Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2019

Notes:
S S Deswal, a 1984 batch IPS officer of Haryana cadre, has been given the additional charge of the counter-terror force National Security Guard (NSG). He succeeded Sudeep Lakhtaki and will hold the post in an additional capacity till a successor or regular DG is appointed. Deswal, the chief of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) force, is Lakhtakia’s batchmate but his cadre is Haryana. The NSG is a counter terrorism unit under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). It is also known as the ‘black cats’ & was raised in 1984 for combating terrorist activities with a view to protect states against internal disturbances. The NSG DG post is occupied by an IPS officer.

Notes:
NDTV India’s senior executive editor, Ravish Kumar has been honoured with the prestigious 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award for his ‘ethical journalism’. Kumar has won the honour for his news show, Prime Time, which deals with real-life & under-reported problems of ordinary people. He is among five individuals who were declared winners of the award. The four other winners of the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award are Ko Swe Win from Myanmar, Angkhana Neelapaijit from Thailand, Raymundo Pujante Cayabyab from Philippines and Kim Jong-Ki from South Korea. The Ramon Magsaysay Award is the highest honour given to Asian individuals and organisations and often referred to as the Asian version of the Nobel Prize.

Notes:
A 23-year-old Indian-origin doctor, Bhasha Mukherjee has been crowned Miss England after fending off competition from dozens of other models. She holds two different medical degrees & has an IQ of 146, which makes her officially a ‘genius’. Mukherjee speaks five languages – English, Bengali, Hindi, German and French -and has a Bachelor’s degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Nottingham. As winner of Miss England, she will be entered into the Miss World contest and will also bag a holiday to Mauritius.

Notes:
A research team at IIT Kharagpur has developed a technology which can generate energy from solid waste with high moisture content. The new technology – Hydro Thermal Carbonization (HTC) – can convert municipal solid waste to biofuel, soil amendment and absorbents. The technology converts organic fraction of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) into Hydrochar by using a batch reactor. The moisture in the waste is used to the advantage of the process which uses water for the reaction. The process has increased the resource recovery yield to 50-65% of urban organic waste. The key to the success of the technology lies in designing a proper industrial-scale HTC reactor with improved heat integration system.

Notes:
ISRO Chief, K Sivan has recently laid the foundation stone for Space Situational Awareness Control Centre (SSACC) at Peenya, Bengaluru. The aim of the control center is to monitor and protect high value space assets from space debris has been laid. The control centre will boost activities forecast for Space Situational Awareness and Management (SSAM), which has now considered a globally essential area because of the ever-growing man created space detritus figure and the multiple collision threat with functional satellites and space vehicles. This step will secure India’s expensive and strategically important satellites and future spacecraft from space detritus such as dead satellite remains, parts of orbiting bodies, near-earth asteroids and extreme weather situations. It would assimilate the tracking data of dead satellites from indigenous observation facilities produce important data from bare observations by inspection. It will also permit research activities to find solutions for space debris, space debris modelling and reduction.

Notes:
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has launched India’s first large-scale trial for two new TB vaccines – VPM1002 and Immuvac. The initiative would enroll 12,000 healthy household contacts of a patient whose sputum has tested positive for TB and are therefore at high risk of contracting the disease. VPM1002 is produced by the Serum Institute of India (Pune) & Immuvac is manufactured by Cadila Pharmaceuticals. These anti-Tuberculosis vaccines aim to prevent infection (pre-exposure) or prevent primary progression or reactivation of latent TB infection (post-exposure). According to the Global TB Report 2017 issued by the World Health Organization (WHO), India has the highest number of TB cases in the world.

Notes:
Maharashtra has become the India’s first state to adopt a digital fingerprint and iris scanning system – Automated Multi-modal Biometric Identification System (AMBIS) – to aid police investigations. This system will soon be replicated by other state police forces across the country. An AMBIS unit consists of a computer terminal, a camera, and iris, fingerprint, and palm scanners. It also includes a portable system to dust off and capture fingerprints from crime scenes. With the integration of the system with facial recognition from CCTV cameras, AMBIS enables the police to cross-reference and put faces to criminals whose fingerprints have been captured on paper over the decades, apart from solving fresh crimes. This new system has replaced the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which has been used by Indian law enforcement agencies to search finger and palm prints.

Notes:
The Union Government has approved Rs 4,900 crore Kosi-Mechi Interlinking project for interlinking of Kosi and Mechi rivers of Bihar. This is the second major river interlinking project in the country to be approved after the Ken-Betwa project in Madhya Pradesh. The ambitious Kosi-Mechi project is unique in many ways. It will not only prevent recurring floods in north Bihar but also provide irrigation for a whooping over 2.14 lakh hectares of cultivable land in Araria, Purnea, Kishanganj and Katihar districts, collectively called Seemanchal region. This approval comes after this project secured the last remaining mandatory technical-cum-administrative nod from Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC). Mechi is an important tributary of Mahananda river.

Notes:
India’s transsexual woman Naaz Joshi has been crowned Miss World Diversity 2019 at Port Louis in Mauritius on August 3. She has made the country proud with a third successive victory in the beauty pageant Miss World Diversity. Apart from the Miss World Diversity title, Naaz also bagged the Best Project, Miss Congeniality, Miss People’s Choice Ambassador and Best National Costume titles. She was the first transgender in the world to win a coveted international crown against natural born females in 2017.

Notes:
The United States has designated China a “currency manipulator”, following the devaluation of the Yuan. The move could escalate the tense trade relations between the two nations. The US action came after China allowed its yuan to weaken past the key seven-per-dollar level for the first time in more than a decade. This decision will engage with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to eliminate the unfair competitive advantage created by China’s latest actions. The decision to label China as a currency manipulator for the first time since 1994 comes just 4 months after the U.S. Treasury passed on an opportunity to make such a formal designation as part of its semiannual currency report. The Treasury uses three criteria to apply the designation: actively intervening in their currency markets, having large trade surpluses with the U.S., and having large overall current-account surpluses.