Current Affairs Quiz - November, 2023

Notes:
India’s first-ever Lavender Farm is coming up at Challa village in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua district. It is spread over two hectares of land owned by the Department of Agriculture Production and Farmers Welfare.
A native of Europe, lavender was introduced by the Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (IIIM) in the temperate regions of the Jammu division under the CSIR-Aroma Mission in 2018, and Doda became the birthplace of India’s purple revolution.

Notes:
Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata were ranked the 4th, 7th, and 10th most polluted cities in the world, according to IQAir. Mumbai’s air quality has been unhealthy for more than three consecutive days.
Based on the 2022 annual average PM2.5 concentration, India was 8th among the world’s top 10 most polluted countries. Internationally, in the IQAir survey, Lahore and Beijing were among the top five most polluted cities.

Notes:
Recently, the Israeli military announced that it had intercepted a missile fired from the Red Sea region, amidst escalating tensions in the Middle East due to Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza with the help of ‘Arrow’ aerial defence system.
This announcement came after Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthi rebels fired drones towards Israel in retaliation for its war against Hamas.

Notes:
The next AI Safety Summit is expected to be hosted by South Korea in mid-2024, followed by France around late-2024.
The UK, which hosts this year’s summit announced the news at the opening of the inaugural summit at Bletchley Park in central England.

Notes:
In 2021, climate adaptation funding from public multilateral entities (such as the World Bank) and bilateral sources (from developed to developing nations) experienced a 15% decrease, as revealed in the 2023 Adaptation Gap Report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
This decline occurred despite the commitments made at the 26th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. These commitments aimed to double the support for adaptation finance from 2019 levels, targeting an annual sum of approximately $40 billion by 2025.

Notes:
In South Africa, paleontologists have made a finding, challenging the notion that humans created the world’s oldest known burial site.
The research has unveiled the presence of remains belonging to small-brained distant relatives of humans at this burial site. These Stone Age hominids, known for their tree-climbing abilities, were unearthed approximately 100 feet underground in a cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site near Johannesburg.

Notes:
Storm Ciaran battered north-west Europe with torrential rains and winds upto 200 kilometres per hour.
Dozens of people have been injured and seven people died across Europe so far. The storm hit French shores with winds of more than 190 kilometres per hour slamming the northern tip of France’s Atlantic coast. In the UK, Channel Islands were among the worst-hit areas.

Notes:
The Finance Ministry released ₹10,000 crore in urgent assistance for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).
The funds were released to meet unexpected increased expenditure under the rural job guarantee scheme. The funds will be available until the first batch of supplementary demands for grants is approved by parliament at its next session. The unusual move came after 95% of the FY24 budgetary outlay of ₹60,000 crore for the MGNREGS was exhausted well before the commencement of the winter session of parliament.

Notes:
COLORS has collaborated with the Ministry of Women and Child Development to support the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao initiative.
The channel aims to address the issue of girlchild abandonment, through the launch of the new TV show ‘Doree’.

Notes:
Indian chess players Vaishali and Vidit Gujrathi win FIDE Grand Swiss women’s and open titles. Vaishali, along with her younger brother Praggnanandhaa, became the first brother-sister duo to qualify for the respective Candidates.
She also became the first Indian to win the Grand Swiss.