Current Affairs Quiz - January 2022

Notes:
Kiribati is one of the most isolated islands in the world. It is located in Oceania and is about 4,800km from Australia.
Until last week, Kiribati had recorded just two Covid cases. After the passengers on the first international flight tested positive for Covid, the country has imposed its first lock-down.

Notes:
Twitter announced a new way for users to authenticate their profile pictures, created by non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The microblogging platform released an official verification mechanism for NFT profile pictures. NFT owners have been uploading jpeg images of their digital assets as profile pictures recently. The authentic NFT profile pictures will be shown with a new hexagon-shaped mask.

Notes:
India has emerged as the largest exporter of gherkins in the world. India has exported cucumber and gherkins of around 1.2 lakh metric tonnes with a value of $ 114 million during April-October (2020-21).
Gherkins (Cornichons) are small cucumbers with thick bumpy skins, also called baby pickles or pickling cucumbers.

Notes:
The Australian government has bought the copyright of the Aboriginal flag, to free the symbol of identity from fights over who can use it.
Indigenous artist Harold Thomas created the flag in 1971 as a protest image. It is used as the dominant Aboriginal emblem and an official national flag. Now, the flag can be reproduced by anyone without fear of legal threats.

Notes:
The National Voters’ Day is celebrated every year on January 25 to encourage the country’s voters to participate in the electoral process.
The theme for this year’s National Voters’ Day (12th edition) is ‘Making Elections Inclusive, Accessible and Participative’. New voters completing 18 years  would be enrolled and be given the Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) on January 25 every year.

Notes:
After massive protests, the Serbia government has cancelled the licenses for lithium mining to Rio Tinto, a multi-national mining organisation.
The Jadar is a river in western Serbia, 75 km long tributary of the Drina river. Serbians staged protests against Rio Tinto’s plans to mine lithium in the Jadar valley near Lozinca town in the country.

Notes:
India’s rank improved one place to 85 among 180 countries in the Corruption perception index (CPI) of 2021.
Transparency International releases the index, which ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. In a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean, India’s score was 40. The report also raised concerns over India’s democratic status

Notes:
The findings of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) Chhattisgarh (Rural) 2021 were released recently.
As per the survey, the proportion of primary school children who cannot recognize letters of the alphabet has doubled since 2018. Only a fewer students can now do basic subtraction or division. The survey covered over 46,000 children in 1,677 villages.

Notes:
Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) launched the Swachhata Start-Up Challenge to encourage innovative start-ups to transform the sanitation and waste management sector.
The challenge has been launched in partnership with Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and Agence Française de Développement (AFD). It seeks to promote enterprise development under Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0 (SBM-U 2.0).

Notes:
The Government of Tamil Nadu has framed a draft policy for senior citizens, acknowledging the State’s demographic transition.
The policy also proposes to create a Directorate for the Welfare of Senior Citizens. The draft document is based on Article 41 of the Constitution, which requires the State ‘to secure the right to work, education and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement’.