Current Affairs Quiz - February, 2023

Notes:
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the earthquake that hit Gaziantep in southern Turkey was the country’s worst disaster since 1939 Erzincan earthquake.
The 1939 Erzincan earthquake resulted in the deaths of around 33,000 individuals. It was caused by the movement of the North Anatolian Fault Zone, which resulted in a quake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale. This earthquake caused damage to the Erzincan Plain and the Kelkit River Valley.

Notes:
Guru Ravidass Jayanti is celebrated to mark the birth of Guru Ravidas, a mystic poet-saint of the Bhakti movement during the 15th century.
The poet was a contemporary of Kabir Das and he taught monotheistic spirituality and message of equality and liberation from Indian caste system. His teachings are widely followed in states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, among others.

Notes:
The Investigation Tracking System for Sexual Offenses (ITSSO) was launched in 2019 by the Central Government to monitor police investigations of sexual assault cases. It is currently operated by the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau).
Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest disposal rate of 97.6 percent, as it disposed of over 74,000 cases against 75,800 cases registered in relation to crime against women.

Notes:
Bard is an AI chatbot that is being developed by Google as a competitor for the popular Microsoft-backed ChatGPT.
Bard will use AI to generate answers in text when queries are typed by the users. This chatbot will function based on the AI model called LaMDA, which was introduced by Google in 2021 as a generative language model for dialogue applications.

Notes:
The Black Galaxy or ‘Invisible galaxy’ was recently discovered by researchers in Italy. It was found and characterised using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array.
The Black Galaxy is compact and has a large amount of interstellar dust. It is forming stars at a rate 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way.

Notes:
The government has set up a special committee to examine the need for a separate competition law for digital companies.
Chaired by Corporate Affairs Secretary Manoj Govil, the committee will review whether existing antitrust laws in the country are equipped to deal with the challenges that have emerged from the digital economy, and submit to the government a draft Digital Competition Act within three months.

Notes:
Yaya Tso has been recently proposed as Ladakh’s first biodiversity heritage site (BHS) under the Biological Diversity Act.. It is also known as birds’ paradise for its beautiful lake located at an altitude of 4,820 metres.
Yaya Tso is a nesting habitat for bar-headed goose, black-necked crane and brahminy duck and it it also has the distinction of being one of the highest breeding sites of the black-necked crane in India.

Notes:
The Everglades is a wetland ecosystem in the southern part of the US state of Florida. It spans across the southern half of a large drainage basin in the tropical region. This wetland ecosystem experiences fluctuating weather changes, habitat loss and environmental degradation.
A 35-year plan with an outlay of 10 billion USD is being implemented to restore this wetland. This is the world’s largest and most expensive ecological restoration project.

Notes:
The One District One Product (ODOP) initiative is aimed at promoting balanced regional development across all districts of the country.
ODOP has been merged with ‘Districts as Export Hubs Initiative’ being run by the Department of Commerce (DoC) with Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) as a major stakeholder. Under the ODOP- Districts as Export Hubs initiative, products with export potential have been recently identified from all 765 districts of the country.

Notes:
The Indian government announced that retail inflation increased to 6.52% in January from 5.72% in December 2022, mainly due to the rise in food prices.
Retail inflation is measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The Reserve Bank of India’s household survey on inflation expectations forecasts that retail inflation will remain elevated in the next year due to a general increase in prices across different sectors.