Current Affairs Quiz - September, 2023

Notes:
Simone Biles wins a record eighth all-around title at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships, a full decade after her first national title.
She won her first world title at the 2013 championships and she has won 25 medals at world championships, including 18 golds — higher than any men’s or women’s gymnasts in history.

Notes:
Thiruvonam, the most auspicious day during the Onam festival, is celebrated throughout Kerala. Onam is a harvest festival that celebrates the return of King Mahabali/Maveli to his beloved state.
The festival is celebrated for ten days and each day holds a lot of significance. Onam also marks the beginning of the Malayalam year, called Kolla Varsham.

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 19th African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Environment ministers of the African continent have agreed to institute national and regional strategies to minimise environmental impacts in the extraction and processing of critical mineral resources.

Notes:
The birth centenary of the eminent physicist Alladi Ramakrishnan is being celebrated in December 2023.
He founded MATSCIENCE, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), in Chennai, and served as its Director until his retirement in 1983 at the age of sixty. The Institute will pay homage to its Founder-Director, by conducting The Alladi Ramakrishnan Centenary Conference at its campus in Taramani, Chennai.

Notes:
President Droupadi Murmu released the commemorative coin on Late NT Rama Rao on his centenary year at Rashtrapati Bhavan Cultural Centre.
NT Rama Rao, who founded the Telegu Desam Party (TDP), also served as the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh for three terms. He initiated many public welfare programs.

Notes:
The Indian Government formally declared August 30 as the National Small Industry Day, a year after the Ministry of Small-Scale Industries announced a comprehensive policy package for small businesses.
The day recognises the contribution of small industries to the country’s growth and is an opportunity for the central and state governments to encourage and support small industries.

Notes:
India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) registered a growth of 7.8 percent in the April-June quarter of the current fiscal (2023-2024), compared to a growth of 6.1 percent in the previous January-March quarter of fiscal 2022-23.
According to official data shared by the National Statistical Office, India’s nominal GDP or GDP at Current Prices in the first quarter showed a growth rate of 8 percent as compared to 27.7 percent in the previous year’s first quarter.

Notes:
Bhaderwah Rajmash and Sulai honey of Doda and Ramban districts of Jammu and Kashmir, have been granted Geographical Indication (GI) tags.
In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had gifted organic Sulai honey to Queen Elizabeth during his visit to Britain.

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.