Search

China's Digital Silk Road provides Beijing with a potent instrument to disrupt undersea cables and gain an advantage in the Indo-Pacific. Submarine fiber-optic cables are critical infrastructure yet vulnerable to sabotage. This paper examines how the planned Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable from China could become a new flashpoint in the Western Indian Ocean. The cable has strategic implications, allowing China to project power and leverage its technological edge. Its landing sites in Pakistan and Djibouti would anchor Chinese naval assets in key chokepoints. The civil-military fusion strategy also facilitates surveillance and espionage via the cables. To counter such threats, India and allies must secure submarine cables through monitoring, contingency planning, and multilateral cooperation. Investing in alternative "democratic digital networks" can also mitigate China's ambitions. Ultimately, submarine cables are emerging as a domain of geopolitical competition requiring policies that safeguard their resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World Health Organization recognized COVID‐19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. A total of 213 countries and territories around the world have reported a total of 27,948,441 confirmed cases as on September 9, 2020. This article adopted two non‐linear growth models (Gompertz, Verhulst) and exponential model (SIR) to analyse the coronavirus pandemic across the world. All the models have been used for active COVID‐19 patients predictions based on the data collected from John Hopkins University repository in the time period of January 30, 2020 to June 4, 2020. Outbreak of COVID‐19 disease has been analysed for India, Pakistan, Myanmar (Burma), Brazil, Italy and Germany till June 4, 2020 and predictions have been made for the number of positive cases for the next 28 days. Verhulst model fitting effect is better than Gompertz and SIR model with R‐score 0.9973. The proposed model perform better as compare to other three existing models with R‐score 0.9981.These above models can be adapted to forecast in long term intervals, based on the predictions for a short interval as of June 5, 2020 and June 30, 2020, active COVID‐19 patients for India, Pakistan, Italy, Germany, Brazil and Myanmar predicted as (236,170, 88,998, 234,066, 184,922, 645,057 and 235) and (486,357, 218,864, 240,545, 193,727, 1,211,567 and 309). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cotton leaf curl disease (CLCuD) outbreaks caused by CLCuD associated begomoviruses (CABs) significantly constrain cotton production in India and Pakistan. In comparison to the CABs circulating in Pakistan, molecular epidemiology, evolution and recombination patterns of CABs circulating in India are less studied. In this work, we characterized CAB complex sequences obtained from the most recent outbreak (Punjab, India, 2015), and rigorously analyzed them with reference to GenBank sequences, submitted from India, Pakistan and other neighbouring countries, using contemporary bioinformatics approaches. In this manuscript, we illustrate the detection of a recombinant, phylogenetically distinct clade of Cotton leaf curl Multan virus (CLCuMuV), suggesting rebound of CLCuMuV in this region. Interestingly, we could not detect Cotton leaf curl Kokhran virus-Burewala strain (CLCuKoV-Bu), which was prevalent in this region, until now. Our study thus indicates substitution of the 'virulent resistance breaking' CLCuKoV-Bu by the re-emerging CLCuMuV recombinants. Our findings corroborate with that of a very recent study from Pakistan and we here discuss epidemiological links between the CAB complexes reported in these two studies. Taken together, these observations signify a shifting epidemiology of CABs, and seem to correlate with the recent prediction of the 'third epidemic' of CLCuD in the Indian subcontinent.