Current Affairs Update - 8 Oct, 2014

• ·         Export-Import Bank of India has, at the behest of the Government of India, extended two additional Lines of Credit [LOCs] to Banco Exterior De Cuba, Cuba aggregating $7.76 million.
• ·         While one LOC (for $2.71 million) is for financing the setting up of a bulk blending fertilizer plant, the other (for $5.05 million) is for financing the modernisation of an injectable products plant.
• ·         With the signing of the above two LOC Agreements, Exim Bank, till date, has extended three Lines of Credit to Cuba, at the behest of the Government of India, taking the total value of LOCs extended to $12.76 million.
• ·         Under the LOC, Exim Bank will reimburse 100 per cent of contract value to the Indian exporters, upfront upon shipment of goods. The LOC will be used for sourcing of goods and services from India.
• ·         The main items that India exports to Cuba are pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, vehicles other than railway or tramway, organic chemicals, rubber manufactured products, and plastic products. The main items that India imports from Cuba are vegetables, fruits, nuts and their preparations, pharmaceutical products, leather, raw hides and skin.

• ·         The Reserve Bank of India is working towards allowing settlement of government bonds in the international systems like the Euroclear, Deputy Governor H. R. Khan said here on Wednesday.
• ·         “We have the proposal of Euroclear and Clearsteam settlement. There is a budget announcement also on international settlement. So, we are working on it to see how we can balance between the loss of liquidity in the local market as well as providing ease of trading for overseas investors,” he told reporters on the sidelines of an event here.
• ·         However, he did not offer a timeline for this.
• ·         He said to start with only settlement of government bonds would be allowed on the international system.
• ·         When asked about whether the RBI is looking for further liberalising the external commercial borrowing (ECB) window, Mr. Khan said the bank had been cautious and it could not fully liberalise the route.

• ·         India was home to about a third of the world's poor in 2011, according to a progress report on various social indicators from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)  issued Wednesday.
• ·         China, whose population is more than India's 1.25 billion, had a mere 8% of the world's poor, the Global Monitoring Report 2014-15 says.
• ·         The report said 60% of the world's poor resided in only five countries in 2011 -- India, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh and Congo. Nigeria, which had 10% of the world's poor, is wedged between India and China in the rankings while Bangladesh had 6% six and Congo had 5%.
• ·         If another five countries - -Ethiopia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Madagascar and Tanzania -- are taken into account, a little over 70% of the world's poor resided in these 10 nations.
• ·         The study for 2011, however, also notes that China and India have lifted 232 million people out of poverty between 2008 and 2011.

• ·         Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday saluted the Air Force personnel on Air Force Day saying they are the nation’s pride and their bravery and commitment continues to inspire.
• ·         “On Air Force Day, I salute our air force personnel. They are our pride and their bravery, commitment and dedication continues to inspire,” the Prime Minister said.
• ·         Today is the 82nd Air Force Day. The Indian Air Force was officially established on October 8, 1932 when it was created as an auxiliary air force of the Indian Empire.
• ·         Cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar was the chief guest of this event.

• ·         The deep depression over north Andaman Sea has intensified into a cyclonic storm ‘Hudhud’ which is mostly likely to intensify into a very severe cyclonic storm.
• ·         “The cyclonic storm ‘Hudhud’ lay centered about 1150 km southeast of Gopalpur. It was crossing Andaman and Nicobar Islands close to Long Island. Thereafter, the system would continue to move west-northwestwards, intensify further into a severe cyclonic storm during the next 24 hours, subsequently into a very severe cyclonic storm,” said S. C. Sahu, Director of Bhubaneswar Meteorological Centre here on Wednesday.
• ·         The cyclonic storm would cross north Andhra Pradesh and adjoining Odisha coast between Visakhapatnam and Gopalpur by October 12.
• ·         “When it would hit the coast, the wind speed of cyclonic storm could be between 120 km per hour and 140 km per hour. As the system will come closer, we will be in a position to pin-point the exact location where landfall would occur,” said Dr. Sahu.
• ·         Last year, on October 12, a very severe cyclonic storm ‘Phailin’ had hit Odisha coast at Gopalpur causing extensive damage.

• ·         The Union Government on 7 October 2014 launched a website attendance.gov.in to monitor the attendance of government employees in real time.
• ·         The move is aimed at increasing transparency and accountability. The government launched the attendance system as part of its Digital India programme.
• ·         The website attendance.gov.in uses an Aadhaar-enabled biometric attendance system to track employees from the cabinet secretariat to Border Road Organization. It provides a graphical representation of attendance in real time.
• ·         The information which can be found on the website are attendance, over time, the number of registered employees and number of employees present.
• ·         A back-end administrator will check the details submitted by the organisation and make the organisation active by assigning it a unique sub-domain which will be the first name of the website.

• ·         Anoop Jain on 8 October 2014 won 2014 Waislitz Global Citizen Award. He was awarded for his exemplified values of a Global Citizen through his work in founding Humanure Power (HP) in Bihar in 2011 that builds community sanitation facilities in rural India.
• ·         The award carried a cash prize of 100000 US dollar in recognition to the work. Anoop Jain was chosen the winner after getting the maximum votes by people from across the world.
• ·         Jain was among the four finalists for the award. Among the other finalists was another young Indian Swapnil Chaturvedi who founded Samagra Sanitation which is focussed on providing awesome sanitation services to the urban poor in India.

