Current Affairs Quiz - June, 2019

Notes:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the 14th G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan on 28th and 29th of June 2019. Former Union Minister Suresh Prabhu will be India’s sherpa at the summit. More than 20 countries will be participating in the G20 Summit. Informal meeting of the BRICS leaders and bilateral meetings with other leaders would also take place on the sidelines of the summit. The theme of the summit is “Human-centred future society”. India has participated in all the G20 Summits held so far. It will host the G20 summit in 2022 for the first time.

Notes:
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has constituted a working group, headed by NSE Clearing Ltd., to review the current framework of margins in the futures and options segment. The group will look into the issue and submit its recommendations to the Secondary Market Advisory Committee. This assumes significance as lower cost of trading was primarily the reason why institutional investors preferred to trade in Nifty contracts on SGX at Singapore rather than on the highly liquid derivatives segment of the National Stock Exchange (NSE). Incidentally, a recent study jointly conducted by Association of National Exchanges Members of India (ANMI) and consultancy firm Ernst & Young (EY) highlighted the fact that trading in derivatives in India costs much more when compared with most of the other leading markets due to a variety of margins that are imposed on the traders.

Notes:
Italy’s Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo have been chosen to host the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics during the 134th session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Skating sports and ice hockey will be held in Milan, while most alpine skiing events will take place in the resort of Cortina. Other snow sports will be held in other venues in the Italian Alps, including Bormio and Livigno. The 2026 Winter Olympics will take place from 6 to 22 February and the 2026 Winter Paralympics will be held from 6 to 15 March.

Notes:
Rachna Khaira of The Tribune has bagged the prestigious RedInk Award for ‘Journalist of the Year’ for her expose during 2018 on the functioning of the UIDAI and its Aadhaar data cache. The Mumbai Press Club, which has instituted the RedInk Awards for Excellence in Journalism, has bestowed the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award 2019 jointly to two retired senior journalists Dinu Ranadive (94), who retired as the chief reporter of Maharashtra Times, and photojournalist Sebastian D’Souza, who had served as photo editor of Mumbai Mirror. Ranadive started his career as the founder-editor of the “Samyukta Maharashtra Patrika”in the 1950s, which had a lasting impact in the movement for the unification of Maharashtra as a state based on language. He had also covered the Goa freedom struggle in 1961, the Bangladesh war in 1970-71 and broke stories on cement scandal of 1982. D’Souza had achieved acclaim for his photographs that captured the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror attack on Mumbai on November 26, 2008.

Notes:
Mohan Ranade (89), the veteran freedom fighter from Goa and Padmashri Mohan Ranade, has passed away in Pune on June 25, 2019. Born in 1929 at Sangli in Western Maharashtra, Ranade was inspired by freedom fighters like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his brother Ganesh Damodar Savarkar. He was a member of the Azad Gomantak Dal, a group of revolutionaries who believed in the doctrine of armed attacks against the Portuguese colonial rule. During Goa’s liberation movement, Ranade was active in attacking police stations at Betim, Banastarim and other outposts. He was arrested by Portuguese police in 1955 and was imprisoned at the Fort of Caxias near Lisbon in Portugal. He was kept in solitary confinement for six years. Ranade was released from prison in January 1969, after the liberation of Goa in 1961, having served 14 years. He received the Goa Puraskar in 1986 for social work. He authored books on the Goa liberation movement.

Notes:
Saudi Arabia has become the first Arab country to be granted full membership of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) following its Annual General Meeting at Orlando in Florida, USA. Since November 2004, Saudi Arabia has been a founding member of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) arm of the FATF group. Its full FATF membership comes after it was reported the Kingdom had made “tangible progress” for its efforts in implementing the FATF’s guidelines. FATF is responsible for issuing international standards, policies and best practices to combat money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation. The FATF Secretariat is housed at the OECD headquarters in Paris. As of June 2019, there are 39 Member countries of FATF and policies drafted by FATF are highly regarded and treated as law.

Notes:
Under the flagship Sagarmala Programme, the Union Ministry of Shipping has recently signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with IIT Kharagpur for setting up the Centre for Inland and Coastal Maritime Technology (CICMT) at IIT Kharagpur. The first-of-its-kind Centre will focus on ship design for coastal/inland waterways, shipbuilding technology and structural design, transport systems & logistics, cryogenic cargo handling, green/renewable energy harvesting from coastal and inland waters and automation and artificial intelligence (AI) for maritime operations. It will provide technological support, research, testing and experimentation facility to agencies involved in inland water transport, shipbuilding, ports. etc. Presently, only Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Belgium have model testing facilities for ships.

Notes:
Vijaya Nirmala (75), the veteran actress and filmmaker , has passed away in Hyderabad on June 27, 2019. Born on 20th February 1946, Nirmala made her acting debut in 1950 as a child artiste in the Tamil movie ‘Machcha Rekhai’. She holds a record in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the first woman to direct as many as 47 films in different languages. She was also feted with the Raghupathi Venkaiah Award in 2008 for her contributions to Telugu cinema. She featured in over 200 films in Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam.

Notes:
In Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, tourist’s promotional festival – Ladakh Singhey Khababs Sindhu Festival celebrated on the bank of Indus River at Leh. The festival presents the Indus River as a symbol of the multi-dimensional cultural identity of India that got its name from the Indus River. Folk songs and dances are performed and local handicrafts and ethnic foods are being exhibited before the tourists during the festival.

Notes:
Sarada Kumar Hota has been appointed as the new Managing Director of National Housing Bank (NHB) for a period of three years. Prior to this appointment, Hota was Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Can Fin Homes. NHB, which is now 100% owned by the government, is the nodal agency for supervision, refinance and development of the housing finance segment.