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:
In Gymnastics, India’s Pranati Nayak from West Bengal clinched a bronze in vault event at the 8th Senior Asian Artistic Championships in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia on June 22, 2019. In the final, she scored a total of 13.384 points to claim the bronze medal. China’s Yu Linmin and Japan’s Ayaka Sakaguchi won the gold and silver medal at the event.

Notes:
The researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have found that gray seals can copy the sounds of human words and songs including “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. The study showed that 3 trained seals were able to imitate parts of popular tunes. The study gave the researchers a better understanding of the evolution of vocal learning and human language development. It also suggested that gray seals could be a new model to study speech disorders since they use their vocal tracts the same way as humans. The grey seal is found on both shores of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is a large seal of the family Phocidae which are commonly referred to as “true seals” or “earless seals”. It is the only species classified in the genus Halichoerus.

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:
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has launched a unique flood hazard atlas on the basis of historic flood inundation captured through satellite imagery over the period from 2001 to 2018. It is expected to help the State manage floods more efficiently. The atlas will help the authorities to systematically plan flood control measures, to carry out relief operations, to plan relief shelters & health centres and to control development activities on flood plains. The atlas is prepared by Odisha State Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA) and National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Hyderabad. Around 14 lakh hectare of agriculture land is being affected by floods every year in Odisha.

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has launched a new “Complaint Management System (CMS)” website where anyone can complain against any of the entities regulated by RBI. Through this website, complaints can be lodged against RBI regulated entities with public interface such as commercial banks, urban co-operative banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), etc. All complaints lodged on the CMS would be directed to the appropriate office of the ombudsman/regional office of the RBI. The application also improves transparency by keeping the complainants informed through auto-generated acknowledgements and enabling them to track the status of their complaints and file appeals online against the decisions of the ombudsmen, where applicable.

Notes:
Union Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri inaugurated the Central Command Centre for Air Traffic Flow Management (C-ATFM) at Vasant Kunj, New Delhi. The C-ATFM system is primarily meant to address the balancing of capacity against the demand to achieve optimum utilization of the major resources viz., airport, airspace and aircraft at every Indian airport where there is a capacity constraint. It integrates flight data from various subsystems like ATC Automation System, flight updates and flight update messages. The system also displays weather information along with static information about airports, airspaces and air routes. The system processes the demand and capacity information and provides decision-making tools to the ATFM Flow Manager for collaborative decision making and to ensure regulated flow of traffic at each airport in India. After successfully implementing the AFTM, India has become the 7th country after the US, Europe, Australia, South Africa, Japan, Brazil.

Notes:
On June 26, the 32nd Congress of the International Seed Testing Association (ISTA) has kick-started in Hyderabad, Telangana. The Seed Congress is being held for the first time in South Asia. Over 600 delegates including seed experts, officials, policy makers and representatives of national and international companies from nearly 70 countries like the UK, South Africa, Argentina, New Zealand, Canada, Austria are taking part in the Congress. The deliberations will be mainly focusing on various technologies for increasing quality seed production and seed export-import policies. Several pre and post-event workshops, conferences and exhibitions are also being held as part of the 8-day long Congress.

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:
India’s chief national badminton coach Pullela Gopichand has been bestowed an honorary doctorate by IIT Kanpur on the occasion of their 52nd convocation on June 28, 2019. He received the honour from former ISRO chairman and Chairman of the board of Governors of IIT Kanpur, Prof K Radhakrishnan. The past recipients of the honour are Former President Prof. APJ Abdul Kalam and former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. Gopichand, as a player, won the 2001 All England Open Badminton Championship. He became the second Indian after Prakash Padukone to achieve this feat. Post retirement, the Hyderabad-based shuttler started his own badminton academy — Gopichand Badminton Academy — in 2008. Many top Indian players including the likes of Saina Nehwal, PV Sindhu, Srikanth Kidambi, Parupalli Kashyap etc. have been trained at Pullela Gopichand’s academy in Hyderabad.