who are affected by conflict and armed violence and promote the laws protecting victims of war.

Its work is based on the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which are international treaties that protect people who do not take part in the fighting (civilians, medics, aid workers) and those who can no longer fight (wounded, sick, and shipwrecked troops. prisoners of war, etc.).

The ICRC was formed in response to the experiences of its founder. Jean-Henri Dunant, during Italy’s Battle of Solferino in 1859. He had witnessed wounded soldiers left to die over lack of adequate medical services.

In 1862, he published an account of the Solferino’s situation

By next year, his popularity led to the formation of International Committee for the Relief of the Wounded with the help of Geneva Society for Public Welfare.

This committee became the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1875.

The ICRC is now one of the components of a large network that includes national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Emblem

The governments attending the diplomatic conference, wherein the First Geneva Convention in 1864 was adopted, decided that a clear neutral sign was needed on the battlefield to protect medical staff and facilities.

A red cross on a white background, the exact reverse of the flag of neutral Switzerland, was opted. The emblem is recognisable at a distance because of its contrasting colours.

At present, there are three emblems that are used by the ICRC-red cross, red crescent, and red crystal. They provide protection for military medical services and relief workers in armed conflicts.

Recently, two ICRC workers were kidnapped in Mali (the country is battling insurgencies that broke out in the north of the country in 2012). Such deliberate attacks a person, equipment, or a building having a protective emblem is a war crime under international law.

The organisation

ICRC’s headquarters is in Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded mainly by voluntary donations from governments and from nation Red Cross and Red Crescent societies.

The work of the ICRC in both World Wars was recognised the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1917 and 1944. It shared another Nobel Peace Prize with the League of Red Cross Societie in 1963, the year of the 100th anniversary of the ICRC’S founding.

All the members are Swiss mainly because of the origin f the Red Cross.

The current president of is Mirjana Spoljaric, who previously served as the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General.

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Some of the world’s biggest oil producers are cutting back. A group of OPEC+ countries, led by Saudi Arabia, recently announced a surprise output cut of one million barrels a day. But do you know what OPEC and OPEC+ are? Or what the production cut implies? Let’s find out.

Oil giants

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is an intergovernmental organisation that produces oil. It was created at the Baghdad Conference in Iraq in September 1960, by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Its establishment took place against a background of great change in the world with extensive decolonisation and the rise of many independent nations.

Headquartered in Vienna, Austria, the OPEC cartel is responsible for fixing the price of oil on the world market and managing supply. This is to avoid fluctuations in oil price that might affect the economies of oil producing and purchasing countries.

OPEC & OPEC+

OPEC is made up of 13 of the world’s major oil-exporting countries-Algeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.

OPEC+ is, as the name suggests, OPEC plus other oil producing countries such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Oman, Russia, South Sudan, and Sudan. In other words, OPEC+ is a group of 23 oil-exporting countries which meets regularly to decide how much crude oil to sell on the world market. In 2016, when oil prices were low, OPEC joined these 10 oil producers to create OPEC+ to have greater control over the global crude oil market. These countries together produce about 40% of the world’s crude oil.

Implication of the cut

Recently, a group of OPEC+ countries announced a surprise output cut of one million barrels a day in a bid to boost oil prices and support market stability. Russia, also part of OPEC+, said it was extending a previously announced unilateral cut of 5,00,000 barrels a day until the end of 2023.

The cut which will come into force from May this year is in addition to the cut of two million barrels a day announced in October 2022 which resulted in a 5% rise in oil prices globally. Recent crises in the banking sector in the US and Switzerland have raised concerns about the possibility of a recession in the near future, which might lead to a decline in demand for oil.

As for the background, demand for oil dropped drastically during the COVID pandemic. Hence OPEC countries decided to cut down production to prevent a supply glut. Besides there was a price war going on between Russia and Saudi Arabia, leading to a slump in oil prices. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 pushed up oil prices raising concerns that the Western sanctions against Moscow could lead to an oil shortage. Following this, many countries stopped buying Russian oil in a bid to make its invasion unsustainable. The wealthy G-7 countries have also imposed a price cap on Russia’s oil exports to keep the country’s oil revenues low. Russia is now exporting more crude to India and China.

The idea behind cutting production seems to be to boost demand by lowering supplies. It is needless to say that this energy crisis is driving up global inflation.

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Cryonics has been making headlines with a number of big names evincing interest in signing up to be cryopreserved after their death. Sounds like something straight out of a science fiction? Well, let’s take a peek into the evolving world of cryonics or cryopreservation.

The term ‘cryonics’ is derived from Greek kryos meaning ‘cold’. Cryonics or cryopreservation is the practice of storing biological material at extremely low temperatures. It involves freezing at ultra-low temperatures (that is below -196 degrees C) in the hope that revival may be possible in the future. At present, cryonics is just a blend of science and speculation (as revival is not guaranteed).

When someone who has consented to be cryonically preserved dies, their body is cooled by a team of technicians. Then it is carried to a cryonics facility where organ preservation solutions are used. The concept of cryopreservation evolved in the 1960s. Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger, a physics professor, is widely regarded as the father of the cryonics movement. It was he who put forth the idea of cryopreservation in his book “The Prospect of Immortality” in 1962. The book captivated the imagination of people and made Ettinger hugely popular. Ettinger went on to found the Cryonics Institute, a non-profit organisation, in Detroit, Michigan, in 1976 and served as its president till 2003. In 2012, Ettinger died aged 92, and his body has been in cryonic suspension since.

Adherents believe that along with advancements in medical and technological fields cryopreservation can revive life, repair damage, and reverse disease and ageing. However, critics look at cryonics with scepticism and also raise ethical questions because the whole process is against nature.

Picture Credit : Google