VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

VOInews, Jakarta: Six months after a deadly war engulfed Gaza, the Palestinian Olympic Committee is fighting against formidable odds to ensure its athletes take part in this summer's Paris Olympics. Palestinian Authority official Nader Jayousi was quoted by FRANCE 24 as saying that his country's delegation will bring a "message of peace" to the world and inspire Palestinian children "whose dreams have been crushed by bombs".

Palestinian athletes have taken part in every Summer Olympics since they were first admitted to the Atlanta Games in 1996. Each participation has had special significance for residents of the Palestinian Territories and the Palestinian diaspora, giving stateless people a place to compete on the world stage.

Participation in Paris will be all the more important in the context of a war that has devastated much of the Gaza Strip and killed at least 33,000 people, according to health officials in the Hamas-ruled enclave, including some of the athletes taking part in the events this summer.

"Among athletes, coaches and club staff, the Palestinian sports world has lost at least 170 people," said Jayousi, speaking from the Palestinian Olympic Committee headquarters near Jerusalem. The victims include Olympic football team coach Hani Al-Masdar and volleyball star Ibrahim Qusaya, both killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza.

"The tragedy is also compounded by the damage to infrastructure: the Yarmouk stadium, the Olympic Committee offices in Gaza, and several other stadiums," he added. "If the war ended today, at least 70% of Gaza's population would be homeless, let alone playing sports."

Jayousi says the war has forced the Palestinian committee to scale back its ambitions, and abruptly ended a pioneering programme aimed at increasing the number of athletes qualifying for the Olympics. Despite the major setback, Palestinian hopes received a major boost last month when Omar Ismail secured the first ticket to the Olympics for men's taekwondo - a feat that other athletes are expected to match in the coming weeks.

The Palestinian delegation fielded a record five athletes at the last Olympics in Tokyo. Jayousi said his goal is to "reach that number". He remains confident that the wild card (an opportunity or permission given to a non-regular athlete so that he can perform at a particular event, ed.) will help his country present its largest delegation in Olympic history. (Daniel).

Source: France24. Com

VOInews, Jakarta: The European space telescope Gaia, dedicated to mapping the Milky Way, has detected a black hole with 33 times the mass of the Sun, in an unprecedented discovery in the Milky Way galaxy, according to a study published on Tuesday (16/4/2024).

The object, named Gaia PH3, located two thousand light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpio, belongs to a family of stellar black holes that result from the collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives. It is much smaller than the supermassive black holes found at the centre of galaxies, whose formation scenarios are not yet known. Pasquale Panozzo, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research at the Paris-BSL Observatory and lead author of the study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, told AFP that the discovery of Gaia PH3 was a fluke.

Scientists from the Gaia Consortium, a group of scientific and technological organisations, were scanning the latest data provided by the probe, with the aim of publishing an updated catalogue in 2025, when they discovered a particular binary star system. "We see a star slightly smaller than the Sun (about 75 per cent of its mass) and brighter, orbiting around an unseen object," Panozzo said, which can be detected by the disturbances it experiences.

Space telescopes provide very precise positions of the stars in the sky, allowing astronomers to characterise the orbit and measure the mass of the unseen companion object. It is 33 times more massive than the Sun.

Additional observations from ground-based telescopes have confirmed that the object is a black hole with a mass much larger than that of any stellar black hole in the Milky Way, between 10 and 20 times the mass of the Sun. Similar supermassive holes have been detected in distant galaxies through gravitational waves. "But there has never been such a discovery in our galaxy," Panozzo said. (Daniel)

Source: AFP

VOInews, Jakarta: For the second time in a decade, the world is experiencing a massive coral reef bleaching episode due to warming ocean temperatures, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned on Monday (15/4/2024). The phenomenon threatens the survival of coral reefs around the world, including the Great Barrier Reef near Australia.

"As the oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe," NOAA Coral Reef Observatory coordinator Derek Manzello said. The process is linked to rising water temperatures, which result in discolouration, and can lead to the death of organisms if exposed to extreme and prolonged heat stress.

But reversing this phenomenon is possible. Affected corals may survive if temperatures drop and other stressors, such as overfishing or pollution, are minimised. The current bleaching episode is the fourth recorded by NOAA since 1985. Previous episodes were observed in 1998, 2010 and 2016.

"The scale and severity of mass coral bleaching is clear evidence of the devastating effects of current climate change," said Pepe Clark of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), a non-governmental organisation.

NOAA estimates that the Earth has already lost between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of its coral reefs, and they could disappear altogether by the end of the century if no major changes are made. Ocean temperatures, which play a key role in regulating the global climate, reached a new absolute record high in March of 21.07 degrees Celsius measured at the surface, excluding near-polar regions, according to the European Copernicus Observatory. (Daniel). 

Source: AFP

VOInews, Jakarta: Indonesia continues to make diplomatic efforts to defuse geopolitical tensions in the Middle East that have occurred recently, said Indonesian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Retno Marsudi. It was especially amid the recent tension between Israel and Iran in a past few days.