Dear Express Explained reader, The United Nations Climate Summit, officially the 26th Conference of Parties or COP26, begins in Glasgow, Scotland today. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is attending, and he will on Tuesday launch an important new initiative to make critical Infrastructure for Resilient Island States (IRIS), which are the most vulnerable to natural disasters triggered by climate change. Science editor Amitabh Sinha is in Glasgow, and you will over the next couple of weeks read, in the print edition of our paper and online, his despatches, news reports, and explanatory articles on a range of climate-related subjects. For now, I would like to flag to you two articles that Amitabh wrote earlier this week: on the agenda for Glasgow, where the countries of the world will seek to finalise the rules for the 2015 Paris Agreement; and on the climate targets that have been set so far, and the extents to which they have been met or missed. The record on the latter has not been stellar, and even if all countries keep their promises on cutting emissions here onward, the world is projected to still be about 2.7 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial times by the year 2100. The Prime Minister, who attended the G20 Summit in Rome on Saturday, also had a landmark meeting with the Pope, and extended an invitation to the head of the Catholic Church to visit India. Liz Mathew wrote a very interesting recall of all the previous occasions on which Indian prime ministers have had meetings with the supreme pontiff. It's a lovely piece of history; do read. Krishn Kaushik wrote two informative explainers related to China this week — one on a new land boundary law that Beijing announced over the last weekend; another, with Sushant Kulkarni, on a new piece of missile technology that it has been reported to have tested recently. Should India see a signal in the aggressive Chinese assertion of the inviolability of its borders in the middle of the tense standoff in Ladakh? What is the hypersonic glide vehicle that China has tested, and how does it square with the Agni 5, India's foremost missile and ICBM candidate? Finally, I'd like to point you to an important legal question that has arisen in the context of the extraordinary drama around the arrest of Shah Rukh Khan's son in an alleged drug bust. Maharashtra minister Nawab Malik has alleged that the officer in charge of the case, Sameer Wankhede, may have lied to get his job, benefitting from a quota to which he was not entitled. Shyamlal Yadav and Zeeshan Shaikh wrote about the controversy and the rules that govern reservations for Scheduled Caste candidates belonging to various religions. Stay safe and stay aware. Keep reading The Indian Express Explained. Sincerely, Monojit (monojit.majumdar@expressindia.com) If you received this newsletter as a forward, you can subscribe to it here | Do read our Explained articles here | .png)
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