• ·         A 5,000-year-old stepwell has been found in one of the largest Harappan cities, Dholavira, in Kutch, which is three times bigger than the Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro.
• ·         Located in the eastern reservoir of Dholavira by experts from the Archaeological Survey of India working with IIT-Gandhinagar, the site represents the largest, grandest, and the best furnished ancient reservoir discovered so far in the country.
• ·         It's rectangular and 73.4m long, 29.3m wide, and 10m deep. Another site, the ornate Rani ki Vav in Patan, called the queen of stepwells, is already on UNESCO list.
• ·         "This is almost three times bigger than the Great Bath of Mohenjo-Daro that's 12m in length, 7m in width, and 2.4m in depth," said V N Prabhakar, visiting faculty at IIT and superintending archaeologist, ASI.

• ·         Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing new methods that let microscopes see finer details than they could before.
• ·         The three scientists were cited for “the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said had bypassed the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopes.
• ·         Betzig (54) works at the Howard Hughes Medfical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia. Hell (51) is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. Moerner (61) is a professor at Stanford University in California.
• ·         This year’s Nobel announcements started on Monday with U.S.-British scientist John O’Keefe splitting the medicine award with Norwegian couple May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for breakthroughs in brain cell research that could pave the way for a better understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s.
• ·         On Tuesday, Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Japanese-born U.S. scientist Shuji Nakamura won physics award for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes a breakthrough that spurred the development of LED technology that can be used to light up homes and offices and the screens of mobile phones, computers and TVs.

• ·         Twitter has sued the US government for restricting the micro-blogging site from sharing online government surveillance reports with its users.
• ·         In its 19-page complaint filed in US District Court in California, Twitter stated that the company wants to report data in a way that reflects the “limited scope” of US government surveillance of Twitter accounts.
• ·         The government’s position, the complaint said, “forces Twitter either to engage in speech that has been pre-approved by government officials or else to refrain from speaking altogether”.
• ·         In a post online, Twitter vice president Ben Lee said: “It is our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of US government officials by providing information about the scope of US government surveillance-including what types of legal process have not been received”.
• ·         The San Francisco-based firm had prepared a transparency report and submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) April 1 this year, seeking pre-publication review.
• ·         Twitter wanted to tell users how many National Security Letters and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act orders it received from July 1 to Dec 31, 2013, Forbes reported.

• ·         The first space weather forecast centre opened on Wednesday in Exeter, southwestern England.
• ·         With a funding of 4.6 million pounds ($7.4 million) from the British government, the Met Office Space Weather Centre in Devon also houses the Met Office’s headquarters, Xinhua reported.
• ·         It will provide space weather forecasts and develop an early warning system aimed at protecting critical infrastructure from the impacts of space weather.
• ·         Space weather has been identified as one of the most important risks listed on Britain’s national risk register. It could cause power grid outages, global positioning system disruption, high frequency radio communications outages, satellite damage and increase radiation threat at high altitude.

• ·         The Georgetown University has appointed its first Hindu priest —a woman — to serve the religious needs of its Hindu students, whose number has increased in recent years.
• ·         Pratima Dharm, who recently retired as the first Hindu chaplain in the U.S. Army, has been appointed as the first Hindu chaplain at the Georgetown University, a move welcomed by the Hindu students of this top private research university.
• ·         Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Jesuit and Catholic university in the U.S.
• ·         Ms. Dharm began her new assignment at Georgetown on October 1, 2014, the university said in a media statement.
• ·         Previously she served on Army bases and hospitals around the world, including a yearlong deployment in Iraq.
• ·         A native of Mumbai, she came to the United States in March 2001, only months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
• ·         Georgetown was the first Catholic university to hire a rabbi to serve as a chaplain in 1968. Three decades later, it became the first American university to hire a Muslim cleric to serve as a full-time chaplain.

• ·         China on 8 October 2014 announced that it will launch a new constellation of marine surveillance satellites by 2019.
• ·         The satellites will monitor ships, oil rigs and marine disasters. It aimed to amidst a string of raging maritime disputes with its neighbours.
• ·         The HY-3 constellation will include a series of satellites that employ synthetic aperture radar technology. The technology will be capable of operating day or night and in all weather conditions.
• ·         The satellites will be able to see and monitor meter-long objects from space and generate high-definition imagery of both land and ocean surfaces.

• ·         Promising India medium pacer Bhuvneshwar Kumar has emerged as one of the five players nominated for the LG People’s Choice Award ahead of the ICC annual awards.
• ·         The 24-year-old bowler from Meerut has had a good run in international cricket in recent times.
• ·         This year’s fifth LG People’s Choice Award sees five players from five different countries nominated to win the only award voted for by the public.
• ·         The quintet of players nominated for the award are England women’s captain Charlotte Edwards, Australia fast bowler Mitchell Johnson, Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews, South Africa fast bowler Dale Steyn and of course Bhuvneshwar.
• ·         ICC Chief Executive David Richardson and ICC Cricket Committee Chairman Anil Kumble will attend the press conference.
• ·         The short-list was nominated by an elite panel of cricket experts, which is headed by Kumble. Other members of the panel are Jonathan Agnew, a former England international, ex-Sri Lanka opener Russel Arnold, former New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming and Betty Timmer, former Chair of the ICC Women’s Committee.

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