Current Affairs Quiz - September, 2023

Notes:
The President of India, Droupadi Murmu released a postage stamp in memory of Dadi Prakashmani, former chief of Brahma Kumaris at Rashtrapati Bhavan Cultural Centre.
This stamp was released under the ‘My Stamp’ initiative of the Department of Posts, Ministry of Communications to mark the 16th death anniversary of Dadi Prakashmani.

Notes:
As 42 per cent workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme still not eligible for Aadhaar-based payment system (ABPS), the deadline for enabling Aadhaar-based payment for MGNREGA workers was extended till December 31
Earlier, the deadline was September 1 and this is the fifth extension by the Centre. This was announced by the Ministry of Rural Development.

Notes:
The 50th anniversary of the U.S. Open becoming the first sporting event to offer equal prize money to men and women was recently held.
The ceremony was attended by former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama, former tennis player Billie Jean King, amateur player Gabby Bell, singer Sara Bareilles, and president of the United States Tennis Association Brian Hainline.

Notes:
Rebel soldiers in Central African nation Gabon claim to have ousted their President Ali Bongo Ondimba.
Rebel officers in the oil-rich central African state of Gabon announced they had seized power following disputed elections in which President Ali Bongo Ondimba, in power since 2009, had been declared victorious.

Notes:
The National Green Tribunal has directed the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) to plant at least 10,000 trees within a month in Uttarakhand.
This direction was s part of compensatory tree plantation to make up for hundreds of trees felled during construction of a road from Simli to Gwaldam. There were petitions about construction of a road in the fragile and sensitive mountains of Chamoli district of Uttarakhand.

Notes:
INDUS-X (India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem), an initiative to build a defence innovation bridge by Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) of the Ministry of Defence, and the US Department of Defence (DoD).
It began an exercise to begin the Indo-US CrossLinx accelerator programme to prepare defence start-ups to expand to the US markets.

Notes:
In a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Karnataka Cabinet approved the formation of fact-checking units to tackle ‘fake news syndicates’.
The government would introduce legislation against the propagation of fake news and propose punishment for the spread of fake news.

Notes:
The Union government appointed Jaya Verma Sinha Chairperson of the Railway Board, becomes the first woman to head the Board.
Jaya Verma Sinha succeeded Anil Kumar Lahoti as chairman and chief executive officer of the Railway Board. Sinha is a seasoned member of the Indian Railway Management Services (IRMS).

Notes:
Inception, a unit of Abu Dhabi AI company G42, has released ‘Jais’, the world’s most advanced Arabic large language model.
Jais is a bilingual Arabic-English model that has been trained on a massive dataset of text and code. It can be used for a variety of tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, and question answering. It was trained on the Condor Galaxy, the world’s largest AI supercomputer, using 116 billion Arabic tokens and 279 billion English tokens.

Notes:
India emerged champions in the Men’s Hockey5s Asia Cup, beating arch-rivals Pakistan 2-0 in a shootout after both teams were locked at 4-4 in regulation time.
With the win, India have booked their place in the FIH Men’s Hockey5s World Cup 2024.