Monthly Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2018

Notes:
The 2018 BRICS Film Festival took place in Durban, South Africa, along with the International Durban Film Festival (DIFF) from 22-27th July. The last day of the festival was celebrated as India Country Day, followed by Awards and Closing Ceremony. The basic aim of film festival is to celebrate world-class film productions from the BRICS nations with the objective of inspiring more collaboration from these nations. The festival screened four Indian Films, ‘Newton’ and ‘Village Rockstars’ in the competition section, and Sandeep Pampally’s ‘Sinjar’ and Jayara’s ‘Bhanayakam’ in the non-competition section. “Newton”, directed by Amit Masurkar, bagged the best film award, while “Village Rockstars” (directed by Rima Das) won the Best Actress (Bhanita Das) and Special Jury Award in the BRICS Film Festival 2018.

Notes:
Umbayee (68), the noted ghazal singer and composer from Kerala, has passed away at Aluva on August 1, 2018. Born in Mattancherry, he was a disciple of Ustad Munawar Ali Khan and was known his reinvention of several old Malayalam film songs in his own natural style. His birth name was PA Ibrahim.

Notes:
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has launched a desktop software ‘e-Aksharayan’ for converting any scanned or printed Indian language documents into a fully editable text format in Unicode encoding. The text can be also saved separately. The application is free of cost and supports editing in 7 Indian languages viz. Hindi, Bangla, Malayalam, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Kannada & Assamese.

Notes:
The Andhra Pradesh Cabinet has recently approved an unemployment allowance scheme “Mukhyamantri Yuva Nestam” through which an allowance of Rs 1000 per month will be provided to unemployed youth in the state. Unemployed youths with a degree or diploma between the ages of 22 and 35 years are eligible to avail the benefit. The state government will set up a website for the scheme by the end of August, where a 15-day registration window will be open for potential beneficiaries of the scheme. The amount will be directly transferred into their bank account. The state government decided to implement this scheme to benefit as many as 12 lakh youths of the state. It has also been decided that 20,000 job vacancies, 9,000 teacher posts and other department vacancies will be filled.

Notes:
In Uttar Pradesh, the iconic Mughalsarai junction has been formally renamed after RSS ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyay (DDU), who was found dead in mysterious circumstances near the station in February 1968. The DDU station is more than 150 years old and one of the busiest railway stations in India. The station contains the largest railway marshaling yard in Asia. It was inaugurated by BJP national president Amit shah. Beside this, he also flagged off a passenger train with an all-women crew and a goods train at the DDU station. As per Railway officials, it will be the first time in India that an all-woman crew will run a train. Mughalsarai is also the birthplace of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. It is a part of the Chandauli Parliamentary seat which is presently held by UP BJP president Mahendra Nath Pandey.

Notes:
Ranjit Srivastava, the Ranchi-based software developer, has claimed to develop the world’s first Hindi speaking realistic humanoid robot and India’s first lip-synching robot. The robot “Rashmi” has developed in 2 years at a minimum cost of Rs 50,000. In simple words, Srivastava developed an Indian version of a social humanoid robot ‘Sophia’ that was developed by a Hong Kong based company. The robot can speak Hindi, Bhojpuri and Marathi along with English. It uses Linguistic Interpretation (LI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), visual data and facial recognition systems. It functions under a specially designed software and linguistic interpretation system. The LI programme analyses the feeling of the conversation while AI program analyses the conversation to extract the response from the device.

Notes:
The two week-long joint military exercise “Maitree 2018′ has started between Indian Army and Royal Thai Army in Thailand on August 6 with a focus on enhancing anti-terror cooperation between the two sides. The exercise will emphasize to hone the tactical and technical skills in joint counter insurgency and counter terrorist operations in rural and urban scenario under UN mandate. Both sides will jointly train, plan and execute a series of well developed tactical drills for neutralization of likely threats that may be encountered in urban warfare scenario. Experts from both sides will also hold detailed discussions to share their experience on varied topics for mutual benefit. Exercise Maitree will contribute immensely in developing mutual understanding and bonhomie between the two armies in order to counter terrorism.

Notes:
Argentina defeated Russia in the final match. India had won one of the matches in tournament.

Notes:
UNESCO has included the Khangchendzonga Biosphere Reserve (KBR) in the list of World Network of Biosphere Reserve (WNBR) at the 30th Session of the Man and Biosphere International Coordinating Council (ICC) in Palembang, Indonesia. With this, KBR has now become the India’s 11th internationally designated WNBR and joined the list of other biospheres such as Nandadevi, Simlipal, Sunderbans, Nokrek , Pachmarhi and Nilgiri. The reserve, which is located in Sikkim, includes a range of ecoclines varying from subtropical to arctic, as well as vast natural forests in different biomes that support an immensely rich diversity of forest types and habitats resulting in high species diversity and endemism. The core zone of the biosphere alone has over 150 glaciers and 73 glacial lakes, the prominent one being the famous 26-km-long Zemu glacier. It is home to a number of globally threatened fauna including musk deer, snow leopard, red panda and Himalayan Tahr and many ethnic communities including Lepcha, Nepalese, and Bhutia.

Notes:
The 11th edition of the India Art Fair 2019 will be held from January 31 to February 3 in New Delhi. It is best known for its strong representation of leading Indian galleries alongside selected exhibitors from across the world. The art fair will attracts visitors with an interest in the art world, such as curators, artists, collectors, journalists, gallerists and critics and art lovers.The director of the 4-day annual art fair will be Jagdip Jagpal